Island of the Swans (55 page)

“To be sure, m’lady,” Offy replied quickly. “I hung it in the studio dressing room myself.”

“How very kind, Miss Palmer. Thank you so much.”

Fighting an onslaught of unwelcome memories, Jane followed the painter’s niece up a second flight of stairs toward what she assumed to be the location of the artist’s studio, acknowledging bleakly to herself that nothing she did really seemed to numb the pain of Thomas’s departure.

Give it up…

Blessed St. Ninian, how she’d tried to forget Thomas Fraser! After Thomas had decamped for war in the Colonies, she’d done her best to follow his advice and had shown nothing but loyalty to Alex, though her husband shared her bed infrequently ever since Louisa was born, and showed fatherly interest only in their ten-year-old son, Huntly. To his eldest daughter, Charlotte, and to Madelina and Susan, he extended passing pleasantries, if he took note of them at all. Louisa, with her bright curls and lovely oval face, had essentially been ignored by the duke since birth.

Jane followed along as Offy Palmer led her down another long passageway on the second floor. There was good reason for her husband to shun her last-born child, she thought glumly. However, if Alex had any suspicions that Louisa was not his, he adamantly refused to confront her with them whenever she took her courage in hand and attempted to broach the subject. He had once again erected an impenetrable fortress around himself, as he had after Thomas Fraser’s miraculous return from the dead, so soon after Alex’s marriage to Jane. To outsiders, their lives appeared perfectly normal. But Jane knew the truth. The Duke of Gordon treated all the females in his household, including her, with a cool detachment that brooked no intrusion.

Sir Joshua Reynolds’s niece opened a door that led into a large unfurnished room. Jane was conscious, suddenly, of the pungent odor of oil paints and bitumen. She gave closer inspection to rows of celebrated faces adorning the spacious gallery.

“Ah, that’s Dr. Samuel Johnson, is it not?” Jane inquired of a marvel-ously rendered figure. “And next to it, Gibbon, the historian?”

“Yes, mum,” answered Offy proudly.

“Now here’s a difficult subject,” Jane said wryly, nodding toward a rather large canvas of the Prince of Wales.

King George III’s son, a young man of eighteen, was quite handsome, but Jane considered him rather dissolute in character. The lad was constantly wrangling with his father over his allowance and his unfortunate habit of wooing unsuitable women into his bed. Jane heard the murmur of people chatting in the next room, punctuated by explosive bursts of merriment.

“Sir Joshua is receiving at this hour?” Jane asked archly.

“Just a small group of friends, due to leave shortly,” Offy Palmer explained nervously. “There’s Fanny Burney, the novelist, whom I’m sure you know—I adored
Evelina
, didn’t you, Your Grace?” the young woman exclaimed. She was plainly enthralled with the rather charming account of an amiable young girl’s entrance into society. “And Angelica Kauffmann, who, I believe, painted
you
the same year my uncle did that charming half-canvas of you in fancy dress… wasn’t that in seventy-four? Dr. Johnson was due for tea,” Offy prattled on, “but I heard not a soul can cross the city because there are masses of people parading in the streets.”

Jane attempted to shrug off a sense of foreboding concerning her brother-in-law’s latest antics as they entered Sir Joshua Reynolds’s celebrated painting room. It was an odd-angled chamber, some twenty by sixteen feet in size, with windows positioned nine feet off the ground. The sunshine pooled in bright patches on the floor, highlighting the spackles of time-worn paint from portraits long completed. In the center of the room, as if sitting on a stage, stood a large wooden easel, and on it, an imposing frame of blank canvas. Nearby was Sir Joshua’s five-drawer box of oils overflowing with small pots of color.

“Why, Duchess!” Sir Joshua said, quickly rising from a small table flanked by two women Jane recognized as the Misses Kauffmann and Burney. “We quite forgot the time. Will you take tea?”

“No, thank you, Sir Joshua,” Jane replied, noting that Reynolds’s guests were in the process of bidding adieu. Once pleasantries and farewells had been exchanged by the departing guests, Reynolds said genially, “Shall we both change, Your Grace?” He pointed to a small attiring room off his studio. Jane could see her court gown hanging in readiness. “A maid will assist you. I must find my smock.”

“That will suit admirably,” Jane answered in a loud voice, remembering the gossip that Sir Joshua’s hearing was failing him at an alarming rate, though he was only fifty-six. Sure enough, this bit of intelligence was confirmed by the curved ear trumpet lying next to a teacup on the table.

