Crown of Stars

by Sophie Jaff

  “Oh my God,” she murmurs again.

  Matthew beckons to the terrier, who clicks past them. “Come on, Tilly, let’s go and find John.”

  As they walk past the sprawling, comfortable rooms, Katherine catches tantalizing glimpses of their sunlight interiors. It’s a lovely, well-worn old house that wears its centuries on its sleeve, though Matthew’s quirky taste and style is clearly visible throughout; velvet couches of olive green and peacock blue, vintage mirrors and rough-hewn coffee tables live seamlessly together. In the corner of a drawing room a series of carved chests are stacked up on top of one another, reminding Katherine of unpacked Russian dolls. In another corner a stately Roman bust resides on a gleaming grand piano, still dignified under the brim of a natty bowler. Scenic watercolors and modernist depictions of squares hang side by side with the Virgin and Child done in oils. Towers of books are stacked next to marble fireplaces, and the whole house has the delicious smell of burned firewood.

  “Your home is nice,” Lucas announces, delivering the understatement of the year.

  “Why, thank you, you’ll get the proper tour in due course.”

  “It’s really big, though.”

  “That too,” Matthew agrees. “It’s excellent for playing hide-and-seek.”

  “It is truly beautiful.” Katherine’s words are ironed flat with envy. This is the kind of chic and witty shabbiness that takes generations of breeding and knowledge to perfect.

  “John would be happier dwelling in some monastic cell, preferably from the fourteenth century, but I must admit I do love creature comforts. You know, running water, central plumbing, glass in the windows. So we settled for Georgian.”

  “Georgie?” Lucas asks, confused.

  “Georgian because it was built in about 1773, when George III was king.”

  “Wow, that’s old.”

  “We’ve done some renovations since.” In the back entrance hall he calls up a dogleg staircase. “John, darling? John?”

  There is no reply, but Katherine hears a faint strain of classical music.

  “John?”

  Matthew goes up the staircase, beckoning Katherine and Lucas to follow him. It creaks and cracks somewhat alarmingly, but also somewhat satisfyingly. Then he leads them along a landing and down a hallway to a door, which Matthew knocks upon and then opens.

  Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, all stuffed, line the room. A shaft of light shines in through the windows on an old oak desk, where Katherine can just make out a man almost completely obscured behind piles and piles of papers and more books, these ones larger leather-bound volumes.

  “John?”

  The man looks up, startled; then his face relaxes into a smile. “Oh, hello!” He rises and comes around the desk to greet them. Tall and thin, almost alarmingly so, he wears wire-rimmed glasses that match his silvery hair. He looks tired.

  “Darling, didn’t you hear me?”

  “In another world, I’m afraid.”

  “Did the builders call?”

  John frowns. “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Oh God, only I had finally spoken to Peter and he told me he would definitely be calling today to discuss the roof.”

  “I didn’t hear the phone ring.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Matthew, don’t fuss.” John smiles again, and his face lights up. Katherine can see why Matthew loves him. When he smiles like that, he’s insanely attractive. “I’m sure they’ll call back. Meanwhile this must be the famous Katherine, so lovely to meet you at last! And who is this?” He kneels down effortlessly.

  “I’m Lucas.” Usually so shy, he seems at ease here.

  “Lucas, it’s good to meet you too.”

  “You have a lot of books.”

  “You think so?” John looks around, as if surveying the room for the first time. “I could do with some more.”

  Matthew groans. “Don’t get him started on this.”

  “Well, you can never have enough books. Don’t you agree, Lucas? I’m sure Katherine feels the same way.”

  “I do.” She would kill to spend a couple of hours browsing through these books.

  John turns to Lucas, “What do you think?”

  Lucas frowns. “I don’t know. Maybe. I like books too, but you have so many of them.”

  “You tell him, Lucas,” teases Matthew.

