Maestra: The most shocking thriller you'll read this year

by L. S. Hilton

  ‘Artemisia Gentileschi, Allegoria dell’Inclinazione,’ I had answered without hesitation. For one tiny moment, Rupert actually allowed himself to look impressed. I’d had that postcard on my wall ever since my trip to Florence at sixteen. Artemisia was the daughter of a painter, the most brilliant of his apprentices, one of whom raped her while they worked on a commission in Rome. She took him to court and, after being tortured with thumbscrews to prove she was telling the truth, she won her case. Her hands were her future, and she risked them being twisted beyond recovery, so blazingly did she demand justice. Many of her paintings were famously violent, so much so that critics had a hard time believing that a woman had painted them, but I had chosen this one because Artemisia had used her own face as her model.

  She was twenty-one when she made the picture, unwillingly married off to a third-rate court painter who sponged off her talent, but she showed herself, I thought, as she wanted to be, unashamed, her rather plain face serene, holding a compass, the symbol of her own determination. I will choose, the picture said to me, I will choose. Like all teenagers when they fall in love, I had been convinced that nobody understood Artemisia like I did. The object might have been unconventional, but the feeling was just the same. We were so alike, she and I. For sure, if she hadn’t died in the seventeenth century, we could have been Best Friends Forever.

  It was Artemisia who got me the job. That interview was the only time that Rupert ever saw me, that is, saw a person rather than a negligible presence. But even then, what he saw was a perfect, clever dogsbody who would do his grunt work and never complain. Now, leaning dry-eyed against a suburban wall, I felt a little skein of love twisting back towards my sixteen-year-old self, standing there in the Casa Buonarroti with her earnest book bag and her terrible clothes, wishing I could appear like a ghost from the future and tell her that everything was going to be alright. Because it would. I wasn’t going to go to the police. Rupert would fire me as soon as they’d taken my statement. No. I could take this, I could make it alright.

  5

  Getting home that evening my nerves were fizzing, and I told myself that after Colonel Morris I deserved a bit of a party. I texted Lawrence to see if there was anything going on at his place that night. Lawrence was an acquaintance from my early days in London: rich, dubious and placidly addicted to heroin. I’d got to know him around the scene, which like all special-interest hobbies is a pretty small world. Now he organised more private affairs at his home in Belgravia and suggested I swing by the Square about eleven.

  Lawrence’s parties supposedly cost £150, but I knew he’d let me in for nothing. I unlocked my bedroom door and let my head fall back against the silk kimono hanging there, breathing in the scent of clean linen and geranium oil from my little ceramic burner. I looked at my books, my neatly made bed, the Balinese-print shawl hung over the foul Venetian blind, and I couldn’t stand the sight of any of it. All cheap, all so pathetically optimistic. Not even the folded promise of the beautiful clothes in the hunchbacked melamine wardrobe could soothe me. I rustled through my things, trying to work out how I felt. Nothing too aggressive. Underneath, I needed to be soft, feminine; on top I would be the cat who walked by herself. I chose coffee-coloured Brazilian-cut lace shorts and a matching bra. Over that I slipped on loose combats, a black tee and Converse. I’d change into heels when I got there – I could afford a cab these days, but I wanted to move, to clear my lungs of the lingering spores of the Colonel’s blanket. I took a luxurious time making up my face to make it look as though I hadn’t made up my face and walked over to Belgravia.

  The still-white stuccoed streets seemed wrapped in secrets. It was always so calm here; whatever sins were concealed behind those plutocratic porticoes were safely swaddled by money. Lawrence was leaning in the doorway of 33 Chester Square, smoking, as I approached. Probably grabbing some peace from the commune of rackety Soho exiles which inhabited his attic, sponging and drinking and fancying themselves artists: in theory the fee for the parties kept them in smack and vinyl. I’d sometimes thought of asking for a room myself, to save the rent, but the atmosphere was too messy; it would distract me from the future I needed to make.

  ‘Hello, lovely.’ Lawrence was wearing blue velvet trousers with a grosgrain stripe and an ancient white shirt, the frayed cuffs gaping over his skinny wrists.

  ‘Hey, Lawrence. Who’s here? Who’s pretty?’

