Kingdom Swann: The Story of a Photographer

by Gibson, Miles

It was at this time that Swann accepted his last, and most notorious, commission. The Portrait of Rupert Gladstone’s Mistress.

  Gladstone was a man of wealth and influence. He was a scholar and collector of antique porcelain. He lived, alone, in a mansion near Hampstead Heath and, despite all the comforts money could buy, was subject to fits of melancholy. When such a mood overtook him he could neither eat nor sleep, found sunlight unendurable and shut himself away in the cellars. The cause of his affliction had never been discovered and many cures had been tried and abandoned.

  His faithful friends were always searching for new ways to lift his spirits and so, one day, when he asked them about a photographer to glorify a mistress they were anxious to satisfy the whim. They were surprised by the odd request since Gladstone had shown no interest in women, but all were agreed that the man to approach was the venerable Kingdom Swann.

  Swann was apathetic to the idea but Cromwell Marsh persuaded him that Rupert Gladstone was worthy of their attention.

  ‘He’s very high-falutin in the art and museum world. A proper old-fashioned connoisseur.’

  ‘And the woman?’ said Swann.

  ‘Now that’s the interesting part,’ said Marsh, winking and tapping his nose. ‘Nobody knows her name. But it’s rumoured she comes from an ancient royal family.’

  ‘She’ll be one of the servants,’ sighed Swann. ‘Whenever there’s a mystery woman it’s usually one of the servants. A maid arrived from the country or a high-buttoned governess.’ He smiled as he sucked at his whiskers. ‘Remember Sir Bentley Fowler? He brought along his governess. He wanted her portrayed as a Roman gladiator. She already owned the costume and we supplied a chain-net and trident. Big woman. Strong as an Indian buffalo. He liked her to lift him up and carry him around.’

  ‘Servant? I doubts it,’ said Marsh. ‘He keeps a very limited staff and all of ’em are men. He don’t like women about the house. He finds their manner disturbing.’ Marsh, as usual, seemed to know more than was good for him.

  Swann was curious enough to accept the commission and Rupert Gladstone arrived in Piccadilly on the following Sunday morning. He was a tall, pale, middle-aged man, dressed for a wedding and smelling strongly of lavender. His grey hair had been oiled flat and his collar starched to a cutting edge. He removed one glove, solemnly shook Kingdom Swann by the hand and stared around the studio.

  ‘Has she not yet arrived?’ he enquired, frowning, fumbling for his pocket watch. He looked worried, as if he regretted everything and might yet cancel the appointment.

  ‘Begging your pardon,’ said Cromwell Marsh, ‘but it’s usual, under the circumstance, for a gent to arrive with the lady in question, safely secured on his arm. It helps prevent any misunderstanding.’

  ‘No,’ said Gladstone distractedly. ‘No. She’s more than I can manage alone. Travel, you know, is such a burden.’

  Marsh looked at Swann and Swann looked surprised and Marsh turned back to their visitor. ‘Perhaps you’d care for a small glass of something to settle the nerves while you’re waiting?’ he suggested.

  At that moment there was a noise at the front of the shop, a scuffling and the sound of men cursing. Gladstone rushed out and returned, a few moments later, with two men bearing a small wooden coffin. He made them lay the box upon the stage, paid them, handsomely, and led them back to the street with instructions to return in one hour. Marsh saw them climb aboard a motor wagon as he went out to lock the shop.

  When all this had been accomplished Gladstone took a key from his purse and gently opened the coffin.

  ‘Maria,’ he whispered. ‘Maria.’

  He gazed inside, his face aquiver with great excitement and his eyes beginning to fill with tears. Slowly, and with extraordinary tenderness, he reached down and pulled a woman into his arms. She was a tiny, dark-haired creature, not more than a child, wrapped in the rags of a wedding dress. As they watched, he lifted the woman free from the casket and placed her down at his feet.

  ‘Oh, my God, she’s dead!’ groaned Marsh, tottering backwards across the stage.

  ‘No, sir!’ hissed Gladstone, grabbing Marsh by the scruff of the neck and shaking him rigid with fright. ‘No, sir, not dead but sleeping …’

  Marsh knelt down to look at the corpse and on closer inspection found it was worse than he’d first imagined. Her face was a ghastly varnished mask, the skin shrunk tight against the skull, the eyes wide open and hard as glass, the jaw loose and the teeth exposed. The wretched girl had been stuffed! He was looking at the work of some diabolical taxidermist!

