by John Moss
“He wasn’t modest, was he?” Miranda observed.
“Who?”
“Magnificent Lorenzo. Who was Simonetta in her own right?”
“The model for Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, somewhat idealized, I would think,” said Alexander.
“She’s lovely, fragile, and vacuous,” said Rachel. “Appropriate for Venus arising, newborn but fully mature, generated from the cast-off testicles of a truculent god.”
“Uranus, I believe, at the hands of his son, Cronus the Titan.” Alexander spoke as if he were merely providing a reminder for a story he assumed everyone knew.
Miranda was astonished at the level of discourse. She had a general knowledge of art, gleaned mostly from reading Christmas gift-books like Sister Wendy’s The Story of Painting, but these two seemed comfortable with fifteenth-century aesthetics as a topic of casual conversation. She was especially surprised by Alexander. She knew Rachel had spent a summer studying in Florence, but how had Alexander managed to assimilate such knowledge into his capacious, undisciplined mind? No, she thought, that’s Morgan. Alexander’s mind is large, but it is quaint and orderly. She had vague recollections of him talking about art school, long before he took up reconstruction, reclamation, renovation, authentic reproduction, and the like.
Restoration. She added that to her list: art restoration. For his project in Beausoleil, Ontario, of course, he would have to know about plaster and painting in Renaissance Italy.
“Are you listening?” Rachel said, nudging Miranda out of her quizzical reverie. “I’m talkin’ here.”
“Yeah. Botticelli, Venus.”
“Right, but I think Sister Marie’s other faces come from ‘The Allegory of Springtime’ — the Primavera.”
“Do tell us,” said Alexander Pope, like a teacher examining a prodigal student.
“Okay,” she said in a voice suggesting she was fully prepared for the occasion. “Panel two, the annunciation imminent. The face is Flora in the Primavera, strangely lusty and fearful, gazing upward at the warm wind of spring. Picture the painting in your mind. Picture the frescoes. In the third panel there are two versions of Sister Marie; on one side she’s prostrate, her face turned away like the centre of Botticelli’s Three Graces, and on the other she’s enraptured, staring up at the Virgin Mary in wonder. She’s the Grace on the left, representing ecstatic desire. The fourth panel shows the face of Venus offering silent benediction. The final panel shows Sister Marie as Flora, again, now fecund with spring, an earth nymph transformed to goddess and the most beautiful, sensual face ever painted. What better way to arise into Heaven than satiated with sex and surrounded by flowers?”
Miranda turned to Alexander. “How’d she do?”
“Excellent,” he said. “I couldn’t have done better myself.”
Miranda looked from one to the other. Despite Rachel’s demand for Miranda’s attention, possibly Rachel had meant to impress Alexander Pope with her explication and Miranda was merely a witness. Rachel and Alexander sat quietly for a moment, eying each other, perhaps also trying to assess their relative roles in the rhetorical drama.
Alexander smiled, leaned across the table, and squeezed Rachel’s hand. She turned it over and responded with a brief squeeze of her own, then withdrew it. Miranda felt excluded again, and yet was impressed with them both. Rachel, for her casual erudition, and Alexander, for his forbearance. He, after all, had been listening to an interpretation of a monumental work of art that was as close to being his own creation as if he had painted the frescoes himself.
chapter fifteen
Lakeshore Road
Morgan found himself behind the wheel of a police car in the small hours of early morning, driving east along Highway 401, without being quite certain why. He had awakened from a restless sleep in a cold sweat, at first thinking the telephone had been ringing and it must be Miranda. Out of the darkness the surge of a diffuse premonition that Miranda was in danger had taken hold. He had no idea why he was driving to Port Hope instead of Beausoleil or Penetanguishene, but he knew that somehow, in his sleep, apprehension for his partner’s safety had coalesced around Alexander Pope. It was no longer a matter of murders unsolved; there was an urgency to get inside the man’s mind. Where better for that than in the man’s home, especially when Pope wasn’t there?
