A Muse to Live For

by Katherine Wyvern

  His eyes are all but dark pupils in the candlelight, with barely a turquoise glint at the edge. “No,” he says firmly. “No, I stay because I love you. I love to be with you. I don’t want to be anywhere else. I am not very good at saying things, maybe. And. I am not very good at trusting people. I did once, and…”

  “And what?” I say, frowning. “Do you think I’d shave your head and chuck you out with nothing?”

  “God, no. Of course not, it’s not that. It’s just that I hate being dependent. It makes me prickly and uneasy, and skittish and…”

  “Dependent? Oh, Gabriel. I am as dependent on you as you are on me. More. Because I am only truly alive when I create … and if I create alone, then I am alone, the most alone, in this howling darkness… I paint the pictures we sell, true, but without you there would be no pictures to paint. What would I do without you? Where do you think I’d be? Still in Dartrey Road, most like, copying horrible prints and wishing I were dead.” I realize that I am grasping his shoulders and shaking him, and also that my voice has cracked, and that I am going to cry, to cry savagely, if I don’t get a grip on myself.

  “Jesus Christ, do you remember my landlady?” I say, a little drunk, a little laughing, and a little desperate.

  That makes him grin, finally. “God, what a termagant,” he says, laughing too, although he looks as moved as I am.

  “Yes … Gabriel. Oh, Gabriel. We depend on each other, I hope. We are in this together, I hope. I love you. And all I have belongs to you. By right. Everything we have, we made it together.”

  He looks at me then with huge, dark, lustrous eyes, and I realize that he’s always been holding something back, that he has always been a little wary.

  “I am not good at loving people,” he whispers, “and telling them that I do. But I do love you. I do. Even if I—I could not say it. Even if I had to joke about it. Why do you think I wear this?”

  He wiggles his fingers, where my grandmother’s gold ring always sits. I smile a sort of trembling smile, caressing his long hand where it lies on the bed-sheet.

  “And why do you think I gave you this?” he asks, touching the slim gold band Gabrielle bought in Nice, and gave to me, to match her own ring. She couched in a jest at the time, saying that if she wore a ring, I’d better wear one, too, lest someone think I’m leading astray someone else’s wife.

  I swear that she’ll tease me to my grave, this Scotch thistle of a woman. I smile at the memory.

  “Do you believe me?” he asks softly.

  “I—I do. I think. It’s just difficult sometimes.”

  “Why? Why?”

  “B-because I don’t know why anyone would love me. I am not beautiful. I am not especially clever. I am half mad and half in the clouds at all times. You can’t bring me into society—I am an embarrassment. All I can do is paint. And only when I’m with you, apparently.”

  “And kiss,” he says, smiling.

  “Eh?”

  “You can also kiss very well.” He leans forward and draws me close, as if to demand a demonstration of his last startling statement. Our lips come together, and our tongues touch and curl of their own accord, and his breath mingles with mine, still smoky and alcoholic. I wonder if anyone who has been drinking grappa should be allowed to smoke right afterwards, but then, who cares? I might go up in flames any day, in his arms, and I wouldn’t mind one bit. When we part, he follows me with a last peck on my lips, and one more, and one more.

  “You,” he whispers, staring into my eyes, “are the most stubborn, the most gallant, the craziest and the kindest person I have ever met. And you are a good man. Of which there ain’t many. Take my word for it. I’ve met a few. You are good to me. Good for me. I love every bit of you. And you must believe it. I don’t know how to make you believe.”

  Before I can answer, he turns to extinguish his cigarette, and collect all the scattered drawings, and put them away. Then he turns back and comes to straddle my lap. When I pull him into my arms, still speechless, we hold each other tight as if we might still be blown apart by some storm.

  “I love this,” he whispers after a while, drawing back to touch, to my absolute astonishment, a small scar on my forehead. “How did you get this?”

  “That,” I say, rubbing my forehead, “was a wicket gate in my grandmother’s garden. Walked straight into it. Was looking at something else, daydreaming, most like. I must have been six, or seven.”

  “And this. I love this, too.” He says kissing a different scar, on my upper lip. “How did you get this one?”