  “Yes, well, but each book offers something different. Each book is like a map that can lead you to a different place, show you something wonderful. And books are also like friends, friends who tell you stories, and who can cheer you up when you’re sad.”

  Lucas looks at him. “Are you very sad?”

  It’s an unexpected question, one that only a young child could honestly ask, and John pauses. In that pause, Katherine decides, Yes, he’s very sad.

  But then John laughs. “No, not too often.”

  Matthew exhales, and Katherine has a feeling he was also listening intently for the answer. “There, now. I told you not get John started on the subject of books! Let’s go down and try to find where Mrs. Langley has hidden the cake.”

  “Why did she hide it?”

  “To prevent me from eating the whole thing!” Matthew takes Lucas’s hand. “And if Tilly takes a liking to you, she might even be persuaded to do a special trick!”

  “What special trick?”

  “Come and see!”

  They head downstairs, and John and Katherine stand for a moment in silence.

  “We shouldn’t have disturbed you,” she says.

  “Not at all, it was time I had a break.”

  “I love this room.”

  “Thank you. It is dreadfully cluttered, though. Matthew is right. He keeps begging me to put it in order, but I have my own kind of order, and a system in place to manage my papers.”

  “You put them down on a surface and hope they remain there until you need them?”

  “Basically, yes.” John removes his glasses, absentmindedly rubs the lenses on his sleeve, and pushes them back up the bridge of his nose. “So, Matthew tells me you’re unfortunate enough to be involved with a de Villias?”

  She likes the way he puts it, although it’s a little too much on the money. “That’s right.”

  “How extraordinary for you and Matthew to meet the way that you did.”

  “It was really a godsend. I needed a friend, and there he was.” You sound so earnest and American. She cringes. “How did you and Matthew meet?”

  “I was a fellow at Oxford, and he was a student.”

  “That sounds wicked.”

  “Actually, I thought he was a total dilettante. He swanned in late the first day and I gave him complete hell.”

  “And how did he take that?”

  “He blinked up at me and said, ‘I shall have to watch my p’s and q’s.’”

  Katherine grins. “Sounds about right. And did he?”

  “Well, honestly, I didn’t think he would stick around, but he did. I doubted whether he was too bright, thought some parent or relative had pulled strings to get him in, but he proceeded to run circles around the rest of group. I told him to stop showing off. At the end of the tutorial, he came up to me and held out his hand and said, ‘Truce,’ and so I shook it.”

  “And the rest is history.”

  “Yes, he stuck around. God bless him, I’ll never understand why.”

  Katherine does, although John is clearly unaware of his considerable appeal.

  “And you and your own de Villias?”

  Her own. She wishes Sael were her own. “Oh . . . we met at a party.”

  “That sounds reasonable enough.”

  She doesn’t mention how they didn’t tell each other their names, how one of them ended up naked at the end of their first encounter, how she never expected to see him again but ran into him at a bar two weeks later. “It does, doesn’t it.”

  “To be involved with de Villias men. We’re brave, did you know that?”

  “No, why?”r />
  “The de Villias curse.”

  “The what?”

  John’s excitement bubbles up through his natural English reserve.

  “The family’s very own curse! Matthew managed to acquire some rare texts for me at an auction recently that made mention of it.” He grins. It’s an unexpectedly sexy grin. “They’ll need further study, so I can’t tell you too much about it yet, but it’s part of the research I’m doing on the de Villias collection.”

  A bell chimes faintly in Katherine’s memory.

  “I think I first saw the name de Villias on a label in the Morgan Library in New York. Before I even met Sael. It was for a painting, I mean, not a painting, an illustration, an illuminated manuscript. From the de Villias collection.” She remembers going to the Morgan on her first date with David and sneaking into a gallery that was closed. She recalls how dim it was, the ghostly empty display cases, the eerie silence, the sense of wrongness. Even now her skin prickles uncomfortably as she recalls it.

  “Was the manuscript called The Maiden of Morwyn Castle?”