He knew there was a connection between these feelings of dread and the fax from London that had come through just before he left headquarters for the night. Scotland Yard was reopening their inquiry into the Renaud’s murders. Their medical examiners were convinced the cadavers under their wax veneers predated original assumptions by a number of years. Forensic identification of the bodies verified their revised findings. They wanted Morgan to suggest an alternate timeline in Shelagh Hubbard’s career. Might she have been in London earlier than previously supposed, perhaps working at Madame Renaud’s in some anonymous capacity that would have given her access to the facilities but left no records of her presence?
That seemed something more likely to be determined in London. A quick check through her file, the very same file that had been forwarded to Scotland Yard more than a month previous, suggested she had pursued an academic career on the fast track without a break between doctoral studies at Oxford, a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of London, and her appointment at the wax museum. Renaud’s had no record of her employment there before the dates indicated in her journal. Her undergraduate and masters work in Vancouver, at the University of British Columbia, combined with her relative age at each stage of her evolving career, left no time for earlier employment in any capacity whatsoever in the Chamber of Horrors. He had faxed back, suggesting the arcane procedures of post-mortem preparation might have contaminated the normal measures determining time of death.
He also suggested they switch to email and, on a hunch, he requested a scan of Madame Renaud’s employment records extending back at least ten years. There might be anomalies Scotland Yard wouldn’t see.
Drifting into a troubled sleep, he had been thinking about Shelagh Hubbard, but he woke up with Alexander Pope looming in his mind. Pope would be the key to resolving the anomalies of Shelagh Hubbard’s activities among the perpetual dead. His first thought had been to call Miranda. He couldn’t call her. She had declared with conviction that she was going to leave her cellphone at home.
“We’re going camping, Morgan. No phone —”
“No pool, no pets.”
“You get the idea. I haven’t been inside a tent since I was a student.”
“Yeah, I knew that. I think I did.” Sometimes when she told him things, he was not sure whether he’d heard them before, or whether the cadence of her voice was so familiar it only seemed like he had.
A surprising number of trucks were competing for space on the road. A succession of eighteen wheelers roared up behind him and veered into the passing lane at the last moment. He was driving above the speed limit. He was thinking.
He tried to imagine Alexander Pope as a sinister figure — the villain in a strangely elusive drama, perhaps by Shakespeare, perhaps Hitchcock. He didn’t fit. In spite of Morgan’s apprehension about the danger inherent in Miranda’s relationship with Pope, Morgan found the man too much absorbed in his own predilections to be a proactive scoundrel. Shelagh Hubbard, in comparison, fit the bill to a T. She frightened him, even now, after death. It wasn’t the crimes; mostly, it was how he had been manipulated in a gruesome entertainment where he didn’t know the rules, where he wasn’t even sure of the game. He had been played for a fool.
The thought of Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, reducing her ridiculous admirer to ruin, and of Mildred in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, how she led her lover into the depths of despair. These images skirted along the edge of his mind, drawing him into their company. Yet, he saw those doomed men as victims in scenarios crafted by misogynous men, while he had been the victim of his own emotional ambivalence.
He loved women. He wanted to be free, he wanted to
be loved — but the two seemed incompatible. Mutually exclusive desires. Himself, alone, caught between.
He thought about Lucy as he turned off the 401 on the outskirts of Port Hope. She had drawn him inexorably into an abyss of anguish, and yet, strangely, he missed her in his life. No, what he missed was the intensity of his unhappiness; the way, like the pain of a phantom limb, she had reminded him of what wasn’t there.
Morgan clambered out of the car, admired the looming outlines of Alexander Pope’s house etched against the predawn sky, and made his way to the side door with its antique lock, which he managed to pick open in seconds. The house was huge inside — larger than he had expected from its outside dimensions — and rambling, despite the severe exterior. There were country antiques everywhere and he could not tell in the dull light of early morning which were original and which were what Alexander Pope described as “authentic reproductions.” Running his hands over a sideboard with raised panels, he thought he could feel something in the wood suggesting it was new, despite the layers of chipped and worn paint with oxblood showing through like wounds. It did not have the feel of old wood — it felt cool and dense. If it was a fake, though, it was, to his eye, brilliantly accomplished.
