Illumination
Authors: Matthew Plampin
Table of Contents
Prologue: Venus Verticordia – London 1868
Part One: City of Light – Paris, September 1870
Part Two: The Goddess of Revolt
Part Three: Wolf Steak at the Paris Grand
For my mother
I no longer remember what Bakunin said, and it would in any case scarcely be possible to reproduce it. His speech was elemental and incandescent – a raging storm with lightning flashes and thunderclaps, and a roaring of lions. The man was a born speaker made for the revolution. If he had asked his hearers to cut each other’s throats, they would have cheerfully obeyed him.
The Memoirs of Baron N. Wrangel
It is not enough to conquer; one must also know how to seduce.
Voltaire
Hannah entered the drawing room and froze: what appeared to be a miniature kangaroo had climbed up onto a chair and was nibbling at a vase of lilies. She stared at it for a few seconds – the black lips pulling delicately at the petals, the elongated toes rubbing mud into the satin upholstery – and wondered what she should do. Creatures both strange and familiar were everywhere at Tudor House. Caged parakeets shrieked in the hall; racoons and marmots scuttled beneath the furniture, their claws tapping on the floor tiles; and at dinner, a huge, sad-eyed dog (an Irish deerhound, they were told) had loped in and laid itself by the hearth without even glancing at the assembled guests.
‘My apologies, Miss Pardy,’ said her host, who had arrived at her side, ‘the little buggers are always escaping from their pen and finding their way indoors. There is nought so bold, so precious clever, as a greedy wallaby. Do excuse me – excuse
us
.’
He edged forward with his arms outstretched, repeating the beast’s name (which was Freda) in the tone of a doting father. The wallaby slipped from the chair, bounding sharply to the right and then to the left – a technique developed to foil the predators of the Australian desert that proved more than a match for a rotund painter-poet in a Chelsea drawing room.
The other guests had started to drift in. Instead of helping their host they gathered like spectators around a street show, cheering as Freda dodged another lunge. Most of them were writers or artists, or those who live off writers or artists; before long they were spouting poetry again, something about a knight’s quest this time, bellowing the verse in good-humoured competition. Hannah didn’t recognise it. She scratched her elbow through the sleeve of her gown. The evening was not going to plan.
Freda made it to the French doors, one of which had been left ajar, and hopped out into the cool April evening. Her owner was close behind, followed in turn by eight or nine chortling gentlemen. Among them was Clement, lighting a cigarette whilst recounting a joke he’d heard in an alehouse. He was doing rather better with these people than Hannah, despite knowing as much about art as the butcher’s boy.
Opposite twins
, that was Elizabeth’s favoured description: siblings born together who were different in every possible regard. This phrase had always made Hannah wince, but she could not deny the truth in it. Her brother had an easy amiability that she would never possess. Clem could bob along quite happily on the surface of almost any society – whilst she sank down into its depths, growing restless and irritable, longing to be away.
A finger prodded Hannah’s hip. Elizabeth was smiling, but her eyes were hard with purpose. She nodded after their host. ‘Follow him.’
‘He is not interested, Elizabeth. Not in the least.’
‘What rot. He’ll soon be finished with that ridiculous pet of his and then you must act. This opportunity may not be repeated.’
‘It is futile. You were at the table. You heard their conversation.’
‘They are unconventional. I warned you of this, Hannah. They are artists. They think differently, even by our standards.’
Hannah sighed. ‘They talked of money and their love affairs – gossip, Elizabeth – and recited a great long bookshelf’s worth of poetry at one another. What is so unconventional about that?’
Elizabeth’s smile vanished. It pleased her to think that these friends of hers were outrageous, an affront to propriety, and she did not appreciate Hannah suggesting otherwise. ‘Perhaps, then, you should have done something to make yourself worthy of their notice. But once more you insist upon surly silence, coupled with a scowl that spoils you completely. How much do you suppose that will achieve, you impossible girl?’
Hannah would not be scolded. ‘And what exactly was I to say? Their only care was the extent of my resemblance to you. None of them so much as mentioned my work. You said that they were curious – that you’d prepared the ground.’
This was a significant understatement. Back in St John’s Wood, Elizabeth had declared that the evening would be nothing less than an
initiation
, launching Hannah into a vibrant world rich with possibilities. An alliance with the Cheyne Walk circle could lead to contacts, to sales, to an arrangement with a picture dealer – to an artistic career. Hannah had actually been excited, despite everything she knew about Elizabeth’s promises and predictions; this, at last, had seemed like a real chance. Within a half-hour of their arrival at Tudor House, however, all hope had been dispelled. There was nothing for her here. Elizabeth had done it again, and Hannah had cursed herself for relaxing her usual scepticism.
‘You must show some blessed
backbone
,’ Elizabeth said. ‘You have the matter in reverse. You are allowing him to overlook you.’
