Breath and Bones (22 page)

If he intended to prompt them toward some kind of action, he failed. Collecting the children one by one, Heber and Sariah strode by without acknowledging him; Myrtice would have done so, too, if Famke had not seen an opportunity to step on her shoelace and force her to kneel and retie it.

Seeing the family stop at various lengths from his cell, Noble pulled a wilted scrap of paper from his coat pocket. He managed to keep his stream of chat fluid. “Thought you'd want to read it—it makes for a most ripping yarn, with some fine description of the gowns and slippers for which your caterpillars are destined, if I do say so myself.”

When the Goodhouses merely looked away from him, he cocked his head at Famke and held the scrap of paper toward her. “Miss Summerfield, how do you fare this fine Indian summer day?”

Famke, who had been savoring the scent of tobacco smoke that steamed from his clothes in the sunshine, dared to step up and reach for the clipping. He, however, pulled it away before she could touch it.

Noble put his mouth close to the iron slats. “There is a lovely little paragraph about you,” he said in a whisper that made Myrtice's eyes narrow and the leather shoestring snap in her hands. “If I do say it myself, a lovely paragraph. Yours is a face, adrift in the desert, that inspires men to heights of artistic—”

“Ursula,” Myrtice said loudly, “will you
please
help me knot this lace?”

Famke hung breathlessly on Noble's next word.

“—achievement. Indeed,” he continued, as if he could not see her flush, “I recollect you have a passion for the arts, do you not?”

Famke suddenly remembered caution. She dropped to her knees, heedless of her ugly homespun skirt, and tried to help Myrtice, thereby entangling the process further. Myrtice made a sharp exclamation and hobbled toward her aunt, leaving Famke to topple into the dust.

“Yes,” Noble ruminated, “I recall that you were most interested in art and artists.”

Famke got to her feet.

“Or, no,” he corrected himself, “I believe there was a particular artist—was he a sculptor?”

“A painter,” she mumbled, with her heart hammering at her ribs. “Albert Castle. Have you heard something of him?”

Noble ran his hand over his flaming head and dropped the hat on it with a wince. He seemed to be searching the far recesses of his memory. “Alas,” he said at last, with every appearance of regret. “I can tell you nothing. Nothing, that is, while I am in—”

“So you do know something?” she asked eagerly, forgetting to soften her voice. She recognized that he was about to shift conversation to his own predicament, and she had no wish to discuss what she felt she could not change. “You have seen him? You have found his work?”

“Ah, Miss Summerfield, but ponder this: how little a particular man, even an artist, matters in the face of art itself. A hundred years from now, when we are dead and our small struggles and plans forgotten, citizens of the world will marvel at a charming watercolor, savor an exquisite poem, polish up a marble—”

“Hurry,” Famke hissed, as Sariah started toward her.

“Have you sought your answer in prayer, as your new faith counsels you to do? Perhaps your present God's earthly wife would be sympathetic to—”

“
Have you seen Albert?”

“Regrettably,” Noble said, with no appearance of regret at all, “any information I might have is at my hotel.” Just as Sariah was upon them, he slid the article between the bars with two fingers.

Famke took it and, for want of a better solution, stuffed it hastily down the neck of her blouse. Continuing the same movement, she also pulled a thin steel hairpin from her wig and poked it through the bars, hushing Harry Noble's thanks with an icy stare.

Then her co-wife took her by the elbow and dragged her back to the bosom of the Goodhouses, who were—all of them, even the children, even Heber—now regarding her with suspicion.

“Brush off your skirt,” Sariah said. “It's filthy.”

But Myrtice was the one to ask what was in everyone's mind: “That man—did he follow you from New York?”

“Of course not,” said Famke; yet, that afternoon, when she unfolded the clipping at last, she was startled to find a rectangle of stiff paper tucked among the creases. It had been professionally printed in thick black ink, with a border of twining vines:

Harry Noble, also Hermes
~traveling~
Temporarily to be found at the Continental Hotel,
West Temple Street, Salt Lake City

Now, why did he do that? she wondered. He couldn't really expect her to go to him there; how would such a thing be possible? She tore the card into bits and burned them in Sariah's cookstove.

Then she began to plot.

In considering the modern “Movement” in New York it is fair to say that we cover the whole country, and the condition of the fine arts in the United States may be measured by applying the gauge to what is to be seen in New York
.

B
AEDEKER'S
U
NITED
S
TATES

It was Viggo's first day in America, and already he was doing his work. He still thought of it this way: his work, as assigned by Mother Birgit; and yet it was what he wanted to do, an undertaking that sat very close to his heart.

As soon as he stepped out of Castle Garden, he asked about trains to Utah and learned that there would be one in the morning. Then, having done as much as he could to find Famke for now, he decided to detect what he might about her husband, the painter. With his knapsack on his back, he wandered into the street and used his shipboard English to ask a pair of gentlemen with fine whiskers and tall hats where artists tended to congregate. He did not mind the gentlemen's sneers and stares, for they answered him, and he went to all those places. The Italian restaurants on Sullivan and MacDougal Streets, the French restaurants on Greene Street and University Place—in their dark, smoky dining rooms, he stared at the shabby men and women tucking in to messy plates and declaiming passionately in a vocabulary he could not understand:
gesso, craquelure, chiaroscuro
.

Viggo asked the monkeyish man at the cash register where he might go to see some paintings.

“At seven of the evening?” the little man said with what Viggo supposed was a Roman snort. “The galleries, they are shut.” But he directed Viggo to another restaurant, one where the owner was in sympathy with Bohemian
ideals. He allowed some of his favorite artists to buy their meals with paint and canvas which he hung on the walls.

