CASTLE SCENE WITH PENITENTS
The days in which I was recovering from a fever under my sister’s care seemed like a long afternoon in childhood, when eternity begins punctually after the midday meal, to linger on long beyond twilight in an odour of flowers and warm rooms. Their comfort and idleness were almost more enslaving than the fever.
The chamber assigned me as a nest was high in the Mantegan castle, overlooking the ragged roofs of an inner court. Despite its height, honeysuckle had climbed up to the window and beyond, to the eaves, clinging wirily to the pitted stonework. During my time in bed, the sound of bees filled the room, together with the pale scent of blossoms.
My sister Katerina sat by my bed for hours. She allowed nobody but her personal servant to attend me. Mostly, she looked after me herself. Katerina was my one surviving sister. I would rouse and open an eye and there she would be, patiently sitting; I would drift off into a realm of feverish dreams, imagining her gone, and then open my eyes again, to the luxury of finding her still there. As I recovered, she took to sitting by the window, stroking her lovely amber-coloured cat, Poseidon, or working at her embroidery.
She still remained during my convalescence, tranquil by the sunlight, while I lolled in the shade of the room, weak from the effects of my illness, and we turned old times into spasmodic conversation.
“I’m truly grateful for your care, Katie. Now the summer is here, let’s see more of one another than we have managed recently.”
“I’m glad of the wish—and yet forces operate in life to separate people, whatever they wish.”
“We’ll take care that those forces avoid us. We’ll remain light-hearted and rise above them.”
Silence save for the industrious bees, and then Katerina said, gesturing outside, “These elegant birds with forked tails are flying about our towers again. They arrive every year from somewhere —some say from the bottoms of ponds. They never alight on the ground. I believe they have no feet or legs, according to Aristotle.”
“They’re called cavorts, and are supposed to come from a continent of southern ice which no man has ever seen.”
She made no answer, instead producing a small white comb with which she commenced to comb out the lustrous amber coat of Poseidon, till his purr was as loud as the noise of the bees.
“It’s hard to imagine a land that no living person has ever seen.”
“Is it? I believe we live in such a land. Close at our hand, everything is mysterious, undiscovered.”
She laughed. “I’m sure that’s a line from one of your plays!”
“Whenever I say anything profound, or even sensible, everyone tells me I stole it from some wretched comedy or other. Don’t you recall how clever I was as a child?”
“I recall how you used to do living statues for us, and we had to guess whom you were supposed to represent. And you nearly drowned in the lagoon when you were doing Triton! I ruined my new dress, helping to rescue you.”
“It was worth it for the sake of art. You were always the best at guessing, Katie!”
As she collected a combful of fur, she would pull it away and flick it out of the window. Combful after combful poured out of Poseidon’s coat and drifted out into the warm air beyond.
“Could it be unlucky to see cavorts on a certain day, do you think?”
“I never heard so. Who told you that?”
“Perhaps it’s an old wives’ tale. They say that if you see a cavort on a certain day of the year, you will think about it ever after, and gradually the thought becomes so obsessive that you can think of nothing else.”
“I’ve heard that theory expounded of other things, but surely not of a mere bird. It’s ridiculous!”
“Possy, look at all this fur you are wasting, you silly cat! People’s thoughts are funny affairs—perhaps they could be attracted to one special thing, as a lodestone enchants metals.”
I stretched and climbed off the bed, groaning and yawning pleasurably.
“Certainly I know people whose thoughts are obsessed by horses or precious stones or women or—”
“Women are different!”
“Different each from each other, sister, I agree—“
“And then there’s poor father, whose thoughts are obsessed by his books...”
She released yet another handful of fur through the window. I went over to her, lolling against the side of the window and tickling the cat’s head, saying idly, “I suppose we are all obsessed with something or other, even if we don’t recognise the fact.”
Katerina looked up at me. With a hint of reproach, she said, “You still generalise about life. You take it so lightly, don’t you? You think everything’s arranged for your amusement.”
