Ashenden (13 page)

“No.”

“It was several years ago.” She went on to say that an awful common man called Anderson or Ferguson, she couldn’t remember, who had made a good deal of money in buttons, or something like that, had set his heart on it. “He used to drive past in his carriage and look in the windows, as if he might snap his fingers and it would be his.”

He knew, whether she knew it or not, that she was talking about the haberdasher James Henderson, whose fortune was feeding a growing reputation as an art collector, but who had not yet collected any of his own pictures.

“Why didn’t he buy it if he wanted it so badly?”

“I expect he couldn’t afford what my husband was asking for it. I can’t say I was displeased.”

Ever since she had entered the room, he had been hoping for an acknowledgment of their intimacy, a gesture of affection no matter how small, and he was beginning to wonder if she had cooled towards him, if the affair was over. Rank, as much as patronage, gave her the upper hand in all their dealings with one another. Perhaps it would be better, despite his present disappointment and ill ease (not to mention the expense of the journey), that it should end after all.

She must have read something of this in his expression. Moving close, and with a boldness that made his heart race, she reached up to grasp the stuff of his coat and kissed him full and deep on the mouth. “Mr. O’Daub . . . oh, how I’ve missed you.”

*  *  *

Rose ran into the kitchen, strands of hair stuck to her cheeks, and said James was coming and he had one of the boys with him.

“Which one?” said Mrs. Trimble.

Rose was out of breath and couldn’t say.

The trap was pulling up in front of the stable block when Mrs. Trimble came through the courtyard at a trot. Frederick jumped off the back.

She seized him by the arm. “Where is your brother?”

The boy was carrying a dead water rat by the tail. The brown fur was matted with black blood, buzzing with flies.

“I said, where’s your brother?”

He nodded back at the trap.

Relief lit the touch paper of her anger. “Get yourself indoors, Frederick. Straightaway. And put that dirty thing down!”

“
Master
Frederick. I thank you to address me correctly.”

He strode off into the courtyard, his eyes hard like marbles. Like father, like son. Seeing him go, swinging the rat by the tail, she itched to run after him and beat the living daylights out of him.

Thomas, always eager for a drama, appeared to see what all the fuss was about, and she told him to help the stable lad take the icebox into the yard. “No need to shout, ma’am,” he said, waggling a finger in his ear. “I hear you plain enough.”

Edward got down from the trap, yawning and rubbing his eyes.

“Thank the Lord,” said Rose.

“I think he’s had too much sun,” said James, who clambered down afterwards. “He’s been asleep most of the way back.” He was carrying the fowling piece, broken at the breech, in the crook of his elbow.

“Take the boy to bed, Rose,” said Mrs. Trimble.

Edward said that he was hungry.

“Supper first, then bed.”

“What if my lady wants to see the children?” said Rose.

“Her visitor has arrived. I doubt she’ll ask for them.”

Rose led the boy back to the house. Mrs. Trimble watched them go, then turned to the footman. “What on earth possessed you to take them out like that without telling anyone? You’ve given us all a fright.”

James shrugged. Putting thoughts into words—or having them in the first place, she suspected—was not his strong point, and it was a while before she got the story out of him and reassembled into an order that made sense. The gist was he’d thought it would be a nice treat. For Edward, that is. When he’d found the boy lurking about the stables with a long face and had said how about they go fetch the ice together, remembering the thrashing his brother had given him in the river (had she heard about that business?) and thinking somehow it would make it up to him, the boy had jumped at the chance. You had your tea? he had asked, and Edward had said yes, he had had his tea, thank you. Then go and tell them where you’ll be, he had said, and the boy had gone off to tell them and how was he to know that he hadn’t? They’d come across Frederick on the way back from Whiteleys. He’d been in one of the fields with the haymakers, with the rat and the gun, and he’d managed to get the gun off him and persuade him to come home. It had taken some doing. The haymakers had the jugs out by then.

“You know what it’s like . . . thirsty work.”

“What are you saying, James?”

