Mortal Love (20 page)

“A scientist of the degeneracy of the criminal intellect. His book has not been translated into English, but I have read it in Italian—
Genio e Follia.
Genius and Madness. He is a very great friend of Learmont. They fancy themselves gatekeepers to the mind, and Learmont believes he alone guards the entrance to a portal that only a chosen few may enter.”

“You mean Beauty.”

Swinburne nodded. “I mean Beauty; I mean Art—these things threaten us, Mr. Cobfinch. Beyond them is a door, and beyond the door is”—he leaned forward in his chair and snapped his fingers—“
what?
Do you know, Mr. Comstock? Have you seen what is there?”

“No.”

“
I have.”
Swinburne's voice shook. He stared up at Radborne, his face taut with desperation and longing. “I have seen! Better that I should have died, or disappeared into the desert like Andrieu's boy—better I had snapped like a thread. And do not doubt that Learmont has seen, too—the gatekeeper whose foot has got stuck in the door! That is how she comes to be here. Tell me, Mr. Confit—do you enjoy watching a cat torment a mouse?”

“No.”

“What would you think of a man who gave live mice to his pet, expressly so he could watch her dismember them?”

“I would think he was exceedingly cruel. Or mad.”

“Learmont is both. He is like no man I have ever known.” Swinburne licked his lips; his gaze darted about the room. “She is his obsession. I do not understand what she is, but I swear to you, Mr. Comstock—you would as well keep a wild jaguar as a house cat! And so he keeps her subdued with his little blue pills and his paregorics. Because he has worked with private patients in their homes, he has avoided the scrutiny of the Commissioners for Lunacy.”

“But he can't simply intend to keep her imprisoned here?” Radborne looked appalled. “I will not believe it!”

“It is true.”

“But why?”

“Her hungers have become his own. He is obsessed with artists, and their tributes: paintings, poems, songs. But he is not content with Beauty's pearls; he must see how the poor oyster excretes them! He must see the spark of sand that coaxes nacre from the ugly gray shell! More than that: he would see if the pearl itself can create another pearl!

“Think of this, sir: Cygnus deprived of its mate will make the most beautiful sound and then expire. Learmont traps a nixie for Ned to paint, and paint he does—paints and paints and paints, until he is overcome by brain fever and his wife nurses him back to us. I have told you that Miss Upstone possesses a powerful nisus. I believe that Learmont is the biter bit: the master enslaved by his charge. Once she gains power over him, she will free herself. And then . . .”

Swinburne fell silent. Beneath his right eye, a muscle twitched. Radborne thought he might weep, but the poet only pressed a hand to his forehead. “She will find her way back.”

Radborne hesitated. He was fearful of encouraging Swinburne's delusion. It was obvious that the poet's own mind had been turned, by exhaustion or drink, or its denial. “Would that not be a better thing? For her to be among her own people again—her family, her . . .”

He could not bring himself to say “husband.” Swinburne raised his head to look at him. His gaze was soft, and for the first time almost kindly. “A better thing? For her, perhaps . . . yes, very well, no doubt it would be. But for us?”

The poet sighed. “I contradict myself, but all art is contradiction. To lose even a small part of the ragged, raging beauty of the world—is that a good thing, Mr. Comstock? Tell me! Because I fear it is not, and yet I know that the toll Beauty exacts of her worshippers is a terrible one. We strive to capture her, imprison her in our poems and our scrawls, but it is we who are maddened. I do not subscribe to Learmont's science: I do not believe that one must be a madman to be a great poet. My own work is the greater now for my own temperance! And yet, and yet . . .”

His voice dropped to a whisper; he stared at the great expanse of windows, the churning sea and cloud-filled sky beyond, but it seemed as though a caul were drawn across his eyes. “I would not see her destroyed.”

“Who would destroy her?” asked Radborne. “Learmont?”

