The Serpent Garden - Judith Merkle Riley
Contents
In memory of the life and work
of
Anne Trudeau
Acknowledgments
With special thanks to my daughter, Elizabeth Riley, for her thoughtful and insightful review of the manuscript in several stages of production, as well as to my editor, Pam Dorman, for her acute observations and perceptive comments. I would also like to thank Carolyn Carlson for her careful and thoughtful editorial work. I am grateful as well for the support and encouragement of my agent, Jean Naggar, and my family. And to those outposts and guardians of civilization, our libraries, my appreciation and gratitude now and always.
The First Portrait
Flemish School. ca. 1490–1510.
The Wedding at Cana.
13½ × 12½
”.
Unfinished pen-and-wash drawing. Private collection.
This unattributed drawing in the Flemish style appears to be the work of a follower of Van der Weyden. Note the derivative composition (see plate 32,
The Wedding Supper)
and the incomplete understanding of human anatomy, especially in the depiction of the lower limbs of the central figures.
—P. Michaels.
F
LEMISH
D
RAWINGS OF THE
R
ENAISSANCE
I
t
WAS IN THE YEAR
1514
THAT FATE AND MY SINS SENT ME INTO THE WORLD AND THENCE TO THE COURT OF THE
K
ING OF
F
RANCE, A VERY WOMB OF INTRIGUE FROM WHICH NO RESPECTABLE
E
NGLISH WIDOW SUCH AS
I
WAS MIGHT HOPE TO ESCAPE UNSCATHED.
Little steps lead to the pit, they say, and I must admit I was overfond of nice clothes and the better sort of wine, to say nothing of the great wickedness of making indelicate paintings for the sake of the handsome sound of money chinking in my purse on market day. They led me a long way, my sins, from a life of quiet if rather boring virtue studying drawing and the life of the Virgin in my father’s house to the worldly deviousness required of a limner to gentlefolk and paintrix to princes. Ah, that sounds grand, doesn’t it? Vanity, yes, that’s another sin of yours, Susanna, I say to myself. And that doesn’t even count the greater ones. Sloth. Shameless deception. And carnal love. But though I know I should repent, when I think on temptation and where it led me, I find it hard to be sorry.
But I am a painter and the daughter of painters, so I will begin the tale of my transgressions with this sketch that was meant to be for a wedding-portrait, but turned out to be the last drawing I did before I left my father’s house behind his coffin. He was a master artificer, my father, brought over the water by old King Henry to repaint the saints in his chapel at Sheen. Being Flemish, which means stubborn and contrary, he taught me his trade just as if he had never left the old country, instead of raising me to English female ways. In this first portrait, I never finished the bridegroom, who has no features but just a splash of wash to show the facial planes and a gown in the Flemish style. I intended to give him the features of my betrothed, Rowland Dallet, Master of the Painter-Stainers’ Guild of the City of London. I also intended to make the bride’s gown red with a blue underskirt in the finished painting besides putting my own features on her face, but she turned out colorless as well as featureless. And now that I look back on it, I think a stuffed Flemish gown would have done better than Master Dallet for a husband. But then, things would not have happened as they did.
One
I
N
the hour past midnight three bobbing lanterns could be seen making slow progress through a dug-up area where a new building was rising in the ruins of the Outer Temple. Two of the men with lanterns were carrying shovels. The third, tall and richly dressed, was guiding an old blind man holding a long, forked dowsing rod. They paused at a pit that revealed a section of the octagonal foundation wall of the ancient tower once called Le Bastelle.
“My lords, I feel the rod dip. There is precious metal there, beneath the earth.” Blind Barnabas, the dowser, hesitated.
“It must be down there, Sir Septimus,” said the swarthy young man in the leather doublet and muddy boots, “where they’re putting in the foundations for the new hall.” He held his lantern high to inspect the newly dug pit.
“Well, what are you waiting for, old man?” Ludlow the lawyer, heavily cloaked against the cold, peered over the edge.
“My lords, my payment,” the old man quavered. “You promised to take me home once I had found it.”
