‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘It was wonderful. The hall was yours, Jimmy. No contest.’
The moustache bristled with satisfaction. Miss Corder spoke up as well, poised and formidably eloquent, reporting on the crowds, the regrettable popularity of Mr Burne-Jones, and in particular on the reception of the firework painting – the Nocturne in Black and Gold.
‘The philistines were out in force,’ she said. ‘They were reciting Ruskin’s words before the picture. He has given licence to ignorant disdain. A refusal to look, or to see.’
Owl was shaking his head. ‘I tell you, Jimmy, the old goat’s been beyond the pale for a good while now. But this is a step further still. Ad hominem, as the lawyers say. Actionable.’
Jimmy was grave. ‘You aren’t the first to say this,’ he said.
‘What was in it?’ Maud asked, by now rather anxious. ‘What did he write that could be so bad?’
They shared a look; then three indulgent expressions were turned her way.
‘You deserve to know,’ Jimmy said. ‘I’d hoped I could spare you, but this may now be unavoidable. It was brief. Published in that peculiar private paper he puts out. But picked up since by everyone.’ He spoke slowly, assuming a terrifyingly steely smile. ‘The fellow wrote that my poor picture approached the aspect of wilful imposture.’
Maud gripped the stem of her flute. This was Ruskin’s own phrase, she could tell. The dreadful notice had plainly been memorised in its entirety.
‘He wrote that I was a coxcomb, Maudie. A coxcomb. That I was asking two hundred guineas to – how was it put? – fling a pot of paint in the public’s face. That the Black and Gold displayed only what he felt qualified to term cockney impudence.’
At this Maud let out an involuntary laugh, a flat, nervous whinny. ‘You’re no blessed cockney, Jimmy.’
Owl was grinning too. ‘It is absurd,’ he said. ‘Completely absurd. And actionable, as I say. In the course of my life, I have learned a thing or two about the law, and there is no doubt in my mind that you have been libelled. He attacks your person, my friend. Your character.’
‘The rogue denies me my fundamental right,’ Jimmy stated, ‘to call myself an artist. He says my work is not art. This is why no one buys. But what right do they have to pass judgement in this manner? These self-appointed critics, these ignoramuses, these blasted fools? What goddamned right do they have?’
‘None,’ said Miss Corder. ‘None at all.’
Owl nodded in sympathy. ‘You must go to court, Jimmy. I have said this to you several times now. The public chastisement of John Ruskin for the abuses of his pen is long overdue. And there must be compensation for the damage he has sought to inflict.’
‘That he has inflicted already,’ said Jimmy.
‘Compensation?’ Maud asked. ‘You mean – you mean money?’
The Owl turned to her in an attitude of apologetic explanation. ‘I know Ruskin, Miss Franklin. Better than any man alive, I should think. I was his – well, I suppose you might call it his private secretary, back before my association with Gabriel Rossetti. I undertook many missions on his behalf, and became familiar with every part of his affairs – some dark regions, Miss. And he has grown yet more strange since. The lunatic’s beard. The demented air that attends on his manners and his writings. It is said—’
‘Owl,’ Jimmy interrupted, dragging on his cigarette. ‘Not now.’
‘He must pay,’ said Owl, changing tack. ‘He can afford to, certainly. His father traded in wines, he traded very well, and left his only child rich indeed. The wretched fellow squats up north somewhere, among the Lakes, atop a veritable mountain of gold. It is your duty, old man, if you ask me, to have some clever lawyer relieve him of a portion of it.’
Jimmy seemed to see the sense in this. ‘We are down, I won’t deny it. To be completely honest, mon cher, we suffer still from the lack of Leyland’s thousand. That is the root of the trouble. Most of what he paid was already owed, you see – it’s long gone.’
Leyland. Maud sat up. ‘The Amber and Black,’ she said.
Again all three of them looked her way, curious and vaguely condescending. A connection had been forming in the back of her mind, since the walk over from New Bond Street. While visiting Lindsey Row in the years before the Peacock Room, Frederick Leyland would surely have seen the Amber and Black when it had Florence’s features. And then he would have seen it again in the Grosvenor Gallery.
‘I saw what you did to it. To Leyland’s daughter. You scraped off her face.’
They laughed hard at this, did Jimmy and the Owl, slapping their palms against the tabletop and stamping their boots upon the floor. It was more than Maud had expected, a lot more, and it knocked her off-course. She found herself smiling too, even as she tried to raise her voice over the uproar.
‘Something else has happened, hasn’t it, Jimmy? Why would you do that?’
‘You see the eye on this one, my dear Owl! A goddamned painter’s eye, it is! Nothing escapes it. Rien de tout!’
And somehow, before Maud could say anything else, she was under discussion as an artist for the second time in an hour. Jimmy trotted out a little legend of his own devising, in which the eighteen-year-old model Maud Franklin, soon after her arrival at Lindsey Row, had happened to discover an album of Japanese prints. The detailed studies of flowers within had inspired her to such a degree, he claimed, that she’d picked up the brush at once, and displayed an obvious gift for it. Owl said that he would very much like to see her latest drawings; as did Miss Corder, who declared that Maud simply must visit her studio on Southampton Row, within the week if it could be arranged. The attention and encouragement flattered Maud to the point of giddiness. Her skin flamed radish red, perspiration stippling her brow. Frederick Leyland and the Amber and Black quite left her mind.
‘I haven’t done anything for a while,’ she said, as her glass was refilled, ‘you know, on account of – of being away and …’
They told her that she must reapply herself at the first opportunity. That it was her responsibility to humankind. To leave such a talent unused, they said, was an unforgivable waste. She had to paint.
Maud nodded, and sipped, and promised that she would.
*
Dusk was shading the grand bend of the Quadrant by the time they decided to eat. As always, Jimmy insisted upon everyone having the same, with him ordering: Homard en Croute, a favourite of his. Maud would have eaten this gladly, but Miss Corder’s sylph-like form, snaking against the table beside her, served as a stern admonition. She had to recover her own figure as soon as possible, so she picked at the little pie, trying to look like she was making a start on it, breaking a hole in the buttery crust and prodding at what lay beneath.
Owl’s serving, in contrast, was gone in moments. Noticing Maud’s reluctance, he offered and then engineered a discreet swap of their dishes. It was a mystery, how he managed to eat such quantities while talking – for talk he most certainly did. Even Jimmy stayed quiet, or mostly quiet, to hear him. In that impressive voice of his, he began to tell them of a certain period of his youth – always brought to mind, he claimed, by the taste of lobster. He was Portuguese, as it turned out, not Spanish as Maud had assumed; or rather a half-Portuguese, the son of an English wool merchant and a noble lady of Oporto.
‘Their final child,’ he said. ‘No fewer than thirteen others preceded me. My father expired, in fact, not long after my birth.’ The cause was exhaustion.’
Left destitute, his widowed mother had moved out of the city with her six youngest to a village down the coast. There, some years later, the teenage Owl had supported