“No. Never. But she is not tame. She will never be tame. She dies, as all beauty does, from age or despair or neglect, and she gives birth to herself. And think of this, Mr. Comstock”—he grabbed Radborne's wrist—“what if she should give birth to another? Cygnus stabs her own breast with her beak, lamenting her mate, seeking to feed her young with her own: what if her young thrive? what if her mate hears and comes to claim her?

“Powerful as she is,” he said, and his eyes suddenly shone like candles, “what if there should be
two
of them? What if a crack in the world became a chasm?
What if they break through?”

Radborne gave a small gasp, of laughter and disbelief. “‘Break through?' I think it's a damned good thing that Learmont is in charge here—that's what
I
think!”

“You are a child!” shrieked Swinburne, and dropped his hand. “He has brought you here as her plaything!”

“My arrangement with Dr. Learmont is a private one,” said Radborne coldly. “I have come here to work, and paint.” Without thinking, he glanced upward.

Swinburne made a strangled piping sound and pointed at the ceiling. “You think you have found your muse, eh, boy? Oh, foolish foolish foolish!” he squealed. “‘But death is strong and full of blood and fair!' Wait until you see your stunner in a coffin with her hair wrapped around your hand and you must cut it loose! Wait until your bowels are unstrung by grief and you find yourself daubing in shit and blood! Oh, what great work you won't paint
then!”

Radborne stared, torn between fury and pity as the little man rocked back and forth. Swinburne clasped his head with both hands, blinking furiously. After a moment this seemed to calm him; he loosened his mantle and let it fall from his shoulders, got to his feet and crossed to the wall of bookshelves. “Are you a member of Learmont's Fuck-Lore Society, Mr. Comitas?”

“No.”

Swinburne tossed his long hair, pinching his chin between thumb and forefinger. He removed a volume from the shelf, turned to brandish it in Radborne's face. “See! See! This is
my
book, the barefaced thief! She is
always
stealing things.”

Radborne expected it to be one of Swinburne's own works. Instead it was a small volume bound in green cloth and stamped with red letters:
Tales and Ancient Drolleries from the Farthest West.

“They are stories collected by Learmont,” said Swinburne. “Inchbold gave it to me as a present, when I first visited him at Tintagel. I found them most interesting. Tennyson confided to me that he did as well.”

“I thought Tennyson was dead,” snapped Radborne.

“Sarcasm is the devil's weapon.” Swinburne flipped through the pages, his eyes bright. “I had forgotten these,” he said to himself.

He glanced up at Radborne. “Perhaps you should have this after all.” He shut the book and handed it to Radborne.

“Thank you.” Radborne opened it to the frontispiece.

Algernon Swinburne,
read the signature at the top right corner.

“Thank you.” He flashed Swinburne a tight smile and closed the book. “I have a commission to do illustrations back in New York. This might be helpful for me.”

Swinburne gave a languid wave. “Do what you will.”

Suddenly he raised a finger to his lips. From upstairs Radborne could hear Dr. Learmont's voice and the sound of footsteps. Swinburne looked at him, his pale face flushed. “I cannot stay any longer. My host will be anxious if I am not back before dark.”

He hesitated. “You are free to speak of this with Learmont or not: he has no hold over me. He never has.”

“You're walking?”

“Of course.” Swinburne pulled his mantle back around his shoulders and looked rather prim. “But I would not recommend that you do so—you would lose yourself on the moor. There are bogs that are
filled
with bones, Mr. Comstock.”

He made Radborne a curt bow. “It would surprise me if we met again.”

“Well.” Radborne held up the volume of
Drolleries. “
Many thanks, then, for your book. And I meant to say, before—in the restaurant, I mean—that your poetry was always, I always—”

He felt his ears burn, and shrugged in embarrassment. Swinburne only smiled.

“‘Wert she not born fire, and shalt she not devour?'” he said softly. He reached out a small, thin hand and patted Radborne on the shoulder. “Godspeed you, Mr. Comstock.”

