Those sea-green eyes, her pert lips, seemed to him already present on the panel somewhere, existing beneath gluey gesso layers sanded soft as eggshell. He had only to tease her forward from below. He even tried to explain this to Marguerite, who was surprisingly sympathetic for her class. “I hear it is like that,” she said with hands on hips, leaning in. “For artists.”
Was he that, now? An artist? Or was Marguerite just too ignorant to withhold the term, as others had done — his tutors, Mother, even Michel, who made an amateur’s survey of art and architecture?
There might be a little of Marguerite in this painting, after all, in spirit if not aspect, for Jean Grenier’s daughter got him painfully worked up at least twice a day, though he lacked the ambition to seduce her.
Unlike the lady in the crayon drawing, the painted girl was a clear translation of fantasy. This long-necked blonde was his match, Victor imagined, sweet and arrogant with a knack for withholding. A careless, slightly dangerous girl with a pout. He painted her in a traditional gown, simple and nondescript, but while the glaze dried, he imagined her bare in the big stone bath at his family’s ancestral château, surrounded by the cerulean blue of Moorish tiles and the white flicker of candles.
To immortalize his daydream, he painted her in a splendid necklace of sapphire and diamonds, gems as watery as the shimmer of bathwater in candlelight. She deserved whatever delight he might offer, for the sadness in her eyes — less defined than that of the woman in the sketch but more subtle in the end, more masterful — made him want to protect her. You have the look of someone damned, he thought. Someone who doesn’t know it yet.
Again, Marguerite’s interest surprised him. “Her neckline’s a bit severe,” she offered from behind. “And that white’s overdone.”
He did not look up from his palette knife but wiped his brow with the palm not covered in paint. “Spoken like a true Paris art critic.”
“It’s too milky, that neck. Too tender.” She laid her hands on his shoulders, and he stiffened. “It begs the blade.”
Was she speaking madness, or was he too inclined to perceive it? Had he misheard? What did Victor really know about the peasant breathing down his neck, or she about him?
He laughed it off — what choice had he? — and let his shoulders relax under her warm hands. And yet he wondered, were Marguerite and her father that brand of peasant? Like the sans-culottes who tore Princess de Lamballe limb from limb during the September Massacres, parading her head — the bloody hair cleansed and primly curled — on a stake beneath Marie Antoinette’s window? Why had it taken Father so long to spirit them out of there? he wondered, letting his mind wander from Marguerite, who went on watching him work. When it had been worse than degrading to stay?
“They have shut us in,” Mother had complained to her husband as Victor hid behind a tapestry, kneading the cat’s velvet ear in small fingers. He did not know who “they” were or how his family could be considered shut in when they came and went freely, albeit only on foot and in strange, simple clothing.
“When will you do something?” his mother had pleaded, and this was a terrible thing, for Mother never pleaded. “Will you let them cut our throats at their convenience?”
At long last their family, like many others, had fled Paris with but a fraction of their furniture, servants, and horses. They got by peacefully for a time in Brittany, where Mother’s family had also decamped, but to show the slightest trace of rank in those days was dangerous: even a spoon with a coat of arms on it might land a man in jail, and before long, Father did land there, no matter their crude efforts to blend in. Perhaps they had delayed in Paris too long, arriving too late and too obviously. They would never know what forked tongue had exposed them. Police in the provinces, anyone prepared to enlist a tribunal, were rewarded for ferreting out aristocrats, priests, and other counterrevolutionary suspects.
Would Marguerite and Jean hiss and gossip at the tavern tomorrow when they went for their annual two-day outing?
“You were going to tell me,” he demanded, his voice harder than before — no longer playful —“why you and your father go to town every year on that day.” Victor set down his paintbrush but lifted it again for the security of holding something. “Tomorrow.”
She averted her eyes. “You should come with us. I know you’re too good to be seen with the spawn of Jean Grenier, but you’ll wish you had.”
“Why? There are amusements in town?”
“You’ll laugh if I say. Call me a superstitious peasant.”
