Will & Tom (14 page)

‘Plumpton,’ he says.

The gardener disappears down a slope. Will follows, the umbrella held out for balance, his boots skidding on leaves and the loose red earth beneath. At the slope’s base is a lake, a dark oblong hemmed in by woodland; man-made, he notices, dammed at one end with a footpath laid out around its banks. On the southern side are the rocks – a few close, squashed-looking stacks, maybe three storeys high, their contours softened by time and a crust of pale moss. It’s a pleasure park, essentially, not so very different from Harewood itself – fake, Tom would call it. There’s no power here. Again, though, Will has no choice. He can’t very well rush back from this outing with nothing to show. Two studies should do it, on the Whatman paper, taken at facing points around the lake; an hour or so on each and he could reasonably ask Stephen to return him to the house. A small rowing boat has been left upturned on the black mud. He settles on its flank.

Sketching the rocks proves surprisingly difficult. The rich, decaying smell of a lake in high summer is close to overwhelming. Insects of every description crowd the air. Worse still, Will’s mind simply will not clear. He cannot locate that condition of absence that attends on his better days. At first, his thoughts are dominated by escape. He plays out the afternoon to come, rehearsing it minutely: every line of the talk he’ll have with Tom, the precise sequence in which he’ll pack his possessions, the combination of coins he’ll hand to the coachman. Yet as the hours begin to mount, he finds himself dwelling instead upon the sheer damnable oddity of this whole business. Mrs Lamb’s presence in the saloon causes particular bewilderment. Had she been eavesdropping in that shadowy alcove? Is this how she knows so much about the Lascelles family and the various rumours that hover around it? Recollection of the look she gave him makes Will quail, unaccountably ashamed; and bristle the next instant with hot resentment. Should he assume that she is now his adversary? But what has he
done
, exactly, to earn such ire?

When Tom appears Will is at the far end of the lake, hunched atop a knoll of sun-baked earth. The second study has slowed to a standstill; he’s watching a dragonfly cruise amid the water weeds, occupied entirely by an imaginary confrontation across the still-room table. He sits up, greeting the sight of the other painter as coolly as he can. Tom is changed again. Gone is the ebullience of the previous day. The fellow has not tracked him to Plumpton for more foolish japes and argumentation. He knows, Will thinks; he knows that I know.

Tom halts before the knoll, standing with the discomfort of a guilty man called into the dock. ‘My God, Will, how the devil did you ever find your way out here? I’ve been roaming in circles all morning.’ His chuckle is uncertain; he presses his palms together, rotating them in opposite directions. ‘Who’d have guessed that the countryside could be so damn muddling?’

Will realises that he hasn’t seen Stephen since their arrival. He looks around the lake. The gardener is half-concealed beneath a shady beech, a fishing line trailing in the shallows before him. He has a clear view of them both. Will appraises the unfinished sketch, dashing in a few lines that could be filled in later if needs be; then he puts the page away, inside the larger sketchbook, and rises to his feet.

‘The rocks,’ he says. ‘Now.’

*

‘Gritstone,’ murmurs Tom, peering up at a massy overhang. ‘Burnt umber and gamboge, wouldn’t you say? A wash of yellow lake for that pinkness there?’

‘What d’you want, Tom?’

Plumpton’s outcrops lean around them, creased and gnarly like the carcass of an ancient, outsized elephant. The ground is the colour of rust and rutted with exposed roots; it slopes back sharply towards the lake, whose waters have crept among the rocks to form black, brackish pools.

Tom lowers his head. ‘She told me you was there. At the ruin yesterday. That you may have seen us.’

Will pictures Mary Ann lying in the castle hearth; their eyes meeting over Tom’s back. ‘May have, Tom?
May have?
’ He stops, urging himself to remain steady, to remember his rehearsals of this conversation. ‘You two was laid out for the inspection of every man-jack who happened to be passing.’

Tom nods, as if accepting fault. He wants to talk, to make sense of this dangerous circumstance he has created, and in the minutes that follow he delivers a full confession. The story is predictable enough. Mary Ann and Tom had been on amiable terms since his visit the previous summer, and were most pleasurably reunited at the dinner held on the night of his arrival. The next evening, after Will and he parted in the hall, they met by chance in an upstairs corridor. She made a declaration, impulsively it seemed, and conquered him at once. There was a kiss, and vague promises; and an interruption, someone mounting the stairs behind, which obliged them to flee to their separate rooms. And the day afterwards, as Tom sat sketching near the castle, she wafted into his line of sight, dressed for riding, strolling idly along the borders of a wood.

