A Mad, Wicked Folly (11 page)

A whimper caught in my throat and I began to run;
my boots pressed painfully against my blisters. The steps
behind me picked up in pace.

I was approaching the back of a public house; workmen
were rolling barrels of beer from a brewer’s dray down a
long ramp and into a cellar. I darted a look over my shoulder. I heard the voice behind me shout again.

A barrel spun into me, kicking my legs away. I slammed
onto the ground, my arms shooting out in front of me. The
impact was so great that my felt beret flew off, and my
hairpins fell in a shower around me. I skidded along the
brick ground on the palms of my hands.

I turned my head and looked into the eyes of the person chasing me. It wasn’t Catchpole.
It was PC William Fletcher.

SAT ON A
stack of crates, trying not to cry, while PC
Fletcher picked the gravel out of my palms. He had
shown no signs of wanting to arrest me. After I fell, he
helped me to my feet, had a quiet word with the publican, sat me on a crate, and began to doctor my hands. As

friendly as he had been yesterday, I did not fully trust him.
I was well aware of the handcuffs hanging from his belt
and his prior threats to haul me back to the police station.

“I need to be on my way. My hands are fine.” I tried to
pull them back, but he tightened his grip.
“I don’t think so. Those cobbles are filthy with muck of
all sorts. You don’t want these scrapes to go septic.”
“So who are you? Florence Nightingale?”
Instead of getting angry, he grinned. “No, but I’ve been
in enough pubs to know what lands on the floor after several pints.”
“Don’t be vulgar! I’ll clean them as soon as I return
home. I’m meant to be going to a charity meeting at the
church and I’m horribly late now.”
“I’ll finish, and then you can be on your way to your
meeting.”
“I—”
“For once in your life just shut your gob and do as you
are told.”
“How rude!”
“Just shush and let me work.”
“I’d better had, because you’ll only chase me down
again if I try to get away.”
“I wasn’t chasing you just now.” He leaned over me so as
to see my hands better. He had taken his helmet off and set
it on the ground, so I was staring straight into his hair. “I was
worried you’d become lost, because these streets are like
a maze. The lads and I sometimes get turned about; that’s
why I followed you. Were you with the demonstration?”
“If I say yes, then you’ll only haul me in front of the
magistrate again.”
He scowled. “What makes you think that?”
“Oh, let’s see . . . could it be because you arrested me
once before?”
“I never arrested you.” He looked different without his
helmet on. His wavy brown hair was cut short on the sides
but left long on top, but his hair made a mockery of this style;
as he spoke, the top flopped down over his face. He pushed
it back in a casual manner, as if this happened all the time.
“Well, you didn’t let me go, either.”
He fixed me with a pointed frown.
“Yes, all right,” I said. “That was for the judge to decide.
At least you weren’t horrible. Not like that other man.”
He frowned. “Catchpole? I hate how he treats the suffragettes.” He dropped another pebble to the ground. “Well,
that is the last of the stones.”
The publican’s wife came out and left a cloth and a
bowl of water on a nearby barrel. PC Fletcher busied himself rinsing my hands with the cloth. My fingers began to
tingle under his gentle touch and my headache began to
fade. I found myself no longer wanting to run away from
him. I felt as though I could stay there in the dirty back
alley behind that pub all day with him.
He drew a handkerchief from his pocket. “It’s quite
clean,” he said, grinning up at me. He bound it round one
the worst of the abrasions, tying a neat bow. “I had better see you back.” He took my hand and helped me down
from the crates. The pain from my blisters made my knees
buckle, and he caught me by the elbow.
“Careful,” he said.
His touch compelled me to step a little closer to him. I
hadn’t noticed before how his mouth lifted up at one corner,
as if he found life too humorous to stop smiling completely.
Such a smile should be preserved forever in a drawing. If
only the feeling of his hand on my arm could somehow be
captured and kept. My stomach fluttered strangely and
my mind recalled that moment when I fell on top of him. I
found that it wasn’t an unpleasant memory anymore.
“Your hair seems to have come undone,” he said.
My hands flew to the back of my head. “My hairpins
came out when I fell.”
We searched around on the ground and found several
by the barrel that had tripped me. My beret lay on the
other side.
With the pins found, I bunched my hair up and tried to
put them back in, but my sore hands wouldn’t allow me to.
