Prologue, 1752
Before the war began, no-one would have said that Bartholomew Lowndes was a man likely to ever see a turn in his fortunes.
After all, years of prosperity had done nothing for 'Babbling' Barty Lowndes; and he was a man who had opportunities a-plenty. He had been a barrister's second son who had a natural bent for art, and despite his parents' fond and exasperated attempts to turn him towards a more profitable trade, "young Barty" had left the stern respectable Protestantism of his family's house in search of his fortune - to follow his Muse, wherever she led him.
His Muse led him a merry dance that would have scandalised his parents. When he had money, he could be found 'in sweet rest' in Holy Ground or drowning his senses in cheap gin-shops. When the money ran out, he would take to his pencil again and frequent the riotous student coffee-houses, where furtive papers were brandished about . Bartholomew would draw amusing satires and obscene caricatures of politicians on the back of law pamphlets, on crumpled sheets of Blackstone's Commentaries – or sometimes on the backs of illicit newspapers. It was an easy-come, easy-go sort of life.
At some point, the desire for something more meaningful than a cursory transaction with an experienced whore must have burdened Master Lowndes' soul, for he married a shy laundress who washed his sheets. She had fancied handsome Mr Lowndes and his fine paints as a shining idol, free with his coin and filled to the brim with talent – and who was to say her nay?
His parents, needless to say, cut him off without a word.
But, against all the odds, Barty and his wife were happy. They suited each other, even if Babble lived in a state of happy intoxication, letting his wife drift gently beside him on a wave of cheap meat pies and small ale.
Master Lowndes lived more on his wife's income from washing shirts than she did on the fruits of his labours– but they made do, somehow, and that was enough. Barty made a few odd shillings from grateful landlords in exchange for touching up the faded paint on tavern signs. Sometimes – miracle of miracles! There was an unexpected windfall ; a flat portrait of the landlord's adoring wife and children was requested. Or a sporting print of a favourite dog, or horse.
The couple of pounds this brought in became more and more necessary, as time went by. The little laundress's belly rose and fell with the turn of the years. Necessity made an artist of Bartholomew in a way his 'studies' never had.
Those were the good years. There was little time for the old pleasures. He built up a solid reputation as an affordable, methodical portrait painter who delivered on time. Barty was moved to wear a coat , called himself seriously by his Christian name, and talk of respectability. He even painted a portrait of his own little brood, on three boards nailed together – himself, his wife, and his six children.
Four didn't reach adulthood. Nathaniel, his eldest, died of scarlet fever before he was a year old, and the twins – two small girls, fair as flax – didn't long survive him. Joshua took a chill with his mother one cold winter. They were buried in a small pauper's plot together with the other pitifully small headstones – all of them no larger than a child's horn-book.
It was then that the joy went out of Mr Lowndes. Oh, something like a ghost of amiability remained in its wake – but it was drowned beneath a sea of October ale and the sharp acrid smell of Dutch jenever. The old drinking habits began in earnest.
The Lowndes family portrait was nailed to the back of a dull study of Highland cattle and shut up at the bottom of Bartholomew's old trunk. He couldn't bear to part with the painted happiness that once was - but Babble never wanted to look at its mocking aspect again.
When Babbling Barty had finally looked down at his two remaining children (Alexander, eight, and Elizabeth, four) he took up his brush again. He began, albeit sluggishly, to wrestle with fickle fortune once more. But it was with the weakening grip of a man who knows he is beaten; who waits for the finishing blow.
What was left of the decimated Lowndes family – a shambling father, half-smothered in shrunken grey wool, with a small boy and a diminutive girl hanging to each hand– left the city of New York – and seemingly dropped off the face of the earth. No-one in the city could have told you what happened to Barty Lowndes and his paints –
Until the war began.
Setauket, 1776
It was a time of singular unease in Setauket. Sullen, grey autumn had blown in from the sea with its endless rain and countless storms – and for a town that mostly depended on the sea for its living and its trade, the foul weather cast a gloom over almost everyone. The farmers further inland weren't much better off. Too much rain meant their crops rotted in the fields almost as it ripened.
So it was a matter of some surprise that a post-coach carrying a portrait-painter, of all things, should have landed in Setauket, closely followed by a carrier's cart bearing all the obscure paraphernalia of his trade. Whilst some of the Setauket gentry had the odd severe oil-painting or Dutch interior, precious few had the money to spare for picture-painting; or indeed, the inclination to spend hard-won money on anything as frivolous as a portrait.
But Mr Lowndes – an affable elderly gentleman with the bright pink cheeks and highly-coloured nose of the affable drunk – proved surprisingly amiable on the subject of fees.
