Feast of All Saints (7 page)

He could well imagine what these letters contained. He could see packets, some torn, some sealed, the thick folded pages of journals protruding from their wrapping, it was a treasure, and yet he could not touch these things. He had no leave. He got to his feet, wiped the dust from his pants, and reaching for the open blinds gently pulled them shut. It seemed the darkness gathered around him like a cloud.

He stood still for a moment. He was excited, perhaps more excited than he had ever been. Outside lay the everyday life that so frustrated him, driving him, pushing him toward all manner of petty mischief and petty defeat. Yet here he felt alive, marvelously alive, and he was afraid of being sent away. He turned quickly, brushing again at the dust on his pants, and went in search of Juliet.

A soft sunlight flooded the end of the passage, aflicker with the shapes of leaves, and shading his eyes with his hand he found himself on the threshold of a vast room, and heard Juliet say to him,
“Cher
…come in.”

She was sitting at a wicker table, her back to the open windows where the wild arcs of the Queen’s Wreath shivered with their tiny pink blossoms in the breeze. The air was cool here, and not stale, and had the tang of freshly cut oranges. Gradually he made out the shadowed features of Juliet’s brooding face. She was holding something small in her hands, a mirror perhaps, and was whispering to it though he could not make out the words. There was a bowl of fruit in front of her. But he was quickly distracted by the scattered contents of the room.

A stack of feather mattresses made up her bed, and it was littered with the lovely fabrics she often wore—tarleton, silk, and flowered silk, flimsy things for which he did not know the name. The windows above it were shaded by the thick-leaved branches of the trees and bathed all in a green-tinted light. While along the walls sat trunks sprung and bursting, and here and there packing crates, papered boxes, clusters of
bonnets with wide tangled ribbons, and bunches of crinkled shoes. Before a cluttered marble-top dresser there stood a magnificent Chinese screen. It was alive with slant-eyed maidens sketched in gold against painted clouds.

Marcel drew in his breath. Every instinct in him responded to this place and to the silent beautiful woman who sat there, her rippling dark hair like a veil over her arms, intent upon the small object in her hands. Her deepset lids were languid with heat or with sadness.

But one splendid detail touched him more deeply perhaps than all the rest. Throughout this place there stood vases of flowers: roses, lilies, fragile bunches of lavender, and wild clumps of jasmine withering there among the sturdier blooms with the thick arching fronds of ferns. She must have gathered these herself, and only she could have placed them so carefully amid this chaos. The table before her was shining clean as was the dresser mirror between the windows behind her head.

A breeze stirred the dark leaves beyond the windows. It lifted the spun gold of the mosquito netting that hung above the mattresses from a peg, sighing with the netting, and dropping it softly back against the wall. It seemed an insignificant thing, yet made the hair on the back of his neck rise.

Juliet leaned wearily to one side on her hand. And raising her eyes to Marcel slowly with a sweep of dark lashes, she smiled. “Look,
cher,”
she whispered, and held the small framed object out to him so that it exploded all at once with the light.

He sank down in the chair beside her own. It was not a mirror at all.

In fact, it was a portrait so finely drawn and so lifelike in its little ornate frame that it gave him an almost unpleasant start. All painting broke his heart over his own crude sketches, but this was quite beyond belief.

“But what…” he murmured.

“Christophe,
cher
…” she said. “My Christophe…he’s a man now, look at him. The boy is all gone…” She herself looked mournfully away.

Marcel had realized this, of course. He had seen that face in numerous engravings, the frontpiece in his novel, on the published text of two essays, and once in a journal, and he had copied it himself in ink a dozen times. Pictures of Christophe covered the wall above Marcel’s desk. He had even cheated for the making of these pictures, using paper to trace or crude devices rigged from lamps to throw the printed image on fresh paper for him to copy it there with his pen.

But here was such a lively picture and so perfect that the technique staggered the imagination. Marcel could all but feel the smoothness
of the small square face, and the rougher texture of the dark coat. He rose, almost upsetting the chair behind him, and held the picture at the window in the light.

