and other fluids. Go on, step closer and look.”
The spectacle presented an irresistible lure; against a good part of her own will, the widow moved nearer. The corpse’s hair and dress rippled faintly with the vibrations of her footsteps, while the scent of alcohol burned her nostrils. Up close, the body looked less alive; the flesh was a dead, arsenic white, and it, too, seemed to ripple. The face had lost some of its shape, as if the bones had turned to rubber; and most grotesque of all, the eyes were missing.
“Melted,” the tall man whispered in their native tongue, when he saw where she was looking, “eaten away in the alcohol. But he”—gesturing toward the other man—“he doesn’t know.”
The blind man clearly did not understand. “Is she not beautiful?” he asked, with his face turned toward the coffin as if in all the world he could see this one thing. He touched the top of the glass curve with the gloved hand, and the widow had to swallow hard. She felt very hot in her silks.
“Too beautiful for the grave,” the blind man went on, answering his own question. “Few scientists know this method of preservation; I learned it expressly for her. She was the last sight I saw before losing that faculty completely.”
If she breathed, she would surely be ill. “But—”
“It was not a slow death, though it took us weeks to repair.” The blind man spoke as if the death itself were of no importance. “If you look closely, you might see little wounds in her face and arms . . .”
She refused to look any closer. She heard the workmen approaching and felt a wave of relief that her duty here would soon be done. They came in stepping carefully, holding the immense canvas-wrapped picture removed from its crate.
The tall man gestured. “Against that wall.”
“And be gentle,” added the blind one.
The workmen propped it up, that artistic behemoth that had vexed her since the day her husband had bought it and proved that although he was willing to raise her to the state of matrimony, he could not shake off the hold of past fascination.
Travel had loosened the canvas wrapping until it now billowed like a sail. The workmen pulled it away to reveal the flat image of a woman, skin startlingly white, hair brilliantly red: an echo of the figure in the tube. Again the widow shuddered, and she looked away for what she thought would be the last time.
But what she saw was hardly more reassuring. The motion of so many feet and limbs had carried over into the cylinder, and the corpse inside was moving: the arms thrashing bonelessly, the hair storming around the eyeless face, and the lips parting as if to tell a story.
.1. IMMACULATE HEART
She casts her best, she flings herself.
How often flings for nought, and yokes
Her heart to an icicle or whim . . .
COVENTRY PATMORE,
THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE
Kapitel 1
This was our first glimpse of Denmark. Very flat it looked,—just out of water, and no more . . .
HELEN HUNT JACKSON,
GLIMPSES OF THREE COASTS
Don’t move,” he said.
So Famke stifled her cough. She held her breath and tried to stay very, very still while the two frog-green eyes took her in. Up, down, and up again, a pencil tapped out her measure on the page, with a faint sound of scratching as he made refinements here or there.
Famke also had to repress the shivers, for it was cold in the room. She was wearing only the thinnest of summer chemises and was conscious that Albert could see everything beneath, right down to the triangle of red below her belly, which was as bright as the hair on her head. She felt exposed, proud and nervous in the way of a girl showing herself naked to a lover for the first time. But this was not the first time, and her companion was not pleased.
“Darling, do try to look alive,” he murmured. “And graceful—or do you think nymphs are often hired for work on farms? It is more than positioning the bones, it’s in the spirit, in the hands . . . like this”—he demonstrated—“see, darling, the energy and beauty flowing from my fingertips? You are a good mimic; now mimic me.”
Famke tried to follow these latest instructions without, as he had previously enjoined, actually moving. She knew Albert didn’t mean what he’d said, or not the unkind part of it; he always got grumpy just after starting work. In any event, he had found her on a farm, and she agreed that he had been a rescuer of sorts. So her arms remained in the air, fingers splayed in the sorcerous pose she’d kept this past hour, as the slow winter light changed from blue to gray and the bells of Our Savior’s Church let the housewives know it was safe to step out to the shops.
Or perhaps she couldn’t help moving just a little. Her arms ached and her lungs tickled, and she had to breathe, after all. All morning she’d been posing with hardly a word or a pause. A little sound broke from her nose.
“The devil!” Albert swore. In a better mood, he might have tossed in another “darling,” but for now he knocked his sketchpad to the floor and strode off to stare moodily out the window.
At last Famke did let herself cough. She coughed a good, long time, to get all the tickles and scratches out of her lungs. When she was done she climbed down from the little platform and joined him at the window.
“Albert,” she said, laying a tentative hand on his arm. She added, in English, “Sweetheart . . .”
He continued to sulk, so she looked out the window, too, and chewed a lip in thought. It was a pristine November day, sunlight dazzling on a full, thick blanket of snow that even the horses hadn’t gone tisse over yet. Chimney smoke had only just begun to soot the rooftops, the trains were blocked by the snow on the rails, and in the narrow harbor chunks of ice were bumping against each other, like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle trying gently for a better fit. A draft leaked in through the warped panes and Famke, shivering, pressed herself against Albert’s back.
She was somewhat pleased to find he was staring toward the ruin of the royal palace, now a white mound to the south. It was a mound they both knew well; one night a month or so ago, just after the fire that started in a garderobe had finally quenched itself in the harbor, the two of them had sneaked past the sentries and poked around the rubble for souvenirs. Famke had held a shuttered lantern while Albert dug out a nearly perfect silver tinderbox still filled with royal matches, something that he with his fondness for cheroots could put to far better use than she; and yet he presented it to her with a gallant flourish. It sat now on the icy mantel, polished to such a gloss that the three ladies carved on the top, whom Albert called the Graces, seemed to move with the light.
Albert spoke. “That ruin”—he pulled her up beside him and pointed, as if she couldn’t see it for herself—“that was the first thing I saw when I woke this morning.”
“Our first snowfalling,” Famke agreed, but he didn’t seem to hear.
“I said