The heavy velvet folds and tight bodice of Jane’s formal gown were stiflingly hot. As she assumed various postures for Reynolds’s scrutiny, she began to doubt the wisdom of commencing a series of sittings in such a warm season. Beads of perspiration bubbled above her lip as she and the artist discussed the effect both hoped to achieve with the painting—and its price: one hundred and fifty pounds.

The artist’s assistant, Mr. Toms, who’d created the lovely miniature of little Louisa, stood to one side, watching the painter intently as Reynolds sketched several quick drawings on paper to give Jane an idea of his vision for the work. At length, he chose to have her stand slightly in profile. He set to work outlining a preliminary drawing on a small canvas, which would eventually serve as a guide to the life-size canvas leaning against the easel.

Jane surreptitiously studied the celebrated artist. He was not a handsome man, but had a pleasant, broad, clean-shaven countenance that might be taken for that of an apothecary, or perhaps a linen merchant. His hands were large and capable—beautiful, actually, despite a darkish caste to them from years of handling oils. Sir Joshua noticed her staring at him and smiled.

“You were studying me rather like I must study you, Your Grace,” he said. Glancing at her injured finger, he added gently, “Rather than wear the ducal coronet, Duchess, I’d prefer you hold it in your right hand.”

“Excellent,” Jane answered calmly, convinced more than ever of the man’s talent and tact. Her amputated forefinger was now completely disguised by the curve of the small crown.

Suddenly Reynolds’s niece Offy Palmer burst through the door and began whispering to Mr. Toms in an agitated fashion.

“What
is
it, Offy?” Reynolds asked, irritably. “Speak up! You know I can’t hear anything when you talk like that! What do you mean, disturbing us like this?”

“I’m so sorry, Uncle,” Offy apologized, wringing her hands and glancing distractedly in Jane’s direction. She ran to the tea table and handed Reynolds his ear trumpet. “Ralph Kirkley has just returned, sir, and says the mob’s headed for Leicester Square!” she shouted into the horn.

“That valet’s afraid of his own shadow, Offy, you know that,” Sir Joshua scoffed, waving his curved hearing aid in the air. “Now, be gone with you! The duchess is, no doubt, melting in her finery, and I want to finish this preliminary sketch as quickly as I can.”

“But Uncle!” Offy protested. “It was Sir George Savile who
introduced
the Catholic Relief Act. Kirkley says he heard some of the rabble swear they’d burn his house to the
ground
!”

“Sir George lives across the square, does he not?” Jane asked.

Offy and Mr. Toms nodded emphatically.

“Yes, but I doubt—” began Sir Joshua.

A low rumble that sounded like a barrel being rolled across a wooden floor drifted into the room through the studio’s clerestory windows. Jane glanced at the wide-eyed Offy and Toms and quickly stepped down from the low riser and velvet backdrop where she’d been posing.

“Sir Joshua,” she said loudly, “I think it wise if we conclude this first appointment and you instruct your servants to make fast the doors and windows of your house.”

“My dear Duchess, I don’t think that will be necess—”

A wave of shouting that even the nearly deaf Reynolds could hear interrupted the painter, midsentence. Offy and Mr. Toms exchanged frightened looks, as Jane hurried to don the simply styled dress she’d worn earlier. By the time she emerged from the dressing room, a rhythmic chanting could clearly be heard in the square outside.

“No Popery! No Popery!”

“Down with Savile!”

“May the Devil take the Pope!”

The shouts seemed to come from every direction. She made her way back through the house and down the stairs. Reynolds and his household were gathered in the front foyer, staring out the window in amazement at Leicester Square. The tree-lined area was packed from one end to the other with the ill-clad, obviously inebriated rabble, numbering in the thousands.

“They was
everywhere
, Sir Joshua!” exclaimed a man Jane took to be the servant Ralph Kirkley. “One group came over Blackfriars Bridge and another, London Bridge, but the main mob marched over Westminster and choked near every entrance to Commons ’n Lords. ’Twas frightening, Sir… I can tell you that!”

“Tell him how they accosted the carriages,” Offy said excitedly. “The Archbishop
himself was
catcalled and howled at and spattered with mud. How he ever escaped inside Parliament must be the Lord’s own knowledge. Sir George Savile’s coach was demolished, I heard… had its wheels wrenched
right off.
”

“I saw it with me own eyes,” Kirkley confirmed. “The House has adjourned, so the mob’s spreading through the town, up to no good.”

