by John Plotz
“Webb, it’s the beautifullest place on Ea … aaaaawwwgh! That’s my beard, my beard, my beard!” Close behind Webb, Morris’s arms were also full, but with a different burden. A baby and a toddler both laughed delightedly as he spun around and around like a drunk bear, trying to disentangle his wayward beard from the hands of his … daughters? I turned back to Mead for confirmation. How a bird without eyelashes, lips, or cheeks can look down on someone dotingly I can’t really say; but he did it. As Mead continued to totter forward with the happily shrieking children, Ed found the relevant facts in his notebook.
“Jenny and May Morris, born January 1861 and March 1862; children of William and …” Remembering my outburst back at the Oxford Union, Ed politely paused to let me finish.
“Jane Burden Morris,” I finished smoothly. “And,” I added with a grin, studying Ed’s face, “Perhaps you’d like to guess the name of the young mother who got up on rickety ladders to stencil those paramecia?”
By this time, Jane had disentangled little Jenny and May from Morris, tumbling down to the ground and tickling them into whoops of laughter. Morris flopped down panting beside Webb and Burne-Jones, on a bench that had been painted with oaks, river meadows, and dappled woodland.
“Right, Ned,” Morris said busily, “this exhibition is going to make or mar us. Customers need to be sure that we shall always have something truly new to give them.”
Ned nodded. “They should feel that if they want to they can live inside an interior designed by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company.”
“Yes!” burst in Morris explosively. “That’s exactly the point. An interior! Not just isolated works.” Everyone nodded cheerfully.
Their smiles faded, though, as he went on. “Besides the stained glass, carving, metalwork, chintzes, and carpets, what have we really got?”
Ned and Webb looked stunned. “Well, Topsy; be reasonable! The firm is only a year old,” Ned finally ventured. “Isn’t that plenty?”
“Nonsense!” said Morris severely, bustling off down a long low corridor while Ned and Philip followed obediently (“Make way for ducklings,” I whispered to Ed). “We can do much better than that. Let’s have a look upstairs in the workshop.”
Ed and I froze stock-still on the ceiling, inadequately sheltered by a couple of roof-beams, as the procession trooped upstairs and along a long hallway to Morris’s study. He made such a fuss and bustle getting settled in that we were able to relocate to a sheltered alcove just outside the door. “Perfect for snatch and bolt,” Ed muttered as we settled in.
“Here we are!” Morris was at his desk tossing papers from side to side with abandon. I could still hear the girls giggling downstairs; behind that, though, I thought I heard some heavy footsteps and—could that be a man’s laugh?
“No, no,” Morris was saying with rising irritation, “that’s the sketches for my Aeneid. Hmm, that’s a birthday manuscript for your wife Georgiana, Ned, don’t look! I’m not happy with the tempera for that one, too yolky … Hmm, saga translation, no … ink tests, no … grrrr—” It suddenly occurred to me that Morris was only a few seconds away from another one of those geyser eruptions.
Instead, he gave a delighted cry. His whole face changed as he held up an exquisitely worked drawing of small brightly colored birds—woodpeckers, I guessed, darting toward a snarled tendril of roses that clung tightly around a wooden frame.
And those petals; those petals. Ed began to whisper to me, but I knew what he was about to say. Smiling back over my shoulder, I mouthed the line along with him: “Through the cold garden boughs we went / Where the tumbling roses shed their scent.”
“It’s from that central Red House courtyard, you know, right by that porch I call Pilgrim’s Rest.” Morris gazed down at the drawing more or less the same way he’d been looking at his two daughters grabbing at his beard.
“Yes, Topsy, it certainly makes Red House come alive,” Ned said finally. “But what exactly …?”
Morris crowed in delight. “Wallpaper, of course!”
He laughed again at their dumbfounded faces. “Of course I know that finding a way to print onto the right kind of paper won’t be easy—I was thinking that some of the printers these days are experimenting with zinc plates.”
As the shocked silence persisted, he gave another easy laugh. “Don’t gape at me like that! I admit they’ll be hard to master, but surely we can have something ready for the Exhibition.”
