Ophelia's Muse (10 page)

 

When Lizzie returned to the shop the next morning, Jeannie Evans greeted her warmly, but the other girls stared at her and gave each other meaningful looks. Mrs. Tozer had done her best to keep Lizzie's absence discreet, but in the midst of so many girls, it was impossible to prevent all gossip. As usual, Lizzie ignored them and focused on her work. She had just finished trimming a bonnet when she looked up to see Jo, the new apprentice, approaching her with a nervous smile. Jo cleared her throat, and the other girls stopped working and watched them, waiting to see what might happen.

Lizzie regarded the apprentice from under raised brows. The girl was nervous, and had obviously been put up to something by her friends.

“Miss Siddal,” she said. “Is it true that you've been married to one of the customers? That you . . . eloped?” She giggled and shot a glance back at the other girls to see if they were watching, which they were—work in the shop had nearly come to a stop.

Lizzie was shocked, but she let out a short, derisive laugh and leveled her haughtiest stare at the apprentice. Then she very deliberately reached for her bonnet frame and began to check the shape. She would not engage the impertinent girl. No good could possibly come from adding grist to the rumor mill.

“Well, that's what's been said, anyway,” Jo continued. “That you ran off with a bloke and now he's left you, and you had to beg Mrs. Tozer for your place back.”

At this, several of the girls began to giggle, their mouths hidden behind their hands. When Lizzie still didn't reply, Jo turned and walked sheepishly back to her seat, as if she suspected that she might somehow have become the object of the joke.

Lizzie kept her face calm, but she was breathing rapidly. If one of the new girls felt that she could treat her that way, the rumors must have been bad. Lizzie was worried. A reputation was such a fragile thing, and the other girls were bound to talk, as much out of boredom as out of any real viciousness.

“That's not it at all,” said another one of the milliners, the plump girl who had never taken to Lizzie. “I have it on good authority that Miss Siddal 'as been sitting for an artist.”

“Who told you that?” Lizzie snapped, surprised.

“It's true then, is it?” The girl looked up from her work with a smug smile. “I'd be very careful if I was you, Lizzie. Once a girl starts taking off 'er clothes for money, there's not a long way to go before she'll take money for anything. And I, for one, don't fancy working alongside that sort of girl.”

All of the color drained from Lizzie's face. She had sat for Mr. Deverell as chastely as if she were his own sister, but her mother was right: It didn't matter what she did, only what people said. “I haven't the least idea what you're talking about. But you ought to pay more attention to your work.” Lizzie pointed at the bonnet that the girl was working on. “You've made the seam crooked.”

They stared at each other coldly, but said nothing further. The other girls, who had followed the exchange as high entertainment, turned back to their work when Mrs. Tozer appeared at the door, looking flushed.

“Miss Siddal!” she said, her voice high and strained. “Please come out to the counter at once. There is a customer here who wishes to speak with you.”

At this the girls resumed their giggling. This was very unusual; Mrs. Tozer never fetched a girl by request. It was known that she didn't mind a little flirting in the showroom—it was good for business. But she was adamant that the young men not treat the shop like an open hunting ground. It was unseemly, to say the least. At the moment, however, a very insistent young man was at the counter, demanding to see Miss Siddal. He would not be put off, and Mrs. Tozer could not permit an unpleasant scene in the shop.

Lizzie stood and smoothed her dress and her hair. Surprised by her own agitation, she took a deep breath to calm her nerves. Perhaps Mr. Deverell was not finished with his painting after all, and had come to ask her to sit again. Her excitement outweighed the embarrassment that she felt at having the other girls' suspicions confirmed.

She went into the shop and looked around expectantly, but she saw no sign of Deverell. Instead, standing at the counter with his face full of expectation, was Mr. Rossetti.

“Good day, Miss Siddal,” he said with a slight bow.

“Mr. Rossetti.” She nodded and tried to keep her voice even. “I didn't expect to see you here. I rather thought that it might be Mr. Deverell.” But she was not disappointed.

