Ophelia's Muse (11 page)

Rossetti watched her carefully. She seemed to have gained a greater sense of presence, like a figure in a painting to which he had just applied the final wash of color. “Yes, you are Beatrice.” He cleared his throat and spoke directly to her: “To complete the picture, all you need is her gown.”

From a wardrobe in the corner he produced an elegant gown of deep green velvet. It was simply cut, with a loose velvet bodice that hung like a tunic over sleeves of royal blue silk.

“It could not possibly improve you—but perhaps you will find that it transforms you.”

He handed the gown to Lizzie, and she held it to her body, feeling the luxurious pile of the velvet. She had never worn a dress so fine. She smiled, thinking that she already felt different. Rossetti had led her to the edge of a new world, and she could sense in it the beginnings of a new self. He was right; all she needed was the dress.

 

To Lizzie and Rossetti, the studio in Chatham Place was a retreat. It floated above the city, a place without prying eyes or ticking clocks. As long as they stayed within its book-lined walls, they felt no need to answer to anything besides the cause of art, and the demands of their own happiness. They were free, and surprisingly innocent—like children playing in a garden, with no thought of the world beyond its walls. This purity found its way into Rossetti's sketches, which showed Lizzie in simple lines: her lips curved in slight smiles, her eyes lowered from nothing more provocative than the languor of a warm afternoon.

The new painting changed that. Lizzie donned the gown, and the studio became a stage.

Draped in velvet and with her hair loose and flowing, she looked every inch the part of Beatrice. It wasn't difficult to go a step further, to believe that she was assuming that medieval maiden's grace and charm along with her attire. In her heart, Lizzie knew that it was nothing more than an illusion, a trick of the studio's enchanting light, and that underneath the gown she was still Lizzie Siddal, milliner. But it was a powerful illusion, and Rossetti seemed to feel its effect as well.

The room, which once felt safe from the sordid implications that the world attaches to even the most innocent of gestures, was now full of undiscovered possibility and hidden meaning. Each of Lizzie's movements, and each of their shared glances, were now weighted with the echoes of Dante's poems: She was the untouchable muse, he was her knight-errant; they were lovers, in body or in spirit; they were souls, swirling in the inferno. Their possibility was limited only by what Rossetti could render on the canvas.

The painting of Beatrice was small and jewel-like, painted in rich reds and greens. The Poet gazes upon his beloved as she passes by him on her way to a wedding feast. Beatrice is pale and lovely, with her head held high and her body still for a moment in the middle of the revelry of the other guests. She has heard that Dante loves another, and she looks down on him, her gaze cold. He leans toward her, his jaw tense and his hands hanging irresolute by his sides. Desire and restraint, equal and opposite forces, hold them rooted to the spot, while the crowd flows around them and a fresco of angels regards them mournfully from the walls above.

As he painted, Rossetti tried to maintain the measured practices of courtly love that he so wished to emulate. But the privacy of the studio was a very different place from the crowded streets of Florence. Rossetti began to wonder how Dante would have fared if he had ever had the pleasure of a private interview with Beatrice.

He placed a crown of fresh flowers on Lizzie's head, barely letting his fingertips brush against her hair as he guided her pose, and Lizzie blushed.

“Your modesty is becoming. Remember, I must have your most proud expression for this painting. Beatrice believes that Dante loves another, and in her anger denies him her salutation. You must look down upon him with disinterested eyes, like a queen upon her subjects.”

He placed his fingers under Lizzie's chin and raised it up slightly. The unexpected touch sent a shiver across her skin, and he let his hand linger for a moment against her cheek. “That's right, just a bit higher.”

He stepped back and slowly took her measure. She purposely kept her eyes down, avoiding his gaze, but Rossetti continued to stare at her.

“It is the height of cruelty, and coquetry,” he finally said, his voice taking on a raw edge that she had not heard before, “for a woman to feign disinterest in a man whom she knows to love her deeply. Dante Alighieri had great control of himself. I don't know if Beatrice would have been so fortunate with another admirer.”

