The Serpent Garden - Judith Merkle Riley (4 page)

“There she is, the harlot! The whoreson’s letter was no lie.” Captain Pickering’s voice drowned out the frantic cries of her maid. “Damn you! Damn you both to hell!” he shouted. Fear and shock froze her to the bed in the very act. The painter shrieked as he was pulled off her by several sets of work-roughened hands. Before she could struggle away, the captain had grabbed her by the hair and pulled her face to within inches of his. Her eyes widened with horror at the sight of her husband’s weather-beaten, hard-boned face and ferocious blue eyes. “Liar, cheat! You’ve deceived me for the last time!” he cried. She could hear the thrashing and screaming of her lover as he fought to free himself from her husband’s sailors.

“For God’s sake, no!” she heard herself shouting as the captain pushed her aside and drew his short sword. Mindlessly, she wept and clawed at his coat, crying over and over again, “No, no!”

Captain Pickering, shaking with rage, plunged his short sword through the painter’s naked belly. The painter’s face distended in an unearthly cry. Two sailors held down the bleeding body while the captain pulled his sword free and, with a curiously cold precision, cut Rowland Dallet’s throat from ear to ear. Blood splattered everywhere. There were pools of it, rivers, oceans. It flowed between the floorboards and spotted the bed curtains. The blood seemed to enrage the furious husband even more. “Whore, whore!” cried the captain, as he battered at her with his bloody fists, then flung her like a bundle of old rags into the slippery puddle at the foot of the bed. But before she lost consciousness, to the very end of her days, Bridget Pickering would swear that she saw a hideous, naked, dark shape leaning over Rowland Dallet’s corpse, smiling and picking through it for something with long, scaly fingers, the way a greedy child might pick the silver coin out of a Christmas pudding.

I woke up craving oranges, oranges from Spain. In all my life I’ve had but one. I’ll have oranges, too, I thought, as I popped my feet out of the bed. The rain had washed away the clouds, and new dawn shone pink and inviting through the studio window. Barefoot and in my shift, oblivious to the cold, I used a weasel’s tooth to finish burnishing the little circle of parchment which, the previous night, I had glued tight to a base cut from an old playing card and then left to dry. I took out my husband’s drawing of the princess. An easy job, I thought, looking at the smooth, pretty face with just a hint of a spoiled pout in the expression.

I set out a row of clean mussel shells to mix the colors in and took six of the best pencils, the narrow little squirrel’s-hair brushes I had made for Master Dallet. I ground and mixed the carnation fresh, to get the light, pretty skin tone just right, then coated the parchment and left it to dry. It was all easy; I’d done it a hundred times for him, now the hundred and first was for me. By now I was frozen through, and glad Nan had made up the fire.

Over my clothes, I put on the silk smock my husband used for miniature painting, to protect the tiny image from hairs or lint that might come from clothing, and then I sat at the worktable. I had a fierce headache; the parchment circle on the drawing board seemed to move and double itself in front of my eyes. My fingers could hardly bend for the swelling. All at once, I felt empty and cold. It had been more than a year since I’d put a line of my own onto paper. What if my skill had gone? What would I tell those rich Frenchmen? My God, if Master Dallet found out, he might break my bones; he might kill me.

Now I was very frightened; I could feel some shapeless, wicked thing hiding in the corner, making darkness even in the daytime. I could hear a rustling in the chimney and smell something ugly, like old, rotting wood. My skin started to crawl. “You’ve lost the art,” the thing whispered. “Better to kill yourself now, before your husband does it.” My chest was all heavy, and I couldn’t breathe. It was something, something terrible like an evil presence that was taking away my painting just when I needed it most.

Then I tried to take away my fear with the thought of all that money, and the good things I could do with it which would be entirely for others and so entirely virtuous. I’ll just start, and my old skill will come back, I thought. But the dark thing crowded more into the room, and I started weeping even though I was so stubborn as to keep hunting out my drawing things.

