Part Three

WOMAN IN WHITE

Emmeline Adeane was making final preparations for a midsummer exhibition at the Barlow Gallery in Mayfair. She would show twenty pictures. Mr Sheridan Barlow himself, visiting Tite Street several times, had professed himself to be ‘encaptured’ with Emmeline’s work – most particularly by her portraits – and Emmeline had decided to be content with that and to refrain from asking Mr Barlow whether ‘encaptured’ was an actual word, which she might be able to find in Mr Ogilvie’s Imperial Dictionary of the English Language.

For it did seem to be the case, she reflected, that the owners of art galleries were very frequently men who were unable to use ordinary language with any precision and who walked about in a horrible blizzard of peculiar superlatives and meaningless coinages, from which they tried to shelter themselves by a wild flailing of their hands. That it was these people to whose commercial souls she had to entrust her work troubled Emmeline, particularly when they liked to grab such a large slice of her sales receipts, but they were the custodians of her life. She could not, after all, sell her work in the street.

The picture by which Sheridan Barlow was most ‘encaptured’ proved to be Emmeline’s portrait of Jane. She had titled it Woman in White (suspecting that Mr Wilkie Collins would not greatly care if she had borrowed the title of his wretchedly famous novel) and she was disinclined to sell it. But Barlow had hurled upon it such a confetti of praise, coupled with the promise of such a rich price to be got from it that Emmeline had given way and agreed to hand it over to him. Unframed, it had remained in her studio ever since Jane had returned to Bath and Emmeline had liked its presence there. Now, she had to load it into a Hansom Cab and cart it round to her framers, Messrs Hartley and Foulkes, skilled artisans of whom she had become very fond over the years.

It was while standing with Mr Hartley at one of his work benches that Emmeline was invaded by a sudden pain in her chest. It was a pain like no other, the feeling of a terrible iron nail being driven into her heart with repeated hammer blows.

She clung to Mr Hartley’s counter with one hand and massaged her sternum with the other, hoping that this might cause the hammer to cease its terrible work. But it did not cease. Emmeline had a brief remembrance of Mr Hartley’s kindly face staring at her with grave concern before she descended into darkness.

She fell sideways onto the dusty wooden floor. Mr Hartley rushed to her side and gathered up her hand, feeling for a pulse. At the same time, he shouted for Mr Foulkes, who was working in an anteroom, and Foulkes, who was getting on in years, immediately came limping in.