Lizzie did not need to look at Rossetti to know that his eyes were still on her. She tried to look down, but it was impossible not to return his gaze. When their eyes met, his were dark and focused. He held her gaze for a moment, and then let his eyes roam deliberately over her body.

The air in the studio changed. It became heavy and still, with the scent of earth, like a field before a storm. Lizzie struggled to hold her pose, trying to radiate Beatrice's chastity along with her beauty. Their eyes met once again, and remained locked; Lizzie was magnificent in her velvet robes and Rossetti was rapt before her. Then, exhaling, he turned away. Without a word he retreated to his easel and began to paint.

His movements were quick and focused, almost angry. He stabbed at the canvas with fast, precise brushwork and long strokes. His whole body moved as he painted, as if he were dancing, the easel his partner. He worked furiously, seeing nothing now but the canvas.

Lizzie let out a breath that she did not realize she was holding. Electric traces danced along her skin where his eyes had moved over her. She stood and started to move toward him. She was drawn to him like a pin to a magnet, a sudden motion without determination. “Dante,” she whispered, calling him back to her, away from the painting that seemed to consume him.

He looked up, surprised, and then in a second he was next to her. “Beatrice,” he whispered, and Lizzie did not correct him.

He kissed her, his lips biting hard against hers, as if he were drinking after a long thirst. She closed her eyes and he kissed her eyelids, and then her brow, while the studio spun around them, a whirl of dusty sunlight and paint and shadow. He ran his hand lightly from her shoulder, over the bodice of her dress, to her waist. He held her like that for a moment, and then took her hand and began to lead her across the room, to a small sofa.

She followed him, as if in a trance. But the sight of the sofa recalled her abruptly to her senses. The spell was broken, and she drew her breath in, shocked at her daring. As she turned away, she was aware only of a vague and unnamable frustration, and a sense that things were happening very much out of order.

She pulled her hand back and stood still, and Rossetti saw at once that he had made a mistake. “Please forgive me,” he muttered, red-faced. The girl before him was as pure as a dove. He couldn't be the instrument of her downfall. And yet—even now he wanted nothing more than to take her back into his arms. He stood uncertainly, his hand reaching toward her.

They were still standing like that when a knock on the door caused them to jump apart.

Before Rossetti could call out, the door swung open and William Holman Hunt strode into the room. He stopped when he saw Rossetti and Lizzie standing flushed and silent. “Well, hello!” he said, with a knowing smile. “I didn't mean to interrupt anything!”

Rossetti recovered first. “Not at all, Hunt. Miss Siddal was just obliging me by posing for my new watercolor.”

“Yes, obliging you. I quite see what you mean.”

Lizzie stared at the floor, mortified. The rose tint of her cheeks was gone, and her face was pale and drawn. She tugged clumsily at her dress, trying to pull up the sleeve where it had slipped from her shoulder. If Hunt had caught a glimpse of the stunning beauty who had just been posing as Beatrice, she was gone now, and an ordinary young woman had taken her place.

Rossetti glared at Hunt and then turned to Lizzie, begging her forgiveness with his eyes. “That will be enough for today, Miss Siddal.”

Lizzie nodded without looking up and hurried into the back room.

Hunt watched her go. “I would ask you where you've been, but I can very well see what, or should I say who, has been occupying you.” He looked around the room at the dozens of sketches of Lizzie that lined the walls.

Rossetti followed Hunt's gaze. He shrugged. “I can't stop drawing her. She's the most beautiful woman that I have ever seen.”

“Aren't they all?”

From the back room, Lizzie could hear the men speaking about her. She struggled to free herself from the velvet gown, which now looked cheap and tawdry to her eye. How easily she had let herself slip into Rossetti's fantasy! She was relieved to put her plain gray dress back on, and she pulled her hair into a simple bun. Embarrassed, she tried to slip quietly out the door without Rossetti's notice.

“Wait, Miss Siddal! Allow me to introduce Mr. Hunt. A fellow artist.”

Lizzie wished nothing more than to be free of the studio, but she turned and tried to present a smooth face to Rossetti's friend. “How do you do?” she asked, the coolness in her voice a rebuke.

