The Serpent Garden - Judith Merkle Riley

by The Serpent Garden (epub)

  “Mother, this bathing picture looks just as if a man did it. And it’s not too big to hide behind a curtain, the way they do. You can sell that one right away, I think.” She looked at it from another angle. “But the colors shine too much. They don’t look like Father’s at all. How are you going to keep the beadle away?”

  “Trust your old mother, dearie. These are paintings by Master Dallet representing his secret tendencies that he hid from his wife. It’s only natural, considering what they’re about, and her so young and newly wed and all. He had them in storage, and a friend returned them all. See that shiny glaze? It looks just like his portraits. It’s not his poor widow’s fault they’re so suggestive—the poor thing has a right to eke out her pension.”

  Cat gave a wicked laugh. Widow Hull looked again at the bathing picture with her shrewd birdlike eyes, and I took away the sketches because I did not want to see the look on Cat’s face if she caught sight of The Temptation of Eve.

  “It’s the medium you use, isn’t it?” observed Mistress Hull. “It lets the colors shine through. My husband told me about it once when he was drunk. It’s each painter’s secret. My husband was always afraid someone would bribe his apprentices and pirate his. But then, along came Browne, and then Hethe, and he tried to pirate theirs. Yours is especially fine—it makes the colors shine like the stained glass in Saint Paul’s. You’re lucky. If you’re ever really hard up, you can sell the secret of it.”

  “Who’ll buy it from me if the paintings are Master Dallet’s?”

  “Hmm. You’re right—oh, what a tangle it all is. It’s a pity women can’t be Masters.”

  “I couldn’t be one anyway,” I said, thinking of Adam’s torso, which still resembled a sausage, no matter how many ribs I painted on it.

  Spring kept pushing on, with flowering apple trees shining all light and sweet against the rolling gray sky and green blades pushing their way out between the stones of garden walls. I think that painting Eden so much must have drugged my senses, because the idea of color started to take over my mind as if I were drunk. I would just stop sometimes and stare, because I was looking at the exact color of the clouds or the way a mud puddle shines. And all the while I’d be thinking something like what I needed was a good burnt umber, but it costs so high and where can you get the real stuff from Italy and not some fake? Everybody thought I was crazy even in my own house, but really I was just thinking. Nan gave it out that it was the terrible grief, and that made me something of a tragical figure in the neighborhood. Then people would touch their heads with a forefinger as I went by and make clucking sounds, but I hardly had time to enjoy the sensation I made because I was thinking too hard. Also sometimes I forgot to put my clothes on right and once I put my bodice on inside out because I really wasn’t noticing, which made people think I really was crazy. Also dogs followed me because they seemed to think I was a sympathetical figure and sort of wandered the way they do.

  One day I was coming back from the baker’s with a basket of bread on my arm and suddenly I could see the whole street flat as if I were painting it, instead of in depth, with the highlights from the last rain glistening just the way they should be painted on the shiny paving stones where people walk and the dirty mud in the gutter. The half-timbered shops and houses were leaning over the street like friendly ladies having a gossip, and their signs made bright splashes of color like jewelry. People were out, and the burgesses and liverymen in their gaudy colored gowns were picking their way through the ordinary black and russet and dun rabble like fabulous sea monsters in a school of minnows. The shop shutters were up and shopkeepers were leaning out over their counters and some of them even crying their wares into the street when somebody likely came by. It was all very magical and only painting could do it justice, but of course you couldn’t sell it because everyone was clothed.

  Unfortunately, I was so busy looking that I stopped without noticing in front of that awful Goat and Jug, and the dogs all stopped too and sat down around me because I think they wanted a piece of bread, or at least they smelled it. And then a horrible drunk hairy man dressed like a carpenter came out of that low tavern and bowed and said, “Madame Blue-Nose, may I escort you to your palace where you might renew the charcoal on your face?” I stopped and rubbed my face very suddenly, but turned out to be clean, and all his friends who had put him up to it came out and laughed.

