by Ann Claycomb
“She pays me,” the girl murmured. “I don’t need more.”
Andersen frowned. “She pays you? How?” He tightened his grip when she would have pulled away. “Have you been stealing from her?”
“No, signor!” She looked up, terrified. “I am not stealing. She showed me once, asked me how to get money for her jewels. I have done things for her before and she has paid me from the bag. I am happy to do things now, I only take a very, very little thing.” She twisted out of his grasp, but only to face him fully, her face open and pleading.
“Please, signor. Do not say it is stealing. I am taking care of her, you said so. I am. She has shown me herself, she has paid me before.”
“Where?” Andersen asked. “Show me this bag you are talking about.”
The girl looked even more frightened and her eyebrows knitted together in confusion, thinking that perhaps she had committed a greater crime in revealing Fand’s secret. She shifted the load of laundry in her arms.
“There,” she said, jerking her chin. “In the wall, by the fireplace. The bricks, you see them? Where they are darker? They move.” Then she hurried down the stairs.
Andersen glanced at Fand, little more than a huddle of bedclothes. Then he crossed to the fireplace and pulled out the darkened bricks. There was a velvet bag in the space behind them from which Andersen poured a king’s ransom in jewels onto the bed. Surely these could not all be real. A necklace of amethysts and black pearls, earrings from which swung emeralds and diamonds, a ring so small his littlest finger could not pass through it, weighed down by a ruby the color of new blood. Gifts from her husband? Andersen looked up at the white face on the pillow. These things did not even suit her. They were heavy and ornate, made for a fleshier woman, or one who delighted in ostentation. They were jewels a man would give a woman when he wanted to show them both off: woman and jewels together, symbols of his wealth. Lifting a necklace of sapphires, alternately dark and light blue, Andersen recalled the night in the alley, the look on Fand’s face as she sized up the man. He could picture her, not as she was now, with her poor hair cropped close and her legs crisscrossed with sutures and scars, but as she was still, in his most fevered dreams, wearing this necklace and nothing more, her lovely face uplifted to the caress of the man who gave it to her.
There was something larger in the bag, a box that looked, impossibly, as if it had been crafted from a cross section of a single enormous pearl. But that pearl would have been the size of a schoolroom globe or a streetlamp. And inside, even more impossibly, was the knife he had given the doctor, still shining, and fitted into the case as though it had been made to do so.
He replaced the jewels and the pearl case. He took the knife himself this time. On his way back to his lodgings, he threw it into a pile of refuse behind a public house.
He swept into Fand’s chamber the next day with what he almost hoped was visible insolence—for why did she deserve the courtesies he’d bestowed on her, when she’d clearly been deceiving him since they’d met?—then stopped short at the sight of her propped up in bed. Her eyes were nearly black under the heavy fringe of her lashes, and she smiled and held out her hand. He gave her his own, helpless to resist her. She had washed her hair and pulled it back with a ribbon; from the front she might have been wearing her accustomed chignon. There were blue-black shadows under her eyes and a fine tremor in the hand he held, but she was Fand again. He had forgotten.
And then in another moment he was angry. He released her hand and went to the fireplace, pulled out the bricks and brought the bag with him back to the bed. Her smile faded. She watched his face as he poured the jewels into her lap.
“Yours?” he asked. “The girl told me about them. She has been taking them as payment for caring for you here. She insisted to me that you allowed her to do so.”
She shrugged, her eyes still fixed on his face.
“And these were gifts to you from whom—from your husband, before he died?”
She lifted her chin and did not break his gaze. After a long moment, she nodded. He wanted to shake her.
“These are the jewels of a princess, Fand,” he said, “a princess or a woman whom a man keeps—keeps for show, keeps like a pet or a prize. Was your husband a prince? Were you a princess?”
