The Serpent Garden - Judith Merkle Riley

by The Serpent Garden (epub)

  “No one could steal the prize from Master Dallet for stinginess, that I’ll say,” said Nan. “Just bundle it up with the art things, then. It doesn’t deserve room in the chest.”

  Mistress Hull had been staring at the table, thinking, her chin in her hand. “They’ll wonder if there’s no table and chairs,” she said. “We don’t want them getting suspicious, now, do we? We’ll have to leave them.”

  “Well, at least take the carpet off it. They won’t be looking for it, since Master Dallet made no will and inventory. Besides, it was Mother’s.”

  Of course, Mistress Hull could not refrain from making aesthetic judgements about the half-finished panels my husband had left, which was altogether inappropriate, considering the dreadful stuff her late husband painted. “Goodness!” she exclaimed. “Here’s a nasty piece of work. Master Dallet should have done his underpainting in terre verte. My husband swore by it.” Well, wouldn’t you know it, that explains the green saints, I thought. That old Master Hull didn’t have a clue how to give a living flesh tone once he had finished the underpainting. Or perhaps it was his medium, which dulled the colors he mixed with it. I use my father’s medium; it was his secret, and he had gotten it in his travels in Italy by bribing the assistant in a great man’s atelier. Only Master Dallet and I knew it, and Master Dallet had to marry me to worm the secret out of Father. It gives a translucent shine to colors and thins them out so you can build a luminous skin tone through successive veils of color. It was the secret of Father’s success in stained canvas work and painting in large.

  “And who’s this dreadful woman with the dragon’s eye?”

  “The Lord Mayor’s wife.”

  “But it looks finished.”

  “It is finished. She refused to accept it.”

  “Oh, that’s the problem with portraits. Nobody refuses a saint’s picture. But a portrait? They take offense and then you never see a penny from your work. My husband said always take part payment in advance on portraits. Claim you must buy materials.”

  “You can’t do that when you deal with great ones. Sometimes, even if they take it, they don’t pay.”

  “Why didn’t she like it, except that it tells the truth?”

  “She said she had become much more slender since he painted the picture, and she wanted it redone. My husband said he’d be damned if he’d dress up that old sow any further, and there it stands.” Mistress Hull inspected the picture up close, then from a distance. She tapped her foot. I was beginning to understand just how Master Hull had made as much of a success as he had, given his very small talent.

  “Hmm,” she said. “I think this should be your first project. Shrink the old biddy’s waist, paint out a couple of chins, and get rid of those frown wrinkles between the eyebrows. Then I’ll send my Cat back to the Lord Mayor’s house with it and tell her that, before his death, Master Dallet had just finished repairing the picture to give a truer likeness. Then we shall see what we shall see.” She tilted her head just like an old hen that spies a fine worm in the beak of a rival. The look in her beady eyes was so funny that for the first time since the horrible birth, I smiled.

  “An excellent idea,” I said. “Will you be wanting a share?”

  “Not on this one,” she answered. “I fear by the time the crows are done picking the corpse, you’ll be sleeping on the floor. And, after all, what good will you be if you go and get sick?” They finished hiding the necessaries of life, including the best featherbed and the largest of our cooking pots, leaving me to ponder alone in bed on the mysteries of marriage. When my husband lived, I was never allowed a single word as to how he spent his money, and mine as well. But once he was dead, I owed his debts, just as if I’d had the pleasure of the spending myself.

  We had only finished hiding things when a bony old lawyer in a fine, fur-lined gown came in with a roll of papers and two workmen. While the workmen carried out the table and the bench and the frying pan, he poked his cold, greedy face everywhere and even prodded under the bed with the staff he carried. “No chests?” he asked. “No plate? No old books?”

  “You’ve come too late,” I said. “The carrion crows have picked the corpse clean.” I was glad to see him look upset. His lizardy little eyes rolled, and his mouth worked, and his face turned pale.

  “He has something that is mine. A book. He…borrowed it. It’s not here.”

