Mortal Love (25 page)

Between folds of color was a columnar figure, two jots of strontium yellow-green marking its eyes. There was little else to indicate that it was anything but meaningless whorls and dabs, green, yellow, black, bister. The figure, such as it was, seemed to float, and even move if Radborne stared at it too long. The masculine form was suggested rather than drawn. What was suggested was grotesque.

“He's … it's obscene,” said Radborne, flushing. He turned accusingly to Dr. Learmont. “You did not force her to paint this?”

“No. She says it comes to her in a dream. Yet the technique is not dissimilar to what Whistler has done these last few months, don't you think? When he's not mincing about with his fluffy white dog stealing paints. And, Mr. Comstock, come look at this.”

Learmont pulled a leather portfolio from a chair and opened it, flipping through the loose pages within. They were all fragments of drawings, with swooping lines signifying arms, legs, torso. Male genitals appeared again and again, along with, perhaps, a man's face: long eyes, black mouth, jagged black lightning in place of hair. Each page was neatly signed and dated, as though the image on it were complete, yet what sane artist would ever think such primitive scrawls could be construed as finished?

“She draws the same things.” Learmont held up a sheet that consisted of nothing but vertical bands of black, the edges of the charcoal softened so that the columns appeared to melt in and out of each other. For Radborne the effect was all the more disturbing because it was utterly without meaning. “She really has a remarkable technical facility,” Learmont pronounced.

“Where?” Radborne took the portfolio from Dr. Learmont and leafed through the sketches. “I see no evidence of it! This is nothing but scrawls. It's cruel of you to humor her—”

He stopped, his attention caught by a pen-and-ink drawing of a man and a woman in a landscape. The woman was Evienne Upstone. Her dark hair was pinned up, but she wore no hat, only a sleeveless shift that clung to her legs as though wet. Beside her was a tall man, bearded and dark-haired. Burne-Jones? Behind them willow trees sent long banners of leaves streaming above a pond or river. It was a winsome drawing, the faces expressive and attractive. Only the trees held a hint of an underlying disquiet.

“Well, yes, all right,” Radborne conceded. “This one is quite good. Is this how she used to draw? Before she became ill?”

“She sketched that for me a week ago.”

Radborne handed the portfolio back to him. “So you really are attempting to cure her.”

“I am attempting to see the world as she does, a world I saw long ago, when I was much younger. She possesses what Ruskin calls ‘the innocence of the eye.' Her bouts of melancholy induce a purity of vision which we have lost.”

“But is she then the painter you wrote of, whom you wished me to companion? You said a man.”

“I did indeed. Jacobus Candell. I thought after lunch I would take you to meet him. Come now, let's see what Breaghan has prepared for us.”

Abruptly he turned and headed for the door. Radborne stared after him in bemusement. He gave a last lingering look at the wilderness of paintings, and followed Learmont into the hall.

Lunch was flabby
sprouts and mutton laid out on a side table in a cold room. Radborne was relieved not to see Breaghan in attendance. He felt a small spur of regret, thinking of Swinburne making his way alone across the moor to Trevenna.

“Do your patients ever dine with you?” he asked.

“Miss Upstone does sometimes. Candell never. His deliriums are rare but extremely violent; he also refuses to eat anything that you or I might find palatable—he lives exclusively on eggs and scrumpy.”

“Scrumpy?”

“Strong cider. He uses the eggs in creating his temperas and scarcely seems to discern any difference between what he is painting and what he is consuming. I will confide in you, Mr. Comstock. …”

The doctor pushed aside his plate. “My hopes were that he, too, might have that innocence of the eye, but I don't think Candell gives a damn for anything but paint and dirt. He is a gentle person, save when the madness overtakes him, but he talks very little. I had thought you might engage him in some social intercourse, you being a fellow painter, and young. You see, he does not recognize himself as an old man. To his own imagining, he is still but twenty-five.”

“What was his exact crime?”

“Ah! I forget sometimes you are an American—you have never heard of Jacobus Candell? He was the most promising young painter of his day, admitted into the Academy, beloved of his friends, at the helm of what surely would have been a most remarkable career—
most
remarkable.”