Hunt smiled gallantly. “Exceedingly well, now that I've seen Rossetti's new painting and his lovely new model.”

“You're too kind,” Lizzie murmured. If she did not quite forgive him for his insolence, she was practical enough to be grateful for his interruption. Who knew what may have happened if he had not come in at that moment?

Rossetti accompanied Lizzie to the door of the studio. On the landing, he took her hand and spoke to her quietly. “Please don't take Hunt's jokes too seriously. No one else does. You will come again tomorrow, won't you?” He smiled, and Lizzie reflexively returned his smile, failing to maintain the haughtiness that she knew that he deserved.

She hesitated for only a moment. “I'll come again tomorrow. But only to sit for your painting. I'm already taking a risk in coming here alone, and I must know that I can trust you.”

Rossetti looked relieved. “What a sweet little dove you are. Please don't worry, you have nothing to fear from me.”

Lizzie waited for a moment, as if there were something else that ought to be said by one of them. The silent, shared knowledge of their quick embrace hung between them, more intimate than any touch. But perhaps it was better not to put words to such things, and so Lizzie turned with a last shy smile and made her way down the stairs.

In the vestibule, she stepped aside to make way for another woman who was just coming in from the street. The woman was plainly dressed, a servant of some sort. But something about her careless knot of thick blond hair and the unnatural rouge of her cheeks caught Lizzie's attention. As the woman passed, she looked slyly at Lizzie and then smirked, as if she recognized her.

Lizzie was sure that she didn't know her, and so she let her pass with a shrug. But she paused in the vestibule and listened to her footsteps as she mounted the stairs, counting off each flight until they stopped on Rossetti's floor. Or was it the floor below? Lizzie couldn't be sure.

For a moment, she toyed with the idea of going back up to Rossetti's studio on some pretext—a forgotten glove, perhaps. Then she laughed, acknowledging her own foolishness. No good ever came of listening at keyholes. Besides, Rossetti's visitors, real or imagined, were no business of hers.

 

Despite Rossetti's promise that she could trust him, Lizzie spent a restless night thinking of how close she had come to forgetting herself. She had always looked down her nose at girls who gave themselves up for the flimsiest of promises, or for nothing at all. How could they put themselves in such a position, Lizzie had often murmured to her mother, watching as a neighborhood girl was rushed down the aisle, already showing her shame. And far worse were the girls who had to leave home and take up in some obscure town to have their babies alone, after the lad took off.

Lizzie knew this, and yet she had still found herself alone in Rossetti's studio, letting him take liberties with her that she could hardly have imagined a few months ago. No, not just letting him. When she was honest with herself, she knew that she had willed him to kiss her, had wanted him to take her in his arms. The feel of his gaze was a strong breeze; his touch was the storm.

She knew that she should not go back to his studio, at least not alone. But when she thought of the alternative—the tedium of the millinery, the plain gray work dresses, and the men who hung about the shop and confused their crude jokes with compliments—she knew that she would return to Rossetti. She had to see him again.

She told herself over and over that he was a gentleman, different from the men whom she knew; that he would never put her in an impossible position. In the studio he spoke to her of Dante's chaste and perfect love for Beatrice. But his voice, as he spoke, seemed to say something else, to hint at a deep current of desire unbound from any code of chivalry. Lizzie sensed the same danger in his paintings, a worship of love and beauty that owed no obedience to ordinary notions of right and wrong. His paintings, and his studio, were a romantic dream, and Lizzie was drawn to them even as she sensed the peril that lay beneath their shimmering surfaces.

And so she returned to his studio, assuring herself that now that she was aware of the temptation, and of her own weakness, she would be better prepared to resist it. But she need not have worried. The next afternoon Rossetti greeted her at the door, his hat already on. The brim was low enough that Lizzie could not quite tell whether the rosiness of his cheeks was due to embarrassment, or merely the warmth of the studio. “It's far too fine a day to stay inside painting,” he said. “Let's go for a walk.”