by Kate Forsyth
Topsy tapped Gabriel on the shoulder. He turned and flung open his arms. ‘Topsy, my dear fellow! Look at you. Fatter than ever. Mrs Topsy feeds you too well.’
‘I thought we were coming for a dinner party.’ Topsy shook Gabriel’s hand warmly. ‘But it looks like you’ve invited half of London.’
‘Well, once you invite one you’ve got to invite a dozen, don’t you find? Come in, you’ll see plenty of people you know.’
Gabriel was speaking to Topsy, but his eyes were on Janey. She gazed back at him. The years had not been kind to him. His curls were thinning, and his body thickening. His eyes were shadowed, and his brow furrowed. Yet none of that mattered to Janey. She wanted to take his dear tired face between her hands and kiss away the marks of grief and pain.
He bowed to her gravely, and took her cold hand in both of his big, warm ones. ‘Are you well, Janey?’
‘Very well, thank you,’ she answered, with a crooked smile.
‘I’m glad you could come. Topsy told me you’re in mourning for your father. I am sorry. No matter how much our parents bother us when they’re alive, it’s always hard to lose them.’
Tears stung her eyes at his understanding. She nodded, and he drew her hand through his arm.
‘Come and let me show you the house. It’s not Hogs’ Hole, but it has its charms.’ He led her away down the hall, Bessie and Topsy having to fall in behind them. ‘It used to be called Queen’s House, but no queen ever lived here, I’m afraid. Unless you wish to move in, Janey?’ He smiled at her.
They passed through an archway, with two ingenious little seats tucked in either side, and then into a broad hallway that ran at right angles across the house. A staircase stood at either end. One was traditionally built, the other a grand spiral with a balustrade made of beautifully forged iron.
Topsy exclaimed at once with pleasure, and went to examine its workmanship. As Gabriel showed him the carved brackets, Janey looked upwards to see the circular shape of the staircase as it looped up. She got a glimpse of a woman’s face, framed by heavy waves of guinea-gold hair. There was a squeak of dismay, and the woman sprang back, her silky embroidered robe flaring over the edge of the step. Footsteps pounded away.
Janey looked at Gabriel. He grinned at her. ‘Some people have mice in their ceilings. I have elephants.’
She did not know how to answer.
‘Very useful for washing windows, you know,’ he said, and led her back down the hall and into the wild disorder of his studio. Costumes were draped over lay-figures, and brushes were stuck in jars filled with thick grey sludge. A half-empty cup of cold coffee held down a stack of drawings, and a fine blue-and-white china bowl was being used as an ashtray. Hundreds of paintings were stacked against the walls or hung on every available surface. Many of them showed Lizzie’s red-golden hair and heavy-lidded eyes. Janey felt a wrench of grief at the sight of them. She looked at Gabriel. He was staring at them with so much pain and sorrow in his face, she wanted to put her arms about him and hold him close as if he were a child. He took a deep breath, braced his shoulders and turned back to her.
‘It is time for me to paint something new.’ Gabriel took her hand. ‘Will you come and sit for me, Janey? Please?’
‘I don’t know … I shouldn’t …’ Her eyes sought her husband. He was standing in the doorway, frowning at them. Janey realised that she was standing very close to Gabriel, her hand clasped in his. She stepped back, drawing her hand free. ‘I do not come up to London very often, I’m afraid.’
‘But you must! Come up with Topsy on the train, and spend the day here, in the studio, then he can come and have supper and then take you home.’ He turned to Topsy. ‘What do you say, Tops? Will you let your wife be painted by me? It’s a shame to keep all that beauty mouldering away in the country.’
Janey’s cheeks were hot, and her breath was coming short. She realised her hands were plucking at her necklace, and clasped them together to still them. Her attention was caught by a small watercolour leaning against the wall. She bent down to look at it more closely.
It showed a man seated in an alcove between two women. The one on the right was clearly modelled on Lizzie, with her bright golden-red hair loose on her shoulders. Dressed in green, she played a lute. The man – who looked like an idealised portrait of Gabriel – listened with rapt attention.
