The Dark Clue (10 page)

‘A what?' I asked, thinking I had misheard her, or that this was her form of ‘girl'.

‘A gale, sir. You'd think the end of the world ‘ad come.' She looked about her; and, her eye lighting on the little casement, seized the handle, and shook it, and then drummed her fingers on the glass. ‘Like that. Captain Wyatt heard ‘er once, ‘owlin' up from the basement; and ‘e said ‘e never ‘eard nothing like it, no, not in the Indies, where ‘e saw a ship go down once, in a ‘urricane.'

‘A fish,' said Sarah, ‘and ‘is ma's a gale.' She giggled; and after a few seconds the woman joined in again, and soon they were whinnying and spluttering like a pair of infants, until the exertion proved too much, and sent the girl into another paroxysm of coughing. Even this Mrs. Watts seemed to take only as evidence that the child had reached some new pitch of hilarity; for she continued to watch her with streaming eyes, laughing herself, until I said:

‘Can't you see the poor girl is ill?'

I sounded, perhaps, unduly harsh; for I was beginning to suspect that this had been an entirely wasted journey, and that the old woman was either too deranged or too simple to tell me anything of value. I decided, however, to make one final attempt.

‘Do you recollect', I said more gently, ‘any particular stories about them?'

She looked perplexed for a moment, as if she had not understood me; and then pressed her hands together and said:

‘The frost fair! ‘Ard to credit now, sir, what with them takin' down the bridge, but them days the river was all-over ice, ‘ere to Southwark, and there was fireworks, and puppets, I even seed a ‘orse-race; and after, the Captain walked me down the City Road, and stopped before a stall; and ‘e said, “You're nothing but skin and bone, girl, you need a bit of meat on you.” And ‘e bought me a pudding.'

‘How old would you have been then?' I asked.

‘Ooh, let's see.' She sucked in her cheeks, and counted on her fingers. ‘Sixteen, I'd say, sir, pretty near.'

And that settled the matter; for I had vivid memories of my father telling me about the last frost fair –
there was a great mall in the middle, Walter, where the ladies and gentlemen promenaded; and they called it ‘City Road'
– which, I knew, had been held in the winter of 1813. If she had been sixteen at the time, she must have been born in 1797, when Turner was already a successful artist, and only two years before he had moved from Hand Court to Harley Street. There might be the remnant of some genuine anecdote or local tradition about the family in what she had told me; but, if so, it was inextricably jumbled with the recollections of her own life, like the image in a splintered looking-glass.

I rose to leave, thanked her, gave her sixpence (which she left lying on her open palm, as if I might add to it), and beckoned to the child. We had barely reached the door, however, when, from below, came the sound of hurried footsteps on the stairs, and a woman's voice calling: ‘Sarah! Sarah!' The girl gasped, and stopped quite dead; then, crying, ‘My ma, she'll flay me!' she ran back into the alcove, and hid herself, as best she could, behind the blanket that served as a curtain.

‘Come,' I began, ‘why should she be angry -?'; but before I could say more a woman rushed into the room. She was about thirty, poorly but respectably dressed, and must have been handsome once; but fatigue and disappointment, like a victorious army, had traced their advance in the lines upon her face. She looked frantically about her, and then, not immediately seeing her daughter, pointed accusingly at me.

‘Where's my girl?' she said, panting heavily. Her voice was quiet, but some emotion she could barely master made it squeak and waver, and her eyes – remarkably like the child's, I now saw – were feverish with anger.

Not wishing to betray the girl, but equally unwilling to tell a lie, and a useless one at that, I said nothing. I must, though, have given her away unwittingly; for my gaze strayed towards the alcove, and the woman at once read its meaning, and pushed past me towards the bed. I managed to bar her way, but not before the child had revealed herself by whimpering, and then promptly abandoned her flimsy sanctuary to take refuge behind me.

‘What ‘ave you done, you little cat?' said the woman, lunging towards her, and raising her hand as if to strike her.

The girl made no reply, only pressing herself further into the narrow space between me and the wall; but Jenny Watts clapped her hands, and started to laugh again, as if this were a kind of Punch-and-Judy show, put on especially to entertain her.

