‘When did you meet again?’
‘About four months ago. She walked through that door, bold as brass, saying she needed my help. Said I owed her one. I told her I didn’t have no blunt to spare. She could look around the place, if she didn’t believe me. But she didn’t want money.’ Nelly pointed to the drawing of the young girl with dark hair. ‘Lucy wanted me to look for her – for Pamela.’
Child leaned forward. Now they were coming to the meat of the story. ‘Who is she? What was she to Lucy?’
‘What we call a game pullet: not yet a whore, but soon to be. She was a former servant, Lucy said, selling her maidenhead for a tidy sum. Lucy had met her at that artist’s house. He painted Pamela too. She’s fifteen years old, but she looks younger. Five feet four, not much meat on her. Lucy said she is sharper than she looks. They’re often the worst ones, see. The ones who think they know everything. They’re the ones who walk right into danger.’
‘She and Lucy were friends?’
‘Not as you’d call it. Pamela had only been sitting for the artist a few weeks. Then she disappeared, and Lucy had been scouring London trying to find her.’
‘Why did she go to so much trouble if they barely knew one another?’
Nelly gave him a pitying look. ‘Don’t take much to guess, do it? Pamela was about the same age Olivia would have been if she’d lived. You could see it gnawed at Lucy. She couldn’t let it go. Wanted me to talk to the rookery whores, in case Pamela had fallen in with bad company. Visit the Bankside stewpots, talk to the park-walkers. That sort of thing.’
Child was frowning, trying to make sense of it all. ‘Did you ever see Lucy with any other drawings by this artist?’
Nelly nodded. ‘Four of them. Pictures of different gentlemen. Lucy said they was members of some sort of club.’
‘Was one of them fine-looking? Short hair? A scar just here?’
Nelly nodded again. ‘Lucy said he knew Pamela too. They all did. I tried to find out more, but she wouldn’t tell me much. Said it was too dangerous. Anyway, I looked all over London, but I found no trace of the girl. When I told Lucy, I expected her to be annoyed, but she weren’t. She acted unsurprised and I wanted to know why. That’s when she told me.’
A very bad feeling began to creep over Child. ‘Told you what?’
‘That she never thought I’d find Pamela, because Pamela weren’t nowhere to be found. Lucy thought she’d been killed – by one of them four gentlemen in her drawings.’
BOOK TWO
5–9 SEPTEMBER 1782
‘At home there tarries like a lurking snake,
Biding its time, a wrath unreconciled,
A wily watcher, passionate to slake,
In blood, resentment for a murdered child.’
Aeschylus, the Oresteia, 458 BC
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE CRAMPS BEGAN half an hour later. They came in waves at first, striking Caro without warning. A chill sweat broke over her each time. They grew progressively worse, and Emelie, her ladies’ maid, must have heard her moans, for she rapped upon the bedroom door, concerned, until Caro snapped at her to go away.
With the cramps came nausea – intense, visceral, rising from her belly to her throat. She battled it, drawing deep breaths, but the cramps came on again, leaving her gasping. Her stomach swilled like soup, bile flooded her mouth, and then she was leaning from the bed, vomiting into the chamber pot.
She stared down at the contents in dismay. That faint minty odour again. Lucy’s words uppermost in her mind: ‘If you vomit within an hour of taking the tincture, there is every likelihood that it will not work.’
Racked by another ferocious bout of cramps, she fell back onto the bed, unable to think of anything but the pain inside her. All night, she lay there shuddering, knees bent, back curled, slipping in and out of a hot, feverish sleep. She dreamed of Agnetti’s Medea, scorned by her lover, Jason, murdering her infant children by way of revenge. Medea fled aboard a golden chariot sent by the gods who had taken pity, but here there was no chariot and no salvation.
The pain subsided a little before dawn. Dazed and weak, she pulled back the bedclothes to examine the sheet. Only a few spots of blood. Nothing like Lucy had described. She pressed a knuckle to her mouth, as fear and desperation overcame her.
*
The old brick workhouse cast a long shadow over the graveyard. Caro shivered, pulling her cloak around her. The chattering of rooks in the plane trees mingled with chanting from the poor boys’ school. The gravediggers lowered Lucy’s coffin into the earth.
