"Effigy, 1816" by Angelisa Fontaine-Wood
Eleazar Gravenall sighed in relief as the door closed, the Villa Diodati and Lake Geneva with it finally behind him, finally quit of these outcast literati and their ghostly tales. Holding no other letters of introduction in Switzerland, he had only this manor for shelter from the ceaseless rains, and the grim skies lowering. There had been no respite, however, from the nightmares of those sharing its roof, the extravagant club-footed host and his company, the sheer agony of their fancies for walking cadavers and blood-drinking ghouls. Now at last, his carriage departing, he was free.
He too was a poet—or had been. He felt honored to have met the host, an English lord renowned for adventures, verses, and outlandishness. True to the man’s fame, Gravenall’s illness seemed to fascinate him, asking for his sensations of that first sight of red coughed into a handkerchief. When asked to share their pastime of hair-raising stories, Gravenall simply could not.
Not only did his own mortality haunt him, his eyes, open or closed, were embedded with the image of his pallid mistress, his beloved Sincerity. He thought of the matchless turn of her throat that he had loved from first glance, a face he seemed to know, did know, already from childhood’s hour. It came to naught, the pale vein streaking her alabaster neck never to pulse again, and the still, misshapen homunculus between her splayed legs. He wanted to speak the name its mother had chosen, after himself, convinced she carried a boy. He willed himself thus to whisper “Eleazar” until its tissues knitted themselves into fullness, into breath. Gravenall, however, could not bring himself to call this wretch anything, these gelatinous bones and coagulated humors, however much he mourned them.
Once able to rise from beside their remains, who knew how long after, Gravenall threw his sonnets, one by one, page by page, into the fire that he kept feeding past hope that through its heat Sincerity might yet cling to life. He swore to write no more.
Nor would he turn Sincerity and their unfortunate child into fodder for this côterie’s lugubrious games. So he spoke to them of his plans for Rome, the Tivoli gardens, the Caracalla baths, of the sun which would right his lungs. They spurred him instead to visit the mummified monks in their catacombs, uncorrupted virgin martyrs in their glass-encased biers. On such a steady diet of the macabre, soon enough he wanted only to put miles between himself and those walls, standing like a monstrous madhouse behind its graceful volumes and serene façade, under heavens that would not, or could not, stop their sobbing.
Leagues and leagues of rutted road allowed for but halted progress under rains straight from the Old Testament. That angry heavens put the dove grays above England to shame, a gentle shade, but which had invaded his very breath with its moldering damp. He had fled the island after her funeral, which his personal allowance had paid for, despite his viscount father’s objections. His genitor sorely disapproved of spending money on a chit of a girl whose name none would remember but for its silliness, as though dreamed up by some lady novelist. The elder man would just as well have seen her tossed into a pauper’s grave. In defiance, his son gave her a decent burial, at the cost of finding himself disinherited.
Gravenall left behind the tame mists of home with funds enough for the voyage, and might—he had to come to terms with it—need no more. He hoped otherwise, that southerly climes promised health, light, and life. What he found was a wan and ghostly sun wavering only at odd and occasional moments. The traveler cursed the downpour, setting his hopes on July.
He awoke every morning, sodden stop after sodden stop, more exhausted than the last, his cough forbidding any restorative rest. Through the interminable stretches of mud, the morbid stories of the Diodati followed him, above all, the one tale, the young girl’s. Prometheus, she had said, but it was half Pygmalion too, retold through inferred grave-robbing and galvanization, through hate instead of love. When she described the hues of the creature’s skin, Gravenall could not help but recall the changing tones of Sincerity’s waxen complexion as the hours passed, then days, before he could manage to admit to her passing.
When he did finally make it across the border into Italy, the driver unhitched the carriage in the courtyard of the first inn to be found, at a fork in the road, one branch leading to a nearby cluster of cottages that had not so much as a name, much less a cross on the map. His man looked upward, shaking his head with a dim promise of the morning. Gravenall, too, turned his gaze to the opacity above and the sky spit in his eye.
The erstwhile poet awoke as usual gasping for breath. Rain pattered steadily on the roof, the rhythm a drumming madness in his skull. Realizing his whereabouts, he wondered in bitterness at what to do. Who would have thought to bring letters of introduction for such a hamlet, hardly more than a widened road? To introduce him to whom? What peasant might be able to read them, even? Gravenall went down for something to warm his bones. He addressed the innkeeper with no great expectations of exchange; all his Italian was merely adapted Latin which had no effect against the man’s dialect.
How then might he spend a day, two days, God forbid longer, counting on weather clear enough to return to the road. Moreover, he needed the jostling sway of the carriage to shake his brain loose from the cobwebbed images conjured by that peculiar girl back at the Diodati, her failed doctor stitching away at body parts, dragging the dead back into life by force. Gravenall’s mind turned ineluctably to Sincerity. The French called love at first sight “the lightning bolt” which he had felt, a recognition on first seeing her. If only he too might have harnessed such power, as had been done elsewhere, and bring her back from the beyond.
The company of the living would serve him well, a different sort of society, the wider world of conversation, wit and repartee and news. His letters of introduction for Rome and the stages there would provide this, once back to civilization. He gripped his fingers around the dirty glass that held his wine, holding on for dear life.
When his driver refused to take up the reins yet another day, Gravenall kicked a bottle lying empty in the courtyard, by chance hitting the inn mongrel. The traveler strode over to the dog, and, forehead against furry forehead, rubbed its neck, whispering comforting words in English. It calmed at his tone. When a cough shook his frame, the dog reached up its snout and licked his cheek. Gravenall thought he might at least commune with the dumb of the animal world, if with no one else. In gratitude, he scratched the animal behind its floppy ears, no longer even caring about his soaking coat and breeches. He went in to signal to the innkeeper his need for drink, stronger this time, and went up to his room to nurse his dashed hopes of ever leaving this backwater, of ever finding the celebrated Italian sun.
He opened his trunk, digging to find something to read, the poetry he had packed away. He did not like to open the baggage before time, but desperation dug into his nerves. He had, however, to lower the lid a moment as his encumbered lungs shook his core. Before he could find his reduced library once his breathing allowed, however, he in fact pulled up the beribboned quire of her letters and locket miniature. On the left, Sincerity’s shy eyes under her ringlets looked out at him, and, on the right, a small token of her brief life: a miniature behind glass, woven of those same ringlets, writhing like a body in pleasure or pain into the form of a willow overhanging an urn.
His hand twitched to take up his pen and rhyme those locks back into life, back into meaning, but he reminded himself of his vow. He took out rather his notebook. It had held verse once, jotted out before his fair copies, but now it served to practice his Italian. He thus prepared for his first introductions when they would come, which they must. He used the rhythms of the raindrops against the accented words and phrases, so different from his schoolboy Latin. His concentration, however, was not equal to his heartbreak. Rome and the healing sun had seemed just within his fingertips on quitting the ghastly fancies of the Lake Geneva lot and now stretched out and on beyond his reach; Would he breathe in the damp until he guttered out in this backwater, never to see the light of day again? The thought of joining Sincerity had its charms but he doubted an afterlife, certainly one so kind.
Thus the days, wet and gray, passed. Gravenall once again tried his Italian on the innkeeper who stared at him blankly, replying with a senseless garble of syllables that the traveler could not pierce. He left off going downstairs, choosing to pass the hours reading in his room. Books proved some company, dead though they be, with the power they retained of speaking across centuries, defying mortal lifespan. Often enough he simply reread Sincerity’s letters, folding them and unfolding them, folding them back again, almost in a holy ritual, just as he rubbed the locket between thumb and forefinger.
One late afternoon, he opened the missives yet again, 1814, 1815, and her last lines of 1816 before she passed. Her protestations of undying love, set in naive couplets, slightly misspelled but in her best script, stabbed at him. Gravenall choked back something acrid, and held the paper a moment to his heart until he recollected himself. When the mongrel barked at a commotion in the courtyard, he welcomed the distraction. The sound of carriage wheels brought him to the window to see a hither and yonning of the inn’s servants and those of a newcomer with a small retinue.