'Anything you can spare, dear sir!' he hiccupped genially, waving an expansive hand towards the startled sergeant standing guard. 'Bartholomew Lowndes, my good sir, is no stranger to customers of limited means! I humbly accept any little – ah, shall we say testament - to my artistic efforts? I am sure your commanding officers would appreciate-'
'Can't let you do that, sir,' the sergeant said firmly, leaning slightly back to avoid the rich smell of second-hand port oozing from the "artist." God alone knew what Major Hewlett would say to a fat civilian smelling of liquor reeling merrily up into the heart of his military base. 'I can let him know you're here, if you like. But that's it, you hear? No guarantee he'll want anything-'
'Splendid!' Mr Lowndes beamed. Over his shoulder, a small sliver of face in a travelling hood framed by a slice of cap dipped its head. The sergeant was surprised – he hadn't seen the wisp of a girl behind her father's bulk. 'I could hardly ask for anything more than an introduction! By the bye – is there a decent inn where myself and my fragile little daughter could stay? Somewhere …respectable?'
'Somewhere cheap,' said the girl in the travelling-hood, severely.
'Now, now, m'dear…'
The guard shifted his musket, uncomfortably. It would be sentry change soon, and he wanted to shrug off the responsibility of these awkward strangers as soon as possible.
'There's only one ale-house,' he said shortly. 'Master Strong's place, down towards the docks. There's rooms, if you've a mind to 'em.'
He coughed and stared straight ahead, sharply indicating that the conversation was over.
It didn't stop him from listening in as the cart rattled on towards Setauket proper, though. A very different conversation was taking place.
'Lizzie, my dear -that was very indelicate. A gentleman never refers to any… monetary embarrassments in front of strangers!'
'Even when it's true?'
'Half of our business is smoke and mirrors, my girl! And don't you forget it. Now – how much shall we have to pay this time ?'
Mr Strong – a dark, glowering man of few words, accepted his guests without question – although he named his price with the confidence of an innkeeper who knows he has the only business in town.
'Hot water's extra. If you want meals too, that's an extra sixpence. Laundry is -'
'Extra?'
The landlord glared at Mr Lowndes' smiling face. 'Anything wrong with my prices?'
'Not at all, my good man, not at all. Only – I wonder… Lizzie, my dear?'
Lizzie, lips pressed thin, wordlessly handed over a pathetically small purse made out of a scrap of cotton, embroidered clumsily with love-knots. It jingled slightly.
'Don't spend all of it, Pa,' she said warningly.
My dear! You dear Papa is the very pink of frugality!' Mr Lowndes said reproachfully – but his eyes were already greedily surveying the glass bottles on the shelf, assessing. Weighing up the amber liquid.
'I wonder, my good sir – a bowl of rum punch? To warm my chilled bones? And if you would join me?'
'Pa? There's the trunks to-'
Lizzie gave up half-way through her sentence. Pa was already firmly drawing his reluctant host aside by one sleeve, explaining the values of whiskey punch as opposed to rum.
She shrugged to herself. It was late. There was little to be done with Pa at this hour – and besides, apart from her father's paints and canvases, there was precious little to cart up to the small poky rooms at the top of the inn. Two packing trunks, her father's old travelling case – and a battered old valise with someone else's initials that her father had picked up in a pawn shop in Boston.
The warm, hop-laden fugs of the Strong Tavern washed over Lizzie's face again as she pushed open the door from the stairs. Inns always seemed to have a peculiar smell; the stale smell of sleepy drunks. Although here it mingled not unpleasantly with a faint under-current of pine from the carefully laid fire in the hearth. For a rural drinking den, it was much better than she had expected. Most of the places she and Father had visited were more… basic. Here there was a panelled snuggery, and a few chipped draughts boards, heavily scored with careless knifepoints –even a few heavily creased broadsheets left scattered about. It looked like Selah Strong could afford basic comfort for his customers in Setauket.
Maybe it'll be different, this time. Lizzie thought. Maybe we'll stay. Maybe -
To her mild surprise , she wasn't the only girl looking for her father near the ale taps. A plump maiden with her hair scraped back into a severe Dutch coif was pulling at a slumped figure in the corner, murmuring 'Vader, sta op! wees so goed…'
She exchanged a startled glance with Lizzie as she passed by the table, her eyes wide and frightened at seeing another woman in the tavern. She must be worried about her reputation, Lizzie thought pityingly. Perhaps her father didn't frequent alehouses - or drink - quite as much as Lizzie's own father did.