It had been two days since she’d taken the tincture. This morning she felt a little stronger, though her stomach still griped. Her skin bore no signs of jaundice, no numbness, no trembling. Her breasts were heavy and sore, a metallic taste in her mouth like she’d been sucking on pennies. She’d had that taste with Gabriel too, all through those hot, angry months she’d carried him. She knew with a mother’s certainty that her child lived.
It had scared her, that night she’d taken the tincture. Her nearness to death in all its guises. Slipping from one world to the next. She didn’t know where to procure more. She didn’t want to procure more. She didn’t want to die.
Which meant facing the reality of her situation. There may still be a chance, she thought. Harry’s pity might win out. He might let me go abroad, as Lord March had suggested, have the child in secret, give it away. His political prospects, her money, Gabriel: all would weigh heavily against divorce. He claimed to love her – perhaps some part of him truly did? They could put things in train together. Maybe Mr Child would help? Swaying slightly, chilled with cold sweat, she hoped against hope that he would see reason.
The vicar, a lean man with a hooked nose and deep-set eyes, read the prayers tersely, underscoring his displeasure. He had refused to let her hold the funeral in her parish church of St George’s, and looked offended that she had even asked. Only the Cravens’ large and regular donations to the parish funds had secured his participation at all. Despite the notice she had placed in the newspapers, only one mourner was in attendance other than herself and Miles: Jacobus Agnetti, standing a little distance off from the grave. He bowed in Caro’s direction, but didn’t approach.
The vicar finished his prayers at a gallop, closing his book with a snap. Caro thanked him and he departed, pausing briefly at the gate to allow a short, shambolic figure into the churchyard.
‘I called at your house yesterday,’ Peregrine Child said, as he approached. ‘They told me you were ill.’
‘I was.’ She slipped a ginger comfit into her mouth. The graveyard resounded with dull thuds as the gravediggers shovelled earth onto the coffin. Agnetti made another bow in her direction and headed for the gate.
‘Who’s that?’ Child asked.
‘The artist Lucy sat for, Jacobus Agnetti.’
Mr Child gave her a glance of concern. Not that he could be said to look much better. A bruise mottled his cheek and he smelled powerfully of gin.
‘I’d like to talk to Agnetti, given what I’ve found out.’
‘I already have. He told me he dismissed Lucy for stealing some drawings a few months ago.’
‘I found one.’ Child took a dirty square of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. ‘This girl, her name is Pamela – she has a connection to all this, I think.’
Caro listened as he told her about his visit to Lucy’s rooms, and how he had tracked down the prostitute Nelly Diver. Lucy and Nelly in the old days; the death of Lucy’s daughter, Olivia; Lucy’s reappearance in Nelly’s life, and her quest to find out what had happened to Pamela.
‘I’ve seen this girl before,’ Caro said. ‘Agnetti painted her. She was his Iphigenia.’
‘Nelly said Lucy met Pamela at his house. I spent yesterday asking around about her, but had no more luck than Nelly. None of the pimps and whores I spoke to had ever heard of her.’
‘Then you’re right. We should talk to Agnetti again.’
Child hesitat
ed. ‘This business is more dangerous than we first thought.’ Caro listened, astonished, as he told her about the ‘official sorts’ who’d gone looking for Kitty Carefree; the important gentleman who’d interrogated Orin Black at the magistrate’s house; and the attempt on his life by an agent of the Home Office.
‘What happened to him, this agent?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
She frowned. ‘The gentleman with the eyebrows – the one who was with the magistrate – he sounds like Nicholas Cavill-Lawrence, Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office. He came to see me the other day to warn me off. Because I went to Jonathan Stone’s house in connection with this matter.’
‘Stone? The moneylender?’
Caro told him about the ring she’d found in the bower and how it had led her to Stone’s estate. ‘Cavill-Lawrence wanted to know if Stone had asked me anything political. He matters to them in some way, I think.’
Child shook his head. ‘You should have left all that to me. This is a serious business, madam.’
‘What was he looking for, this Home Office agent?’
