Mortal Love (9 page)

“Well, gee. I'm really sorry it's dead. Was it—are they—rare?”

“Oh, no. They used to be very common.”

She turned and tugged off her anorak, draping it over the edge of the taboret. She was wearing the same clothes as last night, only with a long black scarf looped around her neck. She shook her head vigorously, and her thick hair sprang out, the way a fern straightens after a heavy rain. Daniel took off his leather jacket and set it on the floor beside the taboret, glanced again at the brass plaque on the wall behind it.

“That's kind of weird,” he said, frowning as he tried to recall his altar-boy Latin. “‘It is fair to obtain knowledge, even from the enemy.' Sort of an extreme motto for a folklore society.”

Larkin shrugged. “Oh, back then people believed there was a system for understanding everything—they just could never agree what the system
was.
These people thought it was folklore.”

“Fairy tales?”

“No. More like folk memories. They were scientific, in their own way—they had a sort of Darwinian approach, always looking for a single source for their stories.”

“Well, that's what I'm doing.”

“Yes.” The rain-washed light gave her skin a foxglove shimmer that made her green eyes glow spectrally. “That's why I thought you'd like coming here. Everything is upstairs, just mind your head.”

She turned, indicating he should follow her into a corridor, immediately ducked through a low doorway, and began to climb a narrow flight of steps.

“So is that what you are?” said Daniel. “A folklorist?”

“No.” She pushed open a door and walked into a small room, wood-paneled and dim, its single round window overlooking the courtyard. There was no furniture save a plain wooden map chest. “I told you, Daniel. I'm not anything.”

She looked at him with that strange covert gaze, as though she were peering at him through a gap in a curtain, then knelt beside the map chest and began tugging at its bottom drawer. “Damn, it's
always
stuck.”

Rain slashed at the window. The air around them felt chill and close; it smelled of dust and old books, though there were no books that Daniel could see, nothing but the wooden chest. He watched, silent, as Larkin struggled with the drawer; he fought the urge to step closer, to kneel beside her and feel his own hands on the worn drawer pulls, the dusty wooden floor beneath his knees and this woman beside him.

“Oh, come on, please, please . . .” she muttered.

He felt a tremor of excitement, but not at the thought of seeing the sketches. A dreamy anticipation, like opening night of his high school play, when he suddenly stepped out onto the stage and discovered that he did, after all, know his lines, knew where to stand and when to move, knew everyone around him, all those half-shadowed figures he'd never really paid attention to before—he knew them all, knew their names and what they would say next, what they would do, just as he somehow knew the woman right beside him . . .

. . . and he
was
beside her, kneeling, his hands on the map chest. Gently he worked his fingers into the crack above the bottom drawer, prying the drawer loose, and yes, he felt it give slightly, just enough to slide free. Larkin tipped her head to look at Daniel, unsmiling, then bowed so that her hair hid her face from him. With great care she began to withdraw a large portfolio of thick caramel-colored leather pebbled with age, its clasps intricate as the fittings on a corset, and set it upon her knees.

“Thank you,” she said softly.

His hands were no longer on the wooden chest but grasping her shoulders. He lowered his face to meet hers, but she was already there, her lips slightly rough and the tip of her tongue tasting of fruit and burned sugar. He kissed her, could feel nothing but her mouth; his hands slipped through folds of cloth then seemed to slide into empty air. When he opened his eyes, she was staring at him bewildered, as though she had just awakened in a strange place.

“Daniel,” she said. Her eyes widened: he could see her pupils contract, then expand until they filled each iris, like a time-lapse film of a blossoming flower. “Daniel.”

The breath caught in his throat:
she saw him.
He drew back, resting his hand upon the map chest to steady himself, and looked at her without speaking: a word would freeze the moment, make it inescapable. He almost saw what would happen next, he almost knew the right thing to say if he were to speak; he had to speak—

“I—should we look at them here?” he stammered.

Larkin flushed, then quickly looked down. Daniel grew hot with embarrassment and frustration.

“Yes,” she said, stumbling to her feet. “Yes, just set them on top of the map chest.”

His hand shot out to steady her. She flinched, and he moved away. She was intent upon the portfolio now, undoing the clasps and gingerly spreading the boards atop the chest.

“Here,” she breathed, lifting and setting aside first one, then a second and third sheet of protective onionskin. “Here they are. Aren't they beautiful?”

He stood beside her, surprised at how small the drawings were—scarcely bigger than a sheet of letterhead—and meticulously worked in pencil and charcoal and ink. All showed the same two figures, a man and woman. The few clothes they wore were rendered as stylized medieval garb. Tiny precise lettering identified each drawing.

“Yes. Yes, they are,” he murmured. He glanced at Larkin and smiled in pure delight. “Really,
really
beautiful.”

Daniel moved to the other side of the chest, angling until he clearly discerned where the artist had sketched then rubbed out earlier lines, ghostly figures in attendance upon the lovers. In the air above them, Daniel traced a near-invisible arm, entwined bodies, a curl of ivy that echoed a dog's tail. When he turned to Larkin, his eyes were shining.

“I see what you mean!” he said. “They're not like his paintings at all. I mean, these are amazingly ...”

He hesitated.

“Explicit?” suggested Larkin.

Daniel laughed. “That's one way of putting it,” he said, and set the pictures side by side atop the chest.

Enchantment. Discovery. Recognition.

He stared at them, brow furrowed. The style was familiar, that immediately recognizable Burne-Jones synthesis of medieval and romantic imagery, strong elegant lines and soft-eyed models. Yet there was nothing merely pretty about these images. It wasn't just that the figures were nearly naked and anatomically correct or that they were conjoined in conspicuously erotic, even brutal poses—their enchantment was not symbolized by a cup, the one who discovered them appeared neither surprised or dismayed, the brachet was not a dog but something else, something that made Daniel look away. To be sure, these details contributed to their strangeness. But it was more than the contrast between the familiar illustrative style and its unexpected deployment, the shock of sex where one expected sunflowers.

