London,1875
The day I lost Edwin, I think my paintbrush knew before I did.
The studio was silent except for the sounds of bristles stroking against canvas, the rain splattering at the high windows, and the murmur of Mr. Poynter’s instructions as he moved among the students. There was nothing to disturb me, and I should have been able to fix my attention perfectly upon the painting on my easel.
But without warning, as if propelled by some contrary part of my brain, my wrist jerked and my brush jittered across the canvas like a live thing, marring my half-finished landscape. It landed on the floor, spattering crimson paint outward in a small, delicate fan of specks, like poppies dotting a field. The room fell silent, paintbrushes paused, and for one frozen moment all I could do was stare.
A gentle cough drew my gaze to Mr. Poynter, who looked over from where he stood beside another student’s easel. His gray eyebrows rose into crescents, his mouth parted between his thick mustache and fulsome beard—and then, as I fumbled something between an apology and an explanation, he shrugged and managed an understanding smile before he turned away.
I laid the dirtied paintbrush in the tray and knelt to wipe up the paint with a cloth. Taking a moment to regain my equanimity, I stepped back to survey my progress and felt a pang of disappointment. In my mind was a low stone farmhouse and a weathered barn flanked by a newly plowed field, the dirt a deep, rich umber, and an absinthe-green meadow edged by dusky apple trees—a scene I’d observed as a child from inside a railway carriage. The image appeared to my mind with utter clarity, down to the beveled wooden edge of the window that framed it like a picture. Usually I could transfer that clarity onto the canvas, but today it was going badly. I took a deep breath, inhaling the pungent smells of linseed oil and turpentine. Then I chose a fresh brush and began to repair the damage the errant stroke had done to the meadow.
The mishap betrayed the unease that had been clawing at me all morning. Its source was no mystery: I hadn’t heard from Edwin yet this week, and it brought back all too sharply the period in his life when he would vanish for a few days or even a fortnight. My parents and I would have an anxious time of it until eventually he skulked home, thin and shame-faced, every shilling gambled away or spent, his mouth sloppy from opium. Each time, he’d promise to do better, but his resolution never held for long. After my parents died, it was my door he’d skulk toward, usually appearing late in the afternoon, with telltale bits of pigment on his hands and purplish shadows under his eyes, mumbling that he’d been working. I didn’t inquire too closely, and it was only later I found out about the forgeries.
Since being released from prison, Edwin swore he was finished with his dissolute habits and would find a way to pursue his artistic career within the law. Indeed, in the last four months, he had exhibited many signs of sincerity; but I had seen him earnestly repentant before. Now it—
“Miss Rowe.”
I started and nearly dropped my brush again.
Geoffrey Wright, at the next easel, leaned toward me, his voice low. “Are you all right? You look awfully pale. Perhaps you belong”—a faint pause, as if for delicacy—“at home.” The solicitous tone was belied by the half-lowered eyelids and the disdainful set to his mouth. He was one of the men who deeply resented the presence of women at the school, although the founder, Mr. Slade, had made our inclusion a central tenet when he’d established it. More than once, I’d heard Mr. Wright declaiming how the classes on anatomical drawing were all but useless because the model’s loins had to be draped when women were present.
“Mr. Wright.” Mr. Poynter’s voice carried a warning.
Like children chastised for a prank, we turned guiltily to look at our professor. But we saw only his back, his hands clasped behind and his head of tidy gray hair inclined toward Miss Stokes’s still life.
Mr. Wright shot me a baleful look before he retreated behind his easel.
I pushed aside my annoyance and worry and summoned my attention back to my canvas.
I knew I was lucky to be here. Unlike Edwin, whose genius for painting had been evident early on, I’d come more slowly and uncertainly to my scrap of talent. I’d been accepted at the Slade School on the basis of two paintings that I could see now were poorly conceived and, though energetic, not well handled. After many missteps, I’d begun to win some approval from Mr. Poynter for what he called “the small scene,” but I’d also begun to understand just how limited my education had been, particularly in comparison with that received by the young men in the class. At times I felt a wretched inadequacy, and though most of the men were kinder than Mr. Wright, often I felt embarrassed at my ignorance. So I spent my evenings reading books on subjects such as geography and history and my days doing my diligent best to accomplish what Mr. Poynter asked.
My work finished for the afternoon, I washed my brushes, set them bristles-end-up in the tin buckets, and hung my smock on one of the wooden hooks on the wall. Fishing in the umbrella rack, I found my own frayed black specimen, still damp from this morning. I opened it as I exited the Slade’s airy marble rotunda and braced it against the drizzle as I started up Charing Cross Road toward Edwin’s flat.
