Breath and Bones (63 page)

“Famke, it is Viggo! I—” But even after all these miles, he could think of no more to say.

“All is forgiven,” called Myrtice when he fell silent; she voiced it rather quietly, however, as she thought—unworthily—of what Famke's disappearance might mean to her.

Edouard had only one thing to say, and it cost no small effort: “
Hygeia
was a beautiful painting!”

The fire snapped close behind them.

In his nakedness, Albert was moving slowly, almost paralyzed with fear that glass would shred his skin and fire would catch him in a fatal clinch. He called, “Wherever you are, darling, don't move! Do not move!”

As he would discover, there was no way for Famke to move, for she was lying in pieces on the ground. When she landed, a thick glass sword had plunged through her chest, pinning her to the earth. More glass had cut away one foot and most of her fingers; fragments of her bones showed orange in the firelight. Part of an ear was missing, and the tip of her nose, and almost all the once-flaming, wild locks of hair.

When the searchers first came upon her, all together, they drew up short, struck dumb by the picture before them. No one knew how to look upon it. Famke's eyes were open and glazed, plainly sightless; yet there was a rasp coming from her chest that said she must still be alive.

Bravely, Viggo seized the glass sword. The old scar tissue protected his fingers as he first pulled, but soon his blood mingled with hers. Myrtice cried out then and tried to swathe his hands with her petticoat. Seeing this, Albert realized how very naked he was, and he covered himself with both of his hands. He was ashamed in front of the others, especially Edouard Versailles. But Edouard did not notice Albert's nakedness or Famke's; he knew the ground's softness meant it was soaked in blood, and he knelt to take Famke's pulse.

Famke was beyond caring about any of this. When her lungs were free of their burden, they released a wild, tired sigh.
It is too bad
, she thought dimly;
just when I was ready to begin my life
.

A great bubble of blood formed through the hole in her breast and hovered there, growing hard and dark. The artist in Famke might have liked to see that, but her eyes remained fixed on the great sea of sky, and her red lips slowly stiffened, wordless. The three men and Myrtice watched to see if they would close entirely.

And thus Famke Sommerfugl, a girl of good family, departed from the earth.

She is the West's greatest artifact
.

“A
RT
N
OTES
,”
S
AN
F
RANCISCO
C
HRONICLE

We laid her out most beautifully,” remembered Albert. His expression was blank behind the smoked lenses, but he put a hand on the glass coffin in what the widow thought a tender, though somewhat horrible, caress. She fancied that his face and figure stood out against the stone walls like some medieval church figure of death, with black holes for eyes.

From the next room came the sound of groaning and cracking wood, as the Chinese workers pried away the sides of the enormous crate. With the reverberations, the blue-gowned, white-skinned, rubber-limbed corpse shuddered in her tube of glass. Her lashes fluttered as if she were about to blink, and the widow felt faint.

“She was fully embalmed,” elaborated the man from the widow's own country. He, too, put a hand on the glass, and with the most delicate sympathy for what he knew must be the widow's horror, he explained that every ounce of Famke's blood had been replaced with formaldehyde, and the best quality arsenic was used. The blood drained for embalming Famke was now rusty red dust in an urn that sat atop the tombs in the Taj Mahal. In consultation with the Institute's experienced morticians, Viggo himself had directed the procedure. “But as you see”—he indicated his gnarled paw, grotesque beside the blind man's delicately gloved one—“after the glass storm, my hands were in no condition to do the fine work. They are good only for rough labor now.”

“Then who is it who put her in this—this bottle?” the widow asked. Her eyes met his severely, with the look she would use to scold a servant or impose a penance.

There was a long silence, as if the men were waiting for something. And in the end it came: One of the draperies at the back of the room twitched, then undulated, and a dark man in mourner's black stepped from what turned out to be not a window recess but a small sitting area. This, she realized, must be Edouard Versailles, the art collector and amateur doctor himself.