“I have no evidence to the contrary so far. You used to be carefree enough, Katie. Is Volpato unfaithful to you? Does he beat you? Why does he leave you here alone for so long?”
She did not remove her gaze from me for a while. Then she looked down at her slender hands and said, “I was fascinated by Volpato and the Mantegan family even as a carefree child. On my eighth birthday, an old soothsayer told me I would grow up to marry him. I did so, and I love him, so that’s all there is to it.”
“Predestination! Have you no will of your own, Katie?”
“Don’t tease me! You are better, I see. You can leave the castle tomorrow, if you desire.”
I kissed her hand and said, “Sweet sis, don’t be cross with me! You are such a beautiful person and I have much liked being pampered by you. I shall marry a girl as much like you as possible—and I will leave the castle tomorrow in search of her!”
She laughed then, and all was well between us, and Poseidon purred more loudly than ever.
The window at which we all were was deep-set within its embrasure. Its ledge was fully wide enough for Katerina and her cat to sit there in comfort and gaze out at the world below. Or a man might stand there and, with no inconvenience to himself, discharge a musket from the coign of vantage. The woodwork round the window was lined like an aged peasant’s brow with the ceaseless diurnal passage of sunlight; perhaps some such thought had crossed the mind of an old unknown poet who, with many a flourish, had engraved two tercets of indifferent verse on one of the small leaded panes of the window:
What twain I watch through my unseeing eye:
Inside, the small charades of men; outside,
The tall parades of regulating sky!
Thus I a barrier am between a tide
Of man’s ambitions and the heavens’ meed—
Of things that can’t endure and things that bide.
Poseidon changed his position and lay stomach upward on my sister’s lap, so that it was now combsful of white fur which were released on the breezes to join the brown. The afternoon had created within the courtyard a bowl of warm air which spilled outward and upward, carrying the cat’s fur with it; I was surprised to find that not a single strand had reached the ground. Instead, the brown and white tufts floated in a great circle, moving between the facades of the rooms on this side of the courtyard and the next, the stables and lofts with their little tower opposite us, and the tall and weather-blasted pines which stood on the fourth side, by the wall with the gatehouse. A whole layer of air, level with our window, and extending to each of the four limiting walls, was filled with Poseidon’s fur. It floated like feathers on water, but in a perpetual stir. Katerina squeaked with amazement when I pointed it out; with her attention fixed on me, she had not noticed the pleasant phenomenon.
The cavorts were also busy. There were perhaps six pairs of them, and they swooped up from their positions in eaves and leads, tearing at the layer of fur, and whisking it down again to line their nests with. We stood watching, delighted by their activity. So intent were the little birds on their work that they often blundered almost near enough to our window to be caught. Majestically round and round floated the fur, and erratically up and down plunged the birds.
“When the baby birds are born, they’ll be grateful to you, Poseidon!” said Katerina. They’ll be brought up in proper luxury!”
“Perhaps they’ll form a first generation of cat-loving birds!”
When at length we went downstairs, the fur was still circulating, the birds still pulling it to shreds, still bearing it back to their aerial nests.
“Let’s play cards again tonight . . . Birds are so witless, they must always be busy—there’s nothing to them but movement. I never find that time hangs heavy on my hands, Prian, do you?”
“Oh, I adore to be idle. It’s then I’m best employed. But I wonder time doesn’t hang heavy for you here, alone in the castello.”
Placing a hand on my sleeve, smiling in a pleasant evasive way, Katerina said, “Why don’t you employ yourself by visiting our wizard of the frescoes, Nicholas Dalembert? There’s a man with a mind obsessed by only one thing, his art Like his wife, he’s melancholy but interesting to talk to—when he feels disposed to talk.”
“Dalembert’s still here! It’s many a moon since I last saw him, and then he was threatening to leave the castle on the morrow! The man is probably one of the geniuses of our age, if unrecognised.”
As we descended to her suite of rooms, and her pretty black maid, Peggy, ran to open the doors for her, Katerina said, “Dalembert is always threatening to leave. I’d as soon believe him if he threatened to finish his frescoes!”
