Loretta Proctor Read online

  ‘What? Why not? Why not to both notions? She’s a beauty, a real beauty and you’ve just begun to capture her. Has she truly a mouth like that?’

  ‘Oh, I like luscious lips, you know that. They look so kissable. And yes, these look exactly like the original.’

  ‘Why won’t you sell her to me?’ pleaded Fred. ‘I’ll give whatever you ask, pay off your rent debts if you like. That’s a good offer, isn’t it?’

  Henry looked at him, his brown eyes full of amusement. ‘Aha… someone’s beaten you to it, my friend.’

  ‘Well, damn them! I’ll pay more than them then.’

  Henry was wistful. ‘Pity, I can’t oblige you, Fred, but the claim is greater when it’s the girl’s father who wants the picture. I think you’ll agree? Besides he’s going to pay me a sum in advance so I can settle up with old Ma Russell then. And it’s a very good price. I doubt you could match it anyway.’

  ‘Who is she, then?’ asked Fred, looking at the picture again, stirred by the mystery that seemed to surround her.

  ‘She’s the daughter of Joshua Farnham, the barrister.’

  ‘I’ve heard of the fellow, but I never knew he had such a glorious daughter or I’d have dug her out… why, I’m half in love with her already! Can’t you introduce me?’

  ‘Guarded like the rare pearlie she is, alas!’

  The portrait drew Fred’s eyes again. He loved something about the line of those eyes, the tenderness of those lips. Was she really like this or had Henry managed to soften and transform her, as he did all his sitters, into some indefinable dream person that had been filtered through his own romantic imagination?

  ‘If I can’t have the picture in oils, I’ll buy this chalk study at least. I wish I could see the original,’ said Fred with longing. ‘What’s her name, anyway?’

  ‘Eleanor Mary. They call her Ellie.’

  ‘How romantic! How suitable! Eleanor, the Fair Maid of Astalot.’

  ‘Don’t get too excited,’ said Henry, with a laugh that turned into a cough. ‘That damned river– shut the window, Fred. It stinks more than ever tonight now the weather’s warmed up. Gives me such a bad throat in the summer.’

  ‘I wish you would move to somewhere a trifle more salubrious,’ said Fred, ‘I’m terrified you’ll get the cholera.’

  ‘It’s better than the place I was in before with the tanner’s yard at the back, remember that one? My God, that was disgusting! Couldn’t bear the smell of that. I’d rather have the river. I will move once I start to make some more money. Maybe this commission will be the start of something lucrative. Old Farnham’s as rich as Croesus. Maybe he’ll find me more clients. I have high hopes.’

  Fred took another long look at the portrait of Eleanor Farnham.

  ‘When will she be back for a sitting?’

  ‘Tuesday afternoon– why?’

  ‘I want to come along and watch you paint her.’

  ‘Aha… you are captured by the lovely Eleanor! Come by all means. But I warn you that she always brings two ancient dragons from home, her maid and an old governess, who is some sort of companion or duenna. You’ll have to call as if by chance and then I’ll introduce you.’

  Fred felt suddenly elated. His moodiness lifted and excitement stirred in him. He sensed adventure or even more than that; he sensed something intangible that flowed from a half-finished portrait that might lead him to some unimagined joy and happiness.

  ‘I’ll be there!’ he said, ‘on Tuesday afternoon!’

  Chapter 4

  ‘No, No, Mama can’t be dying, she can’t be!’

  Ellie flung herself down by her mother’s bed and grasped the coverlet with her hands. Maria lay back on the pillows, her face pale as a statue, her eyes open but gazing into an unknown space before her. It was as if she alone could see something there. Ellie looked in the direction of those staring eyes but saw nothing except an oil painting of St Anne and St Elizabeth, a favourite of her mother’s.

  There was no sign of recognition in Maria’s face, just that blank stare. She had been lying in the crimson bed for months now. In her forty-fourth year, a paralytic seizure had overcome her unexpectedly and she could no longer walk or talk properly. Her once-lovely face sagged and drooped and food dribbled from the corner of her mouth. Of late she had refused food altogether.

