Mrs Whistler. Matthew Plampin

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СКАЧАТЬ attend, held after Leyland’s first reaction to the peacocks – councils of war, Jimmy had called them, with Godwin and Eldon and the rest of them. Had this figure been agreed then? There had certainly been a lot of laughter.

      Jimmy crossed his hands atop his cane. ‘Labour has been carried out, my girl. Payment has to follow. That’s how it goes.’

      ‘But – two thousand guineas, Jimmy?’

      ‘Nothing had been agreed. Do your work, my friend Frederick Leyland said, and then let me know what I owe you. That’s how it stood between us.’

      Maud was annoyed, she realised, beneath her perplexity. She could see this for what it was. Provocation. Cheek. ‘So knowing that he didn’t care for what you’d done, you decided to ask him for a bloody fortune. What good did you imagine that would do?’

      ‘The villain has twenty times that a year,’ Jimmy countered. ‘Many hundred times it in the bank. Gained, I might add, through business practices of the utmost ruthlessness. And anyway, Maudie, you heard what just happened. I have scaled back my bill. Let a thousand guineas go. It’s quite the move, don’t you think? The rejection of the yoke. A lesson in the limits of a millionaire’s power.’

      He ran on for a while, growing increasingly pleased with himself – conceding that the lost money was significant, undeniably, but would soon be made elsewhere, once word of the dining room’s beauty had spread among people of true taste. Maud honestly didn’t know what to make of it all. She was dog-tired, despite having slept through so much of the day. Once again, also, she was being assailed by unspeakable smells, of the kind that tended to linger in public carriages. Old cheese and filthy clothes. The foul stuff that gathered beneath your toenails. These odours seemed to reach into her, to coat the inside of her throat, to coil around her innards. She stared hard out of the window. They were still a good ten minutes from home – from the broken gate and the grimy front door; from the panelled hallway beyond, leading through to the back; from the small cobbled yard and the outhouse in its corner.

      Jimmy had fished his tobacco pouch from his pocket, along with a couple of papers. He rolled them both a cigarette, passing hers over. Maud accepted it, knowing that she could no sooner smoke the damned thing than eat it whole. He put a match to his own and a new aroma filled that tiny, rocking box. Maud liked to smoke, always had, since she was ten years old. Now, though, the smell of it made her think of bitumen and burnt hair, of blood blackening on a butcher’s floor, of something poisonous and revolting. The cab slowed, approaching a corner. Her fingers closed around the door handle and she was out, clinging to a lamp post like it was a ship’s mast in a storm, swinging around and sliding down, coughing up a rope of treacly, yellow-green bile in the rough direction of the gutter.

      It went on for a while, until her convulsions produced only a ghastly croaking sound. Jimmy was close by, perhaps two feet away. Oblivious to the rain, he was sitting on the high kerb, his leather bag beside him, finishing off his cigarette. Behind him was a parade of fine shops, their lamps alight. Traffic was rolling past, all hooves and horse legs and spinning spokes. Their cab was nowhere to be seen.

      ‘Could it have been an oyster?’ he mused. ‘Or that trout, maybe, that we had the Wednesday before last? River fish, Maudie, should never be trusted. One simply does not know what they’ve been swimming through. Why, if I were—’

      ‘There’s a child,’ Maud said.

      She released the lamp post and leaned against it, trying to straighten her hat. Her gown was wet through across the shoulders; a cold drip weaved inside her corset, running down to the small of her back. It had been obvious. A sickness that can’t be shaken. Constant, deadening fatigue. The horrible intensity of smells. And the courses, the blasted courses, late now by more than a week. For nearly four years Maud had managed to avoid even the slightest scare. She knew when the lapse had occurred, though – she knew at once. It had been on the morning Jimmy had finished the shutters. She’d come over to Prince’s Gate, having not seen him for five straight days; and those peacocks, those extraordinary, mystical creatures, had been there to greet her, seeming to have blinked into existence at the snap of Jimmy’s gold-smeared fingers. He’d been up all night and was quite wild with exultation, proclaiming his deep delight that it was her – his Madame, his muse, his sacred partner – who’d been the first to stand before them. She was there, he’d said, in the peacocks – could she not see it? The raw elegance in those necks, in those trailing tails? It was hers.

      They’d moved closer, arms entwining, talking excitedly of how pleased the Leylands would be when they took up residence there, and the great advancement it would surely bring. She’d glanced at him admiringly; he’d caught her eye and held it, in a kind of dare; and it had happened, right there on the floorboards, amid the pots and brushes and screwed-up bits of paper.

      Jimmy was quiet for a minute. Then he flicked his cigarette end into a drain and began to speak about Charlie, his six-year-old son, who was lodged somewhere near Hyde Park in an arrangement that was satisfactory for everyone. This didn’t bring much reassurance, however, either to Maud or Jimmy himself. He stopped mid-sentence, pinching the bridge of his nose, thinking no doubt of the money – the thickening wad of bills on the hall dresser; the back rent due on their damp little house; the deal he’d just made with Leyland, and the different terms that might have been reached.

      ‘We’ll find an answer,’ he said at last. ‘We will.’

      Maud drew in a shivering breath. She knew what was required of her. The babe would arrive, and the babe would go – to a foster family elsewhere in London most probably. Jimmy wouldn’t have children under his roof. He’d made that plain from the beginning: inimical to art, he’d said. And dear God, Maud didn’t want it either! She was a model, for goodness sake – training to be an artist herself, with Jimmy’s tutelage and encouragement. This could wreck it all. She pressed a palm against her forehead. How could she have been so careless? So bloody stupid?

      ‘Edie will help,’ she muttered. ‘She knows people, I think, back in Kentish Town.’

      Saying her sister’s name prompted a series of sudden thoughts, each one weightier and more unwelcome than the last. Sooner or later, she was going to have to visit Edie and submit to a barrage of I-told-you-so’s. Her slender body, starved with such discipline, would swell up to a grotesque size. Jimmy would have to find another model, a girl who might well be better and end up replacing her for good. And she was going to have to give birth. Lord above. All that blood and pain and madness. She gulped, and gasped; and she leaned over sharply to be sick again.

      

      October 1876

      Swooping in through the door of the Knightsbridge telegraph office, Jim snatched up a form and a pencil from the counter and settled himself ill-temperedly in a corner. For a second or two he took in the hushed, assiduous atmosphere, the smell of ink and electrical wire, the tap-tapping of the machines. Then he inserted the eyeglass and began to write.

      Have received your cheque at last.

      He hesitated. This really didn’t do justice to the indignities of the weekend. Scratching together enough coin for basic sustenance had taxed his ingenuity – and he’d give much, much indeed, to forget the disdainful gratification on the landlord’s boiled-beef face as another two days’ grace had been begged of him.

      Pounds I notice.

      The pencil, gripped very fiercely, now popped out from between Jim’s fingertips, disappearing СКАЧАТЬ