  “What you see is what there is. Perhaps you should pursue his creditors, who have been parading through this house for the last two days.”

  “Creditors—yes, it has to be,” he muttered. “You two, take down that bed, there. And the cradle, too. It has to be hidden somewhere. Maybe there’s a compartment.”

  “But she’s still in it,” said one of the workmen.

  “But it was my mother’s wedding bed,” I cried. “My father and mother died in this bed.” Even the workmen stood abashed.

  “Have you no shame at all?” cried Nan, who had watched the procedures with a face like stone. She helped me from the bed, and as I sat on the floor huddled and weeping by the hearth, they began to dismantle the big old carved bed, dumping the straw out on the floor and carrying away the bed curtains and the second-best featherbed. There it went. The bed where my parents had been happy. The bed I’d been born in. When at last the workman came back and carried off the cradle, I felt a curious lightness, as if I had been freed from some secret curse. The evil had been carried off by the lawyer with the cradle, as proud as could be in his taking of it. I started to laugh hysterically, and I saw the lawyer’s workmen turn at the sound and shudder.

  There is something liberating about losing everything. First you weep, then you are numb, then you count over the things you have lost and ponder how hard it will all be, and how you will never have any others like those that are gone. Then after that comes a strange lightness. Without the things one has always had, one becomes another person, any person, no person. It is a queer sensation, like being drunk and abandoning yourself. I walked about the empty room in a state of crazed hilarity, my hair wild, my knees weak. I paused to lean on the windowsill. The street, the sky, the trees, the world, all looked different, shimmering with lunatic color. Suddenly I felt capable of anything, no matter how mad.

  Someone was knocking at the low door into Septimus Crouch’s cellar. “Come in,” he called, loath to leave the shining object before him. The reflection of a half dozen candle flames danced in reflection on it. His face was repeated a dozen different distorted ways on its edge, on the salamander base, across the glistening gold surface.

  “The door is barred, Master,” called his servant.

  “Oh, yes, just a moment,” said Crouch, reluctantly turning toward the door. The cellar of the house in Lime Street Ward was where Crouch performed those experiments that must be done in secret, if scandal were to be avoided. A stone table with suspicious-looking scars and stains stood in the center of the low-vaulted, stone room. There were jugs and boxes on the shelves whose contents did not bear inspection, although the wine barrels that lined one wall were in fact the genuine item. In the very place of honor, at the center of the table, stood the mirror of conspiracy, surrounded by black candles. Hastily, he shrouded it and then threw up the bar of the door. “And how was the goldsmith’s funeral?” he asked.

  “Very poor, Master. But his widow was so grateful for the candles you sent that she kissed my hand.” Crouch chuckled.

  “No one suspected?”

  “Not a soul. The Lombard’s poison worked—”

  “—exquisitely. As it has, through the irony of fate, worked so splendidly upon the Lombard himself—A joke, Wat, you may laugh.”

  At the sound of his servant’s nervous laughter, Crouch snorted. “Ah, Wat, you are a humorous fellow, aren’t you? Well then, take yourself off. Here’s a bit of something for a job well done. Fetch me some supper at midnight—a fowl, something light. I don’t want heaviness to interfere with my thought processes.”

  The door rebarred, Crouch turn
ed again to his new passion. With what fascination he surveyed the moving figures! The mirror, already the mirror had proven his truest friend. A sudden suspicion, a fear, that the goldsmith might make use of the secrets he had learned, had sent him to consult the mirror in secret. There, his worst fears had been revealed: the goldsmith could be seen, plain as day, casting another mirror from the mold he swore he had broken. What if everyone had a mirror? How could Crouch remain supreme? His Lombard partner had agreed, and with the most delightful and practiced Italian gesture, swept his ring-laden hand across the wine goblet, then smiled as the goldsmith drank deep of slow-acting poison. The ring, the ring, thought Crouch as he watched. The Lombard has a hollow ring for dispensing poison. Why did I never guess? Who knows what other subtle means of giving death he has? He will not want to share the secret long and I, I have need of the Mirror of Diocletian more than he….

