The Optickal Illusion Page 9

  ‘Your have parted company with your wife.’ He cleared his throat, hoping at least briefly to divert Cosway from his original intent. ‘In that were your worst fears not confirmed?’

  A spasm of disgust crossed Cosway’s face.

  ‘It was not painting that corrupted her. You are mistaken if you think my Maria proved to be a harlot. I realised with some distress that since birth she had been something far more dangerous for our marriage.’ He paused for a moment. ‘She was a romantic.’

  Provis looked down.

  ‘One of the world’s most influential men pursued her,’ Cosway continued, ‘a far better man than I. I expected daily to discover them in bed together. Yet to my surprise, and, I must concede, mistaken satisfaction, she resisted his physical advances.’

  ‘Why was your satisfaction mistaken? Surely this was a considerable compliment.’

  That dust dry laugh came again.

  ‘So I thought. Until I realised where the real seduction had occurred.’

  ‘I comprehend not.’

  ‘While she was with me he never tasted her body.’ Cosway pronounced the words lingeringly. ‘But he had seduced her mind and her heart. From that moment, though physically she was mine, she only ever truly belonged to him. I believe I took the only honourable course possible. It was I, not she, who suggested that we separate.’

  Once the portraitist had left the apartment his presence lingered like the stench of damp on an early October evening. Raindrops spat against the window, swelling and splitting on the dirty glass. Provis had felt sickened by the proposal, but was sickened still more by the thought of how he would raise it with Ann Jemima. Each chime of the quarter hour on the clock before she returned to the apartment seemed to jeer at his nerves. When she finally did return, singing lightly to herself as she entered, it was only with some effort that he could even mention that Cosway had visited. She had come in from a small dinner in Mrs Tullett’s rooms. The sounds of the evening were written on her face – in her half smile, he could hear the lively chatter, from her flushed cheeks, the clink of glasses.

  ‘What scandal did Mrs Tullett serve up tonight?’ He feigned levity, but could feel the limp and judder of his words.

  She could hear his unease straight away, and looked at him with sharp puzzlement.

  ‘She declares that another lady-in-waiting is with child,’ she replied studying Provis’s face, ‘and once more, that the baby is not her husband’s’.

  He turned away to evade her scrutiny, and went to stoke the fire.

  ‘Tell me not. It is the Prince of Wales who is at fault.’

  ‘For once the fault is not his.’ She disappeared for a moment to hang up her cape and bonnet. ‘According to Mrs Tullett it is the bishop who preached at Michaelmas,’ she continued coming back into the room. ‘I find it difficult to credit – the mother is both fair and witty, and her husband almost limpet-like in his devotions. Jealousy begot this rumour.’

  Provis wanted to speak, but the words huddled at the back of this throat. She glanced at him keenly again. When he remained silent, her eyes roved restlessly around the room. She seized a small calfskin-bound book from the table in front of the fire and started to flick through it. He took it upon himself to walk over to her with a small glass of fortified wine. As she reached to accept it, he looked down at the page in front of her and saw a deft pen and ink drawing of what he assumed was some mythical creature.

  ‘What strange being is this?’ he croaked.

  She regarded him for a moment – he could see she was considering whether to deliver a serious or teasing response.

  ‘It is the anatomy of a louse,’ she finally replied. Seeing him confounded, she laughed. ‘It is no one at the Palace.’

  A half-thought flickered in his mind of members of the court as parasites in silks, scuttering across the dung heap of London.

  Out loud he said, ‘It is from Hooke’s Micrographia?’

  She nodded approvingly, both pleased and surprised he had caught the reference. She handed him the book from which she had made the copy. Provis looked at it, frowning and squinting. ‘I know of it,’ he said. ‘It was popular in Charles II’s reign.’

  ‘Can you imagine what it was like when Robert Hooke looked through a microscope for a first time? He saw a whole new world. Poppy seeds like boulders with hexagons, lice like soldiers in armour.’ She darted him a swift glance.

