Mortal Love (11 page)

Outside, the rain had slackened. A small knot of children clad in tattered blue cambric shifts and trousers took this opportunity to race toward the entryway of the Ragged School next door. They ran shrieking and cursing around Radborne, and one of them yanked at his umbrella as he darted past.

“Won helpcha!” the boy shouted, pausing to kick a spume of filthy water onto Radborne's trousers. “Won helpcha!”

Radborne turned angrily. He was stopped by the sight of the schoolteacher, a grim blade of a man who had materialized in the school's doorway. He held a cane, and as the children slowed to climb the steps, he lashed perfunctorily at their legs, as though striking the heads off flowers.

“Good Christ,” muttered Radborne. Then, clutching color box and umbrella, he hurried in the direction of Blackfriars Bridge. To one side of the street loomed the ruins of the demolished Marshalsea Prison, piles of twisted iron, crushed brick, and knots of what looked like human hair. Even in the rain, the process continued, workers shouting as they trundled barrows back and forth, but whether they were erecting new buildings or dismantling older ones, Radborne could not guess.

He huddled deeper into Mr. Balcombe's ulster. He had little money for such luxuries as a hansom, let alone the train fare to Richmond and the entry fee for Kew Gardens, but the thought of another sunless day in the belly of Southwark, with Mrs. Beale's mutton stew congealing on the table and the Ragged School's master declaiming Deuteronomy to his charges at the top of his lungs, was unbearable.

He trudged on, hopping between the high curb and the scant shelter of tattered awnings. He looked hopefully for an omnibus, but none passed, just the usual carts bearing dead horses to the knackers and gray-faced women hurrying to market. Leggy michaelmas daisies the faded blue of old china straggled between the cobblestones; other than these, Radborne saw nothing green or alive.

“No vegetable love for me,” he said, and laughed. “No mystic way for me.”

Near Blackfriars Road a poster flapped bleakly in the chill wind off the Thames.

A man, his hands swathed in bandages, stood beneath the poster's torn edge and stared at Radborne as he hurried across the street.

“Have we children?” the man shouted. Where his bandages had unraveled, Radborne could glimpse patches of bluish skin. “
Have we children?”

Radborne bent his head and went on, the ulster plastered to his thighs. Ahead of him the arch of Blackfriars Bridge loomed across a sky pearly with the promise of weak sunlight. Suddenly he felt overheated. The collar of his wool jacket stuck to his neck; he felt a trickle of sweat in the hollow of his throat. The light was strange, at once watery and smoky, like gazing through the glass of a dirty vivarium. He tucked the umbrella tight beneath his armpit and shifted his color box so that it covered his breast, lifted his face to the sky, and stepped toward the curb.

Kings Road was crowded with carts and dray horses, hansoms, and four-wheelers. He looked for a omnibus that bore a placard for Paddington Station. Mrs. Beale had taught him how to summon them—one whistle for an omnibus, two for a hansom—but it seemed he would have to cross the bridge first. He stood on the curb, waiting for the traffic to ease. A sudden ray of sun fell sweet upon his face. A barrel organ played “Champagne Charlie,” the organ grinder singing along in a wheezing tenor.

Within the stew of dirt and dung and coal smoke, Radborne could smell something faint but piercingly familiar: not the sewer reek of the Thames but the sharp clean odor of seawater, a scent that somehow had a sound: high-pitched, almost painful. As he inhaled, the sound became a spike of fire in his head. A shudder rent him, from the back of his throat down his spine; his eyes seemed to open wider than they ever had, as though something pushed its way free from his skull. He staggered to curb's edge, avoided falling into the street only because someone shouted at him from an oncoming cart.

“'Ey now, watcher
—
!”

With a grunt Radborne reared back but lost control of umbrella and color box. The first flew like a javelin into the street, fell before the cart's wooden wheels, and exploded into scissored black wings and broken spines. Radborne dropped into a half crouch, desperately grabbing at his color box before it, too, was destroyed.

