I suppose I should be flattered, to think that my face stares out from above so many sofas. It is petty of me to care, but La Belle outsells any of the other posters available in the gift shop, including the works of Thurston Holmes. I have come to understand that people relish the hint of infamy that comes from hanging a jewel thief – and possible murderess – upon their pretty wall.
Some of them, having read Leonard’s book, compare La Belle to the Portrait of Miss Frances Brown on the Occasion of Her Eighteenth Birthday, and say things like, ‘Of course, you can see that he was really in love with his model.’
It is a strange thing to hang upon the walls of so many people whom I do not know, over one hundred and fifty years after I met Edward Radcliffe and sat for him in that tiny studio at the bottom of his mother’s garden.
To have one’s portrait painted is among the most intimate of experiences. To feel the weight of another person’s full attention and meet it eye to eye.
I found it overwhelming enough when Edward finished and it came time for the painting to leave the studio and take its place on the Academy’s wall. And that was well before it was possible for infinite copies to be made and sold and framed; for my face, as interpreted by Edward in 1861, to appear on shopping bags and tea towels and key rings and mugs and the cover of financial year diaries in the twenty-first century.
I wonder what Felix, with his lapel button of Abraham Lincoln and his wild predictions for the future, would make of all this. It is just as he said: the camera is ubiquitous. They all carry one now. Even as I watch, they traipse through the rooms of the house, pointing their devices at this chair or those tiles. Experiencing the world at one remove, through the windows of their phones, making images for later so that they do not need to bother seeing or feeling things now.
It was different after Edward came for me at Mrs Mack’s house on Little White Lion Street. Without discussing it, we each assumed a new permanence to our relationship that had been absent before. Edward began another painting, titled Sleeping Beauty; but where once he had been the painter and I his model, now we were something else. Work bled into life, and life into work. We became inseparable.
The first weeks of 1862 were bitterly cold, but the furnace in his studio kept us warm. I remember looking up at the glass roof misting over, the grey sky glowering, as I lay upon the bed of velvet cushions he’d assembled. My hair he spread around me, long strands over my shoulders, across my décolletage.
We spent all day together and much of the night. And when, finally, he put his brushes away, he would take me back to the Seven Dials only to collect me again at daybreak. There was no longer any barrier to our conversation, and like a needle in the most adept of hands it wove together the various threads of our lives, so that he and I became tied by the stories we shared with one another. I told him the truth about my mother and father, the workshop with its wonders, the trips to Greenwich, the tin in which I’d tried to capture light; I spoke to him of Pale Joe and our unlikely friendship; Mrs Mack and the Captain; Little Girl Lost and my pair of white kid gloves. I trusted him with my real name.
Edward’s friends noticed his absence. He had always been subject to periods of obsessive work and retreat, leaving London for weeks at a time on creative travels that his family knew affectionately as his ‘faraways’; but evidently his complete withdrawal in early 1862 was different. He did not pause in his endeavours even to write and send a letter; neither did he attend any of the weekly meetings of the Magenta Brotherhood in the public bar at The Queen’s Larder.
It was March, and Sleeping Beauty was all but finished by the time he introduced me to the others. We met at the home of Felix and Adele Bernard on Tottenham Court Road; a house with a plain brick facade that concealed rooms of great bohemian déshabillé. The walls were painted in burgundy and deepest blue, cluttered with enormous framed oil paintings and photographic prints. What seemed like hundreds of tiny flames flickered atop elaborate candelabras, casting shadows across the walls, and the air was thick with smoke and impassioned conversation.
‘So, you’re the one,’ said Thurston Holmes, his eyes not leaving mine, when Edward introduced us again, and he lifted my hand to his lips, just as he had done at the Royal Academy. Once again I felt the same churn of warning deep down in the pit of my stomach.
I was not then frightened of many things. Growing up in the Seven Dials had cured me of most fears, but Thurston Holmes unnerved me. He was a man used to getting his own way, a man who wanted for nothing material but obsessed over that which he could not have. He possessed streaks of cruelty, both casual and calculated, and was expert at their deployment. I saw him slight Adele Bernard one night with a caustic comment about one of her early photographic efforts, and then sit back, a smile on the edge of his lips, enjoying the scene as sport.
Thurston was interested in me insofar as I presented a challenge: a treasure he could take away from Edward. I knew this at the time, but I confess I did not understand then to what lengths he would go; how willing he would prove to inflict unhappiness on others for his own amusement.
I reflect sometimes on how much of what happened the summer of 1862 might have been averted had I gone with Thurston that evening in November after the exhibition at the Royal Academy, or paid him a well-placed compliment. But we all make choices, for better and for worse, and I had made mine. I continued to refuse his requests to paint me; I made sure that we were never alone together; I avoided his lingering attentions. For the most part he was discreet, preferring to needle me in secret. Only once did he push things too far with Edward; what he said I do not know, but he paid for it with a purple eye that lasted into the next week.
Mrs Mack, meanwhile, was kept happy by frequent payments for my services as a model, and Martin was left with little choice but to grudgingly accept the turn events had taken. He continued to voice his disapproval whenever he saw an opportunity, and there were times when we would leave Edward’s studio at night and a hint of movement in my peripheral vision would alert me to his presence on the other side of the street. But I could live with Martin’s misguided attentions so long as he kept them at a distance.
Edward’s mother, for her part, encouraged our ongoing association. Sleeping Beauty was exhibited to wide acclaim in April 1862 and a hover of prospective patrons descended; she entertained dreams of Royal Academy glory and wild commercial success, but she was worried, too; for while Edward’s usual habit was to move on immediately to a new subject, he had not yet begun another painting. After the exhibition, he alternated instead between bouts of distraction, in which a faraway expression cast a glaze across his features, and periods of feverish scribbling in his notebook. Motivated by the quality of his recent work and her own reliance on his future, she urged him down to the studio day and night, plying me with cake and tea as if she feared that only by such morsels could I be kept from vanishing back to the place from which I had come.
As for Fanny, aside from a brief nod of aloof acknowledgement at the exhibition of Sleeping Beauty, I saw her only once, when she and her mother came to tea with Mrs Radcliffe and were walked down the garden path to observe the artist at work. They stood inside the door, behind Edward’s shoulder, Fanny preening and posing in a new satin dress. ‘Goodness,’ she said, ‘aren’t the colours pretty?’ – at which Edward met my eyes and within his own I saw a smile of such warmth and longing that it took my breath away.