The Fraud (21 page)

‘I think, my dear,’ said Angelica sweetly, ‘that the Walks are put to much the same purpose now!’ and they laughed again, these fashionable, worldly creatures, and whispered together, while the quiet sister observed figures appearing and disappearing in the enchanting, flickering lantern-light.

They went to exhibitions at the Foundling Hospital in Coram Fields where the artist William Hogarth had arranged for many English painters’ work to be shown, including his own. Again Society promenaded, they were after all supporting the poor deserted little children by their very presence (heard stories of small bundles left at the gates): sometimes the visitors even graciously allowed their names to be given to the little children at the christenings. Francesca looked everywhere in hope of catching a glimpse of the famous painter, was entranced by his portrait of the sea captain who had had the idea of the Foundling hospital, but Filipo disagreed.

‘He makes the man
look
like a Sea Captain!’ he said sourly. ‘What is the point of that?’ and Francesca did not answer, and Angelica smiled and nodded at the passing people behind her fan.

And then Mr Hogarth himself did appear in the distance, with his wife on his arm. Francesca di Vecellio felt her heart beating fast: how very much she wanted to meet again the man who had drawn her in the church in Bristol, who had somehow unlocked her heart and inspired her to draw again.

‘He is a scurrilous little fellow, and ill they say, but we will make ourselves known nevertheless,’ said Filipo di Vecellio, ‘for he of course knows my work and may like to arrange to hang it here. But he is not a real Painter.’ He spoke with disdain. ‘His
Gin Lane
and
Beer Street
and
Harlot’s Progress
-
they are nothing but Caricatures - and he hates Foreigners!’

His sister stood stock still. She was older - surely she was much changed? But he was a man who drew faces, he would remember faces. She remembered his face: she saw him coming towards them. As Philip waited in his path and William Hogarth approached so that the meeting was inevitable, Francesca di Vecellio knew she must not betray her brother: wistfully, but honourably, she turned and moved away towards the other side of the gallery of pictures, heard her brother’s pleasantries and her sister-in-law’s pretty laugh.

Mr Hogarth, she could hear, hurrumphed to see her brother, but at least bowed politely before walking on. The sister, from where she now stood, could not help looking back over her shoulder to catch another glimpse of the short man who had given her hope.
Thank you, dear Mr Hogarth
, she thought, and, just for a moment, the painter stopped and looked back, puzzled, almost as if something whispered in the air.

Only a short time later Mr Hogarth died and the populace who had his prints on their walls mourned him - he had drawn and painted his pictures for them - but the newspapers said he had become rancorous and angry and sad about the lack of support for English Artists, for an English Academy.

‘He had become a Bore,’ said Mr Hartley Pond. ‘And his Painting was vulgar.’

‘I liked him,’ said the artist’s quiet sister suddenly from across the table, ‘I am so very sorry to hear of his Death.’

‘Did you know him, my dear?’ asked Miss Ffoulks, surprised, for the girl wanted to hear so much of Art, and yet had never mentioned Mr Hogarth.

‘I met him once, and he was very kind,’ answered Francesca di Vecellio and her brother commented, laughing, that
kind
was not a word that could be used about that vain, disputatious Caricaturist, now - so sadly of course - taken from them.

 

In the middle of all the innumerable conversations about Art, Miss Ffoulks sometimes talked forthrightly about quite different subjects like the Slave Trade and its iniquities: ‘People chained and crowded in foul conditions and then sold as goods! How can one Human treat another in such a way!’ she would cry indignantly and Mr Hartley Pond looked exasperated at her interruptions, as usual, and took snuff ostentatiously. But Miss Ffoulks was not to be deflected.

‘We are a Brotherhood of Men!’ she cried one day, causing Mr Hartley Pond to snigger now, but again she took no heed. ‘We are a Fraternity of Human Persons and we have a Moral Responsibility to care for our Fellows.’ And the ribbons on her bonnet shook in indignation.

‘What a shame’, said Mr Hartley Pond in his most supercilious manner, ‘that those black persons upon the sea’, (his voice so full of distaste) ‘do not know - and indeed probably will never know! - what a Champion they have in Miss Ffoulks.’

