Bernard Cornwell - Gallows Thief

'He couldn't have finished it himself?' Sandman asked. He sipped the tea, which was an excellent blend of gunpowder and green.

Sir George laughed. 'What did he tell you, Captain? No, let me guess. Charlie told you that I wasn't up to it, didn't he? He said I was drunk, so he had to paint her ladyship. Is that what he told you?'

'Yes,' Sandman admitted.

Sir George was amused. 'The lying little bastard. He deserves to hang for that.'

'So why did you let him paint the Countess?'

'Think about it,' Sir George said. 'Sally, shoulders back, head up, nipples out, that's my girl. You're Britannia, you rule the bleeding waves, you're not some bloody Brighton whore drooping on a boulder.'

'Why?' Sandman persisted.

'Because, Captain,' Sir George paused to make a stroke with the brush, 'because we were gammoning the lady. We were painting her in a frock, but once the canvas got back here we were going to make her naked. That's what the Earl wanted and that's what Charlie would have done. But when a man asks a painter to depict his wife naked, and a remarkable number do, then you can be certain that the resulting portrait will not be displayed. Does a man hang such a painting in his morning room for the titillation of his friends? He does not. Does he show it in his London house for the edification of society? He does not. He hangs it in his dressing room or in his study where none but himself can see it. And what use is that to me? If I paint a picture, Captain, I want all London gaping at it. I want them queueing up those stairs begging me to paint one just like it for themselves and that means there ain't no money in society tits. I paint the profitable pictures, Charlie was taking care of the boudoir portraits.' He stepped back and frowned at the young man posing as a sailor. 'You're holding that oar all wrong, Johnny. Maybe I should have you naked. As Neptune.' He turned and leered at Sandman. 'Why didn't I think of that before? You'd make a good Neptune, Captain. Fine figure you've got. You could oblige me by stripping naked and standing opposite Sally? We'll give you a triton shell to hold, erect. I've got a triton shell somewhere, I used it for the Apotheosis of the Earl St Vincent.'

'What do you pay?' Sandman asked.

'Five shillings a day.' Sir George had been surprised by the response.

'You don't pay me that!' Sally protested.

'Because you're a bloody woman!' Sir George snapped, then looked at Sandman. 'Well?'

'No,' Sandman said, then went very still. The apprentice had been turning over the canvasses and Sandman now stopped him. 'Let me see that one,' he said, pointing to a full-length portrait.

The apprentice pulled it from the stack and propped it on a chair so that the light from a skylight fell on the canvas, which showed a young woman sitting at a table with her head cocked in what was almost but not quite a belligerent fashion. Her right hand was resting on a pile of books while her left held an hourglass. Her red hair was piled high to reveal a long and slender neck that was circled by sapphires. She was wearing a dress of silver and blue with white lace at the neck and wrists. Her eyes stared boldly out of the canvas and added to the suggestion of belligerence, which was softened by the mere suspicion that she was about to smile.

'Now that,' Sir George said reverently, 'is a very clever young' lady. And be careful with it, Barney, it's going for varnishing this afternoon. You like it, Captain?'

'It's—' Sandman paused, wanting a word that would flatter Sir George, 'it's wonderful,' he said lamely.

'It is indeed,' Sir George said enthusiastically, stepping away from Nelson's half-finished apotheosis to admire the young woman whose red hair was brushed away from a forehead that was high and broad, whose nose was straight and long and whose mouth was generous and wide, and who had been painted in a lavish sitting room beneath a wall of ancestral portraits which suggested she came from a family of great antiquity, though in truth her father was the son of an apothecary and her mother a parson's daughter who was considered to have married beneath herself. 'Miss Eleanor Forrest,' Sir George said. 'Her nose is too long, her chin too sharp, her eyes more widely spaced than convention would allow to be · beautiful, her hair is lamentably red and her mouth is too lavish, yet the effect is extraordinary, is it not?'

'It is,' Sandman said fervently.

'Yet of all the young woman's attributes,' Sir George had entirely dropped his bantering manner and was speaking with real warmth, 'it is her intelligence I most admire. I fear she is to be wasted in marriage.'

'She is?' Sandman had to struggle to keep his voice from betraying his feelings.

'The last I heard,' Sir George returned to Nelson, 'she was spoken of as the future Lady Eagleton. Indeed I believe the portrait is a gift for him, yet Miss Eleanor is much too clever to be married to a fool like Eagleton.' Sir George snorted. 'Wasted.'

'Eagleton?' Sandman felt as though a cold hand had gripped his heart. Had that been the import of the message Lord Alexander had forgotten? That Eleanor was engaged to Lord Eagleton?

'Lord Eagleton, heir to the Earl of Bridport and a bore. A bore, Captain, a bore and I detest bores. Is Sally Hood really to be a lady? Good God incarnate, England has gone to the weasels. Stick 'em out, darling, they ain't noble yet and they're what the Admiralty is paying for. Barney, find the Countess.'

The apprentice hunted on through the canvasses. The wind gusted, making the rafters creak. Sammy emptied two of the buckets into which rain was leaking, chucking them out of the back window and provoking a roar of protest from below. Sandman stared out of the front windows, looking past the awning of Gray's jewellery shop into Sackville Street. Was Eleanor really to marry? He had not seen her in over six months and it was very possible. Her mother, at least, was in a hurry to have Eleanor walk to an altar, preferably an aristocratic altar, for Eleanor was twenty-five now and would soon be reckoned a shelved spinster. Damn it, Sandman thought, but forget her. 'This is it, sir.' Barney, the apprentice, interrupted his thoughts. He propped an unfinished portrait over Eleanor's picture. 'The Countess of Avebury, sir.'

Another beauty, Sandman thought. The painting was hardly begun, yet it was strangely effective. The canvas had been sized, then a charcoal drawing made of a woman reclining on a bed that was surmounted by a tent of peaked material. Corday had then painted in patches of the wallpaper, the material of the bed's tent, the bedspread, the carpet, and the woman's face. He had lightly painted the hair, making it seem wild as though the Countess was in a country wind rather than her London bedroom, and though the rest of the canvas was hardly touched by any other colour, yet somehow it was still breathtaking and full of life.

'Oh, he could paint, our Charlie, he could paint.' Sir George, wiping his hands with a rag, had come to look at the picture. His voice was reverent and his eyes betrayed a mixture of admiration and jealousy. 'He's a clever little devil, ain't he?'

'Is it a good likeness?'

'Oh, yes,' Sir George nodded, 'indeed yes. She was a beauty, Captain, a woman who could make heads turn, but that's all she was. She was out of the gutter, Captain. She was what our Sally is. She was an opera dancer.'

'I'm an actress,' Sally insisted hotly.

'An actress, an opera dancer, a whore, they're all the same,' Sir George growled, 'and Avebury was a fool to have married her. He should have kept her as his mistress, but never married her.'

'This tea's bloody cold,' Sally complained. She had left the dais and discarded her helmet.

'Go and have some dinner, child,' Sir George said grandly, 'but be back here by two of the clock. Have you finished, Captain?'