  Her name was Maria Castellana, a gypsy girl from Seville. Rupert Gladstone had met her in Paris and, falling hopelessly in love, had followed her over the mountains to Spain. At first she had fled from his embrace but gradually he had won her heart and a marriage was arranged.

  There were many obstacles on the path to their future happiness. She could not speak a word of English and he could not master Spanish. He was forced to fight a duel with her brother (for reasons of honour so obscure he never made any sense of them) and, afraid of offending the family by butchering one of its favourite sons, allowed himself to be badly wounded. He spent several months in the gypsy camp recovering from these injuries. Meanwhile the family grew suspicious of the pale, young foreigner and demanded he pay an exorbitant dowry before he could claim the girl as his bride. He had to send home for the money and have the banknotes converted to gold. And then, on the eve of the wedding, Maria fell sick with the fever and died.

  Rupert Gladstone returned to London and wasted away with grief. He shut himself into the house and lived in a state of perpetual mourning. He thought he would never see her again.

  But the gypsies were people of honour and since Rupert Gladstone had paid for the girl they promised themselves he should not be cheated. So they skinned her and boned her and pickled her pelt like a sheet of fine and expensive leather. The skeleton was stuffed with horsehair and a seamstress employed to stitch back the skin. Seven months and three days later Maria Castellana was delivered to the Hampstead house, rouged, powdered, dressed for the wedding and securely packed in an olive-wood box.

  Gladstone was overwhelmed with joy to have his love returned to him. His sleeping beauty. His enchanted gypsy princess. He built her a boudoir in the cellars and equipped it with every comfort. He took down silk carpets and a feather bed and spent every evening, locked away, singing to her while he brushed her hair.

  His friends, knowing nothing of the secret, were startled by his changed appearance whenever he emerged from the cellar. A few days locked beneath the ground never failed to restore his health. He would be seized by fits of giggling and sudden outbursts of violent laughter. He was light. He was gay. In short, he was raving mad.

  Now he stood on Swann’s stage, with the hideous creature slumped at his feet, trying to wrench the wedding dress over her leathery shoulders. She gasped and creaked at the seams, her breasts caught up in the rotting silk like darkly polished plums.

  Swann tried everything he knew to make him return the corpse to its coffin. She wasn’t a suitable studio subject and, besides, what purpose would it serve to hoist her before the camera? Her master was free to play with her and marvel at her private parts whenever he desired. She wasn’t likely to run away or desert him for another lover. Why did he want her photographed?

  ‘Mice!’ hissed Gladstone fearfully, hooking his hand beneath the girl’s chin. Her belly jerked forward, as tight as a gourd, and where it was sewn between her legs erupted a long, ragged horsehair beard. The mice were building a nest in her notch. The Spanish love-doll was in serious danger of falling apart.

  This new information, far from gaining Swann’s sympathy, only served to heighten his horror. He shook his head and scampered towards the door.

  ‘Stand your ground!’ ordered Rupert Gladstone.

  ‘No!’ wheezed Swann. ‘No, I can’t do it! You’ve stolen the unhappy girl from the grave. She’s dead, God help us, the girl is dead!’

&
nbsp; ‘Not dead but sleeping!’ raved Gladstone.

  ‘Give her a Christian burial and let her sleep in peace!’ shouted Swann from the far side of the studio.

  ‘Don’t be a fool!’ screamed Gladstone, running to the edge of the stage. Maria Castellana creaked and flopped forward, wedging her face between her knees. ‘Stop or I’ll use my revolver!’

  Marsh gave a shout and fell to the floor. ‘Mercy! Don’t shoot!’ he pleaded, wrapping his head in his arms.

  Swann turned around to confront the stage. Gladstone had pulled a gun from his coat and pushed the barrel into his ear. He laughed wildly. His finger trembled against the trigger. He threatened to blow out his brains.

  Kingdom Swann took the photograph.