“Here, let me help.” I turned around, and PC Fletcher
gathered my hair up in his hands. “Um, I’m not sure what
to do; I’ve never dressed a lady’s hair before.”
“Wind it all up and ram the pins in as best you can. Try
not to skewer me in the process.”
He laughed. “I’ll give it my best attempt.”
I felt his fingers gently comb through one of the tangles
in my hair, and little tingles flashed through me. I closed
my eyes, wanting to lean into his hands, but I forced myself
not to. Thankfully he finished quickly.
“I don’t think it looks too clever. Rather like a Chelsea
cinnamon bun.”
I turned around, feeling suddenly shy. “Thank you for
helping me. I don’t think I would have found my way out if
you hadn’t come along.”
“I was only doing my job,” he said, reaching for his
police helmet. “You shouldn’t walk about on your own. Not
in London. There are a lot of villains knocking about who
wouldn’t hesitate to take a swipe at a woman, especially
lately. A lot of blokes hate suffragettes.”
“I thank you all the same, PC Fletcher.”
“Call me Will.”
Somehow the name Will suited him very well indeed.
“And you must call me Vicky.”
“Well, then. Allow me to escort you back, Vicky.”
We set off. With Will next to me, the fog no longer
seemed ominous; instead, it felt peaceful. The fog blotted
out the surroundings and any passersby, making it feel as
though we were the only people about.
“So you believe in votes for women?” I asked as we
walked.
“I don’t see the point in denying half the population the
right to vote. I think the politicians are frightened women
will take over if they have it.” He shook his head. “My
mum and sister are more capable than my dad and me put
together, so I see no reason to worry about that. It’s daft. So
yes, the suffragettes have my sympathies. I can’t work out
which side you’re on though.”
“With the women, of course.”
“But you don’t fight with them?” He looked at me, his
eyes questioning.
“I’m going to help them with the artwork. I’m not the
fighting type.” I twirled my beret around my hand.
He grinned. “And an artist can’t fight?”
“Not this one.”
“I don’t know about that.”
The sun was beginning to cut through the coal smog,
and a shaft of light fell upon William Fletcher’s face, illuminating the angles of his cheekbones and the length of
his jaw. I thought once again that he had the perfect face to
draw. And then the vision of him on a battlefield struck me
once more, and I thought of how I would like to draw him:
as the knight Lancelot in the Arthurian legend. I wondered
if
he
would pose for me. Perhaps he might be willing to if I
took him up on his offer of illustrating his stories. Doing so
was certainly worth the risk for me now.
“Your offer from yesterday. Does it still stand?” My fingers gripped an imaginary pencil.
“Too right! Have you changed your mind?”
“Maybe. If you’ll do something for me in turn.”
“Name it.” He waved his hand. “Anything.”
“I need a model.”
He looked confused. “A model?”
“Yes. I’m submitting work for my RCA application and I
need an artist’s model. Someone to pose for me.”
He swallowed. “You mean, like the drawing in your
book? Of that man?”
I smiled. “Yes.”
“You mean you want me to model for you with . . .
without my kit on?” Even in the fog I could see his cheeks
flushing bright red.
“Would you?” I held my breath, hoping I hadn’t crossed
a line, but Will seemed like the only person I had met in
London who understood art and its process. And because
of his political views, he didn’t seem a slave to convention
either. I did need a model, desperately. But also the thought
of seeing him without his clothes brought the flutter back
to my stomach. An unclothed man wasn’t the most awful
thing to gaze upon—the broad shoulders with the lines of
muscles down the arms and back, a strong chest, a long
thigh. No, drawing Will without his garments wouldn’t be
the most arduous task a girl could embark upon.
“I . . . well . . . I . . .” He laughed a little. “Blimey. I never
thought you’d ask me that. You already have pictures like
that. Can’t you show the school those?”
“I would, but I don’t have my sketchbook any longer.
My parents took it. They don’t approve.”
“Of you drawing?”
“Yes. They’ve forbidden it, but obviously I’m not letting
that stop me.”
He digested this. “That’s why you lied about your
name.” His face fell. “And then there’s me, behaving like
a rotter. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I should’ve given you a
chance to explain.”
“You couldn’t have known. But yes, that’s the reason
why I lied about my name. I didn’t want my father to know
I’d snuck out of the house to draw. That and the fact I was
around the suffragettes.”
“It’s a shame you lost your book. It was really good.”