“As indeed we will, once it is dug up.” The voice of the blind man’s guide was suave. It was no ordinary treasure that could bring Sir Septimus Crouch, magistrate, antiquarian, and master of the conjuration of demons by the method of Honorius out beyond the safety of the City wall after dark. Here, beneath the ruins, lay one of the infernal’s most powerful demons of destruction, chained as guardian to a treasure chest by an ancient spell. And both of them soon to be mine, gloated Sir Septimus.
“It’s too cold for my old bones. The wind bites through me, standing here. Poor Barnabas has no hood.”
“You shall have a hat of rabbit fur after this night’s work, that I promise,” said Crouch.
“Oh, my lord, a thousand blessings on you. In truth, you are the greatest gentleman that ever lived…”
“Enough. Master Dallet, you and Master Ludlow descend and dig there, where the rod points. I’ll keep watch up here.” Ludlow, the lawyer, cast a bitter look at his patron’s face. Ruined and bought, he thought. I have sold my soul. And now I must labor beside this pretty tradesman. Look at him there, that painter, how he sweats, his eyes, how he hates Crouch. What brought him into the diabolist’s power?
Pallid and triumphant, seamed with the lines of old vice, Crouch’s face loomed above them. Cold green eyes were surmounted by eyebrows overgrown like twin thickets of poisonous weeds. His hair, dark mingled with silver, rose from his head in a smoky mockery of a halo. At the corners of his forehead, two broad, curling white streaks mingled with the dark, shining in the lantern light very like the curling horns of a ram, or perhaps a devil.
“Speed you, Master Dallet, and cease to regret your white hands there. What is beneath will repay your cares a thousandfold. Mistress, wife, tailor, and jeweler satisfied all at a blow. Whatever other venture could extend such promise?”
“Equal shares of everything, remember,” said Ludlow, finishing his descent into the pit to join the master painter.
“Three ways, I said, and so it shall be,” said Crouch, his voice smooth and reassuring. At the bottom of the pit, he could see only the feeble glimmer of two lanterns, and hear the crunch and clatter of metal digging dirt and stone. You, he thought down into the pit. Awake.
A trickle of life began to flow into the desiccated, captive thing below, and it drank greedily at the thin essence of avarice and hate seeping through the earth. Crouch could sense something dank and feel the presence of an alien mind, tentative and wispy, like the first stirrings of an evil thought. The hair rose on the back of his neck, and his spirit exulted.
“It’s solid here,” came Ludlow’s voice. “It’s a pavement.”
There is a ring beneath the black stone
. The thought came from the depths. Why, thought Sir Septimus, the thing is seeking me out. Excellent.
“Look for the ring beneath the black stone,” said Crouch aloud. Ah, my dark friend, he thought, soon you, too, will be my creature.
I am Belphagor the Mighty. I belong to no man.
Nonsense, thought Crouch. He fingered the amulet, engraved with cabalistic signs, once again. “
Onaim, perantes, rasonastos
,” he recited. The words encircled the thing in the chest below with a living, shimmering wall.
You bastard.
But of course. Did you think you were dealing with a fool? Crouch suddenly laughed aloud, so that the blind man started in fear.
Below in the pit, a heavy stone moved with a grating, scraping sound, and the scent of something old and rotted rose from the cavity it revealed. The circle of lantern light shone on a blackened lead coffer, sealed tight with some sort of ancient flux.
“It’s an alchemist’s seal,” said the artist, kneeling to inspect and touch the curious object. “The box is lead. This is no ordinary treasure.” There was a scrambling sound as the two men raised the box from the pit.
Master Dallet, kneeling in the mud, was working at the flux sealing the box with his knife. Suddenly there was a hissing sound, and the lantern flickered and was nearly extinguished in a sudden icy wind. “Who’s there?” cried the blind man with a start.
Food. I need food. I have slept too long
. Belphagor remembered that he had errands, but he had forgotten what they were. Something.
