The Angry Woman Suite (24 page)

“Look at this balance sheet,” she said, again without preamble, handing me a pile of papers. I scanned the top document, bewildered.

“The ledgers looked fine enough at first glance. But as you know, Aidan, appearances can be one thing, reality another. I found that out when I went to pay the taxes. Oh, it was smooth, this easement of funds from escrow accounts to God-knows-where.” Magdalene’s voice turned vehement. “Goddamn Frederick! And goddamn Father for giving him the means to do this to us! And goddamn
me
for not having looked at this sooner!”

Elizabeth spoke: “Say it so I can hear you. Out with it, sister.”

I wondered at Elizabeth’s strange name for her daughter. Looking at Elizabeth sideways, I also wondered how Lear could’ve ever thought her attractive, and wondered (I couldn’t help it) how Frederick could’ve ever stuck it to her. There was a heavy silence, a moment wherein I wished I’d stayed at home; a moment wherein I wished I’d killed Frederick Forsythe on his wedding day, before he’d had the chance to do his real damage; a moment wherein I wondered just how much Festival would be impacted by what, on the face of it, appeared to be a big blow to its funding.

A moment Elizabeth Grayson was not about to let go of.

“Say it, sister,” Elizabeth insisted.

Magdalene raised her head. Her eyelids flickered. “Mother, I’m saying Frederick’s robbed us blind. I’m saying Grayson Investments is broke. I’m saying we’re
worse
than broke. I’m saying Grayson Investments
owes.
I’m saying it’s no wonder Father volunteered to go to war. Is there a better way of getting out of town, I wonder, than running off to war?”

I couldn’t breathe. Had Magdalene just implied her father had embezzled his own company’s investors,
with
Frederick’s help? No. She was distraught. People said all kinds of things when distraught.

“You never were any good with numbers, sister,” Elizabeth said. “Do the math again.”

“And the worst of it is,” Magdalene whispered, “we’ve lost other people’s money.”

I pulled myself back to Magdalene’s distress, putting aside thoughts of Lear and Frederick in cahoots, and Lear supposedly cooling his heels in the relative safety of a French prison.

“I said,”
Elizabeth droned menacingly,
“do it again—”

“Magdalene’s math has always been fine,” I intervened. “And you didn’t do anything wrong, Magdalene. Not personally. This isn’t
your
doing. If money’s lost, it was lost way before you came on board.” I shot a look at Elizabeth.
Venomous
was an apt description of her expression.

“Mr. Madsen, this is not
your
—”

“Shut
up!”
The invective split the air. Magdalene stood and lobbed a pencil caddy at her mother; I was also on my feet by then—it missed Elizabeth by a mile. “Shut up, shut up, shut up! Don’t you see? I have to fix
… everything!
It’s always my job to fix
everything!”

Oddly, Elizabeth smiled. “You’ll wake the baby,” she reproved.

Red blotches stained both Magdalene’s cheeks. “
You
could wake the dead in this house!” she screamed.
“Leave, just go away!”
Then she pleaded with me,
“Make her leave, will you, Aidan?”

Magdalene turned her back to us, arms clasped around her middle, and Elizabeth stared me down, as if challenging me to make another move or utter another sound, which, of course I’d sooner have fought the devil—but then, salvation. And I do mean
salvation.
In the form of a touch at my elbow: a slight touch, hesitant, just enough to get my attention. I turned and flinched, looking into the ugliest face I’d ever seen. Wonderingly, I stepped back.

“Ister,” Stella Grayson said. She had eyes only for Magdalene. “Coos me.”

I took another step back, allowing the never seen, much-rumored Stella Grayson room to get by. She walked slowly, deliberately, and I began moving slowly too, wonderingly turning my head to watch Elizabeth Grayson stamp from the room. Wonderingly watching Magdalene lean into the grotesque harelip’s embrace, sobbing as if her heart would break, and the way Stella smoothed Magdalene’s hair, speaking to her sister in a strange and tender, indecipherable language that I instinctively knew only the two of them understood.

“So the monster saved me from the witch,” I summed things up back at the mill house.

“You always embellish, Aidan,” Sahar chided. “Stella can’t be
that
ugly. And Elizabeth Grayson isn’t a witch.”

“I do
not
embellish. And, yes, Elizabeth
is
a witch and Stella
is
that frightful.” I looked at Matthew. He stared into the fire.

