Will & Tom (26 page)

It holds a number of watercolour drawings, each at least twenty inches by twelve, and all of London – forming a continuous view, like the five-page sketches Tom would make from Adelphi Terrace. Although it’s clear that these were also taken in the open air, before their subject, they’re far more considered in effect. The vantage point is different as well: somewhere on the southern bank of the river, a rooftop close to Blackfriars Bridge, looking north. Several are unfinished. Will can tell that they are preparatory, the basis for another work – a great metropolitan vista, no doubt to be executed in oil on a significant scale. He selects a drawing that is more or less complete, representing the stretch from the spire of St Mary Le Strand to the borders of Westminster, and conducts a swift evaluation.

It’s a fine effort. This can’t be denied. The faithfulness to the atmosphere and arrangements of life is amazing, in fact, beyond anything Will himself has attempted. Tom has captured precisely the low chiaroscuro of a squally London afternoon, with its translucent greys, settled blues and browns, and fleeting smudges of sunlight. As always, the technique is rough in places – jogs and blots, and the occasional bleeding of pigment caused by hasty washes – but Will notes that correct local colour has been painstakingly applied to every building, along with specific shadow tones. It has a breadth to it, also; that indefinable feeling that tightens your chest and quickens your heart. Elevation, he supposes. Tom is serious. He’s coming at this with his very best blood.

Among the edifices that line the Thames’s northern bank is the vast silvery block of Somerset House, dwarfing everything around it. This is where Tom’s monumental city piece is surely headed. If he can transport the effect of this drawing, of all the drawings in this album, into a single epic canvas, the Academy Exhibition will rest in the palm of his hand. The laurels will be set upon his brow, by general demand; the Royal Academicians will usher him into their ranks at the first opportunity, perhaps even forgoing the vote. Will tries to take a calming breath and finds he cannot. His muscles and sinews have contracted to an insupportable degree; it feels as if, were he to be caught by a draught, he’d topple to the floor locked in his current pose.

‘Will Turner.’

Beside him, not three feet away, a forefinger has drawn back a portion of crimson bed-curtain. Candlelight falls through the long triangle it creates, revealing an eye, Tom Girtin’s eye; and past it, the contours and furrows of a landscape of naked flesh. This sight releases Will from his seizure. Gasping, he shuts the album and returns it to the desk, swapping it for his sketchbooks. The rest of Tom’s head appears, his short hair sticking up; he’s grinning, unperturbed by Will’s appearance in his bedchamber in the dead of night.

‘You’ve come for the books. Course you have. Can you smell them, perhaps?’

Will wipes his face on his sleeve. ‘I ain’t—’

‘And dear Lord, look at that
cloak
. Will Turner the burglar. Rather a drastic shift in occupation.’

Will is looking into the bed, at the other person who lies there. He wonders if he should run.

Tom takes this silence as a sign of umbrage. His grin falls and he apologises for his behaviour at the church – for not giving chase when Mr Cope towed Will off to the stables. ‘My chest,’ he says, by way of explanation. ‘I couldn’t breathe, really.’ He moves atop his disordered sheets; the curtain opens further. ‘It was harsh, what Beau did. Throwing you out like that, just for taking a couple of candles. Far too harsh. Word’ll get about, back in London. A boycott, Will, of this damn place. It’ll happen.’

Behind him, Mary Ann Lascelles sits up. Will glimpses the loose, powder-grey tresses falling about her shoulders; the pillowy roll of her stomach as she drops a shift over herself.

‘Tom,’ she says wearily, ‘don’t talk rot.’

‘Rot, my dove?’ Tom replies, glancing at Will. ‘How so?’

This was not anticipated. Will assumed either that Tom would be alone, or the chamber would be empty. The lovers didn’t need to fear discovery, he reasoned, so they’d meet in her room, surely the more spacious and comfortable of the two. He sees now, however, that they are in here for Tom’s sake, so he doesn’t guess that this affair is taking place with the sanction – with the active encouragement and assistance – of the very relatives he imagines he’s defying.