In a swirl of green and ginger gray he was gone.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Higher Pantheism in a Nutshell

T
he room that Daniel entered with
Balthazar Warnick was a wide, welcoming space. Oak bookshelves covered the walls; there were leather armchairs and ottomans, library tables piled with masses of stuff—books, old magazines, curling scrolls of watercolor paper—a rickety library ladder, and a marble fireplace where a small fire burned with a steady, low blue flame.

“Nice place,” said Daniel. He looked around admiringly. There seemed to be no wall space unoccupied by books, but they were obscured by paintings, hanging from the shelves or leaning against them. There were even paintings suspended in front of the heavily curtained windows.

“Sorry about the mess, gentlemen.”

A man turned from where he stood in front of an oak sideboard, a man wearing a beautifully cut suit with the blue sheen of snow at dusk, his skull defined by a buzz-cut V of silvery hair. His tall frame was nearly skeletal, his face lined yet youthful, with eyes so pale a gray they were almost white, the pupils like holes left by buckshot.

“I don't let the cleaning staff in here anymore—once they threw away a Beth Love I'd just bought. Russell Learmont,” he said, and extended a hand to Daniel.

“Daniel Rowlands.”

Learmont turned back to the sideboard, where decanters winked ruby and amber in the soft light. “What can I get you, Daniel?”

“Scotch, please. Neat.”

“Balthazar?”

Warnick turned his melancholy smile on Learmont and settled into a chair. “The same, Russell. Thank you.”

Daniel wandered over to examine a large, unwieldy picture suspended in front of a shelf of books. It depicted a man, tall and black-haired, standing upon the edge of a precipice with a backdrop of flaming sky, a sword in one hand and his helm dangling from the other as he stared into the empty air. A typical Pre-Raphaelite pose and subject, painted on wood, not canvas, yet there was something about the knight's expression that made Daniel feel queasy. The figure looked at once devouring and ravaged, his face a slurry of greenish white and red, more Albert Pinkham Ryder than Edward Burne-Jones. The painting's perspective, too, was skewed. Daniel studied it for a minute before realizing that there were no shadows anywhere.

He frowned. What exactly was the knight looking at, or for? He tried to make out the words on a small brass tag pleached with rust.

The tag was not set in the middle of the frame, but at the lower right-hand corner, where a jagged metal hinge protruded from it. The hinge was broken. The title was incomplete.

Daniel scrutinized the label, again looked at the painting.

How they walked in
—

In what? Who were “they”?

Something poked at his memory, and he felt a sudden sharp thrill of recall.

How they were enchanted. How they were discovered.

He took a step back, trying to take in the entire large canvas.

It was not the work of Burne-Jones. Daniel was certain of that. As he stared, his excitement grew.

Because while this was by another artist, surely the model was the same man who had posed for Tristran in the sketches Larkin had showed him? The same hawkish face, the same deep-set eyes and thin, beautifully curved mouth; the same longing, expressed as devastation rather than desire.

He turned eagerly to the paintings surrounding it, but they were not by the same artist. Most were pencil sketches of a bearded man in a white jacket, a caricature of a Victorian doctor, surrounded by whorls of minuscule handwriting. There were drawings of a bare-breasted woman with wings and a winged animal with the words
INORDINATE DRAGON
beneath it.

“Andrew Kennedy.” Learmont stepped beside him and handed Daniel a glass. “He spent much of the nineteenth century in the Glasgow Royal Asylum.”

“Really?” Daniel sipped his scotch. “What was wrong with him?”

“‘Delusional insanity of exaltation.'”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning he believed himself to be some sort of deity, or demiurge, or numinous figure. Not all the time, of course.”

“Ah. A part-time demiurge. You don't get benefits.”

Learmont smiled. “Nowadays he'd be diagnosed as schizophrenic, or having some kind of bipolar affective disorder.”

“Right.” Daniel gave Learmont a wry look: this was the guy whose pharmaceutical empire had developed a highly specific antidepressant that, according to a recent article in
Forbes,
now outsold all the older SSRIs combined. “Nowadays you'd put him on Exultan, and he'd have a successful career as a telemarketer.”