Lying everywhere against the walls and on top of tables and hutches were odds and ends of forged iron and articulated wood that spoke of pioneer life now as remote as the most ancient of times. He realized in a brief thought that he had no more access to his own heritage than the people on Rapa Nui had to theirs. Less, in fact, for although they might not fully understand their cultural legacy, they lived among its monuments, they replicated historical texts they could no longer read, and honoured the past in ways we have forgotten how to do.
He became annoyed with himself for dawdling; nothing would have pleased him more than to linger over each artifact and item of furniture, and to explore the interior spaces of the house itself. But working against that was a diffuse sense of urgency about Miranda’s well-being and a more immediate concern with being arrested for break-and-enter.
It was still too dark to see clearly, so Morgan decided to run the risk of turning on lights — which, of course illuminated the diverse colours of the painted furniture and made him yearn to examine each piece more closely. He forced himself to keep moving through what seemed like a vast wunderkammern, a live-in cabinet of curiosities. He found two studies, one on the main floor off the central hallway and one upstairs, adjoining the master bedroom. The downstairs study was an office and general workspace, with building plans and business files strewn casually about. The upstairs study was even more cluttered and much more personal. This was obviously Pope’s sanctum sanctorum, where only the most intimate of visitors would likely be admitted.
On display were private mementos, including clusters of photographs on a massive corkboard, numerous framed pictures and diplomas, souvenirs of extensive travel. Innumerable books littered the floor, obscuring the patterns of antique Persian carpets. As soon as Morgan entered the room, he felt he was being intrusive. That was what made him sure it was the best place to start his search. Whatever it was he was looking for, it was here.
He slumped down in a leather armchair and gazed around, taking inventory. The carpets overlapped with casual eloquence but the paintings on the walls were Renaissance reproductions. There were two works of Japanese calligraphy, done with the florid discipline of a master. The framed photographs were in pairs, the left ones of log and clapboard houses as crumbling derelicts and the right ones of the same houses rebuilt as showpieces, looking more authentic than they might have appeared to their original owners. He got up and walked about, circling, as he often did, registering everything, waiting for his gathering perceptions to give up a pattern, a revelation, something he could work with. Outside, the sky was taking on colour. The stars had faded with the promise of morning. Turning away from the window, Morgan scanned the constellations of photographs pinned to the corkboard.
Reflections on a familiar face caught his eye. Partially covered by several other pictures was a snapshot of Rachel Naismith in a country setting. He removed the picture from the board, expecting to see Miranda as well. It must have been taken when they were here in the spring. No, he thought, the background was the green of summer. They were here in March or early April. He held the picture into the light. It was a bit worn and faded. Rachel looked younger. Squinting, he recognized in the background a hill town in Tuscany, and the distinctive square towers of San Gimignano.
He scanned the other photographs on the board more carefully and found another of Rachel, this time rubbing the nose of the famous bronze boar in the Straw Market in Florence. Behind it there was a duplicate picture, only someone else was rubbing the bronze. He squinted. It was Shelagh Hubbard. Behind that was another, the same, only this time it showed Alexander Pope with the boar’s snout under curled fingers as if he were subduing a wild beast.
Methodically, Morgan began removing the photographs, which at some points were layered in clusters three and four deep. He was no longer concerned about leaving behind signs of his illicit search. He could feel his heart pounding and he had to consciously steady his hands. He lifted a framed photo from the wall and tilted it to the light.
Rachel had mentioned her interest in art as a student at Western. It was a long reach from London on the Ontario Thames to Florence on the Arno. But there she was, in a photograph lost among the pictures of reclaimed Ontario buildings, standing by the wall at riverside, with the Ponte Vecchio in the background looking more like a quaint architectural accident than a bridge. Her dark features were difficult to make out against the dazzling light of the Florentine sky. Beside her was a blond woman, Shelagh Hubbard, whose pale features were equally obscured by the brightness of the sun. It was an odd picture, and yet charming, with the ambiance of the city on full display.