  He peered more closely. ‘I have seen framed illustrations on market stalls. I believe also there is a copy of this in the King’s Library. I trust this is not the same volume.’

  ‘I sketched the louse this morning,’ she said, ignoring his question. ‘Yesterday I drew a mite from the same collection. I first saw it when I was a young girl. I thought it the most magical book ever published.’

  ‘This is not from the King’s Library, is it?’ he repeated.

  Again she ignored him.

  ‘It puts a glass where we see nothing and reveals a whole teeming life.’ She looked up. ‘Hooke would stop at nothing. He wrote how he had let a louse suck from his hand to see how the blood travelled through it. He also froze his urine to examine how the crystals formed.’ Her eyes were ablaze.

  ‘You did not repeat this to your elders and betters?’

  ‘I did not need to. Sadly a visiting aunt noted my application to the book. When she read it and realised it contained such indelicate details, it was confiscated.’

  ‘You will replace it in the library?’

  She reached out to take it back from him.

  ‘Please let me keep it for just a few more days.’ There was a whisper of apology in her voice. ‘I will replace it unharmed.’

  Provis took a deep breath.

  ‘I believe you would try to persuade an executioner to stay his axe. If it is not gone in a week, I will replace it myself.’

  They were both silent for a moment.

  ‘You are unusually severe tonight,’ she eventually replied. ‘What is it that truly troubles you?’

  He took a deep breath and told her of Cosway’s visit. At first she simply looked surprised, but when she heard the proposal, she gripped his hands so tightly he felt as if the blood had stopped flowing in them. Then she started to walk up and down the room.

  ‘Do you think he means to hold you to account?’

  ‘I know not. I believe I have done nothing wrong.’

  ‘No, indeed. You are not at fault in the slightest. The honour and kindness in what you have done…’ She paused for a moment, her eyes glistening. ‘No,’ she continued. ‘Even a man with a perverse disposition such as Cosway cannot feel the urge to do you harm.’

  Yet even as she reassured him, he could see she had started trembling. She has grown in assurance so greatly since she arrived, he thought to himself. But now it is as if the void has opened up beneath her once more.

  He cleared his throat. ‘Cosway is one of those who enjoys causing discomfort in others largely because it distracts him from his own unhappiness.’

  She nodded vehemently.

  ‘Yes, you are right. It is a strange game, but is probably harmless.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘Harmless so long as we play it in the right way.’

  As the words left her mouth, it was if she became colder, harder.

  ‘We must seem to appease him, at least to begin with. Let me take the lessons, and we will see if we can turn this situation to our advantage.’

  ‘What if he demands a payment that goes beyond money?’

  She looked at him impatiently. ‘Send Mrs Tullett with me as a chaperone; she is well acquainted with his housekeeper.’

  ‘You believe Mrs Tullett will act as chaperone?’ His voice is incredulous. ‘Will she stay her tongue?’

  Ann Jemima put her hands to her head as if to contain the thoughts swarming within it.

  ‘I believe, because of her loyalty to you, she will.’

  He looked at her sharply.

  ‘If Mr Cosway chooses to dance with other peopl
e’s concealed skeletons,’ she continued more calmly, ‘then we shall at least know that Mrs Tullett has danced with some of his. He shall fear her, both as a witness of the past and of the present.’

  ‘More than we fear him?’

  The pain that crossed her face was so great that he wanted to reach out to her, but he knew better than to act on this impulse.

  ‘It is more dangerous not to play the game than to play it,’ she whispered.

  The first few months of lessons passed without mishap. Provis’s wariness became sapped by the routine. He remarked to himself too how Ann Jemima seemed to become more at ease as time went by. He had never been quite sure what to do about her obsession with drawing and painting. For the first time he confessed to himself that in those early days something about it had frightened him. There had been a painting that she had completed in one of her early lessons of a sunset over a field. He had seen the dance of reds and yellows, observed that the sun was bleeding into a landscape that was not merely lit, but transfigured by what was taking place with the onset of dusk. He had noted the rapt look on her face when she was waiting for his response. So he had croaked that it was good even as he reflected that it was no more use for a woman to have this ability than it was for her to have seven toes on one foot.

