“Wh-what?”
He jerked his thumb at the clearing. “That’s a fairy glade. My gran told me about them. She told me about girls who commune with the fairies. Wicked girls.”
“N-no. I’m not—”
He pulled me to him and hiked up my skirt, one sweaty hand on my thigh. “Are you a wicked girl?” he whispered in my ear. “Do you dance naked with the fairies?”
I scrambled away. He grabbed at me. I stumbled and fell on all fours. He dropped on me and flipped me over, and his hand dove under my skirt again.
“We’re almost married,” he said. “Then I can do whatever I like.” He smirked down at me. “So you might as well start getting used to it.”
I fell back, whimpering. He fumbled to push my skirt up. As soon as he looked away, I reached over my head and grabbed the stone I’d left there. I swung it against his head. It hit with a satisfying crunch. I’d heard that crunch before. On the day Amelia Carter chased me here all the way from the town picnic. She chased me and grabbed me and told me that her father did not come to get his socks darned. She told me what he did do – that she’d seen it. She called my mother a whore. Called me one, too. I said I wasn’t the one who let Tommy Lyons kiss me behind the schoolhouse. That’s when she attacked me. I grabbed the rock and hit her on the head. I only meant to make her stop. That’s all I wanted. To get free and run away. But when the stone struck Amelia’s temple, she fell, and she didn’t get up again.
Tommy did get up. He tried, at least, dazed and blinking. I hit him harder, and I kept hitting him until he lay as still as Amelia had, all those years ago.
When I was sure he wouldn’t rise again, I returned to the clearing with the spade I’d hidden earlier. Amelia said nothing. She only watched as I dug. Then I dragged Tommy’s body to it, and she clapped in delight as I laid him in the hole.
* * *
There’s a ghost that plays in an empty glade, in the woods behind my house.
But she isn’t lonely anymore.
THE RESTORATION
George Mann
Rae has always believed in magic.
Not the elaborate trickery of stage performers, nor the twee tales of childhood, whispered by a soothing mother into her childhood ear: talk of healing kisses and mischievous sprites, hidden portals in the back of wardrobes and faerie folk at the bottom of the garden.
No, this is magic of an earthly kind; the sort made real by the scratch of pencil upon paper, the gentle sliding of a brush across a fresh canvas – a spell wrought in indigo and ochre, in crimson and gold.
As a child, the faces that peered out at her from the walls of the National Gallery had entranced her – windows into other lives, fragile snapshots of long-forgotten worlds. Once, when she had been no more than five years old, a guard had caught her leaning too close, her nose almost brushing the encrusted surface of a winter scene. Rather than admonish her, he had lowered himself beside her on creaking knees and whispered that she must be careful, lest she trip and accidentally fall in.
She’d looked at him, wide-eyed and amazed, imagining herself tumbling into the snowy landscape before her, splashing through the vibrant colours, right into the heart of the frigid scene. One of the boys would abandon his snowball fight to help her up, and together they would galumph through the drifts, up to the warmth and safety of the old stone cottage on the hill. There she would be welcomed by the grinning woman in the window and given hot soup, before being sent on her way again, back into the real world.
The guard had tapped the side of his nose, his eyes gleaming, as if to say: “Of course it’s all true, every bit of it, but you can’t let on, you can’t ever tell anybody else.”
To this day, she never has, and even now, as she walks amongst the stacks of musty canvases and worm-ridden frames, she cannot help but imagine what role she might play in each of the paintings she sees – a handmaiden, a farmer’s wife, a worshipful peasant, a blood-doused murderess. This is how Rae’s life plays out – a succession of paintings, lived through and experienced, each one another chapter in her unfolding story.
She feels cold in the gallery of the old house, and hugs herself, drawing her cardigan tighter around her shoulders. She’s been brought here by the promise of undiscovered gems, masterworks long abandoned, in need of her caring touch. This is her forte, her purpose – she stirs the dead back to life. As a conservator, she coaxes new life from old, repairs flaking memories, excavates stratified layers of over-paint in search of treasure. She seeks beauty in forgotten things.