  “You should be ashamed to accost a respectable widow like that!” I said, but they laughed again because I was trying to shoo away the dogs who were trying to get my bread. I was furious because he had broken into my seeing, which is even deeper than my thinking. Then all those drunk rowdies laughed and shouted,

  “A widow woman better remarry while she’s got the chance.”

  “Especially before people find out her brain’s gone soft.”

  “Soft brain don’t matter in a woman, ’long as other things ain’t soft.”

  “Is yer cookin’ covered in charcoal, too?” I didn’t even look at them to show that rude comments are beneath me. I just stormed off very angry because they had made the street look ordinary again.

  But inside the shop at the Sign of the Standing Cat wrinkly old Mistress Hull was just beaming, and then she hugged me, and so did Nan and Cat even before I could put down the bread.

  “Good news, wonderful news! We’ve sold Eve Bathing!” cried Nan and Cat.

  “To a horrid old grayfriar with a squint visiting from York. Just think! He’d heard about us from so far away!” Mistress Hull was ecstatic. “First he pretended to be looking at a Christ in Chains, but then he asked if we had any female martyrdoms. Ugh! Just imagine! But you should have seen his eyes light up when I showed him Eve Bathing. He said it would help him contemplate the wickedness of women in bringing about the Fall of Man. I said, ‘Ten shillings, not a penny less.’ He said five. I told him it was a masterwork, and since the painter had died, it was bound to increase in value. He said six. I told him these paintings were in the private collections of some of the highest churchmen in England. Finally I sold it for eight, with two needles and a paper of pins thrown in. Now what would an honest friar be wanting with a paper of pins?”

  “Well, a dishonest friar would be using them to court some married woman with a roving eye,” observed Cat.

  “It’s hard to imagine anyone’s eye roving toward him,” said Nan.

  “Eight shillings—and so soon! How’s that one with the snake coming?”

  “I’ve only just begun it.”

  “Well, hurry, hurry, and we’ll all be rich.” We celebrated that evening with a great big pie that gave me a stomachache that lasted until the next day. But even a stomachache can be inspiring when one is in the painting mood, and that bilious feeling gave me a grand inspiration which made me work with great happiness all day. I mean, since the worst snake I knew was Rowland Dallet, I just decided to put his face on the snake instead of the usual devil’s face and I did it all up in green and it was just delicious. Then of course I just got carried away and hunted through his sketches until I found one I was pretty sure was Mistress Pickering, because it didn’t have a name on it, just “P.” That was certainly sneaky of him, especially after telling me she was deformed and had a terrible birthmark on her face.

  Then I gave that Eve Mistress Pickering’s goggle-eyed face and it was even funnier, because there she was just wallowing with that grotesque old serpent and clasping it to her bosom though I must say she looked rather plump for a poor crippled lady who was supposed to limp. Limp, ha! The serpent’s face which was Rowland Dallet’s was leering at her and she really looked carried away, as if it were a handsome man there instead of a big oozing blackish green snake coiled all over her. That bitten apple rolling away I made a nice shiny red, which drew the eye and was the center of the picture.

  I worked and worked. Father’s landscape never looked better, except that I decided a golden heavenly light on the mountain would not be as good as a thundercloud with some lightning to indicate G
od’s wrath, and that made me feel even better. Sometimes I would stop and wipe the sweat off my forehead and then I really couldn’t help laughing, so I did. But it was really very odd; I thought I heard somebody giggling behind me, or maybe two or three somebodies, and I turned very quickly but I couldn’t see anything but a sort of flash and hear rustling. There was something else sort of odd, but I must have imagined it. I thought I saw something like a child vanishing in that flash, but I guess it was a dream from working too hard.

  “Susanna, Susanna, who’s that in there with you?” I could hear Nan’s voice calling through the studio door.

  “Nobody, come on in. I’ve got the whole thing down, at least the beginning.” Nan came in, and her eyes got really large. “You have to imagine it with the glazes,” I said. “This really just gives you a rough idea.”

  “It’s rough all right. What have you gone and done? That’s Master Dallet’s face on that serpent, sure as fate. And that woman he’s lolling on, that’s Mistress Pickering if I ever did see her.”