“You’ve never seemed troubled by what I thought before.”
“Trust me.”
“Give me cause —”
“I won’t let you make me a fool, but call it an anniversary. One it’s our custom to avoid. Papa and I are never here on that day.”
“What day, Marguerite? You’re being very coy.” He felt himself warm to her again. It was his great failing, this willingness to be led.
She heaved the water bucket to her other hip, and Victor enjoyed the view of her body in motion. “You’re too proud, yes?” she said. “To trust a woman? And who is this ice princess? Your paramour?”
He breathed Marguerite, ripe and sweet, but in the dark of daydream he imagined himself in a candlelit bath with the languid girl in this painting, her shadowed eyes staring back at him. “Tomorrow may be my last day at Kerfol, after all. Mother threatens to have her precious papers by nightfall. Stay with me, Marguerite.” He reached for the arm balancing her bucket, a teasing lunge, but her nimble hip eluded him. “Stay, and let your father go alone. Play with me.”
He tried to meet her eye, but she only scoffed and tipped a slow stream of well water into his lap. He looked on with only mild astonishment, wincing.
“There’s what I think of the fire of your loins, schoolboy.”
Marguerite parked the bucket back on the bone of her agile hip and brushed past. “You’re in my path,” she said. “Go and paint your little pictures in the garden.”
Wrenched from dreams faintly recalled, of tender throats and throbbing veins, he woke determined to hitch a ride to town on the hay with Jean and Marguerite. But when he lurched half-dressed out to the stables, their cart was already gone. The dark of the stalls yawned back at him.
He would relax into a day’s work. He could do that, forget that Mother would return greedily endowed with his future, with one fate or another that was not his choosing. He had faced worse.
The light was buttery and kind, though he knew he would want shade later. Victor carried a portable table out to the rear patio, arranged paint pots and brushes, went away, and returned again with the easel. He sat regarding his nearly finished painting, breathing the good stink of turpentine. He worked, and took pleasure in the work.
But it seemed to matter, too much, that he had missed Marguerite and her father. He felt vaguely panicked, surveying the vast sweep of foliage threatening to swallow every surface beyond the patio but the chapel, which hunkered now in shadow.
He lifted a dry brush, idly plying its bristles, and when he looked up again, there was the golden dog again, not ten feet away on the marble tile.
In a funny way it was as if time had looped backward, as if this were somehow, again, his first day at Kerfol, his first sighting of this animal. Had the days between — the waiting for Mother . . . the cheerful, empty exchanges with Marguerite . . . the reckless success with crayon and brush — been a dream?
He’ll bark in a minute, Victor thought, and someone will come. But no one would, he knew. Not today.
Call it an anniversary. One it’s our custom to avoid.
When the forbidding little animal kept its distance, Victor decided to act before fear disabled him as it had disabled his father in Paris. He would chase away the foolish dog and proceed indoors to the library. Kerfol was exactly the sort of house that someone, at some point, felt compelled to write a history about. That history was no doubt in the estate library, easily accessible. He advanced bravely,
but as the dog drew back at his approach, another one, a rough brindled thing, limped forward.
There are no dogs at Kerfol. Had Marguerite not said as much?
But now a third — a long-haired white mongrel — slipped in from the edge of Victor’s vision to join the others. All three stared at him with grave, shining eyes, but none made a sound. They fell back on muffled paws, watchful as he stepped forward.
Charge me, then, he thought stupidly. Isn’t that what packs do?
They let him retreat beyond the patio as he pleased, following at a distance, always the same distance, always with Victor in view. He paced nervously, aimlessly at the edge of the barrier of overgrown thickets, trying not to trip over ornamental urns, grasping his useless paintbrush.