  “Yes!” There’s a satisfaction in fixing the name, like slapping a mosquito that’s been whining in one’s ear. She’s startled when John laughs, equally delighted.

  “I was the one who loaned that manuscript to the Morgan!”

  “No!” Katherine gapes at him.

  “I swear it!” John’s pale cheeks are flushed, his eyes gaining animation.

  “What a bizarre coincidence! You know,” she confides, “I’ve never forgotten how the woman seemed to be staring straight out of the page at me.”

  She remembers the manuscript opened on its stand, the page of ornamented text and then the illumination. The woman, with her tiny black eyes shining out as she stood in her deep-green dress holding a dagger in the one hand and an apple in the other.

  “It was an extremely unusual technique for the artist to use, to have his subject looking directly toward the viewer. Almost unheard of, in fact. Of course, the text itself is highly unusual too.

  “It is? Why?”

  John frowns and runs his hand through his hair.

  “Well, there were far more secular texts popular in the fourteenth century than people give the medieval readers credit for. Romances, histories, poetry . . . I would say it’s how much the story feels like a folktale, or an ‘urban legend’ of that time. I suppose the closest comparison would be Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Langland’s Piers Plowman, but whereas Langland wanted to draw our attention to the corruption of the aristocracy and the church, this story . . .” John pauses and gives an elegant shrug. “It has no obvious moral or social lesson that I can make sense of as yet. And of course the artist who illustrated it was very ahead of his time. I’ve been trying to track his identity down.”

  “That must be hard.”

  “Yes, but there are certain clues that make it easier. Of course the illuminators were encouraged to be seamless, so that the work was flowing and belonged to the whole, but still, artists inevitably tend to leave their marks or a tiny pictorial signature like a mouse or a rabbit in the margins. They were very fond of portraying rabbits for some reason.” John is now getting into the swing of his subject, becoming more professorial by the moment. “And obviously there is the extraordinary material he produced, not religious but truly secular with a fairy-tale quality.

  “One wonders, who would have commissioned such a work? Or did the artist conceive and create it of his own volition? Imagine that, one intrepid illuminator spending precious time and resources to create his own art, not glorying God or satisfying a wealthy patron, but for its own sake!” He realizes that his voice has risen and laughs, embarrassed. “Forgive me. I tend to get completely carried away when talking about it. Matthew says I’m becoming a fanatic, but really, it’s just so fascinating!”

  “Not at all.” Katherine keeps her voice gentle, though there is something frantic about John’s enthusiasm. “It sounds exciting.”

  “You are kind to humor me,” he says, but he looks pleased. “Would you—” He hesitates. “Would you like to see an illuminated page that I’m working on?”

  “I’d love to.” John’s talk has whetted her appetite to see something new. Anyway, she’d like to exorcize that particular ghost from her memory.

  “Give me just a moment.” He moves to another desk, and gently starts moving papers. “Ah, here it is.” He reverently places a piece of glass over a page and beckons her closer.

  Katherine walks toward the desk, aware that her heart is suddenly pounding. She remembers thinking that the woman in that illumination seemed to be speaking to her.

  Make your choice, her jet-black eyes had glimmered. Make your choice.

  She suppresses a shudder with difficulty and looks down.

  Part of a stone wall, tall and smooth and gray, dominates the illumination dwarfing the two figures in the foreground.

  “This is a tower wall,” John explains. “I believe you can see the top of the tower in the background of the illumination that was chosen for display at the Morgan exhibition.”

  Though he stands close to her, his voice seems to be growing fainter.

  “You can see here that he didn’t display the tower in its entirety, he wanted to give a sense and perspective of its size. Incredible, at that time, for him to do that. Most art from the period doesn’t use foreshortening. Perspective didn’t really emerge until the Renaissance.”

