Dreams of Distant Shores

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  The door pulled abruptly out of his hold. Mrs. Grommet, his placid housekeeper, held a hand to her ample bosom as she stared at him. “Oh, it’s you, Mr. Waterman. I couldn’t imagine who was making that racket with the door latch.” She shifted aside, opened the door wide for him to enter.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Grommet,” he murmured. “Throes of creation.”

  “Of course, Mr. Waterman. I didn’t expect you back so soon. Have you had your lunch, sir?”

  “No. Just bring me tea in my studio, please. I expect to be in the throes for the rest of the afternoon.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  In the highest floor of the house, he had knocked down walls, enlarged windows to give him space and light, views from a city park on one side, the broad, busy river on the other. Mrs. Grommet came panting up with a great silver tray. He slumped in an easy chair, sipped tea as he flipped through his sketchbooks for inspiration. Faces, dogs, flowers, birds, hills, rocks, pieces of armor, horses, folds of heavy tapestry, drifting silk, hands, feet, eyes . . . nothing coherent, nothing whole, nothing containing the lightning bolt of inspiration he craved.

  He read some poetry; words did not compel an image. He paced for a while, his mind a blank canvas. He beseeched his Muse. Anybody’s Muse. Inspiration failed to turn her lovely face, her kindly attention, toward him. He wandered to his cupboards, pulled out old, unfinished canvases, studied the stilted figures, the fuzzy landscapes for something that he might redeem to greatness.

  One caught at memory: a head without a mouth. He placed it on the easel, stood studying it. The head, when completed, would have belonged to Persephone at the moment she realized that, having eaten of the fruits of the Underworld, she was doomed to spend half her life in that gloomy place. The young model he had chosen for it had vanished before he could finish it. Harry gazed at her, struck by her beauty, which had inspired his normally clumsy brushwork. The almond-shaped eyes of such pale gray they seemed the color of sun-kissed ice, the white-gold hair, the apricot skin. A true mingling of spring and winter, his model, who had disappeared so completely she might have been carried away into the netherworld herself.

  He tried to remember her name. May? Jenny? She had gotten herself into trouble, he suspected. Harry had noticed a certain heaviness in her walk, the frigidity of terror in her expression. Moved, he had offered, in his nebulous, hesitant way, to help. But she had fled. Or died, perhaps, he was forced to consider. In childbirth, or trying to get rid of the child, who could know? He had tried to find her so that he could finish the painting. But no one seemed to know anything at all about her.

  He wondered if it might be worth finishing. Her eyes, gazing straight out at the viewer, compelled attention. Idly, he traced a mouth with his forefinger, rifling through all the likely mouths he might borrow to finish it. There was Beresford’s cousin Jane . . . But no, even at her young age, her lips were too thin to suggest the hunger that had caused Persephone to eat forbidden fruit. . . . Or was that a different tale?

  He recognized the invisible mouth his finger had outlined, and swallowed.

  Some passing Muse, a mischievous sprite, tempted him to reach for crimson paint. The lips that haunted him burned like fire in memory . . . but darker than fire, darker than rose, darker than blood. He toyed guiltily with all those colors on his palette. Only paint, he told himself. Only memory. The color of wine, they were, deep, shadowy burgundy, with all the silken moistness of the rose petal.

  Vaguely he heard Mrs. Grommet knock, inquire about his supper. Vaguely he made some noise. She went away. The room darkened; he lit lamps, candles. Mrs. Grommet did not return; the streets grew even quieter; the river faded into night.

  He blinked, coming out of his obsessive trance. That full, provocative splendor of a mouth was startling beneath the gentle, frightened eyes of his Persephone. But the likeness transfixed him. Aurora’s mouth it was; he had succeeded beyond all dreams in shifting it from memory into paint. He could not use it. Of course he could not. Everyone would recognize it, even on some other woman’s face. Which he would need to go out and find, if he wanted to finish this Persephone. Maybe not his masterwork, but far easier to manage than the goat; she would do until inspiration struck.