  ‘Well, darling, you, now.’

  ‘Are you coming in?’ From the length of Lawrence’s vowels I thought he was probably going to nod out right there on the doorstep.

  ‘No, darling, not yet. Off you go. Amuse-toi.’

  The party was in the basement but I went for a wander first, imagining, as I always did, how I would live if such a house were mine, how I would change the rooms, colour and furnish them. There was no one to see me run my hand over the sensuous curve of the eighteenth-century banister, the solid certainty of its polished mahogany. I had learned from the smarter interiors magazines that it was wrong for houses to look too ‘done’, that the hideous Seventies green corduroy sofa squatting in Lawrence’s drawing room was as much an ineffable mark of his class as his voice or the way he wore his fraying shirts, but I imagined how the room would look rewashed in Trianon gris, with just a few perfect pieces, spare and exquisite, and myself serene amongst them. Chester Square was a much better antidote to Colonel Morris than my snotty little pep talk earlier. Desire and lack, I told myself, and the space between them, was what I had to negotiate. I sometimes saw my life as a web of tightropes to be walked, stretched between what I could give, or make believe I gave, and what I would possess. I wriggled out of most of my clothes and slipped on a pair of black suede Saint Laurent pumps, then I stalked round the room, trailing my fingers over Lawrence’s lovely, neglected antiques, touching them like talismans. You, I thought, you and you and you. I practically skipped down the basement stairs.

  As I stepped through the black shantung curtain I saw a blonde girl I recognised from other parties going down on a fortysomething guy, professionally sweeping her hair away from her face so he had a good view of her mouth, taking the whole length of him in one smooth swallow. I’d seen her around; she was Russian, but she called herself Ashley – Lawrence usually mixed a couple of rentals with his guests to keep the party going. I walked past them and took a drink from Lawrence’s barman-cum-bouncer, who stood formally against one of the glossy black walls with a tray of champagne flutes, as imperturbable as if he were serving canapés at a diplomat’s cocktail party. I tried a sip, but I didn’t need it.

  ‘Is Helene here?’ I asked. Another regular at Lawrence’s.

  ‘Over there.’ He cocked his head.

  Helene was lying on a black velvet chaise longue, her breasts spilling like syllabub out of an embroidered corset.

  ‘Hey, Judith darling.’

  She lifted her face to me and I bent down to kiss her, taking her tongue, slightly sour with champagne, into my mouth.

  ‘Lawrence said you’d be coming over. We were waiting for you, weren’t we?’

  A boy looked up from where he had been kneeling between Helene’s generously rounded thighs. I wouldn’t have wanted her body myself, but I had a little kink for her belly, the soft pale spread of it. I ran my hand luxuriously over the full mound, exploring its give and sheen.

  ‘This is Stanley.’

  ‘Hello, Stanley.’ He stood up and swooped down again to kiss me too quickly for me to have a sense of his face. His mouth was wide and not too sloppy; he had that young man’s smell of wet hay underneath his cologne. I ran my hands speculatively over his naked back as he pulled me closer, feeling the muscles winged under his shoulder blades. Nice.

  Helene was idly dangling a pair of handcuffs, bright steel, proper police issue. ‘I said to Stanley you might like to double dip?’

  ‘Sure, lovely. Where would you like me?’

  ‘Underneath. Will that be nice, Stanley?’

  He nodded. He didn’t look
as though speech was one of his gifts. I settled next to Helene on the chaise and we began to kiss again, me stroking the delicious dips and roundness of her body, she slowly working off my knickers and gently placing a finger on the lips of my cunt. I took her nipple in my mouth and sucked, swirling my tongue over the areolae until she made a little purring noise, then pushed two fingers inside her. Always that exquisite tightness, so soft, so very soft. I could feel the want inside me now, so I manoeuvred myself face down, wriggling underneath her until our bodies were aligned, my face in the velvet seat, her luscious belly settled in the small of my back. I reached up my right arm and she did the same. Stanley fumbled a bit as he cuffed our wrists together, but he managed it.