“I hope I’ll be able to replace the work in time, but what
really worries me is the lack of life studies. Only one or
two women are accepted at the school each year, and life
studies would set me apart from the other women applying, but now I don’t have any to show.”
He frowned, taking things in a bit more deeply. “Life
studies?”
“The undraped form. The nude? No clothes on and all
that.”
“Why is it important to know how to draw people in
the buff?”
“It’s not so much about drawing people in the buff.
There’s a difference between naked and nude.”
Will looked unsure. “How do you mean?”
“The nude figure is inspiring, sensual. Naked is simply the result of the everyday act of removing one’s
clothes. Someone who is naked is often embarrassed to be
looked at, and that’s certainly not what an artist is after.
Depicting the nude is the most difficult thing for an artist to master,” I said, remembering Monsieur Tondreau’s
lecture on the subject. “Get one thing wrong and the person will look skewed. And when you draw the undraped
form, you learn about anatomy and how the clothing
should fall upon a person. And there is an emotional
component that is challenging as well; the muscles show
tension, relaxation, fear, that kind of thing is clearer with
no clothing on.”
“I see.” Will looked thoughtful.
“A life-drawing session is always professional, mind,
never risqué,” I added.
“Hmm,” Will said. “What will I have to do?”
“Stand as I tell you, keep very still, and don’t speak; it’s
dead easy.”
He stopped walking and leaned against the brick wall
of a building. “Without my clothes on.”
“You don’t have to worry about it. I’ve seen men
undraped before.” I watched him mull it over in his head.
He kept tapping his fingers nervously against the brick and
shooting little glances at me. I hoped he would say yes, but
I knew it was a lot to ask of a person.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. “Can I think about it a bit?”
As Bertram had pointed out to me that day in France, it
wasn’t the done thing for an artist to press a model to take
his clothes off. Although I was disappointed, I nodded. “I can
draw you as you are, if you’re more comfortable with that.”
“That sounds like a better starting place. Where?”
I bit my lip, realizing I had no place to draw him
undraped anyway. I hadn’t quite thought it all the way
through. “Can you meet me at the Royal Academy? By the
Burlington Arcade; do you know it? There’s a place there
where we can work undisturbed. Lots of artists work there,
and people tend to leave them be.”
He nodded. “I have Thursday afternoons off. We can
meet then. Say two o’clock?”
The Royal Academy was close to my house. I could get
away with a church-charity excuse and meet Will for an
hour or two.
We started walking again, and after a little while
Will turned down a small lane that opened out to
Northumberland Avenue. All too soon, Nelson’s Column
came into view. I felt a pang of guilt. Emma stood exactly
where I left here; two paper cones of nuts clutched in her
hands, scanning the crowd, a look of panic on her face,
which changed to relief when she saw me.
“Here I am!” I said. “I got dragged along in the crowd and
I couldn’t get back. I fell, and then P.C. Fletcher helped me.”
“I was that worried about you, miss,” she said. “I didn’t
know what to do. I went to buy the nuts and just like that
you was gone! I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have left your side.”
She pointed at my bandaged hand. “You’ve hurt yourself!”
“It’s nothing, Emma.” I said. “Only a little scratch.”
Will walked with us all the way up the steps of the
church.
“I will leave you then, miss,” Will said, his face crinkling into a smile. He bowed slightly and then trotted down
the steps. I watched him walk across the street toward
Whitehall. I couldn’t help but notice other women glancing
at him as he went.
Perhaps my artistic sensibilities weren’t so misguided
after all.

FTER A CRUSHINGLY
boring morning spent
replacing old hymnals with new ones, John met
me and Emma at the church door, escorted me
back to the carriage, and we headed home. My

new prison warden and lady’s maid was due to arrive
at any moment, but I wasn’t looking forward to meeting
her. Despite the maid’s reported ability to transform Joan
Hollingberry from an ugly duckling into a swan, she would
have to be someone of whom my mother approved: someone old, someone dull, and someone who shared the same
fashion sense. She would probably keep a hand on me at all
times and report back to my mother every time I sneezed.
At least I could slip away from her with an excuse to work
at the charity. I would have no need of a chaperone within
the saintly walls of a church and under the watchful eye
of the vicar.