‘The castle was her suggestion. I didn’t think that it might rain. The morning had been so fine.’ Tom sets a hand on a pocked hump in the rock face. ‘She spoke of her suffering. The miserable conditions in which the baron keeps her, while treating his sons generously. That elder sister, who confines her and condescends to her like she’s an idiot child, and sees fit to punish her like one as well. And Beau. Good God. I mean to say, I had my suspicions. No one who spends any time with them could not. But the facts of it, the peculiar delight he takes in humiliating her – it damn near defies belief.’

Will has been simmering in silence, frowning so hard that his features were beginning to ache; these last revelations, however, succeed in winning a measure of his sympathy. ‘This I’ve seen,’ he admits.

Tom looks back at him. ‘What of the portrait in the gallery, then? Ain’t he shown it to you yet? That’s the thing he’s most pleased with.’

‘Beg pardon?’

‘One of your pals from the Academy painted it. That lickspittle John Hoppner. Beau had used him before, for himself and the baron mostly, but last year he ordered one to be taken from Mary Ann as well. Unknown to her, though, the artist and his patron had agreed on a few special terms first.’ Tom smiles bitterly. ‘See it and you’ll understand why she longs for release.’

Not all she longs for, thinks Will; and he wonders for a moment how the lovers progressed from an earnest discussion of her woes to the scene he discovered. He steps closer. ‘Do
you
understand, Tom, what’ll happen if they catch you? Word is that Lord Harewood will soon be back at the estate. What d’you reckon he might do about this?’

Tom’s blood is up now, his rebellious spirits roused, any penitence forgotten. He crosses his arms, glowering happily. ‘But we ain’t been caught. And we won’t be.’

Will stays calm; he speaks firmly. ‘He’d set his men on you, for starters. Men like the brute who brought me here. Who watches us right this minute from over yonder.’

‘Stephen, you mean? He ain’t no
brute
, Will. Why, his whole life is given to the growing of peaches.’

‘I should think Anthony Neville said similar things, afore they did for him.’

Tom doesn’t respond.

‘Draughtsman from Long Acre,’ Will enlarges. ‘Disappeared a few years back, while at Groombridge. That were the lord’s daughter too, or so they think. It’s claimed—’

‘Will,’ says Tom, ‘that’s tavern gossip. That’s the guesswork of drunks and liars. As I recall, as
I
was told, this Neville of yours fled his debts. Ran off to Ireland, that’s all.’ He laughs in exasperation. ‘These daft stories stick to you like tar, don’t they? Always have. You let yourself be steered by the lowest claptrap, the most moonstruck notions. I’ve never understood it.’

‘Don’t be a fool. The baron would have you flogged. Very probably worse.’

Tom won’t listen. ‘The only floggings done in Lord Harewood’s name,’ he says, ‘are served out on black backs and shackled black limbs, many hundreds of miles from Yorkshire. I’m sure he wouldn’t care at all for such unpleasantness to reach his home soil.’

Will blinks; he sees the deck of the
Zong
, the slavers’ whips curling and snapping in the ocean air. ‘That don’t … you can’t—’ He stops. Draws breath. Changes tack. ‘Your art. These new strategies you talk of. It’ll never come to pass if Beau Lascelles takes against you. You’d be lucky to find work painting barges on the river. You know what can happen. You’ve damn well
seen
it happen. Destitution, Tom. Beggary. We ain’t got so very far to fall, God knows. Neither of us.’

And there it is, that pitying expression of Tom’s, excusing Will once again for the limitations of his mind. ‘But the goal, Will, the whole
point
, is to liberate ourselves from these nobles and gentlemen. To make a stage for our work – ways of earning that’ll free us from their patronage.’

More is said, but Will hears only that he is being denied; his careful solutions rejected, his plan for their salvation cancelled out. His fingers tighten around the sketchbooks. ‘So you’re going to
rescue her
, that it?’ he interrupts. ‘This precious young miss, reared in luxury, is ready to run off with a penniless watercolour painter, and bed down with him above his mother’s shop on St Martin’s Le Grand? Stand by him as he chances everything with his hare-brained schemes, and condemns them both to the gutter? Is that what’s to happen?’

This scenario pokes hard at a tender part of Tom – very possibly because he has yet to give any thought to the matters it raises. He spits out a sound, disgusted and impatient, and starts to stride away, past a spur of gritstone; then he turns back.

