Work 4008: The Baptism of the Jezebels
Oil on Canvas
1797
Description: Four bare-breasted women in veils stand with linked arms in the foreground. Behind them, hundreds of aristocrats run from a stately manor wearing expressions of terror.
The women are smiling.
Commentary: The painting depicts the artist Cornelia Ludgate with three famed eighteenth-century protofeminists: the radical author Seraphina Arden; the aristocratic matron and intellectual Lady Elinor Bell; and the infamous courtesan-for-hire Thaïs Magdalene.
Recurring figures throughout Ludgate’s oeuvre, the close-knit group of women called themselves The Society of Sirens, so named for their revolutionary mission to weaponize their notorious reputations to raise interest in the cause of female rights and education.
The painting is from Ludgate’s exhibition The Jezebels, which criticized the place of “fallen women” in society by posing them as holy figures.
The show was roundly denounced as sacrilege.
Ludgate considered it the triumph of her career.
Chapter One
Cornelia Ludgate tore open the wax seal on a letter and scanned the contents just long enough to see the word regrets.
Her stomach did an unwelcome little curtsy. This was not good news.
Another rejection. The third this week, the tenth this month.
“It’s a no,” she announced briskly, allowing the letter to flutter to the floor with all the other missives offering insincere excuses from her supposed allies in the cause for female rights. Her acquaintances should know she preferred to deal in cheerful, brutal frankness. Just the no’s would do.
Her three best friends, scattered in poses around her painting studio in various draped costumes, groaned.
“Another?” Thaïs said with a dramatic sigh. “I’ve never been rejected so much in all my life.”
Thaïs looked in a mirror, fluffing the red curls that fell down to her ample bottom. “At least not by anyone who’s caught a look at me.”
“Surely,” Seraphina said, adjusting her baby daughter’s head from the latch it held on her breast, “it is only a small matter of time until we receive a yes.”
Cornelia did not wish to be the shatterer of hope, but there was no good news to offer—today, or in the future.
She gave her friends a rueful smile, preferring not to wear her devastation on her face. It was never good to betray such emotions, even with one’s dearest friends.
“This is, in fact, the final no,” she said briskly. “It seems we have run out of people to beg.”
“What cowards,” Cornelia’s aunt, Lady Elinor, murmured.
Coward was too kind a word—hypocrite was more apt. Cornelia had expected some of their acquaintances to be reluctant to host her latest artistic exhibition. Wealthy liberals had once clamored for her paintings back when her work had been known for nothing more dangerous than light political subversion and a whiff of the erotic. But after this past autumn, when the four of them had torn apart the country’s papers with their calls for rights for women, the name Cornelia Ludgate no longer meant mere scandal.
Now it meant sedition.
It meant danger.
It meant no.
“I suppose it’s a measure of our success that no one will risk association with your work,” Seraphina mused. “We wanted a war of shock and scandal, and we’ve gotten one. Now we have to fight for what we need.”
And fight they had.
The battle they had waged the previous year to raise money for female rights had been an unqualified success. They were all infamous women, notorious for their liberal politics and wayward reputations. They had decided to use the public’s prurient interest in their wild lives to raise money for their cause: founding an institute devoted to women’s equality and education.
So far, using the sale of Seraphina’s explosive memoirs, they had raised enough money to buy a handsome piece of land in northern London, where they planned to build the Institute for the Equality of Women. The trouble was, it had been exactly enough money for that handsome piece of land. To begin construction of the building they imagined—a place that would serve as a female sanctuary and bastion of progressive thought and education—they needed another round of funds.
But they were, once again, broke.
Which meant it was Cornelia’s turn to rattle the liberal coffers of the country for coins. Her plan was to hold an exhibition of her most shocking portraits yet—a series called The Jezebels that depicted whores and fallen women as madonnas.
If the advance rumors already surrounding the exhibition were any indication, the series would raise enough money for them to finance the first phase of construction of the institute.
But one could not sell paintings if one could not display them. Without a space to show her work, there would be no exhibition, and no more money, and no Institute for the Equality of Women, and the cause of female rights would languish for another hundred years, and all their efforts would be wasted—
But that was desperate thinking. And if there was one quality Cornelia Ludgate did not enjoy applying to herself, it was desperation.
“We’ll find a way,” she said, taking care to evince a calmness she didn’t quite possess. “We just have to think.”
“Of course we will,” Elinor said. “Perhaps we could let a venue.”
“We’d need ample coin for that,” said Thaïs. “And we’re overspent.”
Cornelia repressed the urge to slump down on the floor and put her head between her hands. They had fought so hard to get here, risked so much. To be stymied by the nerves of people who purported to agree with them but were not brave enough to help was so dispiriting. People liked the idea of a fight. They liked to write essays in support of fine principles, to discreetly send banknotes. But they were markedly less courageous when it came to putting themselves directly in the line of fire.
A slow knock sounded at the studio door, startling all of them.
“What’s that?” Thaïs hissed.
“Company,” Seraphina drawled. “Just what we don’t need in our hour of despair.”
“Cornelia?” a man’s voice called tentatively through the closed door.
Cornelia jolted up so sharply her neck cracked.
“It’s Rafe Goodwood,” he added, as though she would not know his voice deep down in her bones.
She gestured at her friends to cover up, smoothed her painting smock, which was sludged with oil from her palette, and rubbed the paint off her hands as best she could.
She felt her friends’ eyes on her as she walked to the door, inhaled deeply, and opened it.
Rafe Goodwood stood in the doorframe, smiling at her.
She inhaled so sharply it hurt her throat.
He was more handsome than he’d been twenty years ago, when she’d last set eyes on him. Back when he’d been the most beautiful person she’d ever seen.
You hadn’t seen many people yet, Cornelia.
“I’m sorry. I’ve surprised you,” he murmured.
His voice was still the sound of oak, an appealing well-worn timbre with a warmth that hit her like a dram of whiskey.
“I didn’t think you were capable of being surprised,” he added.