Breath and Bones

by Susann Cokal

  If he were to be truthful, he would say this canvas was even worse than when she began.

  “What do you mean by ‘professional’?” Famke asked, with perspiration beginning to bead on her brow. “You mean the style of those who paint for hire, to the client’s orders, without inspiration?”

  Edouard blinked. “I merely referred to a certain . . . polish that is lacking here.”

  “I can’t varnish it yet,” she protested. “We have to wait till the paint is dry!”

  “It is not the varnish,” Edouard said stiffly. “It is the color—garish. It is the lines—exaggerated.” When she continued to stare at him expectantly, he burst out, “This Hygeia looks as if she is—That is, she is not entirely the model of—”

  “So you don’t like her,” she said, holding herself as still as a stone.

  “The picture is not ready to hang.” Now Edouard would not look at it or at her. Beachly had been wrong to buy this canvas, and it was his own fault that the thing had only got worse. “The truth, Miss Summerfield, is that there are certain elements of this composition that make it inappropriate for—for ladies and children—”

  Suddenly Famke coughed. She turned her head so that she wouldn’t spray the canvas; but this was a normal cough, no blood, and for a moment Edouard congratulated himself on what he had accomplished with her cure. She was his masterwork.

  Even so, the cough was of long duration, and it so weakened her that she dropped to her knees at Hygeia’s feet.

  “I know—what you—mean to say,” she gasped. “Her—hairs—”

  “True . . . Such things are generally not painted,” Edouard said, fumbling for a handkerchief; for there were tears on Miss Summerfield’s cheeks, and he was not sure if they came from the cough or her emotions. “Perhaps you have not been properly exposed to artwork before.” He shuddered to think what horrors her brother, painter of the first disastrous Hygeia, might have committed to canvas elsewhere.

  “But I have,” she said. She ignored the handkerchief he held out. “I have seen more paintings in one year than you have seen in your entire life of living here. And this is what I think is art.” She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and said, “Anyway, you see those hairs every day. You see me.”

  Edouard felt himself growing warm, and then sickened with a lurch of shame instilled by the religion in which he’d been raised and of which this painting had unfortunately reminded him. He saw those red hairs again in his mind’s eye and grew even warmer. “But that is for medical treatment,” he said, rather too loudly. Like a proper clinician, he bent knifelike at the waist, then knelt and dabbed her nose with the handkerchief. “What is appropriate to medicine is unacceptable in entertainment. You may have had the best of intentions—” He stopped.

  When he bent so clumsily, he’d brushed the peg holding the muslin used to cover the canvas at night. While he spoke, the fabric drifted slowly down, and now the end of it settled on the crown of Famke’s head. The rest swirled away to tangle at her feet, and with the two of them on their knees, Edouard felt as if they were at an altar.

  His heart pounded. He imagined he were about to place his lips on hers and thereby seal a pact. “You are—ill,” he said, taking refuge once more in medicine.

  Famke’s eyes sank slowly shut, then opened halfway as the blood drained from her face. For once, she appeared to agree with him. “I need to rest,” she said, in a feeble voice. But she shrank from his arms, wrapped herself in that muslin drape, and added, “I can walk there myself. You should leave me now.”

  Edouard felt he could do nothing but obey.

  Birgit twisted the ring on her finger, the one that had marked her, at age eighteen, as a bride of Christ. She had lost some weight lately, and the ring was loose; she would have to wrap it in string to make sure it did not slip off her finger.

  “Sister,” Father Absalom said loudly, on a note of rebuke. The nuns sitting behind him were rigid and still, their faces blank. They would model their behavior, as their attitudes, on his.

  “I am sorry, Father.” Birgit folded her hands and drew a deep, painful breath; in addition to her other problems, she suspected she had contracted a fever. “What do you wish to ask me?”

  She had already confessed to him in private, and her fate was decided, if not yet revealed to her. But it was necessary now to make a second confession to the nuns’ council so that she might serve as an example to others tempted to err; and the confession would be extracted in the form of a catechism.

