Breath and Bones (29 page)

When Famke climbed out, stiff and sore, to begin her rounds of watering holes and boardinghouses, she had a bit of luck. In a saloon where the sign above the piano read,
PLEASE DON'T SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER; HE IS DOING THE BEST THAT HE CAN
, she recognized a painting hanging over the bar. This one featured seven Muses, plus a red-haired eighth and ninth holding a pen and paintbrush. All were lined up quite tidily, like soldiers presenting themselves for inspection. The frame was inscribed:
Had We But World Enough and Time
. . .

“You'll be wanting Ma Medlock's girls,” said the professor at the piano. He looked hardly older than Famke herself, and his hat sat almost as far down on his ears as hers did. With his fingers still dancing over the yellow keys, he gave her directions to the house in question—“the finest girls, sir, the very finest. You'll see the picture don't do 'em justice. But there ain't any with real red hair, or at least there wasn't at the time the picture was made, which is why those two don't have much in the way of faces. Two of the brown-hairs went red since then.”

At Ma Medlock's place, she found seven girls eager to chat with Albert's brother, to stroke his soft hair and kiss his pale cheeks and tease him about ways to put meat on his manly bones. The other customers looked old and tired and were scruffy besides; a tall young fellow in a fairly clean suit was both a treat and a good prospect.

“I—I am so sorry,” Famke stammered as one hand found its way dangerously close to the inseam of Dante's trousers. “I haven't money enough. I am looking for my brother.”

At that, kindly Ma offered her a job repairing an outhouse damaged in a thunderstorm. “Your brother ain't here,” she said, “but leastways we can give you something to go on with.”

Famke patched the back wall gratefully though clumsily, developing an enormous blister on her right hand and a black thumbnail on her left, when she hammered it instead of an iron nail.

“Tch,” clucked Ma, bandaging both of Famke's hands. “You're far too delicate for the life out West. I hope you find your brother soon—and do
something about that cough of yours.” She gave Famke a dollar and a swig of Piso's Cure, then found her a ride in a customer's wagon through the hills to Nederland.

There, in the salon of a Mrs. Armstrong, a half-dozen fair but frail Nederlandish Valkyries hung on the wall assisting the repose of a hero who, this time, seemed to stare out of the canvas with a pair of rather prominent green eyes. The Valkyrie with the reddest hair had a clouded face and remarkably pretty calves.

Famke touched those calves. Sticky. “Do you know where the artist went?” she asked, feeling as if her real fleshly legs would hardly hold her.

“Only two places to go from here: Boulder and Tin Cup.”

From another brothel customer, Famke begged a wagon ride as far as Tin Cup, where she found nothing but a hog ranch. After a few tired tears and an unpleasant encounter with an old
Luder
who seemed to consider Famke her last hope for a customer, she walked and rode back to Boulder, ignoring the ache in her legs and the cough that refused to abate. With a few hours to fill before the next train, she revisited Ma Medlock's and found a house of mourning.

“Ruby is gone,” Ma said. Her eyes were pink with weeping, and she wore her genteel black silk with new conviction. “My oldest, my own girl. Diphtheria.”

Famke was not sure she'd ever heard that word; she wondered if it referred in some way to a venereal infection. “I am sorry to hear it,” she said politely. She thought she remembered a Ruby: the darkest of the Muses, with thin, sharp features, a gold front tooth, and a somewhat splotched complexion. She'd been near the center of Albert's painting, her bare knee over a grinning mask denoting comedy. So she was Ma Medlock's own daughter.

“A beautiful girl,” Famke added, again out of politeness, and Ma rewarded her with a luminous smile that had been greatly aided by a draught of laudanum.

“She's been most beautifully laid out,” said Ma. “Would you like to see?”

This was Famke's first foray down a boarders' hallway. It was dark and stuffy, but the doors were decorated with gaily painted plaques bearing the girls' names: Laughing Laura, Virginia Candy, Ruby. Ma had locked the door to that room; she now unlocked it and led Famke inside, where the curtains were drawn and a lamp was burning low.

