The Art of Seduction (23 page)

D
arkness.

A comfortable, sheltered void.

Then, somewhere in the distance, a flickering light.

Voices.

“I can't stand to see her in such agony,” Richard's voice said.

And another older, more grave, French voice replied, “She has a very high fever. Infection, I'm afraid. I will leave a tincture. Be sure she swallows a spoonful every few hours.”

Her mouth was being opened…The bitter liquid slid down her throat. “It will help her sleep more peacefully.”

She sank into darkness once again. And then she was looking down on herself, as if watching a play. The blue sky of a summer day in Massachusetts. A carefree young girl running barefoot through the woods. Coming home across a covered bridge to the gabled white house with green shutters. Padding upstairs, going into her mother's studio. Her mother painting by the window. Curling up at her feet, feeling loved and secure, happily watching as she squeezed the pigment from the tube onto the palette, mixing it with the other colors to find just the right shade. Applying it to the canvas with loving strokes. Her soft voice explaining to the child what she was doing.

“Why do you paint all the time, Mama?”

“To try and add a little beauty to this cruel world.”

Suddenly, she was pulled out of her contented viewpoint, and she felt her body convulse in pain. The light came from above again, and the voices. But this time another male voice, vaguely familiar. The gangster Dargelos?

“I must get you both out of here. The flics are making a search of every building in Belleville. I need to move you to a better hiding place.”

Richard's voice again, “I'm not sure she can take it. I'm afraid we're losing her.”

“I can't protect you here. There is another place, just two blocks away, that has a sealed-off room in the attic. They'll never find you there.”

Silence. Then Richard's voice again, closer to her ear, “We're going to have to pick you up and move you somewhere. It may hurt, but it won't be for long, I promise you. And then I'll see to it that nothing hurts you ever again. Hold on for me, love, just a little longer.”

She felt her body being lifted, and then a sudden sharp pain. She heard her own cry. But the pain quickly disappeared and she felt herself slip back into that netherworld where nothing hurt.

She saw herself again, as if looking at someone else, but she was different now—older, grown. Stepping off the ship in Le Havre. Hungry for success and fame. Determined to do whatever it took, to prevail at any cost. Grabbing the opportunity—the temptation—that was laid before her and…bringing herself and those she loved most in the world to a desperate situation. Lisette facing the guillotine, Richard a hunted criminal, herself slowly dying in a Belleville attic from a policeman's bullet.

How did it happen? What was the demon in her that had brought them to this point? Where had it all begun?

Once again, she felt herself being pulled away from this vantage point. The light pierced her eyes, and she heard Richard's voice, “I think she's coming around.”

She opened her eyes and saw a haggard face with a week's growth of beard and bleary eyes.

The other voice, the doctor's, said, “Her fever is broken. I think she might make it, after all. See if you can get some soup down her.”

She tried to speak but couldn't. She felt the cold spoon against her dry, cracked lips, and then the warm liquid, salty, like chicken broth. She swallowed and it filled her with a delicious sense of nourishment. But she instantly sank back again into the blackness.

She saw herself standing with her mother before the rolling Pennsylvania countryside. The peaceful green pasture broken, scarred by rows upon rows of white headstones that seemed to stretch to infinity. Hearing, as her mother described it, the shriek of horses, the thunder of cannons, the cries of the wounded and dying. The tears in her mother's eyes as she sank to her knees, grabbed two handfuls of dirt, and rubbed them on her face, sobbing now. “This is what we've done. This is the stain on our family name. This is the legacy you must overcome.”

 

Mason jerked awake.

It took her a moment to realize where she was. A low, sloped ceiling. An iron bed. No windows. A single kerosene lamp. She had no idea whether it was day or night.

Then she felt something wet and warm. Richard, looking much as he had before, was bathing her legs with a sponge. Slowly, weakly, she reached for him, murmuring his name. He turned to look at her. When he saw that she was conscious, tears welled in his eyes.

He dropped the sponge and came to her, holding her head in his hands, kissing her face with deep emotion, like a condemned man saved from execution.

“Richard,” she repeated. It was barely a whisper.

“Don't try to talk, love. You've been through hell. You'll have to take things slowly.”

“Something…something's happened. I need…to tell you…”

“It'll have to wait. There'll be plenty of time later. I was so afraid I was going to lose you.”

He was clutching her tightly, as if afraid to let her go.

She stroked his head. “Everything's going to be all right now,” she told him. “Just hold me.”

He eased down beside her and held her, careful not to hurt her. His lips in her hair, he spoke softly, wretchedly, “When I thought I was going to lose you, I didn't want to go on. I never thought anyone could be as important to me as you've become. I find that I love you so much, it actually scares me. And when I think that it was because of me that you've had to suffer so—” His voice broke.

“No,” she told him haltingly, “it was me…I did it…That's what's happened. I see that now. That's what I want…need…to tell you.”