“Have you heard what role Lord George Gordon played in the melee?” Jane asked evenly, though dreading to hear the answer.

“A footman in Commons told me that the Reverend Thomas Bowen, the chaplain of the House of Commons, asked Lord George to disperse the mob, but when he went outside to speak, he only told them the king would instruct the Ministers to repeal the Bill, as they wanted,” Kirkley related.

“Oh, God…” Jane groaned aloud.
A
pox
on that demented brother-in-law!
she thought.

“Now, I’m told,” the servant continued, “they’re torching Catholic chapels all over the city and attacking the embassies of Catholic countries. Lord Mansfield’s house is burnt to cinders!”

The sound of shattering glass from across the square riveted their attention.

“Oh, no!” cried Offy, “’tis Sir George’s house. Look!”

All the windows in Savile’s fashionable residence across the way were broken, one by one, by rocks thrown by the throng clogging the square. The iron railings surrounding the house were yanked from their moorings, as if they were mere matchsticks.

“I think we should leave this house at once, Sir Joshua,” Jane said decisively. “We could go out the back alley to St. Martin’s Lane and down Pall Mall to my house in St. James’s Square.”

Sir Joshua stared silently out the front window. “My friend, Edmund Burke, also lives in St. James’s Square,” he mused aloud. “Perhaps ’twould be a prudent precaution.”

“But what of the
work
!” declared his assistant, Mr. Toms.

“We shall cram as many canvases into the coach as we can,” Jane said. “Come, let’s not tarry, Sir Joshua,” she added urgently, recalling the violence of the mob that she and Alex had barely escaped at Edinburgh’s Canongate Playhouse. “That rabble will soon tire of merely breaking windows.”

The chanting of the hordes in the square grew deafening as Reynolds, his servants, and the Duchess of Gordon each made several trips from the gallery out the back door to the mews where Sir Joshua’s carriage was being harnessed to a team of grays. Portraits of every size and description were hurriedly carried out of the house and stuffed into the cab or tied down on top of the vehicle. Jane had heard of Reynolds’s famous “chariot,” as he called it, but she was not prepared for such an enormous, richly carved and gilded coach, adorned with painted panels representing the four seasons. The showy equipage was good for business, no doubt, but Jane worried they would be set on the minute the crowd spotted such ostentatious livery.

Ralph Kirkley and the other servants climbed on top of the huge conveyance, each holding onto a painting of the size appropriate to his or her stature. Inside the coach, scores of portraits were stacked high on the seat against one wall and on the floor beneath their feet, leaving barely enough room for Sir Joshua, Offy, and Jane to squeeze in on the opposite bench. The coachman gave a thunderous crack of his whip and the magnificent vehicle, pulled by a perfectly matched pair of geldings, sailed down the back alley and into St. Martin’s Lane.

The coach curtains were discreetly drawn closed, but Jane peeked out the window at the stragglers from the main mob, who brandished scythes and sticks and pelted the carriage from time to time with small stones and rotting produce. Smoke had started to drift into the cloudless sky and Jane could smell the fire she assumed was burning at poor Sir George Savile’s abode.

As the carriage turned the corner into Pall Mall, Jane was horrified to see an ocean of dirty faces, sporting the Protestant blue cockade, clogging the thoroughfare and preventing their progress. Soon, the sea of bodies surrounded the coach. She felt it rocking back and forth, almost as if the throng would soon lift it overhead and toss it like so much cotton, into the crowd.

The sound of a whip’s crack rent the air once more and, in an instant, Jane could hear men and women howling in pain. The cracks and the screams went on for some time and then, slowly, the coach continued along the street. A chorus of obscenities shouted by the throng followed them as Sir Joshua’s carriage ploughed through the teeming masses. At one point, the coach seemed about to topple as its wheels rolled over something formidable. Probably someone’s body, Jane thought, shuddering.

Oddly, St. James’s Square itself was quiet when the horses, their sides heaving and their eyes darting wildly, pulled in front of the sedate residence marked Number 6. Her own staff rushed to free them from the tight confines of the coach.

“I sincerely thank you for your protection, Sir Joshua,” Jane said, alighting the cobbled pavement. “I’m only sorry a relative of my husband’s should have anything to do with such abominations as we’ve seen this day.”