“It’s alive,” the painter said, somewhat drunkenly. He offered Ila the bottle. “You’re going to regret that.” He pointed at the painting. And when Ila raised his brows the painter said, “It’ll take a day—more—to dry. Ah, but you’re in luck. Tomorrow’s the Sabbath.”
Ila carried his water vessel back to his attic lodgings. He was careful of the decorated sling and turned it to the wall to preserve it from the dust of chaff that spilled from the disintegrating pallets in the room where he slept. The painting was dry by Monday.
A few days later the painter found Ila, at midday, refilling his vessel at the Fountain of the Innocents. The man persuaded Ila to come with him. He took Ila to an enameler’s workshop in the Place du Change and had Ila show the enameler his cow, calf, apple tree, arrow, and rabbits.
“He did it, without a pattern, right before my eyes,” the painter said.
The enameler pursed his lips and kept his counsel. He was a prosperous-looking individual who wore clean, decent clothes under his leather apron and arm guards. The painter was shabby and itinerant—the two men were clearly not of the same station in life.
“He’s a clean boy,” the painter added.
“A water carrier must be clean,” Ila said. “At least where the dirt will show.”
“I’ll give him a trial,” the enameler said to the painter. And to Ila: “I’ll feed you today and tomorrow and see how your hand is with enamel, plain stuff, and some fancy work on base metal. Let’s just see how you do.”
“And I’ll come back the day after tomorrow,” the painter said, as though reminding the enameler of a bargain they had made.
“As you wish,” said the enameler, acknowledging no bargain.
Then the enameler took Ila through from shop to workshop, and Ila left his yoke and vessel in a corner and turned to learning a trade.
He was good at it, of course. He had a good eye and a steady hand and was a quick study at things he didn’t know—about different metals, the temperature and consistency of enamel, how different pigments behaved.
After two days the painter came and collected a finder’s fee, and the enameler took on an apprentice. Ila had a clean—if fumy—workshop to sleep in. Later he slept in the shop, behind the counter, guarding the premises at night while the enameler’s family slept above. In a year’s time there was a bigger workshop and shop—an expansion rather than a move—and Ila had a room he shared with another apprentice.
Ila gave his yoke and water vessel away to another strong country boy he met at the Fountain of the Innocents.
• • •
Three years later, when he was eighteen, his master called Ha in one autumn evening from the workshop to take a look at a design a customer had brought in.
Ila’s master had a paper spread on his counter, held down by a silver serving spoon. A spoon with a deep bowl—flat at the bottom—and steep sides. On the paper the same spoon was pictured, in a larger scale, its bowl decorated by a chase—hounds, a tattered, distressed man, and the goddess Diana, a horned moon over her head. On its handle were entwined naked figures.
The customer was a lady, wearing black, her pale gold hair lightly powdered. Ila looked at her hair and thought of a filmed gold sheen—mist over the river at sunrise.
Ila’s master said to him, “How long will it take?” Then to the customer, “My journeyman has a better hand than mine.”
“How many colors?” Ila asked. He knew his master would prefer him to plan that but wanted a hint—was the commission worth his taking pains and doing his very best?
“The motto is black on white,” the customer said. “But I’d like the picture to be as natural as possible, without abusing the materials, of course.” She put out her hand—it appeared under Ila’s gaze, which was directed at her design. (The motto was worrying Ila; the letters were shapes he could copy but not interpret. He wanted to know what it said to help him with its illustration.) The woman’s hand was fine-boned, smooth-skinned, white. She wore a ring on her middle finger, a clear crystal set in gold; under the crystal was an eye cut from a miniature, a glaring authoritarian eye. The customer had put out her hand to touch the gorget Ila wore. A crescent-shaped cavalryman’s steel gorget that Ila had bought from a pawnbroker and had enameled with a picture of Saint Benezet and his bridge, the walls of Avignon, and the towers of the Palace of the Popes. Saint Benezet stood above the bridge, in the heavens, not on clouds but on the backs of a flock of sleeping lambs.
“Is this your work?” the woman said.
