‘Yes!’ Corday, his eyes reddened from crying, looked belligerently at Sandman, then he collapsed into misery again. ‘I was apprenticed to Sir George Phillips.’
‘He’s very successful,’ Sandman said scornfully, ‘despite possessing a prosaically English name. And Sir Thomas Lawrence doesn’t sound very French to me.’
‘I thought changing my name would help,’ Corday said sulkily. ‘Does it matter?’
‘Your guilt matters,’ Sandman said sternly, ‘and, if nothing else, you might face the judgement of your Maker with a clear conscience if you were to confess it.’
Corday stared at Sandman as though his visitor were mad. ‘You know what I’m guilty of?’ he finally asked. ‘I’m guilty of aspiring to be above my station. I’m guilty of being a decent painter. I’m guilty of being a much better damned painter than Sir George bloody Phillips, and I’m guilty, my God how I’m guilty, of being stupid, but I did not kill the Countess of Avebury! I did not!’
Sandman did not like the boy, but he felt in danger of being convinced by him and so he steeled himself by remembering the warning words of the porter at the prison gate. ‘How old are you?’ he asked.
‘Eighteen,’ Corday answered.
‘Eighteen,’ Sandman echoed. ‘God will have pity on your youth,’ he said. ‘We all do stupid things when we’re young, and you have done terrible things, but God will weigh your soul and there is still hope. You aren’t doomed to hell’s fires, not if you confess and if you beg God for forgiveness.’
‘Forgiveness for what?’ Corday asked defiantly.
Sandman was so taken aback that he said nothing.
Corday, red-eyed and pale-faced, stared up at the tall Sandman. ‘Look at me,’ he said, ‘do I look like a man who has the strength to rape and kill a woman, even if I wanted to? Do I look like that?’ He did not. Sandman had to admit it, at least to himself, for Corday was a limp and unimpressive creature, weedy and thin, who now began to weep again. ‘You’re all the same,’ he whined. ‘No one listens! No one cares! So long as someone hangs, no one cares.’
‘Stop crying, for God’s sake!’ Sandman snarled, and immediately chided himself for giving way to his temper. ‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered.
Those last two words made Corday frown in puzzlement. He stopped weeping, looked at Sandman and frowned. ‘I didn’t do it,’ he said softly, ‘I didn’t do it.’
‘So what happened?’ Sandman asked, despising himself for having lost control of the interview.
‘I was painting her,’ Corday said. ‘The Earl of Avebury wanted a portrait of his wife and he asked Sir George to do it.’
‘He asked Sir George, yet you were painting her?’ Sandman sounded sceptical. Corday, after all, was a mere eighteen years old while Sir George Phillips was celebrated as the only rival to Sir Thomas Lawrence.
Corday sighed as though Sandman was being deliberately obtuse. ‘Sir George drinks,’ he said scornfully. ‘He starts on blackstrap at breakfast and bowzes till night, which means his hand shakes. So he drinks and I paint.’
Sandman backed into the corridor to escape the smell of the unemptied night bucket in the cell. He wondered if he was being naïve, for he found Corday curiously believable. ‘You painted in Sir George’s studio?’ he asked, not because he cared, but because he wanted to fill the silence.
‘No,’ Corday said. ‘Her husband wanted the portrait set in her bedroom, so I did it there. Have you any idea how much bother that is? You have to take an easel and canvas and chalk and oils and rags and pencils and dropcloths and mixing bowls and more rags. Still, the Earl of Avebury was paying for it.’
‘How much?’
‘Whatever Sir George could get away with. Eight hundred guineas? Nine? He offered me a hundred.’ Corday sounded bitter at that fee, though it seemed like a fortune to Sandman.
‘Is it usual to paint a portrait in a lady’s bedroom?’ Sandman asked in genuine puzzlement. He could imagine a woman wanting herself depicted in a drawing room or under a tree in a great sunlit garden, but the bedroom seemed a very perverse choice to him.
‘It was to be a boudoir portrait,’ Corday said, and though the term was new to Sandman he understood what it meant. ‘They’re very fashionable,’ Corday went on, ‘because these days all the women want to look like Canova’s Pauline Bonaparte.’
Sandman frowned. ‘You confuse me.’
Corday raised suppliant eyes to heaven in the face of such ignorance. ‘The sculptor Canova,’ he explained, ‘did a likeness of the Emperor’s sister that is much celebrated and every beauty in Europe wishes to be depicted in the same pose. The woman reclines on a chaise longue, an apple in her left hand and her head supported by her right.’ Corday, rather to Sandman’s embarrassment, demonstrated the pose. ‘The salient feature,’ the boy went on, ‘is that the woman is naked from the waist up. And a good deal below the waist, too.’
‘So the Countess was naked when you painted her?’ Sandman asked.
‘No,’ Corday hesitated, then shrugged. ‘She wasn’t to know she was being painted naked, so she was in a morning gown and robe. We would have used a model in the studio to do the tits.’
‘She didn’t know?’ Sandman was incredulous.
‘Her husband wanted a portrait,’ Corday said impatiently, ‘and he wanted her naked, and she would have refused him, so he lied to her. She didn’t mind doing a boudoir portrait, but she wasn’t going to unpeel for anyone, so we were going to fake it and I was just doing the preliminary work, the drawing and tints. Charcoal on canvas with a few colours touched in; the colours of the bed covers, the wallpaper, her ladyship’s skin and hair. Bitch that she was.’
Sandman felt a surge of hope, for the last four words had been malevolent, just as he expected a murderer would speak of his victim. ‘You didn’t like her?’
‘Like her? I despised her!’ Corday spat. ‘She was a trumped-up demi-rep!’ He meant she was a courtesan, a high-class whore. ‘A buttock,’ Corday downgraded her savagely, ‘nothing else. But just because I didn’t like her doesn’t make me a rapist and murderer. Besides, do you really think a woman like the Countess of Avebury would allow a painter’s apprentice to be alone with her? She was chaperoned by a maid all the time I was there. How could I have raped or murdered her?’
‘There was a maid?’ Sandman asked.
‘Of course there was,’ Corday insisted scornfully, ‘an ugly bitch called Meg.’
Sandman was totally confused now. ‘And, presumably, Meg spoke at your trial?’
‘Meg has disappeared,’ Corday said tiredly, ‘which is why I am going to hang.’ He glared at Sandman. ‘You don’t believe me, do you? You think I’m making it up. But there was a maid and her name was Meg and she was there and when it came to the trial she couldn’t be found.’ He had spoken defiantly, but his demeanour suddenly changed as he began to weep again. ‘Does it hurt?’ he asked. ‘I know it does. It must!’
Sandman stared down at the flagstones. ‘Where was the house?’
‘Mount Street,’ Corday was hunched and sobbing, ‘it’s just off …’
‘I know where Mount Street is,’ Sandman interrupted a little too sharply. He was embarrassed by Corday’s tears, but persevered with questions that were now actuated by a genuine curiosity. ‘And you admit to being in the Countess’s house on the day she was murdered?’
‘I was there just before she was murdered!’ Corday said. ‘There were back stairs, servants’ stairs, and there was a knock on the door there. A deliberate knock, a signal,