He held her tighter, stroking her hair. “It doesn't matter now. Nothing matters except that you're going to be all right. We won't talk of anything yet. We're just going to make you well. That's the only thing that means anything to me now.”

He continued to gently kiss her face, holding her, whispering to her, until his voice became a pleasant hum and she slept.

But she was soon awakened by a sense of intense agitation. “I'm so sorry,” he said in the dark. “It's just another of these damned nightmares. I probably shouldn't be sleeping here.”

She reached for him. “No, I want you here.”

“It usually only happens once a week or so. I don't think I'll have it again for a while.”

“I wish I could fix it so you'd never have to have them again,” she murmured.

 

Several days passed. As Mason was able to take more nourishment, her strength began to return. She was still sore and stiff, but her head had never seemed so clear. Richard continued to spoon feed her even after she was able to do so herself. It seemed to give him pleasure to care for her. He'd found a volume of Balzac, and at night he read to her, lying beside her, his voice soothing. Those were the times she loved most. No one read to her since her mother had, so long ago.

Several times, Dargelos came to the door in a distraught manner, but Richard always took him downstairs to talk. He didn't want any outside news to intrude on her progress. Every time she tried to ask about Lisette, he assured her, “There will be plenty of time for that later.”

Finally, she was able to get up and tentatively walk around the room. When she'd passed this threshold, she decided it was finally time to tell Richard everything the perspective of her near-death had taught her about herself.

“I have to talk to you,” she said.

He looked at her, gauging her progress. “Are you quite certain you feel strong enough?”

“It will make me feel better.”

“Very well.”

“You see, you're not the only one haunted by a nightmare. I have one of my own. I think I'm finally ready to tell you about it. It's something I buried when I came to France and thought I'd never look at again. No one knows about it, not even Lisette. But I've found you can't really bury these things. You think you can. You try to. But in the end, it comes back to haunt you. And it keeps haunting you until you face it. In a way, it's the story of what made me an artist.”

He grabbed hold of a chair and brought it over with its back facing the bed, then straddled it, crossing his arms over the seat back. “I'd like to hear it.”

She swallowed nervously. “They say there's a moment in every artist's life—usually when they're young—that twists them and gives them a terrible need—a void, if you will—that only the act of creation can fill. Most artists can't even identify what that moment is. It can be something monumental or something so incidental they barely remember it. I didn't want to look at it before, because it was too painful. But while I've been lying here, slipping in and out of consciousness, I couldn't help but see that it's the seed from which my whole life has grown.”

She looked up at him to find him listening with rapt attention. “Your mother?”

“It happened when I was about thirteen. My father was away on business. I'd come home from school and as I entered the house, I saw that a bag had been packed. Mother was in a somber mood, the way she often was after my father had been harping on her about spending all her time painting. She told me we were going on a trip. When I asked where, she said she wanted to show me something important, something my father would never show me, but something I had to see with my own eyes. So we boarded the train and took the journey to Pennsylvania. To the site of what had been, the year before I was born, the Battle of Gettysburg. Do you know what that is?”

“The Civil War battle. The turning point of the war.”

“It was so strange. As far as I knew, she'd never been there before, but she'd studied and memorized every aspect of the campaign and knew every inch of the battlefield. She took me on a tour of the place, describing the slaughter so vividly that I could see the minié balls in the air, smell the burning flesh, hear the agonized cries of men falling in the wake of Pickett's charge.”

A light came to his eyes. “Your self-portrait. That's Gettysburg in the background.”

“Yes. I didn't understand why she was showing me all this. Until, standing on the crest of Seminary Ridge, she suddenly fell to her knees, rubbed its hallowed soil on her face, and told me that everything we were, every piece of bread we ate, every article of clothing on our backs was the fruit of this holocaust. It was
our
doing. We had profited from its blood. And there wasn't enough water in all the world to wash its stain from our souls.”

M
ason paused, wincing at the pain in her voice. Richard reached over and took her hand. “That's a terrible thing to say to a child.”

“What she said was true.”

“How can it be true?”

“First, I have to tell you I'm not from Boston. I made that up. My family is from a town called Greenfield, on the other side of the state.”

“That's why there were no records in Boston.”

“I wanted to leave my past behind when I came here, so I invented a new history for myself. Greenfield is my home. When my parents married in 1860, my father owned a small foundry there. He'd been trained as a gunsmith, and he had a knack for anything mechanical. He was also, as it turned out, a natural businessman. Anyway, when the war broke out the next year, like all the other small manufacturers in New England, he retooled his shop to serve the war effort. But he did it with much more imagination and skill than his competitors, and by 1862, the Amos Caldwell Foundry was the largest arms manufacturer in the state of Massachusetts. By the next year, it was the largest in all of New England. Almost all the munitions used at Gettysburg, Chickamauga, and The Wilderness by the Union side were made by us.”

