Wilful Impropriety (49 page)

•   •   •

The rough little room was a pickpocket in its wedged corner, with its ramshackle walls built straight up alongside the brick and mortar of the buildings around it, like ivy made of crate splats and bits of tin. The roof was proper thatch, as even artists needed a trade when lacking in patrons, or more precisely to the point, when lacking the necessary traits of character to acquire patronage, such as the ability to regard property as defined in terms of ownership rather than possession. So
two
trades might be more accurate, Sam thought, as in addition to being notorious degenerates and occasional thatchers, the men who resided here were accomplished thieves, with Tristan’s mechanical handiness leading in particular for him to a reputation as a fine cracksman.

Let inside by Antoine, who seemed to be expecting them somehow, Sam fell back behind as he was overwhelmed by the many works of art and strange contraptions in various states of completion surrounding them. In green and golden tones, spanning more than half the long wall at the back of the studio, one huge canvas seemed almost to glow with some inner light, as if the artist had somehow imbued the oils with a living spirit.

“Everyone’s off working,” Tristan said by way of greeting. “And somehow word has gotten round that we’re taking all comers, and it’s astonishing but it seems to have inspired rather a lot of—”

“Of course,” Ingrid said, cutting off his rush of words. She sat just as primly upon a small chair as Antoine lounged luxuriously on a threadbare loveseat in the corner opposite from her.

“Many are called to the arts, to make beauty and create joy,” Jyoti started to add, but Ingrid finished for her.

“They’re just not normally allowed.”

“Nothing’s stopping them,” Sam started to point out, but when he saw Antoine’s head rise in response he waved a hand as if to dismiss his own words. “Never mind. The art will be there. Probably more than we can fit, so it’s a good thing we have a carriage to display the rest on, outside, and the Absolute will probably let us use its walls too.”

Sam fell quiet as Jyoti explained her vision, and then as Antoine did more than just lift his head, but indeed rose and began to pace in circles. Tristan seemed to be ignoring them all, working at a canvas with his back to them, but Sam knew he was listening by how his shoulders tightened when he heard Antoine begin to speak.

“Not just space. We need to get the most attention we can, or they’ll just ignore us. We need to throw an opening so spectacular they’ll want woodcuts done of the day itself . . .”

He went on, listing his ideas, but all the while Sam kept his eyes on the tension in Tristan’s spine and the way Ingrid kept sending him sideways glances. He resolved, since he was stuck with the trousers anyway, to take Antoine aside and make clear his reservations.

•   •   •

This proved, once they had slipped away from what had descended into Jyoti’s dreamlike proclamations of the fuller details of the vision she felt sure had been sent by the Holy Spirit, to be an even more irritating task than Sam had anticipated.

No violence, Sam had insisted firmly, with a note that indicated he was aware that very different visions of just how newsworthy their little event would become if a riot ensued were already forming in Antoine’s mind.

After that, the conversation had become a tangle of misdirection, until he heard Antoine saying, “Still, it might be, or come to be, that one or another of us, perhaps a few in tandem—”

Sam was amazed to find there were yet more tones of voice in the Frenchman’s repertoire to distinguish shades of condescension than he had encountered already. “Tandem means two, Antoine, not a few, which doesn’t mean anything,” he said after a moment of stillness.

“Yet your diversion means everything, because it’s how you tell me to stop, and when what is becomes what is not, everything is one thing and nothing is everything.”

“Words aren’t sport—”

“And you are not sporting, my dear. In my own defense, I seem to recall someone other than myself bringing us on to the subject of words—”

“And meaning. Yes. Aside from your usual drivel, you seem to have understood me quite well.”

“You want no part of it.”

“I couldn’t begin to imagine what you mean, but I will note, on general principle, that I would agree with any vague suggestion of that undefined significance.” It was amazing, the lasting effect just a few hours spent in a small room with a barrister flourishing papers could have on a person, Sam thought as he heard himself speaking.

“Ingrid will be in with it,” he said. “She knows we need a spectacle to establish Ours right from the start.”

Around them, the market was folding inwards on itself, tarps rolling down and workers retreating behind their sheds. After a moment, Sam pretended he hadn’t heard and walked away—but it was a moment, and if he’d noticed, Antoine would have too, and would know that once Sam had spent a bit of time alone with this last, undeniable fact, then Sam would be in with it too.

•   •   •

The days that followed were a blur. Each morning, Sam woke and rushed to the former shop to put a hand in the work that needed doing to prepare, and every afternoon and evening which followed was mostly comprised of the faces of old friends and new acquaintances appearing hopefully over a canvas or around the edge of a sculpture, none of which would ever be accepted to hang in any city’s proudly traditional galleries, and almost all of which were accepted for display at theirs.

Yet the work was done and time passed until, with all the pieces in their place, Sam found herself pausing to gather the other contents of her wardrobe before accepting Jyoti’s invitation to spend the final night before the opening with herself and Ingrid at her family’s otherwise unoccupied estate. Uncomfortable as Sam felt intruding there, the call of the soft bed—and the thought of Ingrid in another room nearby—made her too weak to resist.

And indeed, once the horses had again been greeted and tended, and each of them settled into a different bedroom for the night, Sam found herself, still in the frock, sneaking down the carpeted hallway and slipping into Ingrid’s room, where she found her beloved awake and waiting, sitting up half covered in the bed.

Within a moment they were entwined, only their clothes between them—only fabric, with no room for air, or even time, which stopped for their embrace. Under it, the sense of untouched skin, hidden away but giving off from it a heat which was unmistakably fierce nevertheless.

That Ingrid would let Sam feel the true shape of her body, the secrets she concealed under her long, stern dresses, made Sam feel more privileged than all the deeds of property in the world could ever do.

