Sleep, Pale Sister Page 5

  The man had no fire: his paintings were wan, limp and horribly whimsical, with the sentimentality of his commonplace soul as evident as his lack of passion. Oh, he could paint, I suppose, and the model I acknowledged to be interesting enough, but sadly lacking in colour. She was obviously his favourite, because her face stared out at me from almost all the frames. She was an odd little thing, far removed from modern standards of beauty, but with a certain mediaeval look in her childish figure and loose, pale hair. A favourite niece, perhaps? I scanned the titles inscribed on the frames: Juliet in the Tomb, Nausicaa, The Little Beggar Girl, The Cold Wedding…No wonder the girl looked so mournful: every canvas showed her in some macabre, gloomy role…dying, dead, sick, blind, abandoned…thin and piteous as a dead child, swathed in her winding-sheet as Juliet, in rags as the beggar girl, lost and frightened-looking in rich silks and velvet as Persephone.

  I was roused from my critical reverie by the door opening, and was astonished to see the girl herself come into the room. I recognized her features, but Henry hadn’t done her justice by a long way. She was a delightful wraith of a thing, like a silver birch, with the sweetest slim waist, long delicate hands with pointed fingernails and a mouth that only needed a kiss to make it burst into bloom. She was demurely dressed in grey flannel and looked barely out of her teens. I supposed that she was the niece, or even some professional model he had picked up. The thought of Mrs Chester was far from my mind at that moment and it was in all innocence that I greeted the Stunner:

  ‘My name’s Mose Harper. How do you do?’

  She blushed and murmured something, looking around with those big, hunted eyes as if afraid to be seen with me. Maybe Henry had warned her about me. I smiled.

  ‘Henry should never have tried to paint you,’ I said. ‘I find it’s always a mistake to try to improve on Nature. May I ask your name?’

  Another sideways glance at Henry, still absorbed in conversation.

  ‘Effie Chester. I’m…’ The nervous glance again.

  ‘A relation of friend Henry? How interesting. Not the sober side of the family, I hope?’

  Again the glance. The Stunner resolutely put down her head and mumbled, not at all coyly. I realized that I had really embarrassed her and, detecting a soupçon of the bluestocking, changed my tack.

  ‘I’m a great admirer of Henry’s work,’ I lied valiantly. ‘You might say I was a colleague…a disciple of his.’

  The violet eyes flickered for an instant, with amusement or scorn. ‘Is that true?’

  Confound the minx, she was laughing at me! The light in those eyes was definitely laughter, and suddenly her face was illuminated, irrepressibly. I grinned.

  ‘No, it isn’t true. Are you disappointed?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘It’s his style I dislike. I have no fault to find with the raw material. Poor Henry is a painter, not an artist. Give him a nice, ripe apple and he’ll put it against a silk screen and try to paint it. A pointless waste. Neither the apple nor the public appreciates the gesture.’

  She was puzzled, but intrigued; and she had stopped looking at Henry every time she spoke.

  ‘Well? What would you do?’ she ventured.

  ‘Me? I think that to paint from life you have to know life. Apples are for eating, not for painting.’ I winked slyly and grinned at her. ‘And lovely young girls are like apples.’

  ‘Oh!’ She clapped her hands to her mouth and her eyes left mine and flew to Chester who had just discovered Holman Hunt among his guests and was engaged in earnest, pedantic conversation. She turned away, almost panic-stricken. No, she was not a flirt: far from it. I took her arm, gently turning her back towards me.

  ‘I’m sorry. I was only funning. I shan’t tease you again.’ She looked into my face to see if I was telling the truth. ‘I’d say “on my honour”, but I don’t have any,’ I said. ‘Henry should have warned you against me. Did he?’

  She shook her head dumbly, entirely withdrawn.

  ‘No, I don’t suppose he did. Tell me, how do you like modelling? Does Henry share you with any of his friends, I wonder? No? Wise Henry. Oh, what’s the matter now?’ She had turned away again, and I read a deep, sincere distress in her face.

