He heard Annette ask: “Mr. Cauliflower?”
He stopped and turned to her. “Miss Redmond, you’re awake.”
She sat up on the couch giving a stretch. Annette then noticed the delivered violet envelope. She asked, “Are you not coming with me?”
“I figured you’re ready to tackle the violet envelopes on your own.”
“Oh come on,” she told him, turning her head slightly to the side. A single strand of red hair tumbled down to her waist. “What’s one more consort-appointed inspiration between friends?”
“Friends?” he quizzed her.
Annette stood from the couch. Her house dress smoothed as it had before. She crossed to the desk casually picking up the violet envelope. “We never had the opportunity to finish our conversation before dinner.”
“Oh?”
“You were telling me about your first life and the Dandelion Sisters.”
Nathaniel puffed in defense. “I suppose you want to know more?”
“No,” Annette told him. “Well, I mean yes. I do want to hear more, but . . .”
Nathaniel interjected impatiently by saying, “Yes?”
“You told me a secret about you but I never told you a secret about me.”
“Oh,” Nathaniel told her, suddenly feeling foolish. “I suppose you’re right.”
“You’ve been avoiding me since the last conversation.”
“I have not,” he countered.
“You have.”
“I haven’t!”
“At the end of the meal you gathered the empty plates so fast it was an urgent whirl-wind of crystal.”
“Well,” Nathaniel started but then stopped himself. “Now see here, Miss Redmond, I don’t need to explain my actions to you.” He went on defending himself anyway, “The meal came to a close and your fellow peers, including yourself, had that half-mast look.”
“Half-mast?”
“Eyelids were drooping, Miss Redmond, in the same fashion as a flag is lowered on a pole when it’s half - ” He rolled his eyes. “Why am I saying this when it’s glaringly noticeable why I cut the meal short? Everyone was getting tired. What was I supposed to do? Delay their dozing?”
Annette raised her eyebrows and looked at the envelope by way of waving a white flag in surrender. “Anyway, I figured that after what you shared, you might have been interested in what I had to share.”
Nathaniel stood unyielding to Annette’s imposed self-importance.
“Or would you prefer that I confess nothing? Open this envelope and be done with it?”
“Do whatever you desire, Miss Redmond,” he told her, massaging the bridge of his nose with his right middle finger and thumb.
“Perhaps I can tell you a secret during the downtime in the third inspiration?”
Nathaniel pursed his lips. “How presumptuous of you to think there will be downtime.”
Annette opened the violet envelope. She held in her hand a purple-colored peg. As she took a sip of water from her water cooler, Annette placed the peg into the face of the Lite-Brite board. She was joined by Nathaniel, who picked up the black hoodie and handed it to her.
“You’ll need this,” he curtly explained.
“Will I?” She made no effort to take the black hoodie.
Nathaniel rolled his eyes and helped, wrapping the bulk of it around her. He then took it upon himself to zip up the front. As he did, the office folded and unfolded as it had done the previous two times. Instead of the tumbling of Christmas ornaments or the twists and turns of an attic constructing itself, they found themselves swept in a heartless crashing of ice, snow and a bitterly freezing wind. As the pop-up book settled around them Nathaniel and Annette stood in a dismally gray winter afternoon. What limited sunlight could be seen on that day had already been blotted by clouds which rolled above them causing abundant flakes of snow. The blizzard obscured both Nathaniel and Annette’s vision so that they could only see a few feet in any direction.
As she stood there in her yellow dress and black hoodie, ankle deep in the snow, Annette’s eyes glazed as if she was lost in thought and perhaps instinctively returning to warmer memories. Nathaniel assumed she was envisioning the lazy summer afternoons that she and Adam would have most likely spent in the shade, sipping Mint Juleps at sunset. Perhaps she remembered how her fiancé’s body warmth in the bed beside her had been all the heat that she needed through the winter nights. Or perhaps her thoughts settled comfortably before a fireplace, where she had most likely stood poking the logs and, having been in the warmth of the ever-growing flames, her soon-to-be husband would have held her from behind in the surrounding orange blaze of the fire.