It was the only time they saw Miss Ffoulks, so controlled, so clever, become really angry: her ribbons swirled as she turned upon Mr Pond. ‘As I say, Sir, I believe that we are a Brotherhood, that we owe it to our World to care about the Human Beings who inhabit it.’

‘Including illiterate black men?’

‘Including black men and women who are transported and sold like Cattle, and including, Mr Pond, the people in this great City whose lives are blighted by lack of money and lack of the light, bright air of Kindness.’

‘Tell me, Filipo,’ said Mr Pond, ‘have you visited the new Colour Shop at the far end of the Strand?’ but Mr John Palmer leaned across and patted Miss Ffoulks’ arm; she bit her lip but said no more. Dusk was falling and the artist’s sister moved quietly to light the candles and gently touched the shoulder of Miss Ffoulks as she passed.

 

They went sometimes to the theatre: the Haymarket or Drury Lane; they saw the most famous actor in England, Mr Garrick, reviving an interest in William Shakespeare, playing Macbeth. Hundreds of candles in chandeliers lit the stage. Sometimes Mr James Burke the grey-eyed art dealer and his most elegant wife, Lydia, would join them; the men spoke of money and prices, the women spoke of fashion and gossip. Francesca di Vecellio watched all the faces: the life and the gaiety and the colours and the energy of London - and part of her longed to go home at once to her room at the top of the house in Pall Mall: the attached sewing-room may once have seen embroidery, but was now her very own studio. She had to remember the fashionable faces in her head, of course she could not make sketches on these occasions, so she watched intently: the women in their glorious gowns promenading in Vauxhall Gardens and laughing behind their fans, the elegant men with white wigs and crimson cheeks in St James’s Park, the street-girls in the shadows in the Haymarket plying for trade, and the grey eyes of Mr Burke. And Mr Garrick himself, crying to the heavens where the chandeliers hung, in a beautiful voice.

It was outside the Haymarket, there, that a voice called one night.

‘Dottie! It’s you, Dottie!’

Francesca di Vecellio saw: only Angelica could have done it: in a crowd of fashionable people Angelica stopped. She saw the street-woman who had called to her.

‘Essie!’ she said. And then as if it was the most natural thing in the world Angelica drew the street-woman away from the fashionable people. She spoke to Essie for several moments and then from her cloak she took a coin which she pressed into the woman’s hand. And then she stepped towards the waiting carriage, and smiled at her husband and her friends.

The wonderful Angelica di Vecellio was now one of the most sought-after guests in London for she was so beautiful, and she was now respectably, and very publicly, married. Sometimes now Duchesses would invite her to do good works: to go again to the Foundling Hospital and look at the dear little lost children; to go to Bedlam where the mad people were incarcerated and see how factory-girls and maids thought themselves Duchesses. Angelica did not like going to Bedlam and avoided it when she could, for the wild cries from that place echoed out into her head long after the fashionable ladies, chattering like birds at what they had seen, had waved goodbye to the Director and entered the carriage home.

‘They are like lost souls,’ she said to her husband and he saw that she shivered and he put aside his brushes and paints for a moment, and put his arm about her small waist, and told her she was beautiful, and made her smile. And later Miss Ffoulks informed her that the Government was thinking of passing a bill so that visitors may not observe the patients at Bedlam in that cruel way, and Angelica was glad.

And it was Angelica who insisted one late, dark afternoon at the end of dinner that a great party of them put on their cloaks and walk to Drury Lane to see
The Beggar’s Opera.

‘You too, Francesca. It is an old thing that is all the rage again, I insist you come, it will entertain you!’ And after more wine they finally, with much laughter and gaiety, crossed the
piazza
of Covent Garden to Drury Lane: a chill autumn evening where they could see their breath before them and small street-children cried for pennies, warming their feet in horse dung from the carriages. There was the smell of chestnuts by the small kiosk that sold the purses of sheep’s guts with red ribbons for the use of fornicating gentlemen, and the emollients for certain dangerous street-sicknesses, and the special bottles which were labelled DO NOT TAKE THIS MEDICINE IF WITH CHILD, IT WILL CAUSE LOSS. And the street-girls everywhere and the painter’s sister glanced into dark corners as they passed, and held her cloak about her.

