‘Are you kidding? She’d love to see it.’
Elodie managed a weak smile and told herself that it would be helpful to have Caroline’s input. Unpleasant personal feelings aside, it was her job to learn as much as she could about the photograph and the sketchbook. And if a genuine tie to Radcliffe heralded any new information on James Stratton, it would be a very good thing for the archive team at Stratton, Cadwell & Co. New information on well-known Victorians did not surface often.
CHAPTER FIVE
Elodie walked the long way back, detouring down Lamb’s Conduit Street because it was pretty and the dove-grey chocolate box of the Persephone shopfront always managed to lift her spirits. She ducked inside – force of habit – and it was there, while she was leafing through the war diaries of Vere Hodgson, soaking up a 1930s swing-dance track, that her phone began to shrill.
It was Penelope again, and Elodie suffered an immediate clutch of panic.
She left the bookstore, cutting quickly across Theobalds Road, and then High Holborn, through to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Elodie picked up her pace as she passed the Royal Courts of Justice, darted behind a red bus to cross the street, and was almost jogging as she made her way along the Strand.
Rather than go straight back to work where Mr Pendleton was in exactly the sort of mood to relish catching one of them making personal calls, she slipped down a cobbled laneway that dog-legged towards the river and found a bench on Victoria Embankment, right near the pier.
She fished out her notebook and flipped to where she’d written the phone number of the wedding reception venue in Gloucestershire; Elodie dialled and made an appointment to visit the following weekend. Leaving no time for her commitment to cool, she telephoned Penelope, apologised for having missed her calls, and launched into a report of the progress she’d made with respect to the venue, the veil, the dress and the videos.
After she hung up, Elodie sat for a few minutes. Penelope had been very pleased, particularly when Elodie reported the suitcase of her mother’s recordings she now had in her possession. She had suggested that, rather than featuring only one clip of Elodie’s mother playing the cello, they might feasibly include another at the end of the ceremony. Elodie had promised to make a shortlist of three tracks so that they could look at them together and decide. ‘Best make it five,’ Penelope had said. ‘Just in case.’
So, that was the weekend sorted.
The ferry carrying tourists to Greenwich pulled out from the pier and a man in a Stars and Stripes cap pointed a long-lens camera at Cleopatra’s Needle. A skein of ducks swooped in to take the boat’s place, landing expertly on the choppy surface.
The ferry left ripples that washed against the low-tide bank, filling the air with the scent of mud and brine, and Elodie thought of a description in James Stratton’s journal of the Great Stink of 1858. People didn’t realise how badly London had smelled back then. The streets had been covered with animal dung, human waste, rotting vegetables and the carcasses of slaughtered animals. All of it, and a lot more besides, had found its way into the river.
In the summer of 1858, the smell coming in off the Thames was reportedly so fetid that the Palace of Westminster had to be closed and those who could afford it were evacuated from London. The young James Stratton had been inspired to form the Committee to Clean Up London; he’d even published an article in 1862 in a journal called the Builder, agitating for progress. Amongst the archives were letters exchanged between Stratton and Sir Joseph Bazalgette, whose London sewer system was one of the great triumphs of Victorian England, funnelling excrement away from the built-up centre so that not only was the smell improved, but the incidence of waterborne disease was significantly reduced.
The thought of Stratton reminded Elodie that she had a workplace she was supposed to be at and a job she was meant to be doing. She went quickly, mindful of how long it had been since she’d left to meet Pippa, and was glad when she arrived to find that Mr Pendleton had been called away and would be out of the office for the rest of the day.
Eager to capitalise on her return to efficiency, Elodie spent the afternoon cataloguing the remaining items from the lost archive box. The sooner it was filed and finished, the better.
She started by running a database search for ‘Radcliffe’ and was surprised when the results delivered two items. One of the first jobs that Elodie had been assigned when she started at the firm was transferring the index card system onto the computer; she prided herself on having a near photographic memory for the people and places that James Stratton had known and couldn’t remember ever having come across the name Radcliffe before.
Curious, she fetched the corresponding documents from the file room and brought them back to her desk. The first was an 1861 letter from James Stratton to the art dealer John Haverstock, with whom he’d had plans to dine the following week. In the final paragraph of the letter, Stratton expressed a desire to ‘find out what you know about a painter whose name I came across recently – Edward Radcliffe. I am told he is a man of rare talent, although having had an opportunity to glimpse samples of his work I observe that his “talent”, at least in part, is an ability to charm his young female subjects into revealing more than they otherwise might – all in the name of art, naturally.’
As far as Elodie could remember, James Stratton did not own any of Radcliffe’s paintings (though she made a note to confirm that fact); so, despite his interest in the painter, he must ultimately have been disinclined to acquire Radcliffe’s work.