Her pleasure in their meeting was marred, however, as she watched him look around the shop. When they met in Deverell's studio, she had been able to imagine herself, if not exactly his equal, then at least a person of elegance and interest. She had, after all, been sitting for a portrait. But in the shop the modesty of her position was clear.

Rossetti, however, noticed nothing of Lizzie's discomfort. If he thought at all of her position, it was only that her noble features stood out all the more so in the humble setting of the shop. She had been on his mind constantly as he labored over his translations of Dante's sonnets. In his imagination she had grown more beautiful, and more modest, with each passing day. Now she appeared like a shining saint tending to the poor, or as the lovely Beatrice herself, promenading through the crowded streets of Florence. If her dress was simple, it only set into relief the delicate modeling of her face and her large gray eyes. She needed no adornment—her rich auburn hair was her crown. Such beauty spoke to him of inner depths of virtue and poetry—it must be only the blossom of an intricate and flawless system of roots. Though he had hardly met her, he felt that he already knew her.

Rossetti wanted to reach out and brush a loose curl of hair away from her face. He wanted to take her hand and lead her away from the shop without another word. But he resisted, denying himself this impulsive pleasure, and instead cleared his throat and pulled a package wrapped in brown paper from his pocket. “As I promised you. A translation of Dante's love poems, from
The New Life.
”

“Thank you,” Lizzie murmured, pleased that he had remembered. “You are so kind. I very much look forward to reading them.”

They stood awkwardly for a moment, smiling at each other, but not speaking. Lizzie hated to end the interview, and she groped around for something to say. “And how does Mr. Deverell get along with his painting?” she asked.

“Deverell? I'm sure that he gets along fine. It's a very good painting; no doubt it will be accepted for the Exhibition this spring.” He paused. “But I didn't come here to speak of Deverell's work. I'm afraid that my gift was not entirely unselfish. I had hoped that you might consent to come sit for me, for a painting based on one of the poems. Please say that you will.”

Lizzie could feel the eyes of the other girls in the shop on her. There would be no denying the rumors now, if she were to say yes. “I don't know . . . I've already been away from the shop for several weeks.”

Rossetti looked around as if he had just now realized that he was in a shop. Then he waved his hand impatiently, dismissing it from his notice. “Your beauty must be painted. You wouldn't deny me if you knew how important you will be to my work. Already you begin to inhabit my poems.”

Lizzie laughed at Rossetti's excessive praise, but she was not immune to it. Why should she suffer for the small-mindedness of the other girls? The feeling of being watched by them now only made her answer more exhilarating. She glanced down at the poems in her hands. “How could I deny your request? I'm in your debt.”

She glanced over at Mrs. Tozer, who glared back at her, clearly on the verge of turning the young man out of the shop. She jotted down her address on a scrap of wrapping paper and handed it to Rossetti. “If you send a note round with your address and the time, I will try to settle with Mrs. Tozer for a few more days off.”

“I'm honored,” Rossetti said, ignoring the red-faced proprietress. He made a small bow at the door of the shop. “I'll await your visit with bated breath.”

Lizzie blushed and, avoiding Mrs. Tozer's eye, she gathered up the poems from Rossetti and hurried back to the workroom. Mrs. Tozer might be angry at the moment, but surely she could be reasoned with. After all, it had been her idea for Lizzie to try her hand at modeling.

She sat down and placed the packet of poems on her lap, unwrapping them and examining Rossetti's bold scrawl. She took no more notice of the muttered comments of the other girls than she would have of the wind whispering through the trees. For the rest of the afternoon she stole glances at the poems as she worked, silently mouthing their antique words. Her hands may have worked on the bonnets with practiced skill, but her mind was consumed by a fifteenth-century romance, the words of the poems an incantation, an invitation.