Annette’s mind wasn’t the only one who found itself consumed. Standing there in the blizzard, Nathaniel remembered warm memories of his own.
*
One summer evening in 1808, twenty-three-year-old Nathaniel stood outside Evangeline’s window. Not having been the sort of lad to watch women through glass, Nathaniel felt awkward. Still, he had made a promise with Evangeline that he intended to keep. For months leading up to this night, Nathaniel had avoided taking her back to his master’s studio until Evangeline had sternly, yet playfully, stated that if he wanted to see her again, he must wisely introduce her to his additional inspired paintings. It had been an ultimatum that he could not refuse.
In those few months preceding the taunt, Nathaniel’s affections toward her had developed into an infatuated craving. When he slept, he dreamed of her powdered skin, gently flexed nostrils, her short intakes of breath and heartbeat. Upon waking, Evangeline stayed with Nathaniel as he did his marketing, as he swept the floors and when he picked up a brush to clean the bristles. Had it been love that he had felt for Evangeline? They had barely spoken to one another in the conservatory. He had known nothing of her, so what was there really to love? Had it been her beautiful face? Had it been her soft, pliant skin?
“Perhaps it’s more the idea of you, Evangeline,” he whispered to the ever mounting number of stars as the sun had set in the frame of his loft’s window. He held his own hand in his lap, pretending he was holding hers.
The only time he didn’t think of Evangeline was when he felt the familiar prickling in his fingertips. As he brought the paint to his private canvases, she was there, set on a distant shelf, reserved for another time.
Evangeline found her way to Nathaniel’s studio days after he had painted her. His master had been out that day, leaving his apprentice to his own devices. Nathaniel was shocked to find Evangeline at his doorstep. She was accompanied by her ever-observant chaperone.
Nathaniel insisted that he could bring the paintings down to Evangeline, but his beloved wanted to see them in the upstairs loft. She climbed the ladder as if she had climbed rickety ladders all her life and, in-so-doing, Evangeline explored her true nature: a young woman with a passion for exploratory intrigue instead of a demure world of petticoats, perfume and perfected manners.
He hesitated for a moment before offering Evangeline the first of his secret paintings. But she had come all this way, and he loved her too much to deny what she had so ardently invested her time in traveling to see.
“This one,” Nathaniel turned the painting of Fiona to Evangeline on that day, “was my most recent one, and my favorite.” They were standing in his attic loft. The chaperone was sitting on his chair.
Evangeline turned her head quizzically to the side. “Did you paint her from memory?” Her skin had been cleared of powder. Her hair had been tied beautifully, revealing the slight skin around the top of her neck and below her ears. She had smelled of a lavender toilette that excitedly tickled his nose.
Nathaniel shook his head. “I have no recollection of who she is.”
“No recollection?” Evangeline said with a playful smile, thinking it a joke. “And I suppose it’s the same with these other faces; you have no recollection of who they are either?”
Again, Nathaniel shook his head. “They come to me in the middle of th
e night,” he confessed, “shortly after my master has gone to bed.”
“How do they come to you?” Evangeline turned to the open window of his attic. She wore a violet petticoat that swished as she moved barely two steps. Evangeline was also constricted by the same corset she had worn on the first day they had met. Even though she spoke to him on that day, it was still been evident that she fought to breathe. “Do they come through the window?” she asked him. A sparrow had flitted from one sill to the next in the exterior window.
“Not the window,” Nathaniel said in all seriousness.
“The ladder then,” Evangeline crossed to the ladder which adjoined the loft to the rest of the flat. Nathaniel took several steps toward her, shaking his head. “Well you must see them with your eyes,” Evangeline offered. “The details of each face are too defined to make up from nothing. Tell me. If they don’t climb in through the window, up a ladder and if you don’t see them then how-”
“Through my fingertips.” A silence then passed. The mysterious “Fiona” hovered in his fingers between him and Evangeline. “No other words can describe it I’m afraid.”