“Someone had to do it.”

“Don't get me wrong. At first, we were proud of it, even bragged about it. They gave my father testimonial dinners. President Lincoln presented him with a medal and letter of commendation. Our neighbors wanted him to run for congress. And this good will continued for years after the war. But then, gradually, things began to change. Jealous of my father's fortune, some of the good people of Greenfield began to whisper that it had been made off the blood of a generation of young Americans. When I was ten, a Boston newspaper published a long article detailing the genesis of the Caldwell family fortune, listing battles we'd supplied and the number of men who'd died in them. Shortly after that, a crazed woman who'd lost all three of her sons at Shiloh stopped my father on the street and publicly accused him of being a murderer.”

His hand tightened on hers. “That's hardly fair.”

“Fair or not, incidents like that started happening with terrifying regularity. Both my parents took it hard. My father outwardly steeled himself and tried to appear unconcerned, but inwardly, it ate him up. He grew bitter and took to drinking. My mother, who'd always been sensitive and artistic by nature, was nearly destroyed by it. She was dropped by all her so-called friends. She became ashamed of all the advantages we had and began to hide away from the world behind the gates of our estate. She became fatalistic. Over and over again, as I was growing up, she cautioned to me, ‘Your father wanted to be the most important manufacturer in New England, and he succeeded. Be careful what you wish for, Mason.'

“The next ten years of our lives were especially difficult. My mother finally made me fully aware of our family stain when I was thirteen and she took me to Gettysburg. She wanted me to understand the cloud I'd been born under and to realize that, in some way, my life had to make amends for it. Over the next seven years, there were more articles, the whispering campaign grew louder, and the guilt continued to grow in our eyes. My mother withdrew even deeper into her painting, and my father grew even more angry about what had happened to him. He began to resent her withdrawal from him. They had horrible fights. He kept insisting her painting was making her unhappy, but he didn't realize it was a gift, the only thing keeping her sane.”

“She passed on that gift to you.”

“Yes, she taught me how to draw and work in oils, and I loved it from the beginning. I loved the peace, the two of us painting quietly together. The escape from a world that now seemed ugly and threatening to me. She took me to art shows in Boston and New York, to show me what others were doing. It was wonderful. But every time we returned, there was a price to be paid. My father accused her of trying to make me just like her. He told me painting would only make me miserable, the way it had my mother. Meanwhile, he was drinking more and more, trying to escape in
his
way. I had no friends at all. The family had become pariahs in the community. Our house was falling apart from lack of care—not because we didn't have the money, but because we didn't notice. We were like something out of a Hawthorne novel. When I look back on it, it doesn't even seem real.”

“What happened to your parents?” he asked.

“My mother died when I was eighteen. I blamed my father for it. I said the most awful things imaginable. I told him he'd murdered her, just as he'd murdered all those boys in Gettysburg. I actually said that. It crushed him, because I think he loved me in his own way. But all I could see was that he was the cause of all our misery. I just lashed out at him. After that, I left. My mother had a small family inheritance, which she willed me. I took it and went to Boston, then to Paris. When I left the country, my father tried to give me money, but I spit on it. I told him I wouldn't touch his blood money. That was the last time I ever spoke to him. Several years ago, I received a letter from his attorney notifying me that he'd gone down in a shipwreck off the coast of Brazil.”

“The
Simon Bolivar
?”

“How did you know?”

“It was a major disaster. The agency was hired by a consortium of insurance companies to investigate it. A great many people lost their lives.”

“My father was one of them.”

“So you never resolved your differences.”

“No. I can see now how unfair it was to blame him for the brutality of war. After all, he was only serving his country, trying to end slavery. It was an injustice to make him a scapegoat because he was so successful at doing what had to be done. I wish I'd told him so. But at the time, I didn't even want to. The only thing I wanted was to vindicate my mother, erase the family stain, and clear the Caldwell name. I thought if I could find a way to take all the horror of my past and transform it into something beautiful, the world would love me for it. In time, I found that vision. But it wasn't enough. Because, as satisfying as it was to me personally, the rest of the world didn't give a damn about it.”

He smiled gently. “They do now.”

“Yes, they do. Because I lied and cheated and took a shortcut to immortality. That's what I'm trying to tell you with my story. My upbringing left me with a gaping hole in my soul. The need to fill that hole brought me to Paris, drove me to create, and made me grab for fame when the chance was presented. But the truth I've come to realize is that, even though I'm now more famous than I ever dreamed of being, it hasn't filled the hole. It's only made me feel more empty and lost, and driven us to where we are now. What I now know is, the things I always thought would fill the hole only made it larger. The only thing that will fill it is my love for you. The rest is meaningless. That's what I've learned. That's what all this has taught me.”

