Have you seen her, p.1
ALATHEA a richly painted historical novel of art, ambition, love and defiance (The Heron Quartet Book 5), page 1
ALATHEA
The Heron Quartet Book 3
PAMELA BELLE
Revised edition 2025
Lume Books, London
A Joffe Books Company
www.lumebooks.co.uk
First published by Pan Books Ltd in Great Britain in 1985
© Pamela Belle 1985
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is British English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this. The right of Pamela Belle to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. In accordance with Article 4(3) of the Digital Single Market Directive 2019/790, Joffe Books expressly reserves this work from the text and data mining exception.
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CONTENTS
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Historical Note
Part One: The apprentice 1660-66
Chapter One - First Meeting
Chapter Two - Mary Beale
Chapter Three - Jasper
Chapter Four - Rupert
Chapter Five - The loving brother
Chapter Six - The links of blood
Chapter Seven - Hugh
Chapter Eight - No longer a city
Chapter Nine - Haven
Chapter Ten - The offer
Part Two: The picture-drawer, 1667-74
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve - A wilderness of monkeys
Chapter Thirteen - Portraits à la mode
Chapter Fourteen - A dragon in the heart
Chapter Fifteen - The revenant
Chapter Sixteen - The unlucky moment
Chapter Seventeen - Hang love
Chapter Eighteen - An ancient lover
Chapter Nineteen - The betrothal
Chapter Twenty - An ill-starred wench
Chapter Twenty-One - Woman’s honour
Chapter Twenty-Two - Something of the sea
Chapter Twenty-Three - Run away like a rascal
Part Three: The Artist 1674-1677
Chapter Twenty-Four - Advice to a painter
Chapter Twenty-Five - A harbinger of death
Chapter Twenty-Six - Love in a snowdrift
Chapter Twenty-Seven - A passing bell
Epilogue - Goldhayes
Notes
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The Lume & Joffe Books Story
Also by Pamela Belle
A Selection of Books You May Enjoy
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Historical Note
The obscurer byways of the history of Western art are littered with the paintings of female artists, long forgotten; many of whom, like Alathea Heron, began full of bright early promise, famous and feted, only to fade away under the pressures of marriage, male prejudice and competition, the vagaries of fashion. Mary Beale’s long and successful career was one of the few exceptions, and even she disappeared in the shadows of Lely and Kneller. So although the name of Alathea Heron will probably not be found in any work of reference, her career does reflect some of the problems faced by most women artists in the past, and anyone wanting to explore this field in detail is advised to read The Obstacle Race, by Germaine Greer, whose research and theories I have shamelessly plundered.
I also owe a great debt to all the scholars who have struggled over the years with the complex character of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and I am well aware that my portrayal presents only one facet, and that the most likeable, of a man who has fascinated me since my teens. I am also well aware that the famous portrait of him crowning his monkey, still hidden in the bowels of the National Portrait Gallery, is usually ascribed to Jacob Huysmans: but since there is no signature, and no certainty, I felt free to assign it instead to Alathea. Rochester’s poems, however, are all his, and the order in which they appear in the story corresponds to the order in which most scholars consider he wrote them. The delightful letter in Chapter 21 is also genuine.
As in my previous books about the Herons, I have woven my fictional family into the fabric of a real society, and many of the other characters actually existed. Charles Jermyn, like the rest of his family, lived and died as described in the story; but his marriage to Henrietta Sewell is not a matter of record.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge once more my indebtedness to my mother, and her gimlet eye for errors; to the encouragement of my father and other members of my family and friends; and last, but not least, to that most splendid gentleman Samuel Pepys, without whom any study of Restoration England would be a pale shadow of the rich and fascinating reality.
Part One: The apprentice 1660-66
…an unlesson’d girl, unschool’d, unpractis’d:
Happy in this, she is not yet so old
But she may learn: happier than this,
She is not bred so dull but she can learn.
(Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice)
Chapter One - First Meeting
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The childhood shows the man
As morning shows the day.
(Milton, Paradise Regained)
The day, the momentous day that changed Alathea Heron’s life for ever was a most beautiful one: high summer in the soft green Oxfordshire hills, thick with grass and flowers and butterflies and silly, denuded sheep, filling the air with scent and colour, sound and movement. No cloud marred the limitless, hot sky, and the afternoon sun poured down on the child’s back as she sat, her green skirt almost invisible in the deep grass, and turned her ash-fair head to a cap of wild silver.
