Mrs Whistler

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Matthew Plampin 2018

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Matthew Plampin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover design by Dominic Forbes © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover illustrations © Whistler Butterfly, c.1890 (pencil on paper), Whistler, James Abbot McNeil (1834-1903) / Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, USA / Gift of Charles Lang Freer / Bridgeman Images (Whistler’s signature); Shutterstock.com (peacock).

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780008163648

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008163631

Version: 2018-12-28

Praise for Mrs Whistler

‘Mrs Whistler is a beguiling glimpse of a fascinating world … This novel is a delight’

The Times

‘A terrific novel … It springs off the page, bristling with life. A vivid and absorbing portrait of bohemian London and the love affair between Whistler and his long-suffering but spirited muse’

Deborah Moggach

‘Vividly engaging … a novel that conjures up the Victorian art world in rich colours’

Sunday Times

‘A delightful book’

Literary Review

‘A richly imagined historical novel, full of depth and vitality’

Sunday Times Culture

Dedication

For Sarah

Epigraph

‘Maud could tell the whole story, but she will not.’

Elizabeth and Joseph Pennell,

The Life of James McNeill Whistler (1908)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Part One: The Falling Rocket

Part Two: Arrangement in Grey and Black

Part Three: The Gold Scab

Author’s Note

About the Author

Also by Matthew Plampin

About the Publisher

Part One

October 1876

Maud woke to the sound of a piano. The room around her was dark, its heavy shutters closed. Jimmy was standing to the left, framed by a doorway. She started to speak, to ask what was happening, and he darted forward, shimmering slightly as he passed. Angling her head, she watched as he went to the end of the bed, collected together his possessions and packed them into an old leather bag. When this was done, he whipped off his smock, revealing the suit beneath; and there was that glittering again, like golden fish scales. She realised it was tiny flecks of the Dutch metal he was applying downstairs.

‘Up,’ he said.

The piano was somewhere towards the bottom of the house. It was being played much too hard, attacked almost, the music tangled and all out of time. After a short struggle with the bedclothes – which were the best cotton, far finer than theirs – Maud managed to rise onto an elbow.

‘What in heaven—?’

‘Leyland has reappeared,’ Jimmy told her, cramming the smock into his bag. ‘And he is displeased. We must absent ourselves, my girl, tout de suite.’

Maud swung her legs over the side of the bed, her toes spreading on the bare floorboards. Her shift was damp with sweat. She smelt rather ripe, an oniony sharpness mingling with the curdled whiff of nausea. Despite the warmth, a shiver prickled up the back of her neck; the shadowy room, empty save for the bed, seemed to drift like a raft on a pond.

‘It’s after three,’ said Jimmy. ‘You’ve been asleep for nearly five hours.’ He stopped to study her. ‘How are you faring?’

‘Well,’ she lied. ‘Better.’

‘Come then,’ he said, adjusting the length of lavender ribbon that served him as a necktie. ‘Haste, Maudie. Let’s be off.’

Maud dressed as quickly as she could. Stockings, petticoat and corset. One of her everyday gowns, the colour of old brick with black lacquered buttons. The fabric felt odd against her skin, stiff and coarse, and her boots were tight, as if they’d shrunk a size while she slept. She gathered in her hair, winding it into a loose, greasy bun. Jimmy waited by the open door with the bag between his feet, wiping Dutch metal from his eyeglass with a handkerchief, wincing as the piano struck a particularly jarring note. Maud eased herself from the bed and went over to him, grinning a little as she looked at that mobile, actorly face; the white forelock resting amongst the oiled black curls; the small, sardonic line etched at the corner of his mouth. His eyes were a bright, sun-bleached blue. Wide at first, they dipped until very nearly closed, like a cat’s. He smiled back at her with affectionate impatience.

‘My hat,’ she said, picking a gold flake from his moustache. ‘Think it’s downstairs.’