Without introduction, he said to her, “The idea of the bottle came at the funeral. We all agreed she was too lovely to put in the ground, and we pulled her from the coffin.” He stood gazing quietly down at the glass tube without touching it. The widow thought it odd that he did not look at her; but then, she realized, he had seen enough from behind his drapery.

“Monsieur Versailles has a collection of specimens in jars,” Albert said. “They demonstrate that the body may last in alcohol for ten years, even twenty. I stitched her together myself,” he added proudly, “though it was no easy job. I shaped a fingertip into her nose.”

“My finger.” Viggo showed her the stump with a modest air. “I had sliced it off in pulling the glass sword.”

Against her will, but drawn by overpowering fascination, the widow bent to peer at that nose in profile. When she looked closely, it was indeed misshapen; but the stitches were nearly invisible, concealed with some sort of clay.

“The foot is her own,” Albert elaborated, “but the fingers are of a girl, a lung patient, who died in the stagecoach before reaching Hygiene's hospital. Monsieur Versailles thought of it, and the family was willing.”

Edouard Versailles felt compelled to tell part of the story. Once Famke was dead, he explained, he had realized he did not loathe or even fear her: He—as he confessed in a dispassionate voice, oddly divorced from the setting—he loved her. As he held her body against his, he knew that Hermes's story had been lies, that she had done no wrong but had been the angel in each house she had graced. That night, for the first time, he wept for someone other than his parents.

He visited the Anteroom the next day—there was clearly no reason to bring Famke there, so she occupied a suite at the Springs Hotel—and begged the dead patient's parents for use of her hands. Famke's corpse must
be perfect for the final viewing, as her body had been in life; he would pay any price to gaze on it in its youthful glory. In this way, the Thomas family from Vestal, New York, were able to assuage their own grief with a first-class Grand Tour of Europe. And when Edouard offered a reward for tresses of bright red hair that might be stitched into a wig, Hygeia Springs was fairly flooded with boxes and bags of the stuff. He selected the truest reds and paid each contributor as promised; several of the fair but frail retired on the proceeds and became schoolteachers, then wives.

His story ended there, as if he expected the widow to make some comment—perhaps to approve of the prostitutes' moral advancement. But for the moment she would say nothing.

Viggo and Albert explained that several other great things had come to pass:

Myrtice mailed a copy of the death certificate to the federal agents, who had Heber Goodhouse released and returned to his family. With rest and Sariah's concentrated care, he regained much of his health and began to dream of ways for improving the life cycle of Chinese silkworms. After years of innovative husbandry, he succeeded in breeding a hardy new strain that he christened the Sommerfugl. It entered the Mormon record books as a miracle, and Prophet was renamed Heber City.

Viggo, meanwhile, kept the promise to Myrtice that Heber had first made three years earlier: After a small wedding in Hygeia Springs, he fathered the first of what would prove to be many offspring. Myrtice loved her husband very much, and to secure his affections she agreed to give up the eating of arsenic and to remain in Hygiene as housekeeper of the massive new residence Edouard was erecting of native stone.

To build this new house and the gallery-fortress nearby, Edouard filled in a horrible fissure that the fire had opened in the red earth. Very few were privileged to know exactly what the new house concealed, and the men told the widow about it in whispers while Edouard made feeble demurrals. Where one huge steel rib of the old palace had thrust into the earth, a spring gushed forth; and in those bubbling waters gleamed a golden dust that suggested there must be a mother lode in the rocks of Hygeia Springs. Edouard confessed that the very thought of this still caused him to wake at many a midnight, heart pounding, fearful of what it might portend for the
future. The Dynamite Gang could easily find Hygeia's mountain; what might they do if they discovered the riches it contained?

The butler, Wong, hired a team of his countrymen good with shovels and pipe, and they cleverly converted the spring to a steady source of household water, with a filter to catch the gold dust. That dust was his to dispose of as he pleased. He used it to fund the fulfillment of a longtime aspiration, a wood-frame hotel he designed and named the Celestial, and he settled into a life of prosperous hostelery. Viggo was the manager-in-name who gave a respectable front to the business. The stone walls pressed the gold back into the ground, and it lay there unsuspected even by the three singsong sisters who helped direct the hotel.

