Mortal Love (26 page)

“It is nothing like when they die,” whispered Candell.

He went to the corner of the window, gently cupped his hands around the butterfly to capture it, and turned back to Radborne.

“And, of course, that is nothing like when
we
die,” the old painter added. “Their conception of mortality is nothing like ours: their lives are so much longer that they have no premonition of what it is to die, to live entire lives with the knowledge that everything must die. For them death is rare and always unexpected. They are utterly without a vocabulary for it. That is why they cannot create art themselves, or recognize what we create. To them we are like paintings. That is why they steal our children and take us as lovers. That is why they collect us.”

“Who?” said Radborne. Dread crept over him. “Who are you talking about?”

With a smile Candell took a step toward him, opening his hands just enough that the younger man could glimpse the tiny creature there, its wings brushing against Candell's palms, its antennae black, white-tipped. Without warning, Candell clapped his hands together. There was a pale shimmer in the air about Candell's shirt cuffs, as of chalk dust; then he opened his hands to show a miniature tangle of crushed black and red, a glistening smear of pinkish white.

“They don't make a sound,” he said. Radborne watched, repelled, as Candell lifted his hand to his mouth and rubbed it across his lips. “Not a sound,” he smiled. “Not ever!”

There was a chiming in Radborne's ears, a sweet belling that grew louder and louder until he realized it was no bell but the sea, waves rising to swell at windows and doors, black and gray and green, waves come to overtake them. The room darkened. Candell's face was a moon before him, beard and hair clouds, yellow flash of teeth. And Radborne saw—he thought he saw—he saw something caught upon the madman's lower lip, something tiny and white and moving, not an insect's leg but a woman's arm.

“Mr. Comstock?”

He blinked. The darkness was gone, the room was filled with light. A few feet from the window, Cobus Candell sat painting, a half-finished oval canvas before him. Radborne looked around, confused and frightened. He touched his throat and felt his hand tremble.

“Where is Dr. Learmont?” he stammered.

Cobus leaned forward, a hair-brush tracing a spiral in the center of the canvas. Without looking up he replied, “He had to go attend upon Miss Upstone. He said he would see you at dinner—didn't you hear him say good-bye?”

“I—no.” Radborne shook his head. “I … I must have been distracted. Did he—”

“Could you hand me an egg?”

“An egg?”

“At your feet—there, by
Persephone.”

He looked down. A small canvas was nearly hidden amid the dead leaves beneath the window. Next to the canvas was a dun-colored circlet that could have fit in his palm, a bird's nest. Inside it was a single small egg, tea-colored and speckled with dark brown.

“This?” Radborne picked it up.

“If you please. Thank you,” said Candell as Radborne handed it to him. “Chipping sparrow. They like to make their nests of horsehair.”

He held the egg up to the light, scrutinizing it. Then he tapped the end of his paintbrush against the egg once, brought the shell to his mouth, sucked at it noisily, and dropped it. At his feet there was a litter of crushed eggshells, along with what looked like dragonflies' wings.

“Doesn't do to have too many of them,” said Candell. He began to paint again.

Radborne stood, heart beating much too fast and head pounding as though he had been struck. How long had he been here? When did Learmont leave? Cobus Candell seemed utterly nonplussed, busy with his painting; when Radborne looked outside, the sun had moved westward. He walked over to the window, staring at a ridge of gray cloud above the horizon, as though separated by a knife stroke from the sea. He was afraid to speak to Candell and ashamed of his fear: not of being alone with a madman but that the old man was so calm, so focused upon his work.

“You may look at my paintings if you like,” Candell said after several minutes had passed. “That is what most of my visitors do. I don't always care to speak when I am working. I'm sure you must understand.”

“Yes—yes, of course.”

Radborne turned from the window. He wandered to where a very small canvas rested atop a bookcase crammed with boxes of paintbrushes. The painting showed a banquet, the figures minute but exquisitely detailed, wearing robes and ruffed collars in the manner of Elizabethan courtiers. They were seated around a long table, eating a roasted mouse. They had the same unsettling tilted eyes and cruel mouths that distinguished Candell's other pictures. Still, Radborne admired the old man's technique. None of the figures was bigger than the ball of his thumb, and many of them were smaller. All were rendered in the most extraordinary detail, down to the corselets of minnows' scales and the milkweed down that formed the courtiers' exaggerated collars.