Jimmy slotted the eyeglass into his breast pocket, scooped his bag from the floor and took her hand. Together they started through the house. Even now, moving at speed, her head muddled by sleep and sickness, and that terrible music grinding out in the background – Beethoven was it meant to be? – the pair of them seemed to sweep across the expanse of the landing; to descend the staircase, lent majesty by that grand marble curve; to proceed into the swank hallway below. It was borrowed, of course, wholly counterfeit, but it felt good nevertheless.

They swerved right, towards the dining room. This was Jimmy’s realm, where he’d spent much of the summer. He’d been brought in to finish off the original, rather dull decorative scheme – left incomplete, Maud understood, after its designer fell ill – and had decided instead to transform it into something truly astonishing. She hadn’t been in there for a day or two, which refreshed the effect – so much so that she slowed to a halt upon the paint-spattered floorboards, her hat momentarily forgotten. It was like entering a pavilion at a great international fair. The woodwork, the many yards of intricate spindle shelving, had been coated with gleaming gold. Much of the wainscot, cornice and ceiling was now gold also, and was being overlaid with a pattern of Prussian blue peacock feathers. And there, on the inside of the shutters, were the birds themselves. The central set had been closed, as if to show them off to a caller. A pair of peacocks perched at the top of the tall panels, their magnificent tails arranged beneath them in a cascade of fronds and scales and glistening discs. They were Japanese in character, ancient-looking and otherworldly. The low light in the dining room didn’t place them at the least disadvantage; the gilded wood positively blazed in the gloom, while the blues appeared a rich, fluid black.

That Maud was at Jimmy’s side, that she was helping him to do this – his finest achievement yet, sure to open up a whole new territory – made her so extraordinarily proud it brought tears to her eyes. There was bitterness in her too, though, just a hint; for already, before its completion, this splendid thing had become tainted. A week or so earlier, Jimmy had returned home to Chelsea in a state of fizzing agitation, talking of a development; of how the philistines were everywhere, absolutely everywhere, even lurking within those one had previously thought enlightened, with whom one had considered oneself friends. Eventually, after much shouting and cursing, the full story had been extracted. Frederick Richards Leyland, the house’s millionaire owner, had made an unannounced visit from his base of operations in Liverpool. His reaction to Jimmy’s efforts – undertaken without prior consultation, as a marvellous surprise, a gift to the entire Leyland family – had been, well, a touch disappointing.

‘He didn’t ask for it. That was his response. He didn’t ask for it and he didn’t want it. Not the gold, not the peacocks. Not even your flowers, Maudie.’

Under the original scheme, the dining-room walls had been covered with antique leather, brownish yellow in tone and patterned with spiralling ribbons of summer flowers. When Jimmy had taken over he’d decided that a number of these blooms had to be retouched, with their colours switched from red to blue – and that this task should be entrusted to Maud, in her occasional role as his pupil. It had been monotonous work in truth, with several hundred little flowers to be repainted exactly the same, but she’d done it with enormous care. Learning that it had merely added to the patron’s discontent hadn’t been pleasant.

‘It was like having a lead ingot tied around my neck,’ Jimmy had continued, ‘and being tipped into the goddamned river. Nine years, Maud. Nine years I have been cultivating that unappealing fellow. Much indeed has passed between us, oh yes, well beyond the scope of artistic patronage. And yet throughout all of this, throughout all of my attempts to school him in art, Leyland has understood, truly understood, not a single goddamned jot. All that discourse, all that forbearance, all that blasted time – squandered!’

The room, however, had to be finished. Of this Jimmy had been quite certain. He wanted London society to see precisely what this shipbroker from Liverpool had chosen to reject. Leyland had gone north again, to attend to his business, and so the slighted artist had embarked upon a last surge of industry. He’d moved to Kensington, living in the vacant, half-furnished house, enduring the scrutiny of an increasingly suspicious caretaker and applying himself entirely to his labour. Maud had come to see him that morning, with food and a couple of clean shirts. It had been her first visit, on account of this lingering weakness in her stomach. She’d hoped it was gone, more or less, but the jolting of the omnibus had left her so wracked with cramps that she’d been obliged to head directly upstairs, to the room Jimmy had been using, where she could rest without disturbance.

