Chapter Twelve #2
So early the next day they headed down to Greenwich on the water.
It was a bright day of the best kind as the year eased into summer, and the breeze was stiff with salt.
The boatman headed east, past the great foursquare Tower of London, then the frantic, filthy docks of Limehouse and Rotherhithe and Deptford.
Titus watched the flotillas of boats from across the world, and the astonishing variety of humanity working on them.
Nico had spent quite enough time on docks, so he mostly watched Titus, and the way his face relaxed when he was absorbed in things.
Or, perhaps, the way he tensed up when he was aware of himself.
So much tension. So little trust. Titus had a fortune where Nico had an eye-watering debt to a dangerous man, so it was ridiculous that Titus was the worried one between them, but that was what you got for a lifetime of caution and responsibility.
Nico had never owned more than could be packed into a trunk; his life had never gone anywhere near the kind of path that led to a shop of one’s own and a modicum of financial security.
It sounded like a lot of hard work. Like having a great deal to lose.
That made Nico wonder about the worrying letter again.
He’d cast a surreptitious glance over the writing table but learned nothing.
Was it merely Titus’s pestilential oldest brother, or something else?
Nico had very much tried to position himself as the solver of Titus’s problems, both to be invaluable and because he liked the way Titus looked when he did it.
He didn’t like that Titus wasn’t bringing this one to him.
He wasn’t going to ask, not yet. Instead he kept watching Titus.
Watched him as they strolled through the park, admiring the noble architecture of the Hospital, even more struck by the living panorama of the Thames, thick with shipping, and the sprawl of London beyond.
Watched him as he marvelled at the lovely, complex, incomprehensible astronomical apparatus of the Observatory.
He did have to stop watching Titus in order to pay attention to the famous Camera Obscura, because it was astonishing.
Somehow, in a turret room of the Observatory, an arrangement of lenses produced a great moving picture of the distant street outside, with pensioners and schoolboys wandering up and down.
An attendant explained how it worked; Nico tried briefly to understand, classified it as magic, and went back to watching Titus and the studious way he set himself to grasp the principles of light rays and lenses.
He left Titus to be shown round the interior of the Hospital, which apparently boasted painted ceilings and an impressive staircase, after which he would take luncheon with the Astronomer Royal.
Titus was delighted by the invitation; Nico just hoped he was prepared to become a financial patron.
He had other fish to fry himself, in the person of Sir James Roud, the other Marie Antoinette collector.
Unfortunately Roud was wizened and elderly, too bloodless now for the stories Nico had to tell.
He expressed interest in seeing the painting, but none in buying it, and Nico walked back to meet Titus with a sense of panic that he couldn’t quite suppress.
He’d depended on playing Rankin against Roud to get the price up to what he needed.
He’d depended on Miss Whitecross before that, and on Baynes as well. Some people might see all that as a litany of failures; Nico preferred to consider it a string of opportunities. Granted, none of them had come off yet, but the game wasn’t lost while he was still playing.
He met Titus back at the Hospital, and they took a look at the famous chapel with its elaborate painted decoration of ceiling and walls, and the huge altarpiece.
The Picture of London suggested that perhaps it was too profusely ornamented.
Nico, used to Continental Catholic churches, considered it depressingly restrained.
He did, however, find a great deal to think about in Titus’s careful examination of the altarpiece.
“Do you paint?” he asked as they settled into the boat back to town. “That is, make the art, not the materials?”
“Good heavens, no. I haven’t the talent.”
“Have you tried?”
“Well, no. I should say I don’t have the skills.”
“Have you studied?” Nico pressed.
“Of course I have not studied,” Titus almost snapped. “When would I have studied?”
“But you like to draw.”
“I did as a boy.”
“You still do. You make the little drawings all the time.” Little pencil pictures on letters, invitation cards, any bits of paper that might be lying around.
Nico had opened the Picture of London this morning and seen a few lines on the flyleaf suggesting a face that might, for all the world, have been his own. He’d looked at that for some while.
“Oh, well, yes. It’s—not even a hobby, just an idle distraction.”
“You like to do it, and you like colours. Why do you draw but not paint?”
Titus was looking distinctly harried. “There are techniques to using oils. It’s quite different. I could teach myself to draw.”
“And someone could teach you to paint,” Nico said. “Mon ami, I saw you last night, drunk on pictures, and I watched you today. You like to understand how things are made. And colours speak to you. You know them inside out, you care about how they are used—”
“As an artisan!”
“Is that so far from an artist? You know how the colours work, you know what to use, you have precision and application, and you peer closely at how it is done. Why do you not learn to do it yourself?”
“But I don’t know anything about art!” Titus said, with far more emotion than you’d expect from a man who didn’t care about the subject.
“Of course you do. You look at paintings. You own paintings. You have a dozen or more stacked against the wall.”
“Those were given to me in lieu of payment.”
“Mon ami, if you offered me a painting in lieu of payment, I should not accept it, because a painting has no value to me,” Nico pointed out. “They have value to you. No?”
“Well, yes, but that’s just things I like. Not—not artistic taste.”
“What is taste except things you like? Why do you not put your pictures on your walls?”
Titus looked positively panicked by the change of direction. “Uh, because…”
“Mmm?”
The oars plashed. A lascar on a cargo ship let out a stream of words that, despite the distance and their unknown language, scorched the air.
“Because it’s putting myself forward,” Titus said at last. “Just as learning to paint would be. It’s announcing, I shall do what I want. That’s not— I have not been encouraged to do that.”
He had the look of a man for whom something had just come into focus. Nico clamped his lips shut against things he very much wanted to say, and waited.
“But I could,” Titus went on slowly. “It is nobody else’s affair what I put on my walls, is it?”
“If they don’t like it, they may look at other walls.”
“Quite. And why should I not learn to paint? I daresay some people might find that self-indulgent in a grown man—”
“Who would care? And why let yourself be ruled by what others might say?”
“Don’t you care what people say?”
“Rarely,” Nico said. “I lack stature already; I cannot afford to let others make me smaller.”
“I suppose I have done that,” Titus said.
“I don’t like arguments; I don’t do them well.
I always feel in the wrong, and then one does make oneself smaller, so as not to offend, but it never stops the argument, does it?
It doesn’t matter how little space one takes up, because it’s always too much, and so you give more and more ground till you’ve barely enough left to stand on. ”
Nico’s breath caught. He wanted to ask exactly who Titus was thinking about, and then he wanted their address for a quiet conversation.
“There is no reason at all I shouldn’t learn to paint,” Titus went on, picking his way.
“It wouldn’t harm anyone, and it is—it is something I would very much like to do.
It wouldn’t be selfish, and if it is silly nobody need care, and anyway I can spend my time as I please. I don’t have to justify that.”
“No. You do not.”
Titus exhaled long and hard, then flashed Nico a quick, rueful grin. “I daresay all that seems obvious to you. It’s easier to feel entitled to things with money. Or a title, I suppose, by definition.”
“Limitless effrontery helps too,” Nico assured him. Titus gave a startled yelp of laughter, and the boatman rowed them on.