Glamour in Glass (9 page)

“And it is such a relief, I cannot tell you. I studied French as a girl, but have fallen out of the habit of speaking it. I find I can still read, but understanding is very difficult.”

“Some of your difficulties are due to the dialect spoken here. You no doubt learned Parisian French and this has some Flemish mixed in with it.” Anne-Marie brushed her apron out and surveyed the rest of the room. The trunks stood empty with their contents bestowed neatly in the vitrines and armoires of the room. “I think you are in order now. I will send someone to remove the trunks shortly. What time shall I return to help you dress for dinner?”

“It does not take me long to prepare. Six o’clock?”

Anne-Marie paused, biting her lip, before saying, “I believe … Mme Chastain traditionally sets the table at two.”

“Oh.” The time at which dinner was served in England varied widely from country to town, so it should hardly surprise Jane to find that there was a significant difference across the Channel, and yet she rather had the impression that the move to later dinner times came from the Continent. “I thank you. In that case, half past one should suffice.”

Anne-Marie curtsied and asked for leave to depart, which Jane granted with some reluctance—not because she wished to keep the girl from her other duties, but because the opportunity to speak in her native language was already a relief.

At the door, Anne-Marie paused. “If it is not a presumption of me to make this offer, should you have any other questions or wish some help in understanding the local patois and customs, please do not hesitate to ask.”

“I would not wish to keep you from your other duties.”

“M. Chastain hired me for the purpose of attending to you and Mr. Vincent, because of my English. My other duties are light.”

Taken unawares by this thoughtful act from a man Jane had begun to consider lacking in feeling, she took a moment before she could reply. “Thank you. Or rather,
merci
. If you would be so kind as to help me practice my French, I would be most grateful.”

“Let me arrange for the trunks to be removed and then I will return, if you like.”

“Merci, oui.”

Anne-Marie smiled,
“Au revoir.”

She shut the door behind her, leaving Jane to ponder what could make a man so inconsiderate toward his own children and yet so kind to a stranger.

Six

Damask and Rainbows

The school that M. Chastain operated was beyond Jane’s imagining in scale and concept. Seven young men and two young ladies studied with him, learning far more than the basic elements of glamour the young ladies of England were required to know as part of the womanly arts. Aspects of glamour such as the principle of attemperate cooling, which Jane had struggled to acquire through books and experimentation, these fortunate few were learning the way another student might learn the catechism: as if it were a simple, solved, and knowable problem. Her imagination was excited by the possibilities, and she longed to have been a student there herself and to have gained some of the formal training of which she so often felt the lack when comparing her own skills to Vincent’s.

In what used to be a carriage maker’s showroom, the students each had their own working-place in which to practice and create glamurals. The two long walls of the building consisted of windows, one next to the other, and overhead, skylights afforded light enough to work late into the evening. One student, M. Archambault, had created a tableau
à la Chinoiserie
, which dripped with peonies and had a steaming dragon woven round a fountain. In sharp juxtaposition, an ice palace gave off a satisfactory chill to accompany the crystalline angles of its walls. Speaking in English for Jane’s comfort, M. Chastain discussed his goals of providing a solid base of knowledge so that his students did not have to spend their time discovering the very simplest of principles that most apprentices would learn from their masters. With this pool of knowledge, they would be able to spend their efforts innovating new glamours rather than reweaving worn threads.

It was so noble a goal that Jane again found herself doubting that anything untoward had happened when they arrived. Certainly she had seen no further signs of unrest. She began to wonder if her nerves had been overrun from the rigours of the journey.

“Enough of this, old man. You dragged me across the Channel to see your jacquard.” Vincent crossed his arms and lowered his chin as he did when he was displeased, but the corners of his eyes hinted at an incipient smile.

“Very well, vulture. Since you are swooping in to impose on me, I shall show you so you will leave me in peace.” Barely concealing his pride with this teasing, M. Chastain led them across the floor to the end of the building, where a simple glamour of an oak tree appeared to cast shade over the floor. Entirely fixed, it was rendered with correctness, but to Jane’s eye, it lacked a sense of life. He spun on his heel and gestured at the tree with an unambiguous expression of complacence. “Walk around it.”

Keeping her attention fixed in the physical plane so she could experience the tree as art before she experienced it as craft, Jane followed Vincent around it, first noting that she was mistaken about motion, for the tree swayed gently in an unseen breeze. A few steps ahead of her, Vincent’s breath huffed in a way she recognised as approbation, and a moment later, Jane understood why. What she had originally taken as movement was a transformation. As she continued around, the trunk shifted to become a dryad, and then the tree vanished entirely, leaving only a beautiful woman dressed in a short toga. None of the elements of the original tree were visible. Jane could no longer restrain her curiosity. She let her vision expand into the ether so she could see the threads of glamour that had been so deftly woven. The structure of the tree was visible in this light, but she could not yet tell how it had been arranged so that it was not revealed to the natural eye. Tracing one of the folds which created the pink glow of the woman’s skin, Jane resumed her walk around the tree, wishing for Vincent’s arm to steady her, as her sense of the physical world had been dampened. Moving with care, Jane followed the thread around until she found the twist which caused it to double back on itself. That twist was the marvel, for it had begun in green and now reflected only the pinks of the woman’s skin. A twist, though, seemed insufficient to explain what she was seeing, since the structure of the threads appeared altered by the process. Jane stopped walking and let her cognizance drop as deeply into the glamour as she could, standing riveted for some moments before she located the element she was missing. The thread did not simply twist; it was twisted around another thread coming from the opposite direction. One conveyed the information about the woman, the other the information about the tree, and, bound together, they both supported and masked each other. Only at the sides could one see both sets of folds at once, which accounted for the sense of movement as different proportions of the folds became apparent. “Remarkable.”