Looking around at their skeptical faces, waiting for belief to blossom, he grunted and made a slight concession. “Fine, fine! Say it takes us eighteen months, perhaps as long as two years.” (“Ah, a rare moment of candor in forecasting by Mr. Morris!” Mead whispered drily in my ear.) “That’s a crimp in production, I admit, but think of how easy it will be to distribute once we get all the colors right! Imagine if every customer …”
I jumped suddenly as I heard from the corridor behind me that same easy laugh I’d heard a moment ago. That Rossetti had a habit of sneaking up on you.
“Well, well,” he said, striding smoothly by us into the room. Morris and the others went oddly still as he spoke. “Look at that marvelous drawing! I told you Red House was a wonder of the age, but this, this, well, it’s quite perfect.”
Rossetti plucked the wallpaper drawing from Morris’s hands, and curled and uncurled it idly as he spoke. “I must protest, though, gentle Topsy, against your plans. Imagine gluing something as beautiful as this on just anybody’s wall. Surely you don’t think that every passerby with a few half crowns to rub against one another can walk away from our showroom with a sheet of your design crumpled up in his, his …”
A chill was in the air. Ned and Webb were both looking out the window with great concentration. Morris’s face had turned red as I’d ever seen it—redder even than when we’d seen him charging his pony against imaginary enemies as a little boy. “In his dirty hands, Gabriel? Is that it? Well, if those hands are dirty from ink, from London grime, from the workshops, they’re no dirtier than the hands that made the drawing in the first place. If I can get this process right I’ll sell the paper for a shilling, or sixpence.”
A pause while Morris fumed and reddened and everybody else paled—except Rossetti, whose face was already plenty white, and whose hands shook no more now than they had when he’d first walked in. “By God!” Morris bellowed finally, “I’d be delighted to sell it for tuppence a roll, if I thought people would buy it. I’d like it in every filthy kitchen in Pimlico, on every crumbling Cheapside wall.”
Uh-oh. I crouched down and braced myself as Morris’s voice boomed out, “I’d happily stare a stage with you if you’d care to talk about art and its uses to the stinking masses, or the perfumed ones. But when it comes to deciding who truly deserves”—he rolled the word through his lips like a curse—“to be exposed to art, I have little to say. I long ago left off telling people what they were or were not worthy to possess.” He took a deep breath. “Even you, dear, dear friend. Even you.”
There was a pause, during which Rossetti involuntarily stepped backward, not speaking but never taking his eyes from Morris’s face. With a pang, I suddenly remembered my dad prowling up and down the same way Morris was now—a leopard caged behind bars that only he could see. And I saw Arthur in Camelot, looking across the Round Table at a Lancelot he knows will betray him.
Rossetti was staring at the blank wall opposite as if some fascinating thing of beauty hung there. “If I won’t stand in the way of those I love when they do what I hate,” Morris went on heavily. “Can you really expect I’ll prevent those I barely know from taking my pictures home for any reason they please? They can outfit their favorite dachshund in this Trellis wallpaper; and by God I’ll thank them for it as they walk out the door!”
Morris quivered to a halt, breathing hard through his nose.
“Goodness,” said Rossetti, looking down, “I see how much you’ve been affected by the loss of your father’s fortune.” I don’t know how he did it, but
Rossetti somehow made “father” sound like a dirty word. Ned and Philip both took in slight hissing breaths—nobody looked at Morris, and nobody moved. “Yes,” Rossetti went on absently, running his hand up and down the drawing, “such a pity about those copper stocks, Topsy, really, who would have thought they could just vanish?
“Still,” he went on cheerily, ignoring the solemn faces turned toward him, “the realm, thank goodness, remains filled with wealthy patrons. I should hope there’s no real need for you, for us, to descend from the arts proper to the, the, the …”
“Lesser arts?” suggested Morris in a voice that was a good deal steadier than his flaming skin and drumming fingers would have suggested. There was a long pause, and then Webb moved forward gently, taking the Trellis drawing from Morris’s hand and tucking it precariously away in a side pocket.