But now disturbance had found her out. The piano hit a crescendo, like a crate of bottles cast onto the ground, then, with barely a pause, lurched into another piece. Maud looked towards the hall, wondering how fast they could get away. ‘What happened between you two?’

Jimmy released her hand. He’d thought of a few things of his own that he wanted to take with him, and began a rapid survey of the tools and materials that lay about, picking out this and that, tucking brushes and knives and pencils into his jacket pockets. ‘A new friend had stopped by. The Marquess of Westminster.’

‘Oh, the marquess, was it?’

‘What can I say? His lordship wished to be shown the room. Word is going around, Maudie, of what has been done here. Everyone wishes to see it, from society and the press. And everyone who comes is quite awed.’ Jimmy looked up at the majestic, mystical birds arrayed across the shutters, a trace of reflected gold colouring the whiteness of his throat. ‘But then, honestly, how the devil could they be otherwise?’

Maud’s stomach groaned; she swallowed, her amusement fading. The smells in the dining room seemed especially pungent that afternoon, the cloying, heady odour of varnish mixing disagreeably with the metallic tang of the Dutch metal.

‘Our marquess, however, is not one merely to admire – no, my girl, he wanted it for himself. He’s taken to me, I think. Told me he liked Americans, and Southerners in particular. Something to do with mental independence. At any rate, he was soon talking of how he would have me let loose on a wing of Eaton Hall. He was ready to make terms, right there and then.’ Jimmy frowned; he gave his feathery white forelock a twist. ‘But then Leyland showed himself. Fresh from a railway carriage and ready to kill, in that dead-eyed way of his. The marquess’s compliments were thrown back in his face. The room, and by extension its creator, were maligned most viciously. And this nobleman, this fine person of taste and manners, was all but ejected from the premises.’ He snatched his cane – a length of bamboo, rather longer than was usual – from the corner in which it had been left and marched back to the door. ‘I really cannot stay here another moment. We must go, Maud. Now.’

Maud’s hat was hanging on the back of a wooden chair, beneath an empty stretch of patterned leather on the south wall. It was straw, tied around with black taffeta; as she put it on, an uneasy sensation tightening around her midriff, she spotted a tin basin on the seat of the chair, used for thinning pigment but presently empty. Best to be safe, she thought, and tucked it under her arm.

Jimmy was beckoning, reaching out for her hand, starting them towards the front door as if they were running for a steamer. It was too much. After only a half dozen steps the basin slipped free, crashing against the marble floor. The lopsided sonata belting up from below broke off abruptly. Jimmy hissed a curse; and leaving the basin where it had landed, they hurried out into the street.

Leyland caught them thirty yards from the house. Jimmy was trying to flag down a hansom, which was proving rather difficult; he’d acquired a reputation among the cabmen of Prince’s Gate for pennilessness, for partially paid fares and absent tips, and the first few that went by ignored his hails completely. Maud watched Leyland approach, pulling a little nervously on Jimmy’s sleeve, but he affected not to notice until the shipbroker was directly beside them.

‘Whistler,’ said Leyland, ‘you will finish the room.’

Jimmy stood back from the kerb. ‘But why on earth would you want that, mon cher,’ he said, squinting at the dreary sky, ‘when you consider it such a calamity? Surely it would be best to start anew, with an artist more suited to your preferences?’

‘You are too close to completion. I will see it done, and your price agreed.’