‘She's done no harm,' I said, laying a hand on the mother's arm to restrain her.

‘I shouldn't ‘ave known, save for Sam Telfer,' said the woman, ignoring me entirely, and addressing the girl. ‘I'm gone ten minutes, just to get the tightner, and when I'm back ‘e says ‘e sees a gentleman givin' you brownies, and you takin' ‘im in ‘ere.'

‘I only asked her to bring me to Mrs. Watts,' I said.

‘Oh, so that's what you calls it now, is it?' said the woman, suddenly rounding on me.

I braced myself, for she was now swaying and trembling so violently that I thought her rage would not be contained; but, having been denied the girl, must vent itself on me instead. After a second or two, however, she brought herself under control, and merely clenched her fists, and said with scalding contempt:

‘“Bringin' you to Mrs. Watts!”'

I longed to cry out:
For God's sake, woman, what do you take me for? I have a daughter myself!
and yet I knew that to do so would be useless. Looking at the man before her, she saw not me but someone else entirely; for all her experience had taught her that a gentleman talks to a girl in Maiden Lane, and gives her money, with but one purpose; and nothing I could say or do would persuade her that I should have sooner died than violate her child.

‘I didn't do nothin'! ‘E didn't do nothin'!' screamed the girl, suddenly darting out from behind me, and lifting up her dress. “Ere, ‘ave a look if you don't believe me!'

And, without a word, the woman did so, barely pausing long enough to tug the blanket a few inches across the gap, and so afford her daughter a scrap of modesty.

At length, she grunted and stepped back. She said nothing, but looked at me; and for the first time I saw a doubt in her eyes, and she seemed somehow smaller, like a kite that has lost the wind, and begun to sag. For a moment, I felt, I had the advantage, and at once determined to make the best of it.

‘I will not insult you by offering you more money,' I said, ‘but Sarah has a shilling, which she earned fairly, by bringing me here; and I think you would do well to spend it on the doctor; for that is a bad cough, and should be treated.'

And before she had time to reply, or to tell the girl to give the shilling back again, I left, shutting the door behind me, and made my way back through the court, exciting no more than some whispering, and a derisive laugh, from the boys. A few moments later I was in the Strand – which, with its street-vendors, and gas-lamps, and crowds of cheerful theatre-goers, seemed like the waking world after an oppressive dream.

Forgive me, my darling, if what I have described distresses you; but – as you may imagine – it troubled me, and we have agreed that we must have no secrets from each other. I am haunted not merely by the thought of that poor child and her mother, and the knowledge that, quite unintentionally, I have brought more care into their already over-burdened lives, but also by the nagging question of why Ruskin should have suggested I go to
Maiden Lane at all. Surely he must have known – as I know myself, if I pause to reflect upon it – that after almost sixty years it is almost inconceivable I should find someone who remembers the Turners? Yet what, otherwise (save only malice; and I hesitate to believe he would be so cruel to a man who has done him no harm) could have prompted him to send me to a stinking slum, from which all traces of the family have been long since obliterated?

My one hope is that I shall find the answer when I see Turner's pictures – in which case, I shall know it soon enough, for Marian and I go to Marlborough House on Monday.

My love to you always,

Walter

XII

Letter from Michael Gudgeon to Walter Hartright,
15th August, 185-

Box Cottage, Storry, East Sussex,
August

Dear Mr. Hartright,

Lord, yes! – I remember Turner, though the journey I took with him must have been almost forty years ago now. If I were to draw up an inventory of my memories, I should list them under the following chief heads:

1. Being very cold.

2. Being very wet.

3. Being sick in a boat.

4. Being footsore and saddle-sore in about equal measure.

5. Being ill-housed and ill-fed.

6. Being well housed and well fed.

7. Not giving a damn about any of the above; for my companion was a Great Genius, and I a lusty, impudent, carefree young fellow.

8. Turner very silent when sober.

9. Turner very boisterous when drunk.

I fear I cannot furnish you with a long memoir, for my hand is
rheumatic (my poor long-suffering wife, indeed, is taking this letter down to my dictation); and nowadays I do not go about much. My friends, however, are good enough to call upon me here; and if you think it worth the time and expense to do likewise, I should be delighted to welcome you as one of them, and to tell you all I can recall.

