第1章 The Commission

Aloisia Steindl had spent the morning lifting varnish from the sleeve of a provincial saint, and the smell of it—ethanol and the faint sweetness of pine resin—had worked itself into her hair the way weather works into wool. The saint was fifteenth-century and competent rather than inspired, and his sleeve had been ruined twice: once by a restorer in 1890 who believed he knew better, once by the damp that crept through the chapel wall for a century and was never truly stopped. She worked with a swab no larger than a thumbnail, rolling it in tight arcs across the linen, watching the amber film loosen and the true blue rise from under it. Patience was most of the trade. Nerve was the remainder. Her studio took up the upper floor of a former dispensary in the old quarter, two rooms with tall windows and a northern light she had come to regard as a colleague. On the bench lay a scalpel, a bamboo spatula, brushes of sable and squirrel, a rack of solvents in amber glass, sheets of Japanese tissue cut into squares, and under a folded cloth the infrared camera that had cost her a year of savings and never once disappointed her. Above the bench hung the only photograph she kept of her teacher, taken the spring before he died, his hands lifted as though explaining something obvious to a slow student. The commission arrived on a Thursday, not by hand but by ordinary post: a heavy envelope from a firm of notaries, and beneath its seal a second envelope in paper so old it seemed to have been stored in a drawer for a generation. The first letter was courteous and brief. The second was written in a firm hand that pressed hard on the nib and left the page slightly furrowed. The Abbey of Saint Veylen, in the valley of Fernthal, required the services of a conservator. The great wall of the abbey church—known in the house simply as the Doom of Veylen, a Last Judgment in the manner of the late fourteenth century—had suffered. Soot, damp salts, and the well-meant retouchings of the nineteenth century had darkened it past legibility. The community wished it restored. The community would pay, and pay without haggling, if the work could be finished before the feast of Saint Veylen in the following autumn. There were conditions. The conservator would work alone. No specialist would be engaged without the abbot's leave. No photograph of the wall would leave the valley, which was in any case difficult to leave in winter. Whatever the wall showed her, she was to report to the abbot and to no one else. Aloisia read the terms twice and then a third time, and the third reading did not soften them. She laid the letter on the bench beside the saint's painted sleeve and stood at the window with her hands around a cold cup of coffee. Below, a delivery van turned the corner; two students argued on the steps of the dispensary; the ordinary afternoon went on. The fee was three times what she would charge for a wall of that size, or four times, if she counted the season she would lose. She was not in a position to refuse easily. There was the loan she had taken for the camera. There was the small, ruinous arrangement she had made for her mother's care, the kind of arrangement that was renewed every month the way a wound is renewed. She thought of the account books the way other people thought of weather—as something that happened to her, and to which she could only respond. She called her old colleague, Berthold, who had spent forty years in the church commissions and knew every house in the mountains. Saint Veylen, he said. He said it slowly, the way a man names a thing he has heard argued about. There is a small community there, canons, not monks in the strict sense; seven or eight, no more, and fewer each year. They keep the hours. They do not encourage visitors. He paused. I have never seen the Doom of Veylen. I have asked, twice, in my younger days, and both times I was told the wall was not fit to be seen, and both times that struck me as a strange thing to say about a thing one is asked to admire. What are they hiding, she asked. Nothing so interesting as that, he said. Probably nothing at all. Old houses hoard their small scandals. Then he said, more quietly, that a conservator he had known in his youth had been sent there, decades ago, and had come back after two seasons and never spoken of it, and had given up the work entirely within a year. Aloisia did not like that story. She also did not entirely believe it. Men of Berthold's age gathered such stories the way hedgerows gather litter, and she had learned long ago that a whisper is not evidence. She was a conservator, trained to look at what was present and to record what was absent, and she had a long dislike of meanings that could not be photographed. All the same, when she wrote her reply that evening, she asked for one concession. She wanted to survey the wall herself before she agreed to restore it. It was the one clause she would not sign away. A conservator who promised to restore a wall she had not examined was like a doctor who promised to cure a patient he had not met. The answer came within a week, by wire, and it was a single line: You will be welcome, and the pass remains open until the first heavy snow. She packed the following Monday: her kit, her instruments, the camera and its cases of lamps, three reference books, a folder of her own photographic records, the wool coat she wore in cold studios, and the small tin of strong mints she kept because the solvents made her mouth taste of them by the end of a day. She told the woman downstairs to keep the plants if she did not return by the spring. The woman laughed, and asked where she was going, and Aloisia said into the mountains, and the woman said, in autumn, which is a strange time to go into the mountains, and Aloisia agreed that it was. On the last morning before she left, she stood a long while at the window of the studio and looked at the saint's sleeve. The blue beneath the varnish was clean and cold and exact. She had uncovered the arm, the cuff, the wrist, the hand, and the small gold ring the painter had given him, and every hour of it had been honest work, the kind that neither flattered nor frightened. She wanted the Doom of Veylen to be that sort of work. She wanted the letter's strange clauses to be the ordinary caution of a closed community, and nothing more, and she told herself as much while she folded the coat into the case. She was nearly convinced. That was the trouble with a well-made argument: it could convince almost the whole of her, and leave one small room of her mind untouched and listening. She took the early train, and then the bus, and then, at the end of the line, the narrow road that climbed into the valley of Fernthal. ---