‘Why, I wonder, are you still here? If I’m as blockheaded as you say, and my prospects as dire, then why the
devil
are you still here? Why d’you not just take your damn leave?’ Tom is pointing, his arm bent and index finger straight, the thumb sticking up like the hammer on a pistol; those fine brown eyes bulge a little in their sockets. ‘You’re a
canker
, Will Turner, a strange and dark and … and
bilious
soul. Many in London say so. They marvel at my long association with you. I tell them that they’re wrong, that they run you down most unfairly. Yet here you are, trying your best to prove that it’s
me
who’s in error. That it’s your detractors who see the truth.’ The pointing ceases and Tom is off again, around the spur; and again he halts.
‘Go
. Go on, return to Maiden Lane. Christ alive, it ain’t even like you’re actually involved.’

Will allows himself no reaction. ‘The baron’ll reckon I was a party to it. You can bet on that. Keeping watch and so forth. Or at least that I knew of it and said nothing.’ Which is now the case. ‘We both must leave, Tom. Get to the closest town and find ourselves a stage-post. You must write to Miss Lascelles and ask her to remain quiet. And then we must wait. It’s our only course.’

Tom’s anger is briefly overtaken by his disbelief. ‘Your view of all this,’ he declares, ‘is warped beyond reason. Fleeing won’t do no good. It’d be the surest path to discovery.’

‘How in blazes can—’

‘What you overlook, Will, what you damn well overlook is that Miss Lascelles is taking this risk also, along with me. If I go she’ll be left to endure them alone. So I won’t do it. D’you hear me?’

Tom walks uphill, away from the lake – to a horse, presumably, on which he’ll ride straight back to Mary Ann. Famed for his intractability, Will absolutely cannot abide it in others. He begins a pursuit, shifting his hold on the umbrella, pinch ing at the cuff of Tom’s jacket, to secure him for further remonstration. Tom shakes him off; he grabs out a second time, rather less gently, and they are grappling, Tom pushing at his head, dislodging the sun hat and crunching his grease-and-powder-caked hair up into a ragged fin. Toppling backwards, Will glances against the gritstone spur and reels on towards one of those grimy pools, knowing with certain horror that his momentum is enough to carry him in.

The pool is deeper than it appears. After a few splashing steps, Will is in up to his knees, warm, soupy water filling his boots. The silt bed has a dreadful softness, almost without form. He treads about frantically, struggling to find purchase, sinking to the tops of his thighs. The umbrella, the quality piece from Oxford Street, which has given so much good service on the tour, is abandoned for the sake of equilibrium; the sketchbooks are taken from under his arm and thrust above his head. Once they are aloft, however, the loose leaves start to slide out. Will slams the books against his crown with such force that he staggers, bright beads of light twining across his vision, and sinks a few inches further; but one sheet still gets free, slithering over his face and chest. A corner touches the surface of the pool and moisture rushes in. Weighed down, the sketch flops over like a flatfish and spins slowly away – a close view, he sees, from his first day in the park – the saturated paper darkening, blending with the black water.

‘Pass them to me.’ It’s Tom, back on the shore. His voice is level, all anger set aside; his hand is extended. ‘The books, Will. I think I can reach.’

With some difficulty, Will turns around. He is now submerged past his waist, the pool lapping into his navel. Its thick reek blocks his nostrils and coats his throat. Tom’s suggestion is stupid: even if he could reach the sketchbooks, which is highly doubtful, moving them about would surely result in more sheets falling. Will makes no reply but gathers his strength and his resolve and wades very carefully to land – concentrating on keeping the bundle of paper pressed against his head and the boots from being yanked off his feet by the sucking silt. Arriving without further accident, he drops to a crouch, lays the books and pages on the ground and commences a thorough examination. Tom, just wise enough to leave him be, finds a stick and attempts to salvage the umbrella – which is speared in the mud about six feet out, tilting like an old mooring pole.

The lost sketch is an important one, the close north-eastern view, and a decent piece of work as well. Will shuts the books and sits nearby, a short way downhill. His breeches, his shirt, the tails of his blue coat are all heavy with water; his boots, once kicked off and shaken, release several handfuls of pungent sludge. Taking the porte-crayone from his tail-pocket, he tests the point against his fingertip. The damp graphite crumbles to grey grit. He looks at his muddy stockings. His frustration and his urgency have departed. In their place is a profound sense of defeat.