CHAPTER 6

Rossetti leaned out over the balcony of his studio in Chatham Place. The road below his window sat snug against the Thames, at places nearly spilling over its banks. A mass of carts and carriages surged up the narrow passage, keeping time with the rising tide, and crossed over Blackfriars Bridge, bound for the markets and offices of the city. The sound of the traffic floated up to him, but he barely noticed the pushing crowds below. They were nothing to him but a sea of bent heads and ordinary cares. His eyes were on the river, which shone like dull silver under the gray sky, a hazy mirror of the steeples and domes that lined its banks. If he squinted, he might have been gazing over the Arno from a Florentine palazzo.

His studio was located in an out-of-the-way corner south of the Thames, a good walk from his home in Charlotte Street. But any inconvenience was more than made up for by the painterly light and constantly changing view of the river, and it was an added pleasure when he discovered that his new model, the incomparable Miss Siddal, lived only a few minutes away in Southwark.

The first day that Lizzie came to sit for him, she arrived with his translations in her hands, and the poet's immortal words on her lips: “Here beginneth the new life.”

Hearing her speak the line touched him as deeply as if she had laid a hand upon his heart, and it was all that he could do to usher her in, an answering line playing silently on his own lips, though he did not dare to speak it aloud:

The memory of that first morning was still enough to cause his cheeks to burn. And to his surprise, the feeling did not fade. Her beauty was a fresh surprise to him each day, as if it were too great and too intricate in its detail to be committed to memory. It was an unsolvable puzzle that he worked at incessantly, trying to capture it in sketch after sketch, churned out with a single-minded devotion. At night, after she left, he asked himself whether she wasn't an apparition, called forth from an old painting by his imagination. In his dreams she was life breathed into a marble statue, a goddess who held the secret of fire in the flames of her hair.

Now Rossetti looked down into the street below, searching among the dusty bonnets for a glimpse of Lizzie's red hair. But the throng below pushed on, with no rose among its thorns. He was just turning away when a single upturned face in the crowd caught his eye. There was no mistaking her ivory skin and brightly trimmed bonnet. She held up her hand to shade her eyes as if she were searching among the windows for the one that belonged to him.

Rossetti waved, but she did not return his greeting. He waved again and then, realizing that she could not see him in the glare from the balcony windows, he continued to watch her, unobserved in his worship.

 

Lizzie separated herself from the bustle of Chatham Place and slipped into number 14. In the downstairs hall she stopped before the mirror to take off her bonnet and pinch her cheeks, which hardly needed the attention—they were already pink and glowing.

Satisfied, she started up the narrow stairs to the studio. She stepped carefully on the creaking boards, but before she reached the first landing she heard a door open above her. With a sigh she prepared herself for the appearance of the landlady, who had taken an unwelcome interest in her comings and goings over the last week.

Sure enough, Mrs. Wright was peering out from behind her door at the end of the hallway. She wore a plain black dress with a high neck, and her silver hair was twisted into a tight bun at the crown of her head. When she saw Lizzie, she glared at her with narrowed eyes, and her mouth puckered into a grimace. Like many older women of her sort, she had an active imagination for scandal, and an even greater fondness for voicing her disapproval. Lizzie knew that Mrs. Wright believed her to be Rossetti's mistress, or something worse.

Mrs. Wright's cold gaze wasn't the only humiliation that Lizzie had encountered on the stairs. A few other tenants had smirked and even leered at her as she made her way up to Rossetti's studio. She did her best to ignore them, but their looks stung. She knew that she had nothing to be ashamed of, that she was different from the other girls who modeled for artists, but the world did not generally make such fine distinctions.

Lizzie did her best to maintain her composure. “Good day, Mrs. Wright!” she called out with false cheer.

The landlady drew in her breath and returned Lizzie's greeting with a silent glower, and Lizzie bowed her head and hurried past. As she started up the next flight of stairs, she heard the old woman mutter, “If it weren't for the good rent that he pays,” before the door shut with a bang.

