Seventy-Seven Clocks

∨ Seventy-Seven Clocks ∧

29

Brotherhood

After a night of bad dreams, Arthur Bryant arose unrefreshed and sat on the end of his bed, trying to order his thoughts. He hated to admit it, but they had failed. Failed the public, failed themselves. He had not felt this depressed in years. The pestilence attacking the Whitstable family would try to run its course before they could discover its root. Checking the notes he had left for himself on the bedside table, he rang Jerry Gates at her home. An icy-voiced woman, presumably her mother, asked him to hold. A minute later, Jerry picked up the phone.

“Yesterday you mentioned something about your father working for the Whitstables,” said Bryant.

“That’s right, he had contracts with a couple of their companies.”

“There’s something you could do for me.”

“Anything. Just name it.”

“You could find out about the people he deals with. I realize this might involve a certain disloyalty to your father. I need documentation concerning deals with silk manufacturers and exporters in Calcutta and Bombay. You might talk to your father and find out if he’s seen or heard anything unusual. You know the investigation almost as well as we do. You should know what to ask, and what to look for.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ll get on to it right away.”

“Call me if you find anything, anything at all. Do you have the number of my direct line?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. It’s written down somewhere…”

“I’ll find you, don’t worry,” she promised.

The morning had dawned cold and dull, the weather Bryant loathed the most. His appointment with Peregrine Summerfield was set for nine a.m. He would walk as far as Vauxhall Bridge, then hail a cab. It was a pity the trams had stopped running in 1952; one used to pass right by the front door of his building. He missed the hiss and crackle of the gliding cars.

That was the difference between himself and May. John had no attachment to the past, sentimental or otherwise. He was interested in moving on. He saw life as a linear progression, a series of lessons to be learned, all extraneous information to be tossed away, a continual streamlining of ideas.

Bryant collected the detritus of historical data as naturally as an anchor accumulates barnacles. He couldn’t help it; the past was as fascinating as a classic beauty, infinitely fathomable and for ever out of reach. But this was one secret he was determined to lay bare. He would stake his life on the answer lying in the Whitstable family’s burst of good fortune at the end of the last century. Could there really have been an event of such magnitude that it involved an entire dynasty? A moment of such farreaching consequence that even now, nearly a hundred years later, it was reaping a revenge of misery and destruction?

As he reached the eastern edge of the park, a phrase resounded in his head. The sons shall be visited with the sins of the fathers. James Whitstable and his kindred Olympian spirits, the Seven Stewards of Heaven. The Inner Circle. The Alliance of Eternal Light. They were one and the same. How the Victorians loved their secret societies, their gentlemen’s clubs and hermetic orders, their table-rappings, recitals, and rituals, gatherings primarily designed to exclude.

Was that it? Who had James Makepeace Whitstable and his friends wanted to exclude this time? Their society of seven was no mere parlour game for the menfolk, somewhere to escape from family responsibilities. Their alliance was built within the family itself.

If its purpose was not to exclude, then it must be to protect.

To protect the lives of the Whitstable clan? No, these men were well respected and powerful. They would have made dangerous enemies. What else might they have wanted to protect? Their money? Wasn’t that far more likely? He looked out at the Thames, a curving olive ribbon two hundred and fifteen miles long, flowing back and forth with the pulse of the moon.

The art historian was late, as usual. Summerfield was sporting the traditional English art-history uniform: an ancient tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, a brown woolly tie, baggy corduroy trousers, and battered loafers, presumably intended to identify him to civilians in the event of an art emergency. He noisily hailed Arthur across the forecourt of the Royal Academy in a shower of pipe ash, then clapped him on the back as they entered Burlington House together.

Although he had been a regular visitor in his youth, Arthur had not called at the Academy for quite a while, and was pleased to find it unchanged, Michelangelo’s spectacular Carrara marble tondo of The Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John occupying its traditional space. Every accepted member of the foundation submitted a piece of his or her work to the Academy as a gift, with the result that Reynolds, Gainsborough, Constable, and Turner were all represented on its walls. The Academy’s summer exhibition, an event of unparalleled blandness open to all artists irrespective of nationality or training, had been dismaying critics for more than two centuries.

“Glad you could make it,” boomed Summerfield, looking about them. “Some halfway decent pictures are hung around these walls. Y’know, this business of yours has got me hooked. The Waterhouse study is being authenticated downstairs. I told them it’s genuine but they insist on checking for themselves. Tosspots.”

They descended a winding marble staircase that led to the workrooms where paintings and sculptures were unpacked and studied. Summerfield pushed open a door marked Access By Appointment Only and led the way across a large white studio, one wall of which consisted of opaque backlit glass, to a cluttered wooden bench, on which lay the study Bryant had discovered in Bella Whitstable’s basement.

“Tell me what relevance you imagine this picture having to our investigation,” he asked, watching as the historian lowered his bulk on to a corner of the bench. “Beyond the fact that one of the victims defaced it, I mean.”

