by Kate Morton
She knew what he would ask next: he would ask her how she knew. And what on earth could she say to that? Because she just did? Because they had to be? Because this was her plane, she was flying it, and blindfolded or not she was damn well going to make sure that they got home safely?
In the end, she was spared having to answer because she was wrong: he didn’t ask her that at all. With a faith that made Juliet want to curl up and weep, he took her at her word and moved on to a different subject entirely:
‘Birdie says that even inside the darkest box there are pinpricks of light.’
Juliet was suddenly bone-weary. ‘Does she, darling?’
Tip nodded earnestly. ‘And it’s true, Mummy. I saw them inside the hidey-hole. You can only see them from inside. I was frightened at first when I closed the panel, but I didn’t need to be, because there were hundreds of little lights in there, twinkling in the dark.’
VIII
It is Saturday and the tourists have arrived. I am in the small room where Fanny’s portrait hangs upon the wall. Or, as I prefer to think of it, Juliet’s bedroom. Fanny, after all, slept here only one night. I used to sit with Juliet while she was working at her typewriter, her papers spread out across the dressing table beneath the window. I was with her, too, late in the evening, after the children were asleep, when she would take out Alan’s letter. Not to read; she didn’t often do that. She just used to hold it in her hand as she sat and looked, unseeing, through the open window, into the long, dark night.
This is also the room where Ada was brought, after being pulled half-drowned from the river. Back then it was a trove of fossils and specimens next door to Lucy’s bedroom, the walls lined with shelves from floor to ceiling. Lucy insisted on taking over Ada’s care herself, instructing the nurse on how to do her job until the nurse eventually refused to do it any longer. There was not a lot of space to move after the bed was carried back in, but Lucy managed to fit a wooden chair in one corner and would sit there in the evenings for hours at a time, watching the sleeping child.
It was touching to see how caring Lucy was; little Lucy who had found so few people in her life, after Edward, to be close to. She made certain that the bed was warmed each night with a brass pan filled with coals, and she allowed Ada to keep the kitten, despite that Thornfield woman’s evident disapproval.
One of today’s tourists has gone to stand by the window, craning to see over the wall and into the orchard so that the morning sun bleaches her face. It reminds me of the day after the picnic, when Ada was well enough to be propped up against her pillows, and light spilled through the panes of glass in four neat rectangles to fall across the foot of her bed.
Lucy brought in the breakfast tray, and as she was setting it down on the dressing table, Ada, pale against the linen sheets, said, ‘I fell into the river.’
‘You did.’
‘I cannot swim.’
‘No, that much is clear.’
Ada did not speak again for a time. I could see, though, that there was more on her mind and, sure enough, ‘Miss Radcliffe?’ she said eventually.
‘Yes, child?’
‘Someone else was in the water with me.’
‘Yes.’ Lucy sat on the edge of the bed and took up Ada’s hand. ‘I am sorry to have to tell you, but May Hawkins fell into the river, too. She did not fare as well as you; she could not swim, either, and she drowned.’
Ada listened to this and then, her voice almost a whisper: ‘It was not May Hawkins who I saw.’
I waited then, wondering how much more she would tell Lucy; whether she would trust her with the truth of what had happened on the riverbed.
But she spoke no more about the ‘other person’, saying instead, ‘There was a blue light. And I reached out to grab it and it wasn’t a light at all. It was a stone, a shining stone.’ She opened her hand then and revealed within her palm the Radcliffe Blue, snatched from where it had been waiting amidst the river stones. ‘I saw it shining and I held onto it, because I knew that it would save me. And it did – my very own amulet found me, right when I needed it, and it protected me from harm. Just like you said it would.’
