The Serpent Garden - Judith Merkle Riley (7 page)

“Oh, Master Dallet would bring home old trash! Good for nothing. Throw it out, Susanna.”

“It’s very good vellum. He must have got it for that, to scrape it down and reuse it. Father always said that was a stingy trick.” Suppose some more Frenchmen came for another picture? This stuff would do very well, and I wouldn’t have to pay for it, which can be very expensive if you understand the grades of parchment and don’t get cheated. I decided I could just cut up the margins, and maybe with a good heavy undercoat reuse the center for something else, too. “I think I might need it, Nan,” I said. “Parchment’s high.” I cut the last of the binding from the back of it so that the sheets would pack flatter.

“No one could steal the prize from Master Dallet for stinginess, that I’ll say,” said Nan. “Just bundle it up with the art things, then. It doesn’t deserve room in the chest.”

Mistress Hull had been staring at the table, thinking, her chin in her hand. “They’ll wonder if there’s no table and chairs,” she said. “We don’t want them getting suspicious, now, do we? We’ll have to leave them.”

“Well, at least take the carpet off it. They won’t be looking for it, since Master Dallet made no will and inventory. Besides, it was Mother’s.”

Of course, Mistress Hull could not refrain from making aesthetic judgements about the half-finished panels my husband had left, which was altogether inappropriate, considering the dreadful stuff her late husband painted. “Goodness!” she exclaimed. “Here’s a nasty piece of work. Master Dallet should have done his underpainting in terre verte. My husband swore by it.” Well, wouldn’t you know it, that explains the green saints, I thought. That old Master Hull didn’t have a clue how to give a living flesh tone once he had finished the underpainting. Or perhaps it was his medium, which dulled the colors he mixed with it. I use my father’s medium; it was his secret, and he had gotten it in his travels in Italy by bribing the assistant in a great man’s atelier. Only Master Dallet and I knew it, and Master Dallet had to marry me to worm the secret out of Father. It gives a translucent shine to colors and thins them out so you can build a luminous skin tone through successive veils of color. It was the secret of Father’s success in stained canvas work and painting in large.

“And who’s this dreadful woman with the dragon’s eye?”

“The Lord Mayor’s wife.”

“But it looks finished.”

“It
is
finished. She refused to accept it.”

“Oh, that’s the problem with portraits. Nobody refuses a saint’s picture. But a portrait? They take offense and then you never see a penny from your work. My husband said always take part payment in advance on portraits. Claim you must buy materials.”

“You can’t do that when you deal with great ones. Sometimes, even if they take it, they don’t pay.”

“Why didn’t she like it, except that it tells the truth?”

“She said she had become much more slender since he painted the picture, and she wanted it redone. My husband said he’d be damned if he’d dress up that old sow any further, and there it stands.” Mistress Hull inspected the picture up close, then from a distance. She tapped her foot. I was beginning to understand just how Master Hull had made as much of a success as he had, given his very small talent.

“Hmm,” she said. “I think this should be your first project. Shrink the old biddy’s waist, paint out a couple of chins, and get rid of those frown wrinkles between the eyebrows. Then I’ll send my Cat back to the Lord Mayor’s house with it and tell her that, before his death, Master Dallet had just finished repairing the picture to give a truer likeness. Then we shall see what we shall see.” She tilted her head just like an old hen that spies a fine worm in the beak of a rival. The look in her beady eyes was so funny that for the first time since the horrible birth, I smiled.

“An excellent idea,” I said. “Will you be wanting a share?”

“Not on this one,” she answered. “I fear by the time the crows are done picking the corpse, you’ll be sleeping on the floor. And, after all, what good will you be if you go and get sick?” They finished hiding the necessaries of life, including the best featherbed and the largest of our cooking pots, leaving me to ponder alone in bed on the mysteries of marriage. When my husband lived, I was never allowed a single word as to how he spent his money, and mine as well. But once he was dead, I owed his debts, just as if I’d had the pleasure of the spending myself.

