VI. Easy Prey

Lillian opened the door, and shrieked. There in the rain stood Jacques St Pierre: blood caked on his face and clothing, a handkerchief wrapped like a sling about the left arm that was “badly sprained,” he said, “if not broken. A bullet wound in my leg—a narrow escape indeed.”

“Oh! Poor man.” She didn’t know where to look, what to do. “And where is Mr Peale? Is he hurt?”

“Not hurt—the last I knew. But out of prison. I thought I might find him here. May I come in?”

“Yes, yes, forgive me. It’s just that—” She couldn’t think what she had been going to say. Roger was unhurt and out of prison, ah!—then the escape was successful. But why was he not here with Jacques? No, he was to be in hiding somewhere. “Where then, tell me where!” She helped her friend over to the sofa, sat him down, and summoned the nursemaid for hot water and compresses.

The woman cried out to see him. “Been in a fight, has he? Oh, poor fellow. Mercy.”

“And fetch a physician,” Lillian ordered.

“No physician. Just a basin to wash in. And clean bandages.” Jacques looked helpless, creased and shabby, altogether done in as though he’d had an arduous journey to get here. She dropped numbly beside him on the sofa.

“Do not trouble to heat the water,” Jacques called after the nursemaid. “Just soap to clean the wound. A little alcohol.”

“A wound!” said Lillian, feeling giddy, pushing her hands flat on the sofa cushion for balance. “And Mr Peale—was he wounded as well?”

“Unhurt, I told you—to my knowledge.” He was sounding peevish. “I was shot in the leg. Had I not ducked behind a tree, Mon Dieu! I do not know what might have happened.” He closed his eyes as if to frighten away whatever image harboured there.

“Yes, yes, and how? Tell me!”

“I am trying, ma chère. Give me time. I came straight to see you after I found my way to an inn. The innkeeper would have taken me to a doctor. But I said, ‘Non, non, I must see Madame Guilfoy.’” He reached for her hand and she inched it away. She was not in the mood for his poor hopes. “It is still bleeding,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, chagrined she had not realized the extent of his injury. He was a friend, after all. He was helping Roger. But where was Roger! The nursemaid brought a basin of soapy water and a jar of alcohol. “Put it down,” Lillian said, “I’ll tend to him.”

“A mere flesh wound,” Jacques said. “I was fortunate. But you can clean out the dirt—and the blood, s’il te plaît.” He looked as if he might faint and Lillian offered her salts. He waved them away. “I will tell you what happened. You should know.”

“Tell me, yes.” She dismissed the nursemaid, bathed Jacques’s leg and arm, and cleaned the dried blood off his face and neck while he told his story. How he had bribed the turnkey at the prison, having to use a friend’s money as well as hers; how he had hired a coachman to take them to the country house where he had a relative who would harbour Roger. “For he is still in danger, you must understand, a fugitive.” He turned to gaze into her eyes, to plead with her. “It had to be done. In that prison, he would not last long. Not, eh bien, a—painterly soul like his. He begged me to help free him. Though it put both our lives in peril—you must understand that.” He peered closely into her face. She could see the yellow flecks in his brown eyes.

“I understand, I do, yes. That monstrous prison! So you went off in the coach. You went to this émigré friend of yours.” She was rubbing him too hard; he put out a hand to make her pause. Oh dear. She was no nurse.

“Went toward the cousin’s estate, oui. But hélas, we never got there. We were attacked. A highwayman. Two of them. Masked!”

“Ah!” It was her turn now to use the smelling salts. Highwaymen! She pictured foul-smelling fellows in black, a glittering sword. Or was it a pistol? A pistol, yes, Jacques was shot. “But Mr Peale? He was not shot? He was not hurt, you said?”

He flung up his arms. “I was lying on the ground, unconscious. When I awoke the coach was gone. Your fiancé was nowhere to be seen.”

“But it was dark. How would you know?”

“I went back again today, in the light. No one! I knocked at doors—a gamekeeper, an elderly couple living on the edge of the woods. They had seen no one. I can only assume he is somewhere in hiding. You must have hope.” He looked up at her pleadingly. “I tried. I did my best. They know already he has escaped. They will have sent after him. It is better, my dear, he does not come here. I did my best,” he repeated. He looked wan. She must not forget all he had done for herself and Roger.

