The Serpent Garden - Judith Merkle Riley

by The Serpent Garden (epub)

  “Why, is he greater than you?”

  “Lesser. A nobody. But he finds favor. He’s clever, you know. Clever and good-looking and flattering. He plays a slimy trick, and it passes for amusing. Art! He talks about art! Brushstrokes and pigments, master this and master that, and what painter has died, so his work goes up in value. Useless stuff! And my master gobbles it up. He listens, he listens. And soon that bastard will have my place, I swear. God, when it was poetry, I learned poetry. When it was music, who was a finer judge than I? I learned it all, just to stay in my master’s good graces. What will it be next? Bookbinding? The science of dog breeding? My master amuses himself, and my brain splits.”

  “You need to make this man a fool. Trip him up.”

  “So say you. But that’s no easy task.” Tuke looked up with a sly glance. His speech was slurred. “But I’ve a secret. I’ve heard there’s a man with powers.”

  “Powers?” said the old man, looking alarmed.

  “I’d agree to anything to get that arrogant bastard out of my way. Not dead, you understand. Then he couldn’t see me triumph. A curse, some words…”

  “Oh, of course, of course,” said the man, standing up.

  “Why so hasty?” asked Tuke, leaning on the table at the strangest angle and looking up. “Maybe you’d like to meet him. He’s coming here. Maybe there’s someone you’d like to…”

  “I don’t want to meet no devils out of hell,” muttered the old man as he made his getaway. He gave a yelp as he almost ran into Sir Septimus Crouch, who had just entered the public room and had paused to look around.

  “Out of my way, sirrah,” said Crouch, looking down in disdain at him. The old man took in at a glance the cold green eyes, the strange hornlike streaks of gray in the hair, the perverse and ruined face.

  “He’s over there,” he said, pointing with a finger as he fled.

  Now let me tell you in case you think I am vain and boastful that Adam and Eve were the worst trial ever invented to keep a person humble and make her think that scrubbing floors in a charitable institution might not be so bad after all. Master Hull’s Adam and Eves were just as green and ugly as his saints, with the exception that the saints were fully clothed and Adam and Eve were as naked as the day they were born, cavorting about the Garden of Eden with a big snake that had an ugly old devil’s face on him. They certainly didn’t look like religious paintings at all, unless maybe another religion than Christian that I don’t know about. Before I saw them, I thought it would just be easy to copy them and the money would come rolling in as a temporary thing before people understood that my true inspirational pictures that I hadn’t painted yet were much better.

  The minute I saw them, I knew I was in awful trouble because of my showing off and the boasting that I had done secretly to myself, which luckily I hadn’t spoken of or it would be worse. You see, Master Hull could not draw human anatomy correctly and his people looked a bit like insects or something. But I couldn’t even draw it at all, and his paintings wouldn’t do for a model because they were wrong, too. I am very good on faces, because I have studied them a long time, since I was little, and my father showed me many tricks of making the light shine where the bone shows beneath the skin, and also eyes, which need a special secondary highlight that crosses the white if they are to look damp, which they are. I know his secret of painting velvet and jewels real enough to touch as well.

  But because I was raised like a lady I learned French and Italian and music, but I did not learn to draw naked bodies which are indecent, and you have to have a nude model anyway, which nice girls shouldn’t see. So there I was in a terrible fix because I needed to draw naked people cavorting to make lecherous monks happy but not burst out laughing. I felt a lot like crying, but instead I lied after asking God to forgive me again, and I just said it would be easy to do paintings like that. Then I shut myself in the studio to think and draw and imagine the best way out of this problem, so Mistress Hull could have that sausage she likes so well. Nobody ever bought her knitting anyway and no person can live just on selling pins.