We had only finished hiding things when a bony old lawyer in a fine, fur-lined gown came in with a roll of papers and two workmen. While the workmen carried out the table and the bench and the frying pan, he poked his cold, greedy face everywhere and even prodded under the bed with the staff he carried. “No chests?” he asked. “No plate? No old books?”

“You’ve come too late,” I said. “The carrion crows have picked the corpse clean.” I was glad to see him look upset. His lizardy little eyes rolled, and his mouth worked, and his face turned pale.

“He has something that is mine. A book. He…borrowed it. It’s not here.”

“What you see is what there is. Perhaps you should pursue his creditors, who have been parading through this house for the last two days.”

“Creditors—yes, it has to be,” he muttered. “You two, take down that bed, there. And the cradle, too. It has to be hidden somewhere. Maybe there’s a compartment.”

“But she’s still in it,” said one of the workmen.

“But it was my mother’s wedding bed,” I cried. “My father and mother died in this bed.” Even the workmen stood abashed.

“Have you no shame at all?” cried Nan, who had watched the procedures with a face like stone. She helped me from the bed, and as I sat on the floor huddled and weeping by the hearth, they began to dismantle the big old carved bed, dumping the straw out on the floor and carrying away the bed curtains and the second-best featherbed. There it went. The bed where my parents had been happy. The bed I’d been born in. When at last the workman came back and carried off the cradle, I felt a curious lightness, as if I had been freed from some secret curse. The evil had been carried off by the lawyer with the cradle, as proud as could be in his taking of it. I started to laugh hysterically, and I saw the lawyer’s workmen turn at the sound and shudder.

There is something liberating about losing everything. First you weep, then you are numb, then you count over the things you have lost and ponder how hard it will all be, and how you will never have any others like those that are gone. Then after that comes a strange lightness. Without the things one has always had, one becomes another person, any person, no person. It is a queer sensation, like being drunk and abandoning yourself. I walked about the empty room in a state of crazed hilarity, my hair wild, my knees weak. I paused to lean on the windowsill. The street, the sky, the trees, the world, all looked different, shimmering with lunatic color. Suddenly I felt capable of anything, no matter how mad.

Someone was knocking at the low door into Septimus Crouch’s cellar. “Come in,” he called, loath to leave the shining object before him. The reflection of a half dozen candle flames danced in reflection on it. His face was repeated a dozen different distorted ways on its edge, on the salamander base, across the glistening gold surface.

“The door is barred, Master,” called his servant.

“Oh, yes, just a moment,” said Crouch, reluctantly turning toward the door. The cellar of the house in Lime Street Ward was where Crouch performed those experiments that must be done in secret, if scandal were to be avoided. A stone table with suspicious-looking scars and stains stood in the center of the low-vaulted, stone room. There were jugs and boxes on the shelves whose contents did not bear inspection, although the wine barrels that lined one wall were in fact the genuine item. In the very place of honor, at the center of the table, stood the mirror of conspiracy, surrounded by black candles. Hastily, he shrouded it and then threw up the bar of the door. “And how was the goldsmith’s funeral?” he asked.

“Very poor, Master. But his widow was so grateful for the candles you sent that she kissed my hand.” Crouch chuckled.

“No one suspected?”

“Not a soul. The Lombard’s poison worked—”

“—exquisitely. As it has, through the irony of fate, worked so splendidly upon the Lombard himself—A joke, Wat, you may laugh.”

At the sound of his servant’s nervous laughter, Crouch snorted. “Ah, Wat, you are a humorous fellow, aren’t you? Well then, take yourself off. Here’s a bit of something for a job well done. Fetch me some supper at midnight—a fowl, something light. I don’t want heaviness to interfere with my thought processes.”

