Edward Radcliffe: His Life and Loves. The title was a bit sappy, but then it had been originally published in 1931, and it didn’t do to judge by contemporary standards. There was a photograph of the author, Dr Leonard Gilbert, on the inside of the dust jacket, a black-and-white image of a serious young man in a light-coloured suit. It was hard to guess his age.
The book was divided into eight chapters: the first two gave an account of Radcliffe’s childhood, his family background, his interest in folk tales, and his early artistic abilities, highlighting his particular affection for houses, and positing that the thematic focus on ‘home’ and enclosed spaces in his art might have been the result of his fractured upbringing. The next two described the formation of the Magenta Brotherhood, profiling its other members and outlining Radcliffe’s early achievements at the Royal Academy. The fifth chapter took a turn for the personal, detailing his relationship with Frances Brown and their eventual engagement; the sixth arrived finally at the model known as Lily Millington and the period in Radcliffe’s life during which he created his most extraordinary works.
It went against her grain, but Elodie couldn’t resist starting at chapter six, sinking into Leonard Gilbert’s account of a chance meeting in London between Edward Radcliffe and the woman whose face and bearing would inspire him to create some of the aesthetic movement’s most striking pieces of art – a woman with whom Gilbert claimed the artist would fall deeply in love. He likened Lily Millington to the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets, making much of the mystery of her true identity.
As Pippa had forewarned, a lot of the information, particularly that of a biographical nature, had come from a single ‘anonymous source’, a local woman who had ‘enjoyed a close association with the Radcliffe family’. The source, according to Gilbert, had been especially close to Radcliffe’s youngest sister, Lucy, and offered important insights into Radcliffe’s childhood and the events of the summer of 1862, during which his fiancée was shot and killed and Lily Millington disappeared. Gilbert had met the woman when he visited the village of Birchwood to complete his doctoral thesis; he had then conducted a series of interviews with her between 1928 and 1930.
Although Gilbert’s intimate portrayal of Radcliffe and his model must necessarily have been largely imagined – extrapolated from fact, if Elodie were to be generous – it was rich and nuanced. Gilbert wrote with insight and care, weaving a story that brought the pair to life, culminating in their final summer together at Birchwood Manor. The tone was unusually affecting, and Elodie was pondering why that might be, when she realised the answer was simple: Leonard Gilbert, the author, had fallen in love with Lily Millington. So appealing was his depiction that Elodie found that she, too, couldn’t help but be drawn to this woman of brilliance and beauty. In Gilbert’s hands, she was enchanting. Every word caressed her character, from the initial description of a young woman whose ‘flame brightly burned’ to the poignant turn as the chapter reached its end.
For in chapter seven, the story arrived at Radcliffe’s downfall, and Gilbert went against conventional wisdom to propose his new theory: that the artist’s decline was not the result of his fiancée’s death but was in fact due to the loss of his great love and muse, Lily Millington. Based on information gleaned from ‘never before seen’ police reports, Gilbert posited a theory that the model had been an accomplice to the robbery in which Frances Brown was shot dead, fleeing afterwards with the intruder to America, taking with them the Radcliffe family’s heirloom pendant.
The official story, Gilbert claimed, had been massaged over the years by the Radcliffe family themselves, whose influence in the village extended to sway with the local constabulary, and the family of Miss Brown, in whose mutual interest it was to erase all mention and memory of ‘the woman who had stolen Edward Radcliffe’s heart’. Far more palatable to both families, each of whom took a view to posterity, preferring tragedy to scandal, was the official narrative that an unknown thief had broken into the manor house to steal the necklace, killing Frances Brown and devastating her devoted fiancé. A search was mounted for the pendant, but aside from occasional false reports no trace was found.
Compared with the rest of Gilbert’s book, the theory relating to Lily Millington’s perfidy was proposed in an almost mechanical tone, the text based heavily on direct quotes from the case notes Gilbert had found in the police files. As a researcher, Elodie could understand Gilbert’s reluctance to believe such treachery of the woman he’d conjured into life in the previous chapter. This chapter read as if two aspects of the same man were doing battle: the ambitious academic in possession of an intoxicating new theory, and the writer who had come to feel great affection for a character he’d spent so long depicting. And then there was that face. Elodie considered the way the woman in the silver-framed photograph had got beneath her skin. Even as she reminded herself sternly of the dangers and powers inherent to beauty, Elodie knew that she, too, was resistant to the notion that the woman in white could be capable of such stunning duplicity.
Despite his unwillingness to accept wholeheartedly the idea that Lily Millington was central to its disappearance, Gilbert went into some detail about the pendant, for it turned out that the diamond it contained was no ordinary gem. The twenty-three-carat stone was a blue diamond so rare and valuable that it had its own name: the Radcliffe Blue. The lineage of the Blue could be traced back in time to Marie Antoinette, for whom the remarkable stone had first been set in a pendant; back further to the mercenary John Hawkwood, who obtained the gem during a raid on Florence in the fourteenth century and couldn’t bear to be parted from it, going to his deathbed, according to one report, ‘loaden with honour and riches’; back further still to tenth-century India, where it was said – apocryphally, in Gilbert’s opinion – that the stone had been plucked by a travelling merchant from the wall of a Hindu temple. Whatever the case, when the stone fell into the hands of the Radcliffe family in 1816, it was reset in a filigree gold casing and threaded onto a fine chain to sit at the hollow of the neck. Spectacular, but of prohibitive value: for the half-century or so that the diamond remained in the possession of the Radcliffe family, it was kept almost exclusively in the family’s safety deposit box at Lloyd’s of London.
Elodie wasn’t particularly interested in the history of the Radcliffe Blue, but the next line made her sit upright. According to Gilbert, Edward Radcliffe had ‘borrowed’ the pendant from the safety deposit box in June 1862 in order that his model could wear it in a great work he planned to complete over the summer. This, then, must be the unfinished painting that had come to be regarded by art lovers and academics with mythological longing.