Dead and prepared for the grave, Ruby shone with a loveliness Famke had not remembered as hers in life. Her skin had gone waxy yellow, but her cheeks were painted a dainty rose; her black hair waved gracefully away from her brow, and all the switches and tails seemed to match. Her eyelids were sewn shut so delicately that Famke could not see the stitches. Clearly, this was the work of a loving hand, and it was perhaps that love that had kept the body relatively uncorrupted and only slightly odiferous, despite the absence of an embalmer's fluids.

“A beautiful girl,” Famke repeated, holding a handkerchief over her face.

Ma Medlock interpreted her gesture as a paroxysm of grief. “Do not be sad,” she said bravely. “My Ruby has gone to a better place.” She ran a hand gently over the corpse's brow, her cheek, her arm. It looked to Famke as if she left a blue shadow wherever her hand passed.

Ma wiped her nose and was suddenly all business. “I have a proposition for you, Dante Castle. Your brother is a great artist—tell me, do you share any of his skill?”

“I—” Famke remembered the days painting ice for Nimue. Albert had praised her work then. “I am not sure.”

“Let's go to my office.” After carefully locking Ruby's door, Ma took Famke's arm and leaned on it, all the way to the end of the hall. Her pigeonholed desk there was as vast and messy as Fru Strand's, and she sat down before it with the air of a lost soul.

“I want another picture painted,” said Ma Medlock. She took up some papers and shuffled them, perhaps simply to give herself something to do. “One of just my Ruby. Looking as she does in your brother's painting, but wearing a pretty dress as she is now.”

“I cannot paint a likeness,” Famke said. “I am sorry.”

Ma let the papers drop. They scattered over the floor as if taken up in a gale, and two enormous tears seemed to well up out of the black centers of her eyes. “The burying's on Tuesday,” she said tragically. “And not a painter in town who can touch your brother's talent—only
diggers
.” She fairly spat the word.

With one hand on her thigh, where the pocketed sketch would have crackled if it were fresh enough, Famke thought hard. Her mind was whirling, but, “I might contrive something,” she said at last.

“I will pay gladly,” Ma Medlock offered, reckless this once. “I would like something special to remember my girl by. Something decent and artistic.”

Famke was struck with the idea that, now the madam had been introduced to art, it was an essential element of her life. Those who had witnessed a magic such as Albert's could not return to their ordinary lives: Just so had his artistry ensnared her in Dragør.

“Yes,” she said, “I think I have a scheme.”

To be fair,” said Myrtice Goodhouse Black, with a gray eye on Viggo, “the silk house burned two nights
after
Ursula left, when we brought the candles in to watch the worms spinning their cocoons. And she took only thirty dollars.”

Viggo now realized that the hut in the farmyard was half-destroyed rather than half-built, and the odd shape of the house itself might be the carving work of an inferno.

Sariah pressed her lips together and pushed another cup of the lukewarm tea toward the other woman. “If she hadn't hid that lantern beneath the table where it had no business, we would still have our silk house—one accidental kick from Alma and your dropped match would not have sent the whole place up in flames. And”—she turned to Viggo—“with that thirty dollars we could have bought Myrtice the medicines to ease—”

“Our faith does not condone the use of stimulants
or
relaxants,” Myrtice said stubbornly, looking now at her hands. “Thirty dollars would do me no good.”

“Maybe,” said Sariah, “but then Heber wouldn't have had to sell that quarter-lot in order to travel . . .”

It was fairly clear to Viggo now that the women were disagreeing solely to be disagreeable, and he thought it was up to him to end their bickering. “I have an idea,” he said. “If you wish to find Ursula, should you make people know? In all Mæka, I have seen pictures that say, ‘Wanted . . .'”

Sariah and Myrtice stared at him.

“That
is
an idea,” Sariah said. She looked at the stranger with approval, something like a smile beginning around her lips. “Do you have any knack for drawing?”

