Wonders of the Invisible World

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  He blinked at her, startled, wondering how Adrian had turned into his sister. Then Adrian rejoined them, dusting his hands.

  “You must meet my sister,” he declared. “Emma, this is Edward Bonham, who painted that wonderfully chilly painting with the owl in it.”

  “Oh yes.” She spoke, Ned thought dazedly, as she walked: carefully and delicately, as though she had just turned from a graceful poplar into a woman and was uncertain about the effects she might have on people. “I loved that painting, Mr. Bonham.” There was an unnymphlike smile in her eyes, perhaps left by the wake of his costermonger comment.

  “You should show him your drawings,” Adrian suggested, hauling the last cushion out, and giving it a hearty shove with one boot to an empty spot along the wall.

  “I’ve just been showing them to Mr. Wilding,” she told them. “He said that technically I show promise, but that thus far passion seems to have eluded me. He offered to give me a lesson or two.” Adrian’s mouth opened abruptly; she continued with unruffled composure, “I told him that I understood what he meant, but that true passion in painting could only be expressed by true mastery of technique; without it passion looked sentimental, trite, and in the end ridiculous.”

  Adrian grinned. “Good for you. What did he say?”

  “That most women painters should confine themselves to watercolors, since they have not the breadth of soul to express the fullness and complexity of oils, though he had seen one or two come close enough to counterfeit it.”

  Adrian rolled his eyes. “What did you say to that?”

  “That I would do my best to prove him wrong,” she answered simply. “And then the monkey had an accident on his hair and he went off to wash.”

  Ned loosed an inelegant guffaw. A corner of Emma’s long mouth crooked up. “What are your thoughts on the breadth of a woman’s soul, Mr. Bonham?”

  “I think,” he said fervently, “I could travel a lifetime in one and never see the half of it.”

  She regarded him silently for a heartbeat, out of eyes the color of a fine summer day, and in that moment he caught his first astonished glimpse of the undiscovered country that was theirs.

  Adrian cleared his throat. His sister looked suddenly dazed, herself, as though she had forgotten where she was.

  “Come and eat,” Adrian said, smiling. “Then you can show Bonham your drawings.”

  Emma played the piano after supper while the party, clustered into little groups on cushions and crates, argued intensely about the nature of Art, or languished, satiated, over their coffee and listened to Emma. She scarcely heard what her fingers were doing. She was still lost in that little moment when she had looked into Mr. Bonham’s hazelnut eyes and seen her future. They say it happens that way sometimes, she thought, amazed. I just never thought it would happen now. I never thought that it would actually happen, only that it was always something to be expected, to hope for, never that it would suddenly happen and I would be wondering: What happens next?

  Then Mr. Bonham drifted over and smiled at her. She smiled back. That was what happened next. He lingered to listen; she played, simply content with his nearness. There was nothing extraordinary about his looks; there were half-a-dozen young men in the room, including her brother and the irritating Mr. Wilding, she would have chosen over Ned to pose for the hero of her painting. True eye-stoppers, they were. But hers had stopped at a boyish face with a determined jawline and a sweet, diffident expression, behind which a busy, talented brain conceived pictures like the simple mystery of that winter night, and crafted them with a great deal of ability. She had come to the city to learn to paint; perhaps she could learn something from him.

  Perhaps that was next.

  She was trying to conceive a painting around him, idly wondering which role might suit him best, when Adrian came up to her. She softened her playing, lifted her brows at him questioningly.

  “Emma, this is Marianne Cameron. She wants to ask you to pose for her, but she is too shy.”

  The young woman in question snorted at the idea, making Adrian laugh. She was short and stocky, with frizzy, sandy hair and truly lovely violet eyes. Her pale lavender dress, sensibly and elegantly plain, suited those eyes.

  “You,” she said to Emma, “are the most beautiful thing in this room, with the possible exception of Bram Wilding, who can’t be bothered to pose for anyone. Several of us rent a room on Tidewater Street; we’d love you to come and pose for us. Adrian says you paint, too. If you like, we can make a space for you to work. It’s a bit quieter than this place; we don’t have monkeys and poets swinging from the rafters there.”

