CHAPTER 16

‘You should not be here!’ Agnes cries once more, but the lady is impossible.

Her dome-shaped skirt takes up most of the studio. Wide, fringed sleeves send paintbrushes clattering to the floor as her busy hands explore every surface.

Her daughter, about sixteen years old, lurks on the landing with her arms crossed. Her expression carries all the disdain Agnes feels, but must not show.

‘Is this where it happened? Where Mr Boyle sat?’ The lady tries the chair for herself. ‘And that young gentleman you found? Did you take his shade too?’

‘No,’ Agnes lies. ‘That was an entirely separate matter. Please, Mrs …’

‘Campbell. I already told you my name. I hope you observe better than you listen.’

‘And I have told you that you must leave this place, Mrs Campbell. It is not safe for you to be here.’

The lady’s eyes twinkle. ‘Now, now, I know what you are about. I won’t pay more. Two shillings apiece is a fair price for a silhouette from the parlour of death.’

‘Please, stop calling it that!’

A magpie cackles.

Agnes had anticipated whispers and avoidance after the newspaper article, but not this. She had not reckoned on the ghoulish crawling out from their holes to revel in all the morbid detail.

‘Look, Lavinia!’ Mrs Campbell takes off, knocking over the chair she has just sat upon. ‘Look at the Etruscan pieces. So classical. I am minded to have one of them.’

These are the silhouettes where either the profile or the background has been worked in terracotta to resemble ancient pottery. Agnes always thought it was a cheerful colour; now she looks at the specimens hanging on her walls, and it seems as if they have been smeared with blood.

‘I will not do it!’ she repeats. ‘I cannot. I have reason to believe my customers are being persecuted and until I—’

‘But then the bronzing is charmingly quaint,’ Mrs Campbell rabbits on, moving to another frame. ‘A nice ethereal, ghostly quality, don’t you think?’

Like Mr Boyle’s shade, these pieces are black profiles with little details, like the hair and the collar, sketched on in gold. Agnes remembers how these features glittered by candlelight in the house of mourning at Queen Square and her sense of foreboding deepens.

‘Really, I must insist—’

Lavinia catches her eye from the doorway and shrugs her shoulders. ‘You had better do as my mother says,’ she tells her wearily.

‘Do you not understand the danger?’

Mrs Campbell laughs. ‘And do you not understand four shillings, my good woman? Come, you could use them. I see that you could. Get inside the room, Lavinia, for heaven’s sake. Pick up that chair. Let the woman take your likeness with this nice machine here.’