Curious, he descended into the common room to find someone seated at one of the tables, a gentleman by his bearing and dress, though rumpled by travel, and far older than himself. The stranger turned to him and began to speak, but Gravenall’s hopes withered when he could make out only a word or two. When he tried to reply in his amended Latin, the man’s face broke into a crooked smile. In response he resurrected quite as well, in fact better than Gravenall, this dead tongue.
“A brother in learning, I see. What could bring you to this lost little corner of the land unless it be the torrents that lead me here as well?”
“I am headed to Rome, whither all roads lead, so it is said, but I begin to doubt of it, Signore.”
“Allow me to introduce myself, I am the Marchese di Stramalia. Now tell me, you are an Englishman on his Grand Tour, no? and this is the weather we have greeted you with!”
The innkeeper’s boy brought drink, fortified wine for the elder and something stronger for him. After a rapid side glance at either traveler, he scurried away. Gravenall wondered at his haste as there were no other patrons.
Gravenall took the newcomer in, his quick movements and straight back seemed those of a younger man against the full hoary head, and even his eyebrows like snow overhanging the windows of his eyes. His gaze, though direct, held something unsettling more than frank, as though he might see farther than anyone would wish him to see, or wish to see themselves.
“My name is Gravenall, youngest son to the fifth Viscount Mortain. I have come to Italy for my health, but it seems as though the gods conspire against me. Rome, though, is sure to be warm and bright, by the time I get there, if ever I do.”
“One does ask when the roads will allow passage over a mile or two. I have just myself come from abroad, a return taking far longer than it should have, what with their cursed state. Take a seat and tell me, what have you seen thus far—Paris surely, and afterward?”
Gravenall mentioned the sites he had seen. Stramalia particularly relished the colorful descriptions of the soaring Gothic stones of Beauvais or Troyes, or the stunning expanse of Lake Geneva. Yet his racking cough interrupted these depictions. The old man looked on, less in sympathy than a new and alert curiosity. The strangeness of his reaction recalled to Gravenall his Diodati host. With the elder man’s fleeting look at the red blotched handkerchief, the younger man cited his Horace.
“‘Pulvis et umbra sumus,’ as the poet put it. We are but dust and shadow.” He looked an apology at the Marchese.
“Ah, but ‘I shall not wholly die and a great part of me will escape the grave,’ ” he replied, quote for quote. “I have never been able to entirely grasp the lyric poets, I avow, but that line stays with me. I am more of a Lucretius man, myself, but our fair land boasts the likes of Petrarch and Dante. As an Italian I cannot dismiss the art and its power over the soul.” Gravenall could quite feel the growing weight of the older man’s gaze and study of his person. “And you speak like a poet born.” His tone—intent, pointed—belied the simple flattery of the remark.
“Perhaps, once upon a time, I may have toyed with poetry, but I have renounced the sins of my youth. My tastes, and thus my circles remain literary, however.” Gravenall mentioned his recent host “of whom you have perhaps heard, along with some of his friends whose fame has not spread past the channel, but it surely shall.”
Stramalia’s slanted smile widened. As he reached an arm towards Gravenall, the younger man caught a vague scent of aged flesh, unplaceable but distinct. A scent of must, of dust, but also something more unpleasant than simply the smell of the elderly. At another coughing fit, Stramalia paused while Gravenall recuperated, venerable eyes darting left to right and back again.
“My new young friend, I am at the very moment headed home, with just this stop to warm myself as the servants go on ahead to make ready for me. My domain lies only a little further on, after the left branch of the road. I have to say, this is no place for one of your rank and refinement to wait out the rains. Come, why don’t you, to my villa, to beguile the time more pleasantly? No wife awaits to perturb; I am a bachelor, for better or for worse, and thus some company would all the more certainly help chase away the damp.”
Gravenall noticed the innkeeper and his boy look at each other. Such rustics could not of course understand the discourse, but exchanged glances heavy with some meaning just as foreign to Gravenall as Latin to them.
Yet the younger traveler so welcomed the promise of conversation, social intercourse, mental stimulation, that the man’s strange odor was of no moment, and Gravenall’s ear ignored an eagerness in Stramalia’s invitation that went unplaced and unheeded.
None could call it daybreak precisely, but upon awakening, Gravenall struggled to inhale yet again. Meanwhile he juddered off ill dreams of his finger wrapped with blond curls that themselves then wrapped round his lungs and squeezed them of breath. Such ringlets had framed the curve of Sincerity’s cheek, a cheek she had shared with one who came before her, who had first stolen his heart. He shook this too away. In so doing he slowly realized where he was, in a bed more comfortable than any he had experienced since he left the villa on the lake.
His present circumstances coalesced in his mind, as he spied his trunks at the foot of a canopied bed. He recalled the villa’s uneven roof line—flattened gables of tile—rising before the moon last night, higher than the surrounding trees of palm and pine, as his host’s carriage approached it. The wide arms of a horseshoe stairwell embraced his arrival. Now, high ceilings rose above him, over the blushing plaster of the walls. Long arched windows let in what passed for daylight. Beyond them lay once more a lake, its surface dimpled by the rain.
In his disappointment he barely heard the knock. A servant shuffled in his mortal coil, hot water in a gnarly hand. Bent and wizened beyond even his master, the man, called Giovanni, informed him, as well as Gravenall could gather, that the master awaited in the dining room.
Once Gravenall seated himself at table, his host opened in perfect declensions of a language long buried, asking after his sleep, and then health, inquisitive beyond polite formalities. Gravenall was touched at this, and the hospitality in spite of it, since the episode at the inn left no doubt of what he suffered.
He dodged answering with his grim prognosis. “Forgive me, I am all astonishment at your fluency.”
“Don’t be. I was raised to it. My father placed me early in the hands of a German tutor who spoke no Italian but only Latin, with instructions to thus communicate with me. It became in many senses my mother tongue. This is what I nursed rather than the milk of her breast.”
“Your mother herself agreed to this education?”
“Mother tongue in more ways than one, since it seems I killed that good woman with my birth—no, no do not blanch further still, it is my way, my humor. My upbringing removed me from my fellows, but raised me above them too. You as well, my good sir, for what peer has a poet?”
“Alas, I have long since abandoned that pursuit, as I may have mentioned.”
“And yet an embarrassment of riches awaits to inspire you to pen out some lines while here. Just wait for what lies in store.” Stramalia rose and took him to a window, drawing back a curtain on the gray drizzle spattering down upon sculpted greenery. Before Gravenall could peer past the blurred pane, his host dropped the curtain back. “A man of your fortitude might brave the weather for a garden stroll, later perhaps,” he tossed off. The contradiction with his earlier concern jolted. “Let me show you some of the other delights my residence holds in store and who knows what stanzas might come to you.”
Gravenall did not have time for a rebuttal. The old man took him by the arm—his vague, cloying scent making itself felt almost like another presence doubling Stramalia, a solid shadow of odor.
The Marchese led his guest through long halls of ancestral portraits staring into the void. Doors opened onto a drawing room, a conservatory, a billiard room and so many others that Gravenall lost track. Then they reached the library. Its towering shelves reached higher even than the same long, gracious windows that illuminated his chambers. These looked not upon the lake but upon the rained-out garden. A fire blazed already, flickering off the gold lettering on the book spines, beckoning like a light in a window on a dreary night. Gravenall made up his mind to stay right here unless and until the sun decided to return, however long that might take. Stramalia had other ideas, and crooked a wiry, thin arm over the younger man’s elbow to continue the tour. Up and up a stairwell they climbed. Wide at first, story by story it grew narrower and darker, until finally they reached a closed door. The old man fumbled at his pockets until he drew out a key.
“The best I have saved for last…” The Marchese fidgeted as if about to burst, and yet his usually piercing eyes would not meet his guest’s. “Finally, my studiolo.”