Lizzie had been wandering in and out of taverns, coffee-houses and gin-shops all her life – almost before she had learned to walk. After all, Father's business was mostly there. And despite everything, she had good memories to go with them. There'd been the happy week spent at the Rose and Crown in the late summer of '58; New Dorp had been a haze of apple-scrumping and chasing games for Lizzie and Alexander that summer. Pa hadn't drunk as much, then. Later, in Boston, Addison's Coffee-House had needed a sign repainting and witty mottoes painting all about its plaster walls, keeping Pa at his brushes - and best yet, Mr Addison had commissioned a portrait for his parlour of himself, double-chinned in an old-fashioned periwig. Alexander had made a mess of the brushwork, but Mr Addison had been pleased. Pa had three guineas for the work – and the promise of more besides…
But things had gone sour in Boston. Not just the war, but with Pa. Alexander and Pa had quarrelled then.
It hadn't been the last fight they'd have.
Their next place, the Three Cripples Inn in New York proper, had been managed by a round, comfortable widow lady who all but adopted Lizzie for the three months Father dawdled over the sign. She would have kept them both longer if Pa hadn't spent his fee so quickly on ale in other alehouses – or been quite so drunk…
Lizzie still dreamt she was back at the Three Cripples sometimes. Those were sad dreams; they left her feeling lost and guilty. The Widow West had lost a daughter to smallpox a year before, and she would have certainly kept Lizzie– if Lizzie could let Pa go. But there couldn't be any choice between life with Pa or without him. Pa needed her. And she couldn't have left him. That year had been the year Alexander –
Lizzie shook herself, sharply. She wasn't going to think about that. But she would have given kingdoms to not see the Widow West's face fall as she said 'no…'
'Lemon, Mr Strong! That is the secret! Spices, yes, for a decent rum punch – but a quart of lemon juice with your lump sugar, and a man may float like King Bacchus on a wash of delight!'
Pa was holding a sort of tipsy council in the middle of the room before a large pewter punch bowl, expounding on the proper measure like an alchemist giving a lecture.
A couple of off-duty privates goggled in fascination. Soldiers took kindly to anyone with a large bowl of piping alcohol on hand – and certainly, the locals didn't seem averse to the enticing aroma of lemon and warm Jamaica rum floating through the air.
Mr Strong was watching with an air of cynical amusement from behind the counter.
'Knows how to make an introduction, doesn't he?' he said grudgingly. 'I'll wager half the regiment knows about your father and his punch when he's standing the tavern free drams; let alone most of Setauket-'
'I wish he wouldn't.' Lizzie said, soberly, watching her father's face shine pinkly in the firelight.
'Ay?' For a minute, something like pity flickered in the innkeeper's dark eye. 'Jenneke's another who wishes her father wouldn't…' nodding to the plump girl coaxing her father by the fire. 'But DeJong's a stubborn man. Your father the same?'
Lizzie set her mouth shut. It's all smoke and mirrors, she thought. Thinking it was one thing; complaining to strangers of her father's weakness was quite another.
'No tale-bearer, eh?' Mr Strong finished nonchalantly polishing the pitted wooden counter. 'I can stand you a morsel of supper with the wife, if you like. We don't often have ladies here…and Annie would welcome the company, I'm sure.'
Did he pity her? For a moment, on a swell of pride, Lizzie opened her mouth to refuse - before her stomach answered for her. She hadn't eaten since the all-too-brief breakfast roll that morning. And Mr Strong was attempting to be kind.
Kindness with innkeepers ran all too thin, where Pa was concerned. It would be better to propitiate him. At least for the future.
'Thank you,' she said. 'I'm grateful for your –
'Amos! Mind the bar – and throw out that lout Thompson, would you? He's had enough!' Selah Strong threw down the dirty grey dishcloth and beckoned Lizzie towards a discreet side-door in a narrow passage, where the raucous noise of the inn was more muted. 'Lucky Annie's come down to town with me this week…'
Mrs Strong proved to be a handsome, well-formed woman, with a quick eye and a wealth of dark hair piled up under her cap. She clearly didn't know what to make of her husband bringing a great over-grown girl into their private parlour at first – but a swift, assessing glance was all she needed, before setting another place at table.
She and her husband were both – kind, in a distant way. You could tell that they were small townfolk, from the way they looked her over, as though a new face and figure were a curiosity in itself.
Although Mrs Strong forgot her reserve, and grew quite interested when Lizzie mentioned her father's profession.
'A portrait painter in Setauket? I doubt he'll find much business here,' she said, shaking her head. 'Folk are too busy buying their seeds for spring, worrying about corn prices. You don't get many farmers willing to spend good coin on anything like pictures…'
'There's the magistrate, Annie,' pointed out Mr Strong, between a thoughtful puff at his churchwarden pipe. 'Old Woodhull would probably cough up for something. Not the Tallmadges these days; since their boy ran off with the Continentals… but there's a few.'
'Not enough to live on, Selah!' Mrs Strong retorted. 'And Magistrate Woodhull –' she rolled the title out with a disdainful sniff, 'wouldn't give the time of day to a portrait-painter if he thought it might damage his dignity-'
'That may be so,' Lizzie said dispiritedly. Setauket did not at all seem like a likely place. But she tried to remember her father's arguments. 'But – Pa says if you follow the army, you're practically walking on silver…'
As it turns out, she could not have said a worse thing. Silence fell over the Strong tea-table like a stone.
