Disturbed by Her Song

by Lee, Tanith

  “You’re his daughter,” I said, reverently. “St John Blaze. One of the foremost painters of our age. Perhaps in all the world. Tell me about your father. I’ve been dying to know – your mother scarcely speaks of him – and I—”

  What a change. A sea-change. Great waves washed in, laden with treasure and stars, and her eyes burst alive. While in mine her cool hand warmed and I felt there the faint tick of a pulse.

  So this was the real key that operated her clockwork. Given what I knew, what else could it be? I’d been an idiot not to think of it sooner. To woo a woman I truly didn’t want, what could be more appropriate than to beg her to talk about a man I would plainly have detested?

  It was a sunny morning. The spread pink buds watched us with shy, malign eyes as we wandered away along the path towards a group of cedars and a summerhouse.

  Here we sat down, side by side.

  All this while, Emerald was speaking, talking. Not chatter, but a measured musical cadence, utilizing a fair vocabulary and some quite interesting turns of phrase. Once or twice, when I felt I must ask some other (inane) question, she shot me a glance of utter imperious scorn. But when I merely became a sponge, allowing her to choose every facet of the monologue, she was fluent and almost – affectionate—

  We did not have a conversation as such. However, I was permitted – for she seemed to approve of this – occasional soft laughter at her father’s witty sayings (of which I recall none) or sigh or gasp as his exploits. As for example when he was attacked by bandits in the hills of Tuscany and bought them off by sketching them. A very likely tale.

  Yet I wasn’t bored. I confess it. Partly pride in my own belated cleverness. But also I studied her carefully.

  I thought this was an exercise. For I had no intention of doing what Vera had asked of me. It was, I’d reckoned, anyway beyond my ability, aside from any aversion I would feel. Nevertheless I thought I might, now, come at some obscured method I could next impart to Vera, something that, without embroiling myself in unwanted sex with this smoke-wraith girl, might still prove helpful.

  I wanted Vera’s approval. I wanted to please Vera. I wanted her to reward me. (Mercenary little cat that I was.)

  Despite all this, watching Emerald, just as the young roses had among their thorns, I did indeed begin to learn other things about her. Although I didn’t even know, at that point, that I was. I was so immersed in my acting, for one thing. Which, for a non-professional, wasn’t bad at all, though doubtless Sabella revolved in her grave at my ineptitude.

  After about three quarters of an hour, Emerald drew breath. In fact she was breathing quite quickly, and pastel color was in her cheeks. She had let go my hand, but now reached for it of her own accord.

  “Ruth – would you like to see his gallery?”

  “You mean—”

  As before she shut me up pretty swiftly.

  “I mean I have the key to Father’s study. There’s a secret door. He showed me long ago. There are sixteen works there – some of them are portraits, some are scenes from legend and myth. Not all have been shown. If you are very circumspect.”

  I gaped, signaling, in silence, enormous excitement and consciousness of a special treat, plus willingness to slit my veins rather than reveal the hidden trove.

  “After luncheon,” decided Emerald. “I’ll be sent to rest. Then. If you can get away from Mother—” (alas, I knew I could) “meet me in the tiled annex on the second story.” It was where I’d spotted her first.

  Then, in the middle of my triumph, if so it was, Emerald unnerved me by growing icy pale and lapsing back on the cushioned seat. Was she going to swoon in faultless romantic style? Should I catch her, console her, tell her off?

  Again, some new instinct blindly taught me what I should do.

  As she fell back, touching her brow, I copied her, and I too sank back, closing my eyes in an ecstatic, half-fainting pose.

  Even as I did it I was both surprised and, frankly, embarrassed at myself.

  But next instant, something astounding.

  Emerald leaned to me, smoothed my hands, and drew my head on to her shoulder.

  “There, there,” she said. “I shouldn’t have agitated you so.”

  And when I unclosed my eyes in total astonishment, her hair brushed into them as she kissed me lightly on the forehead.

  Three

  Luncheon was uninteresting, though it comprised delicious summer dishes and three robust white wines.

  “Have some fruit,” said Vera Blaze, indicating a mighty horde of forced oranges and peaches.