He caught it mere inches above the filthy pavement, then collapsed onto his rump. For a moment he sat there, horses stomping past and cartwheels rumbling, their din growing to a hollow roar as they turned onto the bridge. The sun slipped behind a cloud as he stumbled to his feet again.

A woman was on the bridge. Directly across from him, separated by thirty feet and the seething throng of vehicles and foot traffic: as he stared, the sun broke through to cast a flood of pale light upon her. Her clothes were ragged—he had only a vague impression of soft grays and greens, a violent slash of cyan at her throat—and she stood with arms at her sides and the chalky flesh exposed, her sleeves pushed up like a fishmonger's. Her skin had the powdery gleam of limestone, and there were faint green shadows in the cleft of her throat and the hollows of her cheeks. Her eyes, too, were green, a dark, almost muddy color, but the irises were salted with amber, which gave them a strange glitter. He did not think how it was he could notice all this from such a distance, yet he did; her eyes and hair and skin pressed themselves upon him as though he were washed paper absorbing the touch of sable and ink.

She did not see him. She did not appear to see anyone, though her eyes moved restlessly, as if straining to find a point of light in a dark room. Her hands hung limp at her sides as the breeze lifted a strand of hair that gleamed like a dewed cobweb. The rest of her hair was plastered to her skull; a faint vapor hung about her shawl, smoke or mist, and a flicker as though she held a burning lucifer in one hand.

Behind Radborne the organ grinder's voice rang out. He elbowed his way past Radborne to stand on the curb, blocking his view of the woman. Radborne blinked, startled. He swore, pushing the man aside, and jumped into the road. For an instant he saw her; then her face was obscured by a woman with a perambulator. From the corner of his eye, Radborne saw an omnibus approaching. Gripping his color box, he lunged into the middle of the street, heedless of a woman's shriek and the bellowed curses of the omnibus driver, the swelling notes of the hurdy gurdy and a child's laughter.

“Miss!”

Water and icy mud spattered him; someone might have thrown a stone. But he reached the other side and stood upon Blackfriars Bridge, a miniature city crowded with vendors and pedestrians, buses and wagons and cabs and dray horses, with ragged dogs skulking between lampposts and legs.

“Miss!” he cried again.

She was gone. Though, for all he knew, she might have been there still, hidden by the crowd or hiding in it. He looked for her despairingly, ignoring the curses thrown at him by drivers in the street.

“Sir—sir, your bus!”

He looked up to see a young workman in blue moleskin smock and trews stained black with dye. He was pointing at an omnibus wheeling onto the bridge. “I saw yer, nearly killed yerself—don't miss it, now!”

Radborne hesitated. He could see no sign of the woman: had she really been there? Quickly he scanned the bridge again, then heard someone shouting.

“Make up yer mind!”

A few feet away, the omnibus slowed to a crawl, its wheels rattling. The driver stuck his head through the open window and motioned angrily at Radborne.

“Go on, then!” the workman behind him urged. He stuck his fingers into his mouth and whistled once, piercingly. Radborne looked at him, cast a last desperate glance for the woman on the bridge, then sprinted toward the bus.

“Paddington Station?” he gasped as he clambered aboard. The driver nodded, and the bus lurched on its way.

He found a
seat and sat alone, color box on his lap, staring out at the scrolls of advertisements on storefronts, walls, rumbling hansoms, and buses. He kept looking back into the street, in futile hope that he might see the woman again, but he knew that was absurd. He could not even say
why
she had compelled his attention. Something about the way her head tilted to the sky, her damp hair gleaming silvery-brown in the pale sun, the wash of light across her skin and the soft gray of her shawl against her white arms where they hung helplessly at her sides, the flashes of light in one hand where she must have clutched a sputtering match: all conspired to stir and inflame him, as a wayward snatch of music could, or the sight of a fox running across a field in daylight. When the bus grew mired in traffic, he pried open his color box and pulled out his sketchbook and a charcoal pencil, then began to draw, from memory, the woman on the bridge.