Since he’d been let out of prison, we had been meeting every other Tuesday, at his request. Typically he sent a message to my rooms on Monday evening, arranging to have dinner in a pub or chophouse somewhere near the Slade, though on one particularly pleasant day, we met for a walk in a nearby park. His manner was often subdued, and our conversation was prone to moments when both of us broke the silence at once, without the ease we’d had as children. Admittedly, I had a part in this: I kept him at some distance, for I was chary of believing whole-heartedly his claims of reform, although his recent steadiness had raised my hopes more than I let him see. But here it was Tuesday afternoon, and I hadn’t a word from him. While a part of me was prepared for him to resume his erratic ways, his missive could have been lost, and it wasn’t much out of my way to go to his rooms.
I turned off Charing Cross and walked halfway down Judson Place to the building where Edwin rented a room. It was a narrow redbrick house, with two dormer windows like eyes peering out from under a frowning brow. Once a family home, it had been divided into three flats, one on each floor. I went inside the building and started up the thinly carpeted stairs to the top, grasping the wooden banister worn smooth by years of palms and polishing cloths. My own flat, closer to the school, was on an uppermost floor as well. The stairs were a bother, especially when I had items to carry, but like Edwin, I found the light that came through upper windows better for painting. I rounded the landing, already raising my hand to knock.
Oddly, Edwin’s door stood wide open. He was nowhere to be seen, but inside his room were two strange men dressed in dark coats. Their backs were to me, and they were bent over, sifting carelessly through Edwin’s paintings stacked against the wall. The sight halted me at the threshold, my hand on the doorframe, and I felt a flare of indignation. “What are you doing?” I demanded. “Who are you?”
Even as the words burst from me, I took in the pieces of broken gilt frames on the floor, a chair flipped on its side, a long rent in the curtain that separated this room from the bedroom—and a sudden fear made me shrink back.
The men pivoted and stood upright. I am taller than average for a woman, but both of them were a full head taller than I and broad of shoulder. Their eyes examined me with peculiar acuteness, taking in every detail from my facial features to the damp hem of my dress. Perhaps they saw my alarm, for a quick look passed between them, and the elder of the two stepped forward: “Don’t be afraid, miss. I’m Chief Inspector Martin, of Scotland Yard.” He jerked his chin toward the other man. “This is Inspector Matthew Hallam.”
My heart sank, and my fright gave way to weary disappointment and vexation. It seemed I’d been right to hold my hopes in abeyance. Edwin’s resolve to live lawfully was apparently as flimsy as ever. Given the state of his room, there had probably been a dire urgency to his departure.
“Good afternoon, miss.” Mr. Hallam was perhaps five-and-twenty, with wavy brown hair and a countenance that would have made a handsome portrait. “Are you a friend of Mr. Rowe’s?”
I suppressed a sigh. “I’m his sister.”
The chief inspector’s head tipped forward. “Is your name Annabel?”
That made me start. “Yes. How did you know?”
“Miss.” Inspector Hallam’s measured voice drew my gaze back to him. “When did you last see him?”
“Two weeks ago.”
“And you haven’t heard from him since?”
“No,” I replied, wrapping the folds of my umbrella around its ribs. “What has he done?”
Another significant look between them. Clearly they were reluctant to shock me. “It’s all right,” I assured them. “You can say it.”
The inspector’s expression softened. “I’m afraid he’s gone, miss.”
“I’ve gathered that much,” I said resignedly. Edwin had likely taken up gambling again and run off rather than face his debtors.
“Miss?” The inspector seemed to await a response.
I knotted the umbrella’s ties to hold it closed. “I assume he owes someone money, and you’re here to recover what you can.”
The chief inspector spoke up, his voice gruff: “I’m afraid you misunderstand. Your brother is dead.”
Dead.
My eyes flicked back to the younger inspector. He saw I hadn’t grasped the meaning of his gentler word, and he winced in regret and sympathy.
For a moment, everything was unnaturally silent.
I reached for the nearest chair and sat down, averting my face. All I could feel was my heart thudding in my chest.
Years ago, as a child, I fell out of a tree and landed on my back. I had the sensation of my entire rib cage flattening forcibly to the thickness of a washboard, and as I lay there, staring up at the leafy branches, I remember thinking, I shall never be able to breathe again. This is how it feels to die.
I had the same sensation now.
I sat there for some minutes in silence. Neither man broke it. And eventually, unbidden, as my breath returned, came the thought—
Of course Edwin is dead. Of course.