The words cut Lizzie to the quick. She wondered, not for the first time, how exactly she had found herself here. Rossetti's studio was only a short walk from her home in Kent Place, and yet it was as alien to her as if she had sailed for a foreign land. She recalled with lingering shame how, on the first day that she sat for Deverell, his mother had led her around to the studio by the garden path without ever having asked her into the house. She had known, at that moment, where she stood. But the respectable domesticity of the studio, and the genteel company of Mary Deverell, had convinced her that there was nothing really untoward in sitting for an artist.

Rossetti's studio was different. It was a rented space, far from his mother's house, and on her first visit, Lizzie had been dismayed to find that there was no other lady present when she arrived. Rossetti had mentioned a sister, and Lizzie assumed that she would join them. But Rossetti appeared unconcerned by the situation, and Lizzie could think of no way to insist on a chaperone without implying that she could not trust him to behave as a gentleman. In the end she had decided not to make a fuss. She had lived her entire life under the stern gaze of one lady or another, after all, and she could not deny the appeal of the relative freedom of Rossetti's studio.

She tried to put the landlady's glare from her mind as she entered the studio. The room was lined with bookcases, filled to bursting with hundreds of volumes of poetry, history, and myths. Canvases were everywhere, leaning against tables and easels, and propped up on chairs. A desk in the corner was piled with sketches, and an entire table was devoted to glass pots of paint in an array of colors: cerulean blue for painting the sky on a perfect summer day, viridian green for the shoots of new leaves, and madder rose to tint pouting lips.

To a more sophisticated eye, the studio may have appeared humble. The room was large but cluttered, with yellowing wallpaper and an unmade bed that could be glimpsed in a side chamber. But to Lizzie it was like something from a novel—the Parisian garret of a romantic poet.

Lizzie glanced around the room, and dozens of her reflections stared back, her image captured over and over in the sketches that festooned the studio. Her face peered out from every wall: There she was reclining in the divan by the window; over there she rested her face on clasped hands. Piled on the mantel and the desk were still other Lizzies, some quickly drawn in charcoal, and others more detailed and shaded with jewel-toned strokes of watercolor. Rossetti never seemed to tire of drawing her, though Lizzie couldn't imagine what it was about her that so fascinated him.

And then she saw him, standing among the paintings with the confidence of a king among his subjects. He smiled and reached out his hand in greeting.

“Dante,” she said, using his Christian name and giving him her hand to kiss. The gesture, which had at first embarrassed her, now felt more natural, just another part of the glamorous role that she took on when she entered the studio. “I feel as if I never left, with so many reflections here to greet me.”

“If only you never did leave, I should never have to stop drawing.”

Lizzie walked over to the divan by the window and threw herself onto it. If it were up to her, she never would leave, but some propriety and restraint must be maintained, and she didn't think Rossetti could be depended upon in that regard. She enjoyed playing at the sophisticated bohemian, but such games could only be taken so far. “If you never stopped drawing, you might never sleep or eat, and then what would become of you?” she asked.

“What sustenance do I need, other than your presence?”

“Do be serious for a moment!” she laughed. “You know that your habits are irregular enough to begin with. Has that horrid landlady been bringing up your meals?”

Rossetti sat down beside her on the divan. He did not quite touch her, but Lizzie blushed at his closeness. “You're a dear to worry, but there's no need. I've been taking my suppers with the Brotherhood, and I could hardly be called a starving artist.”

Whatever secrecy the members of the Brotherhood had sworn to in the excitement of the moment had in practice been loosely applied. Whispers of its existence had spread out to trusted friends, and Rossetti had wasted no time in telling the story to Lizzie, and recounting his own speech in particular detail.

Lizzie smiled, happy to be in on the secret of the Brotherhood. “How are the plans for the literary circular coming on?”

Rossetti became serious. He was always serious when he spoke of his art. Lizzie liked to watch the way emotion passed over his features, his face as changeable as the spring sky beyond the balcony doors.

