Her wedding!
Elodie glanced at the clock and saw that it was already quarter past ten. She hadn’t even responded to Pippa’s message, but she was going to have to get moving if she expected to be at King’s Cross by eleven. Gathering her phone and notebook, her diary and sunglasses, Elodie loaded her bag. She surveyed the desktop for anything she might have forgotten and, on a whim, picked up the framed photograph, the woman in that wonderful dress. With a glance at where Margot was hunched over by the filing cabinet, she wrapped it in the tea towel and tucked it in her bag.
Making her way through the office door and up the stairs into the warm summer’s day, Elodie started texting her reply.
11 is fine, she typed; Leaving now – send me the address and I’ll see you soon.
CHAPTER FOUR
Pippa was working that day at a publishing house on New Wharf Road, putting together an installation in the foyer. When Elodie arrived at quarter past eleven, her friend was perched at the top of a very tall ladder in the centre of the contemporary white room. She’d been stringing long dresses and other antique items of clothing – skirts and bloomers and corsets – from the high ceiling and the effect was enchanting, as if a dance floor of ivory ghosts had swept in on the breeze. Words came to Elodie’s mind from one of her favourite Wilde poems: We caught the tread of dancing feet, We loitered down the moonlit street, And stopped beneath the harlot’s house …
We watched the ghostly dancers spin, To sound of horn and violin, Like black leaves wheeling in the wind …
Pippa spotted Elodie and exclaimed around the wooden ruler clenched horizontal in her teeth.
Elodie waved back and held her breath while her friend leaned to fasten a petticoat strap to a thread of fishing line.
After an excruciating moment, Pippa made it back to the ground in one piece. ‘Won’t be long,’ she said to the man behind the desk as she shrugged on her backpack. ‘Just out for a coffee.’
As they pushed through the large glass door, Elodie fell into step beside her friend. Pippa was wearing dark wartime dungarees and the sort of puffed-up sneakers favoured by the teenage boys who gathered at the fish and chip shop on Friday evenings. The items were not individually notable, but somehow on Pippa their effect was magnified so that Elodie felt like a dreary little minnow in her jeans and ballet flats.
Pippa drew on her cigarette as they cut through a tall locked gate (to which she somehow had the code) and skirted the canal. ‘Thanks for coming early,’ she said on an exhalation. ‘I’m going to have to work through lunch to get it finished. The author’s coming in tonight to launch the book. Have I shown you? It’s gorgeous – an American who found out that the English aunt she’d known only as an ancient woman in a home had once been mistress to the king and had collected the most extraordinary wardrobe of dresses, all in mothballs in a storage unit in New Jersey. Can you imagine? The only thing my aunt left me was a nose I could steer a boat with.’ They crossed the street and made their way over the bridge towards a glass-faced restaurant adjacent to the Tube station.
Inside, a friendly waitress seated them at a round table in the back corner. ‘Macchiato?’ she said, to which Pippa replied, ‘Perfect. And a … ?’
‘Flat white, please,’ said Elodie.
Pippa wasted no time in pulling a bulging scrapbook from her bag, letting it fall open to reveal all manner of loose papers and samples. ‘Here’s what I’m thinking,’ she began, before launching into an enthusiastic description of sleeves and skirts, the pros and cons of peplums, the benefits of natural fabrics, switching from one illustration to another, barely pausing for breath, until the table was covered in magazine pages, fabric swatches and fashion sketches. Finally, she said, ‘So, what do you think?’
‘I love it. All of it.’
Pippa laughed. ‘I know it’s a bit of a muddle; I just have so many thoughts flying around. How about you – do you have any ideas?’
‘I have a veil.’
‘Ooh la la.’
‘Dad dug it out for me.’ Elodie handed over her phone with the photo she’d taken that morning.
‘Your mum’s? Lucky thing, it’s gorgeous. Designer, I’m sure.’
‘I think so. Not sure which one.’
‘Hardly matters, it’s beautiful. Now we just have to make sure the dress deserves it.’
‘I found a photograph of something I like.’
‘Come on then, give us a look.’
Elodie took the tea towel out of her bag and slid the silver frame from inside.
Pippa lifted a single amused brow. ‘Have to admit, I was expecting a torn page from Vogue.’
Elodie handed the frame across the table and waited, a flutter of unplaceable nerves at the pit of her stomach.
‘Wow, she’s beautiful.’
‘I found her at work. She’d spent the past fifty years in a leather bag at the bottom of a box under some curtains in a cabinet beneath the stairs.’
‘No wonder she looks so pleased to be out.’ Pippa brought the photograph closer. ‘The dress is divine. The whole thing is divine. It’s more of an art shot than a portrait, like something Julia Margaret Cameron might have taken.’ She looked up. ‘Does this have anything to do with the text you sent me this morning? Edward Radcliffe?’
‘I’m still trying to figure that out.’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised. This photo is classic aestheticism. The engaging expression, the loose dress and fluid posture. Early to mid-1860s, if I had to guess.’
‘It reminded me of the Pre-Raphaelites.’
‘Related, definitely; and of course the artists of the time were all inspired by one another. They obsessed over things like nature and truth; colour, composition and the meaning of beauty. But where the Pre-Raphaelites strove for realism and detail, the painters and photographers of the Magenta Brotherhood were devoted to sensuality and motion.’
‘There’s something moving about the quality of light, don’t you think?’
‘The photographer would be thrilled to hear you say so. Light was of principal concern to them: they took their name from Goethe’s colour-wheel theories, the interplay of light and dark, the idea that there was a hidden colour in the spectrum, between red and violet, that closed the circle. You have to remember, it was right in the middle of a period when science and art were exploding in all directions. Photographers were able to use technology in ways they hadn’t before, to manipulate light and experiment with exposure times to create new effects.’ She paused while the waitress delivered their coffees. ‘Edward Radcliffe was very well regarded, but not as famous as some of the other members of the Magenta Brotherhood went on to become.’
‘Remind me?’
‘Thurston Holmes, Felix and Adele Bernard – they all met at the Royal Academy and bonded over their anti-Establishment ideas; tight-knit, but with all the lies, lust and split loyalties you’d expect in the cut-throat nineteenth-century art world. Radcliffe was prodigiously talented, but he died young.’ Pippa returned her attention to the photograph. ‘What makes you think he might have something to do with her?’
Elodie explained about the archive box and the satchel with Edward Radcliffe’s initials on it. ‘There was a document holder inside that belonged to James Stratton; the only thing in it was this framed photo.’
‘And Radcliffe was a friend of your main man?’