“Where’s the gold?” cried the lawyer, scrabbling in the decaying trash in the box, a handful of blackened coins, some old bundles wrapped in rotten silk.
Delicious
, thought Belphagor, as he sucked up the rage like hot wine. He was feeling stronger.
“This old cup is silver,” said Dallet, scratching the tarnish with his fingernail.
“Their sacramental chalice,” said Crouch, taking it from his hand. Crouch smiled as he ran a hand over the obscene figures chased beneath the cup’s brim.
Beware. He’s stealing it from you
. Greed and envy, with a tasty spice of hate, flowed toward him. How easy it was, even after centuries of sleep, to stir men to the evil passions on which he fed.
As clever as ever
, thought Belphagor.
I haven’t lost the touch
. The demon felt himself gaining substance, like a fine, acid mist. He stretched.
“That’s valuable!” cried the lawyer, rising to seize the cup. Taking advantage of the lawyer’s distraction, the painter had lifted a curious, decaying bundle from the box. The wrappings fell away to reveal the jeweled binding of an old book, its silky vellum almost undamaged by mildew.
Keep the book. It is what that old man wants most of all.
“You won’t cheat me of this, Sir Septimus,” said Rowland Dallet, clutching to him the strange old volume that had lain in the bottom of the chest. “You’ve taken the cup. I’m keeping the book.”
“Equal shares!” cried Ludlow.
“That book is mine! Give it here before you regret it!” As Crouch moved toward him, the painter stepped beyond his grasp. Above them, Belphagor sucked up the confusion and rage like a tonic, growing stronger even as he fed the quarrel. The faint outline of form—limbs, a head—began to be visible as a kind of rolling, boiling smoke. The shimmering wall began to flicker.
“Then have your fair share only, you pander!” cried the painter, and with his heavy knife he slashed through the faded gilding of the calfskin spine of the book, severing it into three pieces. Flinging two into the mud, he held the center portion close to his chest. “I, for one, keep my bargains, unlike you
gentlemen
.” The antiquarian’s face grew dark with hate.
“The book of mysteries is mine,” he said. “Mine by right.”
“Then purchase back our shares, if you want it so much. We agreed this time to divide all, and I swear, you’ll never cheat me again.” Knife in hand, the younger man backed away from his patron, picking up the lantern he had set on the ground.
Kill him
, urged the demon.
“I’ll kill you for this,” said Crouch, putting his hand on the Italian stiletto he always carried.
“Come near me and I’ll burn it,” cried Dallet, holding it near the lantern. As Crouch paused, horrified, the painter turned and fled into the night.
Lawyer and magistrate together watched the painter’s flickering light vanish into the dark. Suddenly the demon’s whisper, like a thought, came into Ludlow’s mind.
Why settle for just one share?
The lawyer’s brain began to hatch a plan. An anonymous letter, he thought. I’ll send it to the husband of the painter’s mistress. He’ll kill them both, and my hands will be clean. And the painter’s widow will know nothing of the fragment’s value. I’ll be able to buy it from her for a song.
Clever man
. The demon was beginning to be restored to his old, comfortable, original form, dankly smoky and drifting, swelled with the evil energies he had generated around himself. His lower limbs, furry and greenish, swelled against the shimmering circle that held him, blotting it out here and there.
“My lords, have you forgotten poor old Barnabas’s reward? Will you show me home now?” the blind man’s voice quavered.
“Your reward?” said Crouch, setting down his lantern and taking his knife from his belt. “Why, of course,” he said as he drove the stiletto directly into the old man’s heart. At the deed, Belphagor expanded with a burst of energy and the circle around him shattered. Too late Ludlow’s cry of horror warned Crouch. Looking skyward, the diabolist knight let out a howl of disappointment as he saw that Belphagor the demon had burst free.
Raging with frustration, the failed demon-master watched as a misshapen form rose higher into the night sky above him, blotting out a patch of stars from his view. The dark thing quivered and paused, as if trying to decide where to go. Then it began to drift toward the walls of the sleeping City, leaving behind only an echo of metallic laughter.