draw. She didn’t even have a full set of underwear on. But when she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him deep, she felt his warmth through the layers of his coat and waistcoat and shirt and undershirt, and sudden bright heat sprang into her cheeks, sweat to her brow. She broke into a fever so intense she might have swooned if she hadn’t been caught by another fierce bout of coughing.
Albert released Famke and backed away, to look thoughtfully from her to the sketchpad. He was not particularly bothered by coughs, having come of age in one of England’s coal towns where everybody hacked and suffered night sweats. He watched Famke with those green eyes, too big for their sockets but somehow always squinting, as she doubled over and coughed and coughed, till her face turned a bright beety red—she could feel it—and she developed an urgent need to visit the loo.
As she shuddered, Albert did nothing; but she expected no more. Only this watching, which was his work in life, just as posing for and waiting upon him and being watched had become hers. When she felt the coughing was done, she tried to smile apologetically with her swollen lips. At that, he reached into his sleeve and drew out a handkerchief.
When Famke took it and looked down, she saw another triangle marking her chemise—glistening, just beginning to soak into the delicate batiste, a fan of red droplets radiating out from the vee of her legs. It stretched nearly to the hem and her bare feet. If she could have turned any redder, her embarrassment and shame would have done it: The cough had brought a mist of blood from her lungs, and it had ruined her nymph’s costume. She should get the chemise into cold water right now—but no, Albert had grabbed both her hands and was leading her back to the platform.
“That’s it,” he said excitedly. “That is it! Nimue was a virgin . . .” He pushed her hastily back into her former pose and added the pillows from their bed, arranging them at her feet. “Ice blocks,” he murmured, and then: “She was a virgin, and she gave Merlin her love, and when he failed to return it, she used his own magic to cast a fearsome spell upon him.”
Albert set Famke’s shoulders and chin. “And her maiden’s blood streaked the ice like flames.” He looked at her pointedly, as if she could be expected to spray blood over the pillows on command. When that failed to happen, he continued thoughtfully, “Her blood wove a snare within the ice . . . Of course I cannot truly show that blood or where it came from, but I can suggest, in the shadows of the skirt . . .”
“I need to tisse,” Famke bleated, but Albert stood on tiptoes to drop a little kiss at the corner of her eye. She held the pose.
Back at the easel, he dusted off the sketchpad with his hands. He took a long squinting look at Famke, then found half a charcoal pencil on the floor and began to draw. There was silence, except for the scratching of his pencil and the faint curses of the sailors in the harbor below.
Famke liked when Albert looked at her, even though now, as he plotted her against the stub of pencil or a longer brush, she knew he wasn’t really seeing her at all: He was seeing his idea of this Nimue, a virginal nymph who lived in his mind but not in his bed. It was the same way as he saw the blood on Famke’s chemise not as the sign of sickness but as a signal of beauty, something he called a symbol, unrelated to the coughs that plagued her.
Someone was coughing in the stairwell right now. A sailor, Famke guessed from the loud sound of it. She thought that the sailors who lived in Fru Strand’s rooming house liked to look at her, too; but they looked differently. They saw the same things Albert saw, the same figure and eyes and hair, but even at her age she knew it didn’t mean to them what it did to him. They were only boys, at the very beginning of their years at sea, renting a room for a week or two between voyages in much the same way as they rented girls for a night.
“Keep your arms up,” Albert reminded her, and she brought her mind back into Nimue. I am a magical nymph, she told herself. I am enslaving an ancient wizard. I do not wish to work on a farm again.
Her raw lungs and full bladder only increased in discomfort, but she stood steadfast and focused on Albert’s hands as they performed their infinitely delicate work, drawing her. He had beautiful fingers, long and bony, with a rainbow of paint always under the nails, and to Famke’s mind they produced wonders. They had drawn her as an earthly Valkyrie, in a cloak made of swans’ feathers (and nothing else); painted her as a nearly naked Gunnlod, the loveliest of the primordial Norse giants, watching over the three kettles of wisdom in a deep, deep cave (Albert seemed to be very fond of caves). And now this Nimue, a wizard’s lover, who could be from icy Scandinavia but would be of great interest to the English critics who could make Albert’s fortune. Famke had never heard of Merlin or of Nimue, but Albert was teaching her a great deal about the mythology of her people. He liked to set her lessons from the traveler’s guidebooks scattered over the mantel.
“Maiden’s blood,” Albert said, repeating. He picked up a dry brush and ran it over the sketched Nimue. Famke watched from the corner of one wide eye as the charcoal lines blurred, and in blurring, came to a more vivid sense of life. It never failed to fascinate her, this transformation from paper and coal into human figure. Her figure.
She maintained the pose until, some minutes later, Albert opened a few tubes of paint and splotched a page with shades of weak blue and stark white, marking out the rhythm of color. It was clear there was to be a lot of ice, even in her gown.
With this, Albert nodded to her; she was through. Famke stepped off the little platform, looking askance at the pillows she’d been posing with; she and Albert did not have many, and she knew they wouldn’t be sleeping with these until the painting was finished or abandoned. The pillows must keep their pose, too.
“What shall I call this one?” Albert asked conversationally as he mixed a thin, bright red. “The Revenge of Nimue . . . The Ravishment of Merlin . . .”
Famke took the chamberpot from under the bed and, at last, went to a corner to relieve herself. Albert could go on in this vein for hours, and he usually chose the most descriptive and least pronounceable title possible (“The Violated Nimue, Enraged, Casting Spells Over Merlin’s Prison”) for works he would eventually disown. Very little of Albert Castle’s labor seemed to yield the results he desired, what he saw in his mind—a complete and wondrous world populated by celestial nymphs and robust goddesses, all with Famke’s white skin and wild hair, demonstrating the myths of power and betrayal that had moved him ever since he opened his first book of poetry. He expected perfection and disappointed himself each time he picked up pencil or brush; and each time, the gesture grew in importance: His father had sworn to support Albert only up to his twenty-fifth birthday, which would come on the first day of April. If Albert did not manage to produce a saleable painting in that time, he would have to join his father’s pencil-manufacturing company. But before any painting was half done, he deemed it unsatisfactory; he broke them all over his knee or tore them to bits, then took off at a run through the streets to purge his frustration.
Even now Albert picked up a heel of their morning bread and rubbed it over half the sketched page, erasing some mistake.
The one scrap that Famke had managed to preserve hung in a dark corner above their washtub, where he would be least tempted to destroy it. This was the first sketch he had ever made of her, and Famke looked up at it as she relieved herself: a farm girl, a tender of geese and pigs, with her cap pushed back on her head and a butterfly light in her eyes. Every detail was perfect; it was Famke exactly as she wished to see herself in those days, and it had taken him only an hour to complete.
For all their dissatisfactions, each of Albert’s works was dense with that sort of detail and keen observation, labored over inch by inch. It was that labor that made their eventual destruction so heartbreaking to Famke. She once suggested that he sketch a rough outline first, to get an impression of the scene, but he reacted with horror: “Impressions are dangerous to a true artist,” he said. “You speak like a Frenchwoman—you know, over there a man fills five or six canvases a day with impressions. The Brotherhood know that only in precise details is there truth. It is the difference between a tramp and a good workman—impressions are a passing pleasure; patience and industry make art.”
And yet, thought