Breath and Bones (37 page)

At or near the mines you will find the mountain air exhilarating enough to persuade you [ . . . ] to make a prolonged stay
.

C
HARLES
N
ORDHOFF
,
C
ALIFORNIA
: F
OR
H
EALTH
, P
LEASURE, AND
R
ESIDENCE

Famke shivered, waiting before a strange door until at last a maid might open it. Beveled glass panes had been set like diamonds in white iron filigree, and the air in front of it glimmered dizzyingly with refracted light. In fact the whole house struck her as peculiar, made entirely of glass and iron and steel, with so many domes and minarets that it looked like something Albert would paint in one of his fantasies rather than the residence that a helpful shopkeeper down the mountain had assured her it was. Even stranger, there was a little white palace, or possibly a church, off to one side of the building, and a strange animal clamor in the forest beyond. Famke put one hand against the jamb and was surprised to feel it was warm, for although there was no snow in these mountains as yet, the day promised a frost. She hoped someone inside would offer her a cup of hot tea.

The knob turned, and the door swung open. Famke jumped back. The girl who stood confronting her now was slender and small, and she had the smoothest skin and narrowest eyes Famke had ever seen. Wearing a strange sort of short gray dress over wide gray trousers, the girl clutched the knob in one doll-sized hand, wobbled on feet no larger than Famke's fist, and asked, “How you come in?”

It took a moment for Famke to make sense of the question, and in that time she coughed deeply and dirtied one of the cheap handkerchiefs she had bought in the Phoenix station. “I came on the stage.” She could manage only short sentences. “From Harmsway. I walked from the village and climbed the fence. I am here”—she had to pause and soil another corner of the handkerchief—“for the painting.”

“Pain-thing?” The girl's porcelain face wrinkled in puzzlement, though Famke thought she was shamming or perhaps making a joke. The face remained a smooth mask.

Famke leaned forward a bit and peered into the foyer, which was if anything brighter than the sunshine outside. Walking up the graveled drive, she had thought the house was painted green; but now she saw that the impression came from a profusion of plant life inside—palm trees and vines with complicated flowers—especially striking since what grew on the hillside had turned mostly brown and gold for the winter. This did not look like a house that would hold a large painting, and Famke saw no evidence of one in the foyer.

All the way across the west and into California—Albuquerque, Deming, Benson, Fort Yuma; up to San Bernardino, down to San Luis Rey, the slow ride on the eastern spur to Harmsway—the wheels of the train had spun out one name:
Hygeia Springs. Hygeia Springs
. The stagecoach wheels had jolted the name into her bones. Now at last she stood on the doorstep of Ed Versles, the man who essentially owned the town, the man whose father had founded it and built this otherworldly palace in which to live. She would not accept defeat here.

“There is a painting and a painter inside,” she said stubbornly. “I am here to see them.”

The girl—was she mistress? housekeeper? someone's wife?—pointed back the way Famke had come. “Patient in town. Hospital.” She drew out the
s
sound:
hossssssspital
.

“Yes, it was bought for a hospital, but it was delivered here. Several people told me—”

Now a second woman joined the first, dressed just like her in a gray tunic and wide pants but, if anything, even lovelier in the face. “No visitor,” she said firmly, and she shut the door.

Famke had to wait a long, long time for the master to come home. She sat by the graveled drive on the hillside, out of the maids' sight, and wrapped herself as warmly as she could in Mag's silk dress and wool coat. She wouldn't have thought California could be so cold and damp . . . She wondered where she would sleep tonight, for she was nearly out of Harry Noble's money, and there were no flophouses for ladies who dressed in silk. She told herself not to think about it, to trust in Albert instead. She had almost found him—she felt it in her bones, in a pricking there, and in her chest, where the worms seemed to be chasing the old glass splinters around and gobbling them hungrily.

After some time, fatigue got the better of Famke, and she entered a dreamlike state in which she thought she saw impossible things around her. She watched a family of deer no bigger than dogs as they picked their way delicately across the yellow grass; when they noticed her, they startled and showed long gleaming fangs—tusks, rather—then streamed for the naked trees nearby. From somewhere among those trees came a loud but muffled roar as of some wild beast. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them she saw, in the distance downhill, a strange little horse covered in bold black and white stripes. It tore hungrily at the grass before making copious water upon it. When she looked again, the horse was gone.

The sun was low and red in the sky before she heard hooves crunching on the gravel drive and knew the elusive owner had come. She pushed herself off the ground with some difficulty and shook out her skirts, telling herself that surely a man who loved a painting enough to pay a hundred dollars a foot for it would be glad to meet its subject and help reunite her with the artist.

In the fading light, it was hard to make out anything but the vague dark shape of a rider and horse fused together, like the mythological men-horses Albert had occasionally sketched. They stopped in front of her without any sound beyond the hoofsteps and a final
chuff
of the horse's breath.

Famke was too tired to be anything but blunt. “I am here about your painting,” she announced without preamble. “The one you bought for your hospital. I am the model.”

The man was silent a long time, until Famke became almost afraid. The horse danced nervously beneath him, but she held her ground.

“You have made a mistake,” he said at last.

“This is no mistake.” She drew herself up as tall as she could, despite the stiffness in her limbs. “I am the model for Nimue—for Vivien—and I am looking for the painter. He is my brother.” She felt the sun's last warmth on her face, and she pulled off Mag's hat and let the red light blaze in her hair. She held her shoulders back and her chin up, just like Nimue's, but nevertheless she heard the man say,

“My picture does not look like you.”

The blood drained from Famke's head. Her ears buzzed, and she knew she might faint. In desperation, she admitted, “My—looks may have somewhat changed in the last year.”