At that, she suddenly smiled. She very nearly laughed. She looked down at the heap of jewelry in her lap and touched a diamond bracelet with one finger. The tension returned to her face. Andersen realized for the first time since he’d walked into the room that she did not have anything to write with, nor had she sought out her ever-present little notebook. She seemed content not to explain herself to him.
He reached into the bag again then and drew out the pearl case, set it precariously on top of the pile of jewels. She shrank away.
“No, no,” he said. “It is gone. I removed it from here while you were insensible and I discarded it. This is only the empty case, you see.”
But when he opened it, the knife was there, unblemished. He sat down heavily on the edge of the bed.
“Fand,” he said, “I swear to you that I removed it from that very case and discarded it far, far from this room. I did not want you to ever have to see it again.”
She nodded.
“It is impossible,” he said. Then, carefully, “Can you not . . . will you not tell me—”
She looked around then for her pad, made the familiar gesture with her fingers, of squeezing a pencil. He caught her hand in both of his.
“Will you tell me?” he asked. “Will you tell me all of it? I-I wonder if it might not help you, to tell me, now that I know so much, now that I must believe you. For I’ve seen it, Fand. I gave this knife to the doctor who tended you and it came back. Then I cast it away myself; I felt it leave my hand, saw it fly through the air and land in a pile of refuse on a city street. And yet here it is again. Will you not tell me?”
She sat with her head bent over their linked hands. He thought that she missed her long hair and her veils, that she wished in this moment to hide her face from him. He waited.
At last she raised her head and nodded, her mouth tremulous, her eyes shimmering black to silver and back again. She tugged her hand free and gestured for her pencil again.
“No,” Andersen said. “No. Not that. I will bring you some better paper to write on, and a real ink pen. You shall not scribble this down like something to be discarded on a teahouse table.”
Fand nodded again but still gestured for her pad. He found one in the drawer of the bedside table. While she wrote, he scooped up the jewels, shut the knife case, replaced it all in the wall. When he turned back to the bed she was holding the pad out to him. The high flags of color had returned to her cheeks. He took it and read.
It will take a good deal of paper and a long time to tell. I am afraid it will disappoint you.
“Do not worry about that,” he said, but she reached for the pad and wrote again, then handed it back.
The story is more like an opera than a fairy tale. It does not have a happy ending.
Andersen looked down at her, his heart pounding the same way it did when he heard the overture beginning, when he would lean forward and forget his cramped seat, the hot, stale air, and lose himself in the soaring voices on the stage below. He did not care if her story had a happy ending. He only wanted to hear it, to lose himself in it, to see the shape of it on the page the way he could close his eyes during a well-sung aria and see the notes stringing themselves together in a shining, ephemeral arc. She could not speak, but she would be his muse yet.
HE WROTE THE words—To my little mermaid, my muse—with a flourish inside the front cover and then held the book open with one hand to let the ink dry. He’d bought this particular edition in a shop in London, savoring the peculiarity of paying for his own work, because the size and the softness of the green baize cover reminded him of Fand’s little notebooks. He’d sent her a copy of the first edition, in Danish, when it had been published, but this little volume, with
the mermaid herself stamped on the cover, appealed to him as the right gift to bring this afternoon.
Sixteen years would have changed her, he reminded himself as he put on his greatcoat. It had changed him, for the better. He had acquired income, acclaim, and confidence in his talent. Even his nose had lost its power to depress him, except on his weariest days. But for a woman of limited means, sixteen years had likely meant a loss of beauty, of grace and freshness. Walking to Fand’s latest address, Andersen anticipated encountering a faded version of the vivid woman who had so captivated him. Recalling her struggle to resist injuring herself, he acknowledged that he could even find her wasted by laudanum addiction, or swollen with drink and visibly scarred by that terrible knife.
He was prepared for anything except for the woman who opened the door to his knock: Fand, glowing and vivid. She had not been expecting a caller; she peered around the door at first, then flung it open in exuberant welcome when she recognized Andersen, her lovely face alight. Her hair was loose about her shoulders and she wore no stays but only a flowing gown such as a woman might wear at home, a gown that concealed neither the swell of her bosom—far more abundant than Andersen recalled—nor the larger swell of her belly below.