If a man is fortunate enough to find a steady job he can earn a living more easily here than in Denmark. Back in Denmark one can toil from early in the morning until late in the evening for only fifty øre a day, and in many places the food is bad, too
.

S
øREN
P
ETERSEN
,
A
ARHUS
A
MTSTIDENDE

Famke's mind was a stew of dynamited walls, Dove-in-the-window patterns, and memories of wielding Albert's paintbrush. She had a fever, inspiration, and good intentions; what was more, Ma Medlock had promised her twenty dollars—the equivalent of two turns with one of the girls, or a hundred miles on a Slim Princess—if she did well.

Famke fetched
Twilight of the Muses, with Their Various Attributes
, from the saloon and set it up in Ma Medlock's office. She located the Muse who was Ruby and got out her Bowie knife. She said, “
Fanden
,” then sent up a hasty prayer to the immaculate Virgin Mary. She didn't want to think what Ma Medlock might do if Famke failed to produce the desired results.

Squinting in the absence of Myrtice's spectacles and working carefully, Famke ran her knife around the outline of the painted Ruby. Albert had as always stretched his canvas well; the fabric was taut and the cutting was easy, from the black ringlets atop Ruby's head to the grinning mask at her feet. In a very few minutes Famke had a silhouette of Ruby and a portrait of the Muses with a large hole in the center.

For once Famke wished she were a needlewoman, as she threaded Ma's thinnest one with cotton and began to sew Ruby onto a canvas square she'd framed and stretched herself. She quickly learned to punch a series of careful holes where she intended to stitch, so as not to crack the paint; there was a delightfully crisp pricking and sliding sound as the needle passed through the taut fabric.

Once Ruby was in place, she mixed a primer using what she could remember of Albert's recipe and daubed it first around the seam, then over the rest of the canvas, spreading it as evenly as she could.

That night, while Famke slept, the base dried quickly, cracked, and flaked away. By noon it lay like a drift of dry snow over Ma's desk.

“Yes, it is going well,” Famke said that afternoon, buttering a biscuit for her breakfast with the fair but frail.

Ma began to weep again. “Ruby's starting to turn. She has to go into the ground tomorrow,” she said.

The biscuit in Famke's mouth became very dry. She swallowed hard, choking at the crumbly sensation in her throat, then excused herself from the table and went to Ma's office. With another prayer, this time to the Mary who was the Mormon god's wife, she mixed and applied a new primer. The drying went more slowly, which she considered an encouraging sign.

While she waited, she turned her attention to the Muses painting, where she would have to perform the same sort of patchwork operation. It turned out that the Muse farthest on the outside was a phantom-faced redhead; with a sense of pleasure, Famke cut her away and set her aside, to be stitched into the gap left by the excised Ruby. She rebuilt the framework smaller and stretched the cut canvas over it. Feeling very clever, she nailed the canvas in place, prick-sewed the red-haired Muse into the center, then spackled over the seam with her new primer. She considered this arrangement even more of a triumph than the original.

Now came the most delicate work of all. The Ruby on the new canvas was naked, and Ma Medlock wanted her wearing a frock. She also needed a setting, “something cheerful.”

Famke's experience in this area was very limited, but she thought that as the painting would rarely be exposed to anything stronger than seduction-level gaslight, she just might manage something passable. She mixed several tints of white and blue, as she had helped Albert do in the past. Then, painstakingly, she dabbed a filmy gown over Ruby's naked shoulders and bosom. This was very different from painting with mud on her own petticoat; for one, the canvas was taut, and for another, there were already lines to follow. She managed a passable gown. She wasn't too confident about her ability to shade it properly, so she kept it thin and cloudy, blurring away
from the body—the impression of a dress rather than the detailed rendition of one. She left the mournful mask by Ruby's feet and painted a wispy skirt over the legs behind it. Then, with a sigh of relief, she returned to what she knew. All around Ruby and her laughing mask, she painted a cave of ice.