“How can your husband afford to pay him?”
She laughed. “He can’t! That’s why Dalembert still lives here. He is so lazy! At least he has a free roof over his head. And he’s safer here in isolation now there’s plague again in Malacia.”
“It always comes with the hot weather.”
“Go and talk to him. You know the way. Well meet this evening in the chapel.”
It was always pleasant to stroll through the irregularities of the Mantegan family castle. Its perspectives were like none I knew in the world, with its impromptu landings, its unexpected chambers, its dead ends, its never-ending stairs, its descents from stone into wood, its fine marbles and rotting plasters, its noble statues and ignoble decay.
The Mantegan family had never been rich within memory of living man; now they were positively bankrupt, and my brother-in-law, Volpato, was the last of the line. It was whispered of him that he had poisoned both his elder brother, Claudio, and his elder sister, Saprista, in order to gain control of what little family wealth remained—Claudio by spreading a biting acid on the saddle of his stallion, so that the deadly ichor moved from the anus upward to the heart, Saprista by smearing a toxic orpiment on a golden statue of the Virgin which she was wont to kiss during her private devotions, so that she died rotting from the lips inward. If all this was true or not, Volpato did not reveal. Evil stories clustered about him, but he acted kindly enough in his treatment of my sister, as well as having the goodness to be away for long periods, seeking his fortune among the megatherium-haunted savannahs of the New World.
Meanwhile, his castle on the banks of the Toi fell into decay, and his wife did not become a mother. But I was proud of it, and of my dear sister for marrying so well—the only one of us to marry into court circles.
The way to Dalembert’s quarters lay through a long gallery in which Volpato displayed some of his treasures. Rats scuttled among them in the dim light. Among much that was rubbish were some fine blue-glazed dishes brought back from the lands of the Orinoco; ivories of mastodon carved during the last Neanderthal civilization for the royal house of Itssobeshiquetzilaha; parchments rescued by a Mantegan ancestor from the great library at Alexandria (among them two inscribed by the library’s founder, Ptolemy Soter) and portraits on silk of the seven Alexandrian Pleiades preserved from the same; a case full of Carthaginian ornament; jewels from the faery smiths of Atlantis; an orb reputed to have belonged to Birsha, King of Gomorrah, with the crown of King Bera of Sodom; a figurine of a priest with a lantern from the court of Caerleon-on-Usk; the stirrups of the favourite stallion of the Persian Bahram, Governor of Media, that great hunter; tapestries from Zeta, RaSka, and the courts of the early Nemanijas, together with robes cut for Miluitin; a lyre, chalice, and other objects from the Mousterian Period; a pretty oaken screen carved with dim figures of children and animals which I particularly liked, said to have come from distant Lyonesse before it sank below the waves; together with other items of some interest. But all that was of real worth had been sold off long ago, and the custodian sacked, to keep the family in meat and wine.
Tempted by a whim for which I could not account, I paused on my way among the mouldy relics and flung open an iron-strapped chest at random. Books bound in vellum met my gaze, among them one more richly jacketed, in an embroidered case studded with beads of ruby and topaz.
Taking it over to the light, I opened it and found it had no title. It was a collection of poems in manuscript, probably compiled by their creator. At first glance, the poems looked impossibly dull, odes to Liberty and the Chase, apostrophes to the Pox and Prosody, and so on. Then, as I flicked the pages, a shorter poem in terza rima caught my eye.
The poem consisted of four verses—the first two of which were identical with those adorning my bedroom window! Its title had reference to the emblematic animal over the main archway of the castle: “The Stone Watchdog at the Gate Speaks.” Whoever had transcribed part of the poem onto the window had been ingenious in accrediting its lines to the transparent glass. Amused by the coincidence, for coincidences were my daily dish, I read the final verses.
No less, while things celestial proceed
Unfettered, men and women all are slaves,
Chaining themselves to what their hearts
most need.
Methinks that whatsoe’er the mind once craves,
Will free it first and then it captive take
By slow degrees, down into Free Will’s graves.