“Very likely,” said Learmont.

Daniel turned to survey the paintings and drawings that surrounded them. “Nowadays you might have trouble filling this room with pictures.”

“Oh, you'd be surprised.” Learmont glanced to where Balthazar Warnick sat, perusing a stack of books on a low table. “I have a friend who installed an observatory in his office penthouse. Another fellow built a tidal pool.”

He began to pace slowly along the wall. “This is my observatory. In here I have a hundred telescopes.”

He stopped in front of a small painting crammed with figures vivid as fruit in a glass bowl: citron, emerald, crimson, violet. “And do you know what you see when you look inside one of them?

“A world. Inside every single one of them: a world within the world. Each with its own religion, its own countryside, its own architecture and language, animals and plants and currency and people—kings and queens and gods and devils—”

“And ourselves, mortal men,” said Balthazar Warnick from his seat. “Don't get him started, Daniel. I've warned him, he'll need to develop a drug to stop his compulsion for collecting these things.”

“I'm not collecting them.” Learmont finished his drink, set the glass on a table, and crossed his arms, still gazing at his painting. “I'm conserving them. Protecting them.”

“So you say,” Balthazar replied. “I wonder if they think the same.” He turned back to his books.

Daniel raised an eyebrow. “Do your paintings have opinions on the matter?”

“Of course not.” Learmont laughed but gave Warnick a sharp look. “And the artists I deal with these days . . . well, their agents make more than I do.”

“But you've been collecting these for a while.” Daniel stepped past him to regard a long, cartoonish-looking scroll of brown paper, all balloon-shaped people and dogs and—

“Jesus.” He drew back quickly. “That's . . . Jesus . . .”

“He's been institutionalized for some time now,” said Learmont. “Most of the charges were dropped, and at any rate there was no way he could stand trial.”

“This guy has an
agent?
What, do you troll Bedlam for these people?”

Learmont shrugged. “It's like anything. You go where the talent is.”

He turned so that his gaunt profile was cast in shadow, save for the gleam of one silvery eye. After a moment he turned and crossed to join Warnick. “Excuse me,” he said to Daniel, and gestured at the sideboard. “Please—help yourself. I've some business to attend to. I'm leaving the country in a few days. A sailing trip, perhaps a month down to the Virgin Islands and then up the coast of America to Maine. I have some business there.”

“So I heard.”

But Learmont seemed to have already forgotten him. He pulled a chair beside Balthazar Warnick and sat, pointing to a stack of notebooks on the table before them. “I see you found them,” he said. “What do you think?”

“I think they're extremely interesting.” Balthazar Warnick weighed one of the volumes in his hand, his lips pursed. “But I do wonder. I assume you had them authenticated?”

Daniel went to the sideboard and poured himself another drink, then glanced uneasily at the door. He should leave and find Larkin, get her out of here before Learmont caught up with her.

Though why should she be afraid of Learmont? His gaze fell once more upon the painting of the tormented knight, and he walked over to it, glancing at the others where they sat. They spoke quietly but with no effort at secrecy as Daniel angled himself in front of the painting, listening.

“I brought them to Cottingham,” Learmont said. “As you suggested. He's at the new wing now; he took some samples and said the inks are all period. And the books check out. Mid-1880s, standard stock from Frozetting's.”

He held up one of the sketchbooks, identical to the others on the low table, all the same slate color, with faded gray labels. Learmont flipped through it, and Daniel could see that the pages were filled with writing and drawings in black ink, with here and there a smudge of color—green, mostly, though there were jots of blackish red.

“Well, I can't argue with that.” Warnick picked up another sketchbook and stared at it. “But there's something about them. . . . They just don't
feel
quite right to me.”

Learmont frowned. “You don't think they're authentic.”

“No. The opposite, actually—they seem
too
real.” Warnick glanced at Daniel, who swiftly turned his attention to the canvas in front of him. “Where did you say you got them?”