They sat in red boxes in Drury Lane and the ladies in their bright gay gowns whispered behind their fluttering fans and observed the crowds lit by the myriad of candle-lamps as the music began. Suddenly the Italian portrait painter stiffened and his sister at once felt the hair at the back of her neck shiver, as though a ghost walked.
When I laid on Greenland’s coast, and in my arms embraced my lass
, sang the hero and Angelica leaned forward and smiled with pleasure and did not see how Filipo di Vecellio stared unseeing at the stage and did not look in the direction of his sister as the song went on.

and all the way home Angelica sang again in her sweet voice with some of her gentlemen friends and in the darkness nobody observed the stone face of Signore di Vecellio, or the pale, dark face of the
signorina
who held her cloak about her, and everybody singing:

‘Come and see my Rembrandt,’ boomed Mr Joshua Reynolds one day and Francesca di Vecellio had her bonnet on long before the others were ready, so fearful was she that she would not be included. Filipo would not arrive at Mr Joshua Reynolds’ house by foot; insisted on the fashionable carriage being driven to where the painter now lived, in Leicester Fields. Almost the first thing they saw - having been introduced to (Angelica almost fainted with delight) Mr David Garrick, the actor, who was visiting - was Mr Reynolds’ eagle. It soared above them, in Mr Reynolds’ garden, but Angelica was not convinced.

‘He does not have Roberto’s Nobility of Character,’ she whispered to Francesca (meaning of course the eagle, not Mr Garrick) while the gentlemen were discussing what had been paid for the Rembrandt painting.

‘Sixteen pounds and five shillings and sixpence when I bought it some years ago!’ said Mr Reynolds proudly as he led them into his studio. ‘A Bargain.’

Perhaps they might have shown his own work in progress more notice, but all eyes were drawn to the picture on the wall.

It was a picture of a woman. She was bathing in dark water, she held up her gown in perhaps a slightly shocking manner and stared at the dark water, which reflected the gold and red colour of a gown on the rocks behind her. She was not a fashionable woman, not one of Filipo di Vecellio’s women, she wore nothing on her head, and her light shift was simple, a nightgown even it perhaps could have been. And an ineffable sweetness about her face, about the way she gazed down at the water, and light caught the side of her face and her body and one side of the gown. She was not beautiful but there was an extraordinary beauty about her face and her expression and the whole painting.

‘Hmmm.
Multo bene
,’ said Filipo after some time. ‘Very good. I should like to own a Rembrandt also.’

‘The
light
,’ said the usually quiet Francesca di Vecellio in a loud, breathless voice. ‘Look at the
light
, look at the Reflections on the water, and look at the way the light and the shadows are so different! ’

‘Different from what?’ If she was aware of her brother or Mr Reynolds staring at her she gave no sign.

‘From - from the way many things are painted.’ She stared as if transfixed, seemed hardly able to breathe at all.

‘I do not admire his Nudes,’ said Joshua Reynolds to Filipo di Vecellio over her head, as if perhaps the word ‘Nude’ was to be discussed only by men. ‘And Rembrandt has many Faults: he does not follow the Classical Style. Beauty does not consist in taking what immediately lies before you.’

‘It is so beautiful,’ said Francesca doggedly and Mr Reynolds smiled at last.

‘It is indeed beautiful, Signorina di Vecellio,’ he said, ‘and well worth the money I paid for it. It is of course worth very, very much more, even now, for Rembrandt is slowly coming back into Fashion, mark my words.’ Nobody noticed that the
signorina
turned back as they left the studio, as if drawn back by an invisible thread, she stood right up close as if to touch, almost, the light and the shadows and the strokes of the paintbrush and the thickness of the paint. Mr Reynolds’ sister Fanny finally had to call the
signorina
in to tea with the most famous actor in London.

Mr Garrick told them he wished to reform the theatre so that people would
listen.
‘I no longer want to have young rakes sitting on the Stage and poking at the Actresses, it is not respectful! We have our own English Playwright of great stature of whom people know so little, William Shakespeare - I have re-written and foreshortened him where necessary - and I expect people to
listen
to him.’ And it was clear that Mr Garrick meant he expected them to listen, also, to himself.