Ned said quietly, like someone reciting a poem or a prayer, “I do not want art for a few …”
As he trailed off, Morris, barely moving his lips, finished the sentence: “… any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.” The two looked at one another briefly, then away.
Another long pause—I could hear Ed and Mead breathing beside me, and nothing else. “Right,” said Webb after a long pause. “I suppose I’ll get started with those zinc plates.”
If Burne-Jones and Morris had just scored against Rossetti, he was doing his best not to show it. He yawned elaborately and stood up. “Well, Topsy and Company”—I don’t think I imagined the sneer on this word, either—“I have got to see a lord, a very wealthy lord more’s the pleasure, about a commission. A Blessed Damozel for his mantelpiece.”
He tilted his head so his hair cascaded perfectly off the shoulders of his tattered smock. Annoying as I found him at this particular moment, I still couldn’t help admiring his paint-specked artist’s clothes, and the blistered hands that registered every trace of his long hours at the easel.
“Well,” he went on absently, gazing down at a seam that had begun to fray, “I’ll stop by next week to, as Keats would have said, ‘cash up’ my share in the business. Though what business the poet had talking about cash, whether up or down, I’m sure I cannot rightly imagine!” With a faint, satisfied chuckle, Rossetti drifted away. Webb was so absorbed in gazing after him that he didn’t notice Ed’s hand stealthily extracting the drawing of “Where the tumbling roses shed their scent” from that conveniently gaping pocket.
CHAPTER NINE
Goliath’s Head
Ed and I were quiet as Mead pushed us high above London, west along
the Thames under a leaden sky. I tried to ignore the hole that had opened up in the feathers along Mead’s neck, and the occasional lurch or jolt as he struggled to stay straight. It struck me suddenly that while Morris was as chubby-cheeked and happy as ever, Mead was showing the years. Somehow a price was being paid for every jump we made—and it wasn’t hard to guess who was paying it.
How long could Mead hold out with us on his back? And if he couldn’t? If the next time we went to take off he simply couldn’t manage it, what then? I unwrapped a granola bar from my bag (only two more) and slipped it down to Mead. I caught a gleam of a smile in his eye as he snapped it neatly into his beak—but only a gleam.
“Ed.” I tried for a low, calm voice. “Can we go through the poem again, try to see where we stand?” Without a word he handed me the notebook, already turned to the right page.
I started by reading the first part of the poem out loud, reassuring myself about what we’d already managed to do:
I am the ancient Apple-Queen,
For evermore a hope unseen,
Betwixt the blossom and the bough.
“That one was easy!” I said as chirpily as I could manage.
“Child’s play,” agreed Mead between bites, pausing to wipe a sticky bit of oat off one side of his face.
A gourd and a pilgrim shell, roses dun,
A ship with shields before the sun.
“Well,” said Mead immediately, “the pilgrim will be fine, I’m sure of it. And as for the dun rose—”
“The dun rose,” broke in Ed unexpectedly, “was just plain awesome!”
“The ship was routine,” I said, finding myself getting into the spirit now; it felt like a scavenger hunt.
“And so was:
“A man drew near,
With painted shield and gold-wrought spear.
Good was his horse and grand his gear.”
“And you, Edward,” cut in Mead, “proved yourself well suited to burgling when it came to:
“Through the cold garden boughs we went
Where the tumbling roses shed their scent.”
I checked my gym bag to confirm the inventory. “Apple, shell and gourd, dun rose, ship with shields, pencil sketch of knight on horseback, cold garden boughs on wallpaper,” I recited quickly.
“Okay,” I went on, trying to ignore the rumbling in my stomach and the longing for home that came with it. Don’t think about it, I told myself sternly, shoving away Granny’s face when it popped into view. “So, here’s what’s left.
“Therefore Venus well may we
Praise the green ridges of the sea.
A fork-tongued dragon fresh and fell
Behold I have loved faithfully and well.
Beside dark hills whose heath-bloom feeds no bee,
All birds sing in the town of the tree.
In the white-flowered hawthorn brake
Love be merry for my sake.
And Thames runs chill
’Twixt mead and hill.”
