Will & Tom (27 page)

After an instant of improbable grace, he came thumping down upon Tom, confounding efforts to be caught, flooring them both. There was a brittle snap from the sack; and as they struggled to rise, Will felt a new motion inside it. One route – the safe return of the centrepiece, as part of a bargain for his life – was viable no longer. The injured knee, jarred during the fall, prevented him from standing. Light moved over them as candles were brought to the windows behind the portico. Tom collected the sketchbooks and stepped back, and for a moment Will feared that he was to be abandoned for the second time that night. Instead, he found himself lifted clean off the ground, onto Tom’s shoulders; no mean feat as Will, although short, is a solid specimen. Thus arranged – Will’s face angled towards the lawn, the blood surging thickly to his head – the painters lurched off at a diagonal, away down the slope.

Tom returns from the chamber. He drops a packet in Will’s lap and sits across the passage. ‘Artemis,’ he says, pointing at the detached goddess. ‘See, I’ve read my legends too.’

‘Or Selene. There’s different stories.’

The packet consists of a Whatman leaf folded around a piece of ice the size and shape of a prayer-book. Will sets the broken figure aside and presses the ice to his knee. The relief is immediate.

‘Now,’ says Tom, ‘what in the name of
high heaven
is going on?’

He’s trying to sound amused, detached even, but Will recognises the excitement in him. A grand piece of disobedience has been enacted, a play made directly against the Lascelles, and he wants to hear everything.

‘Why’d he just stand there? Why didn’t he stop us?’

Tom allows this; it’s not as if Will is about to leave, after all. ‘What d’you know of them? Of Beau and his Mr Cope?’

Will thinks of that glimpse in the near-darkness of the state floor, during his first failed attempt to reach Tom’s room, and the way they embraced; of the cut hand in the stables and the lover’s concern with which Beau made his examination. ‘I’ve seen them. Together. Each holding the other like they was—’ He stops. ‘As if they was—’

‘As if they’re on
closer terms
,’ Tom supplies, ‘than is generally assumed.’

He rubs his nose on his forearm and coughs as gently as he can. Will realises that he’s trembling, chilled to the marrow by the time he spent chipping at the ice. His shirt is damp, clinging to his skin in places; on its front is a fresh bloodstain, its source unclear. The hour since the leap from the portico has been demanding indeed, a stumbling, panting progress between a string of hiding places. They went first to an arbour in a corner of the flower garden; then to a stone hut swathed in ivy, close to the stables; and then, alarmed by the approach of gardeners with lanterns, they ventured deeper into the grounds, until they arrived at this curious burrow by the lake. Will’s guess is that these are trysting sites. He tries to picture Tom and the baron’s daughter coupling against the rough walls, or down on the grimy wooden floorboards; and he considers the other painter now, hugging his knees tightly, the breath grating in his throat. Had he not entered that bedchamber, Tom would still be behind the curtains of his four-poster, well warmed by Mary Ann Lascelles. Will takes the balled cloak from beneath his leg and lobs it over.

Tom nods in appreciation and wraps himself from shoulder to calf. ‘They conceal it,’ he continues, ‘in plain sight. That they’re master and valet prevents the questions. Permits the nearness. The private hours they pass together. The adjoining bedchambers. My sense is that it was his idea for Beau to become a patron of art. That he’s directed his master’s taste almost from the beginning.’ He chuckles hoarsely. ‘For all Beau’s talk of Michelangelo and whatnot, I’ll wager that it was Cope’s notion to have us both come up here.’

‘So why—’

‘Something’s gone awry. You could see it at the lake. Cope didn’t much like the way you was handled. He didn’t like it that Beau kept your books. And this put Beau on the back foot. He ain’t used to them disagreeing.’ Tom looks at the sketchbooks, laid atop the sack at Will’s side. ‘There was a chance, Will, and I took it. I got him to give them up. I was going to post them to Maiden Lane later this morning.’

This is all plausible enough. Things were threatening to become untidy. Mr Cope thought it sufficient that Will be made to feel his place and scared away; it wasn’t necessary, in his view, for the young painter to be given cause for grievance as well. This plot may or may not have been hatched collaboratively, but the valet is certainly its stage manager. He arranges the cues and the settings; he ensures the actors are in their positions. And Beau, caught up in his show of lordly swagger, has strayed from the script. Letting Will escape with the books was an easy correction.