Delectation
was written in the lower right corner.
JACOBUS CANDELL, BETHLEM HOSPITAL, SEPTEMBER
1863.

Radborne glanced over his shoulder at Cobus, to see if he used a magnifying lens to paint. He did not. The young man turned back to the painting, squinting at what he thought was a split hazelnut. It proved to be a sort of bassinet that held a bawling, red-faced infant so tiny he got a headache trying to bring it into focus.

“How extraordinary!” murmured Radborne. And all done in oils, too! He tried to move even closer, to get a better look, and bumped against the shelf. “Oh, damn.”

Jars and brushes rattled, there was a
ting
as something fell to the floor and rolled out of sight. Radborne looked for it but found nothing. In the room behind him, Cobus was completely unconcerned; indeed, he seemed to have forgotten that the young man was there at all. Radborne straightened, his attention caught by one of the brushes on the shelf. He picked it up, his eyes narrowing.

“Sable?” he said aloud in wonder. The long handle was of reddish wood. And the ferrule was … gold?

That couldn't be. Radborne held it up to the light. If not gold, then brass plated with gold. The brush hair was long and black, with the faintest frost of white at the tip. When he stroked it against his cheek, it was soft as down.

“It
is
sable!” He glanced at Candell, but the painter remained oblivious. Silently, Radborne poked among the shelves until he found a jar in which other brushes were soaking. He dipped the sable into it, withdrew it, and tapped the ferrule briskly against his index finger. As if by magic, the brush sharpened into a point. He leaned closer to the shelf and drew in the dusty surface, an S so fine it could have been made by a single hair. As he watched, the water dried and the line disappeared.

Radborne whistled softly. Tobolsky sable, too; he'd bet his life on it.

And Tobolsky sable was worth its weight in gold. His own brushes were sabeline—ox-ear hair, dyed white—or squirrel, or camel hair, which was not camel at all but hair from Asiatic ponies. The ferrules on half his brushes had cracked, because they were cheap—a good ferrule was seamless, because the wooden handle absorbed water and cheap seamed metal would split. Radborne had never been able to afford anything better than a single sabeline one-stroke that had some real sable mixed into it. When the nickel-plated ferrule finally broke, he'd repaired it with cotton strips, but it was practically useless now.

And yet a criminal lunatic incarcerated in a Cornish madhouse had thousands of pounds' worth of sable brushes! He glanced once more at Candell, then knelt to see what else he had.

Brushes made of Chinese hog, Hankow he thought; a few Kazan squirrel French quill mops. Varnish brushes, longhaired pointer writers, fan blenders, even a few Oriental brushes. Radborne recognized these because they had no ferrules—the long strands of wolf and pine-marten hair were set directly into their bamboo handles. Save for these, every brush had a gold-plated ferrule, engraved with the painter's entwined initials:
JC.

Behind him he could hear the steady susurrus of Candell's brush upon canvas. The smell of oils was suddenly so thick it choked him. He covered his mouth with a handkerchief and stumbled to open the door. Candell looked up with mild, pale eyes.

“Are you leaving?”

“No. The fumes are so strong, it's making me a bit ill.”

“The poppy-seed oil, I imagine. Or the copal varnish: I was trying it on a corner. Or perhaps you are hungry? There's some eggs. …”

“No,” said Radborne hastily. “Thank you. It's probably the varnish. I've been spoiled by working
en plein air.
”

Cobus smiled. “I haven't had that luxury in some years.”

Radborne flushed, but Candell took no notice, only replaced one brush with another and leaned toward the lower corner of his canvas. “Are you in need of brushes? I saw you inspecting my shelf there.”

“No, it's just that there were so many, and … well, such
luxury
—”

“Dr. Learmont gives them me. Not even Sir Sloshua ever had so many sables, the hound's prick! And you've seen my pigments!”

Candell laughed, a noise like rusty hinges. “When Rossetti saw my cell, he laughed until he wept—a madman with a treasure-house for a paint box! Mind
you
don't weep, Mr. Comstock. If you do, don't do it in my lapis, ha, ha!”