“Show me?” Evangeline asked of him.
Despite her request, Nathaniel didn’t show her how he painted the canvases, at least not for the next few months that had followed. The more he painted in secret, the more Nathaniel convinced himself he had made the right choice in having kept the practice from her. It hadn’t been normal what he painted. Nothing about the images on his canvas, or how they had appeared to him, was conservative. He also feared that, by showing her the method, it might trigger the chain reaction the Dandelion Sisters had forewarned. As a preventative measure, Nathaniel had tucked the newly painted canvas into the shadows of his rafters before going to bed.
Nathaniel had underestimated Evangeline’s desire to witness the late night procedure. She kept in close contact with Nathaniel by letters, asking him to show her how he had created such masterpieces. With each correspondence, Nathaniel devised excuses as to why it wasn’t timely possible. It was Evangeline’s final letter, when she posed the ultimatum, which brought Nathaniel bowing to her will.
In the summer of 1808, after Evangeline’s provocation, Nathaniel cut a path to her window. Though he and Evangeline were two dissimilar canvases, hanging awkwardly on the same wall side by side, Nathaniel yearned too much to be with her, which led him to linger by her window. He didn’t see Evangeline in her room, but took comfort in the shine expanding from her candlelit window.
“Monsieur Cauliflower?” she said from behind him. He spun to find Evangeline out on the grounds, surprisingly without her chaperone! She scolded: “It’s not like a gentleman to peer through windows at night!” Evangeline then gave a lilting laugh, taking a few steps closer. Nathaniel was at a loss for words, entranced by her noteworthy loveliness in the moonlight.
“Mademoiselle Evangeline,” he asked “what are you doing out on the grounds all by yourself?”
Her eyes looked at the moon. “There are some nights that I sneak out and take a walk in the moonlight. I find the moon oddly reassuring.”
“Do you?”
“There are some nights,” Evangeline earnestly whispered to him, looking serious, “where, I swear, I can almost hear it sing!”
Nathaniel turned his eyes to the moon, half-expecting to hear it sing. He felt a cold chill stretch up his spine.
Evangeline erupted in laughter. “Oh come now, Monsieur Cauliflower, the moon can’t sing! How delightfully gullible you are to think that the ridiculous things I say have truth!”
Nathaniel felt foolish. “Then I suppose your challenge in the last letter was simply a rouse as well?”
“Have you been visited by another painting?” Evangeline hungrily held Nathaniel’s fingers. Though they had been in the same room together before on two occasions, this was the first time that they legitimately touched. He felt his heart race!
They strolled silently along the road hand in hand: the painter and his mistress. They needed no words to describe their shared affections. Nathaniel loved her, and she, he assumed, loved him. A twinkle in her eyes reminded him of the stars overhead. As the night continued on, Evangeline once again climbed the ladder of his attic loft requiring little help from Nathaniel below. Evangeline looked at him from the upper landing.
“Coming, Monsieur Cauliflower?” she whispered.
Nathaniel was uncertain whether he should or not. It was Evangeline’s smile that gave him a second wind of courage. His prickling fingers grasped the rungs of his ladder, pulled him, inch by inch, closer to her. On the landing, he and Evangeline met, their noses centimeters apart. Nathaniel thought of stealing a kiss but thought better of it.
Evangeline removed his mysterious paintings from the rafters propping them on display as a collective audience to Nathaniel’s future work.
A portrait was ready to be painted, his master snored through his dreams, and Evangeline was there waiting for Monsieur Cauliflower to amaze her. With these circumstances aligned, Nathaniel lit a candle, removed a box of brushes and paints, and faced a blank canvas lying in wait. Lips pursed, eyes focused, fingers confident, Nathaniel began to paint.
