The Serpent Garden - Judith Merkle Riley (3 page)

“Yes, he did,” I said, “and he tells me it is her to the life.”

“We wish to purchase the master drawing,” said the first Frenchman.

“My husband never sells his drawings,” I said, firmly. A painter’s portrait drawings are his stock-in-trade. Suppose the sitter wants a copy for her aunt in Yorkshire? She certainly has no intention of sitting again and may well have shipped off the first portrait to some admirer. So to make the copy, the painter returns to the drawing he made at the sitting, where he has written in all the colors. My father said that in France, where all the gentle families like to have portrait books composed of faces they admire, other artists pay to copy the drawings, but it is just our bad luck that isn’t the fashion in England.

“We are prepared to pay handsomely. Surely a woman as young and charming as you would like to set herself off with a gold necklace, or some pearl eardrops.” His voice was warm and oozing, like syrup. Ha. Liar. Did he think he was seducing some housemaid? Did he think I was so silly I knew nothing of the value of the drawing? Now I was just boiling, and I could feel my face getting hot, which I could tell those Frenchmen took for modest blushing, because of their shameless leering.

“New jewelry is exactly what my husband would notice first. Do you want him to think I have a lover?” But when a Frenchman opens his mouth, the Devil listens. Who else could have put the idea in my mind that I had at that very moment? The thought of it just plain took my breath away. It was a large idea, a splendid idea, a lie of most grandly sinful proportions; I’d spare the drawing and take my payment in good English cash. Master Dallet would never know.

“My husband would never give up the drawing, but why not commission another painting?” I asked, just as calm as could be, as if the Devil weren’t prompting me.

“It would take too long,” answered the tall one, “and we must send it by—” The short one stopped him.

“A copy in miniature could be delivered by tomorrow evening,” I answered. “My husband’s fee is three pounds.” They looked at each other, shocked by the price. Really, I thought to myself, it would dishonor my husband, who only portrays persons of rank, to ask for less.

“Three pounds?” asked the tall Frenchman, rolling a sarcastic eye at me.

“My husband is a Master of the Guild of Painter-Stainers. No one excels him in fineness of work. If you doubt me, go elsewhere and seek another painter. When you see how poorly the work is done, then return here.” Nan sucked in her breath at my daring. But I could feel something inside me just like a wild beast stirring, and my boldness just grew and grew because when you let bad seeds that are wrong ideas in you they just grow like those weeds and tares you hear about in church and smother out all the good intentions. The Frenchman looked taken aback, and triumph thrilled through my veins.

“You are sure it could be done?”

“Absolutely,” I answered, avoiding Nan’s shocked stare.

“We will refuse the miniature if it is not an exact copy of her features,” said the shorter man.

“My husband’s work is the finest in England,” I answered, as they departed, grumbling.

“What on earth possessed you to make a promise like that?” Nan’s face was horrified. “You know the master won’t be home, and if he is, he’ll be in no condition to paint. And a
miniature
, you careless, thoughtless thing! His hands shake when he’s been drinking, and he’ll have a headache and a foul temper! He’ll be furious when he finds out what you’ve promised. You’ve ruined his reputation, all with your foolish tongue!”

“I know how to put those three pounds to most virtuous use, Nan. Besides, I need to have that money. I have it all thought out. This way I save my husband from cares and worries exactly the way a thoughtful wife should always do and anticipate his needs and comforts. He won’t even be home until after it’s done, and we’ll have firewood and sausages and linen bands and a cradle for the baby without his ever having troubled the burdens of his mind.” Nan looked at me stupefied.

“What are you saying? Susanna, I see your brain turning like a windmill again. Oh, this is trouble. I should never have let you put your head out into the rain.”

“Have you forgotten that I am Cornelius Maarten’s daughter? Remember my Ascension? Remember my Salvator Mundi, that could be fit in the palm of a man’s hand? Even Father’s friends marveled. I have the same hands as when I was a maid. Look at them! Have they become stupid from scrubbing floors?” I held out my hands. My fingers were all swollen up with pregnancy, and the narrow wedding band cut deep. One palm was all stained with color, and there was blue dye beneath my short-cut fingernails.

Nan pushed a loose strand of gray hair up beneath her cap. All the wrinkles in her face twisted up with worry.

“Wouldn’t you like to help your brother?” I said slyly, with the Devil prompting me. “You know Master Dallet said he would help your brother if he could. It would be just as if he did it.”

“But suppose he discovers—?”

