I, Hogarth Page 6

  Laughing Felix showed me an etching by Jacques Callot called The Temptation of St Anthony. So much action and detail there, so much GOING ON. It was a wondrous revelation.

  I pleaded with Frenchy, as I now called Felix, to show me more works by Callot. He laughed once more and said I must understand that one first. I sulked and snubbed him. He smiled, ruffled my hair and called me ‘Beelly Boy’ in that Frenchie accent of his. He spoke more and more French to me. I could usually understand.

  ‘Buying shares,’ announced Stout Gamble in a basso rumble, ‘is like playing loo, faro or basset, with the gratifying difference that you cannot lose.’

  He peered over my shoulder as I worked, struggling into his coat before going off to a coffee house. ‘Let Felix do the motto, Bill. Your letters is shaky. I ain’t risking it.’

  ‘I’m good at letters,’ I protested.

  ‘Felix is better. Do what I say or I’ll clip you round the ear. Take breeding silkworms in Chelsea Park, for example.’ Stout Gamble adjusted his wig, then stood with his arms akimbo.

  ‘What? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Can’t lose. Take a wheel that goes round forever. Wonderful thing, science. And there’s a scheme I’m in, making fresh water from the sea. I’ll buy you boys in, if you like. There’s an offer for you.’

  Felix smiled, his pretty, small features creasing.

  ‘Goldmines in Peru,’ I said. ‘Goldmines in Peru, all of it.’

  ‘Eh? What’s that? Shows how much you know, Billy Boy. Mr Walpole is about to get them for England, them goldmines. He’s swopping Gibraltar and Port Mahon for ’em. Hot news that is.’

  I put my salver down. ‘Oh, you are the very prince of jesters, Mr Gamble.’

  ‘You get on with your work, Bill. Enough of your sauce. What about you?’ Gamble was addressing jug-eared Stephen. ‘Fancy a wager, boy? Fancy a stake?’

  ‘No money, Mr Gamble,’ said the Fowler boy, without breaking off from his engraving.

  ‘No ambition, more like!’ Stout Gamble shook his head in mock despair. ‘See, there’s the difference between you boys and me. England’s on a ride to riches and I’m aboard. Richer and richer! No need to work. Work is for donkeys.’

  ‘Thank you very much!’ I said. ‘Go off to your coffee, Mr Gamble. Us donkeys’ll pull your cart for you.’

  Felix laughed; Gamble joined in, before giving us an extravagant wave, goodbye.

  ‘What we going to do this evening?’ I said, as soon as he’d gone.

  I counted the minutes till the evening’s entertainment as soon as I got up. I pictured it in my head, clear as life, to get me through the engraving drudgery. What I really wanted, that evening, was a whorehouse or a bagnio, as the pressure in my member weighed heavy. But I was still shy with Frenchy and Birdcatcher, though I liked them both, and too afraid to go alone. So I suggested the theatre.

  That evening, then, I dressed in my scarlet waistcoat and gold lace hat. No fustian for me, thank you Mr Ellis Stout-Gamble! Arm in arm, we three companions strode to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, singing sea shanties as we went, feeling like royalty ourselves on the way to the Theatre Royal. The place was packed, not to mention stinking; a short-arse like me could barely see. A sword fight broke out on the stage before the play even started, with us lustily cheering on the winner.

  The play itself, when it finally got started, turned out to be a piece called The Man’s The Master, which was obvious enough. And very dreary it was, except for some of the singing and dancing, which I always enjoyed. But about ten minutes into the spectacle, I recognised a figure on the stage. She was veiled, she was shrouded, which was a pity as she was clearly full-breasted, and she had hardly spoken. But I knew her; I knew I knew her.

  ‘I shall write that actress a billet,’ I shouted in Frenchy’s ear, above the din. ‘I am acquainted with her.’

  Frenchy laughed. ‘I think you confuse the desire with the reality,’ he shouted back.

  While the dreary mumming continued on stage I pulled out a sheet of the paper I always carried for sketching, together with a crayon.

  ‘Madam …’ I wrote. ‘Pray cast your mind back to Fenton’s Coffee House where, some years ago, I had the pleasure of making your acquaintance when you were but a child, and so was I. You wore, as I recall …’ and then I sketched her yellow brocaded dress with the red roses. ‘And very fetching, too. My two companions and I would like to meet you after the entertainment and have a drink with you, to talk over old times.’