It was noon
before he arrived at Kew Gardens. The quiet shock of finding himself in an unspoiled open space made Radborne feel that he had begun his journey in October but ended it in early spring. The sickening strangeness he had felt at Blackfriars Bridge had dissipated, exorcised by his sketches and the promise of sunlight. He paid his entrance fee, pocketing the change with his return ticket, and in a daze found his way into the Palm House.

High above him burned the glass dome, hung with sulfur-yellow gasoliers. Underfoot, fallen leaves rustled, crimson, viridian, purple, and gold. Radborne felt as though a hole had been bored into the middle of his forehead and all the colors of the sky poured inside. He was in a green, warm world that smelled like no other place he had ever been; he was in another country. He laughed, breathing air sweet and moist as tea cake, then began to follow the winding path through the forest of palmettos and ferns, past nurses with prams and benches where silent couples sat side by side, staring dreamily up into the dome's gold-green eye.

It was a long time before he gave any thought at all to painting. But after an hour, he finally found himself alone in a cul-de-sac. Here a small display table held bell jars, fern cases, vivariums, with neatly lettered signs.

Across from the table was a wrought-iron bench. Radborne sat here and wolfed down the sausage sandwich and ginger beer he'd purchased outside of Paddington.

Now, at last, he could work.

He opened his color box. Inside were his sketchbook, his drawing board, and a thick bundle of coarse drawing paper. He set the board on his lap, fastening a sheet of paper to it with pegs and then sharpening a pencil with his pocketknife. He selected two sticks of charcoal, friable and smelling faintly of the fire pit, rolled one between his fingers, and pensively rubbed his cheek, leaving a dark smudge.

“Well,” he said.

He decided to sketch the sundew first. Radborne prided himself on his horticultural knowledge, honed by years of drawing the woods around Elmira. It was why he had fallen in love with the Pre-Raphaelites when he first saw their paintings reproduced in magazines: their loving and obsessive attention to the nearly invisible details of pistil and stamen, petal and leaf.

He had been utterly chastened when, a week before, he finally saw Millais's
Ophelia
at the Tate. That emerald glamour, the astonishing veracity of his bluebells and marshwort! Radborne had never come close to capturing anything like it—and “capture” is what it felt like, that sense of ravishing a live thing, then imprisoning it upon page or canvas.

He glared at the sundew in its globe. Then, gnawing the inside of his cheek, he began to draw.

He was not certain how much time had passed before he noticed he was no longer alone. As he reached for another pencil, he glanced up to see five men standing in a half-circle behind the display table. None was younger than late middle age. All were staring at him with an expression somewhere between curiosity and alarm.

“
Ahem.”

One man, taller than the rest and obviously in a position of authority, glared briefly at Radborne. Then he extended a pointer to indicate the sundew Radborne had been sketching.

“The one in the middle.” The man tapped the glass globe so that it rang like a bell. “No, Horace, not that one—that is the
false
Merrow's sundew. The one in the middle with the overlapping stems—
that
is the true Merrow's sundew.”

The others crowded around him—all save one. He continued to stare curiously at Radborne, finally stepped alongside the young man and peered down at his drawing board.

“Why, what a coincidence!” the man announced. “He's sketching it!”

Radborne frowned. “Excuse me,” he said. “But—”

“Look here, Learmont!” the man called. “It's really very good!”

The tall man with the pointer ignored him, commanding, “Observe the way it seems to bleed when I touch it!” His voice was deep, with a faint burr. He stuck a finger into the vivarium and poked at the sundew. “And yet I would vouchsafe that there is not one among us who is, in fact, a maiden.”

The interlopers snorted in amusement. When the tall man began to lift the vivarium globe, Radborne stood and called out angrily.

“Excuse me! I am working here! Would you mind replacing that and leaving me in peace?”

The men stared at him in astonishment. Then the tall man nodded and replaced the globe.