Yours very truly,

Michael Gudgeon

XIII

From the diary of Marian Halcombe, 16th August, 185–

Marlborough House is not, I am sure, the most magnificent palace in the world: a long, plain red-brick building in the Palladian style, it hangs back a little from Pall Mall, as if ashamed to show its dowdy fagade in such distinguished company. And the crowds that throng it – now that the ground floor has become a temporary art gallery – make it feel more like a railway station hotel than a private residence. But palace it is, and the first I have ever entered; and as we walked down a long covered passage into the lofty hall (so vast that Jenny Lind has sung here, before an audience of hundreds), and paid our shilling for a guidebook, I could not but reflect on how different it was from the house in which Turner had spent his last years, and in which I had first seen one of his paintings.

Perhaps Walter was preoccupied by a similar idea; for he was unusually silent all the way there; and, when we arrived, looked about him with an almost incredulous air, as if comparing it with the scene of
his
last adventure – for surely the filthy little street where Turner had been born, though nearer in miles, must have presented an even starker contrast to this place than the cottage in which he had died?

But then we turned, and all such thoughts and calculations instantly evaporated. We had both seen individual Turners before, of course; but never – for this is the first public exhibition since his death – more than thirty of them displayed together. All at once our eyes were assailed by the most brilliant radiance I have ever seen in paintings – and far more, I have to say, than I
should have conceived possible. Reds, oranges and yellows, as hot and tumultuous as burning coals, erupted from the walls, making even the brightest objects about them – a woman's gaudy green dress, a huge picture of the Battle of Blenheim above the chimney-piece – appear suddenly drab and lifeless. They seemed, indeed, more intensely real than the press of people staring at them, or the building itself – as if we were trapped in Plato's cave, and the pictures, rather than merely flat pieces of canvas hanging
inside
, were in fact holes in the rock, through which we could glimpse the unimagined world beyond.

The effect on Walter was immediate; and so dramatic that I wish I could have found some means to record it, for it would have convinced even the dourest sceptic of the power of art. He stopped dead, and drew himself up, as if someone had suddenly lifted a great weight from his back; his mouth set in a small, surprised smile, and the skin appeared to tighten across his forehead, raising his eyebrows into an expression of wonderment and pleasure. His gaze was fixed on a square picture on the opposite wall, which showed an indistinct white figure apparently emerging from the smoke and flames of a raging fire. From where we were standing it was impossible to make out more; but, rather than going closer (which, indeed, would have been difficult, so dense was the press of people), Walter remained there, seemingly uninterested in the subject, content merely to bask in the radiance of the colour, like a cat stretching itself in the sun. I waited for him a moment, and then, since he still showed no inclination to move, set off on my own to explore further.

The impressions of the next half an hour were so forceful and so contradictory that I must try to set them down here in some detail, before they disintegrate into brilliant confusion. There were more than thirty pictures in the exhibition, and what you noticed about them first was simply their enormous variety. The view I had always associated with Turner,
London from Greenwich Park
, was there – although the original had a grandeur and richness you could not have guessed from our engraving of it; and a terrifying picture of a puny cottage caught in a mountain avalanche, and crushed by a deluge of broken ice and uprooted trees and a giant rock (so ferociously painted that the pigment was as thick and ridged as mortar), recalled some of the dread and horror
the pictures in Mrs. Booth's house had inspired in me. Almost everything else, however, took me by surprise. Here was a magnificent sea piece, showing distant ships heeling in a stiff breeze, which (save for the waves, which gathered menacingly in the bottom right-hand corner and threatened to spill over the frame and wet your feet) might have been by a Dutch master; there a gorgeous classical landscape saturated with honey light, or a sublime mountain darkened by angry clouds. Most striking of all were those wild swirls of paint – like those which had so captivated Walter – in which the pure colour seemed to strive for freedom, detaching itself from form like the soul leaving the body, so that you could not clearly discern a subject at all.