“It’s getting trickier now,” said Ed, in his best chess-player voice. I shot a questioning glance back over my shoulder at him.
“The ones we’ve had so far,” he went on, “all turned out to be objects, which made them easy. And I guess the dragon could be that straightforward—”
“And the birds that ‘sing in the town of the tree,’ too,” I jumped in.
Ed gave an exasperated snort that made Mead shoot us a quick worried glance. “But where’s Venus and the green ridges of the sea?” Ed’s flat pessimistic tone was starting to worry me. “Or Love being merry for my sake? And how are we supposed to collect the Thames running chill?”
I had no answers for Ed’s questions—and to judge from his silence, Mead didn’t, either. If he was even listening to us anymore.
At that moment the poem seemed like only half my troubles anyway. When Morris had tucked that rose in my hand and talked about my geas, he’d triggered a set of thoughts it was hard for me to control, or even make sense of. Now, with a warm southern wind lifting Mead above the clouds into a sunny zone, I found myself starting to doze as we flew. As my head dipped and my eyes flickered (open, closed, open again), a thought popped into my head: Well, what then if happiness is gone? How do I make my art from woe?
And just like that (I was probably doomed not to sleep in the entire nineteenth century, I thought bitterly) I was awake again. How had that thought crept into me? I looked back through my memories, trying to figure out where that woe had come from. The fight? Something Morris had said? Was it something in his eyes, maybe, in the way he’d sighed, or in what he hadn’t said?
Dozing again, I began to feel my fingers tingling. The world split in two; half of me was still there clutching Ed’s waist on Mead’s back. But the other half of me was sitting in front of a zinc plate, painstakingly etching the lines of Trellis onto it. The chemicals you needed to do that kind of work—my nose wrinkled just thinking of them, the chlorides and manganates, and those corrosive acids to fix the design for good. I took a deep breath as I leaned over the plate, and found I could smell them, putrid as a rotting carcass. I put my hand to my nose and sneezed twice, hard.
“Uh, Jen?” Ed said in a dazed voice. Mead was craning his neck to stare at me with open concern.
“Gesundheit!” I said confusedly. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter now, Jen,” said Ed, choosing his wor
ds carefully. “Only a minute ago you were acting like you couldn’t even hear or see us; your head was down, your arms were kind of twitching in front of you, like you were a …” He trailed off, looking for the right words to convey it. “Like a changeling!” he said finally.
I knew we were going there. Ed’s secretly obsessed with the idea of fairies that change babies at birth, and sooner or later all his ideas come back to the possibility that somebody might have been changed without knowing it.
If I was changing now, though, it wasn’t fairies that had done it. All I’d been doing was thinking about Morris, and his life, when suddenly it was as if I could feel what he’d been doing. As if …
“Jen!” Mead’s head had come all the way around over his shoulder (how did he do that?) and he’d tapped my leg hard with his beak. I jerked upright. “I need you here with me, Jen, not daydreaming about wallpaper, or sneezing like a rheumy camel!”
“But Mead,” I said confusedly, “I think I can tell what Morris is feeling. He was at work, and I knew just what he was thinking, just what his hands wanted to do. That could help us somehow.”
Mead clicked irritably. “Yes, Jen, yes you can know what he felt, and even what he thought as well. You can know it because …” Then evidently Mead thought better of it.
“Because why?” Ed asked eagerly, and if I hadn’t been pretending to be too angry to listen, I’d have asked him also. Mead only tssked, though, and flapped heavily on, slowly pulling us back toward the few faintly visible cloud banks high above.
I kept tussling with that question while we descended into a leafy Thames-side London neighborhood. Mead was ignoring me. When I tugged on his shoulder, careful not to dislodge what feathers were still there, he cleared his throat and put on his best tour-guide voice. “Allow me to alert you young visitors to the many virtues of Kelmscott House, the suburban London retreat Morris and his family moved into when their business was really booming. Notice its lovely garden, the five huge windows for watching the traffic on the Thames, even the carriage house with plenty of space for industrial experiments.” I could almost see shiny museum-guard brass buttons on his chest.