  “Speaking of which,” Adrian murmured, “I wonder where that monkey has gotten to?”

  “Us?” Emma asked.

  “We women,” Marianne said briskly. “We have made our own band of painters, and we refuse to be convinced of our inferiority. We learn from one another. Would you like to come and see?”

  “Oh, yes,” Emma said instantly. “I would very much.” She remembered Adrian then; her eyes slid to him. “That is—I came to help Adrian get settled—”

  “Go ahead,” Adrian urged. “We both must work; we can deal with this clutter in the evenings.”

  “Good!” Marianne said with satisfaction. “I’ll come for you tomorrow at noon then. We work all day, but the afternoon light is best.”

  “Miss Cameron paints quite well,” Adrian said, propping himself against the piano as Marianne moved away. “She has even had one or two paintings exhibited: Love Lies Bleeding and Undine—that one has marvelous watery lights in it.”

  “It’s strange,” Emma sighed. “I always feel such a great country gawk, and here I am to be painted.”

  “You’re as far from a gawk as anyone can get without turning into something completely mythical.”

  She smiled affectionately at her brother. “You didn’t say such things when we were younger.”

  “I don’t recall that I was ever less than perfectly well behaved.”

  “You called me a she-giant once and warned that I would never stop growing; I’d be tall as a barn by the time I was twenty, and there would be nobody big enough to marry me.”

  “I’m sure I never said any such thing, and anyway you were probably taller than me, then, which as your older brother I found completely unacceptable. Now I’m taller, so I can be magnanimous.” He straightened, glancing at the party; the noise level had ratcheted upward considerably when Emma stopped playing. “We’d better have Coombe read now that Nelly has finished clattering plates. I do wonder where that monkey is; I hope it isn’t burning up the beds.”

  “I’ll go and look,” Emma said, and slipped through the crowd as Adrian began describing the unutterable delight yet to come: an epic of epic proportions by the brilliant Linley Coombe on the subject of—what was the subject again? Emma heard them all laugh at something the poet said as she opened the kitchen door.

  The kitchen, along with the small dark rooms attached to it, was the domain of Nelly and the cook, Mrs. Dyce. Nelly, who had a thoroughly practical and unflappable nature, was Adrian’s treasure; she could conjure beds out of books and floorboards for any number of unexpected guests, he said, and she did the work of five servants without turning a hair. Now the housekeeper was being scullery-maid, helping Mrs. Dyce with the mountain of dirty dishes. Earlier that day, Emma had helped her unpack the crates, dust furniture for the party, find silverware and candlesticks and lamps among the boxes, and summon food and wine for an unknown number of guests, all before she vanished into the kitchen to help Mrs. Dyce cook the elaborate supper.

  Mrs. Dyce, a gaunt, mournful woman who could turn out a fragrant shepherd’s pie with one hand while she was wiping away a tear for her dead husband with the other, only sighed and shook her head at the notion of monkeys in the kitchen.

  Nelly wiped her hands on her apron, said calmly, “I’ll have a look, Miss.”

  She took a lamp into the inner sanctums of bedchamber and pantry, while E
mma checked the high shelves and cupboards.

  “I don’t see it, Miss Emma,” Nelly said, reappearing. “Maybe Mr. Wilding shut it up in a cupboard after it set Miss Bunce on fire.”

  “I doubt that Mr. Wilding would think of doing anything so sensible.”

  “You may be right, Miss. But one can hope.”

  “One can, indeed, hope. I’ll ask him.”

  But, reluctant to put herself again under that powerful, discomfiting gaze, she looked first into Adrian’s bedroom, expecting she might find the little monkey curled up and napping among the sheets. Her lamplight, sliding over the room, revealed only its familiar chaos. Finally she glanced into the room, hardly bigger than the pantry, where she slept.