Rather, as Daniel stared, each drawing seemed to crystallize the most powerful desire and yearning that he had ever experienced—desire that he realized suddenly had never been fulfilled, yearning that whelmed him like the memory of a dream he had till this moment forgotten, a dream that overshadowed his waking life so that it was unbearable to think that he was not sleeping now—and it was this distillation of longing and ecstatic despair that took his breath away.

Beside him Larkin bent to peruse the third drawing: Recognition. “Of course, he did produce some intensely erotic work,” she said. “They all did. You forget that. You're so used to thinking of all those Victorians as being sexually repressed or frigid or—”

She looked at Daniel and smiled. “Well, all that sort of thing. Maybe it's too much like imagining your parents having sex on the kitchen table.”

“
Please.”
Daniel pointed a chiding finger at her. “But—come on! You have to admit, there's something extreme about this stuff. I mean,
that
—”

He pointed at the thing that wasn't a brachet, then averted his eyes. “How have they been kept secret all this time? Why haven't I heard of them or seen them?”

“Ned said they were never to be seen.”

“But why? He did all those paintings of Maria Zambaco—they were shown in his lifetime. And these . . . well, yes, they're explicit for their time, but their time was a hundred and twenty years ago! How could anyone prevent these pictures from being shown
now?”

“Well, no one really knows they're here.”

“Do you mean they're stolen?”

“No,” said Larkin. A flare of black in her green eyes. “I mean they're not supposed to be anywhere. Georgie Burne-Jones ordered them to be destroyed after her husband's death, but . . . someone got hold of them and brought them here. They're a secret. That's why they've never been reproduced, and there's no mention of them except in a few contemporary accounts from his friends.”

“I can't possibly be the first—you said researchers come to see them.”

“No. That's not what I said.”

Daniel stared across the room. The porthole window was a bleary eye opening onto a blur of silver-green; he could hear the muted roar of a sanitation truck making its rounds. What had become of the girl screaming “Marianne”? He stepped over to the window but saw nothing but the courtyard's enclosed wasteland, the Mini a red island surrounded by black water.

“Was it the model, then?” He turned back to Larkin. “His wife was afraid of another affair?”

“Yes. She was afraid she'd lose him forever. She almost did.”

Daniel returned to stare at the woman in the drawings. Very tall, full-breasted, with long dark hair and a piquant face at odds with that columnar neck. He didn't speak his thought: that she looked like the woman beside him. “Who is she?”

“Her name was Evienne Upstone. She found him after he broke with Maria Zambaco. He was . . . vulnerable, and that made him very beautiful to her.”

“When did he do these? Are they dated?”

“This one”—she pointed at
How They Were Discovered
—“there's a letter Burne-Jones wrote to Rossetti a few months before Rossetti died—this would have been the winter of '81. He refers to a painting with that title. The painting was never found, just this study. I think his wife destroyed it. In the letter Burne-Jones says that he has ‘seen once more the girl in the well.'”

“And she was ... ?”

Larkin hesitated. “No one really knows. But his wife, Georgie, refers to a dream he had. . . .”

She crouched in front of the chest and tugged at another drawer. This one opened easily. It was filled with books—old books, though he recognized a battered copy of
The Helga Pictures
—as well as sheets of drafting paper covered with penciled scrawls, several videotapes, and a bundle of dirty brown yarn wrapped around a stick. Larkin withdrew a volume with gilt letters on the spine:
Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones.
She thumbed through the pages, finally stopping to read aloud.

Daniel made a face. “Well, at least he felt guilty about screwing around on his wife.”

“He wasn't feeling guilty about Maria Zambaco.”

“Really?” Daniel raised an eyebrow. “Who was he feeling guilty about?”

“I don't believe that he was feeling guilty at all. I think the dream meant something else. It—she—was something else.”

Daniel said nothing.
She's a former mental patient.
He thought of Robert Lowell imagining himself to be the king of Scotland and becoming obsessed with hammers, screwdrivers, bushels of nails, and baling wire, all because T. S. Eliot once admitted a fondness for hardware stores; he thought of Nick trying to warn him last night, and of the
TimeOut
interview he'd blown off this morning.

“I don't get it,” he said at last. “Burne-Jones dreamed this person, and then he found someone who looked like her to pose for his painting?”

“No.” Larkin shook her head adamantly. “He did see someone.”

Daniel started to laugh. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I haven't kept up with that kind of stuff since I was an undergrad. It's—”

“Enough.” She held out her hand for the book and returned it to the drawer, then set about replacing the studies of Tristran and Iseult in their portfolio. “We should leave soon if we're going to have lunch. Would you like to see the Candell painting before we go?”

“Sure.”

He followed her back into the hall. “It's in here,” she said, and opened the door to a tiny room that must have been a linen closet, pervaded by a faint smell of starch. Light seeped from a clerestory window; dark bands ran across walls where there had once been shelves. Beneath the high window hung a small oval painting. Daniel's gangly frame filled the room as he stepped inside to peer at the canvas.

“It's so small!” he said.

“Most people need a magnifying lens to see it properly. But it would be lost in a bigger room, so I keep it here.”

“It's yours?”

She smiled. “A gift of the artist.”

The little oval was so crowded with tiny figures he couldn't determine what, if anything, was its subject—it made his head hurt just to try. He crouched to squint at lettering in the lower curve of the canvas:
THE DOG HAS NOT JUMPED DOWN YET.

He frowned: he couldn't find a dog within that throng of minute people and fanciful vegetation. “‘The dog has not jumped down yet.' Does that mean something?”