  Joshua rose from the chair at the side of Maria’s bed where lately he spent most of his evenings, talking to his wife, watching as she slept and trying to tempt her to eat with specially prepared broths and little morsels that she would once have enjoyed. Ellie would come up in the daytime and sit beside the bed, reading aloud or just holding her mother’s hands and hoping for a flicker of recognition or response. All she received for her pains was that stare turning upon her, that frightening, unseeing stare. Faithful Mulhall had made up a little truckle bed at the foot of the great four-poster and stayed by her mistress day and night.

  Joshua raised his bowed head and looked wearily at his griefstricken daughter. ‘Ellie, dearest, she no longer eats or speaks or walks. Your mother wants to die. I know it. She cannot speak but she has made signs to me, touching her heart, lifting her eyes, looking at her Bible. It comforts her when I read passages from St. John, her favourite Gospel. She especially loves me to read of Mary Magdalene discovering Jesus walking in the garden after His Transformation. He called her ‘Mary’ and she turned to him and said ‘Master’…she knew Him because of the way He said her name. It is a profound moment of recognition of the Lord. It always makes her weep. Tears stream down her face.’

  Joshua sighed and turned to look at his wife. Her breath was low, almost nothing now.

  ‘Poor Mama,’ said Ellie, her voice choking with grief. ‘Why would she want to die, Papa, when we love her so, when we need her so much? She is too young; she cannot go and leave us now.’

  Joshua stroked his daughter’s head and gazed at his wife lying so silent and motionless. Mulhall and the doctor stood on the other side, the maid gazing at her mistress with great love. Maria had inspired this sort of adoration in all she had met; she was a woman rich in wisdom and beauty of soul.

  ‘I’ll read that passage to her again,’ said Joshua, ‘I know she hears me, even now that her soul is departing. My beloved Maria…’ he fumbled with the Bible, trying to hold in his emotion, and found the passage already marked from many openings. He then began to read in his quiet calm voice. Ellie felt she couldn’t bear to listen and yet the words held comfort. If her mother thought so too, that was all that mattered in this moment. It was true. Maria was just a shell now, not the beautiful being she had once been.

  Ellie watched her mother intently as her father read out the passage from St. John.

  ‘ “And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord and I know not where they have laid Him.” ‘

  Joshua’s voice carried on while Ellie and Mulhall stood in silence. Maria’s breath rattled forth in one long last sigh.

  The servants downstairs paused as they heard the howl of grief from Maria’s chamber. They put down their implements and stared at each other in dismay.

  Ellie lost weight, her face pinched and eyes dark with sleepless nights. She often awoke just after midnight and all her childhood terror of the dark arose in her. There was no loving person now to come up with a candle and comfort her. Sometimes she slipped from her own room and crept into Mama’s bed. It comforted her, the familiar smell, the moulded feathers of the mattress that bore her mother’s shape, but as time went by, she felt unable to enter the room any more or look on that bed. It hurt her too much even to pass the door. The room remained firmly shut except to the maid who entered to clean and dust the sacred shrine, instructed to put everything back in its exact place when she had done.

  Ellie’s mind also returned perpetually to that perplexing, numbing time when Alfie had suddenly disappeared from her life as if spirited away by some magician. Try as she might to carry on with her life as nor
mal, nothing felt the same or could ever be the same. Alfie’s face appeared everywhere, superimposed upon whatever she did. He entered her dreams and she awoke, troubled and disturbed. She found herself talking to him in her mind day and night, often lying awake for long hours in the dark, weeping over her lost love.

  ‘I never thought of you so much when we were lovers,’ she said to herself, ‘so now why do you trouble my heart all the time, all the time– when you are so evidently gone?’

  Was it pride? Was it mere humiliation at being abandoned so cruelly? How could he have said he loved her, taken her maidenhood, risked so much and then as suddenly jaunted off with his regiment and forgotten her? It was impossible to behave like this unless he was a monster. She had written two or three letters to him via his regiment but there was no reply. He never seemed to come home for his leave or if he did, she knew nothing of it; no one spoke to her about him any more. It was as if he had suddenly ceased to exist. It seemed to her that some cruel hand of fate had erased everything she had loved and that she could never, ever be happy again.