Gravenall knew of curiosity cabinets but did not think that a living man would still have one, or at least not be quite this puffed up at sharing it. Perhaps this was particular to Italy, or just these hinterlands. Was his host then embarrassed? For this was a mania of his great-grandfather’s time at best, and no man could be quite that old and still among the living. The young man turned to take in Stramalia again—the bushy, white eyebrows over the twitching gaze—and took a step to enter.
He duly sighed in admiration at the coins stuck with Hasdrubal’s profile, the piano-playing automaton, a Moroccan sand rose, the stuffed two-headed caiman, a cat mummy from the time of the Pharaohs, cameos from ancient Rome, a unicorn mane pillow, ceramic plates conjuring snakes and fruits, a bronze phallic figure and a candelabra taken from the ashes of Pompeii. The two men paused before the different sculpted cabinets and made their tour around the room. Gravenall respectfully nodded, voicing the occasional question to mark his interest. His host would by turns hurry him on in front of a fascinating Egyptian posthumous portrait, or stall—so it seemed—at a banal coral formation.
As they reached a long set of red velvet drapes, Stramalia appeared to struggle between urgency and delay. His entire arm, holding onto the heavy folds of the fabric, pulling it back just as his guest approached it, trembled. Gravenall stared at his host in spite of himself, hesitated, and stepped into the adjoining room.
Once his eyes adjusted to the dust motes and half-light, he winced at what first met his gaze: display case after display case of fetal skeletons. The diminutive bones were posed in tableaux: fencing, jumping rope, or lying in tiny coffins. Visions assailed him of a creature not even fully human, and yet beloved, a tiny skull he did not baptize, whose name he never pronounced. Gravenall tried to breathe past the horror of it, backing slowly away until his thighs ran into something behind him.
He turned around to find himself staring at a reclining woman, encased in glass, a beauty to take one’s breath away, lying like Snow White on her bier, the fairest of them all awaiting the kiss that would bring her back again to life and love.
Gravenall looked over to Stramalia who stood in the doorway, holding his breath, as if awaiting his guest’s judgment of this pièce de résistance.
There she lay, dressed only in pearls, offered up entire to his eyes, mouth half-open to reveal a perfect row of teeth. Dark, silken curls lay in an arranged mess of chestnut upon her pillow, her legs half parted, in all the liquefaction of feminine passion, her perfect forms in the torsion of pleasure’s crisis, eyelashes near to fluttering, veiling a gaze lost to sensation. With the tint of her cheek, he could not compass that those half-lidded eyes remained unaware of him.
Yet the complexion fooled the eye only for a time, even in the room’s dim twilight. As he slowly realized her for a simulacrum of molded wax, he wondered how she—no, “it”—might feel under his touch. Would it be cold and hard, or melt, or would it have the soft give of flesh? He was glad the glass display case prevented him from finding out.
So troubling was she that he didn’t notice a familiarity in the profile that belied the dark hair. Almost. For as the shape of the brow, the bee-stung lips, the line of the cheek came into focus, he realized he had known her before. As that awareness dawned, he shut his eyes against memory, against the wrongness of the scene entire.
Lost in these reflections he jumped when Stramalia spoke again.
“They worked directly on bone, you know, real human bone is encased in that fair flesh. The hair, too, is real, by the by, as are even the eyelashes. Anna Morandi herself formed this masterpiece for the University in Bologna, when I attended dissections there. Look.”
The host removed the glass rectangle containing the form, framing her, protecting her. Losing himself to his enthusiasm, he lifted her skin away to show a corpse, flayed, body part by body part, unveiling her down to her entrails.
The guest had heard of such figures, anatomical models that served to teach the complexities of the human body. Friends returning from the Grand Tour spoke of one in Florence, whose beauty palliated the grotesquely available recesses underneath. Surface and innards, all of wax, could be assembled and disassembled to better prepare the student of medicine for his vocation.
As much as he knew these forms existed, Gravenall was utterly unprepared to witness her bowels spilling forth what God meant to hide: folds and crevices, clefts and viscera, organ by organ unfolding, as if with a moist sheen even, until Stramalia reached her deepest of secrets, a tiny creature nesting in her womb.
He flinched and turned away, steadying himself against the nausea overtaking him.
His host chattered on. “The fetus, of course, completes the female, by way of teaching midwifery to physicians in training. This particular figure required over two hundred corpses—harder to procure than medical men would like. Only after that many dissections did her creator possess the detail of knowledge necessary to craft this piece of perfection.”
Gravenall had to catch his breath and calm his heaving stomach before he could formulate any polite question. “However did you come by it?”
“Let’s say Signora Morandi entrusted her to me, and leave it at that.” Stramalia snorted a certain satisfaction but Gravenall could hardly tell at what. Once he reassembled the creature, his fingers careful and diligent, the host gazed at it in rêverie. After some lapse of time measured only in raindrops pelting the roof, the old man finally came back to the moment and shook his head as if to clear it, murmuring something in the shell of the form’s ear, his sharp eyes however upon his guest. Did Gravenall really hear “sacerdoto”?
He followed his departing host, turning back his glance, once then twice, where shadows played tricks on the curves and hollows of the reclining figure, at the dead woman living, who had never drawn breath.
The bell rang for the evening meal and Gravenall descended to find the table laid in crystal and silver catching the gleam of the candelabra’s light. In the middle lay a platter of apricots and peaches and other tempting delights that such weather would have seemed to forbid.
Stramalia began without ceremony, still in fluent Latin, “So have you ever seen the likes of her?” he asked, his fervor belying an exhaustion that Gravenall had before noticed. He lifted his glass as though it were a much heavier object.
“Likes of…?” Gravenall, disconcerted, thought—beyond all possibility—he meant Sincerity,
“Of my beauty in the studiolo!”
“Ah, ah, yes, so peculiarly the product of dissections, you were saying. Yet you are no anatomist, if I am not mistaken…?” For a nobleman to so dirty his hands was unthinkable, yet the personage before him did not cease to surprise.
“Bah, my interests lie elsewhere. I told you that Anna Morandi fashioned the figure with her hands, a masterpiece, a nonpareil. Not with a man’s muscle chiseling marble but crafting the malleable matter of the female with what is ductile, melting, like her own nature. Only another member of the fair sex could have imagined and thus achieved the exactitude of mimesis, form to form, as though from a mother to her offspring. This though involved no messy process of birth. She sprung from her ministrations as Minerva from the head of Zeus. It is no accident that, not long after, Signora Morandi sculpted her own self portrait dissecting the brain, that seat of the mind, the spirit, perhaps even what metaphysicians like to call the soul. The only fetus involved was that embedded in the seat of her womanhood, eternally gestating.”
“It—” Gravenall began, searching for a response.
“—She!”
“‘She’, then, is certainly breathtaking.”
“Yes, you fair gasped when you saw her.”
After considering a moment, Gravenall continued. “With long pondering, it came to me: she reminded me sorely of a face I’d seen once, long long ago, when my grandmother took me to London to see the replicas of France’s guillotine victims: a demoiselle in a tumbril, destined to an ungodly and imminent end, all her youth and beauty of no succor. I believe I was quite in love with her, that afternoon and well beyond. I wrote my first poems to her.”
“Perhaps the suggestion of her imminent demise inspired you? So many of our poets have devoted their puissant gifts to saving the dead from oblivion. Petrarch and Laura, Dante before him of course. And yet they themselves on their deathbeds pronounce such verse as to go beyond metaphor, or at least it is said and so I believe. Death has a capacity both to rend and to seal, much as wax upon a letter’s fold.”
“The wax in London certainly turned my head.”
“A mere mannequin, hardly worth the tribute, with a paltry wooden frame beneath her clothing.” Stramalia thus dismissed the French figures that had toured an astounded Europe. “Nothing to compare to my Beatrice.”
So he had named it—her. Gravenall abandoned any and all mention of Sincerity.
