第21章 The Hidden Studio

It was in the second summer after the curse had broken, on a hot afternoon in July when the gardens smelled of lavender and the tower windows stood open to the sky, that the workmen found the door. The east wing had been rebuilt the winter before, the blackened stones hauled away, the walls raised up again from the old foundations, but no one had thought to look behind the service stair, and so the room had waited, sealed and forgotten, while Eleanor and Sebastian and the children and the servants walked past it a hundred times in a day. The mason, a man named Cribb who had worked Blackmore since before the first fire, was the one who found it. He was chipping away the plaster that had buckled and blistered in the heat of the great blaze when his trowel struck something hollow, and when he pulled the plaster away he found a door. It was small, made of oak, its hinges rusted shut, its frame set so deep into the wall that whoever had built it had meant it to be forgotten. My lady, he said, and his voice was strange and hollow in the hot still room. There is something here. You had better come. Eleanor came. She stood in the doorway and lit the candle she had brought, and the light revealed a space no larger than a linen closet, its walls lined with shelves, its floor deep in a fine gray dust that had settled there over the course of thirty years. And on the shelves, stacked and leaning, propped against the walls and wrapped in oilcloth gone brittle with age, were paintings. Dozens of them. Eleanor's candle moved across the room and she lost count at forty. They were all of the same woman. Marguerite. The woman in the tower. The woman who had built the house and cursed it and died in it, all in the name of love. She was young in the paintings, young and laughing in some, young and sorrowful in others, caught at every hour of every day by a hand that could not stop loving her. There were sketches in charcoal and studies in oil and finished canvases in heavy gilt frames, and in every one of them she looked at the painter the way Eleanor had once hoped to be looked at, with an attention so complete it was a kind of prayer. Eleanor set down the candle and lifted the nearest canvas, and behind it she found the journal. It was bound in leather gone soft with age, its pages yellowed, its handwriting small and precise and desperately neat, the hand of a man who had learned to write small because paper was precious and time was short. On the flyleaf, in ink that had faded to the color of rust, was a name. E. Vance. The same initials Eleanor had traced, in her first weeks at Blackmore, in the corner of the portrait of Marguerite hidden behind the tapestry. The painter. The man she had loved. Eleanor sat down on the dusty floor, careless of her gown, and began to read. The journal began in 1778, and it told the story Eleanor had heard from Sebastian in fragments and from Graves in whispers, but it told it from the inside. Elian Vance, for that was the painter's name, Elian, a name no one at Blackmore had spoken in thirty years, was a commoner, a limner from a village in the next county, hired by Marguerite Thorne to paint her portrait on the eve of her marriage to the man her family had chosen for her. He fell in love with her. She fell in love with him. They were happy, truly happy, for a year, for two, and Eleanor felt that happiness in the pages, the small joys recorded in the painter's careful hand, the descriptions of Marguerite's laughter, of the house they planned, of the child they hoped for. And in the margins, pressed and preserved like prayers, were flowers. Dried roses, sprigs of lavender, a single white heather blossom, each one held in place by a fold of the page, each one a day that had been worth keeping. Then the family found them. Eleanor read the account of the fire in the journal's last pages, written not in the neat hand of the earlier entries but in a hand that shook, blotched with ink and with something that might have been tears. The painter had not died in the fire. Sebastian had been told the family story, the story of the painter burned and Marguerite starved, but the truth, the truth the journal kept, was that a maid named Jenny had dragged Elian Vance from the burning house through a scullery window, burned across the hands and the left side of his face, and hidden him in a hay wagon bound for London. Marguerite, locked in the tower, never knew that he lived. And Elian Vance, burned and broken, spent the rest of his life in a garret in Clerkenwell, painting her from memory, because it was the only way he could still touch her. He had died there in 1796, of the fever and the grief, with a paintbrush in his hand. Eleanor closed the journal and sat in the hot still room and felt the weight of the years press down on her. She had thought the curse was broken. She had watched Marguerite's ghost fade into peace on the night of the fire, had rebuilt the house, had raised her children in it, had believed the story was finished. But the journal told a different story, and the paintings told it too, and the last canvas, propped on an easel that had never been moved, was not finished. It showed Marguerite in the tower, and beside her, only half realized, a child. Marguerite was with child, the journal said. When the fire came she was carrying Elian Vance's child. The family took the infant, a girl, and sent her away to be raised by distant kin under another name, and the girl grew up never knowing she was a Thorne, never knowing her mother had built the house she would never see. Eleanor turned to the final page, and there, in the shaking hand of a dying man, was the warning she had come to understand. The child must come home, Elian Vance had written. The fire waits for the child, or the child's child. What I began, my blood must finish. Marguerite still walks the tower because her daughter never returned. Find them. Bring them home. And finish what love began. That night Eleanor sat in the library with Sebastian and read the journal aloud, and when she finished he was silent for a long time. I thought he died in the fire, he said at last. My grandmother always said the painter died in the fire. The family lied, Eleanor said. To protect themselves. To protect the child they stole. He looked at her, and she saw the old sorrow in his eyes, the sorrow of a man who had spent his life believing the stories he had been told. Then we find her, he said. Or her child. We find them, and we bring them home. Eleanor took his hand. It is not that simple. The girl was sent away, the records are scarce, and it has been thirty years. He held her hand more tightly. Then we start with what we have, he said. We start with the journal, and the name, and the truth. And we do not stop until Blackmore is what it was always meant to be. Not a monument to a curse, but a home. Eleanor looked at him, at the man she had chosen, and felt the old certainty settle in her chest like a stone in still water. We will need to go to London, she said. Then we go to London, Sebastian said. Eleanor looked out the window at the tower, dark against the darkening sky, and she thought she saw, for just a moment, the faintest light in its highest window, as if someone, somewhere, had begun to hope. ---