  Birdcatcher and Frenchy read my billet as I printed out the letters with difficulty in the swaying crowd, with people constantly banging into me. The Fowler boy, who was a little drunk, gave a whoop as I wrote the invitation part of my billet.

  ‘Good for you, Bill,’ he said, solemnly. ‘And, why not?’

  I led the way as we pushed ourselves into a five-shilling box seat we had not paid for. There, I found a footman who was keeping a place for his mistress for the afterpiece and offered him two pennies to take the letter to Miss Lavinia Fenton, who, as luck would have it, was just walking off the stage. The footman got his colleague in the same livery to keep his lady’s place, and agreed to run my errand.

  ‘That’s the last you see of your monnai, Bill,’ said Felix-Frenchy, through his grin.

  But that showed how much he knew. The footman was back just as Lavinia came onto the stage again. She had returned my billet, but with a scrawl at the bottom saying we should come to the side entrance after the performance.

  ‘See!’ I cried in triumph. ‘See! I am a person of substance after all!’

  Frenchy and Birdcatcher clapped me on the back for my triumph. And Lavinia even remembered me, when we saw her at the actors’ entrance.

  ‘You was with your dad, right? You’re … wait a minute …?’

  ‘William! William Hogarth.’

  ‘Tha’s right!’

  ‘And these are my friends, Felix Pellett and Stephen Fowler.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, I’m sure.’ There was a silence. My triumph had rendered Birdcatcher and Frenchy speechless. ‘Well, where we going then? This acting lark don’t half make me hungry. I could eat a bloody horse, and no mistake.’

  ‘There’s a chop house near here,’ I said. ‘Would you care to …?’

  ‘Too bloody right I would. Excuse me boys, but you are paying, aren’t you? I’m just a hireling, you know. We don’t earn much.’

  ‘Of course!’ I said, so earnestly the other two laughed. ‘It is our pleasure, Miss Fenton. Avec plaisir.’

  ‘Good accent,’ said Frenchy, drily.

  ‘You can cut the “Miss Fenton”. It’s plain Lavinia to you, William.’

  I offered my arm. She took it with an elegant flourish. We skirted the fringe of Lincoln’s Inn Fields to Portugal Row, with my companions trotting along behind. I looked up to the heavens, silently beseeching my father to look at me now. OH, JUST LOOK AT ME NOW!

  2

  MY VIRGIN state was causing me much anguish. How could I strut the streets – bully-boy apprentice, emergent artist, yellow-waistcoated dandy, fine fellow of London town – when I had not rogered a woman of real flesh and blood? My dreams told me clearly what I had not done: dreams of Kate, now dreams of Lavinia. But the fact remained that I had not done it. This had to change, and it had to change that very night.

  London boasted a girl for every wallet. There were places – Catherine Street, Drury Lane, Fleet Street – where the crowds of harlots were thicker than a Spitalfields weavers’ riot. I wanted one, just one, and I wanted her for the night; no hoisted-skirts bunter up against the wall for me, thank you very much.

  We settled on Lovejoy’s bagnio, my companions and I. But first we dined on whole breast of veal at the dear old Bedford Arms. There, over a large glass of porter, and in a spirit of good fellowship, I confessed my unwanted burden to my companions, Stephen Fowler and Felix Pellett.

  I regretted it instantly. Frenchy told me that my beauty was only for the connoisseur
, while ruffling my hair. I bit his hand, hard, and yelled at him hotly to desist. He licked the blood I had drawn on his hand and stared at me with burning, small black eyes. He looked mad. I memorised his face.

  Stephen the Birdcatcher, the most drunk of us, as usual, told the tale of his own first time with a girl. He was of a wealthy family. To hear him tell it, a maid shared his bed in his boyhood, taking his member in her mouth every night, finally sliding it home.

  ‘I was nine years old at the time,’ said Stephen, slyly.

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ I shouted, ready to walk out on both of them.

  Instead, we all left the Bedford Arms, but drunken Stephen turned the wrong way outside. I steered him by the shoulder past Old Hummums Hotel, which also had bawds outside it, to Lovejoy’s Bagnio in Russell Street.

  This was the place Stephen himself recommended, though he now appeared to have no recollection of that. As Stephen and I were going in, Frenchy surprisingly took his leave, with sudden excuses about ‘work tomorrow’.