Alas, Prosody had not replied when addressed! Yet the sentiment expressed might be true. I generally agreed with myself on the truth of the moralising in poems. Perhaps very little could be said that was a flat lie, provided it rhymed. Thoughtfully, I tore the page from its volume and tucked it in my doublet, tossing the book back into the chest, among the other antiquities.
Beyond the long gallery was the circular guard room, with its spiral stair up to the ramparts. Although the guard room had once been a building standing alone, it had long since come within the strangling embrace of the castle which, like some organic thing, had thrown out galleries and wings and additional courts, century by century, engulfing houses and other structures as it went. The old guard room retained something of its outdoor character despite being embedded inside the masonry of the castle; a pair of cavorts skimmed desperately round the shell, trapped after venturing in through carelessly boarded arrow slits on the inside-facing wall. On the floor lay a shred of Poseidon’s fur which the birds had dropped in their panic.
The character of the building changed again beyond the guard room. Here were stables, now converted to the usages of the Mantegan family’s resident artist, Nicholas Dalembert. Dalembert worked up in the loft, while his many children romped over the cobbles below.
I called to him. After a moment, his head appeared in the opening above, he waved, and began to climb down the ladder. He started to speak before he reached the bottom.
“So, Master Prian, it’s almost a year—it’s a long while since we’ve seen you at Mantegan. As God is my witness, this is an inhospitable place. I wonder what can have brought you here now. Not pleasure, I’ll be bound.”
I explained that I had been ill, that my sister was caring for me, and that I might be leaving on the morrow. “At first I thought it was the plague troubling me! There’s much of it in Malacia, especially in the Stary Most district—brought from the East, the medicos say, on the backs of the Turkish armies. Whenever you fall into a fever these days, you fear the worst.”
“You’re safe from the plague here, that at least I’ll say. The plague likes juice and succulence, and there’s nothing of that in this place.” He cast a gloomy eye down on his children, then busy flogging an old greyhound they had cornered; certainly they were not the plumpest of children.
Dalembert was a hefty fellow, as befits an artist who spends much time dissecting men, horses, and dinosaurs. The years had bowed his broad shoulders and trained a mass of grey hair about his shoulders. He had a huge cadaverous face with startling black eyes whose power was reinforced by the great black line of his eyebrows.
“I came to see how the frescoes were progressing, Nicholas.”
“They’re as incomplete as they were last Giovedi Grassi Festival, when you and the players were performing here. Nothing can be done—I can’t work anymore without pay and, although I don’t want to complain to you about your own brother-in-law, Milord Volpato would be better employed setting his lands in order than involving me in his schemes for self-aggrandisement. I’m so hard up I’ve even had to sack the lad who was colouring in my skies for me.”
As he was making this dismal speech, he was leading me through a side door and across a narrow court. His steps were heavy, his manner slow and deliberate. I wondered at him and his situation. I had no doubt that he was among the greatest painters in the land, and not just in Malaria; yet he had wasted a decade here—indeed, seemed to have settled here, forever dawdling on the Mantegan frescoes, forever experimenting with a dozen other arts. Sometimes he quarrelled with Volpato and threatened to leave. All the while, he complained of Volpato’s stinginess. Yet Volpato also seemed to have some justice on his side when he, in his turn, complained that he housed and supported an idle painter and got no reward for it
We entered the banqueting hall, with its pendant vaulting and splendid lattice window, fantastic with carved transoms, overlooking the River Toi. Dalembert’s unfinished frescoes took their orientation from this window, and their lighting schemes. The theme was the Activities of Man and the Prescience of God. Only one or two pastoral scenes and the dinosaur hunt were complete; for the rest, one or two isolated figures or details of background stood out in a melancholy way behind the scaffolding.
As Dalembert plodded to and fro, expounding what he intended to do, I could see something of his vision, could see the entire hall as a sweet elegiac rhapsody of Youth, as he planned it to be. The cartoons scattered about showed that his wonderful phantasies, his glorious and ample figures, drawn together in grandiose colour orchestrations, opened new horizons of painting. In the marriage scene, sketched in and part painted, the wedding of an early Mantegan to Beatrice of Burgundy was commemorated. What delicacy and perception!