“Perhaps like Dante, both of this world and yet having quit it, visiting the beyond,” continued the host, “with her help, you might toss off a rhyme to this muse, too. At a sonnet written to her beauty and graces, she might open those eyes wide, that blush blooming full on her cheek to find herself so positioned.” He chuckled and gnawed at the cheese’s hard rind, leaving the soft insides untouched. “It would be edifying for you.”
Gravenall drew a long sip of wine, struggling for a reply. “I must disabuse you. I am no poet. I may have dabbled in my youth but that time has long passed. A silly hobby for an overly impressionable boy.” He stared at his host as he took a peach from the center dish. Gravenall tried not to notice as, instead of slicing it with his knife, the Marchese sank his teeth into it and took his time before swallowing.
“Beatrice would have it otherwise,” he stated.
The younger man blinked and deftly turned the conversation to translating the Comedy, Cary’s improvement on Boyd’s work, of his own regrettable deficiencies in the language of the country he visited, and studious application to improve. Thereby he managed to steer the subjects to less outlandish realms until it came time to retire.
Before taking the stairs to his rooms, he too took a piece of fruit. Yet it turned out, upon handling it, to be no fruit at all. At first Gravenall thought it might be some local receipt for marchpane, and opened it with his knife. Slipping the piece into his mouth, he bit not into an overpowering sweetness but into beeswax.
That night, lightheaded from the turn of the conversation, he lay abed dwelling on what he had left unsaid—for the demoiselle he had spoken of who had presaged Sincerity’s face. When he had first crossed paths with the girl, the live one, selling ribbons behind a milliner’s counter, her lovely brow and throat, her cupid’s bow mouth had triggered a recognition of his long-ago infatuation. The fair ringlets instead of long chestnut locks had nearly fooled him, but he had spent hours as a lad gaping at the pathetic figure of the doomed aristocrat.
He had never told a soul how he spent his pocket money returning to the Lyceum theater’s Chamber of Horrors, striding past Mme DuBarry, Marie Antoinette, and Robespierre without a glance, until he found the tableau with his lady love, bound to her death. There he would gaze enraptured and uninterrupted until closing. Her features thus fixed themselves in his phantasie, imprinted upon it, as into the malleable substance of a young mind. Thus when, years later, his eyes fell upon the charming shop girl, he saw past what he wryly thought of as her disguise and immediately inquired of her name.
“Sincerity,” she had replied, as though she were a figure out of an allegory, and surely skin so translucent could brook no false-seeming. She had indeed proven true to him, though his father scoffed at both name and virtue, at least as far as incarnated in his son’s mistress. In their time together, however, Gravenall had penned his masterpiece, a series of interlocking rhymes about Sincerity, as one single entity, both the quality and the woman, though the woman’s face belonged at once to both shop girl selling ribbons and grand lady dragged to her death in a tumbril.
With all this teasing his brain, under the drumming rainfall, he stared at the bedroom hearth’s blaze, lost in a manor house, itself lost to the wider world. Slowly he drifted off and his dreams turned to the fire to which he had sacrificed his sonnet cycle, the fire melting the Lyceum lady into Sincerity underneath, and she in turn melting away into viscera and a stillborn son.
The same Giovanni, frail and hunched, woke Gravenall gently from the shallow sleep his illness afforded, and gave him, along with his hot water, a letter from the master. There, Stramalia explained that he must attend to business but would see his guest at dinner. He gave leave to his poet—the word stood out—to amuse himself as he could, with books, billiards, music, even to brave the garden under the rains. The suggestion puzzled Gravenall as he must avoid the damp at all costs. Then he shook his head at the end of the note, which urged him once more to write out his impressions in rhyme, most especially of “Beatrice.” A shudder came over him.
With no appetite to break his fast, Gravenall found his way back to the library, where tomes of many tongues shared shelves. The lettering along their spines announced treatises on hieroglyphics and emblemata, some volumes on medical matters, but others, too, of rather philosophical bent, Aristotle, the Epicureans, the Presocratics and other schools of ancient thought which came as no surprise given the distinctive upbringing he had spoken of. More curiously, the shelves held speculative metaphysics as well.
With none of this to his taste, the guest turned to a manuscript left open on the bureau. Latin instead of Italian, he might better read it than some of the other offerings on the shelves. Looking hard into the handwriting and the convoluted expression, he realized this was a personal treatise debating the nature of art, a Platonic meditation on forms. The book had a second half, written, he realized, in reverse. He took out his pocket looking glass, managing thus to parse it enough to gather that it concerned how images might be ensouled, should the hand crafting them attain a summit of mirror-like imitation, endowing consciousness to the inert image with incantations created at death’s precipice.
Scrying more than reading tired his weary eyes, preventing his perusal from becoming true comprehension of the queer notions there enclosed, their contorted grammar and even stranger meanings.
Moreover, the image of the reclining form interrupted his focus time and again. He thought of her on her bier, fair as a virgin martyr, such as those the Diodati côterie had described. Those hands however were not locked together in prayer, far from it. His host was right, she, it, what have you, was indeed a wonder. At her incessant back and forth into his mind, he gave up, set the book aside and gently shut the door of the library behind him.
He found the studiolo and walked without a glance past the first collection, past the engravings of Pompeii, the hue-changing cup from a patrician grave and its sculpted grotesques, the wide-eyed Egyptian tomb portraits, the so-called salamanders, all this bric-à-brac that Stramalia had named and explained in both haste and hesitation. Back, and back farther still, he penetrated until arriving at the heavy red drapery. Gravenall drew a breath as deep as his lungs allowed and pulled it aside to enter the final chamber. He slipped past the gruesome little skeletons to the form. Before it, even the tiny bones at their antics receded from his consciousness as did the dust motes, and even the rain pounding on the roof.
Gravenall wondered what, as compared to the sightless stare of Grecian marble, those eyes, veiled under languorous lids, might have seen, be seeing, forgetting them to be glass embedded into wax. He kneeled to peer inward at them, as far as the sleepy gaze permitted, and tried to divine their color—Sincerity’s periwinkle hue or something other, a color that defied definition. He put out of mind the viscera waiting to spill forth from below, to erupt into the crimson of tissue and tendon, muscle and mucous; he put out of mind the child she held within, building tissue and organ, and yet not. He focused instead on the nature of what those glass eyes must have beheld, what was the nature of her vision, as a creature so perfectly alive but for breath must, in spite of the glass of her orbs, perceive.
How had she stared up originally at the woman who had made her? Pleading? Pleading what, then? To leave off and abandon the project of her creation? Or to complete her with breath and life? How could a creature so mirroring flesh and soul be a pure product of cold science? How long he spent contemplating these questions he could not tell but when the dinner bell sounded, he was kneeling still.
Gravenall dressed and came down to find his host. He left aside his encounter with the form, speaking instead of his find in the library.
“I took the liberty of looking into a volume you yourself may have been reading as it was open on the desk, I couldn’t entirely grasp the matter but was fascinated by what I did understand…”
His host replied in a voice less vibrant than before, hoarse, from a form more bowed than Gravenall had previously noticed.
“Ah, I’m glad you found it—I had set it aside for you. What you had in your hand is the notebook, known formerly to one man alive, now to two, written by the very hand of Paracelsus, commenting and translating Hermes Trismegistus. What did you make of it?”
“Neither head nor tail I’m afraid, between the hand and the grammar, not to speak of the backwards script.” He had not been quite so stupid, but preferred to leave his host with that impression.
Stramalia laughed. “Ah yes, the second half. The ancients, the Egyptians, the Etruscans too, so says Annius Viterbo, knew the power of incantation. If we read closely Paracelsus’s gloss on the Thrice-Great Hermes, side by side with Kircher and Agrippa, then we begin to understand incantation as more than words, but as summoning spirit, as that which holds body and soul together, that which can bring certain substances into a higher state of existence, and give consciousness a longer life to enjoy. As for the incantation’s creator, the nearer death looms, the greater the power he endows to his words until on the very deathbed, this incantation becomes an ineluctable force for animation.”
“I fear I’d need more than a simple looking glass to gather all that from the book’s reverse script.”