  ‘Come back!’ I shouted after him. ‘Oh, run off then, you foreign spoilsport!’ I picked up a pebble from the street and slung it at Frenchy’s departing back, but missed him. ‘Come on, Stephen,’ I said.

  We went in, Stephen and I.

  As we entered the bagnio, we were enveloped by a cloud of steam from the baths. We were met in the vestibule by Mother Douglas herself, on the lookout, no doubt, for new flesh among the customers as much as new flesh to add to the stock of ladies.

  ‘Now here’s a couple of handsome young blades! A right couple of gallants and no mistake. My girls are truly in luck tonight. What’s it to be then, gentleman? A turn at the baths, a nice rub down with a nice rub up? Or how about some refreshment while you sit and think about it? A glass of champagne perhaps, or punch? Or we have some good Queen of Scots soup on tonight, just made. Warms your pickle against the cold of the night. Tell me what you fancy, young sirs. This is your home from home.’

  The Mother waved at the somewhat faded plush couches and chairs where we were invited to disport ourselves. The Fowler boy, sobering, or so it appears, named two girls from a list, speaking nonchalantly like a connoisseur, or a cunnyseur, as I had heard it called. I glanced admiringly at him. He no longer appeared jug-eared and ruddy-cheeked: less like a teapot altogether, suddenly the homme du monde – a phrase I had learned from the departed Frenchy Pellett.

  Mother Douglas opened wide her eyes, agog with admiration at the Man Who Knew His Own Will So Well.

  ‘Charlotte Kennedy is no longer with us,’ she purred smoothly. ‘But you can have Fanny Burton. And there’s a new girl, Gertrude Eliot, just up from the country and closed as the day God made her. Just waiting for you.’

  For some reason, this last phrase was addressed to me, as she gazed down at me, for she was a good head taller.

  ‘Huh!’ I said knowingly, having heard from Stephen of a bawd’s deceit with a sponge soaked in pig’s blood, which enabled the lass to re-sell her precious seal nightly, and on occasion more often than that.

  ‘Huh!’ I repeated, so there was no doubt I saw through the ruse.

  ‘Do you have the ague, sir,’ said Mother Douglas, solicitously. ‘The soup is very good for a chest cough.’

  ‘Bring me to Fanny Burton, please, good Mother,’ I commanded, forcefully. ‘And something similar for my companion.’

  I pressed my half-guinea into Mother Douglas’s practiced hand, whereupon I was led upstairs to a corridor of rooms. I forgot all about Stephen Fowler. Mother Douglas knocked on a door, called out and I was bid enter. In a sparse, darkened room sat Fanny Burton, I assume, on a bed, legs crossed, wearing only black stockings, red garters and a linen shift.

  The door closed behind me.

  ‘Good evening, sir,’ said Fanny, waving a stockinged leg in welcome.

  Fanny was dark-haired with lustrous dark eyes, but with the alabaster skin more common in redheads, which made a dramatic contrast. She was smaller than Lavinia Fenton, with more compact features, especially her nose and mouth, but otherwise the resemblance was close, which pleased me. I thought of her as fascinating Lavinia, but more easily available.

  With a sinuous wriggle of her shoulders, one of her snowy beauties was free of the shift, then the other. Wondrous! Oh, wondrous! Her bubbies were perfect-small, perfect- high-round, like cupping glasses, like peaches made of snow. The lovely bud-nipples were pointing different ways. And around the nipples, lovely rings of salmon pink. What were they? In all the art I had seen, I did not recall these rings of wonder, leading the eye and – oh, bliss! – the hand to the lovely, puckering points.

  ‘My name is William,’ I said.

  ‘Is it, now?’ she said, her eyes widening at the news. ‘Would you like to kiss me, William?’

  As we kissed, a final shimmer saw her shift on the floor. I touched her neck, the perfect, round shoulders, so white they had blues buried deep. And then, the greatest long pleasure in any man’s life, I touched the orbs of bliss, the firm flesh of delight, first the right and then the left.

  ‘Put this on.’

  ‘What? What! What is it?’

  She giggled. ‘It’s a condom, silly. Gives me a right tickle. Oh, come here! I’ll do it.’

