Breath and Bones

by Susann Cokal

  In this happy time, Albert and Famke often forgot to eat and usually smelled like each other. When he had been out late in the streets, she washed his feet for him with strong, delicious soap and brought life back to his frozen toes. It was while they were doing this that he told her their Revenge of Nimue was not the first painting on the subject.

  “There is another, called The Beguiling of Merlin,” he said. “I don’t have a print to show you, but I recollect it clear as a summer’s day. The colors are gold and blue. Nimue is reading spells from a book, and the ancient Merlin swoons. Her body is big but it moves like a snake’s, coiling toward him.”

  “Shall there be a book in our picture?” Famke asked.

  “Darling, that is hardly the point. No, my Nimue will be an entirely new composition; I cannot imagine Merlin in a hawthorn bower. Perhaps that is why Burne-Jones’s painting failed.”

  “Who was his model?” Famke asked, rubbing his arches with her thumbs. She hoped it had been Fanny Cornforth, the tavern-girl with hair down to the floor; she had posed for several Brothers and became Dante Rossetti’s mistress.

  “Maria Zambaco, a wild, dark gypsy-woman.”

  “Was she his . . . Did he fokk her?” she asked, reaching for a word the sailors used.

  “Famke!” Albert pretended to be shocked, but he shot her an amused look. “Well, yes. She wanted him to leave his wife for her.”

  “But he didn’t,” Famke guessed. She pushed the basin aside and began rubbing Albert’s feet with a rough towel.

  “No, even though Mrs. Burne-Jones was being courted by William Morris . . . Ouch, darling, not so rough. His wife, Jane, is said to have been entangled with Rossetti after Lizzie Siddal died.”

  “Fanden,” Famke said, “are all of your Brotherhood loving one another’s wives?”

  “Not everyone in the circle is like that,” he said, in a tone she would have thought priggish from a Danish man. He held out his feet, dry now, so she could slide them into heavy wool socks. “There are men of great honor and women of great virtue.”

  Famke’s cheeks reddened at the thought of virtue. “There are women in the Brotherhood?” she asked innocently.

  “Yes, there are women. Some of them even fancy themselves artists,” he added, again in that priggish tone. “Rossetti tried to teach Lizzie to paint. Even Maria Zambaco, the earlier Nimue, takes up the brush from time to time, and she has a friend who makes photographs. But most of the true ladies are content to give quiet support. Euphemia Millais, for example, has been her husband’s mainstay—since she divorced Ruskin . . .”

  Famke could not repress a snort. A divorce caused by private hairs.

  “Well,” Albert concluded, gazing at his warm feet in satisfaction, “that divorce was quite a cause célèbre, but Millais says he’d be nothing without her. And there are other virtuous women. Georgiana Burne-Jones has remained loyal to her husband, and their daughter, Margaret, is quite lovely.”

  As Famke carried the basin to the window, she noticed that although Albert referred to the male painters by their last names, he felt on first-name terms with the women. She glimpsed, fleetingly, a time when the two of them, Albert and herself, would be known as Castle and his Famke. She thought she could be content as the quiet support in the background of his life, if she could be the chief figure in his paintings. And if he would leave the Brothers’ wives alone.

  On Christmas Day, Albert announced it almost shyly: “Darling, come down from your platform. I believe you are complete.”

  He had finished the figural work.

  Famke stepped slowly from the pedestal, struggling with a dual sense of loss and happiness. She had dreaded the day when Albert would not need her to pose—but what a marvel he had made of her! When she looked at the canvas, she saw herself, every bit as beautiful as she wanted to be: eyes like two sapphires, lips like two rubies, skin luminous as a pearl. The fiery hair crackling down her back, the strength of her arms and legs showing through the icy net of nightdress—Famke almost pitied the poor wizard who must, she thought, stand a few feet beyond the farthest reaches of the canvas, where she and Albert were standing now.

  Albert breathed: “It is . . . yes, perfect.”

  He looked about to dash out for one of his mad runs; so to hold him where he was, Famke said that the picture did not quite capture her: If he were truly to paint life’s every detail, he would break with convention and show the hair Down There.