“A mirror is key. The perfect effigy, faultlessly mimetic, showing to the life the image it thereby contains, though perhaps not entirely. Sometimes I ask myself, if I put a mirror in Beatrice’s hands, would she raise it to her face and wonder at her beauty, fogging the glass with her breath?”
“I must insist, we speak here not of a woman,” Gravenall replied, doubting his own words, “but a wax.”
“It is wax that gives us the candlelight we cannot easily do without, by which I can see into your eyes, which some say open to the soul. You saw in the anteroom of the studiolo, those late mummy portraits. Their medium is encaustic, which is to say the painters dipped their pigments and brushes into wax, a substance that melts and reforms, the better to give to the viewer the impression of pulse and flesh to a being that has gone on past the pale of this life, this plane. According to a tale told by Pliny the Elder, the first Greek artists to work at likenesses worked in wax masks. For these same reasons the makers of ex votos also use wax, so resembling the reality of the body’s pain that the Divine must hearken to its suffering and send relief. Plato speaks of wax as that from which we were modeled, that newborns most resemble. We might go still further back and further still to bees and their flowers, the ur-stuff, the primordial matter that makes up this world, and its ephemeral but eternal mystery of fluxus, of change changing. Your English tongue, I believe, speaks of the moon that wanes and waxes.” He took in his hand another artificed fruit from the platter and nibbled it. “Perhaps you can wax poetic, hah!”
The silence that followed hung between them, heavy as the outside rain hammering down on the roof, at the windowpanes. Gravenall could not fill it and for once felt thankful when his cough took him. And yet it subsided just as suddenly. He was able to bring his breath back under control and fill his weak lungs with the air he needed. He began to speak, he knew not how, nor what, but before he could articulate the first word, his host’s brief punctuated laugh erupted into a crisis of suffocation for the cough that overcame the old man.
Retiring to his chambers, the tension left him, tension he had not fully measured, muscles taut with the senseless discourse of his host. Yet no sooner did he exhale his relief than he noticed the disarrangement of his notebooks. Another hand, he could see at a glance, had attempted to retie the love-knotted bow of Sincerity’s letters that she and he only had the secret of. The same hand had left his papers out of order, at a different angle on the desk.
His muscles tightened anew. His father had lamented curious servants as the curse of every grand home, words he lived by and that frequently caused friction with his youngest son. Gravenall hated to think his genitor correct but this discovery regrettably vindicated him. Come morning, private matters would go in the trunk.
Meanwhile, lying in bed he repeated, where others might say prayers or count sheep, his conjugations until he managed to fall asleep.
He awoke on his own, rested, invigorated, a sensation he could not last remember. He had slept the kind night through, not once waking from the strangling damp. What that portended, he could not tell, but it defied all his doctors had forewarned.
His eyes falling upon his papers, he then recalled the previous night’s misadventure, promptly putting it all away in his trunks. As he shut tight the lid, Giovanni knocked and entered with the necessary for his toilette. The fellow looked down at Gravenall’s actions. Was that surprise? Alarm?
“Occulta non possunt temptare. What is hidden cannot tempt.”
The servant replied only that the master invited Gravenall to meet him in the studiolo as soon as he felt presentable.
He followed the hallways and the stairwells he knew would take him to the studiolo. On his way, he glimpsed staff in corners, in the shadows, murmuring as their eyes turned his way and back again, furtive sidelong glances that disquieted. He wondered if he should speak of it to the Marchese.
When he arrived at the rendez-vous, however, he found himself alone but for the form. Confounded by her impossible resemblance to the two, no, the one woman he had loved, he stared. In her features, Sincerity and the Lyceum figure transmuted one into the other by turns as he waited on his host. And waited. He had not a timepiece, and could not tell how long since his arrival there. Time stretched out its long-fingered grasp and let the sand fall through. Hours passed. The studiolo held no clock and only the rain sounded out the passing instants in their interminable succession.
As he stared at the form, words came to him, as of old—he swallowed them down. He rhymed no more, had sworn not to.
On the point of leaving, Giovanni appeared. He relayed Stramalia’s apologies, praying him to wait but a little longer. The servant faithfully delivered the message but Gravenall had to wonder how the pressing look changed the sense of what was said.
The man kept a respectful distance, and a thought occurred to Gravenall. He invited Giovanni to come closer. He shook his head with a look of dread. His eyes fell upon the form then hurried back to Gravenall’s own gaze. When he made to leave, the guest did not prevent him.
He stood there, feeling an ass, and the waste of his time. He had to admit, though, that he had little else to do and what was his entire purpose at this old pile of stone but to wait? At some indeterminate point, Gravenall had had enough. Other concerns had clearly caught up with his host and he decided he would excuse his “impatience” at dinner. He wondered if he should ask for an explanation in turn when the hairs upon his nape stood to. A cloying odor of aged flesh reached him.
“My apologies for keeping you. I thought you might spend that time usefully. Have you made any verses to her, even just in your head, to occupy the time?
Gravenall could not stop himself from staring. How long must he brook this bizarre obsession? It only reminded him of his vows and their reason, the playful little skeletons in their cases dancing around them. He felt anew the loss of Sincerity, of their son, the exquisite suffering of grief.
“Ah, well,” sighed Stramalia, “I will be much occupied these next days. You will have all the time in the world to create, to amuse yourself with whatever stanzas strike you, perhaps even an epithalamium? One never knows.”
“Is someone here soon to marry, then?” Gravenall caught at this like at driftwood in a shipwreck, some bit of social niceties to save them both.
“I have often pleaded business to excuse my absence and lack of hospitatity, but to tell all, my own nuptials may not indeed be far off and that has necessitated preparations.”
Gravenall expressed his felicitations. Stramalia smirked, a self-satisfied groom-to-be.
“There are those predicting rather my funeral than my wedding, which is of course the obverse of the coin, minted as it is from a mold of wax. We shall see, we shall see.”
Gravenall spent the time with desultory games of billiards, or tunelessly tapping at the conservatory’s spinet. He did wonder at his host’s confession of imminent marriage when indeed he might have rather imagined his imminent death against so venerable an age. Decrepit, there he said it, if only silently to himself. He hoped it was not some fresh maiden to know her first attempts at love in such a manner. But this was another world and he knew nobility had its own rules for appropriate mates; he had seen it more than he cared to.
Putting aside these considerations, he sat in the library at his notebook. Well past the long-ago pages of verse, he copied out his vocabulary exercises, a line here, a paragraph there in an Italian becoming bit by bit clearer to him. In spite of himself, he tried a bit of terza rima and then blacked out the trespass against oath. Cursing himself, he returned to his practice, noticing out of the corner of his eye that the servants still stared with fleeting looks of undecipherable nature, resentment at his suspicions, perhaps. There seemed to be more, however.
When Giovanni entered to build up the fire, Gravenall decided to smooth over relations by a humble request to practice his Italian. With the old man’s assent, he began with simpler phrases of breakfast and dinner, times of the day, then basic needs and duties, with familial relationships.
Measuring himself by the fellow’s replies, Gravenall had clearly progressed, making himself understood and in turn understanding something more than he had even days previously, a world previously, with the innkeeper. Emboldened, he falteringly asked about the figure in the studiolo. Giovanni began to look about, as if anxious to continue with his work. Gravenall reproached himself for keeping the man.
Instead of leaving, the servant spoke again, his tone much lower than before. “The captive lady appeared here back in my grandfather’s day. He told me of it at his knee. He told me that as an unliving creature made of the sacrificed dead, she had power of life and death over those who love her, and those she chooses to love. Her influence is inescapable. They say who gazes upon her must love her and it must be true, for my grandfather witnessed the master’s will, written so that the captive lady inherits all his worldly goods and lands.”
Gravenall doubted his comprehension, or at least suspected that he rather overheard the tales that country people told of what they themselves could not grasp.
Giovanni hurried on. “Since she has not inherited, since she yet lies there and the master lives still, she must love him, for he was, even then, my long-dead grandfather said, much older than he. How old he is now, who can tell? I have attended him since my youth and have never seen him ill, nor did my grandfather, who told me it was her love that did this.”