Radborne managed a weak smile. He stepped over a heap of rags that smelled as though something had nested and then died in them. “But the quality of your work—it's truly remarkable, sir.”

He paused in front of another small painting swarming with tiny figures and meticulously detailed vegetation. Its title was
The Wedding-Party.

“Do you paint from memory?” Radborne asked.

“I have no choice. I have sketchbooks, of course, from my journeys. Recently I have had a model in Miss Upstone.”

Radborne felt his throat constrict; he turned back to the shelves and barely kept himself from exclaiming aloud. The shelves sagged beneath hundreds of glass and ceramic jars, holding every imaginable pigment. Common coal, lead white, and hartshorn;
cornu cervium,
that purest black from burned ivory; Cologne earth, precisely what its name implied; Vandyke brown.

And
caput mortuum
—Radborne picked up the container and squinted, trying to read the handwriting on its faded label.

“Oh, that's genuine
caput mortuum,
” said Candell. “Gone out of vogue now—everyone's too squeamish. I gathered that myself when I was in the Valley of Sestris. A dealer in antiquities still had mummies set aside for making pigment. It's very good for rendering dust.” He gave another of his croaking laughs. “The color is not from the mummies themselves, you know—it is derived from the asphaltum which they used to embalm the bodies. They mix it with bone ash. Didn't your instructor teach you any of this?”

“No.” Radborne replaced the canister, picked up another filled with ground lapis lazuli so pure that it was like a handful of sky. “We worked on brush technique, mostly. And some anatomy, though I'd familiarized myself with that from my medical studies.”

“Ah!” Candell set down his brush and beamed. “That is why you are not squeamish! It is a good thing for an artist to have a strong stomach. Some of Rossetti's friends—so fastidious!”

Radborne smiled and continued to investigate the pigments. “It is very difficult to get a good green,” Candell went on, picking up his brush again. Radborne had indeed just put his hand upon a shelf of green pigments. “Once you've seen the real thing, you realize how meager our own efforts are. Green bice is good, but copper carbonate is poisonous. Mustn't lick your fingers! Or your brush.
Verd de Vessie,
sap green—that's what I use. I make it myself, from buckthorn berries.”

“Rhamnus catharticus,”
said Radborne. “The cervispina.”

Candell looked at him, eyes shining. “Very good!”

“I've studied botany since childhood. I have rather a passion for it.”

“Do you? Well, then. You may find much on the moors to interest you, if you keep your eyes open.”

Radborne continued with his inventory, marveling. Some of the pigments were so obscure as to be utterly out of fashion; still, they sat side by side with the most common tints and powders. Pure orpiment, the shining gold that could be lightened only with hartshorn;
auripigmentum
—king's yellow—rich and fatally poisonous; all the earths and transparent lakes that Radborne could remember sucking from his watercolor brushes as a child. Mars yellow,
giallolino de Fiandra,
litharge. A tiny vial of saffron, the dried crocus stamens still intact. Zinnober, which Theophrastus said was obtained by shooting arrows at exposed veins of ore in cliff faces. English vermilion and the more precious Chinese. Saturnine red, that dense, toxic powder composed of leads. Rose Madder Lake. English woad. Tyrian purple,
Murex trunculus;
Saxon blue and Haarlem ashes, German azure and ultramarine,
azzurro oltremarino,
the blue from beyond the sea.

“Bremen blue, Milory, verdetta, walrus tusk, Marc black, lac lake …”

Like a child reading aloud for the first time, Radborne named each one. Not even Pietro's, where he bought his paints in New York, had so many pigments!

“It is a treasure-house,” Radborne said at last. He felt drunk. He wished he could lick his fingers, poison or not: he wanted to spill the pigments onto the filthy studio floor and bathe in them, eat them, stain his body a thousand hues and then dissolve into the stone. “I have never seen such colors! Never.”

Candell swiveled on his stool and regarded him thoughtfully, his pale eyes keen. Finally he asked, “Would you like to see what I am working on?”

Unexpectedly Radborne felt his heart lift. “Yes,” he said. “I would be honored to see it.”