第22章 The Search in London

They left for London at the end of July, in a carriage packed with trunks and journals and letters of introduction, with Chloe installed at Blackmore to mind the twins and Graves charged to keep the house alive in their absence. Eleanor kissed Thomas and Rosalind as they slept and felt her heart tear a little at the leaving, but the journal was in her valise, and the unfinished painting of Marguerite and the child was wrapped in oilcloth and lashed to the roof, and she could not shake the feeling that the house itself was urging her on, that something in the old stones wanted her to find the painter's blood and bring it home. London in August was a furnace of noise and light, and Sebastian's townhouse in Half Moon Street, which he had never lived in and never meant to live in, was a mausoleum of silk and dust and furniture under Holland covers. He had bought it, he told her, because a rake needed somewhere to keep his debts, and Eleanor had laughed, and the laugh had felt like a door opening between them, and they had spent their first evening in London with the covers pulled off the chairs and the windows thrown open to the street, planning their search by candlelight. The journal gave them names. Amarantha. The child's name, written once, in the corner of a page, as if Elian Vance had not dared to write it in full. And the place, Clerkenwell, where the painter had died. And the trade, the only trade he could still practice with his burned hands, the trade he had taught himself again from the beginning, day by day, stroke by stroke, painting the woman he could not hold. The parish records took them to St. James's Church, where the verger, a man with spectacles and a voice like dry leaves, dug out the register for 1796 and ran his finger down the page until it stopped at an entry in faded brown ink. Elian Vance, limner, of Clerkenwell, buried the fourteenth of March. Cause of death, consumption. Eleanor thanked him and asked for the baptismal records, and it was there, an hour later, that she found her. Amarantha Vance, daughter of Elian and Marguerite Vance, baptized at St. Andrew's, Holborn, in September of 1781, five months before the fire. The entry was made in a hand different from the rest of the page, hurried, ashamed, as if the clerk had wanted it over quickly, and beside the infant's name someone had written, in the margin, a note that made Eleanor's breath catch. Committed to the care of Mrs. Judith Farrow, widow, of Wapping. Paid in full. The trail from Wapping was thin, but it was a trail. Eleanor and Sebastian traced Mrs. Farrow's household through the following decades, from Wapping to Bermondsey to the edge of Clerkenwell itself, and at every step the girl's name changed, shortened, disguised, so that by the time she was grown she was called Amy, and then Amy Ward, and then, after her marriage to a clockmaker named Josiah Ward, Amy Ward of Grub Street, mother of two, of whom one survived. The surviving child, the register said, was a boy, born in 1795, the year before his grandfather died. His name was Gabriel. And when Eleanor asked, in a voice she could not keep steady, what trade the boy had been set to, the old verger squinted at the page and said, Painter. Apprenticed to a portraitist in Soho. He is still there, if he is alive. He is the last of them. The last of the Vances. Eleanor did not sleep that night. She sat at the window of the townhouse and watched the lamps of London gutter and go out, and she thought of the girl baptized in a church she would never remember, passed from hand to hand like a parcel, hidden from her own name, raised in rooms that smelled of the river, who had grown up to be a wife and a mother and who had died, according to the final entry, in childbed in 1811, leaving behind a boy of sixteen and a husband who had followed her within the year. The painter's blood had not died out. It had been hidden, and it had survived, and somewhere in Soho there was a young man with gray eyes who painted women he had never seen. She thought of the unfinished canvas, the child half realized beside Marguerite, and she understood, with a clarity that ached, that the curse had never really been about the fire. It had been about a family that had been scattered, a daughter who had never come home, a child who had been made to carry the weight of a love that had never been allowed to be whole. Sebastian found her at dawn, still at the window, and he did not ask what she was thinking. He knew. They went together that afternoon to Lady Victoria's, because the way to the artistic world in London ran through the drawing rooms of the powerful, and Lady Victoria's drawing room was where the powerful came to be amused. The soiree was everything Eleanor hated, a parade of silk and gossip and borrowed wit, but she moved through it the way she had moved through the ballroom at Ashford, as a woman with a purpose, and she let Sebastian be the rake he had once been, charming and glittering and watchful, because a man who was known to have nothing to hide was the best cover a woman with a secret could ask for. The Duke of Ashford found her by the punch bowl, older and paler than she remembered, and he looked at her for a long moment before he spoke. You have the look of a woman looking for something, he said. What is it you hope to find in London, Lady Thorne? A painter, Eleanor said, because the truth was the safest lie. I have an empty wall at Blackmore, and I am told there is a young man in Soho who can fill it. The Duke smiled, a thin smile that did not reach his eyes. Soho, he said. Then you are looking for Gabriel Vance. A remarkable boy. He paints the same woman over and over, and no one knows who she is. His eyes held hers. They say she is the ghost of Blackmore. Eleanor kept her face perfectly still. They say many things, Your Grace. The Duke inclined his head. They do, he said. And sometimes, Lady Thorne, they are true. He turned away, and Eleanor stood very still in the crush of the room, and she felt, for the first time since she had come to London, that she was being watched. She did not wait for morning. She took a hackney to Soho as the sun was setting, and she stood in the narrow street below a window full of light, and she thought of a burned man painting his lost love by candlelight, and of a girl baptized in secret, and of a boy who had inherited the brush and the fever and the fear. She knocked. The door opened. And Gabriel Vance stood before her, with the gray eyes of the Thornes and the worn hands of a working painter, and Eleanor knew, before he spoke a single word, that she had found the last of them. ---