I had anticipated this event so many times. Feared it, longed to prevent it, considered ways to save him, and woken in terror from nightmares of Edwin lying bloody and beaten in improbable places such as vacant museums and the alleys behind railway stations. And now, here it was, and despite all my dread of it, I couldn’t take it in, couldn’t find the edges of it, like a canvas too large for my reach. My eyes cast about his room, and the very shapes of the world nearby—rectangles, ovals, dark and light lines—seemed to have neither their proper dimensions nor their usual distances from me.
I heard one of the men, as if from far away: “Miss, are you all right?”
“Of course,” I managed. My eyes sought something close and dropped to the rip in the forefinger of my glove in my lap. Only a small hole. Not precisely circular and changing shape as I moved my finger. Little more than a fray, really. Easily mended.
The young inspector knelt down beside me, and my eyes met his. They were blue. Almost cerulean. I’d used the color that very day for the sky in my painting. A wonderfully stable pigment, without tinges of green or purple, but not as opaque as cobalt.
“Miss?” The steadiness in his voice dragged me back to the present, and from somewhere inside me rose a violent wave of disbelief and denial.
“Who did you say you were?” I demanded.
“Inspector Hallam.”
“You’re not wearing a uniform.” My voice was truculent to the point of rudeness.
The man’s expression told me he understood perfectly well why I didn’t want to believe a word he said. But he only replied patiently, “No, miss. We’re plainclothesmen. We don’t wear them.”
“And how do you know for certain he’s dead?”
“We found him here, about five hours ago. He’s been removed to the morgue.”
“But how can you be certain it’s Edwin? It could be someone else you found. And my brother has gone missing before, many times. He could have let the room to a friend.” Not that I’d ever met any of his friends.
“His landlady confirmed it was Mr. Rowe.”
My stomach twisted and my mind scrambled to find an explanation, but hope was fading, and my words came faintly: “She might just have said so, to avoid trouble.”
The inspector stood and went to a stack of paintings that rested on their edges beside a box of wooden stretcher bars. He sifted through, removed one, and turned it toward me. “Is this your brother?”
It was a painting I’d made of Edwin years ago, in front of his easel. Father had gone fishing in Scotland for several weeks, and Edwin had returned home temporarily, occupying himself with making a portrait of my mother for her birthday. I’d been at my own easel, trying to catch Edwin at the moment when his brush paused and he looked over at me to smile, one of those crooked grins that began on the right side of his mouth, extended to the left side, and then to his eyes. His hair was a burnished copper that seemed to glow from within and had never darkened to auburn the way mine had. He wore it longer than my father approved, but privately I thought it suited Edwin’s lanky frame, as did the loose white shirt, rolled to the elbows. I hadn’t finished the painting, for his spaniel was still only a brown blur under the easel, but I’d caught something of Edwin’s playfulness, a rarity by then. The day Edwin finished Mother’s portrait, he’d put his paints away and scrubbed his hands and nails scrupulously clean of pigment. By the time my father arrived home, just in time for dinner and bearing a tidily wrapped gift for Mother, Edwin was back in the attitude my father despised most, slouched indolently in a chair, glancing over the racing pages in a newspaper.
“Is this your brother?” Inspector Hallam asked again. Mutely I nodded. He placed the painting back on the stack, the image of Edwin facing out.
I felt a jab of pain, seeing my brother so vibrantly alive. It had been a true representation, once.
“Can you turn it away,” I choked out. “Please.”
He did as I asked.
At the moment when the chief inspector told me Edwin was dead, I felt a complete revulsion, an absolute dread of knowing the particulars. So long as I couldn’t match his words to any picture I imagined, it couldn’t be real. But now, the words slipped from my lips: “How did he die?”
I half expected the inspector to prevaricate, or demur. Instead, he ran his hand across the soft area just below his rib cage. “He was stabbed.”
“But where?” I gestured to the floor.
His head tipped to the side. “It occurred in the bedroom.” I stared at the bedraggled curtain separating the two rooms—began to rise—
“Miss, you can’t go in there,” the chief inspector said. “There’s no point in you seeing the—the evidence, and it needs to remain undisturbed.”
The evidence.
The image of a smear of blood on the floor entered my brain, and sickened, I sank back down. “When did it happen?”
“Yesterday, possibly around this time. Maybe earlier.”
I’d slept last night as usual and spent the whole day at the Slade, not knowing.
And yet knowing, too.
“Miss, do you know anyone who might have been angry with him?” the inspector asked.