Below her, the house lay somnolent amid the still greener grass of the water-meadows around the little River Swere: a golden house, ancient and rather dilapidated, built of the local Oxfordshire stone more than three hundred years ago, and hardly touched since. There were fresh scars, though, where the Parliament soldiers had dismantled the fortifications after the late Civil Wars, when Ashcott had held a King’s garrison, and suffered for it. The encircling wall had gone, and the gatehouse and the tower and the remaining structure had a very desolate, lop-sided look, not improved by the riotous growth of grass and ivy and nettles all around it.
Alathea’s mouth tightened as she stared at it. Doubtless to many this still substantial manor house seemed a palace, and her father had pointed out their good fortune in having such a place to live, but only a month before they had all been at Goldhayes, and, compared to Goldhayes, humble Ashcott was pottery after amber. She had been born there, so had her younger brothers and her sister, and it was her home, the place that her heart yearned for, despite the unwelcome, undeniable truth that it in fact belonged to her Uncle Simon. So, her parents had cared for Goldhayes until the King, and Simon Heron, could come into their own again: and on a glorious May day in 1660, the King and Simon Heron and thousands of other Royalist exiles had joyfully, triumphantly ridden into London amid the wildly celebrating populace, and Alathea and her family must leave Goldhayes, the lovely rose-brick, moated mansion that was the jewel of all Suffolk, and go to Ashcott, the neglected mutilated old house that had belonged to her mother.
Even now, a month after the move, she longed and yearned for Goldhayes. She only had to shut her eyes to take her mind away from the hillside above Ashcott to the park at Goldhayes, to wander up the drive to the bridge over the moat, to lean down and drop twigs and bits of grass on to the still murky water to see if they moved (they never had), to stroll between the clipped flowerbeds over the gravel of the Front Court, to open the heavy oak door in the porch and smell again that strange, warm aroma unique to Goldhayes, sunshine and flowers and polish and herbs, and hear the hard, flat, dearly familiar Suffolk voices of the servants, so different from the soft rolling Oxfordshire drawl.
But her Uncle Simon, newly made Lord Bradfield in recognition of his years of exile and his devoted service to the King and to Prince Rupert, lived there now with his ailing wife and his three unlikeable children, and Goldhayes was Alathea’s home no more. Nor could she reckon to return on the occasional family visit, for her father had parted on very acrimonious terms with his older brother (they had apparently never liked each other very much anyway), and accusations about mismanagement and profligate spending had flown thick and fast, even within her hearing. Lord Bradfield had objected very strongly to what he considered to be unnecessary expenditure on impr
And they had all come to Ashcott, so that her father could put the knowledge he had acquired with Goldhayes and a goodly slice of Suffolk, into setting right crumbling Ashcott and a few hundred acres of neglected land and a hamlet of apathetic peasantry. All of them: her parents, her brothers Matthew and Edmund, her sister Sophie, her half-brother Kit, and her orphan cousin Eleanor, who was six months older than Alathea and had always been part of their family. Together, they must make Ashcott comfortable and the land productive, and there were months and years of hard work ahead. But this afternoon, Alathea had managed to escape here, out of reach of all of them, with the little dog, Mab, who was an ancient and respected member of the family, for company: to indulge her great and secret passion, which was drawing.
*
The boy riding the hired gelding was half asleep, lulled into a state of daydream by the heat, the swaying ease of his horse’s gait, and the somnolent murmur of the bees and the swish of grass. He had long since let the reins drop and the animal made its own leisurely way along the hillside path from Barford St John, lazily avoiding the occasional sheep or grass tussock: and his rider dreamed, revelling in this unique day of freedom. In a life planned to the last detail by mother and tutors — the grammar school at Burford, a student at Oxford at the age of twelve, then the obligatory nobleman’s tour of the more dubious areas of Europe, and an assured place at Court at the end of it all — with his future laid so plain before him, a spontaneous excursion such as this, undertaken purely for curiosity’s sake and unsupervised by overbearing parent or officious tutor, was his idea of paradise, and he was making the most of it. No pressure to conform, to direct his mind along the narrow rigid paths ordained for it by insensitive adults, to behave with the stiff formality expected of an Earl, even a thirteen-year-old Earl: a blessed chance to be himself, and let his mind rove free.
