Science  Write  Now

I do not meet my Patroness until the sun has been swallowed by smoke choked night.

I arrive at the grand casa solariega in the morning and step from the carriage into the shade of its red ochre eaves but am met only by her lady’s maid—a prim woman who refuses to meet my eye. The yellow sandstone walls are warm, and the airiness of the arching façade belies the wrought-iron grilles shuttering blackened leaded-glass windows, belligerently dark even in the lustre of the sun.

The maid sequesters me in what was once a sunroom, its high windows draped in heavy damasks that pool in satiny folds along the floor so not even the most ardent ray of light can slip through.  She permits me only one open curtain, leaving me to set up my artists tools in the dim half-light, despite the brilliance of the day.

I resent the fatuousness of the whole ordeal. When the Marchioness’ letter had arrived at the atelier, I paid it as much mind as the dozen others that had come before it. Some other student willing to sully themselves with the whims of a noble’s vanity would take the commission, as the dozen before had readily done. Yet the page of fine cream parchment had found itself in my hand, under the cold eye of my Master. You cannot live off marble busts, he preached, and I cannot teach for promised money that does not exist.

It was a fate that I had been hiding from, the natural life cycle of those who moved through his lauded studio. Under his discerning guidance, my renderings of the still faces of Roman emperors and philosophers had become immaculate. Exact down to the last shadow of their brow, the finest stone crease of the eye. Perfect. Yet that was not all he taught. What he had tried to cane into me was the profitable art of portraiture, but my honest brush could not overlook a model’s blotched cheeks or sleep-bruised under-eye. A good portrait, the kind a rich lady like the Marchioness expects, obscures the truth of its subject, the subtle tones and blemishes of their skin. Flesh is so much more complex than the plain surface of stone. You need to look through thin veil of the cutaneous layer, down into the blood and bone, and note how their colours bleed outwards to taint the superficial complexion. I miss my busts, where that accuracy was praised, where the more perfect my perception of the subject, the closer to perfection my art.

The lady’s maid only reappears when the sun is on the cusp of setting, dusk darkening like a blossoming bruise. After what has felt like an eternity in that cold dark room, my eyes are as strained as my patience. She diligently lights the rows upon rows of candles that crowd every alcove, stacked like waxen organ pipes. Then the Marchioness enters, silent as a cat, and takes her seat across from my easel. She does not speak except to set me my task.

Paint me as I am.

My knuckles flush bone white as I grip my pallet. I scour her face, searching her eyes for meaning, for some hint that she has reached into my head and is toying with me. The face reflected back at me is as blank as the canvas it will soon inhabit. Only her dark eyes seem alive, glistening like wet oil as she watches me mix my first shades with a rattled hand.

The candlelight catches the line of her jaw, and I mirror the cream curve with a soft stroke of my brush. No, cream is wrong. Closer to alabaster perhaps? Or marble, like my beloved busts? I drop my brush back to my pallet and dab more zinc white into my mix. My eyes flicker back to her still face.

It lacks the peachy warmth I had instinctively mixed. I swirl my brush through the creamy oils, thinking, sliding my eyes back and forth between her and the blank face slowly filling my canvas. The Marchioness sits so still that no matter how closely I study her, holding her face in drawn inspection, I barely observe the flutter of an eyelid. In the silence I feel the bliss of being back at my Master’s atelier copying dutifully from a still bust. She has instructed me to paint her exactly as I see her. It should be so easy. Asked to paint in the way I yearn to, and yet I feel my Master’s rap across my knuckles.

The hours pass as I scrutinise her pallid skin and falter every time I raise my brush. She could be called beautiful. Regal would be polite. Intimidating more honest. Surely she doesn’t intend me to be unflattering? Had my Master not instructed me that the purpose of a portrait was to capture, in perpetuity, one’s beauty?

It doesn’t help that she only sits for me in this cruel half-light, her eyes hollowed by deep candlelight shadows. No expense has been spared in candles. They drip onto every surface, refreshed religiously by the lady’s maid who scrapes away their malformed melted remains and replaces them with slender, fresh wax. Their fickle light makes my eyes water as I struggle to see through to her true hues. The ever-shifting flames cast mercurial light over my subject, and yet, the fire’s heat does not bleed into her skin as it should. It slides off her like water, like it is she who is made of wax.

Waxy. I find my crumpled tube of Naples yellow and press the tiniest dab onto my pallet. It disappears into the skin-toned smear I have been mixing and re-mixing, but at the first stroke I know I’m wrong again. I squint between the brushstroke and her impassive face. My eyes ache from the flickering, imperfect light. Why must she make me work this way?

I step away from my easel and close the impersonal distance between us. She does not move at all, seems even not to breathe. Only the slow turn of her eyes under their hooded lids, following as I lean close to her motionless face, show that she is sharply alert.

Blue. I see it now, close enough to study the way her lip creases. She is cool blue in her undertones. It bleeds from her mouth into her skin, almost as though she is drowned. I can see the spider web of veins lacing her eyelids, creeping down across her temples. Prussian blue—no, indanthrone with a touch of dioxazine purple. Lightened gently with a cool white.