“Of course you did.” She patted his hand while she gazed at the window where she saw her son playing with a stick, an imaginary sword, stabbing and stabbing at an invisible foe—so young to be so martial. “And don’t think I’m not grateful. You will do your very best then? You will find where he is? You will help him?”

“Bien sûr—have I not promised?” He seized her hand and kissed it. She let him hold it a moment, but not too long. He had not yet fulfilled his promise. To find her Roger. To prove his innocence to the world.

Where was he then? Where! Ah. She must send a note to Mary Wollstonecraft. The authoress, too, had promised to help, had she not? To find him innocent of all those accusations. Stealing a painting? Killing a footman? Preposterous!

Henry was leaving his house as Mary Wollstonecraft turned the corner of Queen Anne Street. He did not want his wife to see her—already she complained of his attentions to Mary. Sophia was a good homemaker, she was good in bed, solicitous—Henry did not require talk. A woman should be a comfort to a man, not a companion. He had all the companionship he needed in men. He had his art.

But Mary was running, holding up the hem of her skirt, near collapsing at the foot of his steps, crying out his name. “Henry Fuseli! Sir, we must talk.”

Nein, he did not need this. The authoress had a good understanding, a first-rate mind—for a woman, ja. He had made the mistake of telling her once that he and she were noble minds, that they did not have to play by the rules like ordinary folk. He had said that mainly to get her into bed. He had almost achieved that goal when she started talking. And talking. But the talk veered off on the subject of platonic love: what it was, was it a truer love than physical love and so on and so on—arrgh—all the time gazing soulfully into his eyes. What did he think they had in common? she asked. What did he see in her, what did she see in him? Why did she love him when she did not even like him? That was a surprise! All the while, in her bedchamber, he was trying to remove her petticoats, the innumerable garments that she kept reattaching as he pulled.

Mein Gott!

She was a virgin, she said. At the last he had buttoned up, and left the house. He was tired of playing with no prize at the end. A virgin! At thirty-two? His Sophia was only twenty-seven. Lost hers at sixteen—and willingly.

Yet for all that, it was flattering to be loved. And Mary did look appealing today in her scarlet stockings—a welcome change from the boring black.

“And what is it brings you to my doorstep?” he said, determined to be amused, not to let her get under his skin. “The gallery is not open to visitors today. Not since the theft of my work. Here,” he swung her off the steps, onto the cobblestones. He heard her quick, excited breath. “We shall take a walk, shall we? Look at the river? There is a fleet of boats fresh in from Holland. Shall we flag one down? Take a ride? And ach, look up! Sun is coming out.”

“Mr Fuseli,” she said, “We must talk. You heard about the nightmare.” She turned her liquid eyes on him. That slight squint—one might call it louche, in one eye—most appealing; it gave her a look of volupté. Eyes the colour of burnt almonds. No, they looked green today. The woman was a chameleon. He should not trust her.

“My painting?” he said. “Have I heard about my painting, you ask?”

“Not your actual painting, Mr Fuseli. The fleshly rendition of it. The murder. Isobel Frothingham, strangled, and then rearranged to look like your painting. It was like walking into a madhouse. Truly horrible.”

“Ah.” He had heard about it. The whole world had heard about it by now. They were shouting it in the streets, house to house. Everyone locking doors and bricking up windows. “It was ingenious, yes? Clever. You have to admire the one who did it. A creative mind, surely.”

She seemed shocked at his blithe reaction. “A morbid mind. A horrid, sick, murderous mind. A woman in her prime?”

“If you can call forty-five a woman’s prime.”

“Mr Fuseli.” She was angry now. It became her, that anger: it coloured her cheeks and moistened her lips. Her eyes burned apple-green. He would like to paint them. “I suppose at fifty-one, you have not yet reached your prime.”

A cutting remark. Close to the quick, the sardonic creature. “I think not,” he said—though secretly he worried about getting old, losing his touch. The right hand was shaking more than ever, damaging his work. He had to spend longer now, at a painting. He had never been completely at one with his left hand.

But he would not give in. Never! He would not grow old. Space, height, depth, breadth, health—and youth, ja, all that, he needed in order to paint.