  Katherine vaguely recalls learning about this in college, but her attention is focused on the two figures in front of the wall, a man and a woman facing each other. The man is enfolded in a long black robe pricked with tiny flecks of silver leaf. His hood obscures most of his face. He clutches a staff, and a large black bird perches upon one of his shoulders. With her chestnut hair and tiny black eyes, the woman is clearly the same woman whom Katherine saw so long ago, though here she wears an amber gown and there are ornaments in her hair. One of her hands is outstretched, though whether in greeting or accusation it is hard to tell.

  “Amazing,” she breathes, and the word has a little shake to it.

  “Look at the detail,” John whispers, passing her a magnifying glass.

  Now Katherine can see that the rounded curve of the man’s staff is actually a carved snake coiling up it.

  “And the bird?” She asks something for the sake of asking, for the sake of hearing another person’s voice, for normality.

  “It’s a raven,” John says. “I’m sure it’s a raven.”

  The man appears to gesture toward the forest, that dark swirl in the corner.

  “It keeps me awake at nights,” he admits, “wondering who the man is.”

  He is the Storyteller.

  “What?”

  He is the Storyteller, Caradoc.

  “Katherine?”

  He tells stories. And he tells the truth, which can be more marvelous and more terrible than any story.

  “Katherine, what’s going on? Katherine, are you all right?”

  Deeper and deeper into the picture she falls, closer and closer to the forest, the darkness.

  His eyes are silver.

  The clothes she wears suddenly bind too tight, and the stone walls are closing in, collapsing into blooming black roses, petal after velvet petal unfurling, shining and soft before her eyes, and she falls.

  “Hey, hey! Hold on!” He reaches out, grabbing her arm before they both collapse. Katherine reaches back, clutches his arm, hands and skin, and she sees—

  —John standing in a series of white rooms, dressed in a paper gown. The smell of anesthetic, echoing footsteps. Waiting, always waiting, for someone to come and take him through to another room, another machine. He lies straight, his toe madly itching, but he doesn’t move during the rhythmic bangs and thumps. Trying to think of Bach, no, the Beatles, a yellow submarine. This feels like a submarine. Or the Cure, but the whaa, whaa whines of the MRI are like that terrible trance music that was so big in the ’90s. He tries not to think about his
toe, how it itches. It’s almost comical, something to tell Matthew, but he cannot tell Matthew, he can’t think about Matthew. He doesn’t want Matthew to panic, or is he being selfish? Telling Matthew will make it real.

  And then she is John himself, inside John himself—

  —deep underneath his skin, the meat and the muscle, the organ that looks like a little fish, and there, there it is, the thing. The stranger, the invader, the destroyer. Expanding outward, cells eating, feeding, killing, eating, and taking over.

  If only she could focus in upon it, gather it all in her mind, and then—

  —burn it, pulverize it, eradicate, evaporate, decimate, eliminate, so that even the smallest particle is banished from his internal memory. Be gone, be gone.

  Somewhere, far away, she hears someone cry, “Oh my God, oh my God—”

  Let there be light, let there be light! And there was light, a white light of heat, burning until all that is evil is but dust, and then the dust of dust of dust, pulverized until there is nothingness and it is gone, gone, gone, gone—

  “Stop!”

  Katherine blinks, opens her eyes. John is braced against the desk. Her hand is pressed flat against his stomach, and her other hand is gripping his wrist. He gasps, and she lets go.

  He slumps backward onto the desk. “What the—What just happened?”

  Katherine has no words. Her mind is panicked, blank. She tries to move away, but now he is the one who grasps her wrist. He stares at her.

  And then, very quietly, his eyes not leaving hers, he asks, “Who are you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What are you?”

  “I—”

  “What did you do to me?”

  Her mouth opens as she tries to answer. But she has no answer.

  “John, Katherine!” It’s Matthew, calling for them. “Teatime!”

  The spell is broken. John shakes his head as if to clear it.

  “I—” Katherine falters. She slowly straightens. “I’m so sorry. I guess pregnancy leaves me lightheaded sometimes.”

  Only silence.