She let her cognizance return to the physical world, her breath coming a trifle quicker than the exertion merited, but entirely understandable given her excitement at the technique. Had the dryad merely been
behind
the tree with the spreading branches still visible, Jane would have thought nothing of the illusion, but to have it completely transform in this manner offered endless possibilities. “Truly, M. Chastain, this is wonderful. Yes, that is the right word, for I am full of wonder, not simply at the technique, but at the mind which created it. Am I correct that you are using complementary threads for—forgive me, I am not certain of terms—for the twisting in a double-weave?”

M. Chastain opened his mouth, then shut it again. Shaking his head, he snorted. “I had planned to next tell you how it was done, but I see that you have already discovered that.”

Vincent clapped M. Chastain on the shoulder and gestured to Jane. “Allow me to introduce my wife, who—”

“Who is as perceptive as you said she would be.” M. Chastain offered her a bow. “Forgive my astonishment. But I have several students who still cannot understand how this is done, and they have the benefit of having watched me develop the technique. I had begun to think I was clever.”

“Oh!” Jane flushed. She must be seen as importuning, to come in and immediately pick his technique apart. It was a terrible, rude thing to do, but she had been so taken with it she forgot herself. “But you
are
clever. Recall that you wrote to Vincent about your new technique. I should never have thought of this idea on my own. Your invention is more clever by half than merely recognising that which one has been told about. Indeed, I believe that you give M. Jacquard too much credit by naming it after him and it should instead be called a Chastain Damask.”

M. Chastain chuckled at this. “My students have said the same thing, but it seems immodest.”

“But more accurate, perhaps?” Vincent inclined his head in a bow to his friend.

M. Chastain waved that away, but Jane silently resolved to give credit to the creator by calling the technique a Chastain Damask. He leaned toward her husband with a devilish gleam in his eyes. “And do you also see what I have done, David?”

Her husband shook his head slowly, gaze dulling as he let his perception shift. “I see the twist to which Jane refers, but had not yet recognised the pattern of opposites.”

“The real challenge lies in finding an image which one can create from the pairs of opposing folds. I have yet to use it in a commissioned piece because it takes so much time to create, and clients rarely understand the intricacies or limits of glamour. I tell you, if I could ever find a way to create a glamour here and transport it, I should never leave Binché again. As it is, I must venture forth periodically and try to bring art to the uninformed savages.”

“My husband and I disagree on this point, but I have often felt that an educated audience is a more appreciative audience.”

“Appreciative, yes,” Vincent inclined his head. “But I want to transport them, and whether they understand the craft of my work has little effect on that. All I want or care about is to know if I have taken them outside themselves, even for the briefest of moments. The effort to achieve that is well worth-while, even if they never comprehend my ‘genius.’”

“Speaking of genius.” M. Chastain bowed to Vincent, “I would like to see this
Sphère Obscurcie
of which you have written. I understand the theory, but not the technique.”

Vincent returned Chastain’s bow, then created the
Sphère
so quickly that it almost seemed to appear by itself. Because Jane had seen him perform this glamour many times before, she knew that he had taken a fold of glamour and twisted in his hand so the light in the room twined around itself. He then blew the bubble up into gossamer thinness, until it surrounded him and caused him to vanish from sight. She guessed that he performed it so quickly as a means of showing off to his friend. Other forms of masking glamours involved weaving a recreation of the scene minus the elements one wished to hide. Part of the genius of Vincent’s technique was its simplicity and speed.

M. Chastain narrowed his eyes, stepped into the ball, and vanished. A moment later, Jane heard him say, “Again?”

Vincent dropped the folds and repeated the glamour, working slowly so that M. Chastain could follow his movements. On the third repetition, the Frenchman nodded. “I think I have it.”

He pulled a fold of glamour from the ether and twisted it. Jane winced, seeing that he spun it in the wrong direction, but when she opened her mouth to speak, Vincent caught her eye and gave a tiny shake of his head. The
Sphère
would be invisible from the exterior but would not let light pass through. She held her tongue as M. Chastain expanded the bubble. In a moment, he harrumphed and popped it. “That was unexpected.”

“Mirrored?”

“Yes. Most unpleasant to see oneself distorted upside down on a vast silver bubble. What did I do wrong?”

“Jane?” Vincent beckoned her to join them.

She hesitated, feeling as though she were intruding on a conversation of two colleagues. “You twisted the fold with the clock. It must go widdershins. If you do not twist at all, it is completely dark within.”

“Fascinating.” M. Chastain executed the glamour again, to perfection this time. “It only hides items which are completely within the
Sphère
, yes?”

“Correct.” Vincent tucked his hands behind his back, in his lecturing posture. “I used a gossamer weight of glamour, which flows around objects that intersect it, leaving them visible. Had I used a heavier weight, it would have penetrated those items and shown their interior.”

It was a clever solution, and Jane thought she could be justly proud of her husband for his invention.

“How did you come upon this, Vincent?”

“I was trying to find a way to record glamour at a distance and worked this out as an extension of that theory. You know how it goes.”

They talked in this manner for some time, until M. Chastain was called away by M. Archambault with a question about temperature reduction. Vincent elected to accompany him, though Jane tried to hint that perhaps they had taken up enough of their host’s time already. Excusing herself and hoping that Vincent would follow shortly, Jane made her way back to the main house.

Walking up the main stairs to their rooms, her mind was still half in the workshop, considering the ways in which she could improve on M. Chastain’s creation, while chiding herself for the arrogance which had prompted the notion. Lost in thought like this, she nearly stumbled over Miette, who sat quietly on the stairs in a beam of light. She held a small crystal from a chandelier and was casting rainbows on the walls.

A radiant smile on her face, she held the prism up and spoke so simply that Jane had no trouble understanding her French. “I am making rainbows.”