Lucretia

1854

Two women were in his mind.

It had come to him through the gossip of the prison that there had been a murder in the women’s cells.

He had been thinking of Lucretia, the martyr, the heroine, the faithful partner whose virtue had been taken, and he started to paint her in browns and purples, taking the knife from the folds of the cloak across her shoulders, and pointing the tip at her breast.

They said in the prison that the women had not known each other, that they had been brought in separately and merely formed an alliance through others who knew them both. The tongues that wagged then told of a jealousy, sprung from their knowledge of a man and his possessions, to which they both felt claim.

He took his mind from their degradation and into Lucretia’s bare shoulder, her eyes lifted to heaven, her hair streaming over her neck. He painted the skin very white, luminous, the background dark, the folds of her garment intricate. Strength in the posture, determination of death in her expression.

“What has happened to the murderess?” he asked the steward one morning.

“She is confined,” was all that he would say.

And confinement it would remain forever, for the rest of her days, unless it could be proven that the woman was not so mad as cunning in her intention. He heard the whispering, as though transmitted through the very brick, heard it flowing in the random utterances that passed for conversation in the darkened hallways. They muttered that she had come into the prison only to find her mark. Only to rid the world of her enemy and reclaim her inheritance. He began to dream vividly of the point of the knife, and he painted Lucretia’s knife very pale against the dark cloak, her left arm that grasped it almost floating and she unaware of its intention. He painted her boldly, like a man, so caught up was she in her husband’s imagined disgrace, so oblivious to his forgiveness.

He closed his eyes as the paintbrush lay on the folds of the garments.

He was trying to recall the other female faces of his family. His mother, now faded into obscurity, so much so that he could not recall a single detail of her face. Yet he remembered Mary Anne, elder to him by three years. It had always been said that she resembled her mother, and perhaps there he could keep the memory of them both, two coins pressed from a single mold, with her intense and sympathetic gaze, the curls at her temples, the lace cap that covered her head. There was an anxiety in her look, he thought. Was that a manufactured recollection, her anxiety for him reflected in his memory? He wondered if she ever thought of him.

And then Maria Elizabeth, who had married his friend John Phillip.

Or so they had told him.

Phillip was a painter; would he have painted Maria himself? Would he have painted them together? Would John Phillip have perhaps painted Catherine, his brother’s wife? Was there an image of them all somewhere that he might be allowed to share?

Dadd opened his eyes and gazed on Lucretia. He knew in a passionate instant that he wanted to see his sister. And his sister-in-law. He wanted to see Catherine. He wanted to know if there were children. No one told him of his family. He was set off in a parallel world to them, and yet he yearned to hear them and see them, and he sat still in front of the painting now for more than an hour, until the steward came to disengage the brush from his fingers.

“I would like to see my sisters,” he told the man.

“Your sisters, sir?”

“My sisters,” he repeated. And seeing no reaction other than a smile, he began to shout. “Are you deaf?” he demanded. “Are you as raving as those you pretend to shelter? My sisters! My sisters!”

It was late in the evening when the senior steward came to him.

Dadd was sitting quietly, having taken the laudanum.

They told him then that Maria Elizabeth, the youngest, the sweetest, the most untouched of all the family, had been committed to an asylum in Aberdeen.

His sister had tried to strangle her youngest child.

It was likely, they told him, in softest tones—what, did they think he would leap up and strike them, did they think that he would strike the walls, injure himself?—he had no strength to do such a thing, he had no strength at all—they told him that, like him, like her older brother, she would never leave the place where they had sent her.