Ophelia's Muse (41 page)

Rossetti peered into the grave, overcome by the suffocating feeling that Lizzie was being buried alive. He turned to Ford and implored him, one last time: “Are you sure? Are you quite sure that she's dead?” But he didn't seem to expect an answer, and Ford just shook his head, saying, “Dante, she's at peace now.”

Ford stood by his side for another moment, and then, seeing that his friend needed a few moments alone, said, “I'll wait for you by the carriages.”

“And I?” Rossetti asked, once he was alone. “What peace am I to have?”

But the graves were as silent as the dead whom they marked, and not even a breeze to rustle the ivy broke the quiet. The sky grew dark, and Rossetti felt the shadows gather around his heart. He couldn't bring himself to throw dirt into the grave, and so he picked a poppy from the base of a nearby tomb and threw that instead.

“Goodbye, my dove, my life, my love.” He turned and walked back to the road, each step leading him away from a grave that he carried with him just as surely as if she had been buried in the dark reaches of his own broken heart.

EPILOGUE

The house at Cheyne Walk was particularly gloomy at dusk, and Rossetti had neglected to light any lamps in his studio. It made little difference, he told himself, for his eyesight was failing, and he could paint in only the brightest daylight. He preferred the dimness, in any case, and the shadowy visitors that haunted the corners and whispered behind the drapes. She seemed closer that way, as if he could almost reach out and touch her.

There was a knock at the door, and Fanny entered, carrying a tray. She placed it on his desk: a bottle of gin and two glasses. “Charles Howell is here.”

“Send him in. And then go make yourself useful elsewhere.”

Howell entered and sat down across the desk. He helped himself to a glass of gin and looked at Rossetti, who shook his head no. He'd taken a large dose of chloral to steady his nerves, and had no taste for drink.

Howell leaned back in his chair and studied Rossetti through narrow, wolflike eyes. Rossetti felt himself shrink under Howell's gaze. He shuddered, and then asked, warily, “Well, did you get it?”

Howell straightened up and cleared his throat. He smiled blandly, getting down to business. “Yes. The Home Secretary has granted all the required permissions. He agreed that it was unnecessary to secure your mother's signature, as owner of the plot, due to the very
delicate
nature of the proceedings, and the need for secrecy.”

Rossetti nodded. Then they would go ahead with it, after all. “You've found men to help you?”

“You may leave everything to me. Your presence, of course, will be absolutely unnecessary. I've consulted a doctor, who assures me that, in all likelihood, the body will be perfectly preserved.”

Rossetti shuddered again. “I must insist on absolute secrecy. If people were to discover what I've done, I'd be ruined.”

“It will all be very discreet,” Howell assured him. “We'll go tonight, after dark, so as not to attract attention.”

“Tonight?” Rossetti changed his mind and poured himself a glass of gin. “Well, why not, I suppose. There's no point in putting it off. Lizzie herself would have been the first to approve, I think.” He nodded his head, as if he was convinced.

He could see no other way. With his eyesight failing, he was desperate for the return of the poems that he had thrown into Lizzie's grave. He needed them to round out a very thin volume that he was preparing for publication. “Art, after all, was the only thing that she ever felt for very seriously,” he went on dreamily. “I really think that if her ghost could have returned those poems to me, I would have found them on my pillow the night that she was buried.”

“I've no doubt,” Howell murmured, looking away. Then he stood. Before he left, he cleared his throat once more. “There is one last matter. As your agent, I am, of course, at your service for any small favor such as this. But the men must be paid, and there's a fee for the consultation with the doctor.”

“Yes, of course.” Rossetti snapped out of his reverie. “Pay them as you see fit. You may apply to my banker. As for yourself, if you are successful, I shall do a portrait of your wife, if you like, or any other drawing that suits your fancy.”

Once again the gleam returned to Howell's eyes. He glanced at a half-finished painting in the far corner of the studio. “And that one? Is she spoken for?”

Rossetti followed his eyes and turned slightly paler.

“
Beata Beatrix,
Beautiful Beatrice,” he whispered. “Lizzie.” And then, louder, “No. Not that one. Any other painting, but not that one.” He added, sheepishly, “I can't seem to finish it anyway. I'm afraid it's a failure.”

“I see.” Howell had never met Lizzie, and did not recognize her in the half-finished painting. “Well then, I'll report back to you when we're finished.”

 

In the blaze of a great fire, four men drove their shovels into the earth, each flinty strike bringing them closer to their morbid goal. Above them, the stone angels watched in silent protest. The men, no strangers to the lowest sort of work, were quiet tonight, with none of their usual banter to break the eerie silence. When they finally struck the coffin and hauled it up onto the grass, they crossed themselves and stared at the ground, unable to meet each other's eyes.

Charles Howell, who had been sitting on a nearby gravestone, came forward with a crowbar and began to pry the coffin open. With a great grunt, he brought his foot down on the crowbar and the coffin popped open. For a moment, everything was still. Then, with a sighing sound, a cloud of dust rose from the coffin.