She tugged him into the house, then shut the door behind him and left her hand on his sleeve, smiling up at him with unfeigned delight. A moment later she had whisked away to snatch up a notebook and pencil, scribbling furiously and glancing up at Andersen as she wrote, as though to reassure herself that he was still there.
Fand was pregnant. Beautiful still, even more beautiful perhaps, made lush where she had been fragile, and pregnant. Andersen trembled head to foot as if shaken by a chill. He wanted to flee the house, but he was frozen in place, held captive by all that was familiar in her beauty—the high spots of color in her cheeks, the smell of the sea that wafted from her unbound hair—as well as by all that was new. The shadow between her breasts taunted him, as did her pink and white forearms framed by the lace-edged sleeves of her gown.
She thrust the notebook at him, pushing him into a chair and dropping down onto a footstool beside him, preparing to watch him read with the avidity he suddenly remembered well. Andersen took up the pages and tried to focus on the words. Fand’s handwriting was far more familiar than she was herself, for they had corresponded regularly ever since he’d left Naples. And yet he hadn’t known she was pregnant, that she had a husband or a lover. She’d written about her delight in the continued success of his stories and about opera. Andersen had come to think of her letters as full of music, both in substance and in cadence, for she often captured a performance with the same spare elegance as when she had first described Malibran to him (she sings like a bird in a cage).
The words on the page today were hastily scrawled and hard to make out—but then, his hand was still shaking. I cannot believe you are here! she’d written. After all this time and now you are here just in time for another Bellini, and one that has never been performed in Naples before. We have tickets and Vincenzo will give up his for you to go with me—to think that we will sit in an opera box together again after so many years. You look so fine too, in your cloak and your elegant clothes, but just as young as ever. I worried that you would not come this season though you said you would and I worried I would not recognize you or you would not recognize me. But you have come— the word have was underlined three times—and you are just the same. The tickets are for tomorrow night. We can dine first and then go. I would love to go out afterward to a café as we used to do, but I get too tired now and Vincenzo likes me home to rest.
Andersen lifted his head from the page.
“Who is Vincenzo?” he asked. “You never wrote to me of him. Is he your husband?”
Fand seemed amused by the question. She held up her hands and waggled the fingers so Andersen could see that they were bare of rings.
“Your lover then.”
Andersen tore out the pages she’d written and crumpled them in his fist. Fand flinched and shrank a little on the stool.
“And the child,” he said, “when is it due?”
She reached for the notebook but he held it out of her reach.
“What have you done?” he demanded. “Given yourself to this man, gotten yourself with child by him—what is he, is he a singer? Is he young and handsome, this Vincenzo?”
Of course he was—all of those things. Fand flushed and reached again, urgently, for the notebook. Andersen held it even farther out of her reach.
“You could write a thousand pages and I wouldn’t read them,” he said. “You want to talk to me of opera, of music—did you lie in your lover’s arms and write to me? Did you think you could be both his and mine? You—” He was talking nonsense, but he could not stop. She was pregnant. She would soon bear some man’s child.
“You debase yourself,” Andersen said. His throat was so clogged with rage and pain that he could hardly get the words out. “You will bear a child like this, into this shabby world. I made you immortal and you make of yourself just another who—”
She sprang up and hit him in the face before he could finish the word. Andersen fell back in his seat a moment, then jumped to his feet and loomed over her.
“Do you even know what you have done?” he asked. “What if the child suffers your curse, have you thought of that? Does this Vincenzo even know? What will you do if the child wails for water or feels pain in her feet as if she were treading on sharp knives and the blood must flow?”