  Albert took this with good humor. “Hush, hush, Miss Famke,” he chided, ruffling up the hair in question and sending her into a fit of giggles. “You know we must retain our icy cloud. But here’s a thought! Perhaps you will understand better if you become a painter yourself. I shall make you my apprentice”—he smiled—“as Merlin did with Nimue.”

  It was the finest gift he knew of, and it would more than compensate for the little wood-framed mirror she had given him the night before. He put a brush in her hand and wrapped her fingers around the handle in a way she considered awkward.

  “But I have never painted,” she said, staring down at it. “Ellers, I’ve painted only fences and the goose pen, all in white—er, white—”

  “Whitewash,” he said, pushing her up the ladder. “So then you can paint ice . . . Mind your skirt, darling, we don’t want you to trip; perhaps you should take off the nightdress . . . Here, you may start with this corner. Only try—remember, many English ladies paint.”

  “I am not a lady,” she said, but she let herself be pushed.

  “Ladies paint in watercolor anyway,” he said, and his argument was so nearly logical that she capitulated and put a tiny, all but invisible dot of pale blue in the farthest reach of the left-hand corner.

  Behind her on the ladder, he praised the dot extravagantly. “That’s splendid, that’s really wonderful! Such sensitivity, such finesse—you are a born artist. In that little spot you have captured an eternal truth about the nature of ice, about its essence and symbolic weight in human and natural history . . .”

  “Stop!” She laughed as his hands reached up, caressing first her bottom, then her waist, then dipping into that controversial thatch of hair. “I must concentrate on my art!”

  That day she made two dots more before Albert pulled her off the ladder he’d so insistently pushed her up. He took her to bed, where both were very happy.

  Over the next days, Famke discovered that she liked painting. Albert seemed genuinely grateful for her help with the dreary ice, especially as she was willing to lay the base of blue-white and mottle it over while he walked the streets in search of breakfast or inspiration. She was careful to keep her brushstrokes as smooth and flat as the white gesso, and enjoyed squeezing the clean-smelling paint from its metal tubes—rather like milking a cow, she thought at first; then, when more practiced, like holding a girl’s breast so long that a drop emerged. The very thought made Famke retire for a moment to bed. This is a cottager coming home to warm himself . . . This is a fish . . . This is a paintbrush grinding a pearl.

  When Albert came home, he did the finer work, adding nuance to the ice, a bubble or a flower here, a crack or a worm there, more of the reddish glow that signified not only Nimue’s magic but her virginal anger as well. Soon the canvas was finished.

  Albert bought wide strips of gilded walnut for a frame, then proceeded to bury the gilding under a thick layer of more painted flowers and butterflies. He could hardly wait till the paint was dry before he fit the frame around the canvas—up into the very peak of the roof—and laid a thick coat of varnish over the whole.

  “While Nimue dries,” he proposed, “I should do some smaller pictures. Maybe the Amazon Queen Calafia. Or perhaps Flora, goddess of springtime, as we still have those silk flowers; or Salome, if we can borrow Mrs. Strand’s brass platter. What do you think, darling—are you prepared to surrender the brush and pose for me again?”

  Famke dared a sly suggestion: “Perhaps,” she said, “you could paint John Ruskin on his wedding night, seeing the whol
e truth of a woman.”

  Albert smiled at that but said, “We have no one to pose for the male figure. No, I think we shall try Salome.”

  So she stood before Albert again, draped in filmy veils torn from Nimue’s nightdress, with the brass platter reflecting back her own face instead of John the Baptist’s. She smiled and smiled, gazing at that honeyed image.

  Kapitel 6

  If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

  WILLIAM MORRIS,

  THE BEAUTY OF LIFE

  Finally, the great day came: Nimue was ready to descend to earth. It was the middle of March, the ice in the harbors had all but vanished, and Albert’s father expected him in England. The paint and the sealing layer of varnish had dried to his satisfaction, so there was no reason to delay. Thus, despite what he’d come to think of as an artistic idyll with Famke, he had bought a ticket that would bring him home on time.