  How fortunate the mirror had warned him of the Lombard’s treachery; in it he had seen the Lombard laughing with friends at his own funeral. Now he had laughed at the Lombard’s, instead.

  Until he had gotten possession of the mirror, he had no idea he had so many enemies. Now they stood revealed, all of them. Dangerous, conspiratorial. It was only prudence to remove them. After all, he had great plans. Which one of them had plans of such magnificence, such power? The Lombard was nothing. Someday, kings would rise and fall at Crouch’s command; he would rule this world and the next with mighty powers. No one must stand in his way. The mirror, his secret eye on the world, would reveal everything….

  The Third Portrait

  National Portrait Gallery. N.P.G. ca. 1520. Portrait of an Unknown Lady.

  This portrait, tentatively identified as one of Lady Burghley in middle age, displays the gradual shift of costume from the late medieval style of the court of Henry VII to the more elaborate court costume of the period of Henry VIII. Note especially the characteristic peaked or gabled headdress of the sitter, ornamented with semiprecious stones, the use of slashing to reveal costly embroidered linen, the quilted stiffening of the undersleeve and the widening of the oversleeve, here so great as to allow the sitter’s lap dog to hide within the folds. The anonymous painter has captured with unconscious drollery the identical self-important expression in both the wealthy sitter and her pet.

  —B. Smythe. SIX CENTURIES OF ENGLISH COSTUME

  I have SKIPPED QUITE A BIT AHEAD HERE TO THE DAYS LONG AFTER I BECAME PROSPEROUS TO SHOW YOU ONE OF MY MOST SUCCESSFUL PANEL PAINTINGS. It did make Lady Guildford weep for joy because she was most excessively fond of that little dog—which died shortly after I painted it from eating pheasant bones that nobody should ever give a dog anyway even if they are scraps. I do believe I caught her to the life, except that I did not put in any wrinkles and I told her the ones that were left were signs of character and appropriate to her dignity.

  But the truth is that there was a long time before I got any important patrons. And although I threw myself into my work with all my strength nobody wealthy came to buy, and it was only through the strangest accident in the world that my work later came to the attention of significant patrons such as Lady Guildford. But in that poorer time I had to make an entirely different kind of painting which although they were of a religious nature, appealed to the lower feelings, so I will not show them to you. They were also unclothed, which was why they found so many buyers although not at high prices. And so I did not sign them S.D. Fecit but just left them blank and said someone else must have done them.

  To make this picture I stayed at Richmond for a whole month where Lady Guildford was governess of the Princess Mary, whose portrait had started my whole career although she didn’t know it. The painting took a long time not because I am slow, but because Lady Guildford was too anxious to spend long at any one sitting on account of her many cares for a huge household and also because she spent a lot of time seeing that handsome gentlemen could not sit alone with the princess, who is very fond of company and good times. But in between her sittings I painted several small portraits for the handsome gentlemen who wanted to give them to the princess and the other ladies who were there as companions, and also portraits of ladies who wanted to give them to the gentlemen, and so because they were all very gallant, I left much richer than I came and brought Cat a length of blue wool and Mistress Hull a new cap. I also paid Nan all her back wages, but she spent them on her brother who said he needed them for a business opportunity now that he was out of jail, so she was just as poor as always.

  Six

  THE very evening after the mysterious strangers left the House of the Standing Cat, at the precise moment that Mistress Hull was standing in the buttery deciding how many candles she could expend upon the corpse she had laid out on the floor, the candles were burning low in the paneled dining hall of the royal palace at Richmond. There the musicians had already been sent away when the conversation at the supper party turned to the supernatural. Mother Guildford’s firm stare, which had squelched a newborn discussion of gallantry, softened, for edifying tales of spectral visitations were among her favorites. She smoothed the black silk skirts of her immense, many-petticoated gown and settled her imposing, heavily corseted figure in a more comfortable position on the cushions of her chair. Lackeys filled the heavy silver wine cups again, removing the platters of bones and emptied dishes of stale sauce from the white tablecloth. Mother Guildford’s little dog lay at her feet in the rushes, gnawing on a knucklebone.