“The secret is the light,” I said.
For light seemed to linger on the princess with a serene if sad intimacy, and on her banners and followers with no less lucidity. The church with its galleries and the view beyond were carefully drawn in, proof of Dalembert’s marvellous command of perspective.
The artist paused before a military scene, where soldiers were shooting birds and a peasant boy stood comically wearing a large helmet and holding a shield. In the background rose a small fantastic city, drawn and washed over.
Dalembert dismissed it all with a curt wave of one hand.
“That’s all I’ve done here since we last met. The whole task is impossible without adequate funds. Adequate talent, too.”
“It’s beautiful, Nicholas. The city, with its ragged battlements, its towers, domes, and overhanging garde-robes—how well it’s set amid its surroundings!”
“Well enough, perhaps, yet there’s nothing there which my master, Albrecht, could not have done thirty years ago—fifty years ago.”
“Surely perfection is more important than progression?”
He looked at me with his dark and burning eyes. “I didn’t take you for a man who preferred a stagnant pond to running water. Ah, I can do nothing, nothing! Outside beyond these crumbling walls is that great burning world of triumphs and mobilities, while I’m here immobile. Only by art, only through painting, can one master it and its secrets! Seeing is not enough—we do not see until we have copied it, until we have faithfully transcribed everything . . . everything . . . especially the divine light of heaven, without which there is nothing.”
“You would have here, if you could only continue with your work, something more than a transcription—”
“Don’t flatter me. I hate it sincerely. I’ll take money, God knows I’ll take money, but not praise. Only God is worthy of praise. There is no merit anywhere but He gives it. See the locks of that soldier’s hair, the bloom on the boy’s cheek, the bricks of the walls of the fortification, the plumage of the little bird as it flutters to the sward—do I have them exact? No, I do not! I have imitations! You don’t imagine—you are not deceived into believing there is no wall there, are you?”
“But I expect the wall. Your accomplishment is that through perspective and colouring, you show us more than a wall.”
“No, no, far less than a wall ... A wall is a wall, and all my ambition can only make it less than a wall. You look for mobility and light—I give you dust and statuary! Its blasphemy—life offered death!”
I did not understand him, but I said nothing. He stood stock still, fixing his gaze in loathing on the fortified city he had depicted, and I was aware of the formidable solidity of him, as if he were constructed of condensed darkness inside his tattered cloak.
Finally he turned away and said, as if opening a new topic of conversation, “Only God is worthy of praise. He gives and takes all things.”
“He has also given us the power to create.”
“He gives all things, and so many we are unable to accept. We stand in a new age, Master Prian. This is a new age—I can feel it all about me, cooped up though I am in this dreadful place. Now at last—for the first time in a thousand years, men open their eyes and look about them. For the first time, they construct engines to supplement their muscles and consult libraries to supplement their meagre brains. And what do they find? Why, the vast, the God-given continuity of the world! For the first time, we may see into the past and into the future. We find we are surrounded by the classical ruins of yesterday and the embryos of the future! And how can these signs from the Almighty be interpreted save by painting? Painting gives and therefore demands universal knowledge . . .”
“And, surely, also the instincts are involved—”
“Whereas I know nothing—nothing! For years and years—all my life I’ve slaved to learn, to copy, to transcribe, and yet I have not the ability to do what a single beam of light can do—here, my friend, come with me, and I’ll show you how favourably one moment of God’s work compares with a year of mine!”
He seized my tunic and drew me from the hall, leaving the door to swing behind us. Again we retraced the court, which echoed to his grudging step. We returned to the stable that housed him. The little children sprawled and played. Dalembert brushed them aside. He climbed the ladder to his loft, pushing me before him. The children cried words of enticement to him to join their play; he shouted back to them to be silent.