She whispered her name, and Ingrid gripped her shoulders as if she might suddenly fly away, drawn through the window into space by the same cosmic magnet that had brought her here.

“Only a little while more,” Ingrid whispered back, eventually, when the kiss that had seemed to start nowhere ended abruptly as she rolled away. Mentioning time, she summoned it again, and they both looked toward the dark window.

“We’d best—” Sam started to say, but Ingrid was already rolling back to push her away, out of the bed and onto her feet.

“Yes,” she said, firmly. “We need our rest, and this is no way to get any.” And so Sam headed back to her room, burning but waiting, which was not an unfamiliar sensation.

•   •   •

And then, hours indeed after Sam’s last exchange with Tristan, Our Gallery was officially open.

In the street outside, there were puppeteers and ribbon-twirlers, and at least thirty kites in the air at one moment, though several quickly dropped as they entangled. Antoine had carried on with his cryptic bookkeeping of favors owed from exotic characters, and produced what Sam had to admit was an impressive display of a man’s living trophies, the fellow humans he had met somehow along his various ways.

Jyoti’s two fine horses standing patiently outside the gallery, attached to a carriage with its sides entirely covered by some of the more unusual works their call for art had attracted, became the centerpiece of what began to feel more like a carnival than an opening.

There was even a lady Sam spied in the crowd who, upon careful inspection, seemed a bit uncomfortable in her dress, and who Sam caught several times slumping her shoulders inward as if remembering suddenly to conceal their width. Another spy in the house of renegades, Sam thought, but left her to her own business. Having had no problem deciding upon keeping with the wig and the frock herself this morning, she sensed the stranger might prefer her privacy than a moment of flimsy camaraderie.

Jyoti’s ragtag collection of boys from the park had appeared as well, materializing around her in a cloud of grime and eagerness. They must each have loved her in some burning, unique way, Sam imagined, but she was entirely unaware, and treated them as if they were her personal coterie of angels, and kept them on their best behavior by doing so. They stayed far away from the kinds of young men who tended to surround Antoine and Tristan instead, though an uneasy truce existed between them by the influence of Jyoti’s acceptance of each.

If she looked at you as if you were clean, Sam had noticed, you felt clean, even if you’d last bathed on a day you didn’t know the name of, let alone its distance in time away from the one you were currently also at a loss to identify. Sam and time had never got on well, and she suspected this was one reason she and Jyoti did, when they achieved similar orbits, at any rate.

“Have you imagined it, in yourself?”

Inside the gallery, pressed on all sides by the throng, which had waited all morning for this opening, Ingrid’s voice brought Sam out of her reverie and into another one.

They stood there at the painting’s edge, looking down into the convex in the floor onto which it had been painted. Sam dimly recalled a selection of irregular globes on crumbling stands, a shadow of Uncle Andrew’s wonders overlaid upon the creation before her eyes. There now instead was Jean, the French saint, Antoine’s muse—burning alive, eyes contorted toward an opening in the clouds hinted at but not seen.

Ingrid and Sam watched as each viewer did what they had each first done—turned their heads upward to follow the line of the martyr’s gaze, and found only colorful chalked stars on the ceiling, itself painted in shades of blue so perfect they had to be real. That was Jyoti’s work, of course—her memory of some sky she once prayed under and then brought here with her, to translate from her spirit to their eyes.

Around them, all the works hung from the drop ceiling, rather than against the panels, so that the visitors had to follow a spiraling pathway leading them between the extraordinary metalwork and the many unusual and varied works of art facing them from the other side, into a centralized area around the painting on the floor.

But even before the first circuit of visitors had completed the route, the sound of a commotion outside reversed their direction. While the general crowd went toward the noise, Sam and Ingrid followed a more direct route to what they both immediately knew was its most likely source.

•   •   •

They pushed past the crowds, now all mindlessly moving toward the sound of boots on the march approaching, which echoed down the lane even over the noise of the mob, and went directly for the crowded room on the corner, where they found, as they knew they would, Antoine poised at his window, bottles and cobblestones stacked upon the table beside him ready to be flung. Despite Sam’s earlier suspicions, Tristan was nowhere to be seen, though she knew that didn’t mean he wasn’t off poised to make trouble somewhere else.

“Someone seems to have alerted the authorities,” Antoine said blithely, without turning, eyes focused sharply on the street just outside. “Theft of property, causing a public nuisance and general deviance on display—it is a shame, really, but it seems we will be faced with the inevitable violence of the ruling class and forced to respond in kind.”

Sam took a step back as she saw Ingrid step forward, just as Antoine’s hand reached past the pile beside him, closed around a thin glass bottle. He stood, turned, and tapped it menacingly against the edge of the table.

“I should make you aware,” Antoine said, layers of oily charm falling away by the moment, “that my compunctions about cutting you rather badly are few, and much less compelling than the alternative, you—you
creatures—
”

Use his anger
, Sam thought. Yet she already knew that Ingrid herself knew everything which Sam did about a moment like this, and certainly much more than Antoine—who, for all his bravado, was nevertheless of the mistaken belief that a fight was a civil engagement with rules, as if performed on a stage. The idea that Sam might be stealthily approaching from one side with a hefty chunk of cobblestone in her hand would simply never appear in his mind, for despite his arrogance and ambition, and his apparent inability to regard human life as important on an individual level, he was to the bone one of the world’s truly naive men.

Ingrid was neither naive nor a man, and so in response to his warning she kicked him directly in the most delicately measured scrap of his tailored trousers, the proceeds of his felonious activities always having gone dually toward artistic supplies and his own preening vanity.