“Stella’s
huge,
Matt. She’s got a gigantic hooked nose and a scowl that looks as if it was branded into her forehead. Her skin is only slightly more attractive than head cheese, liver-colored with yellow splotches—and then there’s that unfortunate harelip. Can’t understand a word she says. Magdalene does, of course, but she has to be the only one.”

“Go back to Magdalene,” Matthew said. “What did she say
after
?”

I tried remembering. “Well, after Stella got her calmed down, Magdalene said she’d have to do something. She said she’d have to make the money back for Grayson Investments. When I asked if she had a plan, she just looked at me and said she had to think—and then she thanked me and showed me out.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do.” Matthew unwrapped a cigar. One look from Sahar and the cigar went back in his breast pocket.

“What? Think?”

“Don’t be absurd. Besides, we knew this was coming.”

I hadn’t known anything was coming.

“We’ll make Lear’s money back, and then we’ll make more on top of it.”

“Right you are,” I retorted. “We’ll save not only Lear’s butt, but we’ll keep Festival afloat, too … one small problem, Matt. Any idea how? We’re talking a pot load of money here. Why, I’d wager the better part of it was even yours!”

Matthew’s dark eyes gleamed. “Then more’s the incentive, wouldn’t you say?”

No one seriously considered broaching the subject with Elizabeth Grayson, and so Sahar and the mill house staff, not the infant’s grandmother, kept an eye on Earl while Matthew painted his portraits of Magdalene.

“It’s very simple,” Matthew told Magdalene at the meeting I’d arranged at Washington’s Headquarters. Magdalene put her elbows on the table that served as my desk and repository for small relics yet to be catalogued for the museum, gazing at Matthew with courteous interest. But Matthew paced. He drummed an unlit cigar against the palm of his other hand, emanating an energy bordering on controlled frenzy.

“I need a model,” he said almost curtly. “And you need a job.”

“Oh.” Magdalene stretched her arms across the table. She studied her folded hands. Then she leaned back in her chair. She eyed Matthew with disbelief. I sat at the end of the table, trying to appear nonchalant, looking back and forth between the two, anxious.

Magdalene said politely, “I’m not sure what you mean, Mr. Waterston. I already have a job. In fact, I have so many jobs I hardly know what to start on first. I’ve got accounts by the dozens to straighten—”

“Please.” Matthew held up a hand. “Your accounts are empty, my dear. Depleted. Decimated. Grayson Investments is broke. There are
no
viable accounts. That’s your reality. So what I’m proposing is a
paying
job, an income—which is what you need if you actually intend to support your family.” He lit the cigar. “A paying job,” he said, puffing experimentally, “that will meet your current overhead
and—
”

“But—”

“No buts. Please hear me out—a
nd
give you the opportunity to put back in my coffers that which your charming husband so dexterously took out. I am—or was—your company’s largest account, taking your biggest hit, was I not?”

I gasped—and who could miss the sudden red blotches on Magdalene’s cheeks?

Her voice was low and dangerous: “Yes.”

“Well, then,” Matthew said, sounding anything but helpful, “the way I see it,
you owe me.
And I still need a model.”

I groaned, hand to my head. The expectation had been so different—though not because of any plan Matthew had outlined. I’d assumed maybe a loan to cover Magdalene’s immediate expenses, then a referral to a banker with miracle-inducing strategies for restructuring bad debt.

But not this.

Magdalene squared her shoulders. “I fail to see—”

“How modeling will take care of what you owe me? It’s very simple, my dear. You are extremely beautiful, and I want to paint something beautiful. A suite …”

“A … suite?”

“A collection of paintings with a common theme. A composition in a series of related keys. In this case, a controversial subject. Something very beautiful, yet also terrible. I’ve been contemplating it for some time, but I’ve needed an exceptional model. I’m very particular, and you’re perfect, Magdalene. What I’ve always pictured. So of course no one else will do. What I’m thinking is, when I finish the suite, I’ll sell the paintings, naturally, and make a pile of money—that money will be the money you owe me, Magdalene, plus there will be more, and that “more” will be the interest I’ll defer on the money Grayson Investments
stole
from me
—
”

“Stop,” Magdalene said. She’d gone pale, and her eyes glassy, as if looking at something terrifying in the near distance, something causing her to pack up and move outside herself.