A sound, something between a laugh and a groan, came involuntarily from between my lips. I could think of plenty of people who might fit that description over the years—because Edwin had beaten them at gambling, or had purchased items on credit and refused to pay, or had forged one of their paintings. Not to mention myself, for I’d once been so angry with him that I had sworn I’d never speak to him again. And then there were those whom he might have injured when he’d been drunk at a pub or drugged in an opium den—people he might not even remember and whom I certainly didn’t know.
“Perhaps we should begin with a simpler question,” Inspector Hallam said, his voice gentle. “Would you like to tell your parents?”
“They’re dead.”
As usual, my statement was followed by an uncomfortable, apologetic silence.
“Have you any siblings?”
“No. Only Edwin.”
He winced again. “I’m so sorry. I . . .” His voice trailed off, and he drew a wooden chair over so he could sit facing me, elbows on his knees, his hands clasped loosely, his eyes on mine. “Were you twins?”
I shook my head. “He’s older, by a few years.”
“There’s a fair resemblance.”
“The hair, I know.”
“And the eyes.”
Green like pond scum, Edwin had once said, his voice derisive. But how did the inspector know? Had Edwin’s eyes been open in death? A vision of my brother’s body sprawled, his eyes wide and fixed on the ceiling, a knife handle protruding from his abdomen, appeared in my mind with the clarity of a completed picture. Horror constricted my throat like a drawstring on a reticule.
“Was he expecting you today?” Inspector Hallam asked.
I forced the words out: “Yes—well, no. I mean, we usually see each other on Tuesdays but not here.”
“Were you worried about him?”
That was impossible to answer briefly. “Why do you ask?”
“Your expression when you arrived.”
I hesitated.
“That happens with siblings sometimes,” he said. “They sense when something’s amiss.”
Amiss was such an inadequate word, for all that had gone badly with Edwin for so long.
The inspector said something, but my thoughts were far away from this room and didn’t return in time to draw the words out of the air.
“I beg your pardon?” I asked.
“Er—it’s no matter.” He shook his head. “How old was he?”
I knew this was a question I should be able to answer. Still, it took a moment. I strained to recall that it was mid-September. His birthday was the ninth of October. “Nearly six-and-twenty.”
“The landlady said he lived alone. Was he engaged? Or did he have any special attachments?”
The question struck with the force of a blow. At our last meeting, Edwin had mentioned almost too casually a young woman he’d met—someone’s sister—Charlotte or Caroline—
But he would never be engaged or marry now. Never have children—
“Miss?”
I looked up.
“Any special attachments?” he repeated patiently.
“No.”
“And what did he do for work?”
“Any number of things.” My gaze brushed the stacks of framed canvases around the room. “He’s a painter.”
“Yes. There are a variety of styles and topics.”
Though his voice was mild, I heard the implicit question.
“Obviously, most of these are copies, which he’s done legally,” I said, a note of defensiveness creeping into my voice. “People commission him to reproduce artwork because he’s adept at matching techniques and colors. But he also paints originals sometimes, and lately, he’s cleaned and restored paintings for several galleries here in London.”
He gestured to the space on the wall behind me. “Is that one of his?”
I craned my neck to look. It was a painting I’d done of a young girl and her father at a fruit stall in a market. Goodness knows why Edwin had saved it. The man’s hands were choosing the fruit for a well-dressed woman with a pretty wicker basket—but at the time I hadn’t been able to properly paint the shape of his curved fingers, or the age spots on his hands, and they came out looking misshapen and diseased. And I hadn’t been able to capture his daughter’s feelings to my satisfaction, either. Her loyalty to her father, her boredom at the end of a long day, and her shame at observing his need to please this woman had come out a muddle.
I turned back. “No, it’s mine. Edwin would have done better.”
He let that pass. “Two weeks ago, where did you see him?”
“We met at a pub near the Slade. I’m a student there.”
“And how did he seem?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer. But he waited silently, and finally I sighed. “He wasn’t a lighthearted person. If you don’t know already, I imagine you’ll find out soon enough. He was caught forging a while back, by one of yours, and put in prison for nearly a year. He was released a few months ago.”
A look of sudden comprehension. “I see.” He tipped his head sideways toward the broken frames. “Do you have any idea what happened here?”
“None at all,” I answered helplessly.
“Hallam.”
We both looked up. The chief inspector beckoned, and as the two men vanished behind the torn curtain, I went to the window to look out. Immediately below was a rusty metal gutter filled with the detritus of the city—gray dust and ash, sticks and bits of string, the scraps of what looked like old pigeon nests, now empty.
“Goodbye, Miss Rowe.”
I turned. The chief inspector was standing near the door, his hat in hand.
“Goodbye,” I echoed uncertainly, for Mr. Hallam showed no signs of departing. As the door closed behind the chief, I turned to the inspector. “You’re staying?” I asked in some dismay, for I desperately wanted to be alone.