I pull myself away from her, suddenly conscious of the enthralled flush in my own cheeks. Back at my easel, the colours are thick, softening to oily smooth under the swirl of my brush. I feel heady as I stroke the paint onto the canvas, euphoric with the puzzle laid out and solved on my pallet, giddy with the sharp paint fumes and tallow-sweet candle smoke.

Just as the vague blur of her features begin to form themselves under my intoxicated brush, I pause. The face is on the knife edge of recognisability. I scour my subject’s expression, try to read into her veiled eyes. The Marchioness sits still, frozen, already her own portrait, and I know that I have not solved her riddle yet. Do I capture her ideal, or her exact? I whorl my brush through the blue skin on my pallet but hesitate to carry it to the canvas.

If I choose wrong, then what? Shame? Will she throw me out, to tramp disgraced back to my old atelier? Whisper my name in the ears of other fine ladies and warn them of my poor eye, my unfaithful (too faithful) art? Will my Master forbid me ever standing before one of his easels again?

As I scowl into the undefined features in front of me, the Marchioness stands. Her quiet face gives no clues to my puzzle. With a voice as soft as the candleflames, she says we will sit again tomorrow night and wishes me a good evening. As she leaves, she does not look towards my unfinished work.

I wake late the next morning. Only her lady’s maid awaits me in the dining room. I would love to study the Marchioness’ skin in the natural light, capture her true tones in my mind’s pallet. But she denies me. She will sit only at night, will only be seen by candlelight.

After breakfast I am idle. The maid finds my hovering disturbing and tells me to go admire the manor gardens, if it would please me.  It pleases me better than watching her scrape coagulations of wax off the mantle, so I venture outside.

The Marchioness has a peculiar gardening fascination. Spanish bluebells and irises. Grape hyacinth, lupine, flax and chicory. Woodland forget-me-nots. More blooms I cannot not name. All blue, in every shade, bleeding outwards from the house across the grounds in a capillary sprawl. I hunt among the labyrinth of blooms, swatching petals in my memory. In their tones I find myself hunting for her skin, chasing her as though she frolicked through the garden with me, imagining how she would look, pale skin brilliant in the sunlight, burnished blue.

I stop when I find the roses. There had been another student at my atelier whose particular obsession was to paint arrangements of roses. He would drown the room in their perfume, petals spilling across the floor. He too, had been unceremoniously ousted from the safety of the atelier nest. At the time he had tried to convince me along with him, beckoning me to join him chasing landed gentry and foreign counts—to woo rich patrons who want to see themselves as beautiful as flowers. Make your money in their sitting rooms and you can buy paints in the colours of every blossom in their gardens. It has been some years since I saw him last. I wonder how he fared and if he still dreamed of painting roses.

Never once did I see him paint a blue rose. I reach out to cup a heavy blossom in my palm. The petals are satin soft. They flush cerulean, fading into light cobalt tips and deepening into dark ultramarine at their hearts. Yet when I dip my nose into the silky folds, I am disappointed to find no scent. I think of how the shades of blue come together into the same colour as the lady’s veins. As I caress the backs of the petals, my finger catches on a thorn. It pierces deep through the skin, and I snatch my hand back with a hissed inhale.

The bead of blood is close to a dark alizarin crimson. I suck it away and inspect the puncture. The skin around it is blushed and angry. Ignoring the stinging, I compare my hand against the rose. My tones are warm—pinks, hints of red. Perhaps they’re right when they say nobility has blue blood. The sangre azul.

The Marchioness’s request haunts me. Paint me as I am.

Is she luring me to a trap? She is beautiful yes, but severe. Gaunt in her cheeks and bloodless in her flesh despite her fine-spun veins. Surely no noble woman would want to be preserved eternally in such a state? My Master taught me how best to catch the most flattering light across the skin, to picture it rosy and soft. And yet the Marchioness instruction was simple—as she is.

I squint back towards the grand house with its ochre-stained stone walls and sun-dulled terracotta shingles, its baleful windows darkened and shut. Perhaps if I study other portraits commissioned by the Marchioness’s family, I can solve her riddle. Surely she would want her portrait, when hung among her lineage, to look as though it belongs.

I weave slowly back towards the house pretending to admire the flowers while searching for sign of the lady’s maid. It is mid-morning by now and I catch her hurrying past the window to the sitting room, arms laden with fresh yellow wax. I cut between the garden beds to the other end of the house, to the wing I am forbidden to enter, and slip inside.

This half of the manor is plunged in darkness. Like the sunroom, every window has heavy curtains, drawn tight. In the sliver of sun let in by the open door I see there is a small table by the doorway, laid out with a candle stick and tinderbox, presumably for the maid should she enter from the garden. I light the candle as quietly as I can and close the door, leaving myself with only the halo of candlelight. I hold it up towards the walls as I creep down the hall, searching for oil paint faces. I find none. The walls are bare, without even nails to hang frames.