Today, she is part of a restoration project in a tumbledown old house on the South Downs, a wind-whipped Jacobean manor – dark and bleak and half-buried under the accumulation of years. She’s charged with sifting through all the peeling portraits in search of anything that might be saved.
There’s nothing here of real value, of course. The estate has already been picked over by auctioneers and dealers, its main assets stripped and sent away for sale. Now the estate has fallen into the hands of a trust, and Rae’s job is to salvage what she can from the remnants, to help make the place attractive for future paying visitors. No doubt there’ll be a gift shop, she muses, and a café selling cream teas and fancy cakes. That, she thinks, is what people have come to expect from old houses such as these – as if the servants that once filled its halls had all been waitresses and volunteers, and were judged to have done well in their vocation if nobody got lost and the carrot cake passed muster.
She strolls along the gallery, her eyes flicking over broken frames and ageing panels, half-lost faces and shadowy figures, their lustre lost beneath layers of gloomy varnish. She hears a sound – one of the trustees, perhaps, entering the gallery behind her – but when she turns, there is no one to be seen. She shrugs and continues, knowing that it’s just a symptom of passing years – that houses creak and ache the same as people as they age.
Her eye is drawn to the portrait of a bearded man, propped against the skirting board amidst a stack of water-damaged frames. She crosses to it, drops to her knees. She’ll be filthy by the time she’s finished here, so she doesn’t worry too much about the dust that clings to her knees.
She carefully lifts the painting from the stack. It’s faded and cracked, and the man’s skin tones have taken on a rich yellow hue. He stands with one hand on his hip, encased in armour plate that once shone bright with polish – immaculate and unsullied by battle. The man has a coquettish look about him, a knowing twinkle in his eye. She studies the frame. There’s no obvious attribution, for artist or sitter, although it’s clearly seventeenth century from the style.
Rae thinks she might have found her first project from the old manor. The workmanship lacks finesse, but the sitter’s expression holds a certain charm. It would be a relatively simple matter to clean it, too, to strip back the layers and reveal the artist’s true intent beneath.
She stands, propping the painting against the wall while she turns up the collar of her cardigan. One of the ancient windows must be warped and ill-fitting; the breeze on the back of her neck is cold.
She stoops to reclaim the portrait, but stumbles, her heel catching on an uneven floorboard. She puts out a hand to steady herself, sending three tatty frames crashing to the floor. Hurriedly, she gathers them up – a landscape of the gardens at the back of the house, blocky and ill-observed; a scene of austere childhood in a bygone nursery, the child’s face stern and unhappy; and the portrait of a woman, once beautiful – as evidenced by the full lips, the curve of the jaw – but now so marred and blemished as to be almost unidentifiable.
Something in this last portrait gives her pause. She straightens herself and then carries it over to the window, where the afternoon light slants in through the syrupy panes. She blows on it, gently, stirring the patina of dust. It’s in poor condition. The paint has become brittle, and there are areas around the woman’s face that have been completely lost, leaving behind an incomplete jigsaw, its pieces scattered throughout the centuries. She knows she sh
ould put it back, abandon it to its fate on a spoil heap; it’s too far gone. The work involved in restoring such a thing…
Yet there’s something in the surviving strokes that excites Rae. This is the hand of a true craftsman: that playful smile, the sweep of the velvet drapes behind the sitter, the way the woman’s hands are interlaced upon her lap. This deserves investigation.
She glances back to the picture of the armoured peacock and then makes up her mind. She’s taking the woman’s portrait back to her workshop, where she can assess it properly. Somehow, it just feels right.
* * *
To her, his studio was a place of darkness and flickering candlelight, of dancing shadows cast by the glow of a warm fire.