  “I did not know it would be so soon,” Famke repeated, day after day, until Albert asked her to stop.

  Her lover had larger concerns. Exactly how was it possible to remove a six-by-eight-foot assemblage from an attic with a winding stair? He refused to break down the frame and roll up the canvas; that might crack Nimue’s paint and would surely ruin the harmonious whole. He finally decided to remove the glass from two windows, cut away the wood between them, and lower the painting in the manner of a piano. He engaged the finest box-maker in Copenhagen to prepare a crate and deliver it below on the day of departure. Meanwhile, Famke, bereft and occasionally indulging in a sob, sewed a wrapping of fine linen over the whole piece.

  On the day itself, Albert hired a team of the soberest sailors he could find to handle both the demolition and the lowering. He stood down in the street with an umbrella to ward off the splinters of glass and wood, and he shouted instructions, which Famke translated into Danish as an amused crowd started to assemble. Several of the neighbors were already drunk and ready to laugh at ten in the morning. The landlady, Fru Strand, was drunk, too, and in a stupor; so it wasn’t until all the windows were broken and the wood supports gaping like a toothless mouth that she came boiling into the street to give Albert a what-for. As she raged, he nodded politely, most of his mind on the work above: The sailors had roped up his linened Nimue and were pushing her over the jagged edge. Albert still didn’t speak a word of Danish.

  “Lay some blankets on the sills!” he screeched, and Famke had to translate. For good measure, she also offered Albert’s apologies to Fru Strand, but the woman’s protests didn’t halt until Albert shoved enough Kroner at her to buy new glass for every window in the building, and for a good long soak in her favorite beer-hall. At that, she stood back and watched with the rest of the crowd as the well-cushioned canvas slid stiffly toward them, then lurched over the edge and caught with a jolt on the ropes. The linen covering billowed like a sail. Famke’s stitches were loose, and they had torn on the broken glass; so as the picture descended the linen peeled away, until around the building’s second floor it blew off entirely and Famke was exposed in her near-naked, seven-foot-tall glory.

  The sailors whistled and threw their elfin hoods in the air. The prostitutes stamped. A passing housewife looked scandalized, despite Famke’s cobweb of ice Down There.

  Famke knew she should blush, but she was much too pleased with the effect—she’d never seen the picture from far enough away to appreciate it fully, and she realized again in this moment that it was splendid, very like her and yet far more beautiful than she could ever be. She whirled and flung her arms around Albert, her lips on his lips.

  It was the last kiss they would exchange. Albert put her firmly from him and shouted more instructions to the sailors, and Famke had to translate again. “To the right!” he called; and “Til højre!” she echoed.

  “Careful!”

  “Pas på!”

  “She’s not some clunking sea chest!”

  Famke thought for a moment and told the sailors, “Elsk hende som en Kvinde . . . ” Love her like a woman.

  Albert’s ship was sailing from the old harbor in less than an hour. He pulled out his watch and glared at it with bulging eyes, a gesture that worked in any language. Famke shivered as the wind grew colder.

  “I’ll have to have the linen resewn on board,” he muttered, tossing the loops and strips up over the frame as it slid into its slender crate.

  Up until the last moment, Famke hoped Albert would ask her to come with him. But even in their happiest time together, he had said nothing about doing so; and why should he? She was just a model, and he had important things to accomplish in London; things that required not a model but a sharp, clear head for business. She would only be a burden.

  Famke had reasoned all of this out in the last days, but even as she accepted a generous purse as a parting gift, and even as she watched the nails driven into the picture’s box, watched Albert climb with his bag onto the hearse that was the only carriage big enough to transport Nimue, and watched him drive off with a casual wave of his hat—well, she kept hoping.

  “Tell me how it goes with the Academy exhibition!” she called after him, and she thought she heard him shout back in assent.

  It took a long time for Albert to disappear. The traffic was thick, and everyone wanted to get a look at the foreigner escorting the long, flat coffin. A couple of serving-girls even gave him a flirtatious titter, and he flicked his hat again in grudging pleasure. Famke pulled her shawl over her mouth. And at last the crowds and other carriages swallowed him up.

