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TIMOTHY TICKERING
PORTRAITIST AND LIMNER
He knocked, waited, and knocked again. At last, he heard a shuffling sound from behind the door, and a faint infantile grizzling. For a truth, Timothy Pickering was a husband and father as well as a portraitist and limner.
'Who's there?' It was a woman's voice, and it sounded frightened. Hoare knew his whisper hopelessly incapable of making his needs known to the party on the other side of the door, and that one of his whistled signals would only alarm her. In any case, she would not know what any of the whistles meant. He resorted to one of the pre-printed slips that he carried about with him. He drew it out of his pocket.
'Permit me to present myself,' it read: 'Bartholomew Hoare, Lieutenant, Royal Navy. My deepest respects. That I am not speaking to you is not a matter of intentional discourtesy but is due to my inability to speak above a whisper.'
Whipping out a pencil, he promoted himself to the proper rank, reminding himself as he did so that he must have a new set of slips printed, signed the paper with a flourish, and slipped it under the door. He coughed, and watched the slip disappear.
The door was opened by an anxious-looking woman in run-over slippers, with an infant on her hip. One of the pair gave off a strong odor.
'You bring bad news, I know it,' the woman said. 'Tell me. I shall be brave.'
Behind her, the garret managed to appear both desolate and cluttered; there were no signs of an artist's paraphernalia. The artist must carry out his commissions in his subjects' homes or other places of business. The place was cold and damp, and smelled of old mold. A pot of something dreadful was simmering on a small charcoal stove in one corner, with a scrawny cat staring up at it, looking hopeful.
'I have no news, madam,' Hoare whispered. 'I have simply called to see Mr. Pickering. Is he within?' Since the entire Pickering dwelling was in plain sight, he asked the question only so as to be polite.
'No, sir. Oh, no. He has been away the entire morning, soliciting commissions. And trying to sell his hat. It's a fine hat; 'twas left him by his late brother… Indeed, he departed without even waiting for me to serve his breakfast. You see, I had to attend to poor little Beatrice…' Mrs. Pickering bounced her baby to show this alarming stranger whom she was referring to, and it began to grizzle again.
'But please come in, sir, and have a seat if you please.' With her free hand, Mrs. Pickering brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. It flopped right back again.
'Thank you, but no, madam,' Hoare said. 'I may not tarry. Pray, when do you expect him to return?'
'Why, why…'At this, the infant's grizzling became a full-fledged roar, and Mrs. Pickering must interrupt herself and step aside to put it to a surprisingly firm breast. Hoare took advantage of the interruption to look about the garret.
At first, his glance slipped casually over the ill-made bed, the tilted lopsided table with its unwashed dishes, and the curtained corner behind which, he presumed, lay the family's wardrobe and primitive place of easement. Then it fixed on one wall, on which daylight fell less dimly than elsewhere in the apartment. There he saw an entire portrait gallery in pencil, the superbly candid, precise, unflattering likenesses that he already recognized as uniquely Pickering's work. One of the faces, of a stern middle-aged man of a naval aspect, was hauntingly familiar, but he could not at the moment attach a name to it. Drawn on separate pieces of paper, other faces surrounded it, faces which he knew but had never seen in the flesh-Queen Charlotte, the prince-and, to his astonishment, the vivid, tapered countenance of Mrs. Selene Prettyman. As a very close companion of the Duke of Cumberland, Mrs. Prettyman had been equivocally associated with the affair of the Nine Stones Circle. She was moving in odd company today, Hoare said to himself. Why was she there? Whom did she serve?
Duke Ernest's villainous face was there as well. And, from their heavy-lidded Hanoverian eyes, so were two others of the poor king's dismal litter of princely sons, though Hoare could not be sure, having met only Cumberland and Clarence. Kent, perhaps, York, Cambridge, or Sussex.
