The Fraud (32 page)

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Authors: Barbara Ewing

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‘Rembrandt is of the greatest importance in the development of Art,’ he said, ‘and he has suddenly become very, very much more collectable. They all copy him at times, all of them, including Joshua Reynolds for all he may say that Rembrandt does not follow the Classical Style. Rembrandt paints in a Style all his own, and by some miracle you fell upon the same uses of light and shade even before you saw a Rembrandt painting. You have had the great good luck of living for years with a Rembrandt Portrait, and you have been a quite miraculous student; you may not even know how you take his Style - his Style of etching and his Style of painting has been copied a hundred times - many Artists just call their paintings, especially their self-portraits
after Rembrandt.
I believe that you are so talented, and so at the height of your powers, that you can do what I suggest.’
At last he stopped speaking.
‘Well, Grace?’ He waited in silence at last, not looking at me now, looking at the painting on the easel, but I heard his uneven breathing.
I understood that in some twisted way I had been given the greatest compliment any modern Artist could possibly be given.
And he believed it.
Still I did not speak. It was not what I dreamed of. But perhaps it would
allow
me to do what I had dreamed of. He got up from where he had become so dangerously close; I saw that he was still staring at the Painting on the easel, the girl with the letter, and something, a shadow, passed across his face. Finally he turned to me again. ‘I have made it my business to suggest to your Brother that he travel to Amsterdam in the near future: there would be much of Rembrandt’s work for you to see there, so you must, somehow, arrange to travel there also.’
I stared at him.
‘Time is of the essence,’ he added brusquely, ‘if you will agree. Other people would have to be involved, the people who would be working on the Painting, to age it. We are awaiting your reply.’
I realised then that he did not understand. I was imagining
one day
and he was imagining
this day.
‘You do not mean now? You do not know?’
He stared at me blankly.
‘Filipo did not tell you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Angelica is not just ill. She is dying and I am with her a great deal. We have had all the doctors, but it is no use. She has only a few months to live.’
I liked him for a moment then, his shock, and then his true, sad regret. He sat down again beside me. ‘But - he said he hoped she would recover.’
‘He dreams she will recover. She will not recover.’
He sat beside me with his head bowed for some time, so that I did not know if he was thinking of Angelica or his plans for Mr Rembrandt.
And then I said, ‘Did Philip tell you why she is dying?’
He looked up. ‘Some disease - that only Women contract, he said to me.’
So I nodded in silence. That was true, I suppose.
At last James stood and I could feel the regret, perhaps regret for the glory days that were gone when Angelica presided over the dinner-table of the new young Artists with Roberto on her shoulder , the most beautiful woman in London. ‘We will speak of other matters another time then.’ Then he looked back at the easel. ‘But - I want to take that Painting now. Will you sell it to me?’
I stared at the girl with the letter. ‘Very well.’
From his waistcoat he drew a pouch, and in front of me, in my sewing-room, he counted out ten guineas pieces.—Then he stood for just a moment looking at the room he had once known so well.—And then without saying anything else, James Burke picked up the Painting and left my room.
I looked at the money on the small table, picked it up so that it spilled through my hand.
I never held that amount of money in my life, not even the night I stole so recklessly, that last night I worked on the
piazza
.
SIXTEEN
It was a fine time to be an Englishman.
Foreigners were suddenly less welcome. Often now there were riots against them in London: NO FRENCH ACROBATS one poster read, and the Sardinian Chapel that Filipo di Vecellio and his sister Francesca had once visited was pelted with rocks. People spoke of the
British
Royal Academy and the King advised that he preferred British Artists who had not damaged themselves by making the Grand Tour all over Europe.
An old song from the Seven Years’ War came back into fashion and groups of foolish lads with bottles of English gin roamed the streets carousing, some said the words had been written years ago by Mr Garrick himself.
With lantern jaws and croaking gut
See how the half-starv’d Frenchman strut
And call us English dogs!
But soon we’ll teach these bragging foes
That beef and beer give heavier blows
Than soup and roasted frogs.
A few months later a mad Scotsman (it was put about that he was mad), Lord Gordon, took it upon himself to lead a riot of anti-Catholics rampaging through the streets of London shouting about the Parliament. For a few terrifying days, London was like a wild place: foreigners and Englishmen were killed, both; the Sardinian Chapel was attacked again; Fleet Street was set afire; the foreign walls of the house in Pall Mall of Signore di Vecellio, the well-known Italian portrait painter, had been daubed with red paint - the word PAPIST was writ across the wall and the Signorina Francesca di Vecellio looked down from one of the attic windows on to the fashionable street as crowds pushed by and the King ordered his troops to fire. Four hundred and fifty people were killed in London before dinner was held again in the house in Pall Mall.
The rioters were imprisoned, or hung in groups at Tyburn or Newgate; London became itself again, more or less, and the next sensation in Pall Mall was caused not by violent protestants, but by the arrival of the Celestial Bed.
 
