Breath and Bones (30 page)

The bigger canvas was hardly any trouble at all; Famke knew Ma Medlock cared little about it anymore. She splashed an aura around the transplanted Muse and tumbled into her borrowed bed with a feeling of a job done as well as her capabilities would allow.

Coughing a little, waiting for dreams, Famke thought that she had rescued something beautiful from the shambles of Ruby's life. The portrait would show very well at the funeral, and as for the painting of the Muses—no one would look closely enough to find a seam there, surely.

Once again, she was Albert's collaborator.

Although Sariah Goodhouse and her niece were clearly angry with Famke, Viggo could not complain of their welcome to him. They thought the Wanted poster a very good plan, and while they worked on it they let him sleep in the mud barn, like a hired man. He helped them by making much-needed repairs to the burned part of their house.

Impervious to flame as the mud walls seemed to him, apparently there was enough straw in their composition to smoulder like a big hot coal when the fire traveled from the silk hut to the owners' residence. Thus the east side of the house was nearly gone, and Myrtice had had to hang a couple of quilts over the holes in her walls. Viggo saw the lamplight shining through them at night, when he lay in the hayloft trying to sleep and she sat up, ill, or laboring over the drawing that was going to help him find Famke. They were like the stained-glass windows of wealthy Catholic churches he'd heard described at Immaculate Heart.

By a fortunate circumstance, Myrtice had spent two years in the reluctant study of art; it had been a required course at the normal school she'd attended in Georgia, which was also where she told Viggo she had met her husband, Sterling Black, and lost him.

“He was in cotton,” she said, avoiding Viggo's eyes. He got the sense that
she would prefer not to answer any more questions about her life before this stint in Utah. Probably questions were distressing to women in what Sariah and Myrtice referred to as a delicate condition.

And Myrtice was very delicate indeed; Viggo could see that. Her hands trembled and she perspired, even in this cool autumn weather, as he watched her labor over her ink sketches of Famke. She had a large photograph of Famke posing with the Goodhouse family—standing next to the patriarch, no less—and she kept it propped in front of her as she worked, carefully expanding the ill-defined pale face, enormous eyes, and strange topknot into a head-and-shoulders rendering that she and Sariah found representative. Myrtice was not very good at drawing; but then she said she did not consider the skill proper to the young Saints she taught, and she had not bothered to keep her hand in since returning to the house where she'd grown up. She tore up or crumpled most every sketch before it was finished.

Looking at the photograph from which Myrtice was working, Viggo felt himself pulled to Famke more intensely than ever. He now had three memories of her: the witch at the cauldron, the figurehead on the prow, and this plain, overexposed housemaid. That the last was so ugly and atypical made him the more eager to rescue her. He imagined her adrift somewhere on the vast prairies of the West, or tucked within the folds of a mountainside, probably suffering a loss of memory or a surfeit of shame. Myrtice Black's drawing would be of great help in finding her. Viggo would comb those prairies and hills, showing the posters around every town and nailing them up in prominent situations; surely somewhere someone would be able to tell him something about her.

He and Sariah and Myrtice agreed on the wording of the notice, to be typeset by the same printer who would copy the image:

WANTED

Information as to whereabouts of Ursula Summerfield,

formerly of Prophet City, Utah Terr
.

Hair red or black, eyes blue, build slender
.

REWARD

Respond to Heber Goodhouse of that town or to any officer

of the law in Deseret County
.

“It reads just right,” Myrtice said, looking over Sariah's shoulder at the document on Heber's desk.

“Might could bring that correspondent back, however,” Sariah said dubiously. “He turned up from Salt Lake not two hours after Brother Good-house left again to look for her,” she explained to Viggo, “a man calling himself Hermy Noble. He always did have an interest in your Ursula—risked another trip to the hoosegow, coming back here as he did. Of course we didn't tell him anything about her.”

Viggo did not understand much of that speech, beyond the fact that another man was looking for Famke. He felt a stab of jealousy. Perhaps this man was her artist, the man who had painted her . . . But there was some comfort to be derived from the idea that he hadn't found her yet, and Viggo had the cooperation of the family.

Myrtice twitched: A gas bubble had escaped. Politely pretending it was a cough, Viggo passed her his rough cotton handkerchief, and she dabbed her mouth with it. He felt the heat coming off her body as she smiled at him more warmly than the favor required.

Sariah was oblivious to what was happening in her background; she held the pen poised over the word
reward
. “I'm not sure we should include this,” she said. “Getting these posters printed will cost a small fortune as it is, and we don't have Brother Goodhouse's approval for a reward.”

“‘Reward' is a general enough term,” said Myrtice, tucking Viggo's handkerchief into her sleeve. “It might be the satisfaction of a job well done, of helping a lost soul come home.”

“Exactly right.” Satisfied now, Sariah laid down her pen, leaving a large spot on the blotter.

The traveler will notice that the names of the stations have assumed a Spanish form, and should he happen to address any of the swarthy men that chance to be lounging around the stations, he would very likely to [sic] receive a reply in the language of Hispania. The Spanish spoken is not Castilian by any means, but is about as near it as “pidgin English” is to genuine Chinese
.