She was taking deep breaths; her chest was heaving with what she had to say. She was gulping in the smoky London air. They would walk down to St James’s Park, then onto Westminster Bridge; he would let her cool herself in the breeze off the river. His mood was turning gay. Clever indeed, that murder. Well, a waste, perhaps, an intelligent, attractive woman like that—he’d had a night or two with Isobel before he married—neither took it seriously. But a creative act. A compliment to his stolen masterpiece. One must view the strangling in that vein.

Though the thought of the stolen painting turned his mood sour again. He had painted variants of The Nightmare, for the greedy printmakers of course—one had to make a little money. But this was the original! And it was stolen! They might as well have purloined his soul. At least, he thought, I had signed it. So if it survives, some art lover, in some unknown future, will know it is mine and hang it in a museum.

She was walking close to him; he could feel the weight and slant of her body next to his. A nicely shaped body, a handsome face. His friend Roscoe had commissioned her portrait. Henry had offered to paint her himself but she declined—did not want to appear like a ringletted Medusa, she said, and he had to laugh. A fragrance now from her neck: rosewater. A hair taller than he, perhaps—but one had to measure his height in relation to the force of his personality.

She said, “It is likely, do you not think, that Mrs Frothingham’s murderer was also the thief of your painting?”

“Possibly,” he said, indulging her, smoothing his Delft-blue cravat. She had a point. The Bow Street magistrate would deduce that. The murderer had to be familiar with the painting. Though hundreds had seen it, to be sure. It had hung since ’82 in the Royal Gallery—and then gone to St Petersburg. George III had borrowed it to hang in his own drawing room, until Queen Charlotte made him take it down. Scandalous, she said. Mein Gott! The queen was such a prude.

“Then it would not have been Roger Peale who took it—he could not have murdered Mrs Frothingham.” Her arm was hooked under his. She pinched his elbow.

“Oww. Stop that, woman! Of course he took it. And killed my footman and then the bluestocking, and trussed her up to defy me. Everything points to him. But enough. I do not wish to discuss that question further.”

“But that’s the point. It remains a question. Because Mr Peale is in prison. He is in Newgate.”

“Yes,” he said, “I saw to it he was put there. It will make him confess.To everything. Theft, murder—all the greed and envy that made him criticize my work.”

“But if Mr Peale is in prison, he could not possibly have killed Mrs Frothingham. You know that—you were at her rout. She died only Saturday night.”

“Oh? Well, how was I to know when? I did not kill her.” Too much was going on in his head these days. To hide his confusion he unfurled his newspaper. The wench had caught him in her trap. But there was the front page headline: BLUESTOCKING FOUND DEAD IN HER BEDCHAMBER, and underneath, an artist’s depiction of Isobel Frothingham as the woman in The Nightmare. It was ludicrous. He was fascinated. Mary snatched it away.

“But it was not like that,” she cried, grabbing his sleeve, pointing at the painting. “The illustrator never saw her! It was not a real horse, it was a hobby horse. And a monkey to represent your demon—not a doll dressed as a devil the way they picture it.”

“All the same,” he said, shaking his head, reading on. “Ach!” It was not the artwork that shocked him. It was what was on the bottom of the page, in small print. PRISONER ESCAPES NEWGATE. He stopped walking to read aloud: Art thief Roger Peale escaped after brutally assaulting a prison guard. The prisoner is now at large.

He heard Mary gasp. He ripped the paper in his anger. Then tried to pull it together again. When he failed at that, he tore it into tiny pieces and flung them into an alley and watched the wind take them. Escaped, indeed!

They walked on for a time in silence. Finally he turned to Mary. “How could he escape?” he said. “How, I ask? From Newgate Prison? Who was helping the man? Did he have a weapon? Someone passed it to him, eh? Was it that Guilfoy woman? Ach, I would not put it past her.”

“She is in love with him. She is his intended. You should know what she’s like. She was your intended for a time, was she not?”

“Never mine! She was sleeping with my assistant—he confessed it. That is how she got pregnant.” When she looked sceptical, he pinched her arm. She cried out; it served her right. Her words were knives. Which made him think: “Peale had a knife, you think? To take on that guard? Then crept in through the woman’s window and stabbed her?”

“She was strangled,” Mary said, “not stabbed.”

