“You cannot gauge with what eager anticipation we have waited your proposal,” he said gaily. “Speak out at once and dispel our anxiety.”
It hurt to swallow, but after I had done so, I said, “Did not you tell me that Ser Rutilius spent much of his youth in headstrong dissipations and carefree frivolities?”
He made no answer, so I plunged on. “He must have sown wild seed during this time. Perhaps he has fathered one or two that he knows nothing of. Perhaps he could be persuaded that the dancer is one of these, his own daughter.”
“What then?”
“Then he can have no use for her as bedmate and will leave her to stay as she is, where she is.”
“Yet he already adores her shadow to distraction. Will he not be proud to acknowledge the work of his flesh, seeing what dear loveliness it hath brought forth? Will he not be more avid than ever to have her within his house?”
“As his daughter—that is, as his supposed daughter—she may prevail upon him to accede to her wishes.”
“And will not a young girl of no fortune, apprenticed to a stiff-willed tyrant of the ballet, be pleased to find a wealthy and doting father and enter into a life of luxurious ease and well-being?”
“Not if she be wedded to her dance and its music,” I replied. “And that is what I saw when I watched her. It is difficult to imagine that she would give up the art willingly.”
“Willingly she gave up her shadow.”
Now I began to falter. “But that—that is different…”
He spoke as if from the depths of lassitude, uttering the very phrase I had foreknown. “This will not serve. The risks are too threatening.” But then he surprised me. “And yet, there is something in’t to ponder on. Let us befriend our thoughts a while longer. You can be meditating upon it while Mutano instructs you in the brave art of the whip. The whip is a way of taking shadows you may not yet have considered.”
* * *
Three days passed in which Astolfo seemed to neglect the entire affair: the commission of Ser Rutilius, Maxinnio, and the shadowless dancer. I kept busy, of course; my training seemed never to abate for two hours together. Now the emphasis was on drawing. I had been ordered for a space of time last twelvemonth to draw the shapes of shadows splayed across irregular surfaces: the shadow of Mutano as he stood at the corner of the clay-walled springhouse in the back garden so that it appeared halved on both walls, the shadow of the black cat Creeper where he crouched by the rough stones of the outer wall, the shadow of my own left hand as it fell upon a clot of harebells.
It was soon discovered that I possessed no talent as a draughtsman, but Astolfo explained that the case was of small moment. This exercise was to train my discernment of the shapes that surfaces can make of umbrae; it was a study in recognitions.
But this new assignment of drawing was less a geometry exercise and more in the vein of art. I sat with a sheaf of paper, trying to render likenesses not of shadows but of their casters: garden urns, hyacinths, a quince bush, the sleeping form of Creeper, the huge hands of Mutano. Now and again Astolfo would stop by, leaf through a handful of my drawings, and with a finely pointed length of graphite make swift corrections. Each of his strokes was a revelation and, though I learned much in a short time, it was clear that I was destined to be no Manoni or Petrinius, and I felt, as I often had before, that many hours were misspent.
I was pleased, therefore, when Astolfo informed me we were to pay another call upon Maxinnio and that I should prepare to answer certain questions that might be put to me. “I do not foresee that he will query you,” Astolfo said, “but it is ever best to prepare. You are to recall each detail about the dancer you saw who has no shadow. If you are asked, you must answer truthfully.”
“He will not be glad to find we know of her,” I said. “If he offer to fight, shall I combat him?”
“I do not think you would fare brilliantly in swordplay with a dancing master. We must soon lesson you in dancing to lessen your pudding-footed lubbardness.”
“But if he offer fight?”
“He will not,” Astolfo said. “Go ready yourself. We leave within the hour.”
* * *
Yet when we set out again Astolfo had buckled on that sword he called the Deliverer. This time he did not bedeck himself in the cut and colors of a spice merchant, all green and gold, but wore his ordinary habit of russet doublet and trunks, and soft boots whose floppy tops concealed ingenious pockets. He carried now a rolled case of pliable leather, of the sort used to transport largish maps.
We walked at leisurely pace into this seedy square of town with its sleepy shops of tailors and shoemakers, tinkers and tapsters. When we knocked at the street door of Maxinnio’s establishment, it was opened again by the young girl who had attended us before. This time, at Astolfo’s suggestion, I observed her more closely, but she was only as I remembered: a thin little thing of medium stature, with the jet hair and great dark eyes that shone like wet onyx. Of her figure in the dingy, gray scullery smock I could tell little.
When she led us into the rehearsal salon, the scene was as before, with the severe ballet mistress yapping crossly at her charges, the weary lutenist fingering along in rote fashion, and the lanky Maxinnio on his leather campaign stool, rapping the floor rhythmically with a short silver-headed cane.
He did not weep for joy at our appearance. “Here you are again, Astolfo,” he snapped. “It seems you feel bound by some compulsion I cannot fathom to honor me with your presence and with the company of your overgrown henchmen.”
“I bid you good morrow,” Astolfo said in his mild voice.
“Have you auctioned off all your store of spices? I see you fitted today in a more customary livery.”
“Today I come in my own interest and not in that of the merchant.”
