Black Swan Rising (45 page)

My eyes brimming with tears, I turned to Zach. “How did you—?” I began, wanting to ask him how he’d seen through vampire eyes, but when I turned to him, I saw my father standing beside him looking at the painting with his eyes also full of tears.

“When I look at this,” Roman said, “I see the Luxembourg Gardens on the first evening I walked through them with Margot.”

Zach nodded and I realized that the sight Zach had used to paint this wasn’t supernatural, it was the sight of first love. But whom had Zach loved like this? I watched him as he showed us painting after painting—he’d done more than a dozen since December—each one a breathtaking explosion of color and form. After the first one, my father stopped looking at the paintings and watched me looking at them instead. When Zach raced to the other side of the loft to retrieve something he said he wanted to give me, my father turned to me.

“So,” he said in a low voice, “am I crazy or are these”—he waved his hand at the light-filled canvases—
“something?”

“Oh, these are
something,
all right. These are
everything.
There are whole worlds in these paintings. Only”—I too, lowered my voice—“was Zach in love with somebody he lost?” I thought my father would ask what gave me that idea—how could I see the history of a lost love affair in abstract splatters of paint?—but he didn’t. He only smiled sadly and said, “Didn’t you know? Zach was in love with your mother.”

I opened my mouth to ask questions. How long? Did you know? Were they lovers? But Zach had come back with a
rolled-up piece of paper. “I came across this when I was going through some old sketchbooks,” Zach said, handing me the paper. “I thought you’d want to have it.”

I knew Zach had had a classical art education before he’d become an abstract painter, but I’d never seen anything he’d done that wasn’t abstract. This was a portrait of my mother, sketched in pencil. She was sitting by a pond looking into the water at her own reflection.

“Thank you, Zach,” I said. “It’s beautiful.” When I looked up, my father was smiling at Zach. I saw now why the two men were so close—why my father had stood by Zach all these years when he couldn’t paint a thing, and why Zach had sat beside my father every day he was in the hospital. They were united in having loved the same woman and having lost her. I might not have understood once, but I understood now. If I had known someone who had loved Will the way I did—Marguerite D’Arques or Madame Dufay, say—I would gladly have stayed by her side.

As the long winter lost its grip and spring finally began, I found that there was plenty to keep me busy. To our surprise, Sotheby’s in Paris had expressed an interest in offering the Pissarros in their spring Impressionist auction, so I had to oversee the paperwork, catalog copy, and their shipping.

I also had a lot of signet medallions to make. Rather than hurt my business, the recession had made moderately priced jewelry with mottoes such as
HOPE, FAITH
, and
HARD TIMES MAKE ME STRONGER
more popular than ever. It was difficult, at first, to work with my scarred right hand, but I eventually got enough mobility back to handle the soldering iron. What I couldn’t do, though, was snap my fingers on that hand, so I didn’t know if I could still produce fire, but I did feel a tug in
the palm of my hand that pointed toward true north. That and my ability to see auras and hear thoughts were the only proofs I had that what I had been through was real. I sometimes wondered if those talents might be figments of my imagination, but I squelched such worries (along with any temptation to test those powers by playing mental guessing games or jumping off the Empire State Building) with more hard work.

What kept me busiest was getting the gallery ready for Zach’s show, which was scheduled for the last week in May, on the same day as the Sotheby’s auction in Paris. I was worried at first that my father had given us too little time to publicize the show adequately, but I needn’t have been; the show seemed to publicize itself. The entire art community was fascinated with the idea of a fading star making a comeback. “I think they want good news,” Captain Sullenberger modestly said of the public’s response to his heroic landing, “I think they want to feel hopeful again.” Perhaps watching a washed-up, alcoholic painter pick himself up and create beautiful work again was just such another sign of hope. There was so much preshow buzz, in fact, that I worried Zach might crack under the pressure, but he took it all in good humor, radiating a calm and steadiness I’d never seen in him before. When the paintings were hung, I saw at last that there was nothing to worry about. In the empty gallery moments before the show was scheduled to begin, the paintings themselves radiated an aura of peace and beauty.

“Surprising,” I heard an NYU professor lecturing a group of art students, “given the artist’s turbulent past. But the riot of color and movement seems to lead the viewer through great cataclysms of experience into a hard-won serenity.”

I wondered what experience the professor saw in the paintings. The show was called “Elements,” and the four largest
canvases were entitled
Air, Earth, Water,
and
Fire.
I saw in them my flight over the city, the pain in Noam Erdmann’s eyes when he pressed the compass stone into my flesh, the longing of Melusine for the pure springs, and a bonfire burning on the shore of Governors Island, its flames reaching toward the stars. I saw too, the last flight of the sylphs when Oberon had released their souls into the ether, and a torch-lit garden party in eighteenth-century Versailles. As I circulated around the gallery, I heard a jaded art critic enthuse that one piece brought him back to his grandmother’s garden and a young hedge fund manager say that another made her think of an idyllic summer she’d spent lifeguarding on the Jersey shore when she was a teenager. Whatever they all saw in Zach’s paintings, they wanted them. Every painting was sold before the end of the show.

When I finished helping a jubilant Maia (she’d earned enough on her share of the commission on Zach’s paintings to put the down payment on a studio in Williamsburg) clean up and had locked up the gallery, I found my father and Zach drinking champagne in the kitchen.

“Join us in a toast, sweetheart,” my father crooned as I sat tiredly down at the table.