She only ever visited him at night; his habit was to rise late, and to entertain his wealthy patrons in the afternoons, working until the light went, polishing their likenesses until their portraits shone like beacons of unreality.
He’d always said he was a liar; his work was not to seek the truth but to weave fictions for gold. If he painted his clientele as he truly saw them – he’d told her this one night, as he stroked her milk-hued thigh, his eyelids heavy with the dulling effect of the wine – he should paint them as mouldering corpses, for their souls were too rotten to bear.
She’d laughed at such nonsense, and consoled him in the only way she knew how.
His words, however, had marked the onset of a malaise, and in the weeks that followed he had moped about the place, lacking all enthusiasm for his work. He feared that he had doused his own flame, that he no longer retained any passion for his art. In every person, he saw only the dull and the grey. Life had lost its colour – and no one, he claimed, wished to look upon paintings of that.
His only consolation was the time he spent with her. To him, she was the one thing left alive in a world populated by the shambling dead, the only thing that stirred him from his fugue. And so, laughing, she had thrown off her nightgown and posed for him in the moonlight, challenging him to paint her instead, to abandon his lifeless clients and stoke what passion he had left before it ebbed away entirely.
It had worked, too. That night he had filled sheaf after sheaf with charcoal sketches, working until the candles had almost shrunk down to stubs. Before long, he had eschewed all others, deferring even the most highborn of clients to make way for what he now claimed would be his masterpiece: a study of her, Ariadne, a portrait that truly captured the magnificence of her soul.
Their time together became that shared by artist and sitter, and she feared that she had inadvertently placed herself upon a pedestal, that he had begun to worship her for her form, to come to see her as something other than she was. She told herself that the fervour would pass once the work was complete, and took solace in his renewed enthusiasm. Perhaps, when this was done, he would return to his other clients with more vigour. Perhaps, too, he would finally take her as his bride, a marriage forged in charcoal and oils.
For now, though, there was only the painting. He had eyes for nothing else.
* * *
Rae sits at her desk in the studio, hunched low like a crooked finger, absorbed in a world of microscopic veins and arteries – the cracks running haphazardly across the surface of the portrait like the scatter-brained map of a nervous system.
She’s been studying the picture for three days, scribbling notes on a pad beside her arm, absorbing every facet, every inch. She feels as if she’s beginning to build an understanding of the portrait, to develop a sense of the artist’s original work. It’s going to take hours of labour and further investigation, not to mention the repair work she’ll need to carry out, but the painting has got under her skin, now. It often happens that way – that a particular work has a way of speaking to her, drawing her in. This time, though, there’s more to it than that. She’s not sure why, but she feels the need to look this woman in the eye, to help her re-emerge from the folds of time where she’s been hidden. To see if she can uncover the truth behind that secret smile.
“Your scans are ready.”
This is Margot, a fellow conservator with whom Rae shares her studio. Rae has often reflected that Margot is an odd name for a woman in her early thirties – particularly one who seems so effortlessly stylish. For Rae, the name conjures images of different times, of middle-class housewives taking tea and scones in House of Fraser, but she knows this is wrong of her, a preconception caused by watching too many sitcoms from the ’70s. She has her boyfriend to blame for that.
“Thanks, Margot. You want tea?”
“Oh, go on then,” she replies, as if Rae were tempting her with some illicit treat. She bustles off to her table in the corner, where she’s mixing pigment for a restoration job of her own.
Rae rises from her chair and stretches her weary limbs. She crosses to the small kitchenette on the other side of the room and fills the kettle.
She’s still struggling to establish the identity of the artist – there’s no signature in evidence on the canvas – although her research so far suggests it matches the style and period of William Foxley, a little-known portrait artist working in and around the court of King Charles I. Only a handful of his works survive, and all of them are portraits of courtiers, merchants and clergymen. Yet the woman in the painting here seems to lack the nobility or means of Foxley’s typical sitters. At least, so far as Rae has been able to tell.