Albert lived a long while in the Celestial, where he had a special suite of rooms designed along the lines of the old house, with plate glass walls for abundant light. In that airy studio he experienced a bout of intense inspiration and painted the six canvases that were to earn him Edouard's lasting affection and, in the dark years to come, his protection:
Immaculate Heart, Pearl of Great Price, Slim Princess, Angel in the House, Belle Dame Sans Merci, Winged Victory
. The paintings were based, naturally, on what Albert knew of Famke and what he could learn from the others who had known her. The series of masterworks was completed in one frenetic year by virtue of frequent visits to the glass coffin then housed in the Celestial's Royal Suite. These paintings might have pleased Edouard but would not, Albert came to know, win him much fame in the world beyond Hygeia. Even the most narcissistic of artists must realize eventually when his talents are on the wane; and Albert's waned very quickly. His renewed passion for precise detail and observation could not be satisfied, and his lines grew sloppy as he lost control of what an artist must value most: his vision. For Albert had begun to see things that were not there—faces, fingers, fish tails; mouths that laughed at him, snakes that hissed forth sparks. These images intruded on the careful painterly compositions in his mind and on his canvas. Most people thought he was going mad.

Edouard, however, called in a raft of specialists from Chicago, New York, and Paris. These learned men theorized that in the explosion, tiny splinters of glass—invisible, impalpable, insensible—had wormed into Albert's brain and infected those parts directly concerned with vision, or
perhaps with inspiration. Maybe they flew up his nose or swam down his ears; more likely they pierced his skin and entered his bloodstream, forced through veins and arteries by the implacable pump of his heart, until they found harbor in his skull.

“Imagine your head as a cave,” suggested one surgeon. “The glass shards have stuck to your bones and may even be growing there in the manner of stalactites . . .”

“Or ice,” said Albert.

“Yes, or ice.”

In the end, everywhere Albert looked, he saw nothing but Famke's face. The greatest torture was that no single image would stay before his eyes long enough to be painted; and so, since he could not have his mind's eyes removed, he took up the dark glasses and shut out exterior images. He moved to a smaller and more manageable room in the Celestial, paid for by Edouard; and although he could no longer see the paintings amid the crowd of pictures in his mind, he visited the new gallery-castle on every month's first Monday. Occasionally he climbed up to the house to share a beer with Edouard and exchange tales of the past, or to enter the Taj Mahal, cup the urn of Famke's blood in his hands, and know what it was to hold the outpourings of another person's whole heart.

“I would like to see this urn,” the widow said on that winter afternoon, years after the grand explosion. “I would like to hold it in my hands also.” She was imagining it shaped not as a heart but as a face, the face of a little girl who had suckled her life's sole guardian away and still had the strength to wail and demand; the face of the woman who had held sway on the wall of a room that the widow's husband, Jørgen Skatkammer, had built especially to house the vast, intricate, ugly painting that she now knew the model had painted herself.

“But first we must look again at the picture,” she said; and thus it was she who led the way into the next room, to see the thing tilted in the gilt frame that her husband had commissioned to bear the inscription:

Himlen sortner, Storme brage!

Visse Time du er kommen.

Hvad de gav de tog tilbage.

Evig bortsvandt Helligdommen
.

The sky is darkening, roar the gale! / Fatal hour, you have come. / What they gave they took away. / Forever ruined, sacred thing
.

Seeing it here, the widow felt an unexpected surge of relief: The painting had at last been laid to rest, and with it the most painful part of her conscience. While it hung on her own wall, that face, that hair, that figure had reminded her every day of her life how she had failed to protect the most precious soul in her care, how the girl herself had fallen beyond her reach. And yet it was the ugliness in that painted face which, ironically, had inspired Jørgen Skatkammer to give up his foolish dream of spring love and write to a convent in the distant reaches of Norway with an offer of marriage: Hygeia's coarse features had secured Mother Birgit a kind of life she had never even thought to dream about, a life of comfort and what passed in most circles for love.