He breathed deeply, striding in under the canopy of dangling wisteria, and crossing to the chapel path. He still hadn’t managed to visit the fabled tombs of Kerfol, so he sauntered up the rise, thinking to do so now, impressed with his own bravado. His own maturity. What a fine and civilized diversion! Art. History. Architecture. Father had always indulged these pursuits (though never Mother, unless he begged; she would have him shut in with numbers all day). Some of Victor’s favorite memories involved childhood trips with his father to museums and menageries and the private cabinets of great men. Once, as they stood before an enormous nautilus shell mounted to form the body of a silver-gilt swan in one of the Medici collections, Father lay a hand on Victor’s shoulder.
“I’m not the ineffectual brute she makes me out to be.” Perhaps he thought Victor too young to grasp or retain such a statement, to equate “she” with Mother. “I like quiet,” he concluded. “That is all. There is far too much fuss and bother in the world for my liking. When at the end of the day”— he’d paused to stroke his only son’s boyish mop of hair —“the sun still sets.”
Victor stopped now in his tracks.
In the dark glass of one of the long gothic windows of the chapel, the head and torso of another dog appeared, a white pointer with one brown ear. This was a solemn old soul, larger and more assured than the others, staring out, intent. How did you get in there? Victor wondered.
Victor hurried back through the tunnel, only to find the rest of the pack waiting on the patio. There was a newcomer with them, a shivering black greyhound with pale eyes, that hung back from the others.
Victor stood a full five minutes in that grim half-circle, waiting, as the dogs appeared to be waiting. They wouldn’t bar his approach — Victor knew that somehow — and he thought they must be abused, to cower so silently, though they didn’t look hungry or maltreated. Perhaps they were no more damaged than he, the jumpy son of a murdered man who’d never felt on his own behalf an instant’s physical pain or real discomfort. Only Victor’s mind had suffered, Mother said. His nerves. And what sort of man did that make him?
At last he steeled himself and moved toward the golden leader, stooping to pat him with a nervous laugh. The little dog did not start, or growl, or look away. He simply slipped back a yard or so, paused, and held his watch.
“Well — what?”
As if their movements were tied to his, the dogs separated when Victor stalked forth. “Go ahead, then,” he barked. “Growl. Do something.” They glided forward again, and he backed off through a thicket, making somewhat pointlessly for the stables. Twigs slapped his face and sprang back with a dry rattle, and he was so consumed with relief when he could no longer see them — apart from the old pointer, who went on staring plaintively from the chapel window as if waiting to be let out — that Victor nearly collided with an old brick well concealed in the undergrowth.
He rubbed his hip, tried the crooked stable door, and thought better of it, seeing the futility of his goal. He also saw a clear path, a full cart road, really, leading down from the stable door along the side of the property. He took this merciful route now, laughing at his idiocy, almost enjoying his stroll, the cheer of birdsong. When the road split off, with one side leading down to the front gate and the outer avenue and the other hooking back along the hedge garden toward the château entrance, he hesitated a moment, but only a moment, before making for the house.
He wanted nothing more than to return to and huddle in his bed. She’ll come home soon, he thought irrationally, and see my things outside. He longed for Marguerite’s teasing laugh, and it occurred to him that he not only lacked a father; he had never had a sister or brother to tease or be teased by. As before, the safety of the open sky, the bright, butterfly-laced hedges, lifted his spirits.
He made for the broad steps.
And there they were again, the dogs, the golden one a little ahead of the others. The black greyhound shivered beside a triangular shrub. They were everywhere, it seemed — one here, one there — stationed behind tidy hedges, fanned out in a design of their own accord as if to mock the unknown gardener’s studied pattern. They form their own maze, he thought wildly, and to enter it is to die a madman.
“Stupid animals!” His voice startled even him. The dogs stood motionless, ears alert. Perhaps they had lived too long with people who never spoke to them, he thought now, grasping for sympathy. Their coats were smooth, and none but the greyhound seemed too thin, but their strange passivity seemed even sadder than the misery of starved and beaten animals. If Victor were a man like Michel, he might draw them into a game or a scamper, but the longer he met their fixed and weary stares, the more preposterous that idea seemed. The dogs knew better, it seemed. They knew what this place would and wouldn’t tolerate.