Learmont gave a sad laugh. “I tell you this because when you meet him, you will not believe it, unless you have seen his work. Rossetti and his cronies fell under his spell—his
Caliban Freed
was exhibited in '48, but by then he had already gone mad. Early in the year, he visited Egypt—he had a patron, Dr. Langley, who arranged for Cobus to accompany him to the Holy Land and record all that they saw there. It was to be Cobus's
Italienische Reise.

“Instead it deranged his mind. In his journals he confides that while visiting the Valley of the Tombs of Sestris, he had a vision of the goddess Isis. Tragically, of course, no one saw what he had written in his journals until after the murder.

“Cobus returned to London and resumed his painting, having engaged a young woman named Evelyn Hebblewhite as his model. On the afternoon of October twelfth, he cut her throat with a palette knife, dismembered her, and attempted to hide her corpse in his steamer trunk, along with several bottles of cider and a box of India-rubber erasers. He then departed for the West Country—his intention seems to have been to board a boat for the Isles of Scilly—but he was detained in Penzance and arrested, then brought back to London to stand trial. He was committed to the Criminal Lunatic Department of Bethlem Hospital and remained there for eleven years before I arranged for him to be brought here, at my own expense. He had been given paints at Bethlem but did not have the privacy or freedom to work there. It was my hope that he might resume his work at Sarsinmoor.”

“And has he?”

“You may see that for yourself.”

“But why was he allowed to leave the hospital? A murderer—”

“They kept him restrained for much of the time,” said Learmont. He turned to stare out the window. “A strait-waistcoat combined with electrical therapy and sulphanol would drive the murderous impulses from most people. When I first visited Cobus, he was a scarecrow who could not speak his own name—or recognize it. The psychiaters attending him were themselves living in terrible poverty—a public hospital is not the place to make your fortune in
this
country, Mr. Comstock!

“But his keepers were content with the arrangement I offered them. Mr. Candell has been under my exclusive care since then. He receives the Royal Academy's catalog every year, and many other periodicals, and so has some acquaintance with how the world has turned without him in it. And he has not been without visitors. Rossetti and his brother and sister have all made pilgrimages, and Swinburne, and more recently Burne-Jones. That is why Ned believed this might be an appropriate refuge for Miss Upstone.

“I think, however, that it is now time for Cobus to make the acquaintance of another painter. Will you come with me, Mr. Comstock?”

Radborne looked up, startled, but Dr. Learmont had already left the room. Radborne pushed aside his plate and hurried after him.

“I had dreamed once that I might have many patients here,” said Learmont as he walked. “But no one has ever been quartered in the west wing save Mr. Candell. He likes the solitude, and his room affords the most dramatic views of the ruins—something which would overexcite Miss Upstone, I fear. I am hoping to create a more domestic arrangement for her, something suitable for a woman of her sensibility.”

They went upstairs, retracing their steps until they entered a narrow hall with walls and floor and ceiling all of stone. The windows were slits hacked in the rock, with neither glass nor drapery to keep out the wind. Radborne shivered; a few feet ahead of him, Dr. Learmont turned. Radborne found him a minute later, fumbling at his waistcoat. There was the scrape of metal against stone. Dr. Learmont pushed open a door.

“Good afternoon, Cobus,” he called. “I have brought a visitor for you—you recall that I mentioned a visitor? May I present the American painter Radborne Comstock?”

Radborne followed Dr. Learmont inside. He inhaled the odor of turpentine and blinked. The room was large and held a single immense window, its mullions covered by a grid of iron. It must have cost several times over what Radborne had earned in all his time at Garrison.

“Mr. Comstock,” a voice said in a soft Kentish burr. “You are most welcome here.”

A figure approached him, a man with a worn, seamed face, wearing an antiquated suit beneath an artist's smock of coarse pale-blue cambric. His gray hair reached to his shoulders, paint-spattered and stuck with twigs, as was his beard. He had very red lips like a girl's, parting in a smile to show grayish teeth. His broad shoulders were stooped, his demeanor that of one who has survived a ravaging illness.

Yet as Radborne gazed into his eyes—the palest blue he had ever seen—all he could think was
He is very handsome for a madman.