The men stumbled back, and even Howell felt a chill of fear. He mastered himself quickly, however, and gestured for a torch to be lit from the fire. He peered into the coffin, and then turned to the men with a smile that looked ghoulish in the flickering light. “Nothing but dust and bones. The worms had their way with her long ago.”

He laughed, and the men laughed along nervously. He put on a pair of leather gloves and began to pick among the bones. Something sharp pierced his glove and he cursed and drew back. Then he saw what had stuck him, and smiled. It was a silver pin in the shape of a dragonfly, and if he wasn't mistaken, it appeared to have a very nice sapphire set as its eye. He rubbed the dust from the pin and slipped it into his pocket.

He found the book of poems and lifted it from the coffin. He held it up in the light from the fire, and began to page through it carefully. “Damn! A worm has eaten a hole right through the center. Never mind. Surely there's enough still here to jog Rossetti's memory, if the old lunatic still has half a mind left, after all the chloral he's rotted it with.”

The men shuffled their feet and looked at Howell. “That's what you had us dig it up for?” one asked. “A book?”

Howell sighed. “Yes. A book.” There was no point in explaining to this lot that, if Rossetti were to publish a successful volume, Howell himself would make a pretty penny off of his commission as agent. Rossetti had become less reliable in his production, and Howell was eager to get his best work from him while he still could.

“What are you waiting for?” he asked the men. “Throw her back in, and quickly. This place gives me shivers.”

 

Rossetti was sitting in the same place that Howell had left him. The only change was in his eyes, which had grown more sunken in the intervening hours. They glowed from beneath his furrowed brow like animal eyes, with the unnatural light of madness. The chloral and the gin had him in their grip, and his words were halting and slurred.

“Is that it?”

Howell placed the book on the desk.

“And the body? Was it . . . ?” Rossetti was unable to form the words.

“Perfectly preserved, as we expected.” Howell's voice was smooth. “She was as beautiful as a saint in her tomb. And her hair.” He paused and looked off into the distance, as if he were remembering some wondrous sight. “Her hair had grown to fill the coffin in a crown of glorious red curls.”

Rossetti sighed. “Thank God for that.” He lit a candle and picked up the book. The pages were brittle in his hands. He squinted, trying to read his own writing. His face, already white, took on a grayish hue. “But the pages,” he murmured. “They look as if, as if some creature had feasted upon them.” The image that he had held in his mind all night of Lizzie, as perfect as she ever was in life, began to decay.

Howell frowned. “An effect, I'm afraid, of their age. The doctor warned me that paper might not fare so well in the grave. But I've inspected them, and you'll see that much is still preserved.”

Rossetti couldn't reply. The weight of his crime, one of many, pressed against his chest and nearly choked the air from him. “Go,” he muttered, and then, when Howell hesitated, he shouted louder: “Leave me!”

 

The dreams of chloral are fever dreams, and Rossetti tossed and turned in his bed, unable to wake from his nightmare. The sheets were as hot as the flames that rose high above an empty grave; they leapt and danced until the whole city was consumed by an inferno, with Rossetti himself at the center, burning and writhing in pain.

And then, in a flash, there was nothing. Nothing but blackness, and somehow this was more terrifying than the fire, for he saw nothing and felt nothing, and knew that he was nothing. He opened his mouth to scream, but there was no sound.

He was sinking into oblivion, the inky blackness of sleep, when a shining figure appeared: an exquisite angel, lighting the heavens like a second sun. The visitor hovered at the foot of his bed, held aloft by magnificent red wings. Her skin was white as porcelain and her thick auburn hair fell over her golden robes. Rossetti felt his heart beat hard in his chest. “Lizzie?”

But the figure shook her head. “I am Love,” she whispered.

The angel took his hand and led him from the bed. His burning skin cooled at her touch, and he felt that he was being led forth from hell. She guided him to his studio and stopped in front of the easel. Without a word, she handed him a brush. The studio was dark, but the angel radiated her own light, and she stood silently behind Rossetti, one hand on his shoulder, illuminating the canvas.

Rossetti hesitated. The easel held the half-finished painting of Lizzie. He could no longer paint her from memory—it had been too long. He stared vainly at the brush in his hand.

He heard a whisper, breathed from the corners of the room: “Paint her. She is I. We are one.” He saw Lizzie, as he had many times in his dreams, unconscious and awaiting death. Over the years, she had grown more beautiful in his memory; ever more perfect. The angel beside him nodded. He would create a final memorial to her: He would paint her one last time as Beatrice, at the very moment she was rapt from earth to heaven.

He painted all through the night, and the angel never left his side. When his hands began to shake, he drank the trance-inducing chloral. When his eyes burned, he lit candle after candle, filling the studio as if for a séance.

The picture was unlike anything he had ever painted. It was soft; the light a golden mist and the lines almost hazy. Beatrice sits with her eyes closed and her face lifted. Her lips are slightly parted, as if she were looking to heaven, awaiting a holy communion. Her hands rest open in her lap, waiting to accept a white poppy, dropped by a red dove. Behind her is the city of Florence. But it was not the Ponte Vecchio that Rossetti imagined as he painted the bridge, but Blackfriars, where he had first seen his dear, lost love.