The man was breathing there, and only the eyes seemed lifeless, like gems in the marvelous plasticity of the face. “But this can’t be a painting!” Marcel sighed. And with his nail he tapped it lightly to discover that it was made of glass. However, the most baffling aspect of it was the color; it was done entirely in muted tones of black and white. And suddenly with a loud gasp, he realized what he was holding in his hands. “Monsieur Daguerre!” he whispered. This was not a painting at all. It was the living Christophe in the frame, captured in Paris by Monsieur Daguerre’s magic box! All the newspapers had been on fire with the news of this invention, and yet he had not believed it until now! And as he realized he was looking upon a genuine photographic likeness, even to the slight scuff on Christophe’s boot, he felt the blood drain from his face. The implications of the picture dazed him, never had the world known such a miracle, by which men and women could be captured exactly as they were and the pictures, clear as the reflection in a mirror, kept for all time. And the papers had spoken of Daguerreotypes of buildings, whole crowds of human beings, the streets of Paris, moments in time fixed forever from the clouds in the sky to the expression on a man’s face.

“Perhaps he lies in his letter,” came the voice, weary and rather deep behind him.

Marcel was startled. “Oh, no, Madame, he’s coming home, I read this in the papers,” he said. He sat down beside her and placed the portrait against the bowl. It took an act of will for him to detach himself from it and look into her eyes. “They said he was coming back here to found a school, Madame…for us.” He touched his breast lightly when he said this. “You can imagine what this means to us, Madame…the way that we admire him, the way that everyone admires him. Why, we follow him through every bit and piece of news that we can find.”

Again he glanced at the little Daguerreotype, Christophe in Paris as he lived and breathed. Christophe among the men who invented such magic, and on his way home.

She was looking at him with that same dreamy expression that he had seen before in the street. It wasn’t clear that she was listening to him at all. “He’s a hero to us, Madame,” he went on anxiously, eyes lighting again and again on the small image. “We have his novel, copies of his stories, articles he’s written for the journals…I read everything I can lay hands on. I read his
Nuits de Charlotte
, it was magnificent, like Shakespeare in the novel form, Madame, I could see it happening before my eyes, and when Charlotte died, I died too.”

She’s going to ask me to go, he thought, and I don’t want to go,
not now, not yet. There was something severe in the tiny face in the picture, the eyes fixing him fiercely.

“Of course, I copy his essays,…” he said quickly, “I have a notebook full of them, and sometimes I write essays—well I try—on my own. If he begins a school here…well, there is no telling how many pupils he’ll have.”

He could tutor the best white families, Marcel thought sullenly, perhaps he doesn’t realize that.…But he said the school was for us, for the
gens de couleur
…Marcel put that thought out of his mind. “There’s no telling how many pupils will want to enroll. I imagine your parlor will be crowded with applicants.”

“What parlor?” she asked in a flat, leaden voice.

He was shocked. He had offended her.

“There’s nothing here anymore,” she sighed, her voice so low that without realizing it he bent toward her. Her eyes were moving around the room slowly. “There’s only ruin here.”

“But all that can be changed, perhaps…” He was afraid. She would lose her temper in a minute, tell him he was impertinent and that he should get out. He stared dismally, helplessly, at the surface of the table before him, and then at that little portrait of the man sitting so regally in the chair. Even the boots were so expertly rendered, and the boards of some polished floor a thousand miles across the sea. He shut his eyes.

When he opened them again he saw that she was taking a ripe peach from the bowl. “Are you hungry,
cher?”
she whispered. It seemed little more than a soft explosion of breath.

“No, thank you, Madame,” he murmured.

She stared at him as her teeth cut through the skin of the peach and he saw the ripe bright fruit against her lips.

“You were telling me things,
cher
…” she said in that same low voice. She ate the peach in great bites, the peeling and the fruit, with no other movement than the movement of her delicate jaw, her lips, her tongue…He felt some vague stirring in himself and shifted his weight in the chair.

“About my essays, Madame,” he said without really hearing himself speak. “I was thinking perhaps that I could bring my work so that when the students begin to come…” He stopped. She was studying him, and she was frightening him. He did not want to admit this but it was true.