  First I started by copying the best of the paintings but Adam came out shaped like a melon with long legs like a spider because I was not sure where they joined on. Eve looked a little better but not much, and the more I looked the more it seemed her bosom was in the wrong place. I rubbed out the bad places and tried again and pretty soon the drawing was just a big black mess and I had charcoal all over my hands and face except where the tears were coming down. Then I felt as if I were smothering and had to put my head out the window to breathe and some awful man who was so drunk he was lying in the gutter in front of the Goat and Jug called out:

  “Hey, sweetheart, what’ve you been doing up there? Cleaning the chimney? I’ll clean your chimney for you.” I was so angry I went and got the chamber pot and heaved its contents out the window at him, but they didn’t go far enough so he just lay there and laughed, still dry except for the part that was in the gutter. By this time I was getting very tired of the Goat and Jug and wishing someone would close it down for a bawdy house. Besides, their ale was awful, and we had to go all the way to the Unicorn to get anything good.

  Now seeing that man lying in the gutter all stretched out made me think that if he were naked, then I could get the true proportion, which was what was wrong with my drawings. I would have prayed to the Holy Virgin for help in getting a real model, but she would have been embarrassed. Besides, somebody magical and refined like the Virgin could not possibly bear something so smelly and messy as painting. But I love the smell of paint. It makes me happier than anything else.

  Thinking about how much I loved painting and how little I loved scrubbing floors, I had a great inspiration. I did have one naked model to get proportions from, and she was right in the room with me—if you see what I mean. It is not that I was so perfect in the body but Eve was not perfect either, so it was all right. So I wedged the stool against the studio door and closed the shutters and took everything off and stood against the whitewashed wall. Then I put the charcoal close beside my body and marked the proportions right on the wall, which was not easy for some of the parts. Then I outlined in between the marks, and it really came out very well. A model for proportions. Now all I had to do was prop up my little mirror to look at myself to do the individual bits. After I had finished one side view and one front view on the wall and measured everything, I was quite surprised because the legs did not join on where I thought at all. Now there was only one-half a problem left, which is that men do not look like women and Master Dallet was never much use in that regard and besides he was dead.

  I was so interested in thinking just standing there that I forgot to put my clothes back on, which is really indecent but when I think, I think very hard. It seemed to me that the Adam problem could be solved by concealing all the parts I couldn’t draw behind leaves or a tree trunk or something because all the monks are really interested in is Eve anyway. Then an inspiration for a painting came to me that was very fine, and that is how I had the idea for Adam and Eve Bathing in the Garden of Eden, which is the first one I sold. Adam is in the water up to his middle and you only see his back view while he stares at Eve and Eve is lying on a big rock wringing out her long hair and making cow eyes at the viewer who is behind Adam. There is also a large, speckled snake hanging out of a tree and it’s got a very lecherous face which seems to be an important part of these pictures. When I got the idea I got very excited and sat down to draw and had nearly a whole rough sketch done when I heard Nan rattling and banging at the door.

  “Susanna, what on earth are you doing in there?” she cried.

  “I’m drawing Eve!” I shouted back, but then I remembered I was entirely undressed which is not proper and had to stop.

  “Why on earth did you bar the door like that?” asked Nan when I opened it for her. I must admit I did look rather funny for my laces were done wrong and my face was still black. “Oh, you look like a chimney sweep!” she cried.

/>   “I had to,” I said. “Adam and Eves are a lot more work than I thought. They’re awfully indecent, Nan.”

  “And so you barred the door so no one could see you draw them? You are a funny girl, even if I did raise you myself,” she said.

  “Nan, did you know the foot is the same length as the forearm?” I asked, my mind still on my wonderful discoveries.

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” she answered.