This Celestial Bed was, indeed, a Sensation; in fact when it arrived in triumph in Pall Mall it was advertised (very discreetly) as one of The Wonders of the World.
The Celestial Bed stood in an Emporium called the Temple of Health which had just been opened in one of the large houses in Pall Mall. The Temple of Health advertised many health cures, including mud baths and massage, but its central jewel and great drawing card was The Celestial Bed which was described as standing on Forty Pillars of Brilliant Glass of great strength, encrusted with jewels, decorated with nymphs, and with mirrors above.
‘What are mirrors for, in a bed?’ asked Isabella of her aunt, as the residents of Pall Mall observed their new neighbours.
The Proprietor, Dr James Graham, gave long and learned lectures about Health and The Flowing of Life’s Forces and Juices (certain forces and juices in particular). He informed the populace that on The Celestial Bed about fifteen hundred pounds’ weight of artificial compound magnets were so disposed and arranged so as to pour forth powerful tides of
magnetic effluvia
to give a
sweet, undulating, tittulating, vibratory, soul-dissolving, marrow-melting motion
(that is, in simple language, to shake the bed gently up and down as illustrious couples lay upon it). At the end of his lectures, and at the end of his pamphlets in small lettering, there were instructions as to the manner in which couples (honourable married couples
of course
) could hire the bed for the evening: the party need only send a line, intimating the evening they proposed to visit the Temple of Health (including a fifty-pound bank note) and a Ticket of Admission would be sent forthwith by the bearer, sealed up:
Neither myself, nor any of my servants, need ever know who the parties are who repose in this chamber which I call the SANCTUM SANCTORUM.
And he added, finally, that a Vestal Nymph would be in attendance if required.
The other inhabitants of Pall Mall (for it was a most fashionable and busy and excellent street) were confounded at the sudden further increase in traffic, the anonymous carriages and the huge crowds of interested bystanders who often would not go home. When half-naked nymphs began to be painted on outside columns of the big house, some Pall Mall residents began to complain loudly, especially at night when there was now a continual throng of gaping viewers all hoping for excitement; some residents commented that these sight-seers were no better behaved than the Gordon Rioters (although in this case lives were not lost, so perhaps the comparison was a little exaggerated). But Mr Thomas Gainsborough found the whole proceedings particularly amusing: he lived next door to this Temple and gained much entertainment from the accompanying procedures of The Celestial Bed and the cloaked couples who came and went from these premises in closed carriages. The crowds of interested spectators, who found the salacious comings and goings all very entertaining also, called and laughed along Pall Mall, their voices reached into the nearby large houses of the gentry.
 
One particular room, in one particular large house in Pall Mall where the voices of the interested spectators could be heard, was a room with no mirrors; only shadows.
The candle-lamps were turned down low. They flickered uneasily sometimes, as if they might suddenly whisper out altogether and leave only darkness. Huge shadows fell across the walls and over the twirled and cherub-covered ceiling: smiling, chubby faces and luscious pink bottoms drifted; ghostly; trailing clouds. Shapes of heavy furniture stretched up the walls, dark and distorted. Sometimes, if the woman in the bed moved, the shadows moved: the woman was surrounded by shadows. When the servants came in, or the husband, or the husband’s sister, bringing their own lamps, the woman always turned away from the light.
But it was the other shadows that made the room so dark: the shadows of youth and beauty and the music and the laughter and the cherubic pink bottoms. These shadows haunted: lost, eaten away.
The two children, Claudio and Isabella, had both been summoned, stood now outside the dark room. The boy - but of course he was a man now, almost seventeen years old - did not want to enter the room again, could not bear the air, the stale smell of decay; most of all could not bear the huge bed and the small figure. He shouted at the servants in other parts of the house, quiet only when his father appeared, or his calm aunt in her white cap. The girl, almost seventeen years old also, waited silently, her face quite blank.
Tonight they had suddenly been instructed to wait outside the room for their father. The girl was motionless, but her breathing was nervous; beside her the boy breathed with something that might have been fear.
Sometimes still, when they passed that first, wondrous portrait of their mother where it hung on the staircase in their house in Pall Mall by St James’s Park, the son and the daughter thought they caught the warm scent: musk, or jasmine - they could not name it, only that it lay there, potent, part of memory.
Clocks ticked in the large hallway, several chimed the quarter. Then they heard their father’s footsteps.
‘Come,’ said their father.
Inside the room there were no clocks, for clocks, like light and mirrors, were feared; time, in the darkness, was gone: gone golden days of fashion and beauty and laughter. Their aunt was beside the bed; the candle-lamp held by their father shone away from there; the children moved like ghostly figures, reluctant, towards the shadows, that is, towards their mother.
‘Claudio. Claudio.’ And then after a small silence, ‘Isabella.’ A damp, thin hand held theirs briefly.
‘Claudio,’ said the whispered voice in the shadows. And from the shadows too, they saw old Roberto the parrot, perched on one of the bedposts, silent as death.
The girl, Isabella, suddenly took up one of the candles, held it up the better to see the most beautiful woman in the world. For a brief moment, before her aunt like lightning, and yet so gently, moved, the girl saw her mother.
Her mother had no hair. Her mother’s face had holes in it, as if something had eaten her.
It was the lime.
The lime in the beauty potions. The lime in the famous Venetian Ceruse that had made her skin so white had eaten away the face of beauty.
—Angelica had come to find me the day she finally understood what was happening to her.—She had thought it was only a terrible dream; even now she told herself it would go away; she thought her Beauty - the one thing she had that she valued, the only thing she truly owned (it seemed to her) - would come back.
‘I will wear less,’ she said to me that day she came to find me. ‘It will go away,’ and she looked to me for confirmation that this was so. (By then you could clearly see where the flesh was eaten away below her eye; she had covered it carefully that day - with Venetian Ceruse.) Such was her terror when she came into my room so unexpectedly that she did not see even what was in front of her - except the quilt: the quilt of many colours where I had sewn my own pain - through the small door to the sewing-room there was an easel, but she did not see it; there were Paints but she did not see them, nor my Paintings; she saw me as she knew me: her sister whom she had not been able to marry off to a rich noble friend - the housekeeper.—The only reason she noticed the quilt was that she tripped on it in her hurry to reach me, and just for a moment the colours caught her, I saw them catch her attention - the brightness - and then lose it again as she clung to me and begged me again,
It will go away
,
won’t it Francesca?
but already it had been rumoured about town: the dangers of the Venetian Ceruse, the white paste that made white skin whiter, that fashionable whiteness that was considered then so beautiful; when I bathed her I saw the terrible skin, once so white and shining, finally scarred and black with holes eaten into the sad flesh right down to the bosom where she had applied the deadly lime - to make herself
more
beautiful: yet she was named the most beautiful woman in London already.
Later she asked me for the quilt, some part of her remembered the brightness perhaps, and in the last months I comforted her as lovingly as I could with the coloured quilt which held the bright colours of pain.
 