“Yes, and the saint is my own design. The saint and his sheep. The city is copied from a map.”
“The hill behind the Petit Palais is still bare, of everything but windmills,” the woman said. Then, musing, “I remember.” She withdrew her hand and told Ila’s master that he’d do very well. She’d return in three days. “At evening,” she said, “so be sure to remain open.”
Ila’s master wrote her a receipt for the spoon, and she went out and got into a sedan chair waiting at the door.
“Who is she?” Ila asked.
His master replied that he didn’t know; the receipt had her initial only. But she had mentioned that the spoon was a gift for her friend the Marquis Guy de Chambord.
“Chambord has a château just over the river on the road to Lyon. Some years ago I decorated the stocks of the marquis’s pistols—with bears in arms. The marquis is a traveler. He collects curiosities.” Ila’s master bundled up the spoon and the plan and gave them to his journeyman. “Begin tomorrow,” he said.
Ila asked what the motto said, and his master had to retrieve the plan to read: “‘Many people are rather wicked, even those who hate pleasure.’” Ila’s master shook his head. “She’s not an honest woman, I fear, for that’s not an honest sentiment. However, it is honest work for you.”
Ila thanked his master.
Three days later Ila’s master received a letter that asked him to send his journeyman with the spoon if it was finished. Madame G. would wait for an answer, then send a chair.
“The lady has taken a liking to you,” Ila’s master said, teasing him.
Ila was eighteen and handsome—black-eyed, broad-shouldered, and narrow-hipped.
“Tie your hair,” said Ila’s master. “And be circumspect—I don’t want to lose a customer, not this woman, or the marquis.”
The spoon was finished, so Ila wrapped it in a velvet cloth and climbed into the sedan chair. He was carried through the city to the west, to a narrow house in the shadow of the town wall, near the Porte du Rhône. When Ila arrived at the door of the house its shutters were only just being put up. Ila dismounted from the chair and watched a fresh-faced girl, her breasts resting on the sill as she leaned out—an iron rod in one plump hand—to lever the top shutter up. The girl withdrew, and the window was empty, its shutter now the lid of an unwinking eye. Ila imagined that Madame G. had just returned home, and, indeed, he found her in her robe, her thick hair still clotted with powder, dull, and as tangled as the aerial roots of some parasitic creeper. She called him to her as he came into her hall. He crossed an image on its flagstones—in low relief the face and supplicatory hands of a woman, the marble so worn away by traffic, so clouded, that her figure looked leprous.
Madame G. took the package from Ila and unwrapped the spoon. She advanced on Ila, her eyes still lowered to her hands and the spoon, and pushed against him, shoulder to shoulder, propelled him to the window and the light—light from the sky, blue above the shadowed street. Ila gasped. The lady was close, not pressing, but he could smell her hair—grease, wood smoke, starchy powder. She held the spoon between them and tilted it to the light.
“I see that you’ve turned my lovers into wrestlers,” she said.
Ila didn’t answer, couldn’t think how.
She glanced up at him. “Do you suppose my feelings for my friend are martial?”
Ila muttered that it wasn’t clear from her sketch that they were lovers—then corrected himself, that the fi
gures were lovers. (He had looked, long and hard, wondering whether the one with his back to him had a more rounded bottom and was, perhaps, a her. But the figure’s hair had seemed masculine, locks escaping from a ribboned queue.) Ila waited for the customer to say he’d ruined the spoon, to send him back to his master with a bill for the price of the silver. But the woman smiled and raised the enameled spoon to run its cool bowl gently along Ila’s collarbone. “I think your wrestlers might be lovers,” she said. She turned the spoon and used its handle as a pick to pluck Ila’s enameled cross from his shirt. It hung out from his chest, swinging slightly, and she regarded it, cold and assessing.
Ila’s cross wasn’t quite a crucifix—though it did incorporate the figure of Christ. Ila’s Christ wasn’t crucified, but on the horizontal arm He was dead in His tomb, half-shrouded, with sunken ribs and gray skin. On the vertical arm He was risen, robed in white, His pierced hands raised before His chest and His haloed face serene.