“It goes to the printer tomorrow. I've put in a poem, and we've gathered a few essays that should begin to shape our ideas for the public. But the true test of the Brotherhood's fate will be the upcoming exhibitions. I'm submitting my painting of the Virgin Mary, modeled on my sister, Christina, and Deverell is sending in his painting of you as Viola. Did he write to you? No? Oh, well, no doubt he will. Millais also has something ready to submit. This is our chance to put the proof of our theories before the world, in the beauty of our paintings.”

“I'm sure you'll do wonderfully,” Lizzie said quietly. She knew that it was unreasonable, but she was disappointed that Rossetti would not be submitting a picture of her for the exhibition.

Rossetti saw the unhappiness on her face. “Don't despair—this is only the beginning, and I haven't had time to do you justice yet. For the next Exhibition I will submit a painting of you—of you as the fair Beatrice. You, Lizzie Siddal, will be the face of the new British art.”

“You go too far, Dante. What do I have to offer art?”

“You don't see it, do you? Lizzie, you could be the queen of a Renaissance court, adored by knights and noblemen alike.”

Lizzie shook her head. “Then perhaps I should have been born in another era. My looks have never been mistaken for beauty in this one. I can't help but wonder at your flattery.”

“This is a new era, Lizzie. A new era for art, and a new era for beauty. The age of tailored young ladies with plump cheeks and plump poodles on their arms is coming to an end. True beauty—the classic, strong beauty of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Beatrice Portinari—will prevail. I see you as their heir, Lizzie. You are beautiful to me, and when I paint you, the world will see what I see.”

He leaned a little closer and Lizzie smiled with pleasure. “You flatter me, Dante. I only hope that I am equal to the task. Beatrice inspired such poetry. I can hardly imagine that such a woman was flesh and blood.”

“Perhaps she was like you. Part woman and part angel.”

Lizzie laughed, but Rossetti's face was serious. “I am afraid that you see more in me than is really there. I know of women of great beauty and great virtue, but true angels are only born of the grave.”

“I see only what is right before me.” As they spoke, Rossetti's voice became more urgent, and he peered at Lizzie with eyes that were unnaturally bright. “Angels do walk the earth, but only the true artist can recognize them. Dante saw his fate in the beauty of Beatrice, and I see mine in yours.”

Lizzie blushed, feeling the pull of Rossetti's enthusiasm. No one had ever spoken to her in such terms before, though she had many times imagined herself as a romantic heroine, a Juliet or Queen Guinevere. But she was troubled by the sense that he must be speaking to someone else, someone just past her shoulder, who was truly worthy of such praise and poetry. If she were to give herself over to his vision, she worried that he would only laugh and say, oh, I didn't mean you, dear, and she would be humiliated.

She shook her head again and tried to pull away, but this just seemed to encourage him. Undaunted, he spun his glittering web of flattery. “You are so much like her. No true Beatrice would be vain, or easily won. She was the ideal woman—a queen of virtue, blessed in every way. Dante's love for her was entirely pure, fed by nothing more than a few brief glimpses of her in the street. To Dante she was everything: love, art, salvation.”

“But they never married?”

“They were both promised to others. But if he had known her as a wife, he might never have known her as his divine muse.”

“It must be a wondrous thing, to play such a role in the creations of a great master,” Lizzie said, allowing Rossetti to draw her closer. “To know that one's very existence can inspire such poetry.”

“You will certainly be equal to sitting for Beatrice,” Rossetti whispered, almost to himself. “You have already begun to inspire me.” They were face-to-face now, and Rossetti's eyes were slightly unfocused, as if he saw beyond the present, to the finished canvas.

Lizzie sat very still. For a moment she saw herself through Rossetti's eyes: She was a thing of beauty, inseparable from the paintings in which he saw her. The vision worked a sort of alchemy, as if her imagination could teach her body the secret of beauty. She let the feeling wash over her, and smiled the enigmatic smile of a Renaissance portrait. Her eyes grew wide and bright, and she sensed that their light was capable of drawing Rossetti to her with a single glance. She ran her hand through her long hair, and the enchantment of the movement was not lost on either of them.