  He lingered, contemplating that silent, untouchable mouth. He could not bring himself to wipe it away yet. He would go down and eat his cold supper, deal more ruthlessly with the mouth after he had found a replacement for it. It did not, after all, belong to him; it belonged to the wife of his dear friend and mentor. . . . He tore his eyes from it, lifted the canvas from the easel, and positioned it carefully back in the cupboard, where it could dry and be forgotten at the same time.

  He closed the door and the lips spoke.

  “Harry!” Its voice was sweet and raucous and completely unfamiliar. “You’re not going to leave me here in the dark, are you? After calling me all afternoon? Harry?”

  He flung himself against the door, hearing his heart pound like something frantic trying to get out of him, or trying to get in. He tried to speak; his voice wouldn’t come, only silent bleats of air, like an astonished sheep. “Harry?”

  “Who—” he finally managed to gasp. “Who—”

  “Open the door.”

  “N.”

  “You know I’m in here. You can’t just keep me shut up in here.”

  “N.”

  “Oh Harry, don’t be so unfriendly. I won’t bite. And even if I did—” The voice trilled an uncouth snigger, “you’d like it, from this mouth.”

  Harry, galvanized with sudden fury, clutched at the cupboard latch, barely refraining from wrenching it open. “How dare you!” he demanded, feeling as though the contents of his inmost heart had been rifled by vulgar, soiled hands. “Who are you?”

  “That’s it,” the voice cooed. “Now lift the latch, open the door. You can do it.”

  “If you force me to come in, I’ll—I’ll wipe away your mouth with turpentine.”

  “Tut, Harry. How crude. Just when I’m ready to give you what you want most.”

  “What I want—”

  “Inspiration, Harry. You’ve been wishing for me ever since you gave up on the goat and gave me a chance to get a word in edgewise.”

  “You’re a mouth—” He was breathing strangely again, taking in too much air. “How can you possibly know about the goat?”

  “You called me.”

  “I did not.”

  “You invoked me,” the voice insisted. “I am the voice of your despair. Your desire. Why do you think I’m coming out of these lips?”

  Harry was silent, suddenly breathless. A flash went through him, not unlike the uncomfortable premonition of inspiration. He was going to open the door. Pushed against it with all his strength, his hands locked around the latch, he was going to open. . . . “Who are you?” he pleaded hoarsely. “Are you some sort of insane Muse?”

  “Guess again,” the voice said coolly. “You looked upon your Beloved and thought of me. I want you to paint me. I am your masterwork.”

  “My masterwork.”

  “Paint me, Harry. And all you wish for will be yours.”

  “All I wish. . . .”

  “Open the door,” the voice repeated patiently. “Don’t be afraid. You have already seen my face.”

  His mouth opened; nothing came out. The vision stunned him, turned him into stone: the painting that would rivet the entire art world, reveal at last the depths and heights of his genius. The snake-haired daughter of the gods whose beauty threatened, commanded, whose eyes reflected inexpressible, inhuman visions.

  He whispered, “Medusa.”

  “Me,” she said. “Open the door.”

  He opened it.

  Down by the river, Jo huddled with the rest of the refuse, all squeezed under a butcher’s awning trying to get out of the sudden squall. In the country, where she had walked from, the roads turned liquid in the rain; carriages, wagons, horses, herds of sheep and cows churned them into thick, oozing welts and hillocks of mud
deep enough to swallow your boots if you weren’t careful. Here the cobbles, though hard enough, offered some protection. At least she was off her aching feet. At least until the butcher saw what took up space from customers looking in his windows and drove them off. Jo had been walking that day since dawn to finish her journey to the city. It was noon now, she guessed, though hard to tell. The gray sky hadn’t changed its morose expression by so much as a shift of light since sunrise.

  Someone new pushed into the little group cowering under the awning. Another drenched body, nearly faceless under the rags wrapped around its head, sat leaning against Jo’s shoulder, worn shoes out in the rain. It wore skirts; other than that it seemed scarcely human, just one more sodden, miserable, breathing thing trying to find some protection from life.

  They all sat silently for a bit, listening to the rain pounding on the awning, watching the little figures along the tide’s edge, gray and shapeless as mud in their rags, darting like birds from one poor crumb of treasure the river left behind to the next. Bits of coal they stuffed into their rags to sell, splinters of wood, the odd nail or frayed piece of rope.