I press on. A family such as the Marchioness’ must have portraits. All noble families do. I pass a closed bedchamber and cup my hand around the flame to keep the light from spilling under the door. The next room down is less ornate and its door rests slightly ajar. I press my face up to the opening, raising the candle to cast a trembling strip of light into the dark, and I see them. The unmistakable silhouettes of picture frames. Covered in cloth, not hung but stacked in rows against the walls. In the very centre of the room, a full-length mirror is propped against a dark wood stand.

I push in through the door and set the candle on the floor, hands immediately moving to unveil the paintings. I tug free the first sheet and come face to face with the Marchioness. She is sat, exactly as she sits for me, but eyes bright and cheeks rosy. The candlelight has become soft sun on her face. The corners of the canvas are filled with familiarly opulent renderings of blue roses.

I move to the next paining. It is the same as the first just without the floral border. The Marchioness stares brightly back at me, even in the half-dark. The next, another blushing Marchioness. And the next, full cheeked with cadmium red lips. I uncover every portrait, one by one, scrutinising each down to its finest brushstrokes. None are painted with shades of blue. None except the first, but then it is only in the flowers. I come back to it and stare into the Marchioness’ smiling eyes, her face wreathed in lush petals. There are dozens of paintings. None the Marchioness as she truly is.

Behind me the door whispers open but before I can turn, I am struck bodily and knocked to the floor. The candle trembles at our collapse but does not go out. Instead, it lights the Marchioness face, same as it is lit when she sits for me, inches from my own. But it isn’t the same face that she wears during our sittings, impassively still. No, now it is twisted and alive, her wax-melt skin moulded around a snarl. Her blue lips curl over long pearl teeth. She crouches over me as I lay, winded, on my back.

My breath hitches in my throat and I turn my face away only to catch my own movement in the mirror. Only my movement, for in its silver surface I am alone. I stare into my own shadowy eyes, into the reflection of empty space above me where I can still feel her weight, pressing closer. I feel the brush of her lip on my neck and the words escape me in a gasp.

“I can paint you as you are.”

She pauses, cold mouth kissed to my throat.

“I know what they all did wrong. Please, give me one more chance.”

I feel her on me for a long moment as I wait, unable to look away from the empty space in the mirror. She says very well in a voice that is so close it is as though she has crawled inside my ear. Then she is gone, leaving only air above me.

The lady’s maid drags the mirror into the sitting room and leans it against my easel. I watch her struggle with the awkward glass weight from the corner of my eye, but don’t stir from my waiting. Instead, I remain at the edge of the room, holding the corner of one heavy satin curtain twitched open, watching as the extinguishing dusk settles outside. The blue heads of the flowers begin to dip under the gentle pressure of the twilight, their petals closing tight to hide their hearts, becoming buds once more.

The maid pauses at the door and gives me a long look. I meet her eyes and wonder what she makes of me. She had gone as white as her mistress when she had found me returning from the portrait room, breathing prayers anytime we passed in the quiet halls. Her eyes now, finally meeting mine, are soft and searching. Then she is gone.

As the dark settles, I let the curtain fall back and take up my place in front of the mirror. My canvas lies discarded in the corner of the room, its vague face abandoned to never fully form. In its place I study my own reflection. My pinched face stares back at me from the frame, my skin slightly bloodless in the candlelight. Over my own shoulder I watch the door, left ajar by the maid.

When I finally lift my eyes from the glass, the Marchioness is sitting across from me, same as the night before. No emotion moves her face, breath barely parts her lips. Her eyes, locked to mine, are empty. My hands are trembling.

I take up my pallet and begin to mix my paints. I start as I always would – zinc white with cadmium red and yellow ochre. The flesh is buttery under my knife. Make sure it’s pale to begin, a touch more white. Then blue— indanthrone with a dab of ultramarine like the roses. I blend until my pallet is dressed in the same blue-toned skin I had faltered over the night before.

I stroke the creamy paint gently onto the mirror. This new surface is slippery and my brush skews, twisting my heart against my ribs. But the fervorous high of knowing that I am at last right lures me on. My hand learns the feel of the smoothness of the glass, the way the paint slides in ways it would not on rough canvas. It both gives to me and resists. Too heavy a hand and rather than applying, the paint carries on with the bristles and slivers of mirror slice apart the features. Too soft and the colours refuse to blend.

I continue to toil over my faithful reconstruction. I know that this will be the most beautiful portrait I ever paint and that I will never paint its like again.

The night hangs stagnant as the candle smoke, collecting in the shadowed corners of the ceiling. Time thickens like oils around us. In this room, cloistered away from the world and stood at my easel altar, I feel as though dawn may never come.

I build the rough form of a face, watching as it slowly covers mine. In all her ghastly blue glory I piece the Marchioness over myself until only the mirrored holes of her unpainted eyes are left. I stare into them, and my own eyes stare back, bright with colourless tears. With the final strokes I blot them out.

Despite myself, it’s rapturous.