“What were you thinking?” asked Madame G.
Again Ila was at a loss how to answer.
The woman drew away from him. She gave him the spoon and its velvet wrapping and told him to wait. She told her maid that she would want her carriage in half an hour. “Give this man something to eat and drink. Sit there,” she said to Ila, and pointed at a chair by the window. She gathered her robe and nightgown in her hands and climbed the stairs.
The girl fed Ila. As she was pouring wine she whispered, “My mistress bathes in cold water. She sleeps all day. She never dines at home. This is my fare.”
“Is she kind to you?” Ila whispered back, then, “Decent?”
“Generous and fair,” the girl said. “My family live nearby. If I didn’t see them every week I’d be rather lonely. She never has guests. There’s only me and the groom. He drives her to the château, then eats with the marquis’s servants and sleeps on the floor in the marquis’s carriage house. He sees people. My mistress sleeps almost every hour that she and the marquis are apart.”
“I see,” said Ila, in a worldly way.
The girl smiled at him. “Have you botched her gift?”
“I hope not. I think not. There were no instructions on her sketch.” Ila made a scribble in the air with the tip of one finger, mimed writing. “And the lady is only a fair draftsman.”
The lady was on the stairs watching them.
The girl put the bottle on the tray, bobbed, and hurried away.
“Come with me,” said Madame G.
Ila retrieved the wrapped spoon and followed her to her carriage. She settled herself opposite him and asked him to please clip down each one of the heavy leather blinds. There was only a single candle burning in a fan shell sconce above her head. She tapped on the ceiling and the carriage moved off.
Ila felt the road dip down from the city gates, the cobbles become rutted mud. He heard the driver negotiating with the ferryman. Once they had reached the island, Ila put his finger into the join in the blind and parted it. He applied his eye to the gap and saw trees, a curve of road back toward the river, and thousands of sparks of silky floating seed drifting over the river’s brown water.
Madame G. said to Ila, “Leave that.”
Ila sat back in the gloom.
“I’d like you to show the marquis your cross,” the woman said—then was quiet for the remainder of the journey.
It was dark when they reached the château. Very little of it was visible—some lit windows and two encircling arms of an external staircase that mounted to a terrace before its door. There were torches burning at the edge of the terrace, whose fluttering light dabbed at things in the distance; a lawn appearing as jets of green flame, the gleam of water edged with reeds, a white boat tethered in their furry shadows, and the trunks of plane trees, as smooth as some material poured into a mold.
Ila followed Madame G. and a servant through rooms with many candles magnified by mirrored crystal. He stopped once to stare at an infant preserved in a jar, its skin as blanched as a shallot in white vinegar, its soft wrists and ankles encircled by bracelets of coral beads. There were other jars, a shelf full, like a larder of horrible fruit.
“Come along,” said Madame G.
Ila stopped dead at the door to a room full of paintings. The woman took the package from him and put it into the hands of a man who had come forward to meet her—a man in brocade and lace and silk stockings and silver-buckled shoes. The two came together in an eager, enraptured way.
Ila was meanwhile peering at a big murky canvas, focusing on the bony verity of Christ’s bleeding knees. He heard the marquis laugh. He looked at another painting, small, old, exact in every detail, of the beheaded saints Damian and Cosmo, whose heads rolled on the road, their rolling facilitated by round halos. Their calm faces were visible through the thin, sweated-on linen that shrouded their severed heads.
Ila heard steps approaching, soles of stacked leather on a rug—wealth that made another simple thing possible: stealth, a quiet tread, the footfalls of someone nearer to angel than ox. Ila didn’t turn to the marquis; he was still snatching sights—a painting of the Virgin in a garden, blown, drowsy roses by her drooping head. Ila opened his mouth the better to breathe. His eyes went up the walls from painting to painting till he felt that his body had begun to follow his gaze, felt his fizzing, avaricious, untaught hands climbing the air. He saw a chase through a forest, nymphs in diaphanous robes and rampant satyrs with pricks that were pointed and tapering, like those of dogs. He saw a still life with an almanac, Apollo Anglicus, a seal, sealing wax, quill knife, quills, watch, and combs.