The weather is fine and clear today and so it is busy at the house, a constant stream of tourists, with bookings for lunch at one of the nearby pubs. They shuffle through in small groups and I cannot bear to hear the guide tell yet another cluster to close their eyes in ‘Fanny’s bedroom’ and ‘smell the ghostly hint of Miss Brown’s favourite rose cologne’; and so I have left and am making my way down to the malt house, where Jack is trying to keep a low profile. Earlier this morning I saw, amongst the papers that he’d printed from Mrs Wheeler’s recent email, a letter from Lucy to Ada, written in March 1939. Alas, the body of the letter was covered and I have not yet been able to see what it says. I am hopeful that by now he might have moved the other papers aside so I can have a proper read.
In the hall downstairs, a group has gathered around the landscape painting that hangs upon the southern wall. It is the first work that Edward ever had accepted by the Royal Academy, one of the paintings referred to collectively as the ‘Upper Thames works’, a view taken directly from the top window of this house. The vista itself is a pretty one, overlooking the river: a stretch of fields, a dense area of woodlands and beyond that the distant mountains; in Edward’s hands, though, the pastoral scene is transmuted via shades of magenta and deepest grey into an image of disconcerting beauty. The painting was heralded as signifying a shift from representational paintings to ‘art of atmosphere’.
It is a bewitching piece and the tourists today say all of the same things that they always do. Things like ‘Wonderful colours,’ and ‘Moody, isn’t it?’ and ‘Look at that technique!’ But few of them ever purchase poster copies from the shop.
One of Edward’s gifts was an ability to take his own emotions and, through choice of pigment and brushstroke, render them visually with uncompromising fluency by the force of his own need to communicate and be understood. People do not purchase copies of View from the Attic Window to hang above their sofa because it is a painting fuelled by fear, and despite its beauty – without even knowing the story behind its creation – they sense its menace.
The landscape depicted in the painting impressed itself upon Edward when he was fourteen years old. Fourteen is a fragile age, a time of changing perceptions and emotional transition, and Edward was a boy of particularly intense feelings. His was always a compulsive nature. I never knew him to be half-hearted about anything, and in his childhood he had enjoyed a series of obsessive interests and pursuits, each ‘the one’ until the next arrived. He was consumed with stories of fairyland and theories of the occult sciences, and had, for some time, been determined to raise a ghost. The idea had come to him from his illicit reading at school; hours spent poring by candlelight over ancient treatises found deep in the vaults of the library.
It was at this time that Edward’s parents embarked upon an art-collecting jaunt to the Far East, which took them away from England for the next year. Thus, when the summer holidays arrived, he was sent not to the house in London where he had grown up but to his grandfather’s estate instead. Wiltshire is an old and enchanted county, and Edward used to say that when the full moon rose high and silver the ancient magic could still be felt. Although he resented his parents’ abandonment of him, and the despotic grandfather who must be borne, his fascination with spirits and fairy lore was further fed by his removal to the chalk country.
He thought carefully about where to go to raise his spirit, and considered several nearby churchyards before a conversation with his grandfather’s gardener convinced him instead to follow the River Cole until it met the Thames. There was a spot, the old man said, a clearing in a woods not far from there, where the river turned sharply back upon itself, in which fairies and ghosts still walked amongst the living. The gardener’s grandmother had been born in the north during the chime hour and knew such things, and it was she who had told him of the secret place.<
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Edward confided the events of that evening on a drizzly London night when we were together in his candlelit studio. I have remembered the occasion of the telling so many times since that I can hear his voice now, as if he were standing right beside me. I can recount the story of that night in the woods as if I had been there with him when it happened.
After walking for some hours, he found the river bend and ventured into the woods, leaving chalk flints that he had collected earlier that day as markers to guide him home. He arrived in the clearing just as the moon was rising to the centre of the sky.
The night was clear and warm and he had worn only the lightest of clothing, but as he crouched behind a fallen log he felt a brush of something very cold against his skin. He shook the sensation away, thinking little of it then, for there were far more interesting things happening to occupy his thoughts.
