Chapter 25 The Namesake

The painting of Marguerite and the child and the man in the mirror hung in the library at Blackmore, in the place of honor above the fireplace, and the villagers came in a slow procession to see it, and the women wept and the men stood silent with their hats in their hands, and Eleanor stood in the doorway and watched them and understood that the house had finished its story at last. The curse was not broken, she thought. It was fulfilled. It had been waiting, all those years, not for an ending but for a completion, for the daughter to come home and the child to be painted and the painter to be remembered, and now that it had all come to pass, the house could finally rest. Marguerite did not appear again. Neither did Elian. But sometimes, in the evenings, when the light was low and the library was quiet, Eleanor would look at the mirror in the painting and think she saw a flicker of movement, a shadow of a hand, the ghost of a brushstroke, and she would smile and go on with her work, because she knew now that some presences did not need to be seen to be felt. Gabriel stayed. He had not said he would, and Eleanor had not asked, but the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, and the garret in Soho was let to another artist, and his easel stood in the hidden studio beside Elian's, and his canvases filled the empty walls of the east wing with light and color and the living faces of the valley. The fever that had followed him from London never returned. The cough that had hollowed his chest faded into memory. And Chloe, who had come for a visit and stayed for a reason no one named, found her way more and more often to the studio, until one evening in October Eleanor looked out the library window and saw the two of them walking in the garden together, their heads bent toward each other, their hands brushing in the twilight, and she felt a joy so quiet and so complete that it surprised her. She told Sebastian that night, and he laughed, the real laugh, the one that reached his eyes. The Vances and the Ashworths, he said. The two lines that have been circling each other for thirty years, and it takes a painter to bring them together. It takes a painter, Eleanor agreed, and love. It always takes love. The twins were walking now. Thomas, who had his father's gray eyes and his mother's stubborn chin, took his first steps in September and had not sat down since, and Rosalind, who had Eleanor's dark hair and a solemnity that made the servants laugh, had discovered charcoal. Eleanor found her one afternoon on the floor of the library with a stick of it in her fist, making marks on a sheet of paper, and when she looked at what the child had drawn, her breath caught in her throat. It was the tower. It was Blackmore. It was, unmistakably, the house, drawn by a child of sixteen months who had never been taught to draw, in the same sure line Eleanor had seen in the sketches in the hidden studio. She picked Rosalind up and held her close, and the child squirmed and reached for her charcoal, and Eleanor laughed and set her down and watched her begin again, and she thought of Elian Vance, of the blood that remembered what the mind had forgotten, and she knew that the painter's line had not ended with Gabriel. It had simply been waiting for a new hand. The letter came at the end of October, in a heavy cream envelope sealed with black wax and bearing no mark of its sender. It was addressed to Lady Thorne, of Blackmore, Derbyshire, and it was written in a hand Eleanor did not recognize, a copperplate so perfect it might have been engraved. My dear Lady Thorne, the letter read. I have heard, with the greatest interest, of the paintings that have lately come to light at Blackmore, and of the remarkable young artist who has made his home there. I am a collector of long standing, with a particular passion for the work of the painter known as Vance, whose name I understand is now spoken freely in your household. I should like very much to purchase, at any price you care to name, the unfinished portrait of the woman in the tower, and I am prepared to travel any distance to see it. In the meantime, I take the liberty of enclosing a small token of my sincerity, and I remain, your most obedient servant, V. Eleanor turned the letter over. There was no address, no direction, no name but the single initial, and in the folds of the paper was a dried white heather blossom, the same flower she had found pressed in the pages of Elian Vance's journal. She sat very still in the library, the letter in her hand, the white heather in her palm, and she felt the old familiar chill settle along her spine, the chill she had not felt since the night in the tower when Marguerite had first spoken. The writer knew the flower. The writer knew the painter's name, and the unfinished portrait, and the room it hung in, and the family that had once hidden it all. And whoever they were, they wanted the last painting of the woman in the tower for themselves. Sebastian found her there, an hour later, still holding the letter, and when she handed it to him and he read it, he was silent for a long time. Who is V.? he asked at last. Eleanor shook her head. I do not know, she said. But they know us. They know the house. And they know the flower that Elian Vance pressed into his journal thirty years ago. She looked at the white heather in her palm, and then she looked out the window, at the garden, at the wall, at the lane beyond, where the dusk was gathering and the shadows were long. And someone is watching us, she said. I have felt it for three days now. In the garden, at the edge of the woods, at the turn of the lane. Someone who knows when we wake and when we sleep. Sebastian put the letter down and went to the window and stood looking out at the darkening valley. Then we shall make sure, he said, that when they come, we are ready. Eleanor came and stood beside him, and they watched the last light drain out of the sky, and behind them, in the library, the woman in the tower looked out of her painting with eyes that had seen everything, and waited. ---