And because his mind was always full of words and rhymes, and the wild flood of exhilarating talk he heard at Oxford among tutors and students alike, it was words that jostled undisciplined in his head, arranging and rearranging themselves in fantastic patterns that somehow never seemed to achieve the facility, the graceful fluency he so greatly desired. He had read poetry in Latin, in Greek and in English, he knew large portions of Horace and Shakespeare by heart and their rhythms and language were as much a part of him as his own: and yet when he tried to translate the silent exuberant song inside his head, all that seemed to emerge was dull, pedestrian, ridden with cliché and conceit. One day, he knew, the elusive tantalising key would turn at last and true poetry would flow, but for now the lame verses that struggled from his pen did not seem sufficient for his imagination and ambition. Robert Whitehall, one of the sycophants and hopeful ageing Cavaliers who had attached themselves to him at Oxford — for his title’s sake, for his father’s sake, never for his own sake — had ‘polished up’ some of his childish verses on the King’s Restoration and sent them to His Majesty. Two months older, he grew hot with embarrassment at the thought of those stilted couplets being perused by royal eyes: but Whitehall was a good enough fellow, with his rough talk and refreshingly advanced ideas about learning at hidebound, prosy Oxford, and his enormous capacity for beer and tobacco. Whitehall, the boy decided with a reminiscent, slightly guilty grin, might be what his mother would describe as bad company, as bad as his poetry, but to his mind was very good company on hot summer nights in Oxford taverns.
He was nearly there now, only a mile or so from his father’s house at Adderbury, that he had not seen since he was small: his mother lived at Ditchley, her jointure-house, and its long low mellow frontage, the green park and trees, were engraved on his heart for ever as home. But in going to Adderbury he was in some strange way moving closer to the shade of his father, that fat, bluff, jovial, hard-drinking, hard-loving caricature of a Cavalier whom he had met only once, long ago in France when he was six: he could still remember, when he wanted to, his disappointment at the coarse reality of the fabulous being he had worshipped from afar. He thrust that inconvenient, unpleasant memory from his mind and concentrated on guiding his ambling nag around a clump of hawthorn bushes.
Something tiny and black-and-white leapt up from almost under his horse’s hooves, barking furiously. Startled out of its somnolence, the gelding squealed and reared, and its rider, equally surprised, was nearly thrown. It took most of his not inconsiderable skill to calm his mount as the little dog fussed indignantly around, still protesting at its narrow escape. Then a hand whipped it out of reach by the scruff of its neck, and a furious, breathless voice ordered it to sit, following up this command with a brisk tap on its rump. ‘You may nearly have been trodden on, but there’s no call to make things worse!’ said the voice severely to the dog, which lowered its head and cringed guiltily.
By this time the boy had leisure enough for a proper view of the owner of voice and dog: which proved to be a child, a girl not much younger than himself, with lint-fair hair tangled round her face and wearing a grass-green linsey-woolsey dress and an apron that had seen better days. She said defensively, ‘Can’t you look where you’re going? You nearly ran us down!’
He had immediately assumed her to be some villager’s brat: the sharpness and tone of her voice, with a faint accent he could not recognise, told him different. Angry after his alarm, he attacked in return. ‘That’s not a thing I could have avoided very well, is it? What were you doing, anyway, skulking about in the bushes with your unmannerly cur?’
‘That’s none of your business! And Mab’s no cur, she’s a dear old lady even if she is a bit deaf, and she’s seen hard times and deserves more respect than you’ve given her — so if you’re a gentleman you’ll say you’re sorry and be on your way!’ And with an angry flourish, the girl stood aside to let him pass.
And he would have done, had not a flash of white on the ground caught his eye and his attention. The girl followed his gaze and then snatched it up and held it behind her back, her face, reddening, daring him to comment. But he had seen what it was and, his interest held, said quietly, ‘I’m sorry if I was rude. Have you been drawing? Can I see?’ His curiosity grew: it was, at the very least, a strange thing for a young girl of (presumably) good family to be doing up here on the sheepwalks above the River Swere. Who was she, and where did she live?
The girl stared at him intently, suspiciously. He noticed her eyes: they were long, a smoky green colour, watchful and wary, incongruously adult in her pointed, freckled, sun-flushed child’s face. Evidently her assessment of him was favourable, for she gave a sudden wry shrug and grinned. ‘Yes. I was drawing Ashcott, that’s the house down there, that’s where I live.’ And the white paper was thrust out at him and her eyes, as he took it, all the while daring him to laugh, to sneer, to make cruel comments. But he remembered, with a pang of mortification, his own childish efforts at creation that had doubtless been the subject of much adult amusement behind his back: and knew that, if necessary, he would lie kindly.
But there was no need. He knew very little of drawing or painting: words fascinated him, it was words he could control and manipulate and one day, perhaps, join into poetry. But even his inexperienced eye could discern that the detailed pen-and-ink drawing of the little golden house below them in its green growing valley, was quite exceptional: and from the hands of a girl perhaps twelve years old, truly astonishing. Something of his admiration and surprise must have shown in his face, for she said, hesitantly, as if such appreciation rarely came her way, ‘Do — do you like it?’