Nonetheless, Will is disconcerted by how indifferent Mary Ann is to his presence; and by the casual, faintly sardonic familiarity between them, as if their connection, their fornication beneath her noble father’s roof, is of no particular significance. He can hardly reveal what he knows now. Tom would be staggered, incredulous and then hugely wrathful. Who wouldn’t be, upon such a discovery? He’d turn on her, shouting his questions. And Mary Ann is no timid maiden. She’d respond in kind. A dreadful row would ensue. Someone would come running, most probably Mr Cope. Will would be caught red-handed with the Endymion centrepiece, and destroyed. The black cloak is becoming unbearably hot. He stays quiet, watching the couple in the four-poster very closely.

‘You are poor,’ enlarges Mary Ann from the shadows of the bed. ‘Whereas my father and my brother are rich. It doesn’t honestly matter what they do, does it? Your kind will always be scratching at their door.’

‘My
kind
, Mary Ann?’

‘Painters and furniture makers. Silversmiths and jewellers.’ She shrugs. ‘Professional men.’

Tom manages to remain cool. He turns towards her. ‘Your father and brother will learn that change is upon us,’ he says, ‘very nearly. Proper, effective,
improving
change. The true artists, those like Will and me, will soon be freed from their control.’

Mary Ann sighs, not without affection. ‘But they have the gold. They are the source of it. We all must heed them, all of us, no matter how it might sicken us to do so.’ Will sees her fingertips skim idly along Tom’s hip. ‘What will it be, precisely, this freedom of yours? The freedom to starve, and wander raggedly through the streets?’

‘If that’s what we choose.’

‘Oh Tom,’ she says, lying back, ‘you will not
choose
.’

Will has heard enough. It’ll do him no good to tarry here. He’s got his books; he’s got a sizeable burden to carry, in fact, what with his boots and this damn sack at his feet. The plan is that they’ll leave the house as they entered it and march up the drive to the village, where Mrs Lamb says she has a gig waiting to take them off to Leeds. He lifts up the sack, working it onto his shoulder.

Spotting Will’s intention, Tom breaks from his debate and hops naked from the four-poster to intercept him. Will swerves, stops, trying to avert his eyes from the lean limbs, the long, bony torso, the flapping genitals. Tom doesn’t want to bar his path, he sees, but to assist him – to collude in this illicit escape from Harewood and demonstrate to his aristocratic lover exactly who and what he is. Mary Ann, vaguely irritated, tells Tom to come back to bed. He ignores her, snatching up his shirt and riding trousers. Will steps around him and slips through the bedroom door, thinking to hurry off before he’s dressed.

Mrs Lamb is gone.

Will curses; he peers hard into every shadowy nook. She’s gone for certain, swag-sack and all. Voices sound in a corridor, somewhere to the east; candlelight rises against a wall, carried up from below. The thefts have been discovered. What else can it be? His one hope is to bolt as well. Get outside as fast as he can. Make for the village. But urgency numbs his mind, leaving him quite unable to orientate himself. The only route he can summon is a plunge down the main staircase, perhaps a dozen yards from where he now stands. It seems empty, for the moment at least. Light-headed with terror, he scuttles towards the banister.

Tom catches up with him at the landing, just as he’s starting onto the second flight. ‘Why’s it so damn
difficult,
’ he whispers, hooking a hand around Will’s shoulder, ‘for you to accept an honest offer of help? What is—’

Will twists about, glowering in readiness – and finds that astonishment has dashed every other emotion from Tom’s face. The head of the moon goddess, tiny and perfect and brilliantly white, is poking out of the sack, framed by a neat escarpment. Light lances through the darkness above – through a spread of glass cases mounted high on the wall, in which a menagerie of stuffed birds are forever unfurling their wings, about to take flight. Will attempts to rush onwards, but he treads on a fold of that wretched black cloak and is tripped; Tom grabs for him and together they begin a tottering descent, revolving clumsily, shedding boots and sketchbooks as both fight to keep the sack aloft. After a half-dozen steps Will is thrown aside, dropped on his rear, and for an instant his legs are windmilling through the air; then his left knee slams against the staircase, a stone corner driving between the parts of the joint. The pain is startling, spearing up his thigh and on into his trunk – straining, even, in the tendons of his neck. He bites hard on his cuff, to stem an untimely squeal, and rolls down helplessly onto the fine carpet of the state floor.

Before this first shock has faded, Tom’s arms are under his, dragging him up, urging him to continue. More people are gathering on the upper floor. Candles seems to be converging on the staircase from several directions. Will draws in a shuddering breath. He manages to stand on his sound leg and experiments gingerly with the other one. The results are not heartening: barbed daggers, searing pins, the clear sensation of damage. Tom is busy nearby; he has the sack and is retrieving the sketchbooks. He passes them to Will with an enquiring look.

