The Fraud Read Online Free PDF Page A

just as usual.
    Aunt Joy was missed, however, after all; the household ran amok, it might be said, from the time of her demise: often now there was not food on the table, and voices shouted all over the house as it seemed to dis-integrate.
     
    Slowly Philip’s portraits started to be praised in the city: he began painting the newly-rich, those successful tradesmen who sold the iron and the black men. Rough paintings yet perhaps, but the tradesmen had never been painted by anyone at all before and paid him well; he painted a cloth-merchant, the cloth-merchant’s wife, an alderman, a minister of the church, and - to his mother’s delight - several daughters of real gentlemen.
    ‘At last, my darling boy!’ cried Betty, ‘You will find a Wife worthy of your Ancestors, and we will all be saved!’ But it was not the Bristolian gentry who would save Philip. The rough, hard-working Bristol traders aimed to be real gentlemen themselves, or their sons at least, and their portraits already made them feel like gentlemen. They encouraged Philip’s talent, were soon suggesting he travel to see the Great Old Masters, that he journey to Florence and Rome and Venice and Amsterdam with their own sons: add to his Artistic Education.
    ‘I will come! I must come!’ cried Grace, ‘for my Artistic Education.’ But nobody heard.
    Philip for the first time in his life worked hard, experimented with colours, painted day and night: powerful businessmen and young ladies and gentlemen from the town. He too now talked of his Grand Tour but the financial and domestic situation of the family had become so embarrassing that, to his wild frustration, the money he was earning for his portraits had to be used simply to hold off the creditors, for Marmaduke had finally used the Queen’s Square house as collateral in the gambling dens in the dark Bristol alleys.
     
    And then the plague came.
    It came particularly to Bristol: the ships perhaps, or the sewers, or the black men. The sun shone on, the pestilence flew over the land; whole families died in a city so crowded, so wedded to trade and ships (in the night rats ran from the ships, burrowed into the dark corners of the city). The plague was no respecter of class, made no special dispensation for the Marshall family, people were dying all over Bristol, whole families in some areas: hundreds and hundreds of people died. Juno, the oldest girl who nearly married the son of an iron exporter, succumbed early; at her funeral the mother wept loudly and sang ‘How Great Thou Art’ in a trembling soprano. Then Ezekiel died. Then Venus got her wish and died, to her own surprise, and the vintner’s son did, after all, pay his respects. Finally the life ended of Betty, the fair-haired pretty young bride, who had wanted nobility and whose idea it had been to move to the filthy, stinking city that she thought had held such promise of fashion and of future.
    Philip and Grace and Tobias huddled in disbelief with their father as hurried, smaller funerals were arranged and as more and more creditors called. Betty’s mahogany furniture was taken away. Beloved the poodle disappeared and was never seen again. ‘I hope somebody boiled it up for stew,’ said Philip blankly, and Marmaduke almost smiled. But within a week Marmaduke stared listlessly at his paints and lay upon his bed: his lips took on the faint blue colour that was the sign, the sign that death was near. After only three more days Philip and Grace and Tobias were the only members of the Marshall family in Bristol still alive and they clung together, shocked, dis-oriented, as their father was taken away in a cart piled with bodies and Grace’s tears fell upon her shabby skirt as she sat on the roadway, like any street child, long after the cart had disappeared.
     
    Bristol’s population was shockingly lessened. One of the newly-rich young men of the city, a trader’s son, decided to leave Bristol at once: for Italy, for his Artistic Education,