Suddenly, he recalled whose face had been puzzling him. It was his own. He had not seen himself before as others saw him, his morning view in the mirror being reversed, like all mirror images. This new view made him look disconcertingly strange. When on earth and where, he wondered, had Mr. Pickering made this secret sketch? A look at still another face, and he realized he was staring at a likeness of Titus Thoday.
On a sudden impulse, he turned to the nursing mother.
'Will you sell me these drawings, madam?' he asked.
'Why, I hardly-I-' Mrs. Pickering's eyes wandered swiftly about her home as if she hoped that her husband would appear, like some jinni, and give her the answer. Then the poverty in which she dwelt took charge.
'How much?' she asked in a voice that was suddenly hard.
'How much does Sir Hugh pay Mr. Pickering per likeness?' he whispered.
'Seven shillings sixpence apiece, sir. But Timothy sells his royalties for as much as half a pound.'
Not often, I'll be bound, Hoare silently told himself. They aren't prettified enough to sell for more. But the Pickering family is obviously poor, poor.
'There are… let me see… seventeen of them,' he whispered. 'That would be… let me see… six pounds, seven shillings, and sixpence. I'll give you five pounds for the lot. Have you change for a ten-pound note?'
Her answer was what he had expected.
'Change for a ten-pound note?' Her voice was bitter. 'This house doesn't see ten shillings from one week to the next.'
'Well, well,' Hoare said as if reluctantly. 'Make it ten pounds even, then.' He reached into the pocket in which he did not keep his communications and withdrew his purse. At this rate, he would soon need to draw more funds, either from the Admiralty's penny-pinchers or from his own resources. He found a ten-pound note and handed it to her. She received it in a trembling hand.
'Do you have nothing smaller, sir?' she asked as she watched Hoare detach his purchases from the garret wall. 'No one in the neighborhood will believe we came by a ten-pound note honestly. Indeed, I never saw one before. How big it is! And we do need some food for our larder. We have a few other drawings, sir. Perhaps…?'
'Let's see them, then,' Hoare said.
Still carrying the infant, Mrs. Pickering disappeared behind the curtain and came out with a small roll of sketches. 'That's all we have, sir,' she said.
Hoare did not stop to examine them but wrapped them around the others. He hauled out a fistful of small change and handed it to her.
'Oh, sir! Oh, oh, oh!' Mrs. Pickering cried, and burst into tears. As Hoare raced down the flights of stairs to the street where his ragamuffin guide waited, he heard her voice, fading with the distance, crying, 'Oh, Beatrice, Beatrice! The heavens have opened, and rained down a full year's rent!'
Just as Hoare reached the foot of the stairs, a small hatless figure crashed into him and nearly sent him flying. Thrusting him out of his way, Timothy Pickering raced up the stairs down which Hoare had just come, shouting something about having sold poor David's hat.
Upon returning to the Golden Cross, full of self-praise for his generosity to the poor and deserving, Hoare found that Thoday had preceded him and was waiting in the private bar to make his report.
'I have made the rounds of the dead-houses, sir, as far as was needful,' he told Hoare. 'At the third, in Cripplegate, I found our man's body.'
'Are you quite sure?' Hoare whispered.
'Quite, sir. I examined every portly corpse I saw, comparing its features with the likeness you provided me. It was, if I may say so, an experience I should not care to repeat.'
Hoare could only sympathize. From time to time in his career as Sir George Hardcastle's investigative dogsbody, he had had his own occasions to inspect numbers of the dead, in conditions ranging from the still-warm to the nearly deliquescent. The sweet sickening stench of human corruption was unforgettable.
'The man I found had been dead for about a week,' Thoday went on. 'Since most of that time had been spent in the water, his more prominent features were missing, eaten by crabs or lobsters. But the pockmarks remained, and their pattern was identical to the one shown in the likeness of the missing man. Since, as you informed me, the artist manages to capture every salient detail of a subject's countenance, I satisfied myself that the corpse was