“Yes.” He rested a hand lightly on Edwin’s desk. “And if you’re feeling up to it, I’d like your help.”
“With what?”
“Searching this room. We’ve examined the bedroom, but we’d only just begun in here when you arrived. We want to find anything that might provide a hint about”—the briefest hesitation—“why this happened. It sounds as if you’re his closest relation, and you might notice something out of place, or something missing.”
I winced. I didn’t like the idea of going through Edwin’s things. I dreaded what I might find.
“I know this might be difficult, and perhaps it’s too much to ask right now.” His expression was solicitous, even apologetic. “But the sooner we begin to gather a sense of your brother’s life, the more likely it is we’ll find who did this. Unfortunately, in these cases, time often matters.”
I felt my head bobbing mechanically.
“If you’d rather, I can look while you sit here.” He righted the wooden chair. “And if I have questions, I can ask. I’ll try to bother you as little as possible.”
I swallowed. “No. I’ll help you. I’m all right.”
He let me see his appreciation. “Thank you.”
The inspector and I searched for the next hour or so, looking for anything that might hint at a motive for killing Edwin or anything out of the ordinary. Edwin’s furnishings offered little in the way of comfort, but he had dozens of canvases, a trunk, a bookcase with sketchbooks, a desk and worktable laden with notes and papers. Every so often Mr. Hallam would ask me about something he found or attempt to engage me in some sort of conversation. Perhaps he found the silence awkward, but I had no wish to talk and answered largely in monosyllables. Dutifully I examined Edwin’s items of correspondence, sifted through the meager contents of his wardrobe, examined the paintings, and paged through his copy of Osborn’s Handbook on oil painting and a tattered pattern book of frame styles. I inspected brushes, knives, pots of gesso, bottles of turpentine, the long slender gilder’s blade, an agate burnisher, horsehair cloth, and two aprons stained with colors from tawny turmeric yellow to rose madder. But they told me nothing, and my overwhelming feeling was of remorse mingled with grief, a sense of erasing Edwin’s presence.
With each object I touched, Edwin’s hands were no longer the last to hold them.
As daylight faded, I began to tire. My nerves had been taut for too long.
Perhaps the inspector sensed my exhaustion, for as he replaced various items in Edwin’s trunk, he said, “I don’t think there’s much else to be done here.”
He laid the faintest emphasis on the last word, and in my state of heightened anxiety, I heard a demand. “Where must we go next?”
He looked at me rather blankly.
“Do you mean the morgue?” I asked.
“Goodness, no.” He shifted a few items about so the lid would close, and he let it down with a soft thump. “There’s no need. He’s been identified adequately.”
“But—but I need to see him,” I said with a sudden desperation.
The skin around his eyes tightened in sympathy, and his voice was gentle: “You’ll see him at the funeral, properly, won’t you? I imagine you’ve a church?”
I nodded. “Y-yes. St. Barnabas in Wilkes Street.”
“Then I suggest you wait until then. Truly, it’s for the best.”
Numbly, I nodded. “All right.”
“May I take you somewhere?” he asked as he reached for his large black overcoat. “To a friend’s house, perhaps?”
I’d formed a few casual friendships among the women students, and if I’d shown up on their doorstep, they’d certainly have been kind. But I didn’t want their company. I needed to be alone.
I shook my head. “I can manage. I don’t live far.”
As I donned my coat, a constable arrived, took a seat on the wooden chair, drew a lamp close, and opened a newspaper. Clearly he was there to keep watch over Edwin’s room.
I walked home slowly in the lowering dusk. A lamplighter was making his way down the other side of the street, and the sight of the woolly circles of light working against the foggy darkness halted me. If I’d had to paint a scene that suggested the quality of my memories of Edwin, I might not have found a more fitting image than this deepening gray world lit too sparsely by pale gold. I only knew portions of Edwin’s life myself, and from those, I had furnished Mr. Hallam with the most cursory sketch of my brother’s character and habits. Of course, even in a completed portrait, some attributes are put forth—etched onto the countenance or signaled by the presence of a family crest or a musical instrument—while other aspects are merely suggested or left off the canvas altogether. I heard Mr. Poynter’s voice in my mind: No portrait is ever a complete representation of its subject.
The lamplighter passed me by, and I watched his receding figure. He raised his stick to illuminate one lamp at a time, each one smaller and dimmer than the last, until he vanished from view.
I willed the tears away and kept on for home.
Ready for more? A Trace of Deceit by Karen Odden is available from your favorite bookseller!