The man breathed as though relieved of a great load. “I have told you what you must know here. But now I must return to my duties. Forgive me.”
Alone then, Gravenall did not know what to think. Delusion seemed the law of this isolated land, from master down to servant. Even the library, with its freakish treatise was no better than the mind that had collected it. He turned to more rational tomes, to Vesalius for instance, thumbing from last page to first, flipping the gilded edge along until the frontispiece stared him in the eye: a dissection of a gravid woman. He slammed the volume shut, sore tempted to toss it to the flames. A brightening of the room distracted him from following through.
He went to the long windows and saw a brief clearing of the skies would allow for a small turn in the garden.
He inhaled the scent of turned loam and fresh green, along the terraced flower beds. Their inhabitants drooped tightly closed buds against the next onslaught of rain. The topiary interspersed with dripping statues stood impressive and shadowless in the weak light. Gravenall followed the footpaths upwards to a belvedere and sat a moment, surprised that the climb had not defeated him. An overgrown rose bush snaked a branch down one of the sides of the edifice, yet only one of its blooms had survived the assault of the recent downpours. The color of pulsing blood, its petals opened, shy as that sun, perfect in its kind. His lungs surprised him yet again with permission to inhale deeply of its perfume, without his usual staccato descent into suffocation.
He stared at the rose, an idea coming to him. Yet the creature at the top of the stairwell was no creature at all, no sentient woman to cherish a flower. She was merely a form, possessed of no capacity to appreciate a humble gift of a one-time poet. He turned to leave, shaking his head at his foolishness. The decision stood him in good stead, for the skies recommenced with their dismal weeping, gathering momentum as the seconds passed. At the window’s threshold, he thought again, and plunged back under the rain. He reached for the rose, plucked it, and bore it down the maze of hallways until he reached the studiolo.
Returning to his rooms to dry off and change his sodden clothes, he found his papers once more disturbed, his trunk open to his notebooks. They may have seemed in place this time, but he had been sure to sprinkle a bit of talcum on them. Fingers had attempted to smudge away the powder of its trace, of their guilt. The imprint, however, remained.
Who then could want to look at the mistakes in his efforts at Italian? Or even more bizarrely, his old letters? Could it be his letters of introduction that tempted someone? He could not figure, nor could his instinct impugn Giovanni.
Before he could long reflect, the dinner bell sounded.
“How is your health, my dear Gravenall?’ greeted the Marchese, nibbling fruit that was no fruit. The host took a sip of wine, and turned his mouth down, nodding at the harmony of flavors, his watery eyes fixed on his guest. “And further to that, your writing?”
Was this his intruder after all? The culprit who had riffled through his affairs? For all he pretexted business during the day— with Gravenall occupied by library, spinet, and billiards—it left his host free use of his own chambers.
The guest chose his words carefully and formed his lips round them clearly so as to prevent any and all miscommunication.
“I do not write. I cannot write. I shall not write. I know not what possesses you to keep after me with these requests, with these assumptions, but with all due respect to your hospitality there is no way towards my creating rhymes or whatever verses to satisfy this most single-minded and peculiar preoccupation with my former habits. I must pray you, beg of you even, if I must, to cease with these entreaties, and mention them no more after this.”
“As for that, we shall see.” Stramalia tossed down his napkin to the plate that had not yet been filled, rose, and departed.
The following days of absence signaled perhaps the extent of offense Gravenall surmised he had caused, or perhaps his suit to some unfortunate fiancée at whatever distance. He found he did not care— not at all. In fact, the solitude eased his comfort. And the odd part was that rhymes did come to him. They came unbidden, while poring over Sincerity’s letters, yet again.
To thwart them, he decided to put aside the beribboned quire of the past and instead looked to future society by practicing his subjunctive verbs. In those hours and minutes he usually devoted to Sincerity’s words, the rhymes continued to insist their way into his brain in their stead.
He refused to write them out, but they trotted in his head like a mindless melody that would not subside, like this everlasting rain driving him to the brink. Would it be so criminal to jot them down? So very wrong? Just so that they might leave him in peace once and for all?
He set about scribbling a few words of Sincerity’s fair features but all he could see was the figure. He resisted no more and went to her.
He arrived in the studiolo to be surprised by his host’s back. He saw his arms gesticulating, his hands in rapid movement. Coming softly closer, he heard him speaking, nay, addressing the form, who lay in front of him without her enclosure.
He made out few words, but sure he did understand at least those: “betrothed” “death” “to live” “poet.”
The old man stormed for all the world like a jealous lover, throwing the rose to the floor with what little force animated him. For despite his rage, Gravenall could sense his growing weakness. No wonder death preoccupied the senescent man, confiding in this figure about his spouse to be when he himself stepped ever closer to the grave.
As if on cue, Gravenall saw his shoulders quake as he dissolved into a coughing fit, more serious even than Gravenall’s own. The guest backed away slowly, sight unseen, out the door and back to his chambers, to ponder the mystifying soliloquy of his host.
When Giovanni woke him the next morning, he told him of the master’s absence for the following days, occupying himself with his upcoming wedding. He did not say when they would meet again, but something in the servant’s face went against the grain of his words. As he left, he turned back, and looking at the guest whispered “Beware. What I have told you, remember and beware.”
Once the servant departed, Gravenall took the miniature out of the trunk, Sincerity’s image, the scene with her hair. He thought and thought long, trading it from hand to hand beside the warmth of ire and the rain streaking down on his windowpane, then locked up his papers, keeping the key close in his vest pocket with his dead mistress’s likeness.
He could not help but reflect again on the superstitions that rose from the servants hall, those Giovanni reminded him of. He took the stairs by two steps with each stride.
Alone… or not, he could hardly say anymore, he took out the locket and compared the features one with the other, wondering at their similarity. Rhymes beset him. He ignored them to study the figure who, without her glass case, lay before him like an invitation.
Her flesh tones recalled those of the dead woman long ago putrefying beside him, her humors no longer coursing through her to bring the same blush that now lit up the cheek of the form. He looked again at the image of Sincerity, and found less that the figure resembled her than that she resembled the figure.
A stray sunbeam passed through the windowpane and changed the quality of her flesh into a prevailing translucency, tempting the touch. He reached toward her, not even knowing his own intentions.
As he did so, from his brain bubbled up rhymes once more. He could no more forbid them from forming than he could prevent the rhythms of his own breath, a regular respiration he recalled from running with his hoop and cane in short pants to his grandmother who took him to the Lyceum.
Before he could assay the wax against his touch, he drew back his hand, turned, and ran, the rhymes in his head following him all the way to his chambers.
He must put them down. He must write, must, or else the rhymes in his mind would drive him out of it. He dipped his pen into ink and began his sonnet, in fact the first sonnet of a cycle laid out in his imagination as though he himself were but a vessel to its eruption on to the page and into being.
Forsworn, apostate, he scribbled and scribbled until the ink blotched and smeared his fingers, dotting the pages sprawled over his desk, one after the other, not so much as a single word crossed out, the lines coming as easily as if another voice were dictating it to him, a woman’s voice, far away but coming closer. On and on he wrote until dark and day again, turning over the first sheets when he had covered over the last with his stanzas. Finally done, as some pallid excuse for sunlight broke through the glass, he sat back in the armchair, spent.
Giovanni brought in hot water as well as breakfast, for the Marchese had not shown his face. The servant had no news.
The morning passed with Gravenall in the library browsing titles half-heartedly, too exhausted to make much use of his intellect. Given the night’s exertions, at early afternoon Gravenall retired for a brief rest to put paid to a sleepiness that overcame him. It left his body as soon as he opened the door. For there knelt Stramalia toying with his trunk, indeed raising its lid with some sort of skeleton key in hand. The stench of him, no longer the sickly sweet odor of an ancient body but rather something that filled the room. He saw him fingering Sincerity’s letters then tossing them aside, in search of something, his night’s creation grasped in the knotted knuckles of the old hand.