“And when the students come…” she breathed softly, “…he would take you as one of them.”

He found he was amazed that she had followed his line of thinking at all. “Yes, that’s it exactly, Madame. I want so much to be one of his pupils,” he said.

She began to lick her fingers. The peach was gone. Only the
rough kernel lay on the table, picked clean. And he was astonished, even embarrassed, as he had never seen a lady do this before, and he had never seen anyone, not even a child, do it quite like this. She licked the first finger, drawing it straight across her tongue, and then the second. Then holding her hand like a fan, her tongue found the nook between finger and thumb and sucked there. Gradually as he watched, she licked the whole hand as though it were only natural, and dainty, and then she rested her chin on her clasped fingers, elbows on the table. Her eyes had never left him once.

“You want to go to the school,” she sighed. The gold hoops in her ears moved ever so slightly against the dark waves that hung down her back.

“Oh, yes, Madame, more than anything. I want to try!”

“Hmmmm…” she took a long breath. “And this is why he comes home, then,” she said in an expressionless voice that made her steady gaze even more unnerving…“not what he says in his letter at all.”

“Oh, no, no, that can’t be true,” he said at once. “I’m sure what he says in the letter is true, Madame. He’s coming home because…because of you.”

This was dreadful, he had been saying all the wrong things to her and didn’t know it. He saw her again as he had seen her when he entered the room, holding the portrait, and talking to it in a whisper.

The only sound now was the sound of the breeze. Trees swelling, rustling against the glass, then dying back. Her dark eyes were fixed on him as they had been all along, and her narrow face had that youthful smoothness that was always hers. Not a line of care marked her forehead. Only some subtle softness around her eyes and around her throat betrayed her age.

Then low, with the barest movement of her lips, her voice came again, “You are hot,
cher?”
she asked. “You are tired?” A snakelike arm extended across the table between them, and her long fingers played with the buttons on his vest. He had never seen a woman in his life as beautiful as she was; even the tiny lines around her eyes were exquisite, the flesh a little paler there, very soft perhaps to touch. He looked down suddenly with the first hint of shyness and found himself gazing at her breasts. The tips of the nipples showed through the silk, he could even see the dark circle of flesh around the nipples, and as her hand found the back of his neck, as her fingers actually touched his skin, he felt a tremor pass over him that contracted to a sudden forbidden excitement swelling uncomfortably, unmistakably between his legs.

She was feeling his hair. He saw nothing before him for an instant, except the gathered silk of her sleeve where her arm pressed
against the bulge of her breast. But he made up his mind to look into her eyes, to be the gentleman if he could not be the child she apparently thought that he was. However, she was rising now, and though she had let him go, she was beckoning for him to get up also. And he could still feel the touch of her fingers as if she’d never moved.

A cloud passed over the sun. And then came another. The room was dim, and she was standing by the bed, drinking from a silver pitcher. She turned to him, holding it in both hands as she extended it. He walked toward her, his feet deafening on the bare boards and taking it from her, he drank. His thirst was far worse than he had realized, and in a moment the pitcher was empty. And when he looked up again, he was dumbfounded.

A rapid explosion of rips that he had heard were the hooks of her dress. And she had stepped out of it, and held it loose, gathered against her naked shoulders. He could see the thin margin of her naked leg, the curve of her hip; the fixed expression of her dark eyes might have struck terror.

But never in his life would he be able to describe the physical sensation that overcame him, the immediate grinding passion that obliterated every other sense, any scintilla of judgment. He knew he should run from the room, and he had no intention of doing so.

And as she drew near to him, as her arm went around his waist, he became some single-minded thing that wanted nothing but to rip away that red silk dress. With a gentle tug she opened the buttons of his shirt.

He did not remember getting undressed. Except that he had never done it so fast, with so little regard. She had let the dress drop and slipped between the sheets. Sinking down beside her, he felt the breeze from the darkling windows cool on his arms and on his face. It stirred the tendrils of her hair.