“That merchant who did not exist in the first place.”
“That is true,” Astolfo said. “But you must not complain of being deceived. You did not credit my tale from the beginning. I had not really thought to deceive someone so perspicacious as Maxinnio.”
“Now I sniff arrant trickery,” he replied. “I warn you that if I grow impatient with your pitiable ruses, I shall have my troupe of young girls pitch you through the window onto the cobblestones. They will likewise defenestrate these two footpads that hang to you like baubles on earlobes.”
“Cry you mercy,” said Astolfo. “The day is too shiny new; a shame if violence should mar it. I came only to acquaint you with some intelligence that may not yet be in your possession.”
“You came to monger gossip? I think you will not expect to be paid for this intelligence, as you call it.”
“Only look upon these drawings I have brought. I am curious to know your judgment of these works.” Astolfo untied the laces of the leather case and began to unroll it.
“The only artworks in which I am now interested are the designs for my new ballet,” Maxinnio said. “The preparatory sketches are useless and we must begin them anew.”
“But only glance at this bit of handiwork.” Astolfo unrolled a drawing on fine-wove paper and held it up before the dance master.
When Maxinnio blinked his eyes wide and gave a start that shook his whole body, I edged around to see what image must have produced such a reaction. I judged it would be in our interest for me to give but a lackadaisical, cool look at the drawing, but when I saw the figure there I too was surprised and intook my breath audibly. Maxinnio did not notice, staring fixedly as he was, oblivious to all else.
Here was the dancer without a shadow, the girl I had spied through the cracked door on the floor above. This was her face uplifted, her figure weightless and elongated, her arms raised above her flowing hair, her slender hands thrusting into the light of day. My late exercises in art, clumsy as they had been, gave me to appreciate, to savor, the achievement that lay on the sheet Astolfo upheld.
When Maxinnio turned his eyes from the drawing to the shadow master, his face was full of rage, every feature contor
ted. He looked for all the world like one of those small statues of demons that are set out to fend away evil spirits from temple gardens. When he spoke, his voice was low, choking with fury. “I would have your life for this.”
“My henchmen, as you name them, will answer for my safety,” Astolfo said. “Anyway, why do you threaten? I have brought this exquisite picture as a gift for you.”
“This dancer is my secret. She is the guarantee of my success with the new entertainment. I do not understand how you come by her likeness. She has not been seen abroad. I keep her close. No one is to see her until the ballet of ‘The Sylphs of Light’” is presented in the new season.”
“She will not appear in your dance of sylphs. She will never dance in public.”
“She must. All is settled and cast as in stone.”
“You have rescued from a meager and grudging life many a young girl,” Astolfo said. “You have made the pliable ones into dancers and found employment for some of the others. But your interest in them reaches only so far as the boundary of your professional purposes. You know little of where they come from or who they are or may have been.”
“I maintain neither orphanage nor almshouse,” Maxinnio said. “The girls learn to be not persons but only dancers. They learn to live solely for dance, as I do live.”
“And that is why you do not know even the true name of this girl. That is how you could with impunity strip her of her shadow, sell it away so she could not retrieve it, and present her onstage in perfect purity.”
“I could easily rid them all of their shadows. But only this one embodies the ideal I search for. It is not shadow-lack that composes her perfection.”
“But I have found that she is the natural daughter of a great and powerful noble who does not care to have her prance before the garlicky, mutton-gorging rabble. You are to hand her over to me to deliver to him and thus spare your own life and the lives of those in your employ, at the same time preventing the razing of this place to smoking embers.”
“Who is this giant terror you threaten me with?”
“You shall not know that.”
“How do I know that he exists?”
“Because I tell you so and have the picture of her.… Here, look you upon this other likeness. What do you observe?” Astolfo rolled up the drawing of the dancer and gave it to Mutano, who secured it with a black satin ribbon. Then he unfurled another drawing and held it up as before.
Maxinnio gave this new image a puzzled glance, then leaned forward in his little chair and peered closely. “I think I know this shadow,” he said, “but I cannot say how.”
“It is the shadow of your silver dancer, the shade you bartered away.”
He shook his head. “No. Her shadow is a thing of unparalleled grace. There is something askew about the drawing of this one. It is impaired. It looks as if some wasting disease has befallen it, some distemper that racks its shape.”
“That is the condition it has acquired since it left your hands. This drawing depicts how the shadow now looks at this moment. I shall deliver it to the girl’s father. From this picture of her shadow he will draw certain conclusions about how she is being treated here. When his anger is at its flaming peak, I shall tell him your name and show him where to seek you out.”
“You would play me false and destroy me and my work.… For what purpose?” Maxinnio demanded. “There has been no enmity between us. I hold you in perfect indifference. If you go to ruin me, it will be only in order to fatten your purse.”
“The father will reward me when his daughter is restored to him. There may be payment also for you.”
“I care not.” Maxinnio clenched and unclenched his hand, rapped the floor with his ebony cane. “Heap your coin till it drown you. My concern is with my ‘Sylphs of Light.’ If I could spare my silver dancer, she should go to her father on wings of wind. But the entertainment cannot afford her absence.”