  “You saw her, Nan? What about that birthmark and that club foot and all those terrible afflictions that big liar said she had? You knew all about how he was sinning and betraying me and you never even let on. That’s not very nice, you know.”

  “Oh,” she said, looking sad, “I didn’t think you could do anything about it, and if you knew it would have broken your heart, so we all just kept quiet.”

  “We all? Who all? Everybody in the world knew my husband was a scoundrel and a wastrel and a horrible—horrible, seducer, except for me? You are all mean, mean, mean!”

  “No we aren’t. We just tried to spare you. The world thinks nothing of a man who philanders. It just gives him spice. It’s only women that get in trouble. And you—you always take things so seriously. That man was a snake, and I never trusted him.”

  “Then I think I painted him just right,” I said.

  “That you did,” said Nan, and then she looked at the picture some more. “Just look at that brazen woman rolling her eyes,” she said, and started to giggle. “And, Lord, the expression you put on that snake’s face! What I wouldn’t give just to see the look on his face if he were alive to see it! Ha!”

  “I sort of thought it said everything right there,” I said, feeling pleased.

  “Oh, my, oh, my, this is the vulgarest painting I ever did see,” she said, “and I don’t know whether to laugh or to smack you! For shame!” She put her hands over her face, but I could see her shoulders shake. It seemed to me a very good sign that some low-minded person who did not understand the true meaning of the picture, which was a higher meaning about sin and redemption, would probably pay quite a bit for it. But in spite of what Mistress Hull said about selling a lot of them, I really did not think I could ever copy it over with as much energy as the first time because the inspiration of the moment would never be as great again—if you see what I mean.

  Eight

  IT was during the lengthening hours of twilight that two men mounted on mules rode into Lime Street Ward. Here, in a neighborhood where once-fine residences built against the London wall were being converted into tenements, stood the curious, narrow old house of the noted antiquarian, and former knight adventurer, Sir Septimus Crouch. Above the door in a niche stood a strange wooden imp with a toothy grin, and the door knocker was a brass monkey’s head from the olden times. The shutters on the upper story were thrown open, but old-fashioned windows of translucent linen proclaimed the location of the master’s bedroom and study. Crouch was a believer that evening air, if allowed indoors, carried disease.

  The dancing light of a candle could already be seen behind the linen. Sir Septimus was indoors, eagerly studying the muddy fraction of his newly acquired work of ancient wisdom with the aid of an open grimoire. The book, like many from days gone by, was not one, but several useful related volumes collected and copied together for the convenience of the ancient order that had compiled it. Secrets of power, mysteries of the occult, and mystic prophecies were jumbled together in a near-illegible clerical hand.

  At first, Crouch had rejoiced in his possession of the first third of the work. Recipes for divination and the casting of invincible swords were here. The secret mirror of the Roman emperors had whetted his appetite for all that followed: verses of prophecy that foretold of the fall of kings and the rise of a new world empire. And who, who would be its emperor? The one with the secrets, of course—ah, damn, this clerk of the pothooks might as well have written in code…. All the while as he read, like a secret itch at the back of his mind, was the irritating thought that the demon Belphagor, whom he had hoped to have chained in his service for the pursuit of this affair, was flying loose somewhere. He’d hoped to catch him when he became entangled in a body, but something must have warned the damned creature, because he’d slipped out of the one Crouch was sure he’d take just before the demon master arrived. How to pursue the secrets of the book without putting himself to undue physical effort? He’d hoped to be flying across the sea in a sieve by now. Ordinary travel was so damp, so uncomfortable. Crouch did not approve of the uncomfortable.

  The room around him was cramped and cluttered. The antiquity of the house was proclaimed by its slanting floor. Piles of old charts, maps, strange books, caskets with ancient coins and medallions, and curious goblets, lead daggers, and other implements more suited to the practice of magic than practical use stood helter-skelter on the shelves of an open cupboard, on his worktable, on top of an open armoire, and even under the bed, crowding the chamber pot from its place of honor. Before his manuscript, on his worktable, stood a skull and a beautifully made antique silver drinking cup, decorated with obscene figures.