‘Knee,’ Will mutters. ‘Buggered.’

Tom moves to Will’s side, bending to offer support before steering them towards the hall; only to reverse abruptly at the sight of a footman, already posted at the front entrance. There’s another door, thankfully, just past the staircase. It opens into a drawing room, the yellow silk of its walls hushed to a soft brown-gold. Tom bears left, without deliberation. He’s taking them somewhere.

‘Hold,’ says Will. ‘What—’

‘The saloon,’ Tom tells him, as if stating the obvious. ‘The portico.’

The doors are unlocked and swing back on well-greased hinges. The painters go out into the night. The Lascelles’ artificial valley is laid before them, between smooth columns; stars glint through a tear in the cloud, adding a pure white highlight to the lake. It’s a false release. They are enclosed by a balustrade. And beyond it is a fifteen-foot drop.

‘What in God’s name is this? Are we to glide off into the trees, Tom, like a pair of merry pigeons?’

‘It’s an easy jump. Fairly easy. You saw me do it on the night I got here.’

Will leans against the balustrade. He tries his left leg again, but it will take no weight at all; the least bit of pressure is like a hot tack hammered into the kneecap. His gut stirs uneasily. He ate a quantity of fruit in the greenhouse – peaches and figs, and something purple he couldn’t identify – and he tastes it again now, mixed with the shivering sourness of bile.

‘I can’t walk,’ he states, gesturing at his knee, at his stockinged foot – realising as he does so that his boots are gone, left behind on the stairs. ‘This is – I don’t know – this is broken, I reckon. Hurts like damnation. How exactly am I to
jump
?’

Tom gives up. He crosses his arms. ‘You’re the one who’s turned thief, Will. You’re the one who’s stealing Beau’s china. Why the devil don’t
you
decide what we’re to do?’

‘The service stairs,’ Will says. ‘There’s a flight just through there, that door on the right. We can—’

Mr Cope enters the saloon from the hall, candle in hand, once more hunting out the source of the disturbance. The two artists go still, though God knows why – he’ll have seen them the moment he came in. They are caught. What will he do? Fling open the doors and overpower them, as he did Will at the church? Call for others and have them beaten down?

Neither of these. Mr Cope hesitates for perhaps five seconds; then he sets his candle on a table or sideboard and simply stands there, in that sentry-like way of his, his hands by his sides. Will meets the valet’s level stare. Later on, he’ll try to convince himself that he detected the chink – the minuscule shift of the brow, the bend of the mouth, the almost indiscernible dip of that narrow chin – but in actuality there is nothing. Mr Cope could be a lofty, rather hollow-cheeked plaster-cast, painted to resemble life and dressed up in a modest version of gentlemen’s clothes.

‘He’s waiting,’ murmurs Tom.

‘For our surrender?’

‘No, Will.’ Tom moves to the side of the portico and swings his leg over the balustrade. ‘For us to go.’

*

The cough echoes about the ice house. It’s a hard sound to hear, both grinding and rending – and as suggestive of distress, of raw plight, as any cry for aid. Will looks in; he can make out a crude domed ceiling and a curve of brickwork below, but Tom himself is lost to sight, down among the straw-bales. Abruptly, there is respite; the scraping of a chisel. Then something is inhaled, or some inflamed part chafes against another, and the cough begins again.

Will is seated in the passage, just by the door, which has been propped open to admit the light that slowly gathers outside. The left leg is extended; the black cloak rolled into a ball and wedged underneath it. They’ve been in here for minutes only, but a thin slime, halfway between moss and mud, has already found its way onto everything – Will’s blue coat, so far from new now that it might as well be used for a scarecrow; his breeches and stockings; and the goddess of the moon, broken off from the rest of the centrepiece, who he cradles in his arms.

It should have been predicted. It should have been
avoided
. Tom took the lead, and without accident – dangling at arms’ length before dropping to the lawn, as he’d done the previous week when hurrying over to greet Will. The sketchbooks were next, small after large; but as Will prepared to lower Mrs Lamb’s sack, the candlelight from the saloon became stronger and a voice addressed Mr Cope; so Will simply jumped, the sack against his chest, the black cloak flowing out behind him like a spout.