  ‘There,’ Helene murmured, ‘isn’t that pretty?’ He took her first, straddling my legs and going into her from behind so I felt his balls and the heat and juice of her against my arse. I worked my left hand under my clit where the weight crushed it against me and began stroking. I was eager now, wanting his cock up me, lifting my hips in time with Helene as she took him. I heard her gasp as he pulled out, and then the head of his cock, smooth in the condom, was against my own lips and he slid easily into me, using his hands on Helene’s arse for purchase. He got me close, then went back to Helene, fucking her harder until her body tensed and bucked above me, then entered me again. I was praying for him to last until I was over the edge, then he got me there and she rolled off to the side, her cunt wet against my thigh, and finished him in her mouth. I lay there, breathing, one leg falling to the floor, gaping, my own juice cooling on the fluttering lips of my pussy. This was the rush, for me. Not merely the purity of sheer carnal pleasure but the way that being splayed and screwed by a stranger made me feel so free, so untouchable.

  6

  That turned out to be the last party I went to in London. Now I was working at the Gstaad Club I needed to take care of myself, to give time to sleep and running as well as my actual career. I told myself that I had to dismiss the incident with Colonel Morris. The old bastard had failed at his pathetic attempt, and the only thing that really mattered to me was the endgame. I had pulled off the valuation and that was all that counted at the House. So I had to stay tight and fresh, even if that meant setting the alarm for five to bang out my laps of Hyde Park before leaving for the office. After James began waddling into the club with his showers of fifties I began to have regular facials and manicures and paid for a couple of expensive Pilates sessions at the gym. Thanks to my new reading material, I knew that this was not extravagance, it was Me Time, and Investing In Myself. James was now accepted as my regular and on Thursdays and Fridays Olly said I didn’t need to get booked by anyone else, though sometimes I would sit with another man if I was asked, so James had to wait alone, watching me intently until the obligatory bottle was finished and I could sashay across the dance floor with a welcoming smile on my face.

  I couldn’t help fantasising about what I could do if I could keep old James interested. My job in British Pictures barely paid minimum wage. Although my education had been basically free, I had still taken out a graduate loan for £10,000 when I finished studying to cover rent and expenses. Soon I would have to start paying it back. I had reckoned I was good enough to get a less junior position before the payments fell due so the risk had seemed worth it, but the debt would be called in in the autumn, a scant couple of months away, and until I’d begun at the club I’d just been subsisting. With a thousand a week from James, plus what I could earn on the side from other customers, I could hope to start paying back the loan and breathe a bit, maybe even get a flat on my own. I opened a savings account and watched the numbers begin to stack up.

  It was clear from the start what James wanted, but his arrogance was overlaid with an air of diffidence, as though he didn’t quite know where to begin. Like most men, his favourite topic of conversation was himself, so it was easy to draw him out. He had a wife, Veronica, and a teenage daughter, who lived in Kensington, near Holland Park. He claimed to like reading philosophy in his spare time, though his idea of serious thought was more ‘Jesus CEO’ than Kantian aesthetics. Still, we got quite a lot of mileage out of that. I asked him to recommend a few titles and Googled the reviews so it seemed as though I had read them. Veronica managed the house and sat on various charity committees. I wondered about her, a little, about whether she knew, or cared, where her husband spent his evenings. I doubted she did. Did they fuck? I couldn’t imagine James being capable of it – even if the oestrogen produced by all that flab hadn’t eaten his cock he could barely get up the stairs of the club without risking a coronary. But as our evenings together unfolded, he was keen to convince me that he’d been quite the dog in his day. Oh, he’d had a gay old time, had James. The older married woman in St Moritz, the sisters on Cap Ferrat. He was old enough to claim to have been a debs’ delight, and I came in for a lot of anecdotes about ‘gels’ who gave in in shooting brakes and London squares, madly hilarious house parties and Soho nightclubs. Apparently, what was left of London Society in the Seventies had been an erotic paradise for the morbidly obese.

  *

  ‘Biccie, Judith?’ asked Frankie, the department secretary, pulling my mind back to the meeting as she pushed a plate of chocolate digestives over the conference table. Laura frowned. We were having what Rupert called a High Priority Consultation – me, Frankie, Rupert, Laura and Oliver the portraiture expert, who was slightly thinner and less pomegranate-coloured than our boss.