Hannah frowned at the floor. An oriental rug was laid across it, stained and faded by the passage of dirty paws. She decided to stay quiet.
Elizabeth pointed to a spot beside the grand piano. ‘Stand there,’ she instructed, starting for the garden. ‘
I
will follow him.’
The last of the party came in from the dining room – three young women, the only other females present that evening. All were unaccompanied, but this drew no notice at Tudor House. They’d been seated at the far end of the dinner table from Hannah; they hadn’t been introduced, and had said and eaten very little. The three of them were oddly alike, pale and slender with their auburn hair worn down, clad in loose dresses so white they appeared to glow softly in the gaslight. Hannah wasn’t easily intimidated, yet couldn’t help re-evaluating her own garment; what at home had been a subtle celestial grey now seemed as drab as a day-old puddle.
The three women fell among the cushions of a long sofa, settling into each other’s arms. This casual grace was undercut by their twanging accents, those of ordinary Londoners, which placed them some distance beneath the artistic gentlemen out whooping in the garden. Was this a harem, kept in a similar manner to the painter-poet’s private zoo? Hannah didn’t suppose that such an arrangement was beyond these people. One of the women was looking over at her, she realised, making an assessment then whispering to her friends; they leaned in, heads touching, to share a wicked giggle. Hannah turned away abruptly, searching the drawing room for a distraction. This wasn’t difficult. Every surface was crowded with statuettes and vases, unidentifiable musical instruments or items of exotic jewellery – a collection as vast as it was haphazard. She went to a cluster of jade figurines on a sideboard, suddenly fascinated.
There was laughter in the garden, and Elizabeth reappeared through the French doors with the painter-poet. The taller by two clear inches, she was leading him along as if escorting a convalescent. He was fretting about Freda, who remained at large; she was offering reassurance, telling him that his walls were high and his gardener well practised in dealing with escapees. They drew to a halt a few feet before Hannah.
‘And here she is, Gabriel,’ Elizabeth announced, ‘the reason I ventured out among the menfolk to claim you: my Hannah. Is she not a dove? A skylark, like that of dear Shelley:
a star of heaven in the broad day-light
?’
Hannah managed a feeble smile; she thought this a peculiar way to broach the subject of her paintings. Their host remained distracted, his small, sunken eyes twitching between the room’s various doorways. He looked as if he was prey to many maladies, of both mind and body – a man locked into an inexorable decline. The three women on the sofa were waving, trying to coax him over, but he paid them no notice.
‘Oh I agree, madam, a skylark, yes,’ he answered, running a hand through his thinning hair. ‘I’m afraid you must excuse me, though. Another crucial matter requires my attention – one quite unrelated to wallabies. It’s my blockheaded errand boy, you see. I have given him instructions, very
specific
instructions, but the clod is so extraordinarily slow that I cannot tell if he—’
‘People have claimed,’ Elizabeth continued, ‘that she is the picture of me when I was her age; a duplicate, if you like. My feeling, however, if I am quite honest, is that she has a quality I did not. A Renaissance quality. A note of Florence, perhaps, in the late Cinquecento; the beautiful purity one sees in the maidens of Ghirlandaio. It must come from Augustus’s side.’
Mention of Hannah’s father, dead a decade now, was designed to pin their host in place. Augustus Pardy had been a poet of renown, author of the ‘Ode to Dusk’, the verse-play
Ariadne at Minos
and a number of other commended pieces. He was held in some esteem at Tudor House; Hannah suspected that it was largely for his sake that Elizabeth continued to be invited to these dinners. She held her own, naturally, with endless tales of her foreign travels and the celebrity they had once brought, but her late husband’s name still served as her foundation.
The painter-poet, for the moment at least, was snagged. ‘Your husband was certainly a striking fellow,’ he murmured.
‘She fits so very well among these treasures, does she not? Why, it is like she
belongs
here, in this enchanting haven of yours.’ Elizabeth brought them closer. ‘And she has a question for you, Gabriel. About your art.’
Hannah attempted to hide both her surprise and the utter blankness that followed it. Seconds passed, piling up; their host cleared his throat; Elizabeth’s expectant gaze glared against her.
‘I do envy your position here beside the river,’ she said eventually. ‘I am sure that if I lived at Tudor House I would be out on the embankment with my easel every morning. Might I ask how often you avail yourself of its sights?’
This made him laugh. ‘Heavens above, I could never work
outside!
I trade in
beauty
, Miss Pardy, not coal-smoke and low-hanging cloud! What could there possibly be for my brush out on the Thames? And there are the flies, you know, and the dust, and all the blessed
people
… It’s a French idea really, this outdoor painting, and results only in the most beastly slop.’ He fixed Hannah with a quizzical expression. ‘But I believe you mentioned an easel, miss. Do you paint?’
There was another brief silence.