The shipbroker was a tall, straight sort of man, standing a good foot over Jimmy and Maud. A neat dark beard masked a narrow chin, while blank black eyes stared from beneath a broad forehead. He was wearing his standard, somewhat peculiar costume: a black suit and elaborately frilled shirt, with shiny, buckled shoes, like a music-hall undertaker. There was nothing music-hall about his manner, though – he was utterly cold, his voice without expression. Maud had actually met him on three previous occasions, for dinners at Lindsey Row, at which he’d been awkward, humourless, quite unable to blend with the artists, writers and actresses seated around him. They hadn’t conversed exactly, but they had spoken. Those black eyes had roamed over her, proprietorial and unashamed. Now he paid her no notice at all.

‘We are to make our terms here in the street, are we?’ Jimmy asked. He was using his performance voice, Maud noticed, which was rather more high-pitched than normal, with everything exaggerated – the American vowels yet longer and the Frenchified flourishes more pronounced. ‘Like men haggling over a horse?’

Leyland waited.

‘Two thousand guineas, then. There’s my price. That’s what I asked you for, if you recall.’

Maud turned away, smothering a laugh. He was joking, surely. The dining room was extremely fine, of course it was – but two thousand guineas? That was enough to buy the bloody house it stood in.

Jimmy was perfectly in earnest, however. ‘Four hundred apiece for the three peacock shutters,’ he said, ‘and a further eight hundred for the rest. Very fair, Leyland, by any yardstick.’

‘Do not test me, Whistler. I could have you barred from the house. I could have those peacocks of yours torn out and burned in the garden.’

There was condescension in the shipbroker now. He believed he had Jimmy outclassed, that this was a matter of bargaining, of forming a contract − his province. Regardless of what he thought of the room, the fellow’s pride plainly insisted on victory, and the imposition of his will; that his artist be put in his place and led, chastened, back to work. Maud hugged herself, feeling the first spot of rain land upon her cheek. She knew for a cast-iron fact that it would not be as simple as that.

‘You are right.’ Jimmy inclined his head graciously, as if accepting a fault. ‘You are quite right. My apologies. Bon Dieu, how appallingly rude of me. The decoration is an out-and-out disaster, after all, as you have ruled – as you have just declared so candidly to the Marquess of Westminster, and no doubt many others. The only honourable course, my dear Leyland, the only course open to me as a gentleman and a person of manners, is for us to take this sum of mine and split it between us. I will pay my thousand guineas, as my share in the dining room, and you will pay yours.’

A cab pulled up, a four-wheeler, the driver seeming to recognise Leyland. He leaned over to ask the destination; at close sight of the shipbroker he thought better of it.

‘You are not serious.’

‘I want justice.’ Jimmy cracked the end of his cane emphatically against the pavement. ‘We bear alike the humiliation of this affair, do we not? You for having entered into it so unknowingly; me for having disappointed so very publicly? It only seems right that we should therefore bear the expense in the same proportions. One thousand guineas apiece.’

The figure was uttered with a certain swagger, almost as if it was being attained rather than surrendered. Maud could sense Jimmy’s satisfaction; she could imagine him at the head of their dinner table, in fact, recounting the exchange to laughter and applause. Her head was beginning to spin. She wanted badly to sit down.

Leyland looked to his gaudy shoe buckles, digesting this proposal. ‘Should I consent,’ he said, ‘the sum would be my payment to you for the dining room, and a handsome payment indeed. There would be no question of it being half of anything.’

‘Naturellement,’ Jimmy replied, with an obliging nod. ‘But I must be allowed the time I need. This is paramount, Leyland. I won’t be hurried out or interrupted. I won’t have your blessed caretaker always looking over my shoulder.’

‘You will have the remainder of the year,’ Leyland told him. ‘I am leaving for Liverpool in the morning, and won’t be returning to London until December at the earliest. I expect industry, though, Whistler. Promptitude.’ He glanced Maud’s way at last, and she had a keen, uncomfortable notion of how she must appear: half their age, pale and unkempt, hair falling from beneath her straw hat. Not respectable in the least. ‘I cannot permit any more of this … coming and going. These visitors, whomsoever they may be.’

