Mrs Whistler. Matthew Plampin

shipbroker was a tall, straight sort of man, standing a good foot over Jimmy and Maud. A neat dark beard masked a narrow chin, while blank black eyes stared from beneath a broad forehead. He was wearing his standard, somewhat peculiar costume: a black suit and elaborately frilled shirt, with shiny, buckled shoes, like a music-hall undertaker. There was nothing music-hall about his manner, though – he was utterly cold, his voice without expression. Maud had actually met him on three previous occasions, for dinners at Lindsey Row, at which he’d been awkward, humourless, quite unable to blend with the artists, writers and actresses seated around him. They hadn’t conversed exactly, but they had spoken. Those black eyes had roamed over her, proprietorial and unashamed. Now he paid her no notice at all.

      ‘We are to make our terms here in the street, are we?’ Jimmy asked. He was using his performance voice, Maud noticed, which was rather more high-pitched than normal, with everything exaggerated – the American vowels yet longer and the Frenchified flourishes more pronounced. ‘Like men haggling over a horse?’

      Leyland waited.

      ‘Two thousand guineas, then. There’s my price. That’s what I asked you for, if you recall.’

      Maud turned away, smothering a laugh. He was joking, surely. The dining room was extremely fine, of course it was – but two thousand guineas? That was enough to buy the bloody house it stood in.

      Jimmy was perfectly in earnest, however. ‘Four hundred apiece for the three peacock shutters,’ he said, ‘and a further eight hundred for the rest. Very fair, Leyland, by any yardstick.’

      ‘Do not test me, Whistler. I could have you barred from the house. I could have those peacocks of yours torn out and burned in the garden.’

      There was condescension in the shipbroker now. He believed he had Jimmy outclassed, that this was a matter of bargaining, of forming a contract − his province. Regardless of what he thought of the room, the fellow’s pride plainly insisted on victory, and the imposition of his will; that his artist be put in his place and led, chastened, back to work. Maud hugged herself, feeling the first spot of rain land upon her cheek. She knew for a cast-iron fact that it would not be as simple as that.

      ‘You are right.’ Jimmy inclined his head graciously, as if accepting a fault. ‘You are quite right. My apologies. Bon Dieu, how appallingly rude of me. The decoration is an out-and-out disaster, after all, as you have ruled – as you have just declared so candidly to the Marquess of Westminster, and no doubt many others. The only honourable course, my dear Leyland, the only course open to me as a gentleman and a person of manners, is for us to take this sum of mine and split it between us. I will pay my thousand guineas, as my share in the dining room, and you will pay yours.’

      A cab pulled up, a four-wheeler, the driver seeming to recognise Leyland. He leaned over to ask the destination; at close sight of the shipbroker he thought better of it.

      ‘You are not serious.’

      ‘I want justice.’ Jimmy cracked the end of his cane emphatically against the pavement. ‘We bear alike the humiliation of this affair, do we not? You for having entered into it so unknowingly; me for having disappointed so very publicly? It only seems right that we should therefore bear the expense in the same proportions. One thousand guineas apiece.’

      The figure was uttered with a certain swagger, almost as if it was being attained rather than surrendered. Maud could sense Jimmy’s satisfaction; she could imagine him at the head of their dinner table, in fact, recounting the exchange to laughter and applause. Her head was beginning to spin. She wanted badly to sit down.

      Leyland looked to his gaudy shoe buckles, digesting this proposal. ‘Should I consent,’ he said, ‘the sum would be my payment to you for the dining room, and a handsome payment indeed. There would be no question of it being half of anything.’

      ‘Naturellement,’ Jimmy replied, with an obliging nod. ‘But I must be allowed the time I need. This is paramount, Leyland. I won’t be hurried out or interrupted. I won’t have your blessed caretaker always looking over my shoulder.’

      ‘You will have the remainder of the year,’ Leyland told him. ‘I am leaving for Liverpool in the morning, and won’t be returning to London until December at the earliest. I expect industry, though, Whistler. Promptitude.’ He glanced Maud’s way at last, and she had a keen, uncomfortable notion of how she must appear: half their age, pale and unkempt, hair falling from beneath her straw hat. Not respectable in the least. ‘I cannot permit any more of this … coming and going. These visitors, whomsoever they may be.’

      Jimmy opened the cab door, gave the driver their address and slung in his bag. ‘It will be finished soon enough. I have no desire at all to prolong this experience, Leyland, believe me.’ He reclaimed Maud’s hand. ‘I shall take Miss Franklin here home and see her settled, and then return early tomorrow.’

      And just like that they were going, leaving the millionaire businessman standing on the pavement in the gathering rain. Leyland seemed to have been wrong-footed. He simply stood there, arms by his sides, as Jimmy closed the cab door behind them.

      ‘One thousand,’ he stated, by way of farewell. ‘That is the agreement.’

      *

      ‘There you have it,’ Jimmy declared. ‘There you have the philistine, Maud, revealed in his full and most ignoble aspect.’ The insouciant act was beginning to slip; Maud could see the anger quivering in his jaw. ‘I have to say that the crudity of his methods has been surprising. That business with the Marquess of Westminster, that deliberate insolence, was done merely to tenderise me, don’t you see, ahead of our little negotiation. This is the manner of creature we are dealing with here. A cut-throat professional.’

      The cab turned out of Prince’s Gate. Rain was falling steadily now; people were ducking into doorways and opening umbrellas.

      ‘You asked him for two thousand guineas,’ Maud murmured.

      Saying the sum aloud amazed her all over again. She thought of the recent spate of dinners at Lindsey Row, dinners she’d been too sick to attend, held after Leyland’s first reaction to the peacocks – councils of war, Jimmy had called them, with Godwin and Eldon and the rest of them. Had this figure been agreed then? There had certainly been a lot of laughter.

      Jimmy crossed his hands atop his cane. ‘Labour has been carried out, my girl. Payment has to follow. That’s how it goes.’

      ‘But – two thousand guineas, Jimmy?’

      ‘Nothing had been agreed. Do your work, my friend Frederick Leyland said, and then let me know what I owe you. That’s how it stood between us.’

      Maud was annoyed, she realised, beneath her perplexity. She could see this for what it was. Provocation. Cheek. ‘So knowing that he didn’t care for what you’d done, you decided to ask him for a bloody fortune. What good did you imagine that would do?’

      ‘The villain has twenty times that a year,’ Jimmy countered. ‘Many hundred times it in the bank. Gained, I might add, through business practices of the utmost ruthlessness. And anyway, Maudie, you heard what just happened. I have scaled back my bill. Let a thousand guineas go. It’s quite the move, don’t you think? The rejection of the yoke. A lesson in the limits of a millionaire’s power.’

      He ran on for a while, growing increasingly pleased with himself – conceding that the lost money was significant, undeniably, but would soon be made elsewhere, once word of the dining room’s beauty had spread among people of true taste. Maud honestly didn’t know what to make of it all. She was dog-tired, despite having slept through so much of the day. Once again, also, she was being assailed by unspeakable smells, of the kind that tended to linger in public carriages. Old cheese and filthy clothes. The foul stuff that gathered beneath your toenails. These odours seemed to reach into her, to coat the inside of her throat, to coil around her innards. She stared hard out of the window. They were still a good ten minutes from home – from the broken gate and the grimy front door; from the panelled hallway beyond, leading through to the back; from the small cobbled