On his left sat a sad-looking woman in blue who looked just like Janey, with a cloud of dark hair and lowered brows. She clutched at the man’s hand, as if trying to reclaim his attention. At her foot was a glass full of wine. The other two had drained their glasses dry.
Janey sucked in a sharp breath.
Gabriel turned the painting to the wall. ‘Just a little something I did for George Price Boyle. He’s meant to have picked it up by now.’
Janey tried to keep her voice steady. ‘What … what do you call it?’
‘The Merciless Lady.’
Their eyes met for a long charged moment. Then Janey looked away, heat scorching her skin. She brushed past Bessie and joined the crowd in the drawing room.
What did the little painting mean? Did Gabriel think himself caught between two loves? Janey’s pulse quickened at the thought, till she felt quite dizzy and frightened. She accepted a glass of wine, nodded and smiled as everyone around her talked and laughed, and kept stealing glances at Gabriel. Every single time his gaze met hers.
Who was the Merciless Lady?
Was it Lizzie?
Or was it her?
‘Don’t smile,’ Gabriel said.
‘Why not?’ Janey asked, smiling.
‘It’s not the happiness in you I want to catch. It’s the sadness.’
Janey nodded. She looked away from him, clenching her hands together. Always he saw too much.
It seemed to Janey that happiness was a gift she had not been given. Everything seemed to weigh on her more heavily than it did on others. Each evening, as she kissed her daughters goodnight, she feared she might not see them again. As if death’s sickle might cut their delicate thread while she slept.
It was a hot afternoon in July, and Gabriel had set up a marquee in his garden for her to pose in. Bessie had come with her, to act as her chaperone. A photographer had been hired to make studies of her, so Janey stood or sat or reclined as Gabriel instructed, dressed in her dark blue dress, her hair pinned loosely.
It was easier to pose for the camera than for Gabriel. The staring glass eye was dead. It did not look inside her soul. It did not see the sorrow twisted deep with her weft.
Gabriel gently changed the angle of her jaw. She looked down, not wanting him to know how badly she wanted him to kiss her.
Why could the heart not choose whom to love?
If Janey could, she would love her husband. She would feel a little thrill in the pit of her stomach every time he touched her. She would hang on his every word, and be proud of his cleverness. She would smile at his rage, and tease him into laughter. She would go to bed each night eagerly, and press her skin against his, and shiver with longing as his hand crept between her legs.
But she did not love him. She did not want him. She could not bear him.
Why was the heart so contrary?
Janey told her husband that she was tired. That she was not well. That her head ached. She did her best to pretend nothing was wrong, but it was a poor performance.
At night she dreamed of Gabriel. Her dreams made her twist and squirm in her bed, unable to find a way to ease the constant ache of desire. She walked for miles along the roads, besmirching her skirts. She scrubbed the table till it was white, while the servants watched with resentful eyes. She sewed till her fingertips were sore.
Topsy was working long hours, coming home so tired he hardly noticed her. They sat together by the fire each night, Janey sewing silently, Topsy scribbling poems, sketching designs for wallpapers and fabrics, or frowning over bills and letters. The clock mocked the passing moments. Eventually Janey would fold away her embroidery, and sa
y goodnight. When her husband came to bed, she would pretend to be asleep. When at last his breathing relaxed into snores, she would rise and tiptoe out, lighting a candle, leaning over her sleeping daughters to make sure they still breathed, standing at the dark window and staring at the reflection of her face.
Such beauty, Gabriel had whispered, holding her face in his hands the one time he had lain with her. Such beauty.
The garden at Red House was a riot of clematis and delphiniums and wild roses. Janey worked in it every day, her skirts hitched up through her belt. Jenny and May helped her, toddling about with little buckets and spades, and pulling up daisies along with the weeds. Janey made them chains of pink clover flowers to hang about their necks, and told them that foxglove bells were worn as hats by fairies. Topsy sat in the Pilgrim’s Rest, pipe clenched between his teeth, sketching the rose trellis for a wallpaper design.
Be happy, Janey told herself. Do not think about him.
Yet when Gabriel wrote to ask her to come again, to sit for some pencil sketches, Janey went the very next day. She sat in silence beside her husband in the train all the way to London, twisting her handkerchief in her fingers till it tore.