  The bundle beside Jo murmured, “At least they’re used to being wet, aren’t they? River or rain, it’s all one to them.”

  Her voice was unexpectedly young. Jo turned, maneuvering one shoulder out from beneath a sodden back. She saw a freckled girl’s face between wet cloth wrapped down to her eyebrows, up to her lower lip. One eye, as blue as violets, looked resigned, calm. The other eye was swollen shut and ringed by all the colors of the rainbow.

  Jo, her own face frozen for so long it hardly remembered how to move, felt something odd stirring in her. Vaguely she remembered it. Pity or some such, for all the good it did.

  She said, “Whoever gave you that must love you something fierce.”

  “Oh, yes,” the girl said. “He’ll love me to death one of these days. If he finds me again.”

  There was a snort from the figure on the other side of Jo. This one sounded older, hoarse and wheezy with illness. Still she cackled, “I’d one like that. I used to collect my teeth in a bag after he knocked them out. I was so sorry to lose them, I couldn’t bear to give them up. I was that young, then. Never smart enough to run away, even when I was young enough to think there might be a place to run to.”

  “There’s not,” Jo said shortly. “I ran back home to the country. And now I’m here again.”

  “What will you do?” the girl asked.

  Jo shrugged. “Whatever I can.”

  “What have you done?”

  “Mill work in the country. I had to stop doing that when my mother died and there was no one else to—to—”

  “Care for the baby?” the old woman guessed shrewdly.

  Jo felt her face grow cold again, less expression on it than on a brick. “Yes. Well, it’s dead now, so it doesn’t matter.”

  The girl sucked in her breath. “Cruel,” she whispered.

  “After that I got work at one of the big houses. Laundry and fires and such. But that didn’t last.”

  “Did you get your references, though?”

  “No. Turned out without.”

  “For what? Stealing?”

  “No.” Jo leaned her head back against the wall, watched rain running like a fountain over the edge of the swollen awning. “I wasn’t that smart.”

  The old woman gave her crow-cackle again. “Out of the frying pan—”

  Jo nodded. “Into the fire. It would have been, if I hadn’t run away. If I’d stayed, I’d have had another mouth to feed when they turned me out. So I came back here.”

  Another voice came to life, a man’s this time. “To what?” he asked heavily. “Nothing ever changes. City, country, it’s all the same. You’re in the mill or on the streets from dark to dark, just to get your pittance to survive one more day. And some days you can’t even get that.” He paused; Jo felt his racking cough shudder through them all, piled on top of one another as they were. The old woman patted his arm, whispered something. Then she turned to Jo, when he had quieted.

  “He lost his wife, not long ago. Twenty-two years together and not a voice raised. Some have that.”

  “Twenty-two years,” the man echoed. “She had her corner at the foot of the Barrow Bridge. She sang like she didn’t know any better. She made you believe it, too—that you didn’t know anything better than her singing, you’d never know anything better. She stopped boats with her voice; fish jumped out of the water to hear. But then she left me alone with my old fiddle and my old bones, both of us creaking and groaning without her.” He patted the lump under his threadbare cloak as though it were a child. “Especially in this rain.”

  “Well, I know what I’m going to do when it quits,” the girl said briskly. “I’m going to get myself arrested. He’ll never get his hands on me in there. And it’s dry and they feed you, at least for a few days before they let you out again.”

  “I got in for three months once,” a young voice interposed from the far edge of the awning.

  “Three months!” the girl exclaimed, her bruised eye trying to flutter open. “What do you have to do for that?”

  “I couldn’t get myself arrested for walking the streets, no matter how I tried, and I was losing my teeth and my looks to a great lout who drank all my money away by day and flung me around at night. I was so sick and tired of my life that one morning when I saw the Lord Mayor of the city in a parade of fine horses and soldiers and dressed-up lords and ladies, I took off my shoe and threw it at his head.” The old woman crowed richly at the thought. “I let them catch me, and for three months I had a bed every night, clean clothes, and food every day. By the time I got out, my lout had moved on to some other girl and I was free.”