  “Oh, that was just a common school bully. Same as my nose. Different day, same boy.”

  He shakes his head. “For such an unworldly poet, you sure have been through the mill, you know that?”

  I’d like to say that we both have. He still carries those scars on his back. But I don’t want to bring that up now, after the dreadful news Henry brought about that boy in Pinchin Street.

  “And I love your hair,” says Gabriel, distracting me from that horrible thought. “Especially when it is like this,” he adds, putting his hands on my head and mussing it up worse than ever, which makes me laugh.

  “And your beard,” he goes on, stroking my chin. “Especially when you rub it here.” He runs his fingers down the side of his neck and over his shoulder, and I draw him closer to rub my whiskers along the same path. He shudders with pleasure in my arms, and I am just astonished that anyone so beautiful can find any pleasure in my shaggy, awkward person.

  “I love you, Nathaniel. I do. Sometimes I am just a little lost, here, that’s all,” he whispers, changing subject so suddenly that I am thrown for a moment. “When I am not working with you, when you are down at the lake, I don’t know what to do with myself, that’s all. There’s just so many clothes I can sew, and wear, and all that. I like making clothes. But I—I don’t want to be just making clothes all my life. And I love to sit for you, I really do. I love the pictures we make together. I am so happy, no, amazed, that I inspired someone, that I mattered that much to someone. I didn’t know I could do that. But sometimes—sometimes—I just wish I’d be making something of my own, too.”

  “Tell me what you want to do. Tell me what I can do for you. I’d do anything for you.”

  He smiles a small uncertain smile that is almost a grimace.

  “What?” I prompt. “What? Just tell me.”

  “Can we … can we afford a piano?”

  “A piano?”

  “Yes. A piano. It’s a musical instrument. About this big, you know? You play it with these,” he says, wiggling his beautiful long fingers in front of my face. They are a pianist’s fingers. I wonder how is it possible that I drew them a thousand times and never thought of it. I bring them to my lips to kiss them all in turn, one by one.

  “Of course we can have a piano. Why didn’t you say you wanted a piano? I didn’t even know you can play the piano.”

  “I can’t, yet. I just learned a little, in London. It’s the only good thing that is left from—” He doesn’t finish the sentence, but I think I know what he means. From the time he lived with Stanbury. “It seemed like a lot to ask,” he adds. “We aren’t exactly swimming in money.”

  “We’ll make do. We’ll manage, you’ll see. We are almost done paying Henry back, and we can certainly get a piano. We’ll have to work a little harder for a while, that’s all. You can’t be here just for me and the paintings. You have to be happy too. In yourself.”

  He smiles again, then, hugging me close. “Oh, I am. I really am.”

  And then he unbuttons my shirt, and my trousers, and as I lie back, naked into our bed, his hair envelopes me as he straddles my hips again, pressing his lips on my lips and his body upon mine, skin to skin, heart to beating heart.

  He’s not so appallingly skinny anymore, but he’s still as slim as a reed and he weighs hardly anything on my body. I hold him close, stroking his dark hair when he fits his head under my chin and goes to sleep on my chest.

  So
metimes she is a child within mine arms,—Cowering beneath dark wing that love must chase…

  Mine, mine to love, mine to hold, mine to draw, mine to worship. Oh, my love.

  I kiss his hair softly so as not to awaken him.

  The crickets are loud in the open window, as I flutter blissfully between this sweet, sweet wake and sweeter sleep.

  And Love, our light at night and shade at noon—Lulls us to rest with songs.

  Epilogue

  “Light, so low upon earth,

  You send a flash to the sun.

  Here is the golden close of love,

  All my wooing is done.”

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Marriage Morning

  Garda, Italy, August, 1890

  Nathaniel

  “I’m coming, I’m coming! Arrivo!”

  The bell at the garden gate finally stops ringing as I run out of the front door.

  “Buongiorno, signor Grimsby!”

  It’s Gustavo, one of the local gardeners, with a large basket of eggs and vegetables.

  “Grazie mille,” I say, passing a few coins over the gate.

  “And this,” he says, extracting an improbably enormous bunch of flowers, gladioli, lilies, zinnias, from the back of his ass cart, “per la signora.”