Those last words were her own, written sixteen years ago while she sat up against her pillows, still recovering from her attempt to mutilate herself and gaining strength from telling him her story. He still had the original pages, folded carefully in a locked drawer in his study in Denmark. He had taken her story and shaped another story around it, thinking as he did so that there was a wonderful metaphor to this particular creative process. He was like an oyster adding luster and polish to a grain of sand and producing—in time—a pearl that was now a beloved story across all of Europe and even America.
He had meant the words to wound her and could see that they had. She backed away from him, then moved to the desk that stood against the back wall of the room and picked up another notebook. From behind, her pregnancy was not even apparent; she was a slender, supple length of skirt and flaming hair.
“What could you possibly say that would explain?” Andersen snarled at her back. The stinging of his cheek where she had struck him felt merely like a physical manifestation of the pain of her betrayal of the chaste bond between them. “Will you tell me how you came to love Vincenzo, how he wooed you with his boyish charms and his dark eyes?”
Fand turned, the book and a pencil in her hand, and retraced her steps across the carpet to stand quite close to him, close enough that she had to tip her head back to search his face. She had calmed now, and her expression shifted from perplexity to understanding and then to—Andersen braced himself for it, but then found it unendurable all the same—pity.
She had not known. All these years of agony—first here in Naples, when she had been so close and he had never dared speak of his desire, and since then only from afar, when the mere sight of his name scrawled on a letter from her had been enough to set his heart pounding—she had never known. Andersen might have felt relief that, after all, he had concealed his longing better than he hoped, but for the gentleness with which she touched his sleeve once more.
He jerked away. “You would not hear that word from me,” he said. “And I will not say it and risk you striking me again, but that is still what you are now. You cannot love this Vincenzo, who has no idea what you are, what you were. You have sold yourself for physical pleasure, soiled your story—the story I perfected for you—grasping for what, for a happy ending? When you do not even know what will become of the child?” He pushed his face down toward hers. “What if it is born with a tail, Fand?” he whispered. “What will you tell your lover then?”
The notebook he had been
withholding had fallen to his side. He held it out to her and she took it, stacked it on top of the one she had taken from the desk. She stood with her head bent. Tears made dark splotches on the top page and the pencil trembled in her hand when she raised it to the paper.
But she did not write. She turned from Andersen again, just a step back and an angling of her body so she could set the notebooks down. Then she straightened and snapped the pencil in her fingers.
“Now you will not speak?” He scoffed. “I confess I am hardly surprised—”
But she was not done. She cut him off with a look as surely as if she had spoken aloud. It was the look he had seen only once before, sixteen years ago, and it made him quail now as it had then, when it had not even been directed at him. There were tears on her cheeks and her hands were shaking as violently as his own, but she swept her eyes down Andersen’s body and then back up, and when she looked him full in the face, she curled her lip deliberately, arching one eyebrow, and he was instantly reduced to cringing, abject shame.
He fled the house, fumbling with the doorknob and tripping on the step, plunging away so desperately that he was halfway down the street before he realized that it was raining. Andersen clutched his coat more tightly about him and quickened his pace. When he felt the lump in his pocket and remembered what it was, he jerked the book out as though it burned him and tossed it in a puddle. He did not look back to see it sink, but pictured the green baize mermaid’s smile blurring and smiled savagely. Let her drown, he thought. I’ve no more need of her. I am done with muses.
FAND HELD HERSELF still a moment after the door slammed, then clapped a hand to her mouth and stumbled through the front room to the kitchen, where she retched into the sink. When she had finished, she poured a glass of water from the pitcher on the table and rinsed her mouth until she could swallow without gagging. She carried the glass back into the sitting room and sank into the chair at her writing desk. Vincenzo would be home from rehearsal soon. She swiped the tears from her cheeks with the heel of her hand, then set the glass of water down and moved slowly around the room. She picked her notebooks up and closed them, stacked them back on the desk. She tossed the pages he had crumpled and the pencil she had broken into the fire, then stood a moment watching the flames leap to their devouring.