  “They don’t make jails nowadays the way they used to,” the fiddler said. “They never used to spoil you with food or a bed.” Jo felt the girl sigh noiselessly. “I’d do three months,” she murmured, “if I knew where to find a Lord Mayor.”

  Jo’s eyes slid to her vivid, wistful face. “What will you do,” she asked slowly, “for your few days?”

  “I’ve heard they take you off the streets if you break something. A window, or a streetlamp. I thought I’d try that.”

  Jo was silent, pulling a tattered shawl around her. Jo had made it for her mother, years earlier, when her father had been alive to tend to his sheep and his cows, make cheese, shear wool for them to spin into thread. When she’d gone back, her mother had given the shawl to her to wrap the baby in. The sheep and cows were long gone to pay debts after her father died. Her mother’s hands had grown huge and red from taking in laundry. Alf, they called the baby, after her father. Alfred Fletcher Byrd. Poor poppet, she thought dispassionately. Not strong enough for any one of those names, let alone three.

  The man who was its father showed his face in her thoughts. She shoved him out again, ruthlessly, barred that entry. She’d lost a good place in the city because of him, in a rich, quiet, well-run house. A guest, a friend of the family, who had a family of his own somewhere. He’d found her early one morning making up a fire in the empty library. . . . The only time she’d ever seen him, and it was enough to change her life. So she’d run out of the city, all the way back home to her mother. And all she had left of any of that time was an old purple shawl.

  That was then, she thought coldly. This is now.

  Now, the rain was letting up a little. The young girl shifted, leaning out to test it with her hand. Jo moved, too, felt the coin or two she had left sliding around in her shoe. Enough for a loaf and a bed in some crowded, noisy, dangerous lodging house run by thieves. Might as well spend it there, before they found a way to steal it.

  Or she could break a window, if she got desperate enough.

  A door banged. There was the butcher, a great florid man with blood on his hands and a voice like a bulldog, growling at them to take their carcasses elsewhere or he’d grind them into sausages.

  The girl wrapped her face close again,
hiding her telltale eye. The fiddler coughed himself back into the rain, his instrument carefully cradled beneath his cloak. The old woman, wheezing dreadfully, pulled herself up with Jo’s help. Jo picked up her covered basket for her. Flowers, she thought at first, then caught a pungent whiff of it. Whatever it was she sold, it wasn’t violets. The woman winked at her and slid the basket over her arm. She trailed off after the rest of the bedraggled flock scattering into the rain.

  Jo saw a lump of masonry, or maybe a broken cobblestone, half the size of her fist near the wall where the old woman had been sitting. She picked it up, slipped it into her pocket in case she needed it later. You never knew.

  Harry stood in the enchanted garden of the McAlisters’ cottage in the country. Only a few miles from the city, it might have existed in a different time and world: the realm of poetry, where the fall of light and a rosebud heavy with rain from a passing storm symbolized something else entirely. The rain had stopped in the early afternoon. Bright sun had warmed the garden quickly, filled its humid, sparkling air with the smells of grass and wild thyme, the crushed-strawberry scent of the rambling roses climbing up either side of the cottage door. The cottage, an oddly shaped affair with no symmetry whatsoever, had all its scattered, mismatched windows open to the air. There was no garden fence, only a distant, rambling stone wall marking the property. The cottage stood on a grassy knoll; in nearby fields the long grass was lush with wildflowers. Farther away, brindled cows and fluffy clouds of sheep pastured within rambling field walls. Farther yet, in a fold of green, the ancient village, a bucolic garden of stone, grew along the river. On the next knoll over, John Grainger was battling the winds, trying to paint the scene. Occasionally, as a puff of exuberant air tried to make off with Grainger’s canvas, Harry could hear his energetic swearing.

  Harry had come up for the day to look for a face for his Medusa among the McAlisters’ visitors. Painters, their wives and families, models, friends who encouraged and bought, and who brought friends who bought, wandered around the gardens, chatting, drinking wine and tea, sketching, painting, or watching McAlister paint.