‘Is this why you’re stealing from them? Is it vengeance? Did you want to take something of Beau’s – something precious, to punish him?’ Tom shakes his head. ‘I salute your courage, old friend, truly I do, but you’ve just created a brand-new difficulty for yourself here.’ He nudges the dirty goddess with his shoe. ‘Specially now.’

This seems like a reprimand – like a charge of pettiness. Rather tersely, Will says that revenge or punishment were absent from his thoughts, and that he came by the centrepiece for another reason altogether. Tom asks what that was, as well he might; and Will sees an explanation of some kind is unavoidable. His earlier zeal for this task has disappeared. He is so encumbered by tiredness, in fact, that he can scarcely arrange his words. But Tom deserves it. He deserves to be relieved of his ignorance.

‘It’s all been for you. Everything that’s happened this past week. Us both coming here. The family – their arguments, at dinner and suchlike. Even that ball the other night. They’ve been working you into position.’ He shifts his leg. ‘It’s a scheme.’

Tom’s face has darkened. ‘Christ, Will,’ he says, ‘not more of this. How the devil d’you keep it up? These visions of persecution. These dreams of plotting and death. It’ll end with me being broken on a cartwheel, will it? Drowned in the boating lake?’

‘No,’ says Will. ‘No, Tom. This is real. Miss Lascelles – what you two have been doing. It ain’t what you think.’

‘What I
think
?’ Tom sits forward suddenly, his knees pushing from inside the cloak. ‘What do I think, Will? Pray tell me.’

So it’s to be a confrontation. Of course it is. Will gathers his breath. ‘There’s things about that lady you ain’t a party to. Things, Tom, plenty of things, that she ain’t revealed to you.’

‘The child, you mean,’ Tom says, disdainful now, slumping back against the wall. ‘The child born last year. D’you honestly think I didn’t know? I was damn well
here
. She was still recovering when I arrived from London. That portrait had just been put up in one of the drawing rooms. Beau led me to it afore the dust had been brushed from my coat. That the babe was dead, that his sister was mourning it, didn’t sour the joke any, as far as he was concerned.’ He covers his eyes. ‘The girl was beleaguered. Beset on every side. So I did what little I could to show my friendship – my
humanity
, I suppose, in a circumstance where it was in damn short supply.’

‘It lived,’ Will states. ‘Her child lived. There was a swap, with the brother’s wife. A live boy for a dead one.’

Tom’s hand lowers. ‘How in heaven can you—’

‘They’re trying to use her a second time. That’s what I’m telling you, Tom. They’re trying to pull another damn trick.’

Again, Tom attempts to reject what he’s being told, as a further figment of Will Turner’s garish imagination; but it’s plain that his own mind is beginning to reach out, to grope around the possibilities, and not liking at all what it encounters.

‘A lie has been spun,’ Will says, ‘a mighty lie, with you smack in its middle. The Lascelles need your girl in the family way so they can marry her into royalty. To the scarred Prince – Ernest Augustus, her lover from the spring. And they need it double quick.’

Will envisions anger. He braces for yells, for curses, for snarled denunciations; he readies himself to lunge at a trouser leg as it whips past and impede a rash charge back to the house. None of this comes. The other painter merely grimaces; coughs into the folds of the black cloak; knits his brow in thought. When he speaks, his voice is calm, relieved almost, as if he’s voicing doubts that have been troubling him for a while.

‘It’s reckless,’ he admits. ‘You were right. What you said at Plumpton.
She’s
reckless. I ain’t unpractised at this, not in the least, but I’ve never known the like. Today she had me take her in a boat, for God’s sake, in amongst the reeds, with her sister and nieces sat barely thirty feet away. Habit of her class, I’ve been telling myself. Just the way they live.’ He pauses. ‘And the loathing that family has for each other. It’s more poisonous, even, than last year. And worn so openly. There’s been no end to it.’

‘They’re doing it for you,’ says Will. ‘They know you, Tom, and they know what’ll get at you. Villainy. Suffering. All that.’

This comes out a touch too eagerly. Tom glares in his direction – studies him with distinct annoyance. ‘What’ve you heard then, Will?’ he asks. ‘Come on. What’s your proof?’