  Ruth selected a peach, Emily declined.

  Soon after, Emily-Emerald went to rest for an hour on the couch in her bedroom.

  Ruth, seemingly about to emulate her, found herself caught in a sudden furnace of an embrace. “Go, cunning one,” Vera said.

  It was like being at the beck and call of gods on Olympus.

  Reaching the annex, Ruth found Emerald was already there, her face eager and set with certainty.

  “You must promise to tell no one.”

  Allowed to speak? “Yes,” Ruth whispered.

  “Or,” said Emerald, raising her brows, “I should kill you.”

  Ruth’s own eyebrows rose.

  In this absurd posture they faced each other. Becoming aware of it, Ruth almost laughed aloud. Instead she looked down, and said, “I never would.”

  “Swear it,” said Emerald.

  Held in the dim tiled annex, the latticed diamond lights were littering the floor like debris from a smashed sun.

  Ruth put her hand to her throat.

  “But—”

  “Swear,” said Emerald, inexorable as Hamlet’s father’s ghost.

  Ruth said, “By what?”

  “By something you hold most dear.”

  Ruth raised her eyes and was amazed to find she had filled them with water.

  “Most dear? That is your father’s talent. I swear then, by that.”

  Emerald smiled.

  She was not a lion, nor a lynx. She was – a snake, a serpent, coiled about some apple tree of the heart. She curved her mouth and showed her gleaming flexive wickedness. It had been unguessable. And was now unmissable.

  And somewhere deep in her blood Ruth felt a glimmer like trapped lightning. Scornfully she noted that the emotional sadism of Emerald, thinking she had a weaker human being in her grip, was not unarousing.

  This damsel had grown up dominated by a patriarchal father, and a powerful mother. It was all she knew – how to be subservient, or, locating a slave more pliable than herself – to rule, as she had seen both Blaze and Vera do.

  The quality would not have been appealing if turned on something unable to protest – an animal, a servant – but Ruth had already seen that Emerald was wary of the dog, and also of low-flying birds, beetles and spiders in the grass; both polite and removed from servants.

  Ruth now, however, Emerald seemed to have lured into a personal game. They were female children united in a great secret. But Emerald always being the stronger of the two, the leader, the prince.

  So. She does have something of her mother.

  “There is his study.” Emerald pointed. Classical pose, so like a painting. (Has he painted her?)

  “My God.”

  “Shush. You mustn’t speak. Follow me. Touch nothing. Look only.”

  There was a tall, narrow, dark door, which Emerald unlocked, and inside a large airy study, typical of the room of a rich and untidy man who lounged about. Books and old periodicals scattered the scene, there was a cabinet full of statuary, curiously-shaped bottles, pipes, and a stuffed animal in a glass tank that resembled a furious giant squirrel. A desk guarded the way, and leather chairs, and a man’s Turkish slippers embroidered with gold lay by the empty fireplace tiled in dragon-green. Oddly – or not – the room otherwise didn’t evidence a solitary influence of the exotic East, and where it perhaps showed antiquity, only in a muddled way. As if he had bought some Greek and Roman artifact
s in a job-lot, as some men bought books for their libraries by the yard.

  Behind a dusty green curtain, another even narrower door appeared.

  “It will only open if I do certain things. You must go through sideways. My father jokes and says Mama couldn’t get through, she’s too big.”

  Ha, ha.

  “Avert your eyes!” commanded Prince Emerald.

  Ruth obeyed.

  She heard the door crunch open and only turned and slipped through once her leader had told her she might.

  Perhaps it was a secret from the house, but not from the sky. The roof was all glass, as were, Emerald had told her, most of the roofs of Blaze’s two studios, here and in London.

  Light poured in on an angled walk, on the two white walls of which hung sixteen exhibits, some of which no one else, if the girl was to be believed, had ever seen.

  Ruth recognized the first three nevertheless, from reported exhibitions. Salome’s Dance, Ophelia, Girl with a Lyre.