Gabriel did not lie with her. Gabriel did not kiss her. He barely touched her at all.
Yet his drawings were small miracles of tenderness and yearning.
When Topsy saw them that afternoon, his mouth set grimly. He looked from Gabriel to Janey suspiciously. Gabriel made a joke. Janey was the Queen of Beauty, he said, impossible to draw badly. Topsy did not smile.
Janey sat in silence beside him all the way home.
That Sunday, Topsy took his palette and his brushes, and went to work on the great settle in the front hall. He had been intermittently painting a scene from Malory’s Joyous Gard for months, with the help of his friends. He had painted a golden sky, tall slender apple trees, flower-scattered grass. On one door, a man in a medieval hood, looking much like Topsy himself, played a lute to a woman in a red gown who sat leaning towards him, listening. This woman had been drawn with Janey’s strong jaw and dark rumpled waves of hair. Two other women, partly completed, stood on either side, framing the seated couple. Janey thought that Topsy may have modelled them on Lucy and Kate Faulkner, who had often visited Red House with their brother.
The second panel was almost completed. A man, modelled by Ned, fed a small fruit to his lover, modelled by Georgie. Another woman reached up one hand to break a branch from an apple tree. Two more figures were rising to dance. Janey knew that Topsy had intended them to be Gabriel and Lizzie, but he had felt unable to finish the painting of their faces after her death.
Janey knew the story of the Joyous Gard well. It had been a great castle once named the Dolorous Gard, for it had been inhabited by a cruel lord. King Arthur had told Sir Lancelot that he might have the castle if he could free it from its wicked owner. So the young Sir Lancelot set out to do battle with the monster that guarded it and broke the sinister enchantment upon the land. He turned the castle into a place of great beauty, where art and music flourished. It was renamed the Joyous Gard, and King Arthur and Queen Guenevere visited him there. Later, when his tragic love for his king’s wife had been exposed, Sir Lancelot rescued Queen Guenevere from being burned alive and fled with her back to his castle. King Arthur besieged the castle, the lovers were forced to part, and the castle was ruined. It was once again named the Dolorous Gard, a place of treachery and grief.
Gabriel had told Janey the story, long ago in Oxford, as he had painted her as the queen and himself as the faithless friend.
Suddenly Janey heard a great din. She ran into the hall. Topsy was hammering the hilt of his palette knife into his painting of Janey’s face. ‘I can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t do it,’ he cried.
Janey stood and stared at him. He glared at her in angry accusation. She shrank back. He hurled his palette and knife across the hall and went out, slamming the front door behind him.
Janey stood before the settle. The painting of her face was damaged beyond repair. Janey reached up and covered it with her hand, the splintered wood rough beneath her fingers. Her chest was rising and falling quickly. Her eyes burned.
The palette had broken, leaving a mess of paint on the floor. Wet brushes lay tumbled everywhere, the knife flung clear across the wall. Janey bent to clear up the mess. Her finger slipped into the wet black paint. Janey rose and carefully drew ripples of dark hair above the sketched face of the dancing woman. The woman who should have been Lizzie.
In the early autumn, Topsy told her that they had to leave Red House.
‘The Firm is not making enough money,’ he said brusquely, ‘and my income from my father’s investments has halved this year.’
Janey stared at him.
‘I can’t go on like this. Hours of travel every day, worrying over the bills, having no time for anything.’ He looked at her directly for the first time. ‘Wondering what you are doing all day while I am gone.’
‘Where shall we go? What will happen to the house?’ She could scarcely manage to whisper the words.
‘We have to sell the house.’ He made no effort to soften the blow. ‘I am looking for somewhere in town, somewhere where we can live above the workshops.’
She was dumb with misery.
Part of her realised that it was Topsy’s own grief at the loss of the house that made him so curt. He loved it as much as her; it was the house of his dreams. Yet once he had decided to sell, he poured all his energies into making it happen. It was Janey who could not recover from the blow.
3
A Pearl Beyond Price
Summer 1866
‘What do you think it’ll be?’ Ned asked Phil one morning, as Georgie struggled to her feet, one fist pressed into the curve of her back.