S
TANLEY
W
OOD
,
O
VER THE
R
ANGE TO THE
G
OLDEN
G
ATE

She looks just like an angel,” Ma Medlock sobbed into a scrap of black lawn no less ethereal than the frock in which Famke had clothed the painted Ruby. “The angel she is now . . .”

The funeral was a splendid affair, as a good segment of Boulder's population came out to see Ruby off. The fair but frail and the grimy miners agreed: Ma's pride and joy had never looked better than she did nestled against the auroral satin of her coffin—unless it were in the glistening Heaven of her portrait. It was a shame to consign the one to the earth, but there was the other for consolation. The mourners gazed upon the picture after the burial, while tucking into the baked meats and fruit pies that Ma had commissioned and listening as the young professor played a hymn about the passage of time. Everyone allowed as it was a wonderful funeral.

In her grief and gratitude, Ma gave the artist an extra ten dollars, and Famke felt she had recovered much of what she'd lost in the hills of Colorado: She had the same financial stake with which she'd set out from Utah, something like the same hopes, and, she felt, a valuable new skill. She resisted the urge to return to Leadville to redeem the tinderbox, but rode instead to Denver with renewed purpose, which translated to more manly firmness in her step.

She did not let herself slide into feminine ways when once again she visited Amy Oggle's house. The paint was now dry upon those Muses, too, and by pressing the girls—almost all turned redheads—to search their memories,
she settled upon what seemed the most likely itinerary for Albert: through mining country and down to the land of the savages.

“You look different with your hair cut,” beautiful Jo said wistfully. She ran her fingers through it, almost as if Famke were a prospective customer.

Amy rubbed at a smudge on Famke's cheek. “Complexion's going the way of your hair, too. You need some Eau de la Jeunesse.”

“Glycerine, spermaceti, and almond nut cream,” Big Kitty translated.

“At a reasonable price,” Amy added, and Famke bought a small jar.

The madam said nothing of her feminine earning potential now, but she did permit Famke to take down Albert's picture and paint a few Muses' hair red, and gave her ten dollars for the afternoon's work.

For the next two months, Famke traveled: in train and wagon and on foot, going from salon to saloon to general store, to a nightly pallet in a flophouse where the men around her snored and gassed while she tossed and coughed. Lugging a carpetbag heavy with painter's supplies and Eau de la Jeunesse, with the keepsakes associated with Albert still swelling her secret pocket Down There, she headed first south and then west through Castle Rock, Greenland, Pueblo, Huerfano Station; circled through Hole in Prairie, Rocky Ford, Apishapa; swept through Alamosa, Tirrietta, Servillela. She sought Albert among miners of gold and silver and turquoise, ranchers of cattle and sheep, the Indians and Chinamen and Negroes who served them, and always, always the fair but frail.

Even if there was no direct news of Albert, there was usually word of some artwork. It seemed art had become the currency of the day, and everywhere a local bar or brothel was boasting about its new masterpiece—an oil over the piano, a watercolor in the washroom, a sculpture (but she wasn't interested in those) adding a note of gentility to the red plush salon where girls were auctioned off at so much the hour.

Wandering through those parlors, she studied each picture in depth. Most of them meant nothing to her, and she left before she could be charged for a drink. But when Albert's work was there, she recognized it immediately. She noticed he was painting many warrior women these days; they seemed to be a generally popular subject among the prostitutes who
wanted to think of brighter times, for every whore had a nice word to say about armor and swords. But Famke knew, also, that these subjects had always been dear to Albert's heart and brush, so she hunted until somewhere, in some curl of limb or smoke, she found a little castle formed of two letters.

Most significant of all, she felt, was that many of the women—all of the princesses—had red hair. Among the Amazons, she might find long red tresses flowing over one naked breast and into a brief set of armor, so obviously belonging to the Princess Calafia; and the queen of the Valkyries, the goddess Freya, draped the same coppery curls over a shadowy hero.

Albert remembered her. It was clear that he
could not
forget her. So even as she was shoved out of the salons for not hiring a girl, Famke felt a glow deep in her belly; no, deeper than that, down in her bones.

When there was a chance to make money with her new skill, Famke made it. She cut and repainted pictures to their owners' specifications, reflecting changes in taste and personnel; she did an even brisker trade by persuading madams to let her brush on a layer of varnish to seal the paint—a nicety that Albert had apparently felt too rushed to provide often. She undressed the nymphs and Muses, dyed the drab locks golden or red, painted her own blue eyes into the mysterious blurred faces that Albert had said could house the features of girls yet to come. She painted out freckles and brought certain popular figures to the foreground, relegating others to the shadows, and in the dim light of gas globes and oil lamps the seams were invisible.

These diverse gifts with artwork fascinated the girls: Dante Castle took something his older brother had made and thought perfect, and he made something more useful out of it. He so eclipsed his brother that no one noticed if he patchworked a Valkyrie over Albert's ingenious signature. Anyone would rather look at a pretty girl than a silly building anyway.

Once in a long while, Famke painted an articulate shadow around the sex of a girl near the back of the composition. The whores who giggled at the misted-over genitals, as Famke had once done, crowed when they saw this hint of real hair. In Mirage they banded together and presented her with a wreath woven of their own private locks.