  St John Blaze was, for Ruth, too florid. He did not, she thought, match the purity of a Burne-Jones, nor the adamance of a Rosetti. She didn’t care for these sorts of pictures anyway. In art she had always preferred things left more...unsure. Smokier. Cloudy windows barely showing leafy boughs and fruit; ghostly pallid shapes on the edge of life or death.

  They moved through the gallery with reverence, Ruth keeping wide-eyed and dumb, while her guide mercilessly detailed every canvas or paper, each element, from charcoal and wash to paint, to types of brush. Even the duration of their making was stressed, sometimes weeks, sometimes months. (Had she timed them all carefully in childhood, leaning her head on the listening wall?)

  “This is a sketch of me. My father says he’ll never sell it. I told him, if I were to die, I should like a statue made from it, for my tomb.”

  The voice sounded weaker.

  Diverting herself, definitely, Ruth gave a little groan and staggered. Emerald turned instantly and caught hold of her.

  “I’m sorry. I may die young. Is it so for you?”

  In the light-drenched worm of the gallery, they held each other. Over Emerald’s shoulder Ruth saw the little sketch, quite artful and pleasing. And further along a strange black patch marked with strips of white – a rug?

  “And here,” her arm about Ruth’s waist, “is the picture of the poor woman who died from poisoning.”

  (“That,” said Vera, some hours after, “is the second story I could tell you. Do you want to hear?”

  Ruth waited. All she really wanted was to sit there, by Vera, on a red sofa.

  Vera said, “A simple matter. I confirmed to you that he used some of his models as palettes. In this case, the paint ran down and must have entered the cleft in her buttocks. From where it was absorbed into her private parts. Apparently neither she nor Blaze either noticed or objected to this, and eventually she was washed off by him, like the others. But a week later all her blood had been poisoned and she died. In agony, so I understand. Her name was Katie Araby – invented, one assumes.”

  Ruth thought, wavering, Do I believe her? Is she trying to terrify me? Why? Does she think I’ll do what she wants with that girl better and more effectively if I am also frightened?

  But the waver was solely intellectual. Ruth’s senses otherwise only clamored, like strident gulls, to fall on Vera and be eaten alive.)

  In the early afternoon gallery, things hadn’t been that way at all.

  At that time unprimed to the second story of the anally or vaginally envenomed unfortunate, Katie Araby, Ruth had stared, missing the painting completely, at Emerald. Ruth did not need to speak. Emerald preferred still expressive silences and wide eyes.

  “It was a horrible business,” airily said Emerald. “It seems the girl became impertinently infatuated with my father – and couldn’t control her avowals of love. When he had thrown her out, she drank lye, or some such ghastly thing. I remember how distressed he was. We spoke of it, of course, only some years later, for at the time it happened I was only a child and it was kept from me. He said that he pitied the poor girl. She had been so unwomanly, loud and unruly – not only in her conduct towards him, but in her manner of dying.”

  Emerald had stepped away from Ruth, and at the concluding words Ruth lowered her eyes to the floor of the secret gallery, and thought her own harsh tearing thoughts.

  Emerald however snapped her back with an abrupt demand.

  “You say you greatly admire my father. Perhaps I should ask you, Ruth, to explain yourself.”

  Emerald’s tone had definitely changed. Also she wished Ruth to speak.

  Ruth raised now gentle but Puritanical eyes.

  “His genius makes him godlike to me.”

  “You’re infatuated?” The word she had used dismissively for Katie.

  The question too might be one more to be expected from a jealously watchful wife. Ruth said, calmly and humbly, “I believe the gods are best worshipped from afar.”

  “I see.”

  Oh, the little brat must have learnt this lordly attitude from her mother. But no – for Vera was not thinly chilly like this. This too must come from Blaze himself.

  Nevertheless, where had the floaty swooning maiden gone to? Here was an austere mask of a face, and eyes that were no longer flat polished stones but chips of ice—

  “Because, you know,” went on Emerald, “my father must never be bothered by that sort of woman again. Not that I think you are that sort. If I’d thought it, I would never have brought you here.”