  Father Absalom asked, “Were you aware of the girl’s immoral past when you sent her to Herr Skatkammer?”

  “Yes,” she admitted steadily.

  “But you secured this employment and vouched for her good character nonetheless?”

  “Yes.”

  “And why did you do this?”

  “Because I am fond of her, Father.”

  There was a silence as this crime sank into the minds of the assembled nuns. No one seemed surprised; truth to tell, it was hard to blame a sister for feeling affection. The lie about Famke’s virtue was more serious, but still none of them expected terrible consequences from it.

  Father Absalom’s tone became somber as he spread a page of writing paper on the table before him. “The letter I have received makes another accusation about your dealings with this girl. Do you know what it is?”

  Birgit coughed and then said, “Yes, Father, for you have shown it to me. Herr Skatkammer’s housekeeper accuses me of being Famke’s mother in body as well as spirit.”

  Now some of the nuns could not repress a shiver. They were astonished at how frankly, how calmly Birgit repeated the accusation. What could that mean?

  “Are you the girl’s mother?”

  “No,” said Birgit, “I am not. When she was abandoned at Immaculate Heart, I had been among the sisters for more than a year. Sister Casilde can testify to my virtue and to the fact that I had not been outside the convent walls in that time.”

  “There is no record showing precisely when you arrived. And Sister Casilde is ill in bed.”

  “But when she recovers, she will tell you I speak the truth.”

  This, however, was unlikely; for as everyone assembled there knew, Sister Casilde was old enough to have slipped back into childhood, and her memory was most unreliable. There were no others left from the bygone days.

  “And how do you explain the word pinned to the infant’s blanket—a word in Swedish, and you the only sister who could translate it?”

  Birgit spread her hands and felt the ring slide again. “Many Swedish women came to Denmark to deliver; it was the one place they did not need to give their names to the midwives. I was not such a woman—it is impossible to think I could be. As I told you, I had not been outside the convent in over a year.”

  Father Absalom waited.

  The nuns pushed their ears from their wimples to listen.

  Sister Birgit would say no more.

  .5.

  LA BELLE DAME

  SANS MERCI

  I see a lily on thy brow

  With anguish moist and fever dew,

  And on thy cheeks a fading rose

  Fast withereth too.

  JOHN KEATS,

  “LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI”

  Chapter 47

  Among the prospering industries of the Pacific Coast, one of the most interesting and profitable is that of putting up various articles of food and delicacies in cans and other vessels, for preservation and shipment.

  MOSES KING,

  KING’S HANDBOOK OF THE UNITED STATES

  Mankind’s hopes are fragile glass, and life is therefore also short,” Edouard read out loud. This was the motto, much quoted by his father, that had been carved over the doorway of the miniature Taj Mahal; it never failed to arouse deep thoughts in Edouard as he entered the white marble chamber where his parents lay side by side. The lives of Berthe and Edouard Versailles, père, had indeed been short, their deaths (one of phthisis, one principa
lly of grief) long; but there was some solace in the thought of their embalmment, which was guaranteed to preserve the bodies perfectly for ten years and slow the corruptive process dramatically even after that. By that reckoning, his father had a year or two of fleshly splendor left, while his mother’s mortal coil must long since have begun to sink into her coffin’s silk lining. Edouard, however, still envisioned her as she had been when the coffin was nailed shut: her lips red, smiling as if in relief, the thin auburn hair waving off her brow, white hands clasped comfortably beneath her breasts, which the mortician had kindly restored to pre-consumptive fullness by means of strategically wadded tissue paper.

  Edouard left the iron door open and pulled a chair into the streak of moonlight that reached into the mausoleum. It was a fine arrangement for meditation; luminous even at midnight, the tomb had all the sanctity of the Catholic confessional, and tonight Edouard, for once, treated it as such. He allowed himself to speak in his native tongue, rusty at first but increasingly swift. It was to him the very language of confession.

  “De verre fragile,” he said to Berthe and Edouard, Senior: And just like fragile glass had his hopes been shattered. His hopes of achieving medical prominence, of doing some real good in the world. All because of that cursed painting—Hygeia, Vivien, whoever she was—and his damnably honest response to it.