  I cradle the bunch in my right arm, carrying the basket in my other hand, as I make my way back into the house. After the blinding sun on the gravel outside, the house is pitch-dark. It’s wonderfully cool in here, with all the shutters closed against the afternoon sun. We had come to stay for a few months, but somehow, we have never left. It is truly our home now, since Henry brought the books.

  There are indeed bookshelves, enough for all my books and to spare, and there’s Gabriel’s piano, and curtains at the windows. There is even a Siamese cat, who turned up one day, and somehow became a permanent resident, and gifted us with a litter of kittens, which in turn created much confusion between my bats.

  I leave the basket in the kitchen—Amelia will be back soon and will take care of it—and I walk out through the back porch into the garden, hardly looking where I’m going—my head is so full of images since our last trip to Venice, a thousand drawings of Gabrielle looming in my mind, and Gabriel, too, my secret delight, my dark angel, in Venetian masks and costumes, in Byzantine balconies and shady Moorish courtyards, floating down a canal in a gondola, against peeling stuccoed walls. Intricate lacy shadows, parasols, the shimmering reflections from the sunlit water, playing under the pure, deep arch of their eyebrows. It all flashes before my eyes before I reach the lawn, ideas coming fast as they do these days, blossoming and blossoming and blossoming, incessantly, luxuriantly, like a voracious plant, feeding on its own inexhaustible growth.

  “Flutterby, flutterby, flut-ter-by!” shrieks a child’s voice, and in the dappled shadow of the trees a little girl in a white pinafore runs about in circles waving her arms, creating momentary flakes of white sunshine in the deep green dusk.

  “Lella, acushla, it’s but—ter—fly,” comes Gabrielle’s voice, a little distracted, but ever patient.

  Lella, short for Gabriella, is the most recent addition to our strange, rambling household. After Amelia had her “accident” with Vinicio, the shepherd-boy, and after it was found out that he had had a similar “accident” with a different girl a few weeks earlier, so that marriage was not a possibility lest criminal bigamy be added to youthful imprudence, her family turned her out. There was a certain amount of turmoil in the village when we took her in, baby and all, instead of sacking her, but they are used to it by now. The English (as the natives call us) are eccentric people, and there is no accounting for their whims.

  Amelia is still our cook and housekeeper. She goes to see her parents from time to time now that they are more or less reconciled, but Lella prefers to stay here with us if she can wiggle out of these family visits. She says her nonno, grandfather, is a bechin, which, as far as I can understand the local dialect means an undertaker. He isn’t. He builds fishing boats. But he’s a gloomy fellow, that’s for sure.

  She already has strong opinions, and a charming way with words, this little girl.

  We spoil her outrageously. I hope no harm comes of it.

  The Signora Grimsby is sitting gracefully in a wicker chair in the shade of the magnolia tree. One of her most demure poses today, in a dress of sky-blue muslin with a violet sash and a wide-brimmed straw hat with blue ribbons. It is a commission for a very, very wealthy man in Venice, who declared himself incantato, enchanted, by the signora inglese, the English lady, and insisted to have a ritratto, a portrait, to hang in his salon, as soon as he had learnt that the signor Grimsby was a pittore, a painter.

  I obliged of course, as I oblige all such requests, even if they are rather bread and butter, as art goes. That Gabrielle and I make most of our living with quite a different style of pictures, is our own secret. There are quite a few of these commissions coming in. La signora inglese is rather reclusive, and yet, her very mystery, coupled with her unusual looks, makes her a general favorite. Her ghostly image is taking shape on my easel, in these vivid summer colors and flowing lines, impossibly graceful, almost Pre-Raphaelite, but boldly, broadly painted, in my new way.

  “Per la signora,” I say, plopping the flowers in her lap as she whips away the book she’s been reading in my brief absence. “Don’t smile,” I add, smiling, as I pick up my brush, and that makes her grin, of course.

  “Ahem,” I say, tapping the bridge of my nose with the handle of my brush.