  34

  He never accepted another commission. For more than ten years he had photographed the mistresses of London’s high society. They had been presented to him in all of nature’s variety and never once had he failed to make them feel beautiful. But Maria Castellana had defeated him, had mocked him with her sepulchral smile and stubborn horsehair body.

  When requests were made by General Cotton for private studies of his latest conquest, a ripe and red-haired girl he had pillaged on a raid of Weymouth, Cromwell Marsh was obliged to refuse him. He hinted that Swann was engaged in more urgent and challenging work. But, in truth, Kingdom Swann did nothing.

  Marsh tried setting him off on two sets of novelty pictures using the best of Mrs Beeton’s academy. Ragtime Raptures, or The Dancing Lesson and When Amazons Mount their Bicycles. But Swann found no excitement in them. The old man had lost his enthusiasm.

  The following year the suffragettes began a campaign of terror. A bomb was found attached to the railings of the Bank of England and another inside St Paul’s Cathedral. Millions of women marched through London, shouting slogans and banging drums. They threw stones at windows and tried to set fire to the Royal Academy.

  ‘It’s the same thing every year,’ said Marsh cheerfully. ‘It just wouldn’t be summer without a women’s march.’

  ‘They’ll kill someone before they’ve finished,’ said Swann.

  A few days later a woman threw herself beneath the King’s horse at the Derby and was trampled to death. A man tried to follow her example during the Gold Cup at Ascot but survived, disgraced, and was quickly forgotten.

  ‘Why don’t the government give ’em the vote?’ said Swann.

  ‘They don’t have the brains for that sort of business,’ said Marsh. ‘They’re like children. You can’t expect them to think for themselves. They have to be told what’s good for them. And, besides, the vote won’t be the end of it,’ he added darkly. ‘The next thing you know we’ll have a petticoat parliament and then we’ll have serious trouble.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Swann. ‘They just say that to frighten you.’

  ‘You wait,’ said Marsh. ‘It’s the future. As soon as women get the vote we’ll have all manner of mischief.’

  ‘It makes no difference either way,’ said Swann. ‘A man still won’t be able to find honest work. His children will still be going hungry. There’ll be just as much misery in the world.’

  ‘There’s never no work for an honest man because there’s always a woman,’ said Marsh, ‘prepared to work for half the wages.’

  ‘I’ll never understand why women want to work. There’s nothing noble in wasting your days pushing paper in some pokey office or risking your life in a factory, chopping your fingers through a sausage machine. There’s nothing noble in reducing yourself to drudgery and selling your life by the hour. You’d think they’d be happy to stay at home with their sewing and their watercolours. It’s the privilege awarded them.’

  ‘It’s the choice they’re demanding,’ said Cromwell Marsh. ‘The privilege to pick and choose.’

  ‘The poor don’t have that privilege!’ shouted Swann. ‘They have always been forced to work and in the filthiest conditions!’

  ‘Oh, it’s not the dirty work they want,’ said Marsh. ‘These women want to be chemists and bishops.’

  ‘Chemists and bishops!’ roared Kingdom Swann. ‘Is it nothing but a parlour game?’

  ‘It might sound like fun and games to the greatly superior masculine brain but there’s women in prison starving to death for the sake of such curious notions.’

  ‘If they must leave home and hearth,’ said Swann, ‘let them, by their good example, bring some light and hope to the world. Don’t let them squander their lives like the men.’

  ‘And what would you suggest, Mr Swann?’

  The old photographer puffed out his chest and slipped his hands behind his beard. ‘The world needs sculptors and painters,’ he said. ‘The world needs music and poetry. We’ve seen enough factories and sweat-shops. Imagine a land where every woman was taught to be an accomplished artist. Think of the civilisation we’d build!’

  ‘But if women was artists,’ smirked Marsh, ‘who would we have to be models?’

  ‘The men,’ said Swann, surprised by such a foolish question. ‘Men by their own brute strength transformed into graceful gods.’

  ‘I never saw much evidence in the case of Lanky Parsons!’ laughed Marsh.

  ‘You’d have to view him through a woman’s eyes,’ said Swann.

  ‘You always was a thinker,’ chortled Marsh, very much amused. ‘But your thoughts was always too deep for me.’

  ‘The late Mrs Swann never wanted to work,’ reflected Swann.