  No monkey.

  She turned back into the hallway, perplexed, and jumped. Bram Wilding stood in her lamplight with the golden monkey on his shoulder reaching for the lamp.

  She moved it hastily. “Mr. Wilding. You startled me.”

  “You were looking for me.”

  “I was looking for your monkey.”

  “Ah. Well, I’ve come in search of you. Please forgive my earlier rudeness, Miss Slade; the last thing I would want is to discourage you or anyone from painting. The truth is that I am so distracted by you that any amount of idiocy can come out of my mouth without me hearing a word of it. From the moment I saw you, I knew I must paint you. I see you as the great, doomed Celtic Queen Boudicca, in silk and fur and armor, with her long fair hair flying free as she faces her conquerors, knowing that she will lose the final battle but ready to fight until she can no more for her lost realm. Will you pose for me?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Wilding,” she said with relief. “I’ve already promised Marianne Cameron that I would pose for her—”

  “Put her off.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  He was silent. The monkey chattered at her, wanting her flame, its great eyes filled with it. Bram’s dark eyes seemed impenetrable; light could not reach past them.

  “I’ll talk to her,” he said finally.

  “Mr. Wilding, I wish you wouldn’t. She has offered me a place to paint. I want to go there.”

  He only smiled cheerfully. “I’m sure you will be welcome in any case, Miss Slade.”

  There was a step behind Bram. She lifted the lamp higher and caught Ned Bonham’s face in her light. She gazed at him a moment, smiling upon him and wondering how his face, which she had never seen before that night, could give her so much pleasure.

  “Miss Slade,” he said, smiling back.

  “Mr. Bonham.”

  “I see you found the monkey.”

  Bram Wilding, who must have felt invisible, moved abruptly. His face, which until then seemed genial and imperturbable, had grown masklike; Emma could not guess at his thoughts.

  “You might say it found me.”

  “We are all found,” Bram said lightly, moving ahead of them into shadow. “I suppose we must go and hear Coombe read. What is the subject this time?”

  “A mortal straying into the realm of Faery and how he gets himself out again—something like that.”

  “I didn’t think you could,” Emma said. “Aren’t you lost forever if you wander out of the world?”

  “It depends, I think, on how you actually got there. If you’re taken by a water sprite, an undine, or by La Belle Dame Sans Merci, you’re sunk. But others have found a way to freedom—Thomas the Rhymer, for instance, and Tam Lin.”

  They were walking more and more slowly, Emma realized. Bram Wilding had already vanished back into the party. Light and Linley Coombe’s sonorous voice spilled through the studio doors Wilding had left open.

  Through mists and reeds he ran,

  Through water gray as cloud

  And air that grasped him with

  unseen hands,

  And clung closer than a shroud.

  They stopped before they reached the doors. Their eyes met above the lamp in Emma’s hand. She searched, curious, hoping to find the reflection of her strange feelings in his eyes.

  He said softly, huskily, “Miss Slade, I don’t mean to offend, but I’ve never—I’ve never felt this way before about anyone. As though all my life I have been on my way to meet you.”

  A smile seemed to shine through her as though she had swallowed the lamplight. “Oh, yes,” she whispered. “Yes. I feel it, too.”

  “Do you?” he whispered back with an amazed laugh. “Isn’t it strange? We hardly know each other.”

  “I suppose that’s what comes next.”

  “What?”

  “Getting to know one another,” she answered. “For example, you should know that my second name is Sophronia.”

  “Really? Emma Sophronia?”

  “After my mother’s great aunt.”

  “Well,” he said, drawing breath. “It won’t be easy, but I think I can bear it. Mine’s Eustace.”

  “Edward Eustace Bonham. How terribly respectable.”

  “I try to live above it.”

  Until at last he saw the day

  Green and gold around him spread,

  The timeless, changeless

  land of Fay,

  And he was seized with

  mortal dread.

  “Would I were with the

  dead instead,”

  he cried, then saw the Fairy Queen.

