“And now,” Evelyn muttered, “with additional interest of tuppence a day for delayed payment.”
“Butter me arse and call me a crumpet!” Flora gracefully waggled a lace-gloved finger. “Filprick’s promises have less worth than wot Lucy charges for a screw on Friday nights.”
“Quite so,” agreed Evelyn. “Half a crown.”
“Nah, she’s cut her price to a shilling and thruppence since all the camp followers came home. Competition is rife and even Mona Whittaker has bought ostrich feathers as an incentive.”
Evelyn sighed and tugged her old pelisse close about the neck, refusing to contemplate how long it would take to pay off her debt to Filgrave at such a tariff…or what a feather incentive might involve.
Shooing away the boys who ran ragtag around them, fingers pinching for victuals from Flora’s basket, they hurried passed a gin shop, the only place doing a roaring trade.
“I asked the stage manager at the theatre if he could lend on my wages but…” She trailed off as Flora’s eyebrow rose to her hat brim.
Despite Evelyn being their finest scene painter, her employment only provided enough for lodging and food, with a smidgeon left over for necessities. And she’d heard the gossip – her wage was half that of the lads who splashed paint around as though they were limewashing a house.
“Shame yer went to that Filprick for bread ’n butter in the first place.”
The empty pit in Evelyn’s stomach widened.
To be sure, but her sister had been so ill, and Evelyn had fretted it was the dreaded lung disease. The grasping doctor had prodded and poked, bled her till she’d fainted, blamed her hacking cough on the dank weather that lay like a rotting blanket upon the city this year, and then charged three quid. Flora said she would’ve done the same for tuppence, without the bloodletting…and with warmer hands.
With such a frigid winter and now a spring that refused to blossom, the rest of the money had been spent keeping the fire lit, the bed linens dry and the candles burning for her late-night painting sessions.
Accompanied by her sister’s endless cough, she had rendered her father’s pencil sketch upon canvas in that dim light, imitating his work with wearied hand until the last faked brushstroke upon sham lip.
“I-I’ll have to sell a painting,” Evelyn confided, skipping over a suspect murky puddle.
“Didn’t think you’d any of yer pa’s stuff left?”
Evelyn puffed in her mittens. Upon Father’s death, the Pearce sisters hadn’t slid into genteel poverty but dived belfry first. Shopkeepers, models, colourmen and so-called friends had knocked on the door for owed money before Father had been cold in the ground.
All the furniture had been sold off from their elegant home and they’d moved lodging, then moved once more, every month creeping street by street to the east, until they’d reached the back alleys of Covent Garden.
Papa’s art had been sold long ago.
“I, erm. Well…” Evelyn chewed her lip. “It’s hard to explain…”
Halting on the street corner – never a good idea in Seven Dials – Flora swung her basket with hand on hip. “Spit it out, girl.”
A couple of young bucks brazenly gazed their way and began to throw lewd gestures.
Oh, sod it, as Flora would oft say. “You see, Papa painted me when I was seventeen. For the Academy Exhibition.”
“Nice. As an angel or sommit?” Flora spun back from returning equally lewd gestures at the bucks.
“Not exactly. He wished to paint virtue and downfall but couldn’t find a suitable model: pure innocence corrupted by social influence and destitution.”
“Eh?”
“He painted me as a…retailer of love.”
“Come again?”
“A whore, damn it!” The bucks cheered and she grabbed Flora’s arm, dashing on. “He painted me as a fledgling whore in shameless crimson, standing in a bedroom with rumpled sheets and coin on the table. It was entitledThe Veiled Fall of Innocence.”
“Bet that caused a rumpus with them artsy fusty-guts.”
Indeed. The Royal Academy had judged the turned pose eccentric, the subject matter vulgar, and the artwork had been quietly rejected for a wholly nude Venus with strategic curls – but that was fine, being Classical and all.