Astolfo gave the picture of the shadow to Mutano, who rolled it up and secured it with a red ribbon. “And now, if you will examine this third rendering.” He unscrolled before Maxinnio a last drawing, a likeness of another young dancer. The pose was the same as in the picture of the silver girl, but this girl had black hair instead of blonde and the eyes that gazed sunward were of shining onyx. Though not so tall as the other girl, she was equally graceful, a creature of calm and guileless movement, with the ease of brook water.
Maxinnio looked at it with grave care. “This is an interesting fantasy of what a dancer might aspire to. No one but Petrinius could have drawn it so, but it is not a study from life. If ’twere, I would find the girl and put her to use.”
“The drawing is not taken from life, but the girl is real enough. You may be acquainted with her. She is called Leneela.”
“I think not,” Maxinnio said. “The one Leneela I know is but a little servant girl in our household. She has been sweeping stones and scrubbing floors and pots for three years now since her mother died.”
“This is she.”
“If it be she, how could I not recognize her in this guise?”
“She is so customary to your eyes that she became invisible.”
“She is no dancer, only a scullery maid.”
“She can be trained.”
“In time, perhaps, if she have ability. But time is short.”
“You speak as if you had choice in the matter. The father will claim his silvery daughter. I have offered you another to take her place. There is no cost to you except a delay in presenting your ‘Sylphs.’ You can bargain a deferment.”
“That will not be simple and will incur further expense.”
“Expenses will be compensated. Again, I tell you that you have no choice. A carriage will call for the girl at first twilight. You will ascertain that she is in the best of condition and will hand her into the carriage yourself. To join a child with its parent—that is a handsome thing to do.”
“Handsome or foul-featured, it shall be done. Yet I will not forget this tiresome japery you have turned upon me.”
“I have saved your life,” Astolfo said.
* * *
It was early evening before the three of us came together again, sitting at a table laid out in the kitchen, dividing an enormous beef and kidney pie Astolfo had got from the cook Iratus. A cask of aged cider stood ready to ease down the meat. The shadow master had traveled earlier in the day to the château of Rutilius and arranged how the girl was to come into his household.
“I hope this will prove a fortunate event for the lass,” I said. “’Tis a sorrow, her loss to the art of the dance.”
He nodded gaily and said he was obliged to me for a happy thought.
“How so?”
“I have told Ser Rutilius that I believe her to be his natural daughter and pointed out several similarities of feature and physique. You suggested some such thing. We may well have preserved both of them from destruction.”
“Destruction?”
“One who falls in love with a shadow loves an image of the ideal. No woman can approach to the perfection of such a fond delusion. When disappointment and disillusion set in, a rank distaste for the fleshly person follows, for she will be seen as a betrayer of the ideal, a spoiler of the perfection that once gloriously existed. In a passionate man, revenge will come to seem a necessity. The blade, the noose, the poison goblet stand forth in the mind, palpable and inescapable. There is none so desperate, none so dangerous, as one whose ideals have crumbled.”
“It is well to deceive him then, in the matter of blood ties,” I said.
“If indeed we have deceived. It is yet plausible that she is his own.”
“Will he not go now to seek the mother and verify your story?”
“Alas!” Astolfo cried. “In my vivid account, the mother was strangled by a jealous lover and thrown into the harbor. The sea laves her sorrowful bones ceaselessly.”
“And this lover? Shall not Ser Rutilius look for his track?”
“Al
ack! He has repented himself and lives in exile in the Fog Islands, leading a solitary, miserable existence lamenting the excesses of his former life.”
“A pretty fable. But there are yet matters I do not comprehend. How was it possible for Petrinius to make the three drawings? He had seen neither of the girls and he had no way to observe how the shadow had deteriorated.”
“I knew that he would have made for his own collection a copy of the drawing he made for Rutilius. I asked him to make another, only altering it as if the shadow had started to deteriorate.”
“And the girls? I do not comprehend how he could have seen either of them without his presence at Maxinnio’s establishment being remarked.”
“Petrinius did not see either girl.”
“How then did he make their likenesses?”
“He made none.” Astolfo swallowed heartily from his mug of cider, set it down, and wiped his mouth with his wrist. “But there are others in this land who can draw besides that vain and impertinent artist. In fact, I have been known to dash off a sketch now and then, sometimes in the manner of Manoni, or the Anonymous Citadel Master, or even in the style of Petrinius himself.”
“You produced those fine drawings? But you did not see the silver dancer. You were in the salon below, distracting Maxinnio from my prying.”
“I made attentive note of your description of her,” he said. “And then, of course, there was Petrinius’s rendering of her shadow. Look you, Falco, if a person may cast a shadow, why may not a shadow cast a person?”
“A shadow may cast—”
“Can cast the image of a girl, at least. Think upon your own lustful and lurid fancies. Do they not drive you out into the town in fair weather or foul? Do they not compel you to deceive yourself that a sooty tavern wench is the ideal of grace and beauty? The shadow-ideal in your mind casts Greasy Joan as the rose-cheeked handmaid of Venus. The shadow is the engine of your conception of the actual.”