  ‘No, thanks,’ I whispered back.

  Laura frowned at us and ruched up her pashmina further over the ravages of her Barbados tan. I changed my mind and took a biscuit. At least Frankie offered some gentle female solidarity, unlike Laura, who mostly treated me like an unsatisfactory housemaid.

  ‘Here they are,’ said a girl’s voice. A tall blonde with artfully ratted hair was breathlessly setting down a pile of new catalogues.

  ‘This is Angelica,’ said Laura. ‘Angelica is joining us on work experience for a month. She’s just finished at the Burghley in Florence.’

  If Dave had been there I would have rolled my eyes. The Burghley offered history of art courses for rich thickies too monumentally idle to get into even a pretend university. They got a year in Renaissance Disneyland on the assumption they might absorb a bit of culture by osmosis between spliffs, and a nice little certificate.

  ‘Welcome to the department, Angelica,’ said Rupert pleasantly.

  ‘It’s so good of you to have me here,’ she replied.

  ‘Angelica is my god-daughter,’ added Laura, winching her Botox into a beam. That explained that then. I sat up a bit straighter.

  ‘Now,’ said Rupert, ‘big event today, boys and girls. We’ve got a Stubbs in.’ He passed round the catalogues. They looked like programmes for an eighteenth-century opera. George Stubbs, announced the cover, The Duke and Duchess of Richmond Watching the Gallops.

  ‘Oooh,’ squealed Frankie, like the good sport she was, ‘A Stubbs!’

  I could see why she was excited. George Stubbs was a hugely profitable artist, known for fetching prices over twenty million. I had a bit of a soft spot for him myself – he was from Liverpool, like me, and despite having actually bothered to study anatomy, meaning that his paintings of horses were some of the finest the eighteenth century had produced, he was still dismissed by the Royal Academy in his own day as a ‘sporting painter’ and denied full membership. I was curious to see which of his works we’d got.

  ‘You’ll want to read this thoroughly,’ put in Oliver. ‘I’ve been working on it for quite some time.’

  I flicked swiftly through the pages, but when I came to the main illustration I suddenly felt cold. I had seen this picture before, and there was no way it belonged in a catalogue.

  ‘Rupert, I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I don’t understand. This is the picture I saw in January, the one at the place near Warminster?’

  ‘Don’t worry, your assessment was fine. I went back to have a look at it myself.
Couldn’t have expected the intern to pick up a Stubbs!’

  I hadn’t picked it up, because it wasn’t a Stubbs. And I wasn’t an intern anymore, as Rupert knew perfectly well. I’d worked hard to be able to make that kind of judgement. I tried again.

  ‘You didn’t say –’

  Rupert cut me off with an awkward laugh.

  ‘Wanted it to be a surprise. Now –’

  I interrupted. ‘But I was certain. I took photos.’

  ‘The picture was cleaned, Judith, after I brought it in. The details you correctly identified were later overpaintings. Is there a problem?’

  I knew better than to challenge him again. ‘No, of course not.’ I forced myself to look enthusiastic. ‘How thrilling!’

  A two-week view was planned for September, to precede the sale. Rupert thought the picture sufficiently important for a stand-alone auction. Oliver thought it should be integrated into an assembled sale. Laura talked about which collectors to alert. Frankie took notes. I was too shocked even to amuse myself with what thoughts might be tumbling through the vast and empty expanses of Angelica’s brain. I managed to ask a few diligent questions at the end as to arrangements for the private view, so I could memo the events girls, and then casually asked if they were hilling in the warehouse that afternoon.

  ‘I thought I could take Angelica down to have a look,’ I suggested in a friendly voice.

  Hilling, as I explained to Angelica as we made our way through the dusty confusion of passages that was the basement, was the house slang for unloading works, so called because they had to be wheeled up a slatted ramp into the warehouses. It was an opportunity for the juniors to see the pieces up close as they were unpacked in the viewing room before the experts came down. It was really extraordinary, I explained, to see masterpieces displayed on an everyday wooden bench instead of the sanctity of a gallery. Angelica was engrossed in her phone.