“Ah, I think you understand why I’ve asked you here,” replied Summerfield. “I wondered if you’d see it first.”

Arthur stood before the study and examined it once more. Although just two thirds of the five-foot-long picture had been blocked with colour and all but two of the figures were only roughly delineated, the formal structure of Waterhouse’s finished painting could easily be discerned.

“Perhaps I should explain my thinking,” said Arthur, picking up a paintbrush and running his thumb across the sable tip. “At an early point in the investigation I became convinced that the answer lay in the Whitstable family’s past. There was a madness of purpose that suggested a curious kind of Victorian sensibility at work. Each death has been achieved with grotesque flair, an oddness beyond anything we find in our bright, modern world. Naturally my partner doesn’t agree, so I’ve been forced to go it alone.”

He paused to scratch his broad nose with the end of the brush. “I only had a vague date, some time at the beginning of the 1880s, and a number, seven. Seven men in an alliance, six courtiers and an emperor gathered in a painting. I tried to imagine seven wealthy businessmen, heads of a successful trading family, forming themselves into a society that would protect their self-made fortunes from harm, a society with an acceptable public face, and perhaps less reputable private pastimes. But how would they commemorate its inception without drawing attention? What would the traditional Victorian do?”

“Commission a painting,” said Summerfield.

“Exactly. Your comment about Victorians smuggling sex on to their parlour walls in the form of mythological paintings gave me the idea. But there is a problem with the theory. When the details of this club – The Alliance of Eternal Light – finally came to light, I found that its foundation date was some time in 1881. And you say that Waterhouse produced his painting at the end of 1883. I have a two-year discrepancy in the dates…”

“I can explain that easily,” said Summerfield. “The first oil sketch for Emperor Honorius was knocked out on a manky old bit of board less than a foot square in 1882, and there was probably a gestation period predating that. So it could easily have been commissioned by your alliance. But you’ve got a bigger problem to think about.”

“What?”

“Well, look at it,” said Summerfield, waving at the study. “If this really was commissioned to celebrate the founding of a new alliance, it doesn’t do a very good job. Think of the subject matter. What the finished painting shows is a society out of control. Honorius’s councillors can’t get his attention because he’s too busy pissing about with his birds. I told you before – as the supreme ruler of an empire, he was a plonker of the first order.” Summerfield sucked his whiskers, thinking. “Suppose this bloke Whitstable chose Waterhouse for the painting, and then the artist discovered something unpleasant about his patron? Talk about having your cake and eating it! Waterhouse got to keep the commission by producing this wonderful, satisfying piece of work, and the artist got back at his patron through the insulting classical allusion contained within the picture.”

“There’s no way of proving that.”

“Perhaps not, until you remember what the finished painting looked like.” Summerfield scrabbled beneath the study and produced a crumpled colour photocopy, which he proceeded to flatten out on a cleared part of the bench.

“Here,” he said, pointing at the copy. “Remember I told you that the key character changes? In the study, the central figure is the emperor’s attendant. In the end result, he’s been relegated to the background. The former picture shows a group of men in repose. The allusion is greatly reduced in terms of offence. The latter shows a master surrounded by sycophants. It’s as if Waterhouse was intending to have a gentle dig at his patron, as many artists did, but then – some time between 1882 and 1883 – discovered that the situation was far worse than he had imagined. So he changed the finished picture.”

“James Whitstable was an educated man, by all accounts. Surely he would have understood the allusion and taken offence?”

“I think that’s exactly what happened. The painting was sold to an Australian gallery soon after its completion. Waterhouse remained true to his ethical code. He produced a magnificent work of art. He simply went too far.”

“Which helps to explain why William Whitstable threw acid on the picture. The painting was an affront to his ancestor, and by extension to his entire family. It was the first time it had been exhibited in this country for a century.”

“I have another ‘seven’ for you,” added Summerfield. “John Waterhouse was a Royal Academy painter. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was begun by seven men. Rossetti, Millais, Holman Hunt, and four others dedicated themselves to a ‘childlike submission to nature.’ The actress Ellen Terry once told Bernard Shaw that she always visited Burne-Jones at his studio when it was foggy, because he looked so angelic painting by candlelight. Subsequently the group was joined by many other artists, and Oscar Wilde started poncing around with his sacred lily, wetting himself over the Pre-Raff sensibility because it neatly fitted in with the fact that he was horribly camp. It didn’t help having a fat old queen as a spokesperson, even a brilliant one, and pretty soon everyone started taking the piss out of the Pre-Raffs.”

“Including Gilbert and Sullivan…”

“That’s right. One of their productions parodied the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.”

“…at the Savoy Theatre.” Arthur reached for his cap and adjusted it on his head. “Peregrine, I can’t tell you what a help you’ve been.”

“Let me know how you get on,” shouted the historian. “I want to see how this one turns out.”

But by then his friend had already left the gallery workroom.