  Upstairs in the glass house, Famke was sulking over his critique. She had taken to her room and drawn all the drapes, even the ones on the ceiling, and now she refused to emerge for any reason—not to peek at the baby zebra grazing on the lawn, not to read the Frank Leslie’s he’d reluctantly ordered, not even when he found a former art tutor among the patients in the village and presented the woman through the lacy iron of Famke’s door. She even told the maids and nurses she would accept no more electrical treatments, and Edouard was too embarrassed to press his case. Her room was now forbidden ground.

  And yet everywhere he went, he was reminded of her, for her cough was shaking the house’s foundations. She had hacked elaborately all day and night, and the maids scurried back and forth with covered crachoirs that he was not allowed to inspect. Those spit jars told all the story he needed at this stage: His unwitting blunder had brought the illness back in full force.

  “Mais non!” he cried bravely; if he were not to be honest here, he would be so nowhere. With Berthe and the elder Edouard receptively silent, he said, “I knew. I wanted her to be my chef d’oeuvre—I thought that she was that, and that her work threatened mine. But it was my opposition that disordered her fluids, not her activity. Que je suis pénible. . .”

  He paused, as if waiting for the absolution he still half expected to follow confession. There was nothing: All was silent within the thick stone walls, and Edouard did not even hear the tiny sound his mother’s jaw made as it detached and fell upon her collarbone. But within that silence he thought he heard his answers.

  He was guilty. He owed Famke a penance, something much greater than a magazine subscription and a lady teacher. And the nature of that penance was obvious: He must find the original author of those artistic horrors, the man who would whisk Famke away. Her brother, Albert Castle.

  Viggo was reassured to find his visitor was not the forbidding Sariah Goodhouse but her niece, whom he had known as Mrs. Black.

  “You may call me Myrtice,” she whispered when she descended the stairs in her drab dress. “I am not really Mrs. Anyone.”

  Under the hotel owners’ elaborately unwatchful eyes, Myrtice found herself telling Viggo everything. She could not have stanched the flood of words if she’d tried: It was a relief to speak to someone, and Viggo was so kind.

  She began with her name. “I am not Mrs. Black,” she said with an air of quiet tragedy. “I am not even Mrs. Goodhouse now, but I can’t think what else to call myself.”

  Viggo shook his head as if to clear it, then clutched his temples in obvious pain. Myrtice hesitated; the correct thing to do would be to pack some mint in a handkerchief and hold it to his brow, but when he put his hands back into his lap, her own need to speak overpowered her sense of Saintly charity. She had been traveling so long, and to so many seedy, desperate places, to find him.

  “You see,” she said, gazing down at her own clenched fists in their faded charcoal gloves, “I am not just my aunt Sariah’s niece—but her co-wife as well. Or so I was. I married her husband, Heber; you know that is somewhat the custom among the Latter-Day Saints.”

  “Yes,” Viggo said without moving his head an inch. He had not known, but he was willing to agree to little things. All he wanted was a quiet place in which to lie down, where he might attempt to dream away his memories of the night he had just passed in the arms of the orange-haired whore.

  “When my parents died, she alone of all my relations was willing to take me on. And when Heber came through Georgia on his first mission, he didn’t seem to mind that Sariah—Sarah as she was called then—was encumbered with a child. You see, he loved her right dearly, and because I was part of her he loved me too. When I grew up, he was even willing to marry me, because she asked.”

  Viggo remained politely attentive.

  “But then Heber married Ursula, too, and everything was ruined!” Myrtice blurted out, and she covered her face in her hands and sobbed. “Of course, some of the blame is my own,” she resumed after a minute, whispering even more quietly (Señora Garcia was forced to fetch a dust cloth and hovered nearby, vigorously polishing a battered china shepherdess). “I drew the picture for the Wanted signs, after all. And when those pictures went up in Salt Lake City, the federal agents saw them and formed suspicions immediately. They came to the house, Mr. Viggo, after you left. They said Aunt Sariah is Heber’s only true wife, and they told us they would arrest him if he did not have the last two marriages annulled. Well, he was out looking for Ursula in Dakota Territory—and they thought he was already running from them! They sent him to prison!”