  The princess’s ladies turned to each other with wide eyes, and the Duke of Suffolk, a practiced ladies’ man, took advantage of the old duenna’s brief inattention to cast a burning glance in the direction of the princess. A heavy necklace of pearls and rubies set off her white neck and echoed the colors of her red brocade gown, slashed to reveal heavily gathered, embroidered white silk sleeves. Her heavy red-gold hair, caught in a circlet of gold links decorated with sapphires, flowed freely down her back, for she was still a maiden, and very young. Mary Tudor’s face turned pink when she caught Suffolk’s look, but her bright eyes flashed in return. Jane Popincourt, her French tutor and lady-in-waiting, began an astonishing tale of the sound of a spinning wheel, which came each night from a wall in a bedchamber she had once had.

  “Oh, yes, I remember how very vexed you were that you had no sleep,” cried the princess.

  “And it was I who ordered masons to tear down the wall. And what do you think they found?” Mistress Jane paused. Mother Guildford cast an expectant eye over the awed company. After a dramatic silence, Mistress Jane continued. “A sealed chamber, with a dusty, unused old spinning wheel, entirely covered with cobwebs. We asked the priest to search the records and found that a woman who spun for the queen had died in that room.”

  “But pray tell,” broke in Suffolk, a bluff, heavyset man, “why should a spirit, freed of earthly cares, carry on work both bothersome and laborious?” Everything about Suffolk looked large and square: his dark brown, square-cut beard, his heavy mane of hair, cut flat below the ears, his neck, his shoulders. Somehow it all reminded most people of an ox—an ox in court clothes, his English-cut dark blue satin doublet and heavy brocade gown extravagantly slashed with crimson seeming to sit uncomfortably on his huge frame. But largeness and roisterous spirits had made him the young king’s best friend and partner in high jinks. “No,” he went on, “spirits return only when they have a message for the living—or, perchance, a need for vengeance.”

  “One might ask whether there is a message in the spinning.” The young Duc de Longueville, recently captured at the battle of Guinegate, but as free as any gentleman of the court until his ransom should be paid, was impatient to turn the company to his own story. “I believe that when ghosts work, it is always for a purpose. For example, in this very city, someone I know…very well…heard of a most extraordinary ghostly manifestation—”

  “Oh, tell us!” cried the princess, clapping her hands. Vanity and wine pushed him, at that moment, beyond the bounds of discretion.

  �
�Well, it seems that there was a young painter in the City of London, very handsome, with unique talent in the taking of portraits. He was newly wed to a beautiful wife, to whom he was devoted, and who was expecting their first child—” Longueville was clad in the French fashion, bright and glittering, with his pale blue satin doublet cut well away from his neck to show his beautifully made linen. His flat velvet hat, in dark violet, ornamented with a gold medallion, set off his light brown, shoulder-length curls and narrow features. Half the ladies in the room were in love with him.

  “Ah, then it’s a love story,” exclaimed the princess. Mother Guildford turned a fierce eye, enough to stop a lion in midleap, on de Longueville, but he never hesitated.

  “Exactly so,” agreed de Longueville cheerfully. “But one with an extraordinary ending. This painter, being newly come to a mastership, had many debts. But through good fortune, a great lord came to him with a princely commission, to create a portrait in small, as a jewel, from a portrait in large.” The company leaned forward, and Suffolk set his elbows on the table. The Frenchman did know how to tell a good story.

  “The following day, the great lord returned and met outside the door a holy man, going to offer succor to a new-made widow, whose husband had been murdered the night before in a street brawl. It was the artist who had been murdered, the very night that the commission had been given, and his widow, all unknowing, was waiting for him to return.”

  “Oh, this is so very sad,” said Mistress Popincourt. She took an embroidered handkerchief from her wide velvet sleeve. “It is much too sad for a love story.” Mother Guildford secretly wiped the corner of her eye with a plump index finger.