First were the shoulders, then the left ear, then the right. Detail after detail, the figure on the canvas emerged. To his and Evangeline’s surprise, the face proved eerily familiar.
“Why,” Evangeline brought a hand up to her lips. “That’s me.”
But it wasn’t Evangeline. Not completely. The face on the portrait wasn’t young. The wrinkles around the lips and eyes were more pronounced. Cheeks that were once flushed looked pale. There was a despairing wisdom in the old Evangeline’s eyes indicating a sense of loss. Evangeline slinked from the misshapen version of herself as Nathaniel’s brush unremittingly sited the finishing touches. Evangeline drew closer with curiosity.
The age of the woman in this painting was imperceptible but Nathaniel guessed the age to be well over eighty, possibly past ninety! Though in the painting Evangeline’s hair had grown grey and her skin frail, the general beauty of her upcoming self remained intact. She was painted old but would age relatively gracefully.
Nathaniel’s brush stopped. He sat back on his stool taking a few moments to investigate the art with her.
“What does it mean?” she asked him. Evangeline looked at her painting and studied the other faces around them. She asked in wonderment, “Who are these people that you’ve painted and how am I associated with them?”
Nathaniel didn’t know the answers to these questions. There were secrets behind the portraits: secrets that eluded them both. Secrets that could only be understood by the Dandelion Sisters who had granted him the express gift in the first place. Secrets or no, Nathaniel didn’t care. Evangeline was here with him on this night and that was all that mattered.
Their eyes met. They closed the physical distance between. His kisses were gentle and she fell into them with the same ease that the moon stretched an arc against the sky. Nathaniel’s fingers ventured around her waist where he found the strings of her corset which he unfurled with great passion. Evangeline breathed and did so several thousand times throughout the night while in the arms of her artist. As they made love in the moonlight, the displayed paintings looked upon them like mischievous cherubs. Afterwards, the lovers dipped into a dreamless sleep. For the first and only time in Nathaniel’s timeless existence, the thought of Evangeline did not haunt him.
*
Annette had already been pulled out of her warm memories before Nathaniel had. Her eyes were focused on the environment’s possibilities. At present, Nathaniel’s attention was on Annette’s third violet envelope in which the falling snow thinned making the visibility more pronounced. There came a rumbling sound beneath them: the typical sound of thunder that signaled the approaching end of the violet envelope. Her client had not yet arrived on the scene making him and Annette the only two souls out in this freezing site. All that passed between them was a strong wind that stirred the
snow, kicking it up in clouds of frozen flakes. Nathaniel thought about saying something to lift the silence between them but thought better of it.
It was then that Annette saw someone approaching from the distance. She nudged her mentor, motioning toward the figures standing opposite.
In the time that Nathaniel had been remembering Evangeline, his glasses had slinked down his nose. He swept his eye-glasses up to investigate further. There were two “someones” looking back at them. The two dark, human-shaped shadows in the distance were too far away to determine any exact details.
Annette raised an arm and waved saying “Hello!” but the figures didn’t move. They stood there like stone sentinels, staring back.
“Miss Redmond, refrain from disturbing them!” Nathaniel scolded. “Unless your heartstrings tell you that they’re your clients.”
“That’s them, right? The clients I’m supposed to be inspiring?” Annette asked him but the look of insecurity on Nathaniel’s face made her pause. “Well who else am I supposed to inspire out here? There’s no one!” Annette waved at the strangers again, calling out “Hello out there in the snow!”
Nathaniel consulted his wrist-watch then looked at the strangers. “If they are, they’re too early. Your client should be on the approach but not from that direction.”
Annette dropped her hand, signaling the end of the distant contact. “Well if they aren’t who I’m supposed to inspire, who are they?”
After a brief second, Nathaniel said “I don’t know.” One of the figures stepped forward but stopped. Nathaniel squinted his eyes, hoping for a better look. He noticed that the other stranger put a hand on the first, stopping him.
Asphodel: The Second Volume of the Muse Chronicles Page 10