  Viggo tried to hold his head very, very still while digesting this story. There was but one thought in his brain: “Ursula is married?”

  “Yes, she is married—to Heber,” Myrtice whispered with some of the schoolteacher impatience that had always been her most appreciable flaw. “She is his third wife—or I reckon his second wife now, as my marriage has been dissolved. And the federals won’t let Heber out of Fort Yuma until her marriage is annulled as well, because they say he must keep his first wife and renounce all others. They have him breaking rocks in a chain gang—because of her!”

  Viggo looked confused, even dismayed, but still attentive.

  “Do you know how hot it gets in south Arizona in the summertime, Mr. Viggo? One hundred and twenty degrees! And Heber is not strong; he has a cough. So you see we must find your sister at once.” She paused now to cough a bit herself, and to wish for a glass of water. It was dry work, spilling all a family’s secrets. “I don’t suppose you’ve found her . . .”

  Viggo gave a little murmur that she took for assent.

  “But have you learned anything at all? I know you’ve searched all over Colorado—I looked for you there, too, in all manner of dreadful hotels. It was easier to follow you—of her I couldn’t find hide nor hair.”

  As to what he had learned, Viggo was reluctant to say anything lest he say too much. He was so stunned by what Myrtice had just told him that he felt he’d have little control over his own tongue, and he must by no means mention that Famke had been masquerading as a man or that she’d been earning her fares in the bagnios. He would not even hint that he himself had been to such places, much less that he had just come from one; Myrtice believed he had returned to the hotel very late and hadn’t wished to disturb her until morning. She did not recognize his symptoms, and it would not have occurred to her that a woman’s fluids might be drying in his trousers as he sat next to her.

  He remembered with a little shock that Myrtice, who had just untangled her web of family for him, still believed that Famke was his sister. And then he remembered that when
he last saw her, Myrtice had been expecting yet another addition to the ever-growing Goodhouse clan.

  “What is happened of your baby?” he asked, his nerves making him unfortunately plainspoken.

  Myrtice flushed brick red, nearly the color, incidentally, of the brothel girl’s nipples. “I—er, I was unwell for a time,” she said. “The strain of events was too much for my delicate state of health.”

  Naturally she did not mention the arsenic eating, which had ensured that when the barely formed creature slid out of her womb and its blood was washed away, the complexion beneath was unearthly white. When the almost-baby was laid in its grave, it exactly replicated the new china doll that Sariah enclosed in a black coffin and set out on the mantel along with her own.

  “This is what it means to be a woman,” Sariah had said, embracing her niece awkwardly after ensuring the coffins were spaced just so.

  Myrtice got suddenly to her feet. “You see, Mr. Viggo, we must find Ursula before more tragedy befalls the Goodhouses.” She shook out her skirts until she was sure the tears had retreated from her eyes. “Now, if you will pardon me, I am going to find a telegraph office. My aunt will be relieved to hear I have found you at last.”

  Chapter 48

  This gypsy of a book has few facts and not a word of fiction; not so much as a dry fagot of statistics or a wingfeather of a fancy.

  BENJ. F. TAYLOR,

  “CONFIDENTIAL,” IN BETWEEN THE GATES

  It is often said that truth is stranger than fiction; but how much stranger even than truth is the tale of the gallant Robber Baroness and her brood.

  “TO THE READER,”

  IN RUBBLE ON THE RAILS

  Edouard’s vow of penance had been sincere, but he had difficulty prosecuting it. He sat for hours in his office, attempting to word an appropriate advertisement; but he found his mind occupied instead with other ways of wooing back Famke’s good graces. Perhaps it would not be necessary to contact Albert Castle after all, or at least not immediately: Edouard tinkered with the galvanic device, hoping to make it bring down Famke’s juices more efficiently, once she deigned to allow it; he read recent books on tuberculosis and tested new tonics on himself. Yet long moments would go by in which he could not have accounted for his time.