Phil put his head to one side. ‘It’ll be either a girl or a boy,’ he pronounced, after due deliberation.
Ned shouted with laughter, then agreed he thought Phil might be right.
Georgie laid both hands on the hard swell of her stomach. It would be a girl, she knew it. She had had a most vivid dream nine months ago. She had imagined herself swimming in a deep green pool of water, ripples of light passing over her naked body. A slim silver fish swam below her. Its fins brushed against her belly. Georgie had swum to the surface, and rolled over on to her back. Her belly was swelling round and pale and luminous, as if she had the moon within her womb. She cradled it with both arms, and her skin parted and unfurled like the petals of a wild rose, revealing a tiny child curled within the secret golden heart. The child had been a girl, and Georgie had woken knowing both that she was once again with child, and that this time she would have the daughter she had always longed for.
The months after baby Christopher’s death had been the darkest and most melancholy Georgie had ever known. She had not been able to bear to stay at their rooms at Great Russell Street. So they had moved to the first house they could find, in Kensington Square. The building faced north, and was cold and draughty. The narrow garden smelt of cat urine. The rooms were small and gloomy, and Ned complained that the light was too poor for painting. Georgie had wanted to find a house with a big, sunny garden, and apple trees, but Ned had wanted to stay close to Kensington. His old friend, Val Prinsep, lived only a short stroll away. His family – who had made their fortune in India – had created a lively artistic salon at their home, Little Holland House. Ned had taken to going there often, leaving Georgie at home with Phil.
With his big blue eyes and dark curls, five-year-old Phil looked as if he would have the sweetest of tempers. He was a little autocrat, however, who loved ordering around the young maid-of-all-work. He would climb up on a chair in the kitchen, point a wooden spoon at the cupboard, and say, ‘Jam and bread. Now.’ He hated being put to bed, particularly now the evenings were light for so long, and would struggle and scream and fight till Georgie was exhausted. Ned was no use; he did not have an autocratic bone in his body, and simply looked surprised when Geo
rgie begged him to intervene.
Once Georgie lost all patience and threatened her little boy with a spanking. He stared at her defiantly, his full lower lip quivering, saying, ‘How cruel of you.’
She could not bear to strike him, and so he stayed up till all hours, playing on the carpet with his trains and his wooden blocks, till at last weariness overcame and his eyes fluttered closed, his head pillowed on his plump arms. Georgie carried him up to bed, tucking him in beside her so she could soothe him back to sleep if he woke.
As the days grew longer, Georgie’s stomach swelled till she could no longer disguise her shape with shawls. She was filled with apprehension, unable to forget the last terrible birth and its tragic aftermath. She comforted herself by remembering the dream she had had, of a baby girl curled in the centre of a rose. Surely it meant that this child would live?
If Georgie was fearful, Ned was petrified. He hovered over her, trying to make her rest, begging her to stay home, away from the contagion of the streets.
Yet he did not feel any need to stay home himself. He went to Little Holland House most days, and often stayed late, smoking and drinking and talking. Sometimes he did not get home till the wee hours of the morning, coming in with his boots in his hand but knocking over the umbrella stand on the way.
Georgie could not believe her own husband was proving the ills of alcohol.
She would lie awake for hours, listening to cats squall out in the garden, arguing with Ned silently in her mind. Yet when he came in, she shut her eyes and pretended to be asleep, unable to bear the idea of quarrelling with him.
She had no-one to talk to. Her mother and youngest sister, Edith, were in Bewdley, looking after her ailing father. Alice and her husband, John Kipling, were in India, nursing a baby boy they had called Rudyard. Agnes was engaged to an ambitious young painter called Edward Poynter, and Louie had betrothed herself to an up-and-coming politician named Alfred Baldwin. Ned had been most cast down at their engagements, hating the idea of the little girls he had known being old enough to marry and have children. He had written a letter to Louie, which said: ‘I am unchangeable in my love for you, don’t doubt it: nothing will ever divide us – no chance nor circumstance will bring that about – but a little gloomy sulkiness is excusable in me. I only had two wenches and they are both gone …’