第24章 The Unfinished Portrait

They reached Blackmore in the rain, at the end of a long green August, and Gabriel Vance stepped out of the carriage and stood in the courtyard and looked up at the house the way a man looks at a portrait of a woman he has loved his whole life without ever meeting her. He did not speak. He walked through the great hall and the library and the chapel, his boots ringing on the stones, and Eleanor walked beside him and did not speak either, because there was nothing to say. The house was speaking for itself, in its warmth, in its light, in the smell of roses that drifted in from the garden, and she saw him feel it, saw him stop in the middle of the hall and close his eyes and put his hand on the stone pillar as if he were listening to something only he could hear. This is it, he said at last. This is what I have been painting. Not the woman. The house she was in. I have been painting the light of it my whole life, and I did not know. He did not sleep that first night. Eleanor found him at dawn in the hidden studio, sitting on the floor with the journal open in his lap and the unfinished painting before him, and his face was pale and his eyes were bright and she understood that he had not moved since she had left him there the evening before. I have read it all, he said. Every word. He closed the journal and set it aside and looked at her, and there was something in his face she had not seen before, a stillness, a certainty. She was not starved, he said. My great grandmother. The family said she starved herself in the tower. But the journal says she was ill, that she was carrying my grandfather's child, that they took the child from her the night she was born and she never held it, never saw it, never knew its name. Eleanor sat down beside him on the dusty floor. The journal says, she said. The journal does not say what she felt. It cannot. He was silent a long moment. No, he said. But the paintings can. He began to work that same day, and the house changed around him the way a lake changes when a stone is dropped into it, in widening rings. He worked in the studio in the mornings and in the tower in the afternoons, and his cough, which had followed him from London like a shadow, faded as the days went on, and the color came back into his face, and Eleanor watched him paint the way she had once watched Sebastian dance, with the sense of a thing being done that had always been meant to be done. He did not paint Marguerite as a ghost. He painted her as a woman, in the tower, with her hand resting on the stone sill, and beside her, only sketched, only beginning, the child. He painted her the way Elian had painted her, with the same attention, the same tenderness, and when Eleanor asked him how he knew the pose, he looked at her with the painter's gray eyes and said, Because it is the pose she has always been standing in, in the only painting I have ever been able to see. The night before the anniversary of the fire, Eleanor found him in the tower room at midnight, and Marguerite was with him. Not the shimmering ghost of the old days, but something quieter, a warmth in the air, a scent of roses, a presence so gentle that Eleanor felt it like a hand on her shoulder. Gabriel was standing before the finished canvas, his brush still, his face wet with tears, and he did not turn when she came in. She is here, he said. She has been here all night. She has been waiting for me to understand. Eleanor came and stood beside him and looked at the painting. It was finished. Marguerite stood in the tower, and in her arms was the child, and behind her, in the mirror that had hung in the room for a hundred years, was the reflection of a man with a paintbrush in his hand, young and whole and unburned, watching them with the look of a man who had finally been allowed to come home. Elian, Eleanor breathed. He is here too, Gabriel said. He has always been here. He has been painting her from the other side of the mirror, and I have been painting her from this one, and tonight we have finished the same painting, and she is free. The fire came an hour before dawn. It was small, a candle knocked over in the studio, a curtain catching, a thread of smoke climbing the wall, and Eleanor woke to the smell of it and ran through the corridors with her nightgown trailing, and she found Sebastian already there, and Graves behind him, and Gabriel standing in the doorway of the studio with a bucket of water and a strange, quiet smile. It is not the old fire, he said. It is not the curse. It is the house testing us, the way it tested you. The way it tests everyone who has ever loved it. They put it out together, the four of them, and the east wing smelled of smoke and wet wood and roses, and Eleanor stood in the gray dawn light and looked at the painting, which was unharmed, and at Sebastian, whose face was smeared with soot, and at Gabriel, who was laughing, actually laughing, with the relief of a man who had been afraid his whole life and had discovered that the fear had been a ghost too. The house is quiet now, Sebastian said. Eleanor listened. The silence was deep and warm and complete. It is, she said. It has been quiet since the night we chose each other. It was only waiting for the last of its children to come home. Chloe arrived the next morning, summoned by a letter Eleanor had written from London, and Eleanor met her at the gate and took her arm and told her the whole story as they walked through the gardens, and when they reached the studio and Chloe saw the painting, and saw Gabriel, who was standing at the window in the morning light with a brush in his hand and no fear in his gray eyes, she said, very softly, so that only Eleanor could hear, You did not tell me he was beautiful. Eleanor smiled. I did not know it mattered, she said. But she watched the way Chloe looked at Gabriel, and the way Gabriel, when he turned and saw Chloe, looked at her, and she thought of Marguerite and Elian, of two people finding each other in a world that did not want them to, and she felt the old story turn, at last, toward a new beginning. ---