  It turned out that visiting the Lord Mayor’s wife was not as easy an idea as it seemed at first, because I had to have my new widow’s weeds in that good wool all finished so that the servants would not think I was a beggar and chase me away. So we stayed up half the night cutting and sewing and I designed some nice little touches, such as pleats on the back of the bodice that open into the skirt and some cutwork on the sleeves that brought that plain old black dress beyond the ordinary, though they were not as simple to sew as plain would be. All this work made Cat, who is really Catherine Hull who has no prospects, very angry. She cried and stormed and said she didn’t see why she had to help, because it was me that was getting the new dress and I always got everything and never had to help in the kitchen now that I was doing all that stupid painting, and it was no fair. Then her mother said that I was a sorrowful widow, and she said that was no fair, too, because at least I had been married once and she never got anything. And I said she deserved to be married to Master Dallet who was as mean as a snake, anyway. Then Nan said hush and we stayed up all night crying and making up, because it is hard to be women without money, even if you have plans for it later.

  All these troubles meant two things, namely it took more days to finish the dress and also Cat got to go to the Lord Mayor’s with me to see the sights and her mother told her what to say so she wouldn’t make a mistake and spoil everything. She carried the picture because I was a sorrowful widow and supposedly too weak to carry anything, but it was not much trouble because it was not too big, being a table-picture, that is, a picture painted on a wood board, and it matched one the mayor had had done of himself which he liked perfectly well. A lackey in grand livery showed us into the mayor’s hall, where we sat on a hard bench and kicked our heels in the straw a long time waiting. Then the mayor’s wife came with two ladies attending her, and she was a big haughty lady with as many chins as Master Dallet had painted and a much fiercer eye. I told her all about my husband’s last desire to satisfy her above all things in the matter of her portrait, and unwrapped it, and she burst into tears.

  “He has captured my true self,” she said, wiping away all the dampness and pretending she hadn’t cried. “I see I misjudged him. I thought him hard and cynical, but now I understand he was just seeking perfection. What a terrible loss you must feel.”

  So I wiped at my eyes and said the pain was almost unbearable, but at least he had left objects of beauty like this behind him which was a consolation. All the while I really did feel great sorrow, because I think I could have made a fortune improving rich ladies with bad looks like this one because there are ever so many more of them than pretty ones. Besides it is not their fault they are homely, and every woman should feel pretty once. And looking at pictures of themselves more beautiful and spiritual might soften their dispositions and make them kinder, so it would really be a kind of improvement of the world that one would be doing instead of outright lying.

  So we parted with a nice little purse of money, and Cat was walking on air because that lackey who was young and good-looking made eyes at her and pressed her hand as he showed us out, and I felt like dancing because I had done my part very well indeed. When we got home, Mistress Hull and Nan felt like dancing, too. So we all joined hands and did for a while, while Mistress Hull called out the steps.

  “Whew,” said Mistress Hull, wiping her brow as she sat down. “It’s been a long time since I danced. Oh, I used to have such a light foot! But a widow can’t be too careful in this wicked world. Did I tell you that the handsomest young man in some lord’s livery all hidden beneath a plain black cloak came hunting for Master Dallet’s apprentice while you were gone?”

  “An apprentice? What did you say?”

  “The truth, that he had none.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “He looked at me in the strangest way, and then said he’d get to the bottom of the truth even if I wouldn’t help him.”

  “Then he must have been up to no good. Maybe he’s serving someone else who’s trying to collect one of Master Dallet’s old debts.”

  “That’s what I thought. He had a big hat pulled down over his eyes, as if he were being secretive, and when he thought I wasn’t looking, he wandered about pretending to be doing nothing, but looking ever so closely at Master Hull’s paintings. And, can you imagine? He rolled his eyes! Such rudeness in the face of sacred works! Young men today are sunk in sin, I tell you. After that he asked about the apprentice. It all sounded very dubious to me, so I told him that I’d suddenly remembered that there was an apprentice long ago, but he’d gone to Antwerp to serve some master whose name I’d forgotten.”

  “Apprentice, humpf!” exclaimed Nan. “It was undoubtedly a trick by someone else who wants money. There’s no end to the devices they’ll use.”

  “At least he wasn’t from the guild. That would be trouble and a half,” said Mistress Hull. “Now, remember, ladies, every painting that comes from this shop was painted by a dead liveryman of the guild.”