  “Ha, hmm,” Sir Septimus said aloud to himself, shifting his huge bulk in his heavy, cushioned chair and pushing his leather-framed spectacles back up his nose. “This is definitely the Secret. The holy blood—an object—grants absolute power over all of Christendom and the heathen. It is held somewhere by these people—the Priory of Sion. Never heard of ’em. At some point, given what our Clerk of the Illegible Hand hints at in these first verses of prophecy, they will burst forth to reestablish the true dynasty and create an empire such as has never before been seen on earth. Now do they still exist, or is it an allegorical name of some sort? The Helmsman. Hmm. Commands the Priory in its sacred task through centuries. That’s clear enough. If there still is such a fellow. Who could he be? They must have been through several since this book was buried.”

  Crouch got up and poured himself more heavy, sweet wine from a silver flagon on his table. Morosely he stared into the goblet, swirling the wine. The last of the cask and nothing else like it in London. Well, never mind, he would soon enjoy a better, when he advised kings and supervised the rise and fall of empires with the aid of his mirror and the secrets of the book. Never mind that the mirror showed only the conspiracies of the present, not those of the future. The future was all written here. All he had to do was decipher it—that, and get the other two parts of the book into his hands. The Secret wasn’t in his part. Damn! He stood and then began to pace, calling down a thousand curses on that miserable painter, Dallet. He deserved the death he found by Ludlow’s subtle ruse. But it has simplified matters, thought Crouch. Now I need only deal with Ludlow and it will all be in my hands again. Wolsey, what was he? Nothing. Crouch would have the power of the book; Crouch would be the power behind the new throne, the greatest Europe had ever seen. Crouch knew. Crouch had studied. The prophetic verses would bring him at last to the place of eminence he deserved. He sat again and drank, then set himself once more to the task of deciphering his fragment, mumbling to himself the while.

  “Now here in the beginning, the verses predict the fall of the false kings…now which ones are they? There are so many, these days…. Let’s see, this reference is to the demon that governs the French part of hell, hmm, yes, it must be the Capetian dynasty then…which is the dynasty of the True Blood then? Every sign says it is later in the book. And
this other business, ‘the splitting of the oak.’ I can’t make it out at all, though it appears to be important. I need that middle part of the book, and the end. I hope Dallet’s soul is sizzling…” His fist tightened. At that very moment, the monkey’s head clattered on the door below. Crouch listened as the footsteps of his manservant went down to the front door, then hid the fragment of the book beneath a pile of papers.

  The stranger who was shown in was tall, gray haired, dignified, and clad in a foreign doctor’s gown.

  “Maître Bellier, at your service, most esteemed Sieur Crouch.” The stranger’s eye lit on the obscene cup, and a slight, ironic, smile of recognition played across his features. Crouch’s cynical, malignant green eyes did not fail to notice the stranger’s expression. Aha, he thought, how curious. My answer has come. And we are well matched.

  “An ancient art object, a curiosity I have recently acquired,” he said in a falsely genial tone of voice.

  “But of course, Sieur Crouch. I understand that perfectly. That cup is an old friend. There are a number of them in Europe, you know.” The stranger’s face, narrow and intelligent, crinkled up with sly amusement.

  “Why, Maître Bellier, I had no idea. Please do be seated and state your business with me. Are you interested in purchasing rarities? I have many curious objects that might interest you, although the cup is not for sale.”

  “Ah, Sieur Crouch, you have already discovered my purpose. You see, we know that you have stumbled onto the London Hoard.”

  “The London Hoard?” Crouch raised an eyebrow. “Why, I’ve never heard of it.”

  “And you have never heard of the Templars, once masters of great wealth, despoiled of everything by a conspiracy of the King of France and the Pope?”

  “I am a student of history, Maître Bellier. I know well they were found guilty of witchcraft and obscene and diabolical practices during the reign of Philip the Fair, when he was King in France.” At this answer, the stranger leaned forward toward Crouch, speaking in a new tone of intimacy.