“It’s really not a bit deceptive, you see. After all, for a whole year now I’ve burnished his parchments, ground his colors, and even painted in draperies and the embroidery on sleeves. Why, that’s practically a whole painting in itself, except for the faces which are what makes it a painting by the famous Rowland Dallet and worth so much. The only difference is that this time, we’ll have the money direct in our hands to use the way Master Dallet would have wanted if he’d thought of it. These foreigners will just take it away with them and no one will be the wiser, even him.”

“But I promised your parents—”

“Oh, that promise! You’re always throwing it up to me! Didn’t Master Dallet promise to keep me when my parents arranged my marriage? I’m beginning to come to the conclusion that he deceived them, Nan.”

“Oh!” she said, shocked, and crossed herself. “You must never speak ill of the dead. Your mother was a saint. Your father was a man of perfect judgment, perfect! But when a Master of the Guild so condescended to study with him, a foreigner, what could he think but that it was all for love of you? Ah, lord, he was so certain it meant a golden future for you that he couldn’t see anything but good in the man.”

But painting was in my bones, in my hands, in my eyes. My brain was humming with the plan of the picture, the way I’d lay out the palette. I wanted it again in my hands, the mother of pearl shining beneath my colors, all arranged just so. I wanted the tiny neat brushes, which we limners call pencils, arrayed on the worktable, I wanted to see the shine of color as I first laid it across the tinted ground of the parchment. I looked at his mending, there in the basket by the fire. Suddenly, without knowing why, I hated it. I hated the wrinkles his living had made in it, I hated the smell of his body on it. I grabbed the basket from the bench and upended it into the fire, ugly brown stocking and all, and then stormed into his studio. The gray light of early spring was already failing, but I spread my arms wide, as if I could catch all the light in the world in them. “I’ll have
this
,” I said, “and may the Devil fly away with you, Master Rowland Dallet.” Behind me I could hear Nan scrabbling to rescue that ugly stocking from the fire. My ears were deaf to her agonized wail:

“But I promised your mother to keep you out of
trouble
!”

As I mixed the glue and cut the parchment to prepare the base for the next morning’s work, I hummed to myself, “Three pounds, three
pounds
and we shall be
rich
. The froggies will take it
away
and no one will be the wiser.” Like that man in the Bible who is so busy counting his granaries or whatever it was that he forgets to repent of his sin and so comes to no good end by being forgetful, I never even stopped to ask myself what two mysterious French gentlemen, who didn’t even give their names, wanted with a miniature of the king’s sister.

Three

I
T
was gray dusk. Inside the Green Gate Tavern, they were lighting the rushlights, and the last passers-by could hear drunken singing coming through closed shutters. A man with a gray hood pulled closely around his face hurried past the tavern and on up Lime Street through the melting heaps of dirty snow. Reaching the edge of the city, he stopped before a tall, narrow house crowded in among the crumbling tenements that stood beneath the walls. He looked at the door. Yes, there was a niche above it with an imp carved in stone. It must be the place. But suddenly he could go no farther, his way barred by a beggar who stood barefoot in the slushy mud on the doorstep. The man took in at a glance the beggar’s long, patched homespun cloak and pallid face. Behind the intruder, the monkey’s-face door knocker gleamed invitingly on the front door of Sebastian Crouch’s house.

“Out of my way, fellow. You hinder me,” said the man.

“Stay a minute, Master Goldsmith,” said the beggar. “Give me a coin and ask for God’s blessing.” Brazenly, he barred Master Jonas’s way.

“Who are you to delay me? I say, make way,” said Master Jonas, the goldsmith.

“Go home and finish the bishop’s casting,” said the beggar. His face was hidden in the shadow of the house’s overhanging upper story.

“What business is it of yours? I am meeting someone here. Again, I say, get out of my way.” The goldsmith’s mind was full of riches and impatient with desire.

“If you go inside, I will abandon you,” said the beggar. He was slender and pale. The goldsmith looked down at the strong, white bare feet in the freezing mud.

“Abandon me? Go right ahead, you sturdy, worthless fellow. You should be working for a living, not threatening decent folk in the street.”

“Working? Do you think the cunning of your hand comes from you alone? Haven’t you seen me standing by your furnace? Haven’t you felt my hand guide yours as you poured the metal into the mold? Are you so thankless that still you want to pass through this door?”

“I do indeed, sirrah. I have business with an important man. Get out of my way.”

“Very well,” said the beggar as he stood away from the door. “I will go from you. There are others who need me more.” Relieved, Jonas the Goldsmith pushed his way past the beggar and rapped three times with the monkey’s-head door knocker. An elderly servant appeared and ushered the goldsmith into the paneled, oak-beamed hall. Outside, the beggar gazed at the locked door for a moment, then threw off the old cloak and followed them, pushing through the half-timbered wall beside the door as if it were no more solid than smoke. An old woman closing her shutters across the street saw the hem of a rich gown and the tips of a pair of tall, iridescent wings pass into the solid wall and thought she had gone mad.