  ‘Will you not go for a ride with your cousin Anne today?’

  Ellie looked up from the embroidery she was listlessly working on. Twice she had unpicked the same row of satin stitch. Next to her was a book, opened at a page but left aside. Nothing could occupy her mind and heart but her unhappiness and sense of loss.

  ‘No Papa. I don’t desire it at all.’

  The thought of Anne chattering away in her happy, heedless manner when her own heart was so full would be too much to bear. Pretending to smile, pretending that anything in this life mattered any more.

  Joshua came over to her and bending, took his daughter’s hand in his own. He peered into her face and frowned as he said, ‘You must go out a little, my dear. Some fresh air. A turn around the square at least? No? Child, it’s not healthy for you to stay in like this all day. You are losing your rosy cheeks.’

  ‘Oh, I am very well, Papa, I assure you. I prefer to stay in these days. There’s much to do.’

  ‘Will you at least turn to your painting again?’

  Ellie considered the matter. It raised a glimmer of interest in her eye.

  ‘Perhaps I will, Papa. You are very kind to suggest it.’

  Joshua looked at her with troubled eyes. Ellie tried to smile at him, but the smile did not reach her eyes these days. They were deep pools of sadness.

  Ellie was busy in her own little room. Her furnishings were simple and light as befitted her nature. The curtains were not of heavy velvet like those in Mama’s room but made of thick lined cotton with a dainty flower design of forget-me-nots sprinkled over a white background. Here were two little cages with tiny finches in them, Ellie’s beloved birds. She loved birds, so light, delicate and fragile. They could be so easily crushed yet could fly for miles, fly so high above mankind. Ellie thought it must feel wonderful to fly up into the air like that. She had let the birds free for a little and both of them now perched upon the back of her armchair and twittered to each other.

  Ellie also used her room as a studio where she could paint her unusual watercolours. She loved elaborate designs, loved to paint scenes from Tennyson’s poems and romantic books like Scott’s Waverley novels. She had taken her father’s advice and was glad of it now. In these days of loss and grief, her love of painting was the one place where she could lose herself for a while; forget the treachery and sadness of life in some lost, lovely world of dream images: knights in armour, damsels fair. A false world, but beautiful and comforting.

  Taping down a sheet of paper on a table, she brushed it over with water to stretch it and stood considering the picture she wanted to paint. A scene from Keats perhaps… the Eve of St. Agnes maybe. Her mind, as it often did these days, drifted away to the past…

  There was a knock at the door and Papa came in. He looked more animated than he had in a long time and Ellie looked at him, puzzled.

  ‘Put on your bonnet, my dear. I have a surprise in store for you.’

  She laid down the brushes she had just selected and sighed a little. ‘What is it, Papa? Where are we going?’

  ‘If I tell you it will be no surprise, now will it? Come, my dear. You look a deal too pale still. Fresh air and a change of scenery is what you need. What we both need.’

  Ellie didn’t want to go anywhere. What she wanted was to remain undisturbed at home, stitch her meaningless embroideries, play with her little birds, and paint imaginary scenes that transported her for a brief moment away from the present crushing emptiness of life. No Alfie, no Maria. Loneliness embraced her rather than warm, loving arms. But there was Papa to consider. Dear soul, he suffered too. She was being so selfish, lost in her own grief and forgetting how much he loved Mama. He was lonely too. Rousing herself with an effort, she rang for Mulhall.

  ‘No need to dress up,’ Joshua said. He was almost blithe in his manner. What on earth had he in mind? Curiosity woke Ellie from her lethargy.

  She called her little finches to her and they flew one by one onto her finger. Then placing them back in their cages, announced that she was ready for the mysterious journey.

  ‘Just fetch my cape and green bonnet will you, Mulhall?’ she said as that lady poked her head around the door.

  ‘Yes, Miss Ellie.’

  Once attired, Ellie went downstairs to her father who was waiting by the door for her. He handed Ellie into the cab, took his place beside her and they set off for a part of London that she had never seen before. Her trodden routes had always been around the area of Belgrave Square, or to the comfortable suburban homes of her parents’ friends in Hampstead and Highbury. She knew well the open road to Barnet and on to Oreton Hall but had little knowledge of the inner depths of London. When young she was taken to Madame Tussaud’s ‘Baker Street Bazaar’ to see the famous waxworks, or occasionally to the Palace and St. James Park. When older, she was allowed to go with Maria and her cousin Anne to ride in Rotten Row.