  “Thoughtful of them to leave us so many,” I couldn’t help remarking.

  “Most considerate gentlemen,” Mistress Hull said, laughing. “Especially since they are going to buy us a dinner in celebration.”

  “Not at the Goat and Jug, I hope.”

  “A low place like that? No, we’ll have the best. Those good dead men are going to take us to the Saracen’s Head.”

  I suppose I have made it sound easy about painting Adam and Eve Bathing in the Garden of Eden, except for the bodies which I cheated on. But there was another problem about this kind of picture, too. That is, who knows what the Garden of Eden looked like? You cannot make it like England because it should seem faraway and more beautiful than anything on earth because it is Eden. Now I had always been bored with landscapes anyway, and painting Eden is a lot of landscape. Some people do Adam and Eve very large to omit the landscape but I would have to paint bodies better, and not make do with so many leaves and vines because they could not be coming out of nowhere just for my convenience but had to be attached to plants and trees, which gets back to the problem of Eden.

  Fortunately, my father was a terrible taskmaster when he was alive and never let anything get by. One of the things he didn’t let get by was landscapes, which I hate because they are dull. He had made me copy one of his landscapes that he had done on his travels over and over, for practice in trees and color perspective and also rocks and mountains which are the very dullest of all and nobody should ever have to paint them. He used to say I would thank him someday and now I wished I could. I just took that old landscape because it didn’t look like England and loaded it up with flowers and it made a good Eden. I had to fix a few things, for example, the strange tall rocky mountain in the back, behind all the greenery. It had a castle at the top. But since there were no castles in Eden, I just took away the castle and put a golden light on top of the mountain coming out of a cloud as if God were up there. I used that foreign place in all my Adam and Eves, one way or another. It was a kind of joke, especially on Father, who took that landscape very seriously and said if people appreciated landscapes more than portraits of themselves, they would see it was a masterwork.

  I had just gotten the landscape done and was putting another glaze on Eve to make her nice and pink when Mistress Hull came up to inspect.

  “My, you’ve been working away up here. Let’s see.” Eve’s hair had come out especially nice, in long, dark ripples, and I do know how to give expression to eyes, even a “come hither” expression which is how I imagine that Mistress Pi
ckering lured my husband to his early but not undeserved doom. There were still a few little problems, but I thought I had covered them over pretty well. “Humpf! That Eve is a hussy! Who would have thought a woman could paint a thing like that! Did you mean for her knees to be that fat? Oh, no, don’t look so worried. I know my customers. They all like fat knees. Ha! I could sell a dozen of these! How fortunate you are to be so talented!”

  I felt so gratified, I showed her the best of my sketches, and Mistress Hull inspected them with a shrewd commercial gaze which impressed me very much.

  “Hmm. Eve Tempts Adam. It’s nice, that lecherous look you give him while he stares at the apple. But why is he all covered up with vines? That Eve—my, she is generous up top; that’s excellent. Oh—my—this one! Ha! You must do several. I’m sure this one will go for double. How did you ever think of it?” Her eye lit up as she spied my sketch for The Temptation of Eve. It was altogether my most daring work, which featured my improved ability to draw Eves in such a way that you hardly missed that there was no Adam at all. That is, Eve is lolling back on a grassy bank immorally intertwined with the serpent and a really unregenerate look on her face, and the bitten apple is falling out of her hand which is all limp because she is just so carried away. I’m surprised I thought of it at all, but sometimes these things just come to me and besides, I got all angry thinking of how my late husband was such a snake spending all my dowry money to cut a figure for that dreadful Mistress Pickering that he deceived me about and said she had a club foot.

  While I was showing her my drawings Cat came up to snoop around, because she is convinced I just lie at my ease upstairs instead of scouring pots whereas I actually work very very hard except that it is a lot better work than rubbing sand around in a lot of dirty old dishes. Even she was amazed, and when you can amaze a sour unmarried girl who thinks unkindly of everything, that is something.