But as I laid the big drawing out on the table for copying, I felt the oddest pressure in the air behind me, as if someone curious were watching what I was doing. “Of course you can, Susanna,” I heard in my ear. I turned my head suddenly, and caught a flash in the corner of my eye, something that shone, all translucent, and which I can only describe as, well, oddly
feathery
. The light seemed bright and rich in the room, and my heart lost its heaviness. I could feel a calm sort of joy beating through my veins, where sad, heavy blood should have been. Well, I thought, now I’m seeing things as well as having a dreadful headache. Maybe Nan was right and it was all from putting my head out in the rain when she told me not to.

Then all at once the headache faded, as if someone had touched my forehead. The edges of the parchment circle regained their sharpness. A curious heat flooded through me, and I began to sweat. Oh, I thought, I must spare the parchment, so I wiped the fast-flowing drops off my forehead with my sleeve. I was soaking now, and even the silk smock was damp through. My fingers seemed to loosen and felt clever and deft.

With the boldness of a swimmer who dives into an unknown river, I took a deep breath and mixed the first color for the line drawing, carnation with a little thin lake, and laid down the forehead stroke. There it lay, neat and correct. Inwardly, I exulted. As I felt my hands and mind connect in the old way, inwardly, I seemed to hear an odd sound, like the approving rustle of a voice coming from somewhere nearby. All around it, I could hear the faint echo of children’s laughter, like a dream or an imagining. The ugly thing, and the smell and evil rustling, had vanished as if the laughter had chased it away.

Lightly I sketched in the features with the pale, rusty color; the proportion pleased me, and I moved on to sketch in the slashed sleeves and jeweled ornaments of the costume. These always give me special joy because I do love good jewelry, and nobody has better jewelry than princesses. “Well done, Susanna,” I seemed to hear in my ear. “Go on.”

The picture drew me on as I saw it emerge from the parchment. In the shells, I mixed the body colors with water and gum arabic, then laid them on the tiny mother-of-pearl palette with growing sureness. Next came the shading colors, laid on in lines of a single hair’s breadth, so minute and close that they appeared solid to the inexpert eye. That is one of the secrets of a perfect miniature, as my father always used to say. Painters in large try to lay on the color in blobs as they would in a big portrait, and so lose the fineness of control that is necessary for a true likeness. They try to turn the form as they would in a large painting, with dark colors, violets, greens, and even black in the receding shadow, and so produce a sinister, dark muddle in place of luminous color. Father’s shading tones, which he learned from the illuminators, are rich and bright, only giving the illusion of shadow when seen next to the body color. All these are secrets the English painters have not yet discovered, which is why this work goes to foreigners. Foreigners and Rowland Dallet.

So absorbed was I in the painting that time seemed to vanish. A wide and luminous space opened out around me, where common sounds became muffled. A still chiming, more beautiful than music, filled the edgeless space. Occasional comments of Nan, who would come in to say, “Why, that is very like!” and other words of praise, faded to the meaningless whispering of leaves far away in another world. A perfect pleasure in color occupied my physical being, more pure and perfect than any other kind of pleasure I could imagine. With a curious exactness, my tiny brushes found the precise shade and light to throw the figure from flat into round. At last I was done: in the fading luminosity, I ground the burned ivory for the black of the eye, which is almost a speck, fresh before mixing and applying it, so that it would shine from the picture with a true glance. A background of blue bice, richer than the sky in summer, set off the red hair and fresh, pale face. There were flashes of light caught in every jewel, and the rich gown shone like silk. I looked around, as if I had awakened from a dream. The afternoon was nearly gone. The sensation of watchers in the room seemed to fade. The workroom was again somber, dark, and empty of all presences, either good or evil.

“What is that racket downstairs?” I asked Nan.

“It’s that widow quarreling with some customers, no doubt. Don’t let it disturb you. The French gentlemen could be back at any moment.”