  It was of some comfort to him to realise that Cosway was equally disconcerted by her talent. The painter’s sarcasm did not have its usual easy lilt when Provis called to hand over his first payment for the lessons.

  ‘She has learnt something from her country drawing master, Septimus Green, even if his tastes seem a little eclectic,’ he remarked.

  ‘You will take a guinea for three months of lessons?’

  ‘You are most generous.’

  ‘She is not more able than your wife?’

  Provis’s laugh died on his lips as he saw Cosway could not meet his eye.

  ‘She is but seventeen. She has a raw talent that could, or could not, advance her quite far in painters’ circles should she be foolish enough to want to spend much time in such pursuits. Her amateurish interest in science is somewhat fashionable now in the arts. A book called Newtonianism for Ladies by an Italian, Signor Algarotti, discusses light and colour and is popular in salons on the Continent. If you are happy to pay me, I can acquire one for you.’

  The verger felt a sense of something crumbling around him. He wondered whether his emotions were akin to those felt by contemporaries of Galileo when they first discerned that the earth might revolve around the sun, rather than vice versa.

  ‘I… I have spent much time in auction houses, a-as you are aware.’ He knew not how to express himself. ‘In the last few years especially I have seen many pieces of art that have come from France, and beyond. But they are not… but they are not…’

  ‘By women.’

  Provis looked at Cosway almost pleadingly. ‘To my mind there is nothing wrong with a woman painting well.’

  ‘You are an unconventional man, Mr Provis. That is one of your greater attributes.’

  ‘It is empirical evidence rather than any other measure that makes me consider it an unwise future. If women were meant to paint,’ his hands flailed in the air, ‘surely they would have painted great works for centuries.’

  Cosway got out his wallet and opened it. In response to his gesture Provis handed over the guinea.

  ‘My former wife,’ the portraitist replied, ‘was somewhat tedious on this matter, as you can imagine. There have been female painters since the Renaissance, and even before – we just do not hear of them very much, if at all.’ He sighed, as if disdainful even of the effort of repeating her. ‘She talked much of Fede Galizia, a Milanese painter from the early seventeenth century. She was the daughter of an artist, and was herself acknowledged as an artist of some talent by the age of twelve. Towards the end of her life, her preferred theme was Judith cutting off the head of her lover Holofernes.’

  ‘She talked to you of this…’ Provis began, and then stopped himself.

  ‘… at the point when our marriage was clearly coming to an end. Yes indeed. One needed little imagination to understand her fondness for Galizia’s work at that point.’

  He looked penetratingly at Provis, who forebore to meet his eye. ‘She also talked of Sofonisba Anguissola,’ Cosway continued, ‘who was born in Italy and later worked as a court painter for Philip II of Spain. One of her more charming images was of her sisters playing chess. She must have been reasonably formidable, at the very least as an individual – Philip II also employed Titian.’

  ‘These are remarkable instances. Why then…?’

  ‘Are they not as well known? I certainly found it best as a man not to speculate – at least not in front of my wife.’

  Provis frowned at him.

  ‘Philip was the son of an Emperor. If he was enough of a connoisseur to employ Titian, then surely he would not have indulged a woman painter out of charity.’

  ‘That was certainly Maria’s interpretation.’

  They stared at each other for a moment.

  ‘Mr Provis, if you are minded to bear with Ann Jemima on this – and I can see you may be – then you can do no harm. She is the kind of young lady who, if opposed, will only become more determined. Marriage and children will distract her before too long, God willing. In the meanwhile, shall we see where this journey takes us?’