The black figure glanced up toward his house, the glass panes of which were making it into a giant lamp, magnifying the light inside and casting a net of illumination over the trees and grass that surrounded it. She saw the outline of a long, straight nose and rather full lips.

When he spoke he seemed to voice the words that came first to his mind. “The figure in the painting has yellow hair and a Grecian nose. She is nothing like you. And I don't know where your brother is, either,” he added as an afterthought.

Famke coughed a little but didn't need a handkerchief. Unconsciously, her hand groped for the man's stirrup. “May I see it?” she asked. “I have come so far . . .”

“But it is not a remarkable picture,” he said.

Famke's hand dropped. This was almost the worst thing he could have told her.

He explained, “An agent bought it for me at auction, and I don't much like it. It shows no sense for nuance.”

Famke thought of the hours in the Nyhavn studio, how they had stretched into weeks and months as Albert painted each little square with his hair-thin brush. She said, miserably and by reflex, “If you want the picture changed, I can do it. For a reasonable fee.”

“Still,” the dark man concluded, as if he had not heard her, “I suppose there is no harm in letting you look.” With a sudden gesture of gallantry, he climbed down from the horse and offered his arm to Famke.

As Famke ascended the hill for the second time that day, she was aware that her host was adjusting his gait to hers, that he walked slowly and restrained the impatient horse in order to accommodate her. She was grateful, however, that he did not expect her to make conversation; she didn't have the strength to offer an excuse for her lethargy, to mention the altitude or her long journey and guide his attention away from that troublesome cough that punctuated every third step or so.

For his part, Edouard Versailles was glad that the woman did not require him to speak, either. He was not accustomed to genteel female company, or indeed to company of any sort; it made him nervous, and he hoped that the stranger could not tell that his arm trembled as it supported her, that his feet stumbled even as he guided her steps. He was wretchedly aware that what he'd said to her had sounded rude, and yet he could not think how he might have expressed himself any better.

It had been a long day in “Hygiene”—so called locally because the inhabitants had butchered the name Hygeia Springs much as they had done his own. This trip down the mountain had been a necessary exception to Edouard's usual rules of solitude and silence, and it had exhausted him. In fact, he had begun to wonder if perhaps he had been rash in founding this hospital—but then again, to reserve the secrets of his cure to himself would have been avaricious. Thus he had resolved to keep private only the house and the grounds with their menagerie, and he had made these bounds clear to his servants, who had always been so obedient in the past.

He would, of course, ask them how this red-haired wraith had managed to enter his sanctuary; and yet he could not even find the words to pose her the same question, let alone to send her away. He could scarcely admit to himself that he was eager to let her inside, to see how she looked in the light, to put a visual diagnosis to her pronounced chest-rattle.

This desire to look at another person was unusual; Edouard Versailles rarely even saw his servants, the men he'd saved from slavery on the railroads, the girls he'd rescued from the dreadful cribs of prostitution in San Francisco's Chinatown. He valued them all precisely for their ability to make themselves invisible. So when he tied the horse to its hitching post, he knew a ghostly groom would lead it to the stable; and as he came up the steps with this mysterious woman, the front door swung open silently. He stepped into an empty foyer, just as he wished. The butler, Wong, was
standing behind the door, ready to close it and collect his hat and coat from the hall table; but Edouard did not think of Wong any more than he thought of the palm trees and passion vines, the faded sofas and cracked sideboards, or even the maids Precious Flower, Ancient Jade, and Life's Importance, as he followed the trail of gas globes they'd lit in the hallway and entered the one room large enough for the painting he was so reluctantly housing. His office, the most private room of all, where the linen-swathed canvas was propped against two palms so tall that the fronds brushed the filigree iron ceiling.

The strange woman followed him in. She looked even thinner in the light; but that light also emphasized her ethereal quality. Her skin was bone white, her cheeks blood red, her hair a startling dark orange. As she advanced through the potted palms and jasmine vines, she seemed to shimmer, and her image was reflected in the night-darkened walls all around. One or two spectral visitors followed where the fleshly one went.

Tongue-tied, Edouard followed her over to the swathed painting. She put one spidery hand on the drape and plucked feebly; so, feeling he could do nothing else, Edouard pulled the thing free. He remembered, then, the social delicacies of introductions and offers to take a visitor's coat and give her a seat, but it felt too late for them.

Famke was thinking neither of him nor of etiquette, and if he had taken her coat she would have protested, for she was still grave-cold. She stared at the revealed picture and saw that he was right: This painting was not of her.

The composition bore some similarity to
The Revenge of Nimue
; there was a tall woman with her arms splayed, gesturing at a vast cave of reddened ice in which the traces of frozen flowers could be seen. But the face, the form, the character of the model were unfamiliar, and there was no evidence of Famke anywhere. As she searched, she realized this was in fact the picture she'd seen reproduced in
Frank Leslie's
. The whole picture began to swim. She blinked, many times and rapidly, but she could not clear her vision. She put a hand to the glass to steady herself and asked, “Is there a castle made of the letters A and C in the lower right corner?” Edouard Versailles confirmed that there was.

That at least was something.

“The goddess Hygeia,” Versailles explained, trying to pretend he could
not see her crying. “Thawing the winter of ill health, freeing the afflicted from their suffering. It is to hang in the entry of the hospital I am building in the village.” He paused to chide himself mentally: Of course she knew about the hospital already; that was why she'd come here. His hand crept to his woven watch fob and worried away at it. “I have a programme in mind for a general cure of the diseases that afflict the lungs. I cured myself,” he ended, weak where he had intended to sound forceful.