This establishment was French and, perhaps because of the exceptionally heavy cloud of wine and smoke in the air, most of the paintings looked blurry to Viggo. He had difficulty deciding what some of them were meant to depict. Was this one a haystack or a fat frog? Was that a gentleman in a frock coat or a widow in weeds—or perhaps a cart horse wearing a hat?

He felt more comfortable with a few small canvases tucked into a corner near the kitchen. These were simple compositions and very realistic in their details: one of a glistening spill of dead fish, mouths gaping in a way he recognized and understood; one of a rose and a fly, with every vein in petal and wing finely traced; and one of a ship on the sea.

Having recently been on a ship himself, Viggo devoted most of his attention to this last. It was, he thought, very nicely done, with many masts and a wild hard wind blowing holes in the sails. The waves on which the ship rode rose high and luminous green, crashing into soap-white foam. It was small wonder, then, that the lone human element in the picture—the ship's figurehead—looked terrified: her face and bosom blunted, her long red wooden hair licking down the hull like a flame.

It was a fine picture indeed, and every detail suited it but one. Bending very close, Viggo saw that the wave in the far right corner was, yes, about to enfold a castle such as he would expect to find only on dry land. He made out the sharp peak of a turret and a crenellated square to the right, with an open space where the far wall would be. He did not quite understand why it was there until he blinked and saw that the castle was actually a blending of two decorated letters: a towering A and a fortresslike C.

Painted around the frame's four sides, he read:

• Remember me when I •
• am gone away Gone far away •
• into the silent land. •
• Christina Georgina Rossetti •

The words were simple, and he understood most of them. A.C., the man who wrote to Famke, was in Mæka looking for her. Viggo's eyelids fluttered in a way that, to the restaurant's other patrons, made him look most artistic.

Even on a Sunday, farm life centered on the silkworms, which were growing fat, sluggish, and ready to spin: pregnant with their own next selves. Soon the yellow-gray bodies would make white-gray cocoons, and the Goodhouses would be one step closer to securing prosperity for the Prophetians. That afternoon, as she lifted the veil over the largest table, Famke imagined a worm writhing through the eye of a needle, being stitched into a delicate map of paradise. And as she spread the chopped mulberry leaves, she envisioned worms wiggling their slow way through her own petticoat, right where she had painted the bloody ovals that never became a face.

Six weeks
, she thought.
If they are going to spin, I have been here six weeks
.

Famke heard her name. Heber and Sariah's oldest daughter, Alma, was standing in the farmyard, calling her into the house. Famke scattered the last leaves haphazardly, and as she replaced the linen, her toe collided with something hard that gave a liquid slosh: the lantern. Famke poked it farther beneath the table and its gauzy skirt.

“Gadding about the farmyard again,” Sariah commented, when Famke joined the family where they had gathered in the dun-colored parlor. All the Goodhouses looked somber, but then it was hard to look otherwise when seated below so many white manikins in black boxes. Sariah held a heavy book that she placed in Famke's hands:
The Silk Farmer's Guide and Almanac
. “It is time we learn how to take the next step.” Apparently there was no more sin in reading on a Sunday than in feeding the livestock.

Sariah pointed out the passage Famke must read, the chapter that described baking the cocoons and spinning their threads. Sariah herself would read privately about reserving a few pupae for breeding, and the manner in which to encourage mothly mating. While the children played Emigration with peg dolls and iron handcarts, and Sariah cut the sacred symbols from a worn-out union suit that was ready for the rag box, the two younger wives took turns reading aloud. Together they memorized instructions for winding a cocoon's outer hundred feet or so onto one set of wooden reels, the finer and more valuable inner thread onto another, and twining four of those strands together on the spinning wheels that Heber had bought at auction.

Heber, sitting with a favorite Mormon tract, spoke up when Famke
paused for a sip of water. “Four,” he said, “is an ideal number. Where four are bound together, there is great strength.”

Sariah and Myrtice pursed their identical mouths, and Famke excused herself to visit the convenience.

She sat on the hot wooden seat and opened Harry Noble's clipping again. This she read avidly, savoring the descriptions of “frangible threads into which the caterpillars' lives will spin, to be cut by a fair flame-haired Atropos; eventually to adorn the ladies Eastward in ruffles and flounces of softest, buttery silk, to line their slippers that they may walk on air, while the lovely Mormon Fates labor in their simple homespun . . .” Naturally she overlooked the last part. She would not wear homespun forever.

Nor would she stay in Prophet forever. That her departure was imminent, Famke was certain: Harry Noble had information about Albert—he had been coy, but a promise had been obvious beneath his words. If he turned her hairpin to good purpose, he would be back in Salt Lake City soon; and he would probably leave just as quickly, fleeing whatever sense of justice had put him in the hoosegow. He would take all news of Albert with him.

Shifting for a more comfortable position, Famke weighed her possibilities, devised a dozen plans and discarded them all. She must get to Salt Lake, which was now her Zion as well as the Mormons'; she must convince Heber to bring her—but how? She had wasted so many days here already . . .

The moths will hatch and die and have their babies before I escape. And I will have to raise the babies
.

Then it came to her. She stuffed the clipping back into her bosom and fairly ran into the house, arriving flushed and unsteady on her feet.

“I am ill!” she declared. “I am in a condition! I must see a doctor immediately.”

With an energy and push that had scarcely been expected from the disciples of Mormonism, this work was crowded with all possible speed
.