  Her hands clenched the soft fabric of her gown, and her voice was low and violent. ‘Please, Mr Harper…’

  ‘What is it?’ I was caught between irritation and concern.

  ‘Please don’t talk about modelling! Don’t talk about the wretched paintings. Everyone asks about the paintings. I hate them!’

  This was getting interesting. I lowered my voice, conspiratorially. ‘Actually, so do I.’

  She gave an involuntary chuckle, and the stricken look went out of her eyes. ‘I hate having to play the same part every day,’ she went on, almost dreamily. ‘Always to be good, and quiet, to do my embroidery and sit in attractive poses, when inside I want to…’ She broke off again, perhaps realizing that she was about to pass the bounds of propriety.

  ‘But he must pay you quite well,’ I suggested.

  ‘Money!’ Her scorn was evident, and I dismissed any notion of her being a professional.

  ‘I wish I had your healthy disregard for it,’ I said lightly. ‘Or, at least, that my creditors did.’

  She chuckled again.

  ‘Yes, but you’re a man,’ she said, sobering abruptly. ‘You can do what you like. You don’t…’ Her voice trailed off miserably.

  ‘And what would you like?’ I asked.

  For a second she looked at me, and I almost saw something in her expression…like the promise of a bleak passion. Then, nothing. The wan look returned to her face.

  ‘Nothing.’

  I was about to speak, when I became aware of a presence at my elbow. Turning, I found that Henry, with impeccable timing, had finally left Hunt to mingle with his other guests. The girl at my side stiffened, her face rigid, and I wondered what hold Henry had over her to make her so much in awe of him. And it wasn’t just awe: there was something like horror in her eyes.

  ‘Good day, Mr Harper,’ said Henry with his punctilious courtesy. ‘I see that you have been looking at my canvasses.’

  ‘Certainly,’ I replied. ‘And fine though they are I could not help but notice that they fail to entirely capture the charm of the model.’

  It was the wrong thing to say. Henry’s mellow gaze narrowed to an icy pinprick. It was in colder accents that he introduced me to her at last.

  ‘Mr Harper, this is my wife, Mrs Chester.’

  I possess, you may have noticed, some degree of charisma: I exerted all of it to negate my earlier faux pas and create a good impression. After a few minutes of shameless flattery Henry thawed again; I caught the birch-girl looking at me a few times, and there and then I swore I’d give her my heart. For a while, anyway.

  The first thing I needed was access to the beauty. It takes patience and strategy, believe me, to seduce a married woman, as well as a solid footing in the enemy camp, and for a while I was at a loss as to how I could insinuate my lecherous self into her life and her affections. Patience, Mose, I thought. There was a world of small-talk to be done before that!

  During the course of the conversation I made every effort to seduce, not the wife, but the husband. I spoke of my admiration of Holman Hunt, whom I knew Henry admired; deplored the newly decadent tendencies of Rossetti; spoke of my experiences abroad, expressed an interest in Henry’s newest canvas (a vile idea to cap all of his previous vile ideas), then finally voiced the desire to be painted by him.

  ‘A portrait?’ Henry was all attention.

  ‘Yes…’ hesitantly and with the right degree of modest reserve,

  ‘or a period piece, Biblical, mediaeval…I haven’t really thought much about it, yet. However, I have been an admirer of your style for some time, you know, and after this very fine exhibition…I was mentioning it to Swinburne the other day—he was the one who suggested the portrait idea, in fact.’

  Easy to say: I knew that a Puri
tan like Henry would hardly be likely to exchange words with a man like Swinburne to verify the fact, and he knew as well as I did the relationship between Swinburne and the Rossettis. Conceit puffed him up like a teacake. He scanned my face carefully.

  ‘Fine features, if I may say so,’ he said ponderously. ‘I should not be ashamed to transfer them to canvas. Full-front, would you say? Or three-quarter profile?’

  I began to grin, and quickly transformed the vulgar leer into a smile.