As he expected, Morgan found a photograph with Rachel and Shelagh together. They were standing arm in arm like a couple of honeymooners in the Piazza del Duomo, posing near one of the Baptistery doors by Lorenzo Ghiberti, the “Gates of Paradise.” As myriad explanations swarmed through his mind, he could not help but respond to the beauty of the city that had brought this improbable threesome together. It must have been five or six years ago. Morgan had been there fifteen years before that. As personal memories surfaced, he suppressed them. This had to do with Miranda. How did she fit into the picture?
Rifling through the remaining photographs, Morgan found a Polaroid snap by a street photographer taken in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. Alexander Pope’s long arms were casually draped over each woman’s shoulders, drawing them close to his side. The intimacy of their embrace seemed to Morgan a public celebration that the three of them were lovers. In his mind, however, the images of four people, not three, wheeled in freefall as he struggled to assimilate their possible relationships.
Morgan scanned the room with renewed diligence. He reached out and touched the surface of a painting with his fingertips. What he had taken as reproductions were original copies. Several were in the style of Botticelli. All were of heads only, as if the artist had no interest in the subject matter. Alexander Pope had refined his skills with colour and style in Florence. Had he also perfected the art of the fresco?
As he was leaving the room, Morgan braced for a moment against the door frame to soak in as much as possible of what he was seeing. As he looked about, he ran his fingers along the spines of books at eye level on the shelves nearest the door. His hand stopped over several familiar volumes. He turned to look at them more closely. They were the same blue colour as Shelagh Hubbard’s journals, the same size, more like binders than books. Inhaling deeply, he withdrew one and opened it, finding, as he expected, blocks of passages in her handwriting, interspersed with familiar pen sketches, all in black ink, detailing aspects of the Madame Renaud’s murders. He quickly opened another volume and discovered what seemed an exact duplicate of her journal describing Morgan’s intended fate as a pile of desiccated bones
in a Huron burial mound. The final volume inevitably offered a duplicate account of the Hogg’s Hollow tableau with the same sketches and horrifically clinical descriptions.
On closer examination, these seemed to be practice copies, as if Shelagh Hubbard had done them in preparation for the final edition that he and Miranda had found at her farm. There was another blue binder lying flat on the same shelf. It was not as large, but much thicker. Morgan opened it and saw immediately that it was a collection of handwriting exercises and practice sketches all in the same black ink as the other three binders. The journals found at the farm were done in various inks, suggesting that they had been written over an extended period of time. He glanced up at the wall on the other side of the door. The framed calligraphy was done in black ink. Written neatly in Roman script on the lower right corner of each was the name Rachel Naismith and a date.
Morgan sat down in the big armchair. Had Rachel forged Shelagh Hubbard’s journals? Had she written them in the first place? For the final versions did she use a variety of inks to create the illusion of authenticity? Handwriting analysis had not been done on the volumes found at the farm. A cursory comparison with Hubbard’s academic notes seemed sufficient verification of authenticity, since their authorship was never in doubt. Now it appeared, in all probability, Rachel Naismith, with the collusion of Alexander Pope, had created both sets. How much of the content were they responsible for? Was there a possibility Shelagh was innocent?
He rose abruptly and picked up the photograph of the three of them together in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. Now what he saw in their eyes was not a play of possession or submission but the sinister glee of conspirators. He looked again. Conspiracy? Lust? It was simply a street photographer’s snapshot of three friends — probably, by their demeanour, summer residents not tourists, leaning against each other in a piazza in the heart of the city.
Morgan set the picture down on the countertop with the others and shuffled them into neat, random piles. They would be there when he returned with a warrant, once things fell into place. He snapped off the light and was surprised that the room remained fully illuminated. The sun was well over the horizon; the day had begun.