He scuffed his toe on the ground and pulled his ear. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the lad’s had a few.” The ear received more of his attention. “To hear him talk, you’d think he’d shot a buck.”

Those were the most disrespectful words that she had ever heard him utter about one of the family, and as soon as they were out of his mouth, he blushed to the roots of his hair.

It was then that the passing bell began to toll, slow and deep,
marking each year of a life. As the sound came across the hushed fields, they counted in silence.

“God rest His Majesty’s soul,” said Mrs. Trimble at the end.

“Amen,” said James.

Mrs. Trimble glanced up at the turret clock, which was broken and could not tell her the time. They were in a backwater here; the news was probably hours old. The end of an era. What would happen to the country now with a girl on the throne, the Lord only knew.

*  *  *

“It is a beautiful house.”

“The moths like it,” she said. “And so do the beetles and the silverfish. They adore the carpets and the furniture and the books. Positively dote on them.”

They were eating in a pink-and-green room, and what they were eating was also pink and green. Asparagus, that was green, and very green it tasted too. And something trembling in aspic, which for some reason made him think of a baby’s bottom. He was not sure how to deal with it. It wasn’t a chop, put it like that.

The butler in his worn frock coat hovered in the shadows. From time to time he came forward to pour the champagne and the furrows on his face would sharpen into charcoal lines. A bitter man, thought David Maurice. He’d seen the same type in the murk of Cork alehouses, men with grievances they nursed to themselves along with their grog. Not a drinker, this one, he thought, rather a person pickling in his own sour juices.

Georgiana sipped from her glass, made a face, and said that she had asked for the wine to be iced, not frozen. “It is so cold, it sets my teeth on edge.”

“I beg your pardon, my lady.”

David Maurice glanced up from his cracked gold-rimmed plate, but the man’s face was a professional mask. He had never become accustomed to the way they were with their servants—ignoring them one minute as if they were blind, deaf, and dumb, and carved
from stone, taking them to task the next, like little children who wanted the world and saw no reason why they shouldn’t have it this instant. What made him uneasy was the fact he never knew which side he was supposed to be on. He smiled at the butler, smiled at Georgiana, who was feeding the dog from her plate, then squirmed in his seat. He noticed how her plump rounded arms tapered to narrow wrists that you could encircle with one finger and thumb.

Fish was next, with a remote taste of mud, and more champagne, which washed the taste away. There was a small, fine bone lodged in his teeth and he didn’t know what to do with it. In London, dining with his friends, talking about books and plays and paintings, it was not the sort of thing that concerned him.

The food came in unpredictable relays and was served by a pair of footmen, one knowing and leering, whose gaze he avoided, and the other raw-boned and simple, who appeared to have hurled his clothing on his back and his wig on his head, because nothing was straight. As they handed round the dishes, by turns ingratiating and inept, it occurred to him that footmen were ordinary fellows who assumed the part when they put on their livery, just as he was an ordinary fellow who had altered his accent and origins to present himself as an artist. The idea was disturbing. By the end of the meat course he was more than a little drunk and the truth was he couldn’t have said what they ate after that. He was conscious only of the light fading as the long day wore itself out like an overexcited child.

Georgiana got up from her chair with a harsh rustle of silk and told the butler that they would have another bottle of his “frozen champagne” in the library. David Maurice rose to follow her, hearing a faint shrilling that might or might not have been coming from inside his own head. Drink had blurred him. All the talk at dinner had been of Delgado, what he was doing, who he was seeing, and whether or not he would win his seat, none of which he knew the answers to. Delgado would have to marry, she had said. Someone in his position, with his ambitions, had to marry money. “I wonder who will be fool enough.” Then she had laughed. In a moment of sobering clarity, as they walked through the echoing spaces of the house, feeling the
blood heat of her creamy arm through the cheap cloth of his coat, he realized that she was still in love with his former friend (he supposed Delgado had been his friend) and that it was the type of love that you never got over. “Well, so much for all that,” she said, leaning into him. “Let’s make the most of the evening while we can. Now the King is dead, no doubt my husband will summon me to court tomorrow. A parade of respectability suits his purposes on occasion.”