In the end, it was as if they held in common one memory so deep and dark that nothing since had seemed worth a growl or a wag, rather like Victor’s own notions of his father under the blade of the guillotine. How could he wish to be a man after that knowledge? Did death not dwarf all expectations? All ambition?
What these dogs most suggested to him was loneliness beyond reckoning, and he tried to imagine his father’s loneliness under the blade. Had they thrust a hemp bag over his head? Could he see the sky through the fabric? Were there bits of blue, Victor wondered, to soothe his eyes, and did white clouds reel past, perhaps a seagull circling — or some better, brighter bird? Was it all blinding brightness in that last moment? All color, like the world when Victor closed his eyes or let his vision blur, let the brush lead him . . .
Maybe Mother and his succession of tutors were right, and he would always be a child, painting unexceptional pictures. Except one, he thought with grim pleasure, remembering the girl on the easel across the courtyard.
When he arrived at the patio, the dogs had already stationed themselves on either side of his worktable like sentries. He laughed out loud at the absurdity of it. The dogs shifted uneasily. What were they waiting for? What could he give them?
When will you do something?
Though the portrait was on the other side of the easel, he held her face in mind with desperate clarity, and at almost the same moment that the dogs began to stir, he remembered Marguerite’s words. That neck begs the blade.
Real or imagined, the words struck him with fresh horror, and he blundered to the easel with closed eyes, shooing back the dogs, and now Sömmering’s words swarmed into his thoughts like wasps. Furthermore, credible witnesses have assured me that they have seen the teeth grind after the head has been separated from the trunk.
Victor opened his eyes long enough to snatch the painting up under an arm and gather the paint tray to him like a child from a burning bed, and then he closed them again, with surprising determination. And I am convinced that if the air could still circulate through the organs of the voice . . . these heads would speak.
He felt paint ooze over his wrist as he strode past the wretched watchers into the gilt-and-mirrored shadows of Kerfol. Once inside, he dared to open his eyes, hurried to a bench in the great hall, and set her down beside him. He held the board in two trembling hands as he might the shoulders of a lover.
Yesterday’s glaze had dried, and his soul’s mate seemed to watch hi
m, craning her tender neck, and he knew then that they were but two dolls, poppets, playthings. Whom would he love in a world of play? Playing house, playing lovers, playing at a future?
Do something.
He took up a paint pot, the first he snatched, red cadmium — a good, dark color — and began to slap paint straight from the pot onto her face. He heaped it onto his palms, the oily slap a pleasure against his skin, a joy in his nostrils. With hands slippery as a surgeon’s, he swiped and fumbled for the big boar’s-hair brush. He slashed at her pretty eyes, erasing what could only suffer, saving her.
Before long, much of the panel was a blank red stain, and his heart beat hard as he strode to the big front door and opened it again, his hand leaving a bloody smear on the doorknob. The dogs were there, dotting the lawn, perfectly still. Soundless as before.
He eased the door shut, though they would not pursue him. Again, he knew this. Somehow. Still he staggered to the stairs, tripped, and fell forward on his hands. Victor walked up on all fours like prey, leaving a pattern of handprints.
Mother woke him in his bed, but only after the trunks were packed.
In a silky bustling of widow’s silk, she peeled the covers back and cursed the paint everywhere. “Oh, Victor, not you as well as the stairs!” She barked for Michel, whose footfalls came nearer. “Victor, look at you. Covered . . .”
He cringed like a child as she heaved the blankets away, curling out of her reach. “I don’t care if I never come back here,” he told the pillow, feeling the full wrath of his father’s memory.
“Look at you . . . foolish boy. You’re not well again. Up, now!” She slapped his behind, and he rolled sullenly away. “See what Mother has for you in the carriage . . .”
“Or if I die penniless —”
“You’ll have that chance after I’m dead. Only then, my boy —”
The servant heaved him up with that drab, knowing expression Victor hated. Michel, who had lifted him before, seemed especially despicable now, with his strong forearms hooking Victor’s armpits.
The Ghosts of Kerfol Page 6