Several men, Crouch’s business partners in this newest venture, were already seated by the fire. Crouch himself presided over all from a cushioned, barrel-backed chair, his feet propped up on a little stool carved like a lying dog, his arms waving confidently as he explained some point of the project at hand.

“Ah, and here is Master Jonas at last. Our company is complete,” he announced, as the goldsmith took a seat on the bench by the fire and stripped off his mittens to warm his hands. The fire irons, he noticed, were very curious in form, cast in the shape of two immense, black salamanders, their eyes formed by holes that let the orange flames wink and spark through them. It could only be that their owner was a powerful occultist. “You have seen the drawing, Master Jonas. How soon might it be cast?”

“The question is not how soon, but how much. It will take nearly a pound of gold to make it; a fortune, not even counting the silver and other precious metals.”

Crouch turned to address a man in the heavy, Italian gown of a Lombard banker. “You can provide that much?” The man, dark bearded and somber, nodded gravely, yes.

“The thing, what is it? Not a goblet, surely, the upper bowl is too flat. And as for the burnishing, it will cast a strange reflection at the face of the drinker.”

“Ah, Master Jonas, not the drinker, the seer. You are now one of our company, and worthy of our confidence. What you will cast is not a mere goblet, but the fabled Mirror of Diocletian, by which this mighty emperor was able to see revealed in its surface all plots and cabals against him, even though they be planned in the depths of the earth or the farthest reaches of the sea. The formula, until now, has been lost to the ages: gold and silver, mingled in exact proportion with certain parts of a black goat and the blood of a virgin.” Crouch’s eyes lit up, and he rolled these last words on his tongue. “It must be cast with certain—ah—enchantments. Happily, through my knowledge of antiquities, I have discovered the formula anew, concealed in a box of secrets and prophecies guarded by the most puissant demon Belphagor, whose guardian power I overcame with the most terrible commandments of the mighty Honorius. Now I have gathered these gentlemen into my enterprise; this is but the first of the wonders we shall create. We shall command the wealth of princes. We shall see across the world at a glance. We shall fly like eagles. Do you begin to comprehend now the meaning of our oath?”

The somber men about the fire nodded, and Jonas was suddenly seized with terror. What was he, a tradesman, doing in the company of such great gentlemen? If he did this work, he would know too much. What would happen to him? Ah, God, even the beggar at the door knew he should not have entered. But then he thought of the fortune that might await him, his debts, and how with cleverness, he might extricate himself to his advantage….

Invisible on the smoke-blackened rafters above the conspiratorial company, three figures, two barefoot infants with shining eyes and the pale, tousle-headed beggar in the luminous gown, were sitting and listening. Their iridescent wings were neatly folded, and they dangled their toes almost directly over Crouch’s head, peering down at the company the way boys who are fishing peer into a shadowy pool to see where the biggest fish is hiding.

“Well, well. So Belphagor’s out at last,” said the beggar.

“Aren’t you going to tell on him?” asked one of the children.

“Who’s Belphagor? Pooh! A second-rate demon at best. I haven’t time to think about him just now. I’m planning to do that ungrateful goldsmith one last favor.”

“What’s that?” cried the little creatures, their wings vibrating with excitement.

“I’m going to put my finger on his balance when he weighs out the ingredients; then the mirror won’t work properly, and they’ll all blame one another, instead of killing him to preserve the secret, which he now understands is exactly their intention.”

“Oh, clever, clever! What will the mirror show?”

“Why, their own thoughts right back at themselves. Everything they already think, they’ll see and take it for a prophecy. Conceited braggarts. It will do them good,” pronounced the beggar with a sniff.

“Then will you tell about Belphagor?”

“We-ell, when I’m done. I think I’ll follow the old demon and see what he’s up to, first. I need to pay him back for a little trick he played on me back before the Templars stuffed him in that box, and I don’t want my fun spoiled. There’s time enough to go reporting things to the archangels later.” With that, all three of them rose through the ceiling. The men at the fire thought the gusts of air from their beating wings had come down through the chimney.

“By God, Bridget, you grow more beautiful daily!” exclaimed Rowland Dallet, leaning back in his chair and setting his wine cup back among the laden dishes. Mistress Pickering had ordered a nice little supper of chicken cooked with saffron and opened a bottle of Spanish wine for the painter’s pleasure. She ordered little Master Pickering, whose round, dark head and large brown eyes had more than a passing resemblance to the painter’s, carried off to bed by the nursemaid. Master Dallet had amused the baby and his mother both with his rapid drawings of the bearbaiting he had attended with several gentlemen the previous week. Then she had played the virginals and he had sung in a mellow baritone about the faithlessness of women. Now he returned his attention wholly to the mother of the recently removed infant and to the food on the little candlelit table by the bed. The amplitude of Master Dallet’s stomach was already beginning to bear witness to his passion for the table. In time this passion might undermine his dark good looks, and thus his pursuit of other passions, but for now all his passions, as it were, carried equal weight.