The door rebarred, Crouch turned again to his new passion. With what fascination he surveyed the moving figures! The mirror, already the mirror had proven his truest friend. A sudden suspicion, a fear, that the goldsmith might make use of the secrets he had learned, had sent him to consult the mirror in secret. There, his worst fears had been revealed: the goldsmith could be seen, plain as day, casting another mirror from the mold he swore he had broken. What if everyone had a mirror? How could Crouch remain supreme? His Lombard partner had agreed, and with the most delightful and practiced Italian gesture, swept his ring-laden hand across the wine goblet, then smiled as the goldsmith drank deep of slow-acting poison. The ring, the ring, thought Crouch as he watched. The Lombard has a hollow ring for dispensing poison. Why did I never guess? Who knows what other subtle means of giving death he has? He will not want to share the secret long and I, I have need of the Mirror of Diocletian more than he….

How fortunate the mirror had warned him of the Lombard’s treachery; in it he had seen the Lombard laughing with friends at his own funeral. Now he had laughed at the Lombard’s, instead.

Until he had gotten possession of the mirror, he had no idea he had so many enemies. Now they stood revealed, all of them. Dangerous, conspiratorial. It was only prudence to remove them. After all, he had great plans. Which one of them had plans of such magnificence, such power? The Lombard was nothing. Someday, kings would rise and fall at Crouch’s command; he would rule this world and the next with mighty powers. No one must stand in his way. The mirror, his secret eye on the world, would reveal everything….

The Third Portrait

National Portrait Gallery. N.P.G. ca. 1520.
Portrait of an Unknown Lady.

This portrait, tentatively identified as one of Lady Burghley in middle age, displays the gradual shift of costume from the late medieval style of the court of Henry VII to the more elaborate court costume of the period of Henry VIII. Note especially the characteristic peaked or gabled headdress of the sitter, ornamented with semiprecious stones, the use of slashing to reveal costly embroidered linen, the quilted stiffening of the undersleeve and the widening of the oversleeve, here so great as to allow the sitter’s lap dog to hide within the folds. The anonymous painter has captured with unconscious drollery the identical self-important expression in both the wealthy sitter and her pet.

—
B. Smythe.
S
IX
C
ENTURIES OF
E
NGLISH
C
OSTUME

I
have
SKIPPED QUITE A BIT AHEAD HERE TO THE DAYS LONG AFTER
I
BECAME PROSPEROUS TO SHOW YOU ONE OF MY MOST SUCCESSFUL PANEL PAINTINGS.
It did make Lady Guildford weep for joy because she was most excessively fond of that little dog—which died shortly after I painted it from eating pheasant bones that nobody should ever give a dog anyway even if they are scraps. I do believe I caught her to the life, except that I did not put in any wrinkles and I told her the ones that were left were signs of character and appropriate to her dignity.

But the truth is that there was a long time before I got any important patrons. And although I threw myself into my work with all my strength nobody wealthy came to buy, and it was only through the strangest accident in the world that my work later came to the attention of significant patrons such as Lady Guildford. But in that poorer time I had to make an entirely different kind of painting which although they were of a religious nature, appealed to the lower feelings, so I will not show them to you. They were also unclothed, which was why they found so many buyers although not at high prices. And so I did not sign them S.D. Fecit but just left them blank and said someone else must have done them.

To make this picture I stayed at Richmond for a whole month where Lady Guildford was governess of the Princess Mary, whose portrait had started my whole career although she didn’t know it. The painting took a long time not because I am slow, but because Lady Guildford was too anxious to spend long at any one sitting on account of her many cares for a huge household and also because she spent a lot of time seeing that handsome gentlemen could not sit alone with the princess, who is very fond of company and good times. But in between her sittings I painted several small portraits for the handsome gentlemen who wanted to give them to the princess and the other ladies who were there as companions, and also portraits of ladies who wanted to give them to the gentlemen, and so because they were all very gallant, I left much richer than I came and brought Cat a length of blue wool and Mistress Hull a new cap. I also paid Nan all her back wages, but she spent them on her brother who said he needed them for a business opportunity now that he was out of jail, so she was just as poor as always.