“It’s done, Nan, and I like it better than anything Master Dallet ever painted. Listen at the door while I put the portrait in its case; you know I love gossip.” There were several plain, round, polished wood cases on hand. For a princess, there should be jewels, I sighed to myself. Well, never mind, if they want jewels, they can have a goldsmith make another case. But suppose they don’t come? Then God just hasn’t willed it, I thought. I’ll keep the picture as a sample of my work. “I’ll have to hide it,” I said to myself distractedly. After all, Rowland Dallet had sold my Salvator Mundi as a work by a long-dead Burgundian master.

The shouting had grown louder. Then there was a clattering of clogs on the stair, followed by a positively rude banging on the door. Nan flung it open to confront the widow’s daughter.

“Mother says she won’t have it laid out there. The lease give her right of use, and she just won’t have it cluttering up the shop. You have to take it up into your rooms.”

“And just what is it you’re talking about?” Nan asked her.

“You’ll see,” she answered, her eyes narrow and her smile malicious. Perhaps a gift, I thought, pushing ahead of Nan down the narrow, spiral stair. Downstairs, two sailors stood beside a long, dark-stained, canvas-wrapped bundle they had laid on the ancient rushes covering the floor. They looked embarrassed as I stooped to uncover the bundle. For a moment my breath stopped. Then I could feel a kind of curious coldness all through my body before I could hear the oddest scream that seemed to come out of me but also from far away. The skin was a bluish gray, and the clotted, open wounds, a deep murrey unlike any I could ever have imagined…. The bundle was the corpse of Master Dallet, as dead as a herring.

The taller of the sailors, the one with the black hair and the earring, looked suddenly embarrassed as he stared at my swollen middle, and the wedding ring on my finger.

“Um, an accident in the alley behind Captain Pickering’s house,” he said.

“Footpads,” added the shorter one, with the rusty beard.

“The captain came home from sea unexpectedly,” broke in the widow’s daughter, with a meaningful look.

“—and found the accident,” interjected the shorter sailor. I scarcely heard them, my heart was pounding so. It was all clear to me. This was the terrible punishment for my forwardness and wickedness in daring to paint when I should have been serving my husband better. Now he was dead and we were ruined, all because of me and my selfishness. Who would look after us? Who would help the baby? He might have loved me, if the baby were a son. Now there was nothing. No hope. Tremors went up and down my body, and I felt faint.

“Now look what you’ve done, and her expecting!” I could hear Nan accusing the sailors. “You’ve killed her with shock!” The first convulsion threw me at the feet of the corpse, and set the women in the room wailing. I felt heavy hands holding me down, and heard the widow giving orders, “Not there, here—do you want to kill the child as well?” As the seizure passed, the widow, who was kneeling by my side, rolled her eyes heavenward and proclaimed, “Oh, the sorrow! Only a widow can understand another widow’s grief!” Groggy as I was, I knew perfectly well that she was savoring the moment with that special pleasure that elderly people get from disasters. “What can a
man
know of women’s suffering!” she announced triumphantly. I could hear embarrassed mumbling from the sailors, who backed toward the door, only to find it had been barred by Nan.

“Just see what your captain has done!” she said. “Do you know what great patrons Master Dallet has? He has painted our old King Harry the Seventh himself, and the new King Harry that is, when he was prince, and many other gentlepersons. Your master will never outlive the scandal of delivering his poor murdered corpse to his pregnant wife and killing her.”

“He had a right—” grumbled the short sailor.

“Nan—Nan,” I whispered, “I felt something. I think the baby’s coming.” Nan didn’t hear me, but the widow, who could hear a secret through three walls, did.

“Murdering a poor, innocent widow
and
her orphan child—” the widow added, “a scandal to the heavens. All of London will hear. Your master will never escape the justice of God and man,” she announced righteously, pointing her finger melodramatically to the heavens. The sailors’ eyes darted from side to side. There was no escape through the barricade of women.