her beauty for the generations.
Albert once explained to Famke that he’d come to Denmark in hopes that, in a land without a significant artistic or cultural tradition, he might find some last remnant of the medieval life depicted by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to which he aspired. At home in his father’s overstuffed, overheated rooms, he had thought of Famke’s land as historically backward—or primal, he amended when she’d learned enough to protest the first term—populated by simple peasants in wooden clogs, flower crowns, and brightly colored folk costumes, still living out the stark paradigms of Nordic mythology. He’d found more of the curlicued Renaissance and overstuffed nineteenth century than he’d anticipated, but nonetheless he’d fallen in love.
When Albert said that, Famke felt a thrill in her stomach, as if she were going to be sick, but in a good way. It left her belly tingling. But even though Albert repeated the word “love” quite slowly, she wasn’t sure exactly what it was he’d fallen in love with. Before she could muster the courage to ask, he had moved on to another subject.
“If I hadn’t come here, I would have gone to America. To the west.”
Famke stared up at the ceiling, which was water stained but marvelous, Albert said, for reflecting light onto color. “America . . . But that is so far away, so . . .” At Immaculate Heart, there had been a jigsaw puzzle from America, a picture of a vast snowy mountain ringed with purple wildflowers. The children had called it Mæka.
“That American west is a new land, and it holds a host of wonders for the artist—and yet it has seen no truly great painter. Yes, had I had the funds, that is where I would have gone . . . to the forests primeval, the mountains and plains, the mines, the canyons . . .”
Albert had reason to respect Mæka’s ancient woods, for it was from good American cedar that his family’s fortune had been made. His father would buy nothing else to make the innovative graphite pencils he manufactured, from a money-saving design that allowed six, rather than five, hexagonal cylinders to be cut from one block of wood. And just after Castle, Senior, decided to affirm his new social status by purchasing work from the era’s fashionable artists, Albert’s determination to become one of them had been born. The poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti came to the house to hang the Castles’ first acquisition, a portrait that reminded Albert’s father of the dear wife who had died shortly after presenting him with the boy for whom he had finally found room in his budget. Thin and hollow-eyed, but with a smile and a chin-chuck for little Albert, Rossetti had spent an hour or so in the gloomy cedar-paneled parlor. That brief moment of kindness had been a ray of moonshiney hope for the anxious little boy, who hid behind a tasseled settee and observed the careful measuring of the wall, the straightening of the frame, the earnest discussion between the sober factory man and the painter in prime of life, both widowered. That afternoon, nine-year-old Albert decided to learn this magic trick for pleasing people. He would use every technique in Rossetti’s arsenal: the goddesses, the eye for details, the colors.
To Famke, however, the most beautiful thing he had ever made was that first plain sketch from Dragør. When he wanted to toss it in the fire, claiming it was far from perfect—even far from a likeness—she whisked it out of his hands and wept so stormily that at last he allowed her to tack it to the wall above the washtub. It was the one work that he held inviolate, and as Famke scrubbed at the paint stains on his clothing or soaped her own legs and arms, she liked to look at it.
Her face, looking back at her, forever exactly the same.
Kapitel 3
The Danes had a splendid record for fighting in the middle ages and up to the last century, but have become an agricultural people, and their activity is devoted to making butter and beer, and raising poultry and hay. Copenhagen is the only city of any size.
WILLIAM ELEROY CURTIS,
DENMARK, NORWAY, AND SWEDEN
In a rare moment of introspection, it occurred to Famke that other people might consider she was making a fool of herself. She’d thought the same in Dragør about a milkmaid who trailed around after the local doctor, begging for rides in his buggy and dreaming up reasons he should examine her. And at the orphanage, when one of the girls developed a crush on Sister Birgit—the last person, Famke had thought with scorn, who’d look at an orphan that way—Famke had kissed the girl herself and deflected destiny. But now it might seem that she, too, Famke of the Immaculate Heart, had developed hopes above her station.
She was in love, with all the passion and force and urgency and trepidation of her years. She did not precisely look on Albert as a savior, but her life was vastly more enjoyable with him than without, and so he was a sort of hero. She had fallen in love by that first night, with pain and blood marking the sharp dart of love settling into her flesh. He smelled good, including the cheroots. She even loved his odd, froggy eyes, so placid in sleep that she kissed them tenderly as she watched over him. He was the first man she had known well, and because there had been nothing like him in her life before, she occasionally suspected it was foolish to hope he would always be there. And just as quickly, she dismissed those notions—after all, Albert himself told her all those nice fairy tales and myths, and hadn’t he mentioned that the Pre-Raphaelites were prone to marrying their models?
One night, Famke felt Albert prop himself up among the pillows and gaze down at her. “‘He who loveliness hath found,’” she heard him say, “‘he color loves, and . . .’”
Her eyes flew open at that. She rolled over and poked Albert to make him speak more. “John Donne,” he said, laughing. “Color is beauty, and you, darling . . . it would take a whole dye shop to describe you.” Then he sobered and took on that tedious tone of the bedtime lecturer, sinking back against the pillows, telling her about something called Old Masters and the National Gallery, the dulling effects of old varnish and the traditional artists’ mistaken assumption that to paint like the masters they must limit their palettes to gray and brown . . . Albert intended, like his idol Rossetti, to reintroduce color to loveliness.
To Famke, all this meant was that he loved color; and that itself might mean . . .
Love gave her the stamina she needed to pose the long hours Albert demanded of her; and those hours were growing longer and longer, as he had determined that Nimue would be the first picture he finished: She would be perfect, complete, in all senses of the word. Accordingly, he studied the pose from every viewpoint and considered every nuance within the story. He moved the angle of Famke’s arms a degree up or down, adjusted the backward thrust of one leg, tried combinations of hair braided and unbraided while Famke basked like a cat in the feel of his fingers. Again and again her lips, nails, and nipples turned blue, but Albert said that was appropriate—“because even a nymph would feel the chill.”
At last they had the pose just right, and Albert spent some days drawing intently, sometimes in charcoal, sometimes in graphite. He tacked the studies of Famke’s face and body to the walls of their garret. And only when he had the picture fully realized—Famke in her magician’s stance, the dance of her hands shaping turrets of ice—did he begin to prepare his canvas.
Albert had decided that this picture would be big, of a size that only a museum gallery could accommodate properly. He bought four straight pieces of Norwegian fir five and seven feet long. He nailed them together in the loft, borrowing a hammer from the landlady. When the frame wobbled, he acquired four more stakes and nailed them into an airy latticework behind.
From an importer on Bredgade, he bought the finest canvas in Copenhagen. There was no cloth bolt wide enough to cover the entire space, so the lengths had to be sewn together. Even with Famke’s help, the stretching itself took days. They laced all four sides over the frame with a series of cords—not unlike the strings that closed a corset, thought Famke, who longed to wear such a garment herself and feel like a lady.
No easel could support a canvas so tall and heavy, so Albert went back to the lumber dealer and fashioned six little props of wood; three he nailed to the ceiling, and three to the floor. He nailed the fir frame to these blocks, and Famke at last stopped