He nearly struck the man. Only his age and frailty brought Gravenall to reason, seeing the slight frame convulsed with cough. Once the host could speak again, he straightened himself to what height he could attain and summoned, then bid, then pleaded with his guest.
“You must come to see Beatrice,” his small, hoarse voice implored. “You will then understand.”
The two men came to her, laid out without her glass, four candles lit as though at the compass winds of cardinal points.
“Now versify!” Stramalia commanded now, instead of beseeching him. Gravenall, however, could but pity him, as the old man forced this pathetic attempt to compel him. “Recite your rhyming words, chant them! I know you have written them. I have seen them and have waited long enough! I shall have these incantations of the dying and their inherent force for life, for my own and for my spouse’s.” He ignored his guest’s stupefaction “First we must wed. We must cleave one to the other and become one flesh, one substance!”
Gravenall thought better of reckoning with the Marchese as he approached the form.
Leaving her face intact, zone by zone Stramalia removed her breasts, her belly, her organs. His hand passed over her, his gestures acting almost as a seduction, as one might remove one’s mistress’s layers of dress to find her womanhood waiting. Above the viscera the form’s beautiful face awaited, expectant.
The poet’s Italian was good enough now to understand his host’s declaration to the form.
“I take thee as my wedded wife to love and honor…”
The master bent to kiss it, when a tide of phlegm and blood overtook his lungs. His body heaved with the effort to grasp air. He gasped, his eyes wide with surprise, even reproach and betrayal. His mouth, opening and closing like a fish just caught from the waters, unable to take in vital fluids. Was it but minutes later that he fell with his full weight upon her then slid to the floor? Or much longer? Gravenall could not tell but when he had gathered himself together from the shock, he went to the old body and put his tiny looking glass under the nostrils. The mirror remained still and serene as a lake surface by fair weather.
The poet reached toward what nested in her open womb, brought it to his breast. With his other hand he replaced the plates of body parts, all the while cradling the little wight. He returned each swathe of tissue to its proper place, restoring her to fullness, reciting all the while his poem, his incantation, he knew not which. The flickering candlelight gave the impression of fluttering eyelids. He placed the mirror under her nose.
Nothing. He didn’t know what he had believed might happen but the mirror remained undisturbed by any trace of respiration.
As if to assuage his grief anew, he cradled the small heft in his arms, calling it by the name its mother chose, whispering “Eleazar” and rocking it as if to sleep. He paid no mind to the sense that the weight grew, that his arms carried not molded wax, but flesh and bone and blood. From this heft broke a lusty cry piercing the poet’s ears with its first breath. He took it from him to see motherblood staining his shirt with its scarlet force.
Cradling it close he bent again to the form. Against expectation, against hope, against even shame, he recited this time the other rhymes, those he also knew by heart, the simple couplets that Sincerity had penned to him in her letters.
And that throat, the vein marbling it, like the course of a rivulet, such as spring brooks after winter melts, began, he thought, unless he had indeed lost his senses, to pulse, he could not help but add “again”. He knew the face staring at him, recognition in her woken eyes.
Once able to rise from beside their remains, who knew how long after, Gravenall threw his sonnets, one by one, page by page, into the fire that he kept feeding past hope that through its heat Sincerity might yet cling to life. He swore to write no more.
Nor would he turn Sincerity and their unfortunate child into fodder for this côterie’s lugubrious games. So he spoke to them of his plans for Rome, the Tivoli gardens, the Caracalla baths, of the sun which would right his lungs. They spurred him instead to visit the mummified monks in their catacombs, uncorrupted virgin martyrs in their glass-encased biers. On such a steady diet of the macabre, soon enough he wanted only to put miles between himself and those walls, standing like a monstrous madhouse behind its graceful volumes and serene façade, under heavens that would not, or could not, stop their sobbing.
Leagues and leagues of rutted road allowed for but halted progress under rains straight from the Old Testament. That angry heavens put the dove grays above England to shame, a gentle shade, but which had invaded his very breath with its moldering damp. He had fled the island after her funeral, which his personal allowance had paid for, despite his viscount father’s objections. His genitor sorely disapproved of spending money on a chit of a girl whose name none would remember but for its silliness, as though dreamed up by some lady novelist. The elder man would just as well have seen her tossed into a pauper’s grave. In defiance, his son gave her a decent burial, at the cost of finding himself disinherited.
Gravenall left behind the tame mists of home with funds enough for the voyage, and might—he had to come to terms with it—need no more. He hoped otherwise, that southerly climes promised health, light, and life. What he found was a wan and ghostly sun wavering only at odd and occasional moments. The traveler cursed the downpour, setting his hopes on July.
He awoke every morning, sodden stop after sodden stop, more exhausted than the last, his cough forbidding any restorative rest. Through the interminable stretches of mud, the morbid stories of the Diodati followed him, above all, the one tale, the young girl’s. Prometheus, she had said, but it was half Pygmalion too, retold through inferred grave-robbing and galvanization, through hate instead of love. When she described the hues of the creature’s skin, Gravenall could not help but recall the changing tones of Sincerity’s waxen complexion as the hours passed, then days, before he could manage to admit to her passing.
When he did finally make it across the border into Italy, the driver unhitched the carriage in the courtyard of the first inn to be found, at a fork in the road, one branch leading to a nearby cluster of cottages that had not so much as a name, much less a cross on the map. His man looked upward, shaking his head with a dim promise of the morning. Gravenall, too, turned his gaze to the opacity above and the sky spit in his eye.
***
How then might he spend a day, two days, God forbid longer, counting on weather clear enough to return to the road. Moreover, he needed the jostling sway of the carriage to shake his brain loose from the cobwebbed images conjured by that peculiar girl back at the Diodati, her failed doctor stitching away at body parts, dragging the dead back into life by force. Gravenall’s mind turned ineluctably to Sincerity. The French called love at first sight “the lightning bolt” which he had felt, a recognition on first seeing her. If only he too might have harnessed such power, as had been done elsewhere, and bring her back from the beyond.
The company of the living would serve him well, a different sort of society, the wider world of conversation, wit and repartee and news. His letters of introduction for Rome and the stages there would provide this, once back to civilization. He gripped his fingers around the dirty glass that held his wine, holding on for dear life.
When his driver refused to take up the reins yet another day, Gravenall kicked a bottle lying empty in the courtyard, by chance hitting the inn mongrel. The traveler strode over to the dog, and, forehead against furry forehead, rubbed its neck, whispering comforting words in English. It calmed at his tone. When a cough shook his frame, the dog reached up its snout and licked his cheek. Gravenall thought he might at least commune with the dumb of the animal world, if with no one else. In gratitude, he scratched the animal behind its floppy ears, no longer even caring about his soaking coat and breeches. He went in to signal to the innkeeper his need for drink, stronger this time, and went up to his room to nurse his dashed hopes of ever leaving this backwater, of ever finding the celebrated Italian sun.
He opened his trunk, digging to find something to read, the poetry he had packed away. He did not like to open the baggage before time, but desperation dug into his nerves. He had, however, to lower the lid a moment as his encumbered lungs shook his core. Before he could find his reduced library once his breathing allowed, however, he in fact pulled up the beribboned quire of her letters and locket miniature. On the left, Sincerity’s shy eyes under her ringlets looked out at him, and, on the right, a small token of her brief life: a miniature behind glass, woven of those same ringlets, writhing like a body in pleasure or pain into the form of a willow overhanging an urn.
His hand twitched to take up his pen and rhyme those locks back into life, back into meaning, but he reminded himself of his vow. He took out rather his notebook. It had held verse once, jotted out before his fair copies, but now it served to practice his Italian. He thus prepared for his first introductions when they would come, which they must. He used the rhythms of the raindrops against the accented words and phrases, so different from his schoolboy Latin. His concentration, however, was not equal to his heartbreak. Rome and the healing sun had seemed just within his fingertips on quitting the ghastly fancies of the Lake Geneva lot and now stretched out and on beyond his reach; Would he breathe in the damp until he guttered out in this backwater, never to see the light of day again? The thought of joining Sincerity had its charms but he doubted an afterlife, certainly one so kind.
