The Vesuvius Club

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ISBN: 0-7432-9119-0

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Consecrating

For Ian

My love, my life

Acknowledgements

Huge thanks to Ian Bass, John Jarrold (who lit the first Lucifer), Clayton Hickman, Darren Nash and my editor Ben Ball — honorary English gentleman.

1. Mr Lucifer Box Entertains

I HAVE always been an appalling judge of character. It is my most beguiling virtue.

What, then, did I make of the Honourable Everard Supple whose likeness I was conjuring on to canvas in my studio that sultry July evening?

He was an imposing cove of sixty-odd, built like a pugilist, who had made a fortune in the diamond mines of the Cape. His declining years, he’d told me during the second sitting — when a client begins to thaw a mite — were to be devoted entirely to pleasure, principally in the gaming houses of the warmer and naughtier parts of Europe. A portrait, in his opinion (and his absence), would be just the thing to hang over the vast baronial fireplace in the vast baronial hall he had recently lavished a hundred thou’ upon.

The Supples, it has to be said, were not amongst the oldest and most distinguished families in the realm. Only one generation back from the Honourable Everard had been the less than honourable Gerald who had prospered only tolerably in a manufactory of leather thumb-braces. Son and heir had done rather better for himself and now to add to the title (of sorts) and the fake coat of arms being busily prepared across town he had his new portrait. This, he told me with a wheezy chuckle, would convey the required air of old-world veracity. And if my painting were any good (that hurt), perhaps I might even be interested in knocking up a few carefully aged canvases of his ancestors?

Supple blinked repeatedly, as was his habit, one lid lingering over his jade-irised glass eye (the left one) as I let myself imagine him tramping into the studio in doublet and hose, all in the name of family honour.

He cleared his throat with a grisly expectoration and I realized he’d been addressing me. I snapped out of my reverie and peeped around the side of the canvas. I’ve been told I peep rather well.

«I do beg your pardon, I was absorbed in the curve of your earlobes.»

«I was suggesting dinner, sir,» said Supple, flipping a half-hunter watch from his waistcoat. «To celebrate the successful conclusion of me picture.»

«I should be delighted,» I lied. «But I feel it only right to warn you that I have a peculiar horror of artichokes.»

The Honourable Everard Supple rose from the doubtful Louis Quinze into which I’d plonked him, sending a whisper of paint-flakes to the dust-sheeted floor.

«We might try me club, then,» he suggested, brushing the sleeve of his frock-coat. «Or do you have somewhere you artistic-types favour?»

I rose and ran one of my long, bony hands through my hair. They are long, white and bony, I cannot deny it, but very fine. Waistcoat and face flecked with paint, I shrugged.

«As a matter of fact, I do,» I said. «Charming little spot in Rosebery Avenue. Come back at eight and we’ll drive over.» So saying, I suddenly turned the easel on its squeaking castors, revealing the portrait to the golden light washing through the skylight. «Behold! Your immortality!»

Supple creaked forward on his expensive boots and fixed a monocle, rather unnecessarily, into the orbit of his false eye. He frowned, cocked his head to left and right and grimaced.

«Well, I suppose you get what you pay for, eh, Mr Box?»

My name is Lucifer Box, but I imagine you know that. Whether these scribblings eventually form the core of my memoirs or are found secreted in oilskin wrappers at the bottom of a lavatory cistern years after my demise, I have no doubt that, by the time you read this, I will be most terribly famous.

I handed Supple his soft kid-gloves with as much brusqueness as I could muster. «You don’t like it?»

The old fool shrugged. «Just not sure it’s terribly like me.»

I helped him into his overcoat. «On the contrary, sir, I believe I have caught you.»

I smiled what my friends call, naturally enough, the smile of Lucifer.

Ah! London in the summertime! Hellish, as any resident will tell you. Even in those first few innocent years of the new century it smelled of roasting excrement. So it was with ’kerchiefs pressed to mouths that Supple and I entered the dining rooms I had selected. They were alarmingly unfashionable but, in the long light of dusk, the white-panelled plainness could have been called Vermeeresque. Not by me, you understand. A flypaper above the hearth twisted lazily, amber and black like a screw of ear-wax.

This place, I told Supple, was owned and run by a woman called Delilah whose crippled daughter I had once painted as a favour.

«She was not, perhaps, the bonniest thing,» I confided as we settled down to eat. «Lost both hands to a wasting disease and had them replaced with wooden ones. And — oh! — her little legs were in horrid iron rings.» I shook my head despairingly. «Ought to have been exposed at birth, her father said.»

«Nay!» cried Supple.

«Aye! But her dear mother loved the little mite. When I came to paint the portrait I did my best to make little Ida look like an angel. Prophetically enough. Though it turned out she had some pluck.»

Supple wiped soup from his pinkish lips. Sentimental old Victorian that he was, a tear sprang to his one good eye. Most probably the Death of Little Nell had been like mother’s milk to him.

«Poor Ida,» I sighed, picking idly at a chicken leg. «Grabbed from her bath-chair by a gang of dacoits and sold into bondage.»

Supple shook his head mournfully. No doubt an image of the doe-eyed cripple had flashed into his silly old brain. His fingers tightened on the fish-knife. «Go on. What happened?»

«She made a bolt for it, God bless her,» I continued. «Took off across the rooftops with the fiends in hot pursuit.»

Blink-blink. The jade glass eye regarded me steadily. «And then?»

I closed my eyes and steepled my fingers. «She got as far as Wapping before her brittle little legs gave out. She fell through the roof of a sugar merchant’s and into a vat of treacle. Of course, with those wooden hands she could get no purchase on the rim and she drowned. Very, very slowly.»

Drinking the last of an indifferent burgundy with an air of finality, I clapped my hands and turned the conversation towards more cheerful matters. Now I had Supple’s trust, it was time to betray that of others. I wanted the practice.

I regaled Supple with what I know to be an inexhaustible supply of anecdotes (not many of them true,