Proof
. Mrs Lamb used this word, Will remembers, back in the greenhouse, when telling him there was none. He reveals what happened at the ball, in the empty dining room – the fragment of the Lascelles sisters’ dispute that had drifted in through the window. Tom dismisses it. Too vague, he says. Mary Ann and Frances frequently differ. Their exchange could have referred to any number of things. So, rather more self-consciously, Will names Mrs Lamb.

‘The still-room maid? How the devil would she know of a … a
secret plot
among the family?’

‘She watches them. She’s been watching them since the beginning. She’s pieced it together.’

Tom is shaking his head again, more firmly. ‘That woman has her hooks in you. I saw it, in the garden. I warned you, Will. I told you to keep well back.’

‘You don’t know about her,’ Will says. ‘Not the truth. None here do.’ He meets Tom’s baffled stare. ‘She’s from their sugar plantations. In Jamaica. She’s a runaway. A slave.’

This revelation, Will thought, would at the very least earn him some understanding. Had Tom not spoken bitterly of the origin of the Lascelles’ wealth at Plumpton? Had he not railed against slavery in innumerable taverns and coffee houses, demanding its cessation, heedless of whom he might offend or estrange? But no. Tom is not shocked, nor contrite. He is disappointed. Dismayed by his companion’s gullibility. Their course changes – as if a sail has been caught in a brisk wind, the boom sweeping unexpectedly across the deck. Will ducks an inch, into his coat collar.

‘That’s what she told you, is it? That she’s just like them poor souls in the pamphlets?’ Tom’s tone grows scathing. ‘Then how come there’s people employed on this estate – good people, with no reason whatever to lie – who’ll tell of her family in Leeds, her
Irish
family, that she ain’t quite managed to hide from view? Who’ll talk of her deceptions and her intrigues? Of how nobody with any brains in their head goes within ten damn yards of her?’

‘Stories only. Servants’ malice.’ Will frowns; he must make a case. ‘She’s a decent woman, at her heart. D’you hear me, Tom? She’s giving the money from this to the anti-slavers. The Abolitionists. To aid those still enslaved.’

‘The money?’ Tom is puzzled; then he looks down at the broken goddess and joins the parts. He starts to laugh. ‘Dear God, Will, has she got you stealing for her? Is that what’s really happening tonight?’

‘Just once,’ Will replies, rather weakly, feeling what remained of his advantage fall away. ‘I agreed to help her. So she’d help me get the books. I ain’t—’

‘She fucked you, didn’t she?’

Will’s hesitation is his answer. ‘We shared—’

‘She
fucked you
, Will Turner,’ Tom proclaims, ‘and she conquered you completely. The woman’s a sharper, and she spotted a juicy mark – a young guest a good distance from his natural place, well supplied with imagination, and pride, and self-regard, but lacking,
wholly
lacking, in worldly knowledge. A fellow she could prime to do her bidding. All it took was the conjuring of some tall tale and a timely lifting of the skirts, and you was risking your neck so she could haul in the plunder – then jump from this house afore she was pushed.’

Will bridles at this account, but can’t think of anything to pitch back. ‘That ain’t how it was,’ he mutters. ‘Not a bit of it.’

Tom smiles grimly from within the cloak. ‘Where is she then, I wonder, your Mrs Lamb? Why ain’t she at your side, telling you what to do next? Weren’t there a plan for your escape?’

This is more mockery, a ribbing rebuke. Tom has guessed what happened outside his chamber door. The ice packet is melting, the fine paper soaked; a cold drip runs into the underside of Will’s wounded knee. He alters his grip, flexing the numbed fingers. One thing, he sees, is certain here. He has done that which he swore early on in life never to do. He has
ventured out
. He has established a connection – a slight one, God knows, but a connection nonetheless – and he has been compromised by it. Made ridiculous.

Tom lets him off. He rises with a groan and moves to the entrance. For a minute he stands looking at the sky, making a landscapist’s assessment of the hour; then he runs through the various coaches that stop in the village, identifying Will’s options.

‘You’ve missed the post, I reckon,’ he says, ‘but there’s a telegraph at six.’

Will nods, testing his leg – the pain, he thinks, is marginally reduced – then realises what he’s heard. ‘Ain’t you coming?’

‘I can’t. Not yet.’

‘But they might think you knew. About the china. That you was in on it.’

Tom isn’t worried. ‘There’s a clear culprit. They won’t be looking for anyone but your friend from the still room. If I’m seen on my way back in, I’ll just say I was out studying the dawn for a drawing. I’ve done such things before. Nobody’ll question it.’