  Ruth said, “Emerald, I am socially far beneath all your family. But in the case of your father, I’m worthy only to scatter flowers at his feet, and that in his absence. I really think, if ever I were to meet him – I’d die at once. Like you, I’m not strong. My heart would never stand it. Like Semele in the presence of Zeus – I’d burn up and drop in ashes.”

  Emerald nodded.

  She must be addled. Also she was incredibly naïve. Yet even so.

  Even so, I’m enjoying this pretense – this dramatic act I’m putting on.

  Once more ashamed of herself, Ruth again hung her head and Emerald stepped over and took her arm.

  They then continued down the gallery, looking at the pictures. (Ruth wondered, with an inner frown, if any canvas or sketch here showed Jane Wilkins, the other victim Blaze had indirectly murdered. She couldn’t ask, naturally. Dedicated actress that Ruth had now decided she was being, the inner frown failed entirely to reach her surface.)

  The sketches, generally, she liked better than the paintings. They were fragile and in some instances nearly phantasmal – women in antique clothes, or naked, with long-fingered hands and misty hair. There was only the one sketch of Emerald, the one she had said she would like used to model a figure for her ‘tomb.’ It didn’t, Ruth had privately decided, look at all like her. Perhaps one more example of Blaze’s intransigent creation of the Ideal Daughter, which even this weird girl had not yet totally achieved.

  What intrigued Ruth was, in fact, the peculiar black thing – not a rug, too small, but perhaps some sort of thick cloth? – with the white stripes along it. They reminded her of something – she couldn’t think what. She had dared to ask Emerald, in a slavish voice, what it was. And got the disappointment of Emerald’s saying, “That? I don’t know. He has never said.” “But didn’t you ask?” “Oh, no.” “It looks – Egyptian? Moroccan? – some trophy brought back from there?” But Emerald ignored this and began another of her lectures on St John Blaze.

  Curiously – or was it curious? – as she did this, her sharp demeanor melted down in the blaze of him, and Emerald became malleable and soft once more, motivated only by a proper and discreet daughterly enthusiasm.

  Do I tell her mother any of this? Will it help? Surely Vera already knows about these fluctuating twins who are both Emerald?

  Ruth became claustrophobic in the gallery, walking endlessly up and down with this mad person clutching her arm and fluting about her filthy swine of a father. Sh
ould Ruth fake illness and so get out? Or would Emerald let her out? For even now there was a certain bossiness about Emerald.

  Finally Emerald did say they should leave the gallery. Too much human presence was not, it seemed, good for the paintings.

  What on earth could human presence, Ruth wondered, do to them? It was they, or their maker, who had done harm to humans.

  They parted in the annex, Emerald embracing Ruth quite tenderly.

  “Go back to your room now,” instructed Emerald. “In half an hour we must go down for tea. Mother insists on it. She is,” observed Emerald, “addicted to tea.”

  So am I, thought Ruth. So are many women.

  “Is your mother—” said Ruth, cautious, “that is – she seems strict with you—”

  “Oh, what do I care? She’s nothing to me,” said Emerald, and the mask face was there again, a fleeting hard second.

  “But she is your mother.”

  “Well, perhaps your mother is very lovable to you,” said Emerald. Landing, had she known it, a perfect hit. Touché.

  And so on to the passion-red sofa, where Ruth sat with Vera, after Emerald had vaporized away from the teapot and the cigars.

  “I can’t do this, Vera.”

  “Yes, you can, Ruth. Haven’t you seen the alteration in my daughter? I can see it. She has some life flowing in her pale veins.”

  “That is his life. She is only interested in him.”

  “And weren’t you clever to make believe that you were too.”

  At least Vera didn’t, for a moment, mistake Ruth’s lies to Emerald, which she had recounted in a combination of disgust and actorish pride.

  But then Ruth spoke to Vera of the canvas of the woman who had been ‘poisoned.’ And Vera put down her cup, scowled magnificently, crossed her legs – whose shape was clearly visible through another pair of Turkish trousers, long, muscular and leonine – and told Ruth the facts of the death of Katie Araby.

  Vera then said, “My child showed you his odd little gallery, into which I’m supposed never to be able to penetrate. So, now I’ll show you the hothouses. Would you like that, my astonishing Ruth?”