“That was only because Sally didn’t like you,” Effie said.
“Hmm.” Simon, apparently unbothered by the knowledge that Effie’s dear departed pet had thought poorly of him, pulled out his timepiece. “What about that port?”
“What has happened to this room?” Archie, seemingly having forgotten that he was in a hurry, was looking around as if he’d never seen the place.
“How do you mean?” Effie asked.
“It looks as if a rainbow fell from the sky and took up residence.”
Effie’s bedchamberwasrather in disarray. The dressing table at which he had made his toilette last night was littered with ribbons and tinctures. He had been trying on different waistcoats, and he’d left the rejects strewn about.
Simon, from over near the mantel, pointed to the flowers bedecking Effie’s ormolu clock. “What are these? They’re as big as a man’s fist.”
“Dried peonies. Aren’t they magnificent?”
“Where are the black roses that used to be here?”
“I felt a change was in order.”
“And where is the painting that used to hang here?” Archie had made his way to Effie’s dressing area at the far end of the room. “It was an odd image—a monkey sitting on a dead woman’s chest.”
“She wasn’t dead; she was dreaming. And it wasn’t a monkey; it was a demon. That was a reproduction of a Fuseli entitledThe Nightmare. And to answer your question, I took it down.”
How to explain why, though, which was what Archie was actually asking. When Effie had first seen the image, years ago in a book his mother brought home from Italy, he’d recognized it. Not because he’d seen the painting before, but in the way one recognizes that which is familiar. That was the magical, horrible-wonderful potential of art, to show us what we already know. To be a mirror.
But then one day last spring, he’d thought:Art can show us the familiar, yes, but can it also wear a groove in our souls, turning the familiar into theexpected? If one has nightmares, need one remind oneself visually of that fact every time one enters one’s bedchamber? Might doing so evenprimeone to have nightmares?
The nights had been getting so much worse. He had been desperate to try anything to get the nightmares—if one could even call them that—to stop.
But like the printing press, the nightmares were difficult to explain. He might be able to do it in Brighton, after a drink or four, but now, here, he didn’t know how to tell the boys about any of it.
Happily, he didn’t have to. Archie moved down his line of questions. “What have you replaced it with? And isn’t this a rather unusual color for sky?” He tapped the painting’s gilt frame. “Who painted it?”
“I did.”
The boys made admiring murmurs, and Simon made his way over to join Archie. “What do you call that color?”
“I don’t know, exactly. It is very like a liqueur my mother is fond of called Chartreuse. She imports it from France. I believe it is made by monks.”
Effie was a trifle surprised no one questioned the concept of a green sky. When he’d painted his first, it had been an accident. He’d been sipping the liqueur in question, and somehow, its color had made it onto his canvas. Then he’d just kept doing it. He wasn’t sure why, only that it almost seemed as though the sky came out of his paintbrush that color, without any apparent forethought on his part.
“Who is that woman?” Archie asked.
Effie hesitated. “I imagined her.”
It was not, strictly speaking, a lie. He did not know what Julianna looked like. He knew the components of her visage, based on her own reporting: brown, almost black hair that curled more than she preferred when it was down; green eyes; “tall for a woman.” But one could invite a dozen ladies fitting that description to tea and end up with a drawing room full of a dozen different-looking ladies.
So, no, the woman against the chartreuse sky was not Julianna. It was an idea of Julianna.
“This is extraordinary,” Archie said.
“Indeed,” Simon said. “It feels as if she’s looking at you. Into your very soul, even.”
That’s because she is.
Effie did not care, though, for the notion of Julianna, or this Julianna avatar, looking into Simon’s soul. Looking into anyone’s soul but Effie’s.
Still, he was chuffed by the praise. “It is my best work, I think. Which of course is not saying a great deal. We all know that my skills with a paintbrush are generally on par with those of a girl in the schoolroom. A very young one. I ought to stick to poetry.”
