were you, sir?’
‘Neither was he,’ says Will quickly. ‘Neither was Tom.’
The still-room maid brushes past, the stained cuff of her dress pressing against Will’s sleeve, then tearing away with a syrupy tackiness. ‘Goodness, Mr Turner, neither was anyone! You saw the confusion yesterday, when you showed up at our door. The family expect us to manage their little surprises, whatever they might be. Just look at the unholy bother down here this evening – twelve extra guests there are, and with no notice at all. A wonder we don’t rise up against ’em.’
Swinging about, Mrs Lamb advances imperturbably into the crowded junction of corridors before the kitchens. Will follows, trying to keep in her wake and out of everyone’s way. This is impossible: when a footman strides from the western stairwell, he has to skip sideways to avoid a collision. The servant is bearing a silver wine cooler, an ornate piece with lion’s feet at its base, filled almost to the brim with fresh vomit. Mr Purkiss is named as the culprit; wearily, as if this is but the latest in a line of similar misdemeanours.
‘Life in service, eh, lad?’ says Mrs Lamb to the footman. ‘Does it match your boyhood dreams?’
‘Enough now,’ calls Mr Noakes from his stool, over the laughter. ‘Sluice room with that, Mr Jenkins.’
The passage to the still room is quieter, a rich, jammy smell thickening the air. They go inside; moulds and pans, recently used, are piled upon the dormant stove, and perhaps two dozen tallow candles burn in a range of improvised holders. A stout table has been brought in and stood in the centre of the room. Across its middle, in their hundreds, are jellied sweetmeats. This is their source. Dusted lightly with sugar, they are arranged in rainbow bands – ruby red sea shells, like the one Will sampled; stars of jade with trailing tails; azure fishes beside coral-pink piglets.
‘My contribution,’ says Mrs Lamb, ‘to this most magical of nights. A new batch, Mr Turner, made especially. Pass over the trays, would you?’
They are alone, the door standing ajar behind them. Will sets down the sack. ‘Them candles you gave me,’ he says.
‘Oh aye. How d’ye find them? Any better?’
Will unclasps the larger sketchbook and takes the Brookes print from under the front cover. The moment is not nearly as dramatic as he envisaged. Mrs Lamb looks at the page for a second only. It leaves her totally unconcerned. She starts to stack dirty bowls and utensils at the table’s edge, clearing a space by the sweetmeats.
‘Mr Turner,’ she says, ‘you must pay no mind to that. It’s speakers in the markets, sir, over at Leeds and elsewhere. The scoundrels will stuff their pamphlets into a basket without so much as a by-your-leave. I use them for scrap.’ She heaves a chopping board to the floor. ‘I’m sorry, truly, if that one upset you.’
‘It didn’t upset me, madam,’ Will lies hotly. ‘It simply … it …’ He stops, wrong-footed. ‘It was chance, then? An accident?’
The still-room maid tosses a long knife into a dish, the bone handle clattering around the rim. ‘Heavens, Mr Turner, so mistrustful! Tell me, what else could it be? Why might I have done such a thing on purpose?’
Will’s gaze strays to the bowed hull of the Brookes. ‘That I don’t know.’
‘There’s the blessed family for a start, and the minions they have hereabouts. If Noakes or Cope found a body with summat like that they’d see them whipped like they was caught poaching rabbits. Why didn’t you rid yourself of it?’
Staring now, Will is thinking of the slave ship upon the open sea, and how it would move; the dreadful compression of humanity below deck as it rolled upon a wave; the hundreds of gallons of freezing saltwater that would pour in through the hatches. ‘I don’t know that either.’
Mrs Lamb comes around the table to retrieve her sack. She slides out the silver trays and lays them in a row, upon the knotted wood. ‘There’s more,’ she says, almost casually, ‘if you want them, that is. In that drawer.’
Will is snapped back to the still room. ‘What d’you mean?’
She shrugs. ‘Just seems that you’re holding on to that one very tightly, Mr Turner. Perhaps it speaks to you. To your Christian conscience.’
Will returns the Brookes to his sketchbook, refastens the clasps and looks towards the door. Is this why she wanted him in there? Why she snagged him in the corridor? He has an instinctive wariness of causes. Painters of any ambition take care to remain independent. He knows a couple of politically minded artists back in London and it’s proving a pronounced obstacle to their rise. ‘I don’t, madam. I assure you.’
The still-room maid shrugs again and begins to transfer the sweetmeats from table to tray, plucking up three or four of the miniature piglets at a time; and then she changes the subject so deftly and completely that it’s as if their discussion of the Brookes hadn’t occurred.
‘In’t it strange, though,’ she says, ‘that the family should be choosing to put on such a large entertainment as this one upstairs. Word down here is that Mr Lascelles and his sisters – one of his sisters, anyhow – should rightfully be hiding themselves away.’
Will, still a little flustered and contemplating his exit, wasn’t listening. ‘Beg pardon?’
‘And there’s the death.’ Mrs Lamb adjusts a couple of the piglets. ‘Some might say that it’s difficult to mourn an infant only a day old, already buried down in Huntingdonshire, and with a twin still living. But their brother Henry would be unimpressed, I reckon, and injured perhaps, to see all this jollity at Harewood barely two months later.’
This Will hears. Henry Lascelles is the second son, the politician. Will was unaware that he’d suffered such a loss. Small children die easily, though, and babies especially; it is not, in his experience, regarded as grounds for any prolonged seclusion. ‘What was the first thing? The sisters?’
Mrs Lamb, starting on the fishes, is happy to tell him. ‘They say that our Miss Lascelles found herself in a spot of trouble down in London. Quite compromised, she was. The poor dear had to be whisked off post-haste, back to Harewood.’
Just as Will deduced. He sees Mary Ann flouncing from the dining room upstairs, her footfalls rattling the glassware; Beau’s show of contrition once she was gone. ‘What happened?’
‘D’ye really not know, Mr Turner? D’ye not read the London papers? The Intelligencer and suchlike?’
Gutter rags were always heaped around Father’s shop, pored over by the clientele, every veiled reference and pseudonym debated at length. Will, concerned only with art reviews, never looks at them. ‘I confess that I don’t.’
The first silver tray is covered, loaded with confectionary. Mrs Lamb switches to the stars, continuing her revelations with steely levity. ‘You’ll be unaware, then, that Miss Lascelles’ mishaps are followed closely in their pages. All the available details. They find their way up here eventually. And those on the staff who wintered at Hanover Square saw plenty of it for themselves.’ She taps a clot of sugar from a star’s tail. ‘There was an affair, Mr Turner, and a wild one at that, and then there was a jilting. Our young miss was knocked off some gentleman’s boots like a lump of dung.’
‘Who was he?’
‘No