  “Oh, damn.” She quickly removes her glasses, which she has begun to wear a couple of years ago, when sewing and reading and playing. She did ruin her eyes, my poor love, stitching fourteen hours a day under those dim English skylights. The glasses give her a delightfully serious, studious look when she’s absorbed in her work or her reading or her music, but we usually don’t include them in the paintings.

  Her eyes are still the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. When I am drawing or painting them, I know I am exactly where I was supposed to be in this world.

  She has become a voracious reader since Henry brought the books. She was a bit scornful at first, and picked up a novel as if it could bite, pored over it for a few weeks, frowning as if she had a personal grievance with it, and then suddenly she was reading like a soul possessed, novels, plays, poetry, history, anything. By now she speaks Italian better than I do, and she’s embarked in Rossetti’s poems, and the Vita Nuova. You would think it is an improbable way to start reading Italian, but she makes better sense of it than I ever did. She makes me feel like an absolute dimwit, lately.

  “Listen to this,” she says, as we work on in our companionable way, and (she has a prodigious memory for verse) she recites, “And still she sits, young while the earth is old—And, subtly of herself contemplative—Draws men to watch the bright net she can weave…”

  “…as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went—Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent—And round his heart one strangling golden hair.” I finish the sonnet with her, smiling.

  She smiles back. “Do you know them all by heart?”

  “Oh God, no. But I always liked that one. It’s very … sincere.”

  She frowns, critically. “He lusted for beautiful women all the time. But then he makes her sound wicked. A witch. Just because she is beautiful, which she can’t help. Like she does it on purpose.”

  “Ah, have mercy on the poor man’s soul, my love. You know, for someone like Rossetti—for someone like me—beauty, a beauty like yours—is like sacred fire. It is necessary. Wondrous. But it can burn you from the inside out. It can blast you to pieces.”

  She sniffs, still frowning, and then looks at me with a depth and complexity of expression that I could never capture on canvas, not in a thousand years.

  “I didn’t blast you to pieces though, did I?” she whispers.

  I smile at that. “Well, maybe a little, at the beginning. But now you are here with me. I am whole now.
Quite whole.”

  I look at her as I paint, at that indefinable smile that lingers on her lips even when she’s serious, and I wonder, as I do sometimes, did you know, my love, did you ever imagine, or dream, when you were alone, in that sweatshop after hours, trying on a gown not your own, or in your dark garret, or in that great house, where things were done to you that you will never tell me about, or under that lamppost, late at night in the cold and rain, did you ever dream, that you’d be here one day, in the sun, comfortable, and free, and happy, admired all ‘round, the mistress of your own home, the love of my life, my muse, my … wife?

  ****

  Nathaniel and Gabrielle Grimsby lived between Lake Garda and Venice for the rest of their lives. They traveled extensively but never returned to England. Although much of Nathaniel’s work remained anonymous for over a century, it was discreetly prized by the most discerning collectors of the age, and fetched increasingly high prices. Nathaniel also became a successful portrait painter, and recorded their travels in vivid watercolor sketches, but Gabrielle always remained the main focus of his art, the subject of over a hundred large oil paintings and thousands of sketches and drawings. By the age of thirty she spoke, read, and wrote French and Italian fluently, and had become an accomplished pianist. Those who met the Grimsbys in society often overlooked Nathaniel, but described his wife as “queenly”.

  In November, 1891, Robert Browdie was arrested for assaulting and raping a nineteen-year-old milliner’s apprentice called Anne Eveline Thomas. Without the protection of his former employer, Browdie was tried, and the court unearthed his whole violent history. He was found guilty of at least seven different cases of battery and rape, and the brutal murder of William Edwards, a sixteen-year-old telegraph boy. He was sentenced to death and hanged in the Shed of Newgate Prison on January 16th, 1892, at 9 AM exactly.

  Henry Langsworth often visited the Grimsbys or traveled with them, and remained Nathaniel’s agent and closest friend until his death in 1915. Nathaniel and Gabrielle weathered the war years in their house on the lake. Gabrielle’s identity remained a mystery until 2019 and the publication of Nathaniel Grimsby, the Man and the Secrets by Diana Björklund, with Bronsen, Ross & VaLey Academic Press, Cambridge.