  ‘I’m in your hands,’ I said.

  7

  As the door opened and I saw him for the first time, I was certain that he had seen me. Not this body, but the essential me, in my most naked, helpless form. The thought was terrifying and, at the same time, powerfully exciting. For an instant I wanted to strut and dance before this stranger in a display of shamelessness which transcended the pale envelope of flesh I could discard at will, as my husband stood by unseeing.

  I cannot explain the strange wantonness which possessed me. Perhaps it was the heightened perception lent to me by my recent illness, perhaps the laudanum I had taken earlier for my headache, but the first time I saw Moses Harper, I knew that this was a truly physical being, governed by his own desires and pleasures. Watching him and speaking to him under the heedless eye of my husband I understood that he was everything I was not; he radiated energy, arrogance, independence and self-satisfaction like the sun. Best of all, there was no shame in him, no shame at all, and his lack of shame drew me irresistibly. As he touched my arm, his voice low and caressing, charged with the promise of sensuality, I felt my cheeks flush, but not with shame.

  I watched him covertly throughout his conversation with Henry. I cannot recall a word he spoke, but the tone of his voice made me shiver with pleasure. He was maybe ten years younger than Henry, with an angular figure, sharp features and a satirical expression. He wore his hair long and tied in the nape of the neck in an eccentric, old-fashioned style. His dress, too, was deliberately informal, even for a morning visit, and he was hatless. I liked his eyes, which were blue and rather narrow, as if he were laughing all the time, and his easy, mocking smile. I am certain he noticed me watching him, but he only smiled and continued his conversation.

  I was astonished that he should have commissioned a painting from my husband; from the little I had previously heard of him, Mose Harper was an impudent good-for-nothing, fit only for painting filth, with no sense and less taste. Now, Henry was telling me, in an indulgent voice, that Mose was ‘a young rogue’ whose travels around the world had ‘much improved him,’ and he would no doubt one day make a ‘fine painter,’ as he showed ‘excellent draughtsmanship and a certain originality of style.’

  For some time Henry propounded his ideas on the portrait, suggesting, then rejecting, various subjects such as Young Solomon and The Jacobite. Mose had written a list of his own ideas, including Prometheus, Adam in the Garden (rejected by Henry because of what he called ‘the degree of modesty which must be accorded to such a subject’) and The Card Players.

  This last title intrigued Henry, and he met Mose later at his studio to discuss it. Mose told him that the idea had come to him while reading a poem by the French poet Baudelaire (I have never read any of his work, but I am told he is very shocking, and it does not strike me at all odd that he should be a favourite of Mose’s), in which:

  Le beau valet de coeur et la dame de pique

  Causent sinistrement de leurs amours défunts.

  Mose thought the phrase most evocative, and visualized a canvas ‘set in a greasy Parisian café, with sawdust on the floor and bottles of absinthe on the table. Sitting at the table is a young man holding the Knave of Hearts; next to him a beautiful lady has played the Queen of Spades.’

  Henry was not immediately enthusiastic about this subject, which he found rather sordid. He himself had a notion to paint Mose in mediaeval dress, perhaps as The Minstrel’s Lament, ‘sitting beneath a rustic sundial and holding a viol, whilst behind him the sun sets and a procession of veiled ladies, carrying various musical instruments, passes by on horseback.’

  Mose was politely unenthusiastic on the subject. He did not see himself as a mediaeval minstrel. Besides, there was the background to be thought of. To paint the mediaeval landscape with the ladies on horseback might take months. Surely it would be simpler to choose the dark interior and concentrate upon the portrait itself?

  There was some sense in that argument, and Henry’s reluctance lessened. There would be no harm in the subject, he decided, as long as it was tastefully executed. He did draw the line at having the French poem engraved on the picture-frame, but Mose assured him that that would not be necessary. Henry began to make plans for the new canvas, abandoning A Damsel with a Dulcimer for the time being, to my immense relief.