The loft was his workshop. One end was boarded off. The rest was filled with his tables and materials, with his endless pots and brushes of all sizes, with piles of unruly paper, with instruments of every description, with geometrical models, and with a litter of objects which bespoke his intellectual occupations: an elk’s foot, a buffalo horn, skulls of aurochs and hypsilophodon, piles of bones, a plaited hat of bark, a coconut, fir cones, shells, branches of coral, dead insects, and lumps of rock, as well as books on fortifications and other subjects.
He brushed through these inanimate children too. Flinging back a curtain at the rear of the workshop, he gestured me in, crying, “Here you can be in God’s trouser pocket and survey the universe! See what light can paint at the hand of the one true Master!”
The curtain fell back into place. We were in a small, stuffy and enclosed dark room. A round table stood in the centre of it. On the table was a startling picture painted in vivid colours. I took one glance at it and knew that Dalembert had happened on some miraculous technique, combining all arts and all knowledge, which set him as far apart from all other artists as men are apart from the other animals with which they share the globe. Then something moved in the picture. A second glance told me this was nothing but a camera obscura! Looking up, I saw a little aperture through which the light entered. Directed by a lens, it shone in through a small tower set in the roof of the stable.
“Can our poor cobwebs of brains counterfeit a picture as vivid and perfect as this? Yet it is merely a passing beam of light! The lens in the roof has a better mastery of experience than I! Why should a man—what drives a man to compete against Nature itself? What a slave I am to my hopes!”
As he bewailed his lot, I stared at the scene laid out so curiously and captivatingly on the table. From the perspectives of the rooftops, we looked down on a stretch of track outside the castle, where the Toi ran beside a dusty climbing road. By the river, resting on grass and boulders, sat a group of people as dusty as the road, their mules tethered nearby. So enchanted was I to observe them, and to overlook such details as an elderly man who mopped his bald head with a kerchief and a widow woman in black who fanned her face with a hat, that it was a minute before I identified them as a group of pilgrims or penitents—evidently embarked on a long journey and making life hard for themselves.
“You see how they are diminished, my friend,” said Dalembert “We see them as through God’s eye. We believe them real, yet we are only looking at marks on a table, light impressions that leave no stain! Look, here comes my wife, toiling back up the hill—yet it is not my wife, only a tiny mark on the tabletop which I identify with my wife. What is its relation to her?”
“If you knew that, you would hold the secret of the universe, I daresay.”
His great brows drew together.
“She has been copied by a master painter, who uses only light.”
I watched as the small figure of his wife, in climbing up toward the castle gate, slowly traversed an inch or two of tabletop. I did not answer Dalembert, not having his religious convictions; but he never needed prompting to speak.
“We stand—our generation, I mean—on the verge of some tremendous discovery. All things may be possible . . . And yet, what man can say if we aren’t ourselves little more than reflections of light-
“Or shadows, as Plato says in the seventh book of his ‘Republic’ . . . As an actor, I’ve often thought it—I seem most substantial when I’m being a fictitious creature.”
“Actors—they’re nothing, they leave no trace.”
“If that is so, then they are like Plato’s shadows on the wall of his cave.”
“Those that observed the shadows were captives, chained where they sat since childhood. That much at least is not allegory.”
“Shall we go down to greet your wife?”
“She has nothing to say. She probably has nothing to eat either, poor jade!” As if to dismiss her, he stepped back and turned a handle, causing the lens or mirror attached to it to be moved. At once, the labouring woman and the penitents were swept away. Rooftops and gables appeared in our enchanted circle, and then an inner court.
The sharp diminution, the steep perspective, and the amazing brilliance of the scene gave the buildings so novel an air that at first I did not recognise where we were. Then I uttered a cry of surprise.
All at once the whole panorama was known and interpreted. Minute birds flittered here and there. These were the very cavorts I had watched with my sister. I could even see a haze of cats fur, spread out like a web and stirred by the warm circulating breath of the courtyard. I looked for my bedroom window. Yes, there it was, and on the open sill Poseidon herself, glaring out at the creatures who were making so free with her abandoned coat! How bright and minute the colours were, like some living Schwabian miniature in enamel! The entire window with its parched woodwork was less than half the size of my little finger’s nail, yet I saw every detail of it, and the cat, to perfection. What images of peace! I was watching them still when—with startling speed—the whole view was blotted out by a rapidly growing bird, which rose and rose, as if from the depths of the table, until it blotted everything out A scrabbling sounded overhead, and a cavort fluttered down between Dalembert and me.