“Cobus, you may remember that Mr. Comstock is visiting from New York City,” said Learmont with a smile. “He does not know many people in London, and it was my thought that he might serve you as an apprentice.”

Radborne bristled at the term “apprentice,” but his reply was cordial.

“I am pleased to meet you,” he said. Candell only stared at him, still smiling. His eyes seemed to focus on something just behind the young man. Radborne quickly glanced over his shoulder, but of course there was no one there. Slightly annoyed—had the old man done it on purpose?—Radborne walked into the room, keeping a careful distance from Candell, and began to look around.

“Well, this is impressive.” He whistled admiringly. “Who pays for your canvas and wood?”

“Why, Dr. Learmont,” said Candell. He smiled again, an expression of ineffable sweetness, and lifted his hand, as though waving to someone far off. “Doesn't he provide for you?”

“Not yet,” said Dr. Learmont.

The room was filled with paintings. Not the deranging display of Learmont's office but the familiar hodgepodge of a working studio, canvases primed and unprimed set upon easels or leaning against the wall, tables holding jars full of brushes and heavily crusted palettes, magnifying lenses and boxes of broken charcoals, all of it ripe with the smells of damp canvas, pine oil, solvent, and a faint underlying stench of rotten eggs. On the walls hung finished paintings—a large canvas of a red-haired woman plucking an apple from her breast, a man gazing with stunned recognition at his own shadow, seeing within it the lineaments of a monster. There were portraits, too—a bulbously cheerful man Radborne recognized as Gabriel Rossetti, someone identified as the Supervising Physician of Broadmoor Asylum, and Learmont himself, seated upon a throne of twigs and birch bark and rowan berries.

But in portraits and fantastical paintings alike, the faces had an odd similarity—the eyes unnaturally long and uptilted, the mouths curved in a manner both sensual and cruel. They filled Radborne with a slight disgust, as though he had overturned a log to find an animal's decomposing corpse. He averted his eyes, but the sense remained, blurring into the memory of the woman on Blackfriars Bridge, lingering heat upon his cheek.

“Mind your step, Mr. Comstock,” said Learmont.

Radborne looked down as something shattered beneath his foot. “Good Lord,” he muttered.

Autumn leaves covered the floor, beech and oak and hawthorn and gorse, with here and there the bristly husk of a beechnut or a heap of acorns like tiny skulls. There were also scores of eggshells. Some seemed to have given up their insides for tempera medium; others had been hard-boiled but only half eaten, adding to the fetor of turpentine and leaf mold. Radborne bent to see what he had stepped on and in disbelief held up the remnants of a glass vial.

“Gold leaf?”

“It is not your fault,” said Candell in his soft voice. “I forgot that I put it there.”

Radborne shot a glance at Learmont, but the doctor was busy inspecting a small canvas with a magnifying lens.

“You may keep it if you like,” Candell added, and patted Radborne on the arm. “This paint, ‘It is all fairy gold, boy, and will prove so.'”

Radborne stared at him, then nodded and pocketed the fragments. “Er, yes. Thank you.”

He turned and walked to a table near the window, amazed at the array of pigments there—lapis lazuli and viridian, carnelian and
caput mortuum,
ground gems and the crushed remnants of Egyptian mummies, emerald-winged beetles and iridescent blue butterfly wings. An iron cot strewn with leaves and a chewed-up blanket appeared to be the room's only bed.

Candell sidled up beside Radborne. “Do you hear them?”

“Hear them?” Radborne discreetly turned his head. A foul smell came from Candell, rancid oils and spoiled eggs, the unmistakable stink of dead mouse.

“They're not very loud. Listen.”

Cobus turned and pointed. For the first time, Radborne saw that the room was full of insects—gnats, which he might have expected, from the filth and litter everywhere, but also myriad scarlet butterflies no bigger than his thumbnail. Candell nudged him, indicating where one battered itself against the window.

“Can you hear it?” he asked.

“Hear it?” Radborne thought he was joking, but a look at the painter's intent face showed he was not. And indeed, when Radborne tilted his head and held his breath, he
could
hear something, the faintest memory of a sound: heavy snow on glass, a falling leaf.