‘Papers of some kind. He thought Lucy might have left them with Nelly, but she didn’t have them. I think that’s why Sir Amos sent men to Lucy’s rooms – to look for them. I suspect it’s also why he volunteered to take the case from Guildford – only he’s acting on the Home Office’s account, not his own. For all we know, they’re talking to all Lucy’s friends and acquaintances. Because they think she entrusted these papers to someone.’
Caro remembered Sir Amos’s searching eyes, during that one moment of their meeting when he’d seemed curious. And you had no other dealings with the dead woman other than those you’ve described?
Liars, all of them liars. She’d thought their crime to be indifference, but for some reason they seemed to be protecting Lucy’s murderer.
‘There’s that letter I saw in the bower, but Sir Amos wasn’t interested in that. Why not – if it’s documents he’s looking for?’
‘Probably because he already has it. One of his constables could easily have picked it up. This must be something different. Maybe connected.’
Caro shook her head, trying to take it all in. Two documents? Two murders? Both prostitutes – or close enough. Both sitting for Jacobus Agnetti.
‘Lucy believed Pamela was murdered by one of four gentlemen,’ Child said. ‘She told Nelly they were all members of some sort of club. One is named Lieutenant Dodd-Bellingham. I don’t know the names of the others. Dodd-Bellingham accosted Lucy outside her lodgings just before she was killed. Lucy had drawings of these four men – probably the ones she stole from Agnetti – but Bow Street took them.’
‘The Priapus Club,’ Caro said. ‘I know their names: Jonathan Stone, Lord March, the lieutenant, and his brother, Simon.’ She told him about Stone’s painting, and the four rings.
‘Stone was wearing the original. We need to find out which of the others dropped his copy in the bower.’
Child gave her a sidelong glance. ‘Then you no longer believe Lord March to be as pure as holy water?’
She flushed. ‘I am keeping an open mind.’
Child’s grin swiftly faded. ‘This is more than we ever anticipated. Baird’s attempt on my life. The Home Office involvement.’
‘Having misgivings, Mr Child?’
‘I’d be mad not to. But I’m here, aren’t I? Unlike you, I need the money.’
Caro watched the clods fall from the diggers’ shovels. Lucy might have been murdered at any time, she thought. If this girl Pamela is the cause of it. The killer simply took his opportunity in the bower. It wasn’t my fault.
A long line of gentlemen’s faces spiralled before her eyes: the four members of the Priapus Club, Sir Amos and Cavill-Lawrence. Faceless gentlemen too: the men who’d bought and sold Lucy, the man who’d killed her and who’d killed this child, Pamela.
‘Lucy didn’t walk away,’ she said. ‘How could she? Pamela was her atonement for Olivia. To fail her a second time would have been unthinkable. I suppose that’s why he killed her – because nothing else he’d done to stop her had worked.’ She turned away from the grave to face Mr Child. ‘And now he thinks he has won. He thinks nobody cares about his crimes. But he is wrong in that belief, and soon he will know it.’
PAMELA
13–20 January, 1782
In Mr Agnetti’s house there was much to love and much to hate.
Pamela hated lying for hours on the wooden altar, her neck stiffening, her limbs turning slowly to ice. The studio was octagonal, on the first floor of Mr Agnetti’s house in Leicester Fields, and he often opened the four long windows to disperse the smells of turpentine and paint. The altar was painted to look like stone, and Pamela wore a white robe. To her mind, it was not so very different from the stage in Mrs Havilland’s tableaux house, except that the eyes watching her here belonged to goddesses and monsters in gilt frames. Agnetti didn’t seem to feel the chill, but then he wasn’t the one lying half-naked with his bubbies out.
She hated it when she had to pose with Peter Jakes, dressed in a helmet and loincloth, puffing out his onion breath, flicking her nipple with his wooden sword when Agnetti’s back was turned. Still, the artist paid a guinea an hour, half for Mrs Havilland, half for her.
She hated her walks to the house with her watcher, his terse comments and vigilant eyes, trudging through the grimy snow day after day. Agnetti had said it would take three months at least to paint her likeness and many more weeks to paint the drapery and landscape. He’d intimated that in the future he might use her again, and she hoped next time he would paint her as a goddess.