“Of course,” I said, taking a Baccarat crystal flute (one of a set my parents had brought back from their honeymoon in Paris) from Zach’s steady hand. I gazed at my father and remembered how tense and worried he had looked five months ago, on the night I’d come home from John Dee’s shop with the silver box. Now, despite his gunshot wound and his week in the hospital, he looked happy and rested and glowing from the success of Zach’s show.

“Here’s to a successful show,” I said, lifting my glass. “The
paintings are amazing, Zach. I’m almost sorry to see them all go.” I meant it even though I knew that what we’d earned on our commission from the sales would go a long way toward paying off our debt and putting us on the road to financial stability. Zach had been that generous with his commissions and the prices had gone wildly high.

“We’ve got more good news,” my father said, exchanging a look with Zach. “I just heard from Pierre Benoit at Sotheby’s. The Pissarros sold for twice their reserve.”

“Really?” I said. “That’s great! Who bought them?”

“An anonymous buyer,” Roman said. “So much for snow scenes not selling in a recession!”

I thought of the mauve-and-blue-tinted snow in the Pissarros, remembering how on the night of the robbery I’d longed to slip into those snow-covered French fields, and I wished I could see the paintings one more time, but I raised my glass and said, “To Anonymous, then, whoever he or she may be!”

We clinked our glasses, the old crystal chiming like church bells. Then my father said, “There’s something else strange. Anonymous insisted on sending us a gift along with his money. A package was delivered earlier today. I was so busy getting ready for the show I didn’t have time to open it.” He pointed to a wooden packing crate on the floor beside the safe door.

“That
is
strange,” I said. “It must have been sent before the auction. Anonymous must have been pretty sure he was going to get the paintings. And why send the seller a present? I’ve never heard of that.”

Roman shrugged. “Me neither. Why don’t we open it?”

Zach got out a screwdriver from the tool drawer and went to work dismantling the wooden packing case. I searched the outside of the box for an address or shipping label, but there
was nothing. It was clear, though, that the gift was a small painting, professionally packed.

“Maybe it’s another Pissarro that he wants us to sell for him?” I wondered aloud as Zach removed the last layer of packing foam from the painting. I could see that the gilt frame was mid-nineteenth-century, but the front of the canvas was facing away from me and toward Zach.

“Not a Pissarro,” Zach said. “A Vuillard maybe? There’s no signature. The subject’s Parisian, though. I’m sure I’ve seen the place before.”

He turned the painting around and propped it up on a kitchen chair, just as he and my father had propped up the Pissarros that night in December. As on that night I felt as if the painting opened a window onto another place, but this time it was a rain-soaked park in Paris in shades of blue and lilac, lamplight gleaming on bits of marble statuary and the leaves of trees. A small stone church loomed dimly in the mist at the back of the park.

“It’s pretty,” I said, moving closer to the painting. “An old church in Paris.” As I said the words, something pricked at my memory.

“The
oldest
church in Paris,” my father said with a faraway look in his eyes as he gazed at the picture. “That’s Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. Your mother and I stayed at an apartment nearby in Saint-Germain lent to her by one of her old friends—Marie Du something or other—after the war. When I came back from the galleries, I’d find your mother sitting in that church and then we’d have dinner at the café across the street. After the war the neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés was where one would go to listen to jazz or to Sartre and de Beauvoir arguing about existentialism . . .”

My father went on for some time, reminiscing about the days he and my mother had spent in Paris in the fifties, and trips they later took there to buy paintings. I listened contentedly, gazing at the painting and sipping more champagne than I should have. By the time Zach went home and my father went up to bed, it was almost dawn. I continued to sit at the kitchen table and gazed at the painting as the gray light of dawn slowly stole across the canvas.

A painting of an old church in Paris. That’s what Marguerite D’Arques had left for Will in her London lodgings when she left him. He took it as an invitation to find her—and eventually he had, by following a clue he found in the church that had led him to another clue . . . and then to another, until he traced her back to the pool beside the tower—to the place where she summoned the creature that made her mortal. Isn’t that where Will would have taken the silver box now? He said that he’d tried to retrace his steps over the years and failed, but maybe he’d found a way this time, and perhaps he’d wondered if I could follow the trail if I had the starting point.

I reached into my pocket for my loupe, but brought out the lover’s eye instead. I’d taken to keeping it in my pocket and holding it up to my eye every once in a while, always hoping it would show me something other than the blank silver back of the brooch. I held it up now over the painting. For a moment I wondered if I’d gotten the loupe after all because I saw, as though through glass, the scene in the painting in front of me . . . the rain-slicked park, the stone church . . . but then I saw that the rain was actually falling and, as I watched, a dark-cloaked figure walked by, his boots stirring the lamplit puddle.

I blinked and the vision abruptly faded. The brooch was opaque and the painting was still. Perhaps I had imagined it,
or perhaps Madame Dufay’s eye, although damaged by smoke, had revived for a moment at the sight of a familiar place.

I brought the painting upstairs and leaned it against the window behind my worktable so I could look at it while I searched the Internet. By the time the morning light had fully filled my studio, I’d reserved a seat on a flight to Paris. I looked up from my computer screen and noticed that the Poland Spring bottle that I’d brought back from Governors Island—the one I’d filled with the last of Melusine—was glowing in the light, as if it knew that it was on its way home. Then I looked at the painting. In full sunlight it glowed like an opal, each raindrop glistening as if the sun in my studio were actually shining on that rain-soaked park. Like the vision I’d had before, the illusion only lasted for a moment, but long enough for me to know that once I set foot in that park, I’d be on the path to finding Will Hughes and the Summer Country.