  The twist to Cosway’s bargain happened, in the manner that such things do, once Provis’s guard was dropped entirely. One afternoon Ann Jemima arrived home from her lesson late. When Provis asked her how she had fared that day, her response was clipped and irritated, while the air around her shimmered with unease. His suspicion made him suddenly feel ill. He observed the hunch in her shoulders that had not been there, noted the drawn pinched look in her face. Any phrases that came into his mind to ask her what had happened felt too dangerous to deploy. He burned with quiet anger, but did not want to scare her into silence. Later that night, over dinner, she suddenly declared with some disbelief that Cosway had promised she would become a better artist if she inserted her hand into his breeches. When she spoke the words out loud Provis could feel his fury as if it had been stamped on him by a branding iron.

  ‘What did you reply to the scoundrel?’ he asked her.

  ‘I told him I had no desire for white paint at that moment,’ she declared angrily. As her eyes flashed he could see the tears in them. ‘In truth he did nothing. He spent the whole lesson looking goats and monkeys at me, but he never tried to touch me.’

  ‘What of Mrs Tullett?’

  ‘She has not accompanied me in the last month.’

  Disbelief blotched red up his neck.

  ‘You have not had a chaperone?’

  ‘We agreed…’ She took a deep breath, as she fought back the tears. ‘We agreed that since he was behaving himself,’ she looked at Provis angrily, ‘that I would attend the lessons on condition that his housekeeper was in the house.’ Distractedly she wove her napkin in and out of her fingers. ‘I thought that would be safeguard enough. And for three weeks it was. I thought there was a truce between us. But now it seems it is over.’

  He paced up and down.

  ‘I should go round and beat the bastard. You must cease the lessons straight away.’

  She cast the napkin to the floor.

  ‘I cannot. Oh – you must credit me when I say I would if it were remotely possible.’

  He looked at her in horror, saw the mixture of anguish and defiance in her eyes, sensed the taut anxiety in her voice.

  ‘What can you possibly mean, my girl?’

  She looked away.

  ‘I thought there could be no harm in it.’

  ‘In what?’ he asked increasingly alarmed.

  ‘The manuscript.’

  ‘The manuscript?’ he repeated. Later he would be aware that this was the moment when the trap started to close in earnest, but right now he just looked at her, dumbfounded.

  ‘I have asked Mr Cosway to approach the P
resident of the Royal Academy. I wanted him to find out if he will buy it from us.’ She could not look at him. ‘You and I talked much about the best way to achieve the highest price possible for it. You yourself said in the auction houses most buyers would not comprehend its value. And you were right. It was then that the idea came to me. I thought that no one in London would either desire or be in a position to pay more money than Mr West.’

  It took him a while to absorb what she had said. As he did, he shook his head repeatedly.

  ‘The President of the Royal Academy?’ he whispered with incredulity. ‘You wish him to scrutinise this manuscript?’ He held his hand to his forehead for a moment. ‘Does Cosway understand its origins.’

  ‘He does.’

  She stared at him for a moment, and he stared back.

  ‘I cannot believe what I am hearing,’ he whispered.

  ‘The techniques in the manuscript work. Cosway himself is convinced from what I have demonstrated to him. This is the surest way of proving their worth.’

  She stepped closer to him and he stepped back.

  ‘I have gone out of my way to support you in your ambitions to be a painter, my girl. That has proved precarious enough. Are you confident Mr West will recognise its value? That he will not ridicule us to the King and lose me my position here?’

  ‘There is no one better to scrutinise it. Cosway himself believes that Mr West would be delighted to preside over such a discovery.’

  ‘Cosway, Cosway, Cosway.’ His hands clenched and unclenched. ‘Ann Jemima, you have known from the start that I want us to have as little to do with Cosway as is humanly possible.’ His voice rose with anger. ‘Yet at every turn I find myself shackled to him as if in Newgate gaol. What has possessed you to ask him to make this approach?’