A beam of moonlight illuminated the clearing and Edward felt the pull of premonition. Something, he knew, was about to happen. A strange wind blew and the surrounding trees rattled their leaves like fine pieces of silver. Edward had a sense that there were eyes hidden in the foliage, watching the empty clearing, just as he was. Waiting, waiting …
And then, suddenly, it was dark.
He glanced skyward, wondering if a cloud had come from nowhere to blot out the moon. And as he did so, he was gripped by a sickening claw of terror.
His blood was as ice and, without knowing why, he turned and fled back through the woods, picking his way from one piece of chalk to the next until he emerged on the edge of the field.
He continued, he thought, in the general direction of his grandparents’ house. There was something behind him, chasing him – he could hear it over his own ragged breaths – but when he threw a glance over his shoulders there was nothing there.
His every nerve was alight. His skin rippled cold as if it sought to leave his body.
He ran and he ran, the landscape dark and unfamiliar around him as he leapt over fences, broke through brambly hedgerows, and pounded across fields.
All the while, the creature followed, and just when Edward thought that he could run no further, he glimpsed a house on the horizon, a light visible from a window at its top, like a lighthouse in a storm, signalling the way to safety.
Heart thumping in his chest, he headed towards it, scaling the stone wall and leaping to the ground to land in a moon-silvered garden. A path of flagstones led to the front door. It was not locked and he opened it, hurrying inside and pushing the door closed behind him. He slid the bolt across.
Edward climbed the stairs on instinct, moving higher and higher, away from whatever it was that had pursued him through the fields. He did not stop until he reached the very top, the attic, and there was nowhere else to go.
He went straight to the window, scanning the nocturnal landscape.
And there he stayed, watchful and alert, taking in every detail of the view until at last dawn broke incrementally, miraculously, and the world was once again restored to normal.
Edward confessed to me that for all of the tales of mystery and horror that he had read and heard and invented for his sisters, the night in the clearing of the woods, when he fled for his life and sought refuge in this house, was his first experience of true fear. It changed him, he said: terror opened up something inside him that could never be properly sealed.
I know now exactly what he meant. True fear is indelible; the sensation does not recede, even when the cause is long forgotten. It is a new way of seeing the world: the opening of a door that can never be closed again.
So when I look at Edward’s View from the Attic Window, I do not associate it with the fields outside Birchwood Manor, even though the likeness is uncanny; it makes me think instead of small dark spaces, and stale air, and the way a person’s throat craves and burns when struggling to find the very air for their next breath.
The tourists may not purchase posters of View from the Attic Window for their walls, but they do buy copies of La Belle.
I suppose I should be flattered, to think that my face stares out from above so many sofas. It is petty of me to care, but La Belle outsells any of the other posters available in the gift shop, including the works of Thurston Holmes. I have come to understand that people relish the hint of infamy that comes from hanging a jewel thief – and possible murderess – upon their pretty wall.
Some of them, having read Leonard’s book, compare La Belle to the Portrait of Miss Frances Brown on the Occasion of Her Eighteenth Birthday, and say things like, ‘Of course, you can see that he was really in love with his model.’
It is a strange thing to hang upon the walls of so many people whom I do not know, over one hundred and fifty years after I met Edward Radcliffe and sat for him in that tiny studio at the bottom of his mother’s garden.
To have one’s portrait painted is among the most intimate of experiences. To feel the weight of another person’s full attention and meet it eye to eye.
I found it overwhelming enough when Edward finished and it came time for the painting to leave the studio and take its place on the Academy’s wall. And that was well before it was possible for infinite copies to be made and sold and framed; for my face, as interpreted by Edward in 1861, to appear on shopping bags and tea towels and key rings and mugs and the cover of financial year diaries in the twenty-first century.
I wonder what Felix, with his lapel button of Abraham Lincoln and his wild predictions for the future, would make of all this. It is just as he said: the camera is ubiquitous. They all carry one now. Even as I watch, they traipse through the rooms of the house, pointing their devices at this chair or those tiles. Experiencing the world at one remove, through the windows of their phones, making images for later so that they do not need to bother seeing or feeling things now.