But Matthew didn’t stop.

“I don’t like quibbling. This suite is so important to me, I’m prepared to advance sitting fees, Magdalene. Name your poison. In addition, I’ve arranged for your other defaults to be forgiven as well, until this suite is completed and sold. As I said, I intend to make quite a lot of money off these paintings, and I mean an
obscene
amount, Magdalene. And when I do I’ll consider your firm’s debt to me paid in full, and you as sufficiently unencumbered enough to renegotiate your other debts, thereby keeping the hounds at bay until your father returns from France. I believe many of the other accounts in question here belong to other backers of Festival as well—people
I’ve
referred to your father, is that correct?”

It was the
coup de grâce.

“You believe correctly,” Magdalene said faintly.

“So we agree my credibility has been made an issue? Because of
your
firm.”

You had to admire her poise, her grace under the stink of insult.

“But given this plan and the time to implement it, I believe you’ll be able to recapture your accounts, Magdalene, rebuild Grayson Investments, and even save Festival for your home town. And no one need be the wiser about our … arrangement. Just the three of us. And your father, of course. How does that sound?”

Magdalene looked up, and I know Matthew saw it at the same time I did: the flash of light in those pale, glassy eyes. A light so angry and sharp and focused, it took my breath away. I leaned in, fascinated. There was life there, all right. Tons of life. Magdalene Grayson was brimming with life and spilt anger.

Unbelievably, Matthew smiled. And all I could think was that he didn’t get it, he just didn’t get it. But how could he? He didn’t know Magdalene as I did, so he’d no way of knowing what he was in for. I
did
know her. I’d had the arrogant and deceptively smart Magdalene as a pupil for what I’d considered, then, to be ten too-long years.

Good.
After what he’d just put Magdalene through, Matthew deserved a rough ride, and I hoped Magdalene would give him just that. And I hoped I’d be around to see him thrown a time or two. The way he’d treated her! I didn’t understand how his mind worked, and I’d every intention of telling him so.

“You patronized her!” I shouted. “You talked to her as if she were ten! Why, I didn’t talk to her that way even when she
was
ten! And after you said we wanted to help! You not only patronized her, but you used
me
to do it! I won’t have it! No, I won’t be a part of this, Matt!”

He drew on his cigar, completely impassive—and eventually got a word in edgewise. “Magdalene’s the kind of woman you
don’t
give
things to, Aidan. She’d eat you up if you did. But if I read her right, Magdalene’s also pragmatic. Maybe even … honorable. I wonder, does anyone use such a word anymore? Honorable? At any rate, only an idealistic fool would starve first, and Magdalene’s nobody’s fool. This was the only way, ruffling her feathers to get her to see things the way we want.”

“
We?
Come again? She hates your guts! And now she probably hates mine too, thinking I’d something to do with you acting like such a shit to her. By the way, just how is it you think you
know Magdalene so well?”

Matthew studied his cigar pensively.

“Well?”

Looking back, I still consider his answer a dodge.

“I’ve found one either hates or loves the hand of opportunity, Aidan. There’s no in-between.” He looked up. “Precisely where
is
it written that the model must love the artist? Can you answer me that? As for knowing Magdalene—it’s the eyes. Those eyes practically spit fire. She was so mad she could hardly keep still. But she
did
keep herself contained. Did you notice? Oh, I saw it—and I’m going to capture that anger, Aidan. I’m going to capture it for the whole world to see. Hell, half the world’s at war and angrier than ever, they’ll relate. And when I’ve captured that anger, Aidan, old boy, when I’ve tamed it, I’m going to set it free. Free as a bird.” Matthew smiled at a point past my shoulder.

“I don’t understand.”

Matthew’s dark eyes landed back on me. His smile vanished. “What comes after anger?” he demanded.

“Murder,” I muttered darkly, thinking I’d like to bash his head in. “Maybe … acceptance. Hell, I don’t know!”

“Anger’s never the same,” he said quickly. “That’s what makes it so riveting: its variables. So won’t it be interesting to see which direction Magdalene goes next? Because, before it’s over and done, she
will
go every which way, Aidan. Every angry person does. And every angry person eventually plays around with the idea of murder, too, trust me on that. The big question, though, is how much will Magdalene take before she strikes back?”