As dawn approached, he applied a last coat to the red hair that glowed like a halo, and he pushed back from the easel, throwing his brush aside. He no longer knew if he had painted Beatrice, or Lizzie, or the shining angel who rested by his side. But it didn't matter; they were one.

He turned, and the angel was gone. He was alone. He gazed at the painting. “It's my masterpiece,” he whispered. And then, to the empty studio: “It's a dream. A beautiful dream, of something that once was, and never will be again.”

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank my friend and agent, Jeff Ourvan, for his invaluable support, and my editor at Kensington, John Scognamiglio, for his help and guidance. I would also like to thank all of the coffee shops whose seats I hogged in Brooklyn and San Jose: Your caffeine and wifi made this all possible.

 

I've always loved Pre-Raphaelite painting. I first saw Rossetti's and Millais's paintings at the Tate Britain when I was a child, and there was something in those paintings that made me want to invent stories about the gorgeous and mysterious women they portrayed. Later, when I was picking up my textbooks for my first year of law school, I stopped in the art section at the bookstore and paged through a book on the Pre-Raphaelites. It was there that I first encountered the thrilling and tragic tale of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his first love, his model Lizzie Siddal. The story had everything—love across class lines, the mysteries of the creative process, betrayal, drug addiction, even grave robbing—it was the stuff of the best fiction! There were more than a few nights when I should have been outlining contracts law that I was actually sketching out ideas for a book based on that story. I ended up losing that laptop, but the idea stuck with me. Later, when I had some time off from work with my first child, I started doing research on Rossetti in earnest, and I felt like I had to tell their story, that it was a story that people would want to hear.

 

 

The fact that Lizzie is known mostly through other people's interpretations and characterizations of her in their paintings and memoirs piqued my interest. A few of her paintings and poems have survived, but very few of her letters have been found, and most scholarly literature on her depends on the written opinion of the higher-class men who knew her as an artist's model. I approached her as a character with sympathy for her position as a working-class woman in Victorian England, and with respect for her attempts to transcend her humble beginnings and make a name for herself as an artist and poet in her own right, in a society that was hostile to such attempts. I wanted to give a voice to a woman who had the power not only to inspire great men, but also to work alongside them. I also felt that although her story is very much rooted in the Victorian era, it has undeniable echoes in the situation of many modern women who still find themselves choosing between marriage and career, and facing disapproval of the choices they make that wouldn't raise an eyebrow if a man made them.

 

 

While writing the book I found that I had great sympathy for both Lizzie and Rossetti. It's difficult to say that they were bad for each other, because together they made great art. But on a practical level neither one could give the other what they needed from the relationship. In this day and age, they could have moved on from the relationship. But in the Victorian era, once Lizzie allowed herself to be publicly linked to Rossetti, she had no choice but to see the relationship through to marriage. Anything less would have been social suicide: She never would have been able to find a husband, and her poor health left her unable to support herself with menial work. Rossetti himself was not immune to these pressures. He knew he ought to marry Lizzie, even as he realized that he regarded her more as a muse than a wife, and sought what he felt to be necessary inspiration in other models. They were both stuck in a system, and in a relationship, that became increasingly detrimental and poisonous to their art, but neither could see a way out.

 

 

There are so many beautiful paintings from this movement. Obviously I'm partial to John Everett Millais's painting of Lizzie as Ophelia. That painting captures a very fleeting moment—the cusp of life and death, despair and release—almost perfectly. It's a painting that manages to capture a very private and lonely moment without seeming small. Similarly, I'm very fond of
Beata Beatrix,
Rossetti's painting of Lizzie as Beatrice, the muse of Dante. It's another moment that captures a woman on the verge of death, accepting into her outstretched hands a symbolic poppy from a heavenly dove. That Lizzie served as the inspiration for these two paintings raises a lot of interesting questions: What was it about her that led some of the era's best painters to both immortalize her, and to figuratively kill her?

 

 

Before I started writing, I spent about six months just reading about Rossetti, Lizzie, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. I started with the paintings and the poetry, and then moved on to biographies, critical works, and volumes of letters. The critical works start with biography and then move on to the art, but I liked getting to know my characters through the choices they made in their creative output first.
Ophelia's Muse
takes history as its jumping-off point and then uses the poems and paintings of the era as inspiration for many of the personal scenes. I think the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood lived as if there were few boundaries between art and life, and I wanted the book to reflect this.

 

 

For me, the research was just as much fun as the writing. I loved delving into another time and place and learning how people lived in the past. Reading about Victorian England, it was hard not to go off on tangents—the dawn of the rail system, the intricacies of women's dress, a feud between Whistler and Oscar Wilde—that weren't directly useful in writing the book. But I felt like as long as I was steeping myself in Victorian culture, it was okay to follow the occasional bit of research down a rabbit hole.