  “Any other dreadful secrets?” he asked.

  “I once threw an aspidistra at Adrian.”

  “Did you hit him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good shot. I’m sure he deserved it.”

  “And you?”

  “I suppose you should know,” he said reluctantly, “that I can never be that romantic figure, the struggling artist in the garret, much as I wish I could deceive you. I was an only child, and my father died several years ago, leaving me more money than is good for anyone, a house in the city, and another on a lake in the north country.”

  “Oh,” she said, amazed. “Mr. Bonham, how have you managed to stay unattached?”

  “How have you?” he countered, “looking the way you do, like a young goddess who got stranded among mortals?”

  She felt her cheeks warm. “Really? I always see myself as such a hobbledehoy of a girl. Fashionable young women are supposed to look delicate and spiritual. That’s hard to do when you’re nearly as tall as most men. In the country, I have a reputation for being eccentric. I wander around in a pair of big rubber boots and a huge hat, carrying my easel and paints. I bribed the milkmaid to pose for me dressed in ribbons and lace among the sheep, and the old gardener to wear a cloak and a tunic and pose as a druid on top of a ruined tower. He never heard the end of that.”

  And oh, she was as fair as fair

  Can be, with hair spun out of gold

  And emerald eyes without a cloud or care,

  Just a smile to make the mortal bold

  And walk into her lair. She said,

  “Come into my bower and tarry with me...”

  “Miss Slade.”

  “Yes, Mr. Bonham?”

  “Should I ask you to marry me now, or would you like me to wait a bit?”

  She felt no great surprise, only a deepening of the strange peace she felt upon first looking into his eyes. “I suppose,” she said reluctantly, “you should wait, otherwise people will think we are completely frivolous. Perhaps you should invite me for a walk in the park instead. Tomorrow afternoon when I finish posing for Miss Cameron. There should be time before dark.”

  “Do you think I am frivolous?”

  “No,” she said quickly, surprised. “How can you ask that? You must know that my heart has already answered you.”

  He started to speak, did not, only held her eyes and she felt the warmth of the smile on his lips like a phantom kiss.

  She scarcely slept after the party had broken up in the early hours of the morning, and the house finally quieted. It was difficult, she discovered, to smile and sleep at the same time. When she heard the housekeeper stirrin
g, she rose and dressed, went into the kitchen to ask for a cup of tea.

  “You’re up early, Miss,” Nelly said.

  “I thought I would do some unpacking, rid our lives of a few more crates.”

  “It will be nice not to have to walk around them. I’ll give you a hand as soon as I tidy up from the party.”

  Mrs. Dyce produced Scotch eggs and cold ham and toast; after breakfast they worked so hard that when Marianne Cameron rang the bell at noon, most of the books had been unpacked and shelved, and Adrian’s collection of oddities and props had found places to reside that were not the floor or his bed. He had come out of his room at midmorning, helped them pile empty crates and hang paintings. By the time Miss Bunce came to pose and he began to paint, there was an empty island of polished floorboards around his easel.

  “I’ll get the door,” Emma told Nelly, whose arms were full of costumes out of a crate that needed to be folded and put away. “It’ll be Miss Cameron, come for me.”

  But, opening the door, she found Bram Wilding instead.

  Surprised, she glanced behind him down the hall, hearing bells striking noon all through the city.

  “Good day, Miss Slade,” he said. “I have good news. I was able to persuade Miss Cameron to let me paint you first.”

  She stared at him, still bewildered by the unwelcome sight of his face instead of the one she expected.

  “How?” she asked incredulously.

  “I offered to speak to a gallery owner who exhibits my work about doing an exhibit of work by the women’s studio. Miss Cameron found my suggestion irresistible.”

  Emma found his suggestion awoke a childish impulse in her to stamp her foot at him. “I wished,” she said coldly, “to pose for her.”

  “And I wish you to pose for me.”

  “Do you always get your wishes, Mr. Wilding?”