'That so, is it?' Selah Strong was glowering at an invisible enemy on the hearthrug in front of the fire, his dark eyes suddenly alive with smothered resentment. 'Lucky for us then. Someone gets profit from the lobster-backs breathing down our necks…'
'Selah,' Mrs Strong said warningly. She judiciously moved the port-decanter away from his reach. 'We profit from them too, I suppose,' she said, with a quick glance at Lizzie's face. 'They pay for their drink, and spend their wages here-'
'That's what I meant,' Lizzie said, uncomfortable at the turn the conversation was taking. She had the shrewd feeling that the Strongs were not exactly Loyalists. 'We - I mean – Pa paints the officers. Most of them send miniatures home, things like that. And the high-ups like half-length portraits – sometimes even full ones…'
'As victors over the savage natives, I shouldn't wonder,' Mr Strong muttered.
'Selah!' Mrs Strong snapped. 'That's enough.' She rose. 'I believe my husband is tired, Miss Lowndes. He says things he doesn't mean. And I'm sure you'll be wanting your bed yourself.'
The conversation was most definitely closed.
Small town, Lizzie thought. Loose talk. There was a certain renewed coldness in Mrs Strong's manner that revealed she thought her husband had said too much.
Lizzy rose slowly to her feet and bobbed a prim, frosty little curtsey in return, somewhat offended. But then , of course, she was a stranger to them. They didn't know what she and Pa were.
Politics rather passed Pa by. He followed the money, wherever it called from. Anyone who could pay for a likeness or an allegorical scene could have one. But as His Blessed Majesty's troops seemed to have rather more money in their pockets, his transaction of late had been mostly redcoats and rich Loyalists.
Lizzie's only loyalties were to her father. She had nothing else. And propitiating people on behalf of her father was now second-nature to her.
'Mrs Strong?' she said, taking her by the sleeve. 'My father is a man of discretion. As am I.'
The slight fear in Anna Strong's face did not diminish. She hesitated slightly - enough for Lizzie to finish.
'And my father said –' Lizzie lowered her eyes like a good girl, 'that he'd be delighted to paint your husband and your good self –'
Now where had that come from? The lie had slipped out almost before Lizzie had pause to think. It was true, Mr Lowndes had frequently painted his way out of potential debt. But not recently.
'Paint? Us?' The scowl on Selah Strong's face momentarily slipped, to be replaced with an incredulous look. 'What'd your father want to paint us for?'
'We haven't the money-'Mrs Strong began
'Not for money. Not even for the room,' Lizzie said, quickly. 'As a token of… good faith.' And God, where were the lies coming from, Pa wouldn't be painting anything until he was sober…
But, against all the odds, it worked.
Mr Strong glanced at his wife. 'Annie? Would you… like that?'
'Me?' Unconsciously, Mrs Strong reached up to touch an errant lock of hair that had escaped from her cap. Husband and wife stared across the room uncertainly at each other.
'Yes. Yes, I think I would like it,' Mrs Strong said finally, looking taken aback. 'I should like it very much. And it would look well at the big house, Selah – to have a picture there of you…'
'And you!' Mr Strong said eagerly, pushing back his chair. 'I should like to have a picture of you, Annie – looking down on me from the mantelpiece, say. It's a pretty thought…'
The unexpected signs of marital tenderness from the innkeeper discomfited her almost more than the thinly veiled suspicion from moments the slightly stunned expression on Mrs Strong's face, it had surprised her almost as much, too.
Lizzie coughed slightly and looked away in mounting embarrassment.
'I'm sure Pa will oblige – as soon as he can,' she said, carefully inching her way towards the door. 'I'll say goodnight, sir,' she said, hastily whisking her skirts around the edge of the door before anyone had a chance to stop her.
Lizzie cursed in the privacy of her own head, all the way up the rickety stairs, as raucous laughter echoed from the tavern snuggery. Why had she said that? She'd sworn, not again. Not, not again…
But Pa wouldn't stagger up to bed until the brandy punch ran out.
She had time. And she still had the Strongs' faces fresh in her mind from supper. The more portable canvases were kept close to hand, along with sheets of sketch-paper and Pa's worn leather roll. He kept a sharp knife there to sharpen his charcoals.
It might be worth it, if it gained them a little good grace in Setauket.
With a steady hand, she began to trace a long, dark curve on a leaf of foolscap, losing herself in a world of careful lines and sharp pencil-strokes.
Smoke and mirrors, Lizzie thought, as she opened the battered travelling valise. It's all smoke and mirrors.
