Chapter 23 The Painter's Curse

The garret was worse than she had imagined and better, in one way, than she could have hoped, because it was full of light. A skylight had been cut into the roof, and beneath it, in the strong white light of the late afternoon, stood easel after easel, propped against the walls and leaning on chairs and stacked in corners, and on every surface, in every medium, was the same woman. Marguerite. She was in charcoal and in oil and in the pale scratch of pencil on paper, young and grave and laughing and sorrowful, and the sheer number of her, the impossibility of her, made Eleanor's chest ache. Gabriel Vance stood in the middle of the room, a palette in one hand, a brush in the other, and he did not ask her name. He looked at her the way a man looks at a door that has been closed for years and has suddenly opened. You are from Blackmore, he said. He did not ask it as a question. I am, Eleanor said. How did you know? Because you are the first person who has ever come to this room and looked at the paintings, he said, and set down his palette, and smiled a smile that did not reach his gray eyes. Everyone else looks at me, and wonders why I am wasting my talent on a woman who does not exist. She exists, Eleanor said. Her name was Marguerite Thorne. And she built the house you have heard about, and she died in it, and she has been waiting thirty years for her family to come home. He went very still. The smile faded from his face, and for a moment he looked younger and older at once, and when he spoke his voice had gone rough. I do not have a family, he said. I have a name I was given and a trade I was set to and a grandmother I barely remember, who died when I was sixteen, and a box of her letters in a chest in Wapping that I have never had the courage to open. My mother used to say that we were meant for something else, that there was a house, that there was a story. She died when I was sixteen. My father died of the same fever, painting, the year after, and I have been alone since, and I have been painting the same woman since I could hold a brush, and no doctor and no priest and no amount of gin has ever told me why. Eleanor crossed the room and stopped before the largest canvas, a portrait of Marguerite in the tower, the same pose as the unfinished painting at Blackmore, the same gray light, the same half-turned head. Because she is your great grandmother, Eleanor said softly. Because you are the last of the Vances, and the blood remembers what the mind has forgotten. And because she has been waiting for you. She told him everything then, the whole story, sitting on a crate in the painted light of the garret while the sun went down over Soho. She told him about Marguerite and Elian, about the fire and the lie, about the child smuggled away and the name changed and the thirty years of silence. She told him about the journal and the unfinished painting, about the hidden studio and the maid Jenny and the burned man in Clerkenwell who had painted his lost love until the day he died. She told him about the curse, and about the night she had chosen love, and about the ghost who had finally gone to rest, and about the last page of the journal, the one that had brought her to London. And when she finished, Gabriel Vance sat very still in the darkening room, his hands folded in his lap, his gray eyes fixed on the wall, and she watched him take it in, the way a man takes in a blow. He was silent so long she thought he would not speak. Then he said, in a voice barely above a whisper, My whole life, I have been painting a woman I thought was a dream. And she was my great grandmother. And she has been waiting for me to finish what her painter could not. He stood up then and went to the skylight and stood looking out at the rooftops of London, and Eleanor saw his shoulders move, once, twice, and she did not know if he was laughing or weeping. It is not a curse, he said at last, turning to face her. It is a letter. A letter written in paint, sent through the blood, waiting thirty years for someone who could read it. He came back across the room and stood before her, and for the first time there was something in his gray eyes that was not guarded, not bitter, not afraid. I will come to Blackmore, he said. I will finish what he began. But I will not come as a Vance, and I will not come as a Thorne, and I will not come as anyone's charity. I will come as a painter, to paint the truth. Eleanor held out her hand. Then come as that, she said. It is the only thing we have ever needed. He was packing when Sebastian came up the stairs, and Eleanor watched the two men take each other's measure in the doorway, the rake and the painter, and she felt the old fear stir in her chest, the fear she had thought she had left behind in the tower. Sebastian did not look at her. He looked at the paintings, at the hundreds of Marguerites, and then he looked at Gabriel, and she saw something cross his face, something she could not name, and when he spoke his voice was even and cool and entirely his own. You have her eyes, he said. I know, Gabriel said. I have been looking at them all my life. They went down the stairs in silence, Gabriel carrying his easel, Eleanor carrying the small bag of his belongings, Sebastian carrying the largest canvas, and in the hackney on the way back to Half Moon Street neither man spoke, and Eleanor sat between them and felt the heat of the city and the weight of the future and the small bright thread of hope that had been pulling her forward since the moment she had found the door in the east wing. That night, when Gabriel had been settled in a room above the stables, Sebastian came to her and stood in the dark and said, You love him already. Eleanor rose from the window. I love what he means, she said. He is the last piece of the story, the part that never came home. It is not the same thing. Is it? Sebastian was silent. She went to him and took his face in her hands, the way she had once taken his hand in the fire. I chose you, she said. In the tower, I chose you. In the chapel, I chose you. In the fire, I chose you. And I will choose you in every room of that house, every day of my life, until the last candle goes out. He closed his eyes. I know, he said. It is only that I have spent my whole life being the man no one stays for, and I am still learning to believe that you are real. She kissed him, soft and sure. Then learn, she said. We have the rest of our lives for it. ---