She loved learning about his pictures, listening to Mr Agnetti’s voice as he explained, rich as chocolate. Soon he would start on the painting, though he said he would continue to sketch her as it progressed. Chalk and charcoal first. Then black, ultramarine and white. Then yellow ochre, rose madder lake, and vermillion. Even the names of the paints sounded romantic.
She loved the idea of adorning the wall of a nobleman’s mansion. The Pamela in the book said that virtue was the only true beauty. But a duke didn’t hang you on his wall because you said your prayers at night.
Most of all, she loved spending time with Lucy Loveless and Kitty Carefree . . .
*
They’d first met on the third occasion Pamela had sat for Mr Agnetti. He’d stopped to rest two hours in, as he often did, but this time he’d told her to get dressed.
‘My wife wishes to meet you. She invites you to take tea with her and her friends.’
Pamela followed him downstairs, rather nervously. The rippling notes of a harpsichord reached them, and as the player struck the final chords, applause.
Agnetti’s morning room was even grander than Mrs Havilland’s parlour. Arched windows, rich with drapery, overlooked a small snow-shrouded garden. Yellow silk wallpaper filled the room with a honeyed light. And warmth! A large fire piled high with coals. Pamela felt life flowing back into her frozen limbs. Two ladies sat at a tea table, a silver chocolate pot and porcelain teacups between them. A third woman with tumbling red curls sat at the harpsichord.
‘My wife,’ Agnetti said, indicating one of the women at the tea table. ‘My dear, this is Pamela. My new sitter.’
Mrs Agnetti rose and they studied one another. Much younger than her husband – thirty at most – she was a similar height to Pamela, but all skin and bone. She wore a gown of ruched primrose satin and an extraordinary turban of ivory silk, pinned with a ruby brooch, that wouldn’t look out of place in the Sultan’s Seraglio scene at the tableaux house. Her face beneath the turban was small and white and hollow: sunken green eyes, a petulant mouth, and tiny teeth.
‘You must call me, Theresa, child. Come, take a seat.’
Welcoming words, but her voice was distant, lacking warmth. Agnetti indicated the other women. ‘Here are two more of my sitters: Lucy Loveless and Kitty Carefree.’
The celebrated harlots whom she and
Cecily had watched that night from their bedroom window. Pamela examined them with mounting excitement, and not a little curiosity. How odd that Mrs Agnetti consorted so freely with whores. Wasn’t she afraid for her own reputation?
Lucy gave her a broad smile, wafting herself with a silk fan. Pamela admired her indigo satin and her piled chestnut hair, a long, loose ringlet resting upon one plump breast. Kitty blew her a kiss from the harpsichord. She had ivory skin with barely a freckle, an upturned nose and soft, coral lips. ‘Just look at her, Boleyn. Remember what it was like to be young and beautiful?’
Lucy, to whom this remark was apparently addressed, rolled her eyes. ‘I wouldn’t swap what I know now, not for twenty-five guineas a night.’
‘I would.’
Mrs Agnetti poured Pamela a bowl of chocolate with her own hands. Agnetti looked on fondly, and when his wife retook her seat, he went to kiss her. She turned away, so that his lips only brushed her cheek.
His smile faded. ‘I shall leave you.’
Kitty played an arpeggio. ‘You said if I played Haydn you’d tell us about India, remember.’
Mrs Agnetti glanced at the door through which her husband had departed. ‘If you fetch the Madeira, I will.’
Lucy glanced at Kitty. ‘It’s not yet twelve.’
‘Your choice,’ Mrs Agnetti said. ‘Madeira and India. Or chocolate and London.’
‘Oh, Boleyn, don’t be a dullard.’ Kitty crossed to a decanter on a console table and poured. She handed around the glasses, and then draped herself on a sofa. Pamela sipped tentatively. She preferred the taste of chocolate, but it gave her a thrill to be drinking fine wine, in this fine room, in the company of these fine women on equal terms.
‘I grew up in India,’ Mrs Agnetti addressed Pamela. ‘My father sat on the Council of Bengal. Lucy and Kitty like to hear stories about my time there.’
‘I should like to hear them too, Mrs Agnetti.’
‘I told you to call me Theresa.’ Her tone was sharp.
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