I managed to evade the hypnotic stare of Wicked William and concentrated first on the sunny opulence of the wedding portrait. Robert and Mary Even the names were reassuringly solid. Following the painter’s clues, I knew that this couple had married in the autumn; their betrothal, according to Stillingfleet, had been in the summer of 1662, and presumably Robert had been pursuing this heiress during the previous London season. At the very time Jayne Marston had been sent away to the country. Had he known the sorry story of his sister Comfort’s maid? It was a family with a reputation for large-heartedness in its dealings with its retainers. Yes, he would have known. He would have been concerned. But concerned, perhaps, for another reason.
Mary’s fortune had saved the family and guaranteed his position in society. Robert would not have welcomed any breath of scandal to do with the family his golden goose was about to marry into. ‘Of Quaker stock,’ Nicholas had said. I looked again at the heart-shaped face, framed by wispy golden tendrils, the modest dress, the tightly pursed lips, and I wondered about Mary.
‘Was it to avoid offending you?’ I murmured, ‘That Jayne and her child were done away with? Too inconvenient, too vocal. A servant, yes, but so intertwined with the family she had forgotten her place and was making herself a nuisance? Would it have ruined Robert’s schemes if you’d discovered that his brother had seduced a family maid?’
I couldn’t believe that.
‘And why did you flee?’ I asked, turning at last to William, ‘Why didn’t you just tough it out?’ An earldom, the king’s supporters back in power again – the future looked good for William Easton. What was he fleeing? Not a family scandal – there must have been something more.
The dark eyes taunted, enticed, seduced. I speculated again about the identity of the unknown painter and was struck by a devastating thought. A thought so obvious and yet so shocking I groped my way to a Chippendale chair and, against all the house rules, sat down on it. The painter’s message now screamed out at me. How could I not have seen it before?
I heard Nicholas leaving the library and called out to him.
‘Ellie? You OK?’ He hurried to join me.
‘We’ve got it all wrong, Nicholas!’ I said. ‘Come and have a look again at Wicked William. He’s been wrongly accused! It couldn’t have been him!’
I positioned Nicholas in front of the portrait. ‘Now, imagine you’re the painter. And that, of course, in the sixteen sixties, means you’re a man. The sitter is reacting to you. What do you see?’
‘Oh my God!’ said Nicholas. ‘I see it! And to think that all these years women have been averting their eyes thinking he was trying to seduce them. He wasn’t at all, was he?’
‘No. I’m not sure they had a word for it in Cavalier England, but this chap was gay and proud of it, as you’d say.’
‘I’m certain they didn’t have a word for it in north Norfolk! And it was a capital offence at the time. “Death without mercy”, according to the Articles passed by Parliament in sixteen sixty-one. He could, technically, have been executed if discovered.’
‘What if he were discovered?’ I speculated. ‘Caught in flagrante with a handsome young painter, let’s say?’
‘He’d have had to flee to somewhere more worldly – to France…to Italy… Poor old Stillingfleet, holding all this together! But this is just guesswork, Ellie.’
‘Oh yes. But look at his hand, Nick! Do you see the flower he’s holding?’
Nicholas peered at the tiny purple face.
‘Always assumed it was a violet, but it’s not, you know! It’s heartsease. Common little English flower. It’s got a lot of names – love-lies-bleeding, love-in-idleness, la pensée in French, wild pansy.’
‘Exactly! Pansy! A badge. The seventeenth-century equivalent of a pink ribbon. That’s what you’d call flaunting it! So how likely is it that he’d be spending time in London undoing a lady’s maid? Possible, I suppose – but I can’t see it! No. I think we’ve got to look elsewhere for the father of that little scrap in the coffin.’
Our eyes turned on Robert’s handsome countenance. I waved a hand at his line of progeny. ‘It’s pretty obvious in which direction his preferences lay!’ I said with more than a touch of bitterness. ‘And he had such a lot to lose if his puritan bride-to-be were to catch him with his hand up a maid’s skirt! Mary doesn’t look the understanding kind to me!’
I looked at the pair in disgust. Their faces had taken on a cast of smug respectability. Their innocent children, healthy and happy, had thrived perhaps at the expense of that other unwanted child.
Suddenly I found myself playing the role of judge in this case that would never come to court and I knew what was required of me. I knew the formula that would ensure undisturbed nights for Diana and Nicholas.
I spoke aloud to the portrait and to anyone else who was listening on the stairs. ‘Robert Easton, I find you guilty of infanticide,’ I said simply. ‘May God have mercy on your soul.’
‘Deus tute eum spectas,’ said Diana, who had come silently to join us. ‘God has seen him. God knows what he has done.’
A week later Charles waved a postcard at me.
‘Not much in the post. It’s for you from some boyfriend of yours in Norfolk. A picture of a bloke in a periwig and it says, “Thank God! At last a quiet night! Eternally grateful, love, Nicholas.” What did you get up to in Norfolk, Ellie?’
The Inkpot Monkey by John Connolly
Edgerton was suffering from writer’s block; it was, he quickly grew to realize, a most distressing complaint. A touch of influenza might lay a man up for a day or two, yet still his mind could continue its ruminations. Gout might leave him racked with pain, yet still his fingers could grasp a pen and turn pain to pennies. But this blockage, this barrier to all progress, had left Mr Edgerton a virtual cripple. His mind would not function, his hands would not write, and his bills would not be paid. In a career spanning the best part of two decades he had never before encountered such an obstacle to his vocation. He had, in that time, produced five moderately successful, if rather indifferent, novels; a book of memoirs that, in truth, owed more to invention than experience; and a collection of poetry that could most charitably be described as having stretched the capacities of free verse to the limits of their acceptability.
Mr Edgerton made his modest living from writing by the yard, based on the unstated belief that if he produced a sufficient quantity of material then something of quality was bound to creep in, if only in accordance with the law of averages. Journalism, ghostwriting, versifying, editorializing; nothing was beneath his limited capabilities.
Yet, for the past three months the closest he had come to a writing project was the construction of his weekly grocery list. A veritable tundra of empty white pages stretched before him, the gleaming nib of his pen poised above them like a reluctant explorer. His mind was a blank, the creative juices sapped from it, leaving behind only a dried husk of frustration and bewilderment. He began to fear his writing desk, once his beloved companion but now reduced to the status of a faithless lover, and it pained him to look upon it. Paper, ink, desk, imagination, all had betrayed him, leaving him lost and alone.
To further complicate matters, Mr Edgerton’s wallet had begun to feel decidedly lightweight of late, and nothing will dampen a man’s ardour for life more than an empty pocket. Like a rodent gripped in the coils of a great constricting snake, he found that the more he struggled against his situation, the tighter the pressure upon him grew. Necessity, wrote Ovid, is the mother of invention. For Mr Edgerton, desperation was proving to be the father of despair.