“Never mind. She was killed. That is the point! She was killed. The killer did not want blood. He wanted it to look like my painting. There is no blood in my painting. Ha!” He pointed a finger at Mary; he was feeling better now. “So Peale was free that night, eh? The man who stole the painting was the killer as well. He had already killed my footman Benjamin—why not one more? You were right. Aha!”

They were at Westminster Bridge. The stone towers of Westminster Abbey rose gloriously beyond it—they would bury him in that abbey, a famous artist, ja. He laughed hugely, and held Mary in a hard embrace. Now she was confused and he loved it. “You were right, clever girl, meine Leibe, you were right.”

She did not return his embrace. She just stood there, her hat askew in the breeze off the bridge. He could see the frustration in her eyes, in the pout of the full lips. She had come to press a point, to ask for help for the young artist, and he had turned her theory on end. It was hilarious! “Come, come, my dear,” he said. “We will cross the river. I know a little tea garden there. We will have tea and cakes—the almond ones you like? We will talk. Ja, by God, we will talk. Come along now. Come.”

He tipped up her chin. She was in love with him: platonically she said, but he knew it was more than that. Much more. The virgin did not yet know her other self. If she could be awakened, ah, and he could do it for her if she would let him—together they would release a new woman to the world. Platonic, ha! There was no such thing as platonic. It was physical—or it was nothing. Look to the beasts! And what were human beings but animals at bottom? At bottom—he liked the pun. He had spent his life painting animals. Painting passions.

She was frowning. Her elbow slipped from under his. She was turning away, running back off the bridge, dodging the hawkers, skipping between the carriages and the snorting horses. “In a month or two,” he called after her, “I will arrange with our friend, Joseph Johnson, an outing to Paris. He has been speaking of it. Paris, I said. Why not?”

That got her attention. She turned and blinked. He caught up with her. “You have been wanting to go to Paris, have you not? So we will go. You and I and Joseph, and Sophia.”

“Oh,” she said, dismissing Sophia.

“Well, she is my wife. And we need the bookseller to keep peace with her.”

“Your wife, sir, will be afraid. The blood will flow in the streets and she’ll feel faint and want to come back home. You would have to bring her back.”

He laughed and took her arm again, squeezed it, planted a kiss on her right cheek; then fondled her right breast, and she let him. “There is no blood in the Parisian streets. Well, hardly any. Yet. Though it will come, I can feel it in my bones. I can smell it in my paintings. You have talked with Talleyrand, eh? He is a scoundrel in anyone’s book. Untouchable, one would think. But he promises it will be safe to go in May or June. He will help with the arrangements.”

“Will he come, too?” She was pouting; she obviously did not want a large party.

“No, no, he is still scrounging about for funding for his parliament. Hoping the king will come round, even though His Highness ignores him. He will stay here another month and keep trying. But come. That dish of tea. The cakes. They serve wine as well, eh? We will talk. You are always wanting to talk and I am always putting you off. Shame on me! Well, this time we will talk and talk! About our trip to Paris, eh? We will find time to sneak off together in one of the gardens and make love, shall we?”

She stood a moment, struggling to regain her dignity, her reputation as she called it. Her Rights of Woman. A muscle twitched in her cheek and she stilled it with a finger.

Then she smiled. She was a daring one at heart. That was why he liked her company. He caught her arm in his, and felt the return squeeze. He would not have to take her to Paris. She could lose her head right here in London. Lose more than her head, ja.

“No more talk now about that thieving artist,” he said, and touched her pretty nose with a playful finger. “We’re off to the tea garden!”

Roger Peale woke to rain pelting his barred window. He was wearing a nightshirt so coarse it made his skin raw. When he tried to rise, one leg was too heavy to move. He saw that it was chained to a spike in the centre of the room so that if he were able to get up, he could walk only in a radius of four feet, between bed and window. What was this place?

He shouted as loud as he was able. He shouted and shouted—and no one came.

He was not back in Newgate. Not in that solitary cell the turnkey had threatened. This was no dungeon, for rain shone in the window and beyond was a dark green forest—trees and underbrush as far as the eye could see. He was not in London.