Jimmy opened the cab door, gave the driver their address and slung in his bag. ‘It will be finished soon enough. I have no desire at all to prolong this experience, Leyland, believe me.’ He reclaimed Maud’s hand. ‘I shall take Miss Franklin here home and see her settled, and then return early tomorrow.’

And just like that they were going, leaving the millionaire businessman standing on the pavement in the gathering rain. Leyland seemed to have been wrong-footed. He simply stood there, arms by his sides, as Jimmy closed the cab door behind them.

‘One thousand,’ he stated, by way of farewell. ‘That is the agreement.’

*

‘There you have it,’ Jimmy declared. ‘There you have the philistine, Maud, revealed in his full and most ignoble aspect.’ The insouciant act was beginning to slip; Maud could see the anger quivering in his jaw. ‘I have to say that the crudity of his methods has been surprising. That business with the Marquess of Westminster, that deliberate insolence, was done merely to tenderise me, don’t you see, ahead of our little negotiation. This is the manner of creature we are dealing with here. A cut-throat professional.’

The cab turned out of Prince’s Gate. Rain was falling steadily now; people were ducking into doorways and opening umbrellas.

‘You asked him for two thousand guineas,’ Maud murmured.

Saying the sum aloud amazed her all over again. She thought of the recent spate of dinners at Lindsey Row, dinners she’d been too sick to attend, held after Leyland’s first reaction to the peacocks – councils of war, Jimmy had called them, with Godwin and Eldon and the rest of them. Had this figure been agreed then? There had certainly been a lot of laughter.

Jimmy crossed his hands atop his cane. ‘Labour has been carried out, my girl. Payment has to follow. That’s how it goes.’

‘But – two thousand guineas, Jimmy?’

‘Nothing had been agreed. Do your work, my friend Frederick Leyland said, and then let me know what I owe you. That’s how it stood between us.’

Maud was annoyed, she realised, beneath her perplexity. She could see this for what it was. Provocation. Cheek. ‘So knowing that he didn’t care for what you’d done, you decided to ask him for a bloody fortune. What good did you imagine that would do?’

‘The villain has twenty times that a year,’ Jimmy countered. ‘Many hundred times it in the bank. Gained, I might add, through business practices of the utmost ruthlessness. And anyway, Maudie, you heard what just happened. I have scaled back my bill. Let a thousand guineas go. It’s quite the move, don’t you think? The rejection of the yoke. A lesson in the limits of a millionaire’s power.’

He ran on for a while, growing increasingly pleased with himself – conceding that the lost money was significant, undeniably, but would soon be made elsewhere, once word of the dining room’s beauty had spread among people of true taste. Maud honestly didn’t know what to make of it all. She was dog-tired, despite having slept through so much of the day. Once again, also, she was being assailed by unspeakable smells, of the kind that tended to linger in public carriages. Old cheese and filthy clothes. The foul stuff that gathered beneath your toenails. These odours seemed to reach into her, to coat the inside of her throat, to coil around her innards. She stared hard out of the window. They were still a good ten minutes from home – from the broken gate and the grimy front door; from the panelled hallway beyond, leading through to the back; from the small cobbled yard and the outhouse in its corner.

Jimmy had fished his tobacco pouch from his pocket, along with a couple of papers. He rolled them both a cigarette, passing hers over. Maud accepted it, knowing that she could no sooner smoke the damned thing than eat it whole. He put a match to his own and a new aroma filled that tiny, rocking box. Maud liked to smoke, always had, since she was ten years old. Now, though, the smell of it made her think of bitumen and burnt hair, of blood blackening on a butcher’s floor, of something poisonous and revolting. The cab slowed, approaching a corner. Her fingers closed around the door handle and she was out, clinging to a lamp post like it was a ship’s mast in a storm, swinging around and sliding down, coughing up a rope of treacly, yellow-green bile in the rough direction of the gutter.