“You might feel that way now, but—”

“No, I got that dark need out of my system by doing those paintings, and now they mean nothing to me. They're just something I passed through. I'm on the other side of them. You, Richard, have healed me of the need to express that vision, and of the need for the world's approval. Loving you has taught me that it's not the receiving of love that fills the hole inside us, it's the
giving
of love.”

As she spoke, his eyes grew misty. He rose, then stretched out on the bed beside her, cradling her in his arms. “Thank you,” he said hoarsely. “For trusting me, for sharing all this with me, for loving me. It makes me feel so close to you I can't express it.”

She nestled into his warmth, feeling her heart swell with love for him as he gently stroked her hair. “I've told you my nightmare. Won't you tell me about yours?”

His hand stopped momentarily. Then he pulled her closer and kissed the top of her head. “You're tired,” he told her. “You need sleep. I don't want you to think about anything else. Just let me take care of you for now.”

 

By the end of the week, Mason was feeling almost fully recovered and even a bit restless at being cooped up in their hiding place. One morning, the door suddenly swung open and a pack of dogs flooded the room, leaping on the bed, licking her face, competing for her attention. Lisette's dogs! She'd asked about them earlier and learned that Dargelos had rescued them after Lisette's arrest and had put them up in a Belleville apartment where Hugo had been taking care of them.

Richard was right behind them. “The sun is shining and you need some air. I thought it might do us both some good to give these fellows a walk.”

The sight of them was a painful reminder of Lisette's dilemma, for which she was responsible. She took them in her arms, one at a time, and tenderly hugged them to her, thinking how Lisette must be worrying about them.

They strolled down Rue de Belleville and took a side street to a park that held a sweeping view of Paris from the east. As the dogs romped around the green space, Mason and Richard looked out at the Pantheon, the gleaming gold dome of Les Invalides, and far in the distance, the peak of the Eiffel Tower, below which preparations for the opening of the Mason Caldwell retrospective were proceeding under the personal scrutiny of Inspector Honoré Duval.

Holding Richard's hand, Mason asked, “What are we going to do about Lisette?”

“I'm not sure what we
can
do.”

“I can't live with myself if something happens to her.”

“I don't know her very well, but she strikes me as a clever girl. She'll figure out some way to protect herself. She knows the truth and she'll tell it before going to the guillotine.”

“You don't know her at all. Lisette is like all the frustrating, surprising, and magnificent things about France all rolled up into one person. She'll keep you at arm's length for an agonizingly long time, but once she accepts you, it's with a loyalty and fierce devotion that we're not capable of. I'm telling you she
will
go to the guillotine without saying a word in her defense if she thinks that word will betray me in any way.”

“Sadly, I fear you may be right in that assessment.”

“There must be someone
we
can go to with the truth. The press. The American ambassador. Someone who will listen and help us.”

“Duval will figure that out right away. If we try, he'll cut us off. We'll be shot on sight. Getting us has to be his chief imperative right now.”

“What about Juno? Can he do anything?”

“God knows he's going to try. The man is half out of his mind with grief. It's all I can do to talk him out of doing something foolish.”

“Does he know who I really am?”

“No, I thought it best not to complicate the situation. He thinks you're Amy and you're being hunted because you know Lisette's innocent and could ruin their case against her.”

She shook her head in despair. “There must be something. I won't accept the fact that there's nothing we can do.”

“As dire as her situation is, she still has a trial to go through, so she's not in any immediate danger of the guillotine. In the meantime, we have something else we have to do.”

She couldn't think what he meant. “What's that?”

“The French government has confiscated the paintings.”

“I know that.”

“We have to get them back.”

“The paintings?”

“They stole them from us, we'll steal them back.”

She couldn't believe what she was hearing. “You still want those paintings?”

“Of course I do.”

She dropped his hand. “Did you hear nothing I said? I don't care about the paintings anymore. They can do whatever they want with them as far as I'm concerned.”

“I heard you and I understand. But you must understand that, no matter how you might feel about them at this moment, those eighteen paintings constitute a masterpiece of art. They're a part of you, they're important to the world, and they're a responsibility we can't walk away from.”

“Even if that were true, how do you think you're going to accomplish such a feat?”

“We have Dargelos and the Parisian underworld as our allies. We can find a way.”

“All right, say we pull off the impossible and steal the paintings back. Then what?”

“We get them to Hank, who'll arrange to take them secretly back to America.”

She stared at him in disbelief. After all that had happened to them, the one thing dominating his thoughts was
still
the paintings.

A wave of frustration swept through her. For a long time, she didn't speak. Then she took a breath and said, “Richard, I've told you the secret of my past. Won't you tell me yours?”

She saw the flash of something unreadable in his eyes, but all he said was, “There's really nothing to tell.”

“You can tell me about the nightmares. I know they're eating you up. You're having them more often. You try to hide them from me, but I know they're getting worse. Can't you try and confide in me?”