  When he was well and truly gone, Famke trudged up the stairs she’d so often flown up with a fragrant dinner or some other little token for her lover. Fru Strand’s wrath had renewed as Albert disappeared, and she dogged Famke’s steps.

  “Good window glass, to say nothing of the wall, and now I’m left to find workers to replace it all in dead of winter!

  “Coming and going all hours of the day and night, and banging the doors each time . . .

  “You told me he was gentry, but I never saw it . . .”

  At last they reached the studio, now open to elements that included the stiff breeze that would soon bear Albert away. They found the cheap clothes closet in fragments, Famke’s few garments scattered over the floor.

  Fru Strand crossed her arms over her beer-stained bosom. “I’ll never rent to artists again,” she said.

  Albert had meant to leave Famke enough money to get through the spring, but he hadn’t bargained on Fru Strand. She was not used to lodging single females, and though she didn’t mind the sailors’ occasional cohabitation, she very much minded the suspicion of housing a prostitute. Famke protested that she was no such thing, and that she and Albert were married; indeed, as Fru Strand grudgingly admitted, Famke never received a single visitor, man or woman. Nonetheless, guessing that Famke had some means and wasn’t going anywhere while they lasted, Fru Strand began to chip away at the girl’s modest hoard.

  “Your . . . husband,” she said one day, hesitating over the word just long enough to make her point, “nå, he didn’t leave enough for the windows.”

  It was useless for Famke to argue; there was no one to back her up, and Fru Strand could, with little trouble to herself, have had her thrown into the street. So Famke handed over the sum demanded. Of course the glass did not materialize; Famke dwelt in the darkness of boards nailed over the huge hole Albert had left, and she paid through the nose for candles.

  Another time, Fru Strand announced that Famke had fallen behind in the rent.

  “I’m certain Albert paid up till summer,” Famke protested.

  But Fru Strand shook her head. “I’ve seen this sort of thing before,” she said with crafty kindness—the girl was young, she thought, and a little sympathy goes a long way with those who have recently left their parents. “Do not think you are the first girl to have been used and left in the lurch. Just be grateful it’s only a fe
w Kroner you lack—thank God he didn’t leave you missing your monthlies.”

  Silently, Famke laid the money in the beer-stained palm.

  “I am right, am I not?” Fru Strand asked, hovering on the threshold. “He didn’t leave a bit behind, did he?”

  “No,” Famke snapped, her hand on the doorknob. “He did not!”

  It was a pleasure to slam the rickety thing in Strand’s disappointed face. And to know she now had every right to stay until mid-May, if she wanted to.

  No, Albert had left precious little of himself behind. She had done his packing and knew very well that, except for the tinderbox he’d given her and the sketch he’d used to woo her, she’d been scrupulous about returning everything he’d ever touched or used. She had even returned the bits of costume he’d assembled for her to wear in some of his tableaux: Nimue’s filmy shift, Calafia’s tin sword and the shield she’d used to hide her missing breast, the shiny tears shed by the love goddess Freya when her husband lost himself among the nine Norse worlds. Freya had wept liquid gold; all Famke had had were a handful of spangles she’d stuck on with Albert’s pomade, and even those were now rattling in one of his trouser pockets.

  For the most part she avoided intercourse with the outside world. While she wasn’t with Albert, she would be alone; she would wait. But one day, drawn by curiosity as much as by the idea of making some money, Famke roused herself to visit the Royal Academy of Art. Her pulse fluttering with nervous excitement, she presented herself as a professional model, and as it happened one of the life-drawing classes needed a girl that very day. Famke disrobed and sat as the instructor told her to do, with her knees pulled to her chest and head bowed, her neck and spine exposed. It was a relatively easy pose. When the students filed in she peeked around a kneecap and searched their faces eagerly: Perhaps, she thought, there would be another Albert among them—not a replacement, for no one could replace him, but someone with the same sort of vision. Maybe several such someones.