  ‘She was too light and delicate,’ said Marsh.

  ‘I would have forbidden it!’ said Swann. ‘I would never have allowed the disgrace. Men were born to labour, God help them, and women to feel the benefit.’

  He looked around and despaired. He was too old to have any hope for himself or the world. The new century, that had seemed, at first, to promise such progress, was lurching like a drunkard down a spiral staircase towards its own destruction.

  What will become of a world where the cities roar like factories and the streets are filled with motor cars? The age of machines! No room now for men and horses. Every street a thundering procession of motor buses, motor cycles, motor cars and traction engines. And when all the streets are filled with machines they build new streets and new bridges and more machines to fill them with smoke and noise and danger. And the earth beneath the streets filled with tunnels filled with electric trains. No need to ask a p’liceman! Underground to anywhere. Quickest way. Cheapest fare. And the sky above the streets filled with aeroplanes filled with God-knows-what ready to fall on your head in flames. And no end to the machines or this craving for speed, as if men were doomed to spin in circles, faster and faster, until the planet itself is spun from its orbit. And in the future the world turned into one mighty machine, where men are born into slavery and chained like spokes in the engine wheels. Men made into machines.

  Women, too, if they get half a chance.

  35

  At the beginning of November Violet Askey was walking through Piccadilly towards a meeting of the Working Womens’ League. She was forty-five years old. A gaunt, grey-haired woman in a felt hat and a threadbare coat. She carried a carpet bag under her arm and a Votes for Women badge pinned to her coat. The bag contained a brick she had filched from a building site in Soho Square. It was a cold evening, the streets empty, the buildings marooned in a deep, brown, freezing fog. The brick was heavy and Violet was tired.

  She was tired because she was growing a cancer. On that dark November evening in 1913 the tumour was the size of a walnut, a small stain at the base of her neck. She would take to her bed in another few weeks and within six months she’d be dead. Had she known of her fate she might not have thrown the brick. She might not have bothered with political meetings, worked for a tyrant like Mrs Nottingham, lived on steamed noodles or died a virgin. But Violet Askey knew nothing. She thought she would live for ever.

  She turned a corner and saw the figure of a man on the opposite side of the street. He was a large, bearded man stooping to l
ock the door of a shop, searching his pockets for keys.

  The sight of him made her blood run cold. She stopped walking and stared at this strange yet familiar figure in old-fashioned frock-coat and muffler. And, as she watched, all the frustration of the years, all the regrets and disappointments, overwhelmed her senses and made her go for the brick. She balanced its weight in the palm of her hand, hesitated for a moment or more, and then she threw it at Kingdom Swann’s head.

  The brick clipped his ear, the window exploded and he fell to his knees under thousands of flying daggers of glass. When he recovered from the shock and turned to look for his assailant Violet Askey was already gone, running to her death through the gravy-coloured fog.

  Cromwell Marsh, who had left the shop only moments before, came running back to the scene of the crime, alarmed by the sound of breaking glass. He found Swann sprawled in the gutter.

  ‘The suffragettes!’ gasped Swann. ‘The suffragettes are coming!’

  ‘Where?’ shouted Marsh.

  ‘There!’ shouted Swann, pointing at nothing. His hands and face were covered in blood.

  Marsh stared blindly into the fog. ‘Did you see them?’

  ‘No,’ said Swann. ‘They sprang at me from nowhere, screaming and shouting like devils.’

  ‘How many?’ said Marsh, afraid that they might return for a second, more violent attack. ‘How many of them?’

  ‘Dozens,’ groaned Swann. ‘There must have been a dozen or more. Great big buggers armed with sticks.’

  ‘You’re bleeding,’ said Marsh, kneeling down beside him.

  ‘My God!’ gasped Swann. ‘I’ve been murdered.’

  Marsh pulled out his handkerchief and dabbed at the old man’s face. ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked as he gingerly searched the beard for splinters of window glass.

  ‘I feel very queer,’ confessed Swann. His eyebrows had been torn but the heavy muffler had saved him from any serious damage.

  ‘Keep your pecker up,’ said Marsh, hauling him out of the gutter and propping him, for safety, against a convenient lamp post. ‘We’ll soon have you made more comfortable.’