  She hauled my breeches down, then slipped the furry sheath, like a brown caterpillar, over my agonised member, grown puce with withheld desire. Thus attired, she pushed me home. She was kind and by gentle holds, grips and pushes, caused me to prolong my slow ecstasy. I mounted, I pushed, I thrusted, I came. Exploded.

  I was dozing, moments later, when a remarkable scene was played out before me. First, the door burst open and a young fellow in a nightshirt and nightcap charged in, carrying his clothes. As Fanny screamed, he was followed by a woman in her shift and mob cap who was shouting ‘Run John, run!’

  The man addressed as John made for the window of Fanny’s room, as a third party entered, sword drawn. This latest addition to the sudden crowd in our room sported an elegant silver frock-coat, a Spencer wig and boasted large silver buckles covering three-fourths of his shoes. I drew the curtains to our bed, muffling Fanny’s screams, and hoisted up my breeches as frock-coat caught nightshirt and made to run him through.

  The woman in her shift and cap screamed ‘No!’ and then ‘Run, John!’ and threw herself on her knees in front of frock-coat, impeding him from running nightshirt through. By then I realised that nightshirt had taken a room at the bagnio to be with the woman, who was no doubt frock-coat’s wife.

  ‘Hey!’ I shouted. ‘Stop all this, leave this room at once!’

  But frock-coat and nightshirt were struggling over the sword, with the woman still on her knees between them, her arms round frock-coat’s legs. I do not know if she intended thus to hamper frock-coat, but that was the effect of her actions. In the struggle, the sword turned into frock-coat’s chest: he groaned, he bled, and he lay there, mortally wounded.

  At that moment, the constable and two men of the watch appeared at the door.

  Nightshirt picked his pile of clothes from off the floor and thrust them at me. His face was close to mine. He was blonde, with the pasty flesh of dissipation and pale watery-blue eyes, bloodshot and somewhat protuberant.

  ‘I’ll collect them tomorrow,’ he breathed, with remarkable composure in the circumstances, nodding at the clothes. ‘Hide them till then. Where will you be?’

  ‘At Ellis Gamble’s, the engraver,’ I said. ‘It’s my place of work.’

  ‘I know it,’ he said.

  I thrust nightshirt’s clothes under the bed covers, provoking a squawk from Fanny. Just as the constable and his men entered the room, nightshirt dived out of the window and the woman on her knees, realising her husband was dead, commenced howling like a banshee.

  The constable was a plump fellow with a lantern and a stave. He waddled to the window, ignoring the howls of the widow, as I supposed, on the floor. Putting down his stave, he held onto his battered felt hat to stop it falling off and peered into darkne
ss through the gale of wind coming through the window.

  ‘After him!’ he bellowed, to the two fellows of the watch: lanky, cretinous looking individuals, both of them. And with that, the watch left the room, followed by the plump one at a lumbering trot.

  Mother Douglas entered shortly afterwards, not outwardly discomfited. ‘That was John Rakesby,’ she sighed, nodding at the open window through which the blonde, dissipated and clothesless one lately exited. ‘There’s always trouble when he comes.’

  Fanny emerged from the hinterland of the bed, pleasantly pink, and put her shift back on. ‘I think it is best that you leave now, William,’ she said. ‘The constable will come back, no doubt, for this fine fellow.’ She indicated the corpse on the floor, blood staining from red to black on his white silk shirt. ‘Come back and see us soon, though, won’t you? It will be such a pleasure.’ She fluttered her eyelashes at me.

  I nodded, smiled, gathered John Rakesby’s clothes together, kissed Fanny goodbye and walked slowly to the door. Stephen appeared and we left together, after a more than usually memorable night.

  3

  WE NEVER SAW Stout Gamble at the Gamble home, for the noble Mrs G, calm as a millpond, settled the minimal living needs of we scruffy little band of apprentices. Gamble would first appear at ten in the morning at the emporium which bore his name, freshly minted to spend himself on the demands of the day. There he would find a veritable tick-tock of working activity, which, unbeknown to Stout Gamble, was all of five minutes old: having wound itself up just before we knew he was coming.

  He saw me engraving a wyvern, a beast I detest, the more so as it never existed. I have a marked prejudice in favour of forms of life which actually live. The repeated engraving of wyverns was an activity designed to constrict and finally crush the human spirit. It was only Frenchy doing so much of my work that kept my élan up and stopped me running feral, and I shall forever be grateful to him.