“Wretched creatures! How clumsy they are!” Dalembert said, lumbering about and striking at the bird—nearly clouting me in the process. “This isn’t the first time one has tumbled in here. Get out of the way while I kill it!”
I descended the ladder while he hit out at the luckless bird, circling round and round in the darkness.
Below, the children were all crying in delight. Their mother had just entered by the street door. She greeted me wearily and sat down.
She was a heavy woman. Her face was withered now and had lost much of its former beauty. Her name among men was Charity; she was, in fact, a flying woman. Our laws in Malaria governing the flying people were very strict, but Charity, as child and young girl, had been one of those favoured few allowed to nest on top of the campanile, on account of her great beauty. I could recall her being pointed out to me as a boy, flying with some of her sisters—a lovely and remarkable sight, though the subject of lewd boyish jokes, for the flying people scorned clothes.
Now Charity kept her pinions folded. Since marrying her lover, Dalembert, for whom she had modelled, she never flew and had perhaps lost the art.
Seeing me, she rose and offered a hand in welcome. The children tugged at her robe so vigorously that she sat down again before pouring me a glass of wine. I accepted gladly—her husband had been too mean to offer me one.
“I hoped you would come to see us, Master Prian. Your good sister told me you were almost recovered from your fever.”
“I would never come to Mantegan without visiting you and Nicholas. You know that. As ever, I have a great admiration for your husband’s work.”
“How do you find Dalembert?”
“As bursting with genius and ideas as ever!”
“And as religious, and as despairing?”
“A trifle melancholy, perhaps . . .”
“And as unable to paint a wall!”
Picking up a couple of the children, she went over to the water bin, dipped a ladle, and drank from it. The children then called out for a similar treat, and she gave to each in turn, the boys first and then the girls. Over their clamour, she said, “He is too ambitious, and you see the results. I’ve just been out washing for a wealthy family to earn enough to buy bread. How we shall manage when the winter comes, I don’t know. . . .”
“Genius seldom cares to earn its bread.”
“He thinks he will be famous in two hundred years’ time. What good will that do me or his poor children, I don’t know! Come, I must find them something to eat. ... I shouldn’t complain, Master Prian; it’s just that I don’t see matters in the same light as Dalembert, and the road up to the castle grows steeper week by week, I swear.”
As I leaned against a wall, sipping the wine and watching how she managed to work while keeping the children entertained, I wondered if she still recalled the aerial views she had had of our city as a young girl—how enchanting it must have looked before she had to walk it! But I said nothing; it was best not to interfere.
It seemed as if the artist had forgotten me. I heard him pacing overhead. He would be working again at his figures.
Passing her the empty glass, I said to Charity, “I must go and rest now. Tell your husband that I hope to come and see him again before I leave the castle. And I’ll ask my sister if she can get Volpato to pay him a little more money.”
She shook her head and gestured dismissively with her hands in a gesture reminiscent of her husband’s.
“Let well alone! Don’t do that! You may not know it, but Volpato has threatened to throw us out, frescoes or no frescoes, if he is pestered ever again on the subject of money.”
“As you wish, of course.”
“It is not as I wish but as I must”
I went to the door. She pulled a long grey feather from her wing and stooped to give it to the smallest baby to play with. I was out of the door before she straightened up again.
The day was moving toward evening. The shadows were climbing the sides of the courtyard. As I crossed to my sister’s quarters, I noticed that the cavorts had all gone. High above my head, the panes of my window were still catching the eye of the sun, but Poseidon had vanished. All was still. The fur had sunk down at last to the ground—a dusty twist of it rolled across the flags under my feet Now only light filled the tranquil air.
I was well again: tomorrow I would probably quit the castle.