“County girl, addicted to heroin. She was being treated here in London. I saw them in her room. She said her boyfriend gave them to her.”

“Doubtful,” said Warnick.

Learmont nodded. “I think she nicked them. Her place was full of things. She tried to sell me some Moche pottery. I told her I'd turn her in to Interpol for fencing cultural treasures. That put her in mind to do business more quietly.”

“How much did you pay for these?”

“Two thousand pounds. She wanted ten.”

“Do you think she'd talk to me? I'd like to know where they really came from.”

Learmont shook his head. “She's gone—off to Tangier or someplace like that. Drug problems.”

“Ah. That's too bad.” Warnick once again bent over the stack of books. Daniel sidled to the wall and began scanning titles, listening all the while. “Well, I don't know what to say. But I have to ask you, Russell—why are you doing this? After a while this sort of obsession becomes a liability, Russell. It creates an egress.”

Warnick set the notebook back down. Russell Learmont picked it up, cradling it protectively for a moment, then replaced it with the others on the table. “The other painting is supposed to arrive tomorrow,” he said. He glanced to where Daniel was standing. “I've made special arrangements to have it cleared quickly.”

“You'll keep them both here?”

Learmont laughed wryly. “For a bit. Carrying coals to Newcastle, I know: I should just bring this one with me. But I want to see them both together. To see ...”

He seemed to notice Daniel for the first time and fell silent. Balthazar Warnick looked up as well. His sea-blue eyes held Daniel's for a long moment; then he glanced at the door, put a hand on Learmont's shoulder, and stood.

“Russell, I'm afraid I have to be going.” Warnick patted his trouser pockets and frowned slightly. “Oh—my keys. I remember. I gave them to your valet. . . .”

Learmont got to his feet. “You stay here, Balthazar. I need to make a quick call anyway.” He looked at Daniel and smiled. “Nice to meet you. Excuse me.”

He left the room, leaving the door open behind him. Balthazar Warnick waited until he was gone, then crossed to join Daniel. He said nothing but scanned the books on their shelves, now and then moving aside a painting to get a better look. After a minute he pulled a volume out, then handed it to Daniel.

“This might interest you,” he said, and walked away.

Daniel stared at it, a battered volume bound in green cloth.
Tales and Ancient Drolleries from the Farthest West.
Folk tales, he saw when he began flipping through it; there were a few illustrations. At the back, tucked between the marbled endpapers, he found a handwritten note on pale-blue paper.

Daniel tried to make out the scrawled words: brother? other? He turned to the frontispiece, where a signature was written in small, neat cursive.

Algernon Swinburne.

He skimmed a few pages. The verses seemed insipid, the few illustrations crude imitations of Rossetti. He was replacing it on the shelf when someone slipped behind him and grasped his arm.

“Daniel! I looked all over for you—”

It was Larkin. She'd pulled her hair back into its neat chignon, but her color was still high, her green-glass eyes too bright. “Things are winding down. We should think about going.” She rubbed her arms. “Can I borrow your jacket? The air-conditioning was turned up in the bathroom, I got quite chilled.”

“
Your
jacket,” Daniel corrected her, and pulled it off. “Here.”

He put it over her shoulders, and she smiled, reached to run a finger down his cheek. “I'm just going to sit by that fire for a minute and get warm.”

“No.” He shook his head. “We should go. Let's go. Now.”

She looked at him, then shrugged. “All right.”

She started slowly for the door, where Balthazar Warnick stood, watching her impassively. Her hands touched everything she passed—leather armchairs, bookshelves, a paisley scarf covering a library table—as though making an accounting of objects in her own room. In her night-blue dress and velvet jacket, she looked like a stoned refugee from one of the hippie caravans that toured the English countryside each summer. Daniel fought the urge to help her, recalling some dim cartoon voice from his childhood—never touch a sleepwalker, never speak, never wake her. . . .