  What price Mose had promised Henry for the picture I do not know, but my husband was filled with hopes for it; Mose, with his connections, would no doubt have it hung at the Royal Academy and this might well be the making of Henry’s career. I paid little attention. Henry and I were not dependent upon Henry’s paintings for income. Any money he made was for him a matter of personal satisfaction, a proof of his talent. For myself, the only interest I had in his new painting was that the long and frequent sittings meant that I would have the opportunity to see Mose nearly every day.

  8

  I never liked Moses Harper. A thoroughly dangerous and calculating individual, rumour had it that he had been involved in countless shady enterprises from forgery to blackmail, although none of the rumours—which inexplicably led to even greater success with the ladies—were ever proved.

  For myself, I found him a very inferior type, with no morals and fewer manners, except when he chose to exert himself to please. He was an artist of sorts, though the work I had seen, both painting and poetry alike, seemed calculated only to shock. His work was neither harmonious nor true to life; he delighted in the grotesque, the absurd and the vulgar.

  Despite my dislike for low company, I realized that the connections he had acquired might be of use to me: besides, my idea for his portrait was an excellent one, and might even attract the attention of the Academy. I had already submitted my Little Beggar Girl along with the Sleeping Beauty: the critical response was encouraging, although The Times condemned my choice of model as being ‘insipid’ and suggested that I expand my choice of subject-matter. For this reason I abandoned my current project and began on the sketches immediately although I disliked having to deal so closely with Harper—his reputation was such that I did not want Effie to come into contact with him: not that she would have encouraged the fellow, you understand, but I hated to think of his eyes on her, demeaning her, lusting after her.

  However, I had little choice: Effie had been ill again, and I arranged a small studio on the top floor from which I could work. More often than not, Harper would sit in the garden or in the living-room while I sketched him from various angles, and Effie would work at her stitchery or read a book, seemingly quite content with our silent company. She showed no interest in Harper at all, but that afforded me little comfort. In fact, I might have been more patient with her if she had shown a little more animation.

  Effie could think of nothing but her books. I had discovered her reading a most unsuitable novel a couple of days previously, a hellish thing by a certain Ellis Bell, called Wuthering Heights, or some other such nonsense. The wretched book had already driven her into one of her megrims, and when I took it away—for her own good, the ungrateful creature—she dared to fly into a violent tantrum, crying: How dare I take her books! weeping and behaving like the spoiled child she was. Only a strong dose of laudanum was sufficient to calm her, and for several days afterwards she kept to her bed, too weak and pettish to move. I told her, when she had almost recovered, that I had long suspected that she read too much; it gave her fanciful notions. I did not like the kind of morbidity, bred of idleness, that it encouraged. I told her that there could be no objection to improving, Christian works,
but forbade any more novels, or anything but the lightest kind of poetry. She was unstable enough as it was.

  Whatever she told you, I was not unkind: I saw her instability and tried to control it, encouraging her to take up activities appropriate to a young woman. Her needlework lay untouched for weeks and I obliged her to take it up again. Not for myself—no—but for her. I knew she desired to have talent such as I had: when she was a child she used to try and paint scenes from her favourite poets, but I always dealt honestly with Effie; I did not flatter her to gain her affection but told her the sober truth: women are not, as a rule, made for artistic activities; their talents are the gentle, domestic ones.

  But she was wilful; she persisted in her daubs, saying that she painted what she saw in dreams. Dreams! I told her she should dream less and pay more attention to her duties as a wife.

  You see, I did care for her. I loved her too much to allow her to delude herself with vanities and conceits. I had kept her pure for so long, had lived with her imperfection, had forgiven her for the seed of wickedness she, like all women, carried within her. And what did she give me in return? Megrims, fancies, foolishness and deception. Do not be deceived by her innocent face as I was! Like my mother she was diseased, the bud of her unfurling adolescence blackened from the core. How could I have known? God, in His ferocious jealousy, threw her in my path to test me. Let a single woman, just one, into the Kingdom of Heaven itself, and I swear she will throw down the blessed one by one—angels, archangels and all.