  The route they now took seemed a long way away from her habitual scenes. It wended its way through busy, noisy streets and dirty, mud-churned main thoroughfares towards the river. Ellie looked out of the window, astonished by the changing scenes before her and wondered how it was she knew so little of a city she had lived in all her life.

  ‘Where are we going, Papa?’

  Joshua just smiled. He tapped his nose.

  Eventually they arrived at a long, dismal street near a huge bridge. She glimpsed the river in the distance and when they descended from the cab, smelt it too. It was most unpleasant. What was going on?

  ‘There’s Fleet Street just down there,’ said her father, ‘there… can you not see the dome of St. Paul’s?’

  She could just glimpse the silvery dome of the great and famous London cathedral. ‘May we go and see it, Papa? Please let us go and see it!’

  ‘We will, we will. When our visit is over.’

  A visit. But to whom? They rang the bell and Ellie fidgeted, consumed with impatience and curiosity. After some time an untidy little maid opened the door.

  ‘We are here to see Mr Henry George Winstone,’ Joshua said.

  Chapter 5

  ‘One face looks out from all his canvases,

  One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:

  We found her hidden just behind those screens,

  That mirror gave back all her loveliness.

  A queen in opal or in ruby dress…’

  Christina Rossetti: In an Artist’s Studio

  As they began their ascent up the narrow stairs, Ellie and Joshua passed a strapping young woman with a mass of coppery hair who stared at them with an almost hostile look. Ellie was taken aback and wondered who she might be and what her business was here.

  Mr Winstone, who was waiting for them at the top of the stairs, didn’t trouble to introduce the girl to them though it was evident she had come from his rooms. He merely said, ‘My dear Mr Farnham and Miss Farnham, do come in.’

  They entered and Mr Winstone
took Joshua’s top hat and gloves, relieved Ellie of her cape and bonnet and ushered them into this studio. Now she understood where she was at last and gazed around in awe and amazement.

  ‘As you know,’ Joshua said with a smile, ‘I wish to have my daughter’s portrait painted. Let me introduce you to her. As you see, she is much surprised. I have brought her to see some of your work before she commences her sittings.’

  ‘Oh, Papa!’ said Ellie delighted.

  Mr Winstone showed them several of his paintings and it was

  then that Ellie realised that the young woman who had passed them on the stairs was Winstone’s model and, of course, one was never introduced to a model. Yet she felt she would have liked to speak to the fiery redhead that had passed them on the stairs.

  Winstone’s work attracted her at once and she wished with all her heart that she was as expert with form and colour as he was. There was so much to learn. She had a sudden desire to work in oils and made up her mind to take in all she could of this new situation. Evidently, she was to be allowed to come for the actual sittings, allowed in a real artist’s studio! It was such a wonderful experience, and Henry Winstone a gifted and charming man.

  He made a quick study of her in chalks, which her father considered critically and then nodded in agreement.

  ‘I think this kind of pose will work well, Mr Winstone,’ he said.

  Ellie looked at the study thoughtfully. She asked her father if she might be painted in the beautiful ruby-red velvet dress that had belonged to her mother. She felt it would please him as much as herself.

  ‘My dear, that is a splendid idea,’ Joshua said.

  Turning to the artist, Ellie said, ‘My mother’s dress is very special, Mr Winstone. Crimson is a colour that I love more than anything.’

  ‘I agree. That would be truly stunning. Ruby-red is one of my favoured colours. Is this the shade you have in mind?’

  He brought over a jar of crimson madder paint and she looked at it and nodded.

  Tipping a small amount into a dish, he regarded it pensively. ‘It’s a good choice, because this colour actually intensifies with time. It was used a lot by the old masters. Yes, a very good choice. I shall have to see how you look in the dress to decide how we shall apply it. Possibly it might need to be made even more intense by adding a little carmine. But you like it – this is what you refer to?’