The marquis and Madame G. stood before him, both looking at his rapt upturned face. Ila finally looked down at them. He was panting, as if he had been running. He thought—of the Virgin’s roses—White on the edge of each petal. He said, “I see how.”
“Nothing is too good for you,” the woman said—to Chambord.
The marquis picked up a chair and set it behind Ila. Ila sat down and the woman crouched at his feet, with her hands resting lightly on his knees. The marquis squatted, too, and his brocaded robe settled after him, sighing. The marquis was grizzled and dark-eyed. His eyelids drooped at their outer corners; he looked pensive or possibly tired. He held the spoon in his hand. “I see that the handle’s end is sharp, and its stem is grooved all the way to its bowl,” he said in an aside to Madame G.
“Yes. I chose its shape. It’s a spoon and a bloodletting instrument. And I chose its motto and design. This journeyman chose only to substitute wrestlers for my lovers. But, Guy,” she said, “look at his cross.”
The marquis fished the cross from Ila’s shirt.
“See how he’s solved the problem of precedence,” the woman said. “The risen Christ doesn’t overlap the dead, nor the dead the risen.”
“The Dutch are responsible for that heretical picturing—Christ in the tomb,” Chambord said. “Holbein,” he added.
“I don’t know it,” she said.
The marquis asked Ila, “This medal you’ve used to mask that difficult join—the place where the dead and risen overlap—why is it what it is? Where did you see it?”
The medal was another of Ila’s rabbits sniffing an arrow.
“It’s just something that came to me—the first time I had a brush in my hand,” Ila said. “I do know what I intend it to mean.” Ila hesitated and blushed. “The rabbit is so innocent that it doesn’t know someone has aimed an arrow at it. It is so innocent that it doesn’t understand the Grace of its escape. It only wonders whether the arrow is good to eat.”
The marquis looked at his mistress and returned her compliment. “Nothing is too good for you,” he said. To Ila he said, “Please take a look about.” The marquis got up, went to the door, and gave instructions to a servant.
Ila floated up; he drifted, only anchored by his eyes. He picked up an ivory ball, a symmetrical knot of rats, a surface of slick backs and whippy tails. He rolled the ball against his mouth. The marquis gave him a glass of wine. Th
e glass had a gold rim, the first metal Ila had had in his mouth that had no impure tang. Nothing bloody. Ila sipped the wine and sighed. He looked down into the eyes of the man who had served him—the marquis, his better—and who intended who knew what. Ila decided that whatever the marquis wanted he would give; he would give for time here, for the freedom of the house, for the white on the edge of each rose petal, for knowledge of how.
They fed him cakes that glistened with a film of clear honey. The wine tasted of raisins and shriveled the skin on the inside of his mouth. Madame G.—Grazide—led him to a deep couch, with curtains and bolsters, like a bed, a better bed than Ila had ever occupied. She had him sit in its muffling cloth cavern. Grazide sat beside him. Chambord refilled Ila’s glass, then sat beside Grazide. She turned her back to the marquis and lifted her hair off her neck. He unfastened the gold lacing at the back of her dress, loosened its neck to bare her shoulders and upper arms.
Grazide said to Chambord that he would now see what else she could offer him.
Ila put his head back and drained his glass. He was on fire with sugar and liquor, hot already, happy to be touched. He didn’t much care that he was in the room with a woman and her lover. He liked the room. He lay back and looked at its carved ceiling. “Wood, not stone,” he mused aloud. He turned his head to smooch his cheek across the silk-lined fox far rug that draped the daybed. He told the couple that the room was like the Chambre du Camier in the Palace of the Popes, where he’d gone to mend the enameling on a medallion, on a lamp, on an altar. Ila spoke with drunken exactitude. His ears were full of fur, it seemed—fur’s dry warmth was deafening him. He told them that the Chambre du Camier reeked of fire. But the fire was three hundred years cold. Its smell had outlived the people who had extinguished it.