The library walls, between glazed shelves of dull brown books, were the same green as the awning that shaded the bank on Lee Street in summer. Georgiana complained how stuffy it was, crossed the room, and opened a window, which struck him with amazement, as he had never seen her perform even so simple a task when there was a bell to summon someone else to do it. The night air came in, sweet with the fragrance of white flowers and mown hay. Even now, it was not quite dark: candlelight and twilight took it in turns to trade places with each other so that it was hard to say whether it was brighter or dimmer indoors or out.

“Show me,” she said, her eyes straying to the portfolio. “I want to see what you have made of me.”

“I have made of you what you are.”

“And what is that?”

“Magnificent.”

“You have all the blarney of your countrymen,” she said, but he saw the comment had pleased her.

As his fingers fumbled with the strings, he thought how the rich, even the poorest rich, could stretch time. At home they had risen with the sun and gone to bed when it set. It had been more or less the same after his father’s luck had famously changed: he couldn’t remember an evening when a candle had burned more than an hour after dark. Here on the shortest night of the year the sconces were lit, picking out the gilt letters on the spines of books he doubted anyone had read. Georgiana, he knew, had struggled to turn more than a few pages of Delgado’s novels, including the most recent one that had immortalized their affair, mystified as to why it contained so much politics.

“Show me,” she said, leaning over him, her breath sour-sweet with champagne and strawberries.

“Close your eyes.”

Her eyelids trembled.

“Close them.”

He had so little power over her, or over anyone, that when she shut her eyes, he was tempted to keep her standing there, the prisoner of her own curiosity and anticipation. Then he reminded himself he had a living to make, opened the portfolio, removed the plain sheet of paper that covered the watercolor, and told her she could look.

She didn’t say a word. Not at first, and not for some long moments afterwards.

David Maurice had won the commission for the family portrait on the strength of his friend’s introduction. Sir Frederick had sat for him briefly, long enough for him to get the measure of the man, which was to say long enough for him to see the way the man wanted posterity to view him. He found him to be one of those bluff, loud, unthinking fair-haired types, unconscious of their own cruelty, an impression that fitted with what he had already learned. The children, who could not be expected to sit, he had sketched in the nursery at Carlton Terrace on a number of rainy afternoons. He had to admit that some of those sketches were more realistic than what he had subsequently painted. As a matter of course, you shortened noses, pinned back ears, and added healthy robustness to spindly limbs. He had never known a mother or father who wished to see the warts on their children’s faces.

Georgiana was a different matter. He’d had no need to gloss her beauty and she had made herself available for many sittings in which he could record it, savor it, and in due course pay it the physical tribute her veiled eyes and parted lips had invited. A few of the women he had painted before had responded in the same way— it was all that looking, he supposed, easily confused with admiration—but those encounters had been brief and had ended in shame on both sides and for different reasons. Often he wondered how
this would end, but not when he was with her. She had a knack or an instinct for making the present infinite, and it was only when he was apart from her that he considered the danger to both of them, a danger of which she seemed entirely oblivious. Or perhaps it was simply that she liked courting risk.

The
mise en scène
of the portrait was the Middle Ages. Historical settings generally met with approval, so he’d found. The boys in hose, Clara in a trailing gown that might have come from any period, dogs in the foreground, one of which was Blanche. Sir Frederick, with his high forehead and drooping mustache, he had portrayed emerging from the darkness at the top of a stone stair wearing a suit of armor, the noble protector of his family. The armor was a gift, for it enabled him to improve the man’s physique. Halfway down the picture, where the diagonal composition reversed on itself, was Georgiana, the wide wings of an ermine-trimmed velvet cloak framing the creamy whiteness of her breasts. She could have walked out of the picture into the court of St. James’s and set a fashion. That was the entire point of the romance, as he understood it. It had not escaped his attention that this evening she was dressed in the same gown she had worn for the sittings and which he had painted.