The kettle boils and she makes the tea. She deposits one mug on the edge of Margot’s desk and carries the other over to the computer. A few brief keystrokes and she brings up the x-ray image of the painting on the screen.
She always loves this bit, the moment when the veil is lifted, when secrets are revealed. She leans closer, rubbing her neck, peering into the picture. It’s as if she’s peering into its soul, seeing past the artist’s façade to everything that lies deeper.
She’s not disappointed.
Beneath the layers of flaking paint, there’s a drawing so exquisite that she gets up from her chair and walks across the room. She takes a deep breath and then slowly lets it out. She realises she’s digging her fingernails into her palms. She stops, and drums them on the work surface of the kitchenette. Then she returns to the computer, sits down and pulls her chair in close.
The line work is phenomenal. It’s been sketched in swift, confident movements, each stroke tracing the contours of the woman’s body. The face peering out at her is a thing of beauty: slender, with high cheekbones and a gentle, curving jaw. It’s almost as if the woman is looking straight at her, here and now, peering out from behind all that damaged paint to meet her gaze. Rae leans closer to the screen, and for a moment the reflection of her own features seems to line up with those of the nameless woman within, eyes meeting eyes, lips meeting lips. She feels a kind of kinship with this lonely survivor, as if they’re both somehow adrift, yet orbiting one another through the painting. It joins them, somehow, like a tether, an anchor.
“…for all the ages.”
The sound pulls Rae from her reverie, and she sits back from the computer screen, feeling somewhat dazed. “I’m sorry, Margot. I missed that.”
“Missed what?”
Rae twists in her seat to look at her friend. “What you said. I was lost in my painting. Sorry.”
Margot laughs. “You must be hearing things. I didn’t say a word.”
Rae frowns and then shakes her head. “Maybe you’re right,” she says, sipping her tea. But she feels a momentary pang of disquiet.
Still, now that she has the drawing, she has the map of what she needs to do. She’ll start by cleaning back the last of the varnish and dirt, and then she can – slowly, carefully – begin to wake the woman who lies beneath.
* * *
Days became weeks became months.
Every night she would visit his rooms, and every night he would be waiting for her: the battered stool set out by the window, the canvas propped and ready on its easel, the scarlet gown upon the bed.
She’d learned to hate th
at gown. It was all he would have her wear – all he could see now when he looked at her. When she filled the gown, she existed.
He’d barely touched her for weeks. She’d tried provoking him flirtatiously, but his disinterest manifested in other ways, and they’d both been disappointed; he for the time he had lost, dragged away from his canvas, she for the intimacy that no longer existed between them.
William had found a different sort of intimacy, of course; he worshipped her with his brushes, teasing her every curve, tracing his fingers around the shape of her breasts, the pout of her soft lips. For him, this was more than enough. He had his muse, and it was all that he could think of. It occupied his every waking thought, and she knew that she could never live up to the perfection he sought in her image. To Ariadne, the painting had become a prison. In freeing William, she had confined herself.
And yet… she loved him still, and so she sat in the tallow light while he worked, and longed for the day when she might be free.
“At least let me see it,” she pleaded, late one night, beyond the witching hour, when he finally downed his brushes. There was a look of quiet contemplation on his face.
“It’s not ready,” he replied dismissively. “It’s bad luck. It’ll ruin everything.”
At this she’d thrown the gown off and stormed out indignantly, slamming the door behind her and eliciting cries of outrage from the family in the neighbouring rooms.
She’d thought twice about returning the following night, but something – perhaps habit, perhaps the hope that her outburst might have stirred some reaction from him – led her back to his door.
Sure enough, he was waiting for her, pacing the room, his hands clasped behind his back, the stool by the window, the gown repaired and waiting on the bed.
Why she didn’t turn and flee, she did not know. Wordlessly, she had entered the room and closed the door behind her. He had met her gaze, the relief evident behind his eyes. And then she had donned the dress, and taken her place on the stool as before.
Phantoms Page 19