When I had made Angelica that gaily-ribboned hat she liked it at once, insisted on wearing it to Vauxhall one summer afternoon long ago, and when they had gone, her ribbons and her perfume flowing behind her, I had painted her in that hat, such happiness and gaiety and delight.
That painting is burned now, like all the paintings then.
But the more ill Angelica became the more she had wanted me to sit with her, until she slept; the small light burned always beside her, for although she hated the light she was scared of the dark, and one night when I saw that she had fallen asleep I brought my charcoal and my paper back into her room and I drew the sleeping face of Angelica - I could not stop myself.—Although her hair had long gone and the marks of the Poison were everywhere, for some reason her eyelashes still grew dark and they lay upon her poor face as a last remnant of her Beauty, covering the dark eyes. —I turned the lamp slightly and she stirred in her sleep but did not wake - with the light that way I could draw her Beauty still: even as her face was eaten away, the lovely structure of the bones was there - I drew more shadow than light so that the marks on her face blended into shadow.—And over her, in my last Portrait, the quilt that she had asked for, all the colours, bright colours, drifting into the shadows.—For weeks I worked on this picture in my Studio for I wanted to capture her in oils but still something was wrong, I could not get it right, and then a few nights before her death, as I sat with her, embroidering, she suddenly asked for Isabella, when the girl came I made to leave them but Angelica said quickly,
No
,
stay Francesca
,
talk with us too
, as if she was - it seemed perhaps - afraid to be alone with her daughter - the lamps had been moved away from the bed, it was upon Isabella that the light shone, her dark hair and her pretty (pretty is quite different from beautiful) but rather sulky face; Isabella wanted to talk of Fashion and Florence and Paris, did not see how painful this was to her Mother - finally I managed to change the subject by telling them I had passed the new Temple of Health in Pall Mall the previous day, and I had seen that old quack we all knew in our youth, with the Silver painted on his hair, Doctor James Graham, who was promoting his Celestial Bed and had advertised for a Nymph to assist him in his miracles.
‘I remember Dr Graham,’ said Angelica suddenly. ‘Long before he went to America and became famous we knew him, Francesca, remember? He asked me, not altogether in jest, if
I
would be his Vestal Nymph and dress in white robes and sing and play the harpsichord while he extolled his very expensive - Emollients,’ and she smiled slightly.
‘What exactly is a Celestial Bed that interests everybody so?’ Isabella asked, and although I believe there is much entertainment to be gained from Doctor Graham’s lectures on bodily fluids, I felt that this was probably not the time to acquaint Isabella with these facts.
‘I expect it is something to do with Angels,’ I told her, and once more the shadow of a smile crossed Angelica’s face, named after all for an Angel, and there suddenly was the last of her beauty, there in her dark eyes, deep black pools of distress, almost the only thing I could see of her face that evening, because of the way the light fell, and sorrow on her face like a whole river of unshed tears, and the bright quilt in shadow - in desperation I made some excuse and literally ran to my Studio, and I worked to show those dark, deep eyes and then the Painting was finished, less than one week before she died.

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