waited a moment, and when he didn’t answer—he was still emptying his nose—she added softly, “Vil du elske mig?” Will you love me?
He didn’t seem to hear, and he would not have understood the Danish words; but Famke took his silence for all the affirmation she needed.
“Darling, please stop smiling,” he said, looking up. “Remember, Nimue is angry.”
But in the warmth of her smile, he was inspired to pull out a pair of dried butterflies—saved, perhaps, from that bridal carriage ride—that might alight on the ice blocks and freeze there, to represent springtime and the love that once existed between Nimue and Merlin. He bought some silk flowers, frayed and faded them, then painted them withered and bewormed in the ice. Famke did not need him to explain that symbolism.
In this happy time, Albert and Famke often forgot to eat and usually smelled like each other. When he had been out late in the streets, she washed his feet for him with strong, delicious soap and brought life back to his frozen toes. It was while they were doing this that he told her their Revenge of Nimue was not the first painting on the subject.
“There is another, called The Beguiling of Merlin,” he said. “I don’t have a print to show you, but I recollect it clear as a summer’s day. The colors are gold and blue. Nimue is reading spells from a book, and the ancient Merlin swoons. Her body is big but it moves like a snake’s, coiling toward him.”
“Shall there be a book in our picture?” Famke asked.
“Darling, that is hardly the point. No, my Nimue will be an entirely new composition; I cannot imagine Merlin in a hawthorn bower. Perhaps that is why Burne-Jones’s painting failed.”
“Who was his model?” Famke asked, rubbing his arches with her thumbs. She hoped it had been Fanny Cornforth, the tavern-girl with hair down to the floor; she had posed for several Brothers and became Dante Rossetti’s mistress.
“Maria Zambaco, a wild, dark gypsy-woman.”
“Was she his . . . Did he fokk her?” she asked, reaching for a word the sailors used.
“Famke!” Albert pretended to be shocked, but he shot her an amused look. “Well, yes. She wanted him to leave his wife for her.”
“But he didn’t,” Famke guessed. She pushed the basin aside and began rubbing Albert’s feet with a rough towel.
“No, even though Mrs. Burne-Jones was being courted by William Morris . . . Ouch, darling, not so rough. His wife, Jane, is said to have been entangled with Rossetti after Lizzie Siddal died.”
“Fanden,” Famke said, “are all of your Brotherhood loving one another’s wives?”
“Not everyone in the circle is like that,” he said, in a tone she would have thought priggish from a Danish man. He held out his feet, dry now, so she could slide them into heavy wool socks. “There are men of great honor and women of great virtue.”
Famke’s cheeks reddened at the thought of virtue. “There are women in the Brotherhood?” she asked innocently.
“Yes, there are women. Some of them even fancy themselves artists,” he added, again in that priggish tone. “Rossetti tried to teach Lizzie to paint. Even Maria Zambaco, the earlier Nimue, takes up the brush from time to time, and she has a friend who makes photographs. But most of the true ladies are content to give quiet support. Euphemia Millais, for example, has been her husband’s mainstay—since she divorced Ruskin . . .”
Famke could not repress a snort. A divorce caused by private hairs.
“Well,” Albert concluded, gazing at his warm feet in satisfaction, “that divorce was quite a cause célèbre, but Millais says he’d be nothing without her. And there are other virtuous women. Georgiana Burne-Jones has remained loyal to her husband, and their daughter, Margaret, is quite lovely.”
As Famke carried the basin to the window, she noticed that although Albert referred to the male painters by their last names, he felt on first-name terms with the women. She glimpsed, fleetingly, a time when the two of them, Albert and herself, would be known as Castle and his Famke. She thought she could be content as the quiet support in the background of his life, if she could be the chief figure in his paintings. And if he would leave the Brothers’ wives alone.
On Christmas Day, Albert announced it almost shyly: “Darling, come down from your platform. I believe you are complete.”
He had finished the figural work.
Famke stepped slowly from the pedestal, struggling with a dual sense of loss and happiness. She had dreaded the day when Albert would not need her to pose—but what a marvel he had made of her! When she looked at the canvas, she saw herself, every bit as beautiful as she wanted to be: eyes like two sapphires, lips like two rubies, skin luminous as a pearl. The fiery hair crackling down her back, the strength of her arms and legs showing through the icy net of nightdress—Famke almost pitied the poor wizard who must, she thought, stand a few feet beyond the farthest reaches of the canvas, where she and Albert were standing now.
Albert breathed: “It is . . . yes, perfect.”
He looked about to dash out for one of his mad runs; so to hold him where he was, Famke said that the picture did not quite capture her: If he were truly to paint life’s every detail, he would break with convention and show the hair Down There.
Albert took this with good humor. “Hush, hush, Miss Famke,” he chided, ruffling up the hair in question and sending her into a fit of giggles. “You know we must retain our icy cloud. But here’s a thought! Perhaps you will understand better if you become a painter yourself. I shall make you my apprentice”—he smiled—“as Merlin did with Nimue.”
It was the finest gift he knew of, and it would more than compensate for the little wood-framed mirror she had given him the night before. He put a brush in her hand and wrapped her fingers around the handle in a way she considered awkward.
“But I have never painted,” she said, staring down at it. “Ellers, I’ve painted only fences and the goose pen, all in white—er, white—”
“Whitewash,” he said, pushing her up the ladder. “So then you can paint ice . . . Mind your skirt, darling, we don’t want you to trip; perhaps you should take off the nightdress . . . Here, you may start with this corner. Only try—remember, many English ladies paint.”
“I am not a lady,” she said, but she let herself be pushed.
“Ladies paint in watercolor anyway,” he said, and his argument was so nearly logical that she capitulated and put a tiny, all but invisible dot of pale blue in the farthest reach of the left-hand corner.
Behind her on the ladder, he praised the dot extravagantly. “That’s splendid, that’s really wonderful! Such sensitivity, such finesse—you are a born artist. In that little spot you have captured an eternal truth about the nature of ice, about its essence and symbolic weight in human and natural history . . .”
“Stop!” She laughed as his hands reached up, caressing first her bottom, then her waist, then dipping into that controversial thatch of hair. “I must concentrate on my art!”
That