“You have no idea what I go through. No man can abide a clinging woman. Whereas
you
are far too lovely to ever cling,” he opined, setting down a gnawed leg bone and delicately wiping his fingers. Mistress Pickering loosed her long, black hair, smooth as silk, shaking her head to spread it over her half-bare shoulders like a dark cloak. She half smiled in answer. “Glorious,” enthused the painter, admiring the shining blue lights in the flowing dark mass. “You are perfection. Your hair. Your lovely little waist. I want to paint every inch of that delicious skin of yours. Would you prefer to be Venus, rising from the sea foam, or perhaps Delilah the temptress, reclining on a lion?” He held up his hands together, the thumb and fingers forming a hollow square, like a picture frame, to surround the imaginary scene.

“The temptress,” answered Bridget Pickering, looking up at him through her long, dark lashes with adoring eyes. It was a bit tricky for her to accomplish this, her most effective little gesture, since she was three inches taller than the painter. But height in a lover was never her first concern. In those proportions that mattered most to her, she had found the painter a perfect specimen. And when you added to this a flattering tongue, a pleasant and frequent offering of gifts, and a random schedule of work that allowed for convenient trysting, it was small wonder that Rowland Dallet was her favorite, if not exclusive, way to beguile the time while her husband was away at sea. She thought, for a brief moment, that she had lost him when he married, but soon enough the
Magdalen
had left port and the painter had arrived once more at her door, not the least chagrined.

“Naughty man,” she had said, “what makes you think I will have you back?”

“My damned fine equipment, madame, and your randy eye. Surely you didn’t think you could be outmatched by a shaggy little Flemish cow, did you?” And since he had brought her a perfectly stunning bracelet, she’d taken him back in a flash.

“Tell me, how’s that virtuous little wife?” she asked, glancing slyly at him as she unpinned her sleeves.

“Fatter than ever. Her face puffs like a bladder. She bleats after me like a sheep. ‘When will you be back? Can’t you fetch me some oranges? I’m wanting some so.’ She irritates me. She positively drives me off. She should study your ways if she wants to be attractive.” Mistress Pickering smiled a little, as if she thought any imitation of her to be impossible. Rowland Dallet shrugged a little as if to say, Well, I suppose you’re right, and then went on. “Ever since her parents died she’s been more of a useless lump than ever.” Dallet was seated on the bed now, undoing the points that kept his codpiece and hose snugly fastened together.

“Mmmm,” responded Mistress Pickering, “did they leave you anything?”

“Twenty pounds and some ugly foreign furniture, plus a cross-tempered old servant-woman who came with the lot. Oh yes, some cooking pots and a Turkish carpet they brought over the water with them. I suppose I could sell the wretched stuff.”

“I’ve always wanted a Turkish carpet. Is it big?”

“Little. They put it on the table. So now I have a fat Flemish wife, fat Flemish furniture, and a carpet on my table. And all for success in my trade. A devil’s bargain. The world in return for marriage to a dowdy woman. Pity me, O goddess.”

She sat down beside him on the bed, reached behind her, and unlaced her bodice. As he saw it loosen, he plunged his hand down it, while with the other he pressed her backward. As she felt his weight on her, her mind soared. It was a special kind of triumph, to lead a newly wedded man by the nose like a prize bull. And married to a younger woman than herself. What a fool that woman was to think that a worldly man like Rowland Dallet would be interested in her for any other reason than advancing his trade. She enjoyed imagining the look on the silly sheep’s face if she could somehow magically see him there, and see her victorious.

Once, just after the wedding, she’d seen the girl leaving Saint Paul’s, on Rowland Dallet’s arm. Now Bridget Pickering was envisioning in her mind the plump, almost childish little figure she had seen. What a fool: pink cheeked, round faced, with simple blue eyes, a spattering of ridiculous freckles across a tip-tilted nose, and gingery, unruly hair that crept from beneath her matron’s headdress. I’ve won, she said to the image. The girl’s freckled face vanished, and he was in her. The sweet sensation flowed through them both. The warm sweat mingled on their bodies, and his breath was coming in fast, broken gasps when there was the fierce crash of the bedroom door flung back suddenly. There was the heavy sound of men’s boots and the howling of women in an outer corridor.