It was different after Edward came for me at Mrs Mack’s house on Little White Lion Street. Without discussing it, we each assumed a new permanence to our relationship that had been absent before. Edward began another painting, titled Sleeping Beauty; but where once he had been the painter and I his model, now we were something else. Work bled into life, and life into work. We became inseparable.
The first weeks of 1862 were bitterly cold, but the furnace in his studio kept us warm. I remember looking up at the glass roof misting over, the grey sky glowering, as I lay upon the bed of velvet cushions he’d assembled. My hair he spread around me, long strands over my shoulders, across my décolletage.
We spent all day together and much of the night. And when, finally, he put his brushes away, he would take me back to the Seven Dials only to collect me again at daybreak. There was no longer any barrier to our conversation, and like a needle in the most adept of hands it wove together the various threads of our lives, so that he and I became tied by the stories we shared with one another. I told him the truth about my mother and father, the workshop with its wonders, the trips to Greenwich, the tin in which I’d tried to capture light; I spoke to him of Pale Joe and our unlikely friendship; Mrs Mack and the Captain; Little Girl Lost and my pair of white kid gloves. I trusted him with my real name.
Edward’s friends noticed his absence. He had always been subject to periods of obsessive work and retreat, leaving London for weeks at a time on creative travels that his family knew affectionately as his ‘faraways’; but evidently his complete withdrawal in early 1862 was different. He did not pause in his endeavours even to write and send a letter; neither did he attend any of the weekly meetings of the Magenta Brotherhood in the public bar at The Queen’s Larder.
It was March, and Sleeping Beauty was all but finished by the time he introduced me to the others. We met at the home of Felix and Adele Bernard on Tottenham Court Road; a house with a plain brick facade that concealed rooms of great bohemian déshabillé. The walls were painted in burgundy and deepest blue, cluttered with enormous framed oil paintings and photographic prints. What seemed like hundreds of tiny flames flickered atop elaborate candelabras, casting shadows a
cross the walls, and the air was thick with smoke and impassioned conversation.
‘So, you’re the one,’ said Thurston Holmes, his eyes not leaving mine, when Edward introduced us again, and he lifted my hand to his lips, just as he had done at the Royal Academy. Once again I felt the same churn of warning deep down in the pit of my stomach.
I was not then frightened of many things. Growing up in the Seven Dials had cured me of most fears, but Thurston Holmes unnerved me. He was a man used to getting his own way, a man who wanted for nothing material but obsessed over that which he could not have. He possessed streaks of cruelty, both casual and calculated, and was expert at their deployment. I saw him slight Adele Bernard one night with a caustic comment about one of her early photographic efforts, and then sit back, a smile on the edge of his lips, enjoying the scene as sport.
Thurston was interested in me insofar as I presented a challenge: a treasure he could take away from Edward. I knew this at the time, but I confess I did not understand then to what lengths he would go; how willing he would prove to inflict unhappiness on others for his own amusement.
I reflect sometimes on how much of what happened the summer of 1862 might have been averted had I gone with Thurston that evening in November after the exhibition at the Royal Academy, or paid him a well-placed compliment. But we all make choices, for better and for worse, and I had made mine. I continued to refuse his requests to paint me; I made sure that we were never alone together; I avoided his lingering attentions. For the most part he was discreet, preferring to needle me in secret. Only once did he push things too far with Edward; what he said I do not know, but he paid for it with a purple eye that lasted into the next week.
Mrs Mack, meanwhile, was kept happy by frequent payments for my services as a model, and Martin was left with little choice but to grudgingly accept the turn events had taken. He continued to voice his disapproval whenever he saw an opportunity, and there were times when we would leave Edward’s studio at night and a hint of movement in my peripheral vision would alert me to his presence on the other side of the street. But I could live with Martin’s misguided attentions so long as he kept them at a distance.