He remembered leaving the prison with St Pierre. The latter had bribed the turnkey—Roger would have to repay him—or was it Lillian who paid? He pushed his mind as far as it would go, but for the moment it yielded no more clues. He strained against the misery of his chained leg, his aching head, the vertigo when he tried to stand. They went off in a carriage, yes; he had fallen asleep from the exhaustion of the time spent in Newgate. Something happened then: shouted threats, a highwayman, yes. Possibly two. He had never before encountered a highwayman, only read of them in newpapers—desperate men, demanding your watch, your jewels, your cash. Riding off with the booty, seldom hurting one, no, for if caught, it would be the hangman for them.

Then why, why was he in this place?

There had been a gunshot, he remembered that, and St Pierre crying out. And when he tried to stumble out of the carriage in his leg irons: the door locked on the outside—and the horses starting up. I am being abducted, he had thought at the time—had he? But why? Who? Why had he thought abducted?

Memories were crowding back. They brought him here. A woman and man, stripping him of his clothing, of one manacle (he was grateful for that), throwing the coarse shirt on him, making him drink a bowl of ill-tasting gruel. Himself so starved he drank it down. And afterward, the bed, the deep, drunken sleep, nothing and nothing. Blessed nothing. Until he woke. And from the way the light struck the trees, he gauged it was noon.

He cried out, but again no one answered. Was he here alone? But then he heard a groaning in an adjoining chamber. “Hello, hello,” he called, and the groan came louder. A voice shushed the groaner, and then feet padded to his door. He heard the scratch of a key in the lock; an old woman stood there with a tray: a bowl of porridge and a hunk of bread, a mug of something sickly yellow. Some drug potion perhaps.

He waved it away. “I don’t want your poison. I’ve had sufficient sleep.” He needed to be wide awake and stay that way. He needed to find a way to escape this place. For some reason he was prisoner here. When he had done no wrong; he had stolen no painting—why would he have coveted that piece of eroticism? But he had escaped prison. He was a felon; he was criminal in the eyes of the law. He dropped his head back on the pile of straw that served as pillow and turned to the barred window.

“No poison here, son,” she said. “This be a licensed house. We don’t serve poison. You better take the food. You look like you need it.”

“What is this place then? Tell me that. Who brought me here?”

The woman shrugged her shoulders. She seemed a decent sort. A round, withered apple of a woman, with pitted cheeks and a tangle of white hair under a plain linen cap. A shapeless brown dress topped by a voluminous apron, with patches of dirt where she had wiped her hands a thousand times.

“I work here mornings. I don’t know who brought you here. Your wife? Wanting to get rid of you? So she can have her honey to herself?” The woman cackled.

He balked at that. “I have no wife. But I have a fiancée who is crazed with worry this moment and I’ve no way to tell her I’m alive. Unless you—” He held out his hands. “Just paper, a pen, or a brush, a small brush will do. I’ll send her an image. She’ll know it’s mine.”

The woman laughed and plunked down the tray on a small wooden table by the bed. “I can’t do that, son. This be a madhouse you see. A private madhouse. We had six here but one died and one got away. You make number five again.”

“Escaped?” He sat up and clasped his hands together; felt a surge of hope.

“Oh no, son, nobody leaves here on his own. This one was took away by her husband. Seems he got religion, you know, so sorry he put her in, and now he come to take her out. Though she looked a fright, she did. Scared of him, aye. He had to put her in the waggon, still manacled so she wouldn’t hit him. That’s why they chain you—for your own good, is how they put it. So you won’t hurt yourself.”

The woman went out. He lay back again and stared at the scarred ceiling. It was full of holes as though someone had thrown darts. His leg ached from the iron. His head was an anvil, being hammered on; his mind, blank. He couldn’t conjure up an image of Lillian or the garret where he painted, where he had been happy pulling images up out of his mind and his past.

Where was that world now? What had happened to it? What had he done to lose it? Why had his God forsaken him? For though he was a Dissenter, he still believed in a First Cause, a Presence. Some spirit that “rolled through all things,” as that young poet Wordsworth described it one Tuesday at the bookseller’s. The poet had been to see the ruin of some abbey, and the line just came to him, he said. He would use it one day in a poem. For Roger, a ruined abbey was an image for a painting.

He squeezed his eyes shut and prayed: “Blessed Spirit, hear me now....”

But when he opened his eyes again there was only this humble room, the sour smell of gruel, and the rain, slapping hard against the barred window. The chain on his leg, chafing, digging into his poor flesh.

The absence of hope.