Thus the days, wet and gray, passed. Gravenall once again tried his Italian on the innkeeper who stared at him blankly, replying with a senseless garble of syllables that the traveler could not pierce. He left off going downstairs, choosing to pass the hours reading in his room. Books proved some company, dead though they be, with the power they retained of speaking across centuries, defying mortal lifespan. Often enough he simply reread Sincerity’s letters, folding them and unfolding them, folding them back again, almost in a holy ritual, just as he rubbed the locket between thumb and forefinger.
One late afternoon, he opened the missives yet again, 1814, 1815, and her last lines of 1816 before she passed. Her protestations of undying love, set in naive couplets, slightly misspelled but in her best script, stabbed at him. Gravenall choked back something acrid, and held the paper a moment to his heart until he recollected himself. When the mongrel barked at a commotion in the courtyard, he welcomed the distraction. The sound of carriage wheels brought him to the window to see a hither and yonning of the inn’s servants and those of a newcomer with a small retinue.
Curious, he descended into the common room to find someone seated at one of the tables, a gentleman by his bearing and dress, though rumpled by travel, and far older than himself. The stranger turned to him and began to speak, but Gravenall’s hopes withered when he could make out only a word or two. When he tried to reply in his amended Latin, the man’s face broke into a crooked smile. In response he resurrected quite as well, in fact better than Gravenall, this dead tongue.
“A brother in learning, I see. What could bring you to this lost little corner of the land unless it be the torrents that lead me here as well?”
“I am headed to Rome, whither all roads lead, so it is said, but I begin to doubt of it, Signore.”
“Allow me to introduce myself, I am the Marchese di Stramalia. Now tell me, you are an Englishman on his Grand Tour, no? and this is the weather we have greeted you with!”
The innkeeper’s boy brought drink, fortified wine for the elder and something stronger for him. After a rapid side glance at either traveler, he scurried away. Gravenall wondered at his haste as there were no other patrons.
Gravenall took the newcomer in, his quick movements and straight back seemed those of a younger man against the full hoary head, and even his eyebrows like snow overhanging the windows of his eyes. His gaze, though direct, held something unsettling more than frank, as though he might see farther than anyone would wish him to see, or wish to see themselves.
“My name is Gravenall, youngest son to the fifth Viscount Mortain. I have come to Italy for my health, but it seems as though the gods conspire against me. Rome, though, is sure to be warm and bright, by the time I get there, if ever I do.”
“One does ask when the roads will allow passage over a mile or two. I have just myself come from abroad, a return taking far longer than it should have, what with their cursed state. Take a seat and tell me, what have you seen thus far—Paris surely, and afterward?”
Gravenall mentioned the sites he had seen. Stramalia particularly relished the colorful descriptions of the soaring Gothic stones of Beauvais or Troyes, or the stunning expanse of Lake Geneva. Yet his racking cough interrupted these depictions. The old man looked on, less in sympathy than a new and alert curiosity. The strangeness of his reaction recalled to Gravenall his Diodati host. With the elder man’s fleeting look at the red blotched handkerchief, the younger man cited his Horace.
“‘Pulvis et umbra sumus,’ as the poet put it. We are but dust and shadow.” He looked an apology at the Marchese.
“Ah, but ‘I shall not wholly die and a great part of me will escape the grave,’ ” he replied, quote for quote. “I have never been able to entirely grasp the lyric poets, I avow, but that line stays with me. I am more of a Lucretius man, myself, but our fair land boasts the likes of Petrarch and Dante. As an Italian I cannot dismiss the art and its power over the soul.” Gravenall could quite feel the growing weight of the older man’s gaze and study of his person. “And you speak like a poet born.” His tone—intent, pointed—belied the simple flattery of the remark.
“Perhaps, once upon a time, I may have toyed with poetry, but I have renounced the sins of my youth. My tastes, and thus my circles remain literary, however.” Gravenall mentioned his recent host “of whom you have perhaps heard, along with some of his friends whose fame has not spread past the channel, but it surely shall.”
Stramalia’s slanted smile widened. As he reached an arm towards Gravenall, the younger man caught a vague scent of aged flesh, unplaceable but distinct. A scent of must, of dust, but also something more unpleasant than simply the smell of the elderly. At another coughing fit, Stramalia paused while Gravenall recuperated, venerable eyes darting left to right and back again.
“My new young friend, I am at the very moment headed home, with just this stop to warm myself as the servants go on ahead to make ready for me. My domain lies only a little further on, after the left branch of the road. I have to say, this is no place for one of your rank and refinement to wait out the rains. Come, why don’t you, to my villa, to beguile the time more pleasantly? No wife awaits to perturb; I am a bachelor, for better or for worse, and thus some company would all the more certainly help chase away the damp.”
Gravenall noticed the innkeeper and his boy look at each other. Such rustics could not of course understand the discourse, but exchanged glances heavy with some meaning just as foreign to Gravenall as Latin to them.
Yet the younger traveler so welcomed the promise of conversation, social intercourse, mental stimulation, that the man’s strange odor was of no moment, and Gravenall’s ear ignored an eagerness in Stramalia’s invitation that went unplaced and unheeded.
***
None could call it daybreak precisely, but upon awakening, Gravenall struggled to inhale yet again. Meanwhile he juddered off ill dreams of his finger wrapped with blond curls that themselves then wrapped round his lungs and squeezed them of breath. Such ringlets had framed the curve of Sincerity’s cheek, a cheek she had shared with one who came before her, who had first stolen his heart. He shook this too away. In so doing he slowly realized where he was, in a bed more comfortable than any he had experienced since he left the villa on the lake.
His present circumstances coalesced in his mind, as he spied his trunks at the foot of a canopied bed. He recalled the villa’s uneven roof line—flattened gables of tile—rising before the moon last night, higher than the surrounding trees of palm and pine, as his host’s carriage approached it. The wide arms of a horseshoe stairwell embraced his arrival. Now, high ceilings rose above him, over the blushing plaster of the walls. Long arched windows let in what passed for daylight. Beyond them lay once more a lake, its surface dimpled by the rain.
In his disappointment he barely heard the knock. A servant shuffled in his mortal coil, hot water in a gnarly hand. Bent and wizened beyond even his master, the man, called Giovanni, informed him, as well as Gravenall could gather, that the master awaited in the dining room.
Once Gravenall seated himself at table, his host opened in perfect declensions of a language long buried, asking after his sleep, and then health, inquisitive beyond polite formalities. Gravenall was touched at this, and the hospitality in spite of it, since the episode at the inn left no doubt of what he suffered.
He dodged answering with his grim prognosis. “Forgive me, I am all astonishment at your fluency.”
“Don’t be. I was raised to it. My father placed me early in the hands of a German tutor who spoke no Italian but only Latin, with instructions to thus communicate with me. It became in many senses my mother tongue. This is what I nursed rather than the milk of her breast.”
“Your mother herself agreed to this education?”
“Mother tongue in more ways than one, since it seems I killed that good woman with my birth—no, no do not blanch further still, it is my way, my humor. My upbringing removed me from my fellows, but raised me above them too. You as well, my good sir, for what peer has a poet?”
“Alas, I have long since abandoned that pursuit, as I may have mentioned.”
“And yet an embarrassment of riches awaits to inspire you to pen out some lines while here. Just wait for what lies in store.” Stramalia rose and took him to a window, drawing back a curtain on the gray drizzle spattering down upon sculpted greenery. Before Gravenall could peer past the blurred pane, his host dropped the curtain back. “A man of your fortitude might brave the weather for a garden stroll, later perhaps,” he tossed off. The contradiction with his earlier concern jolted. “Let me show you some of the other delights my residence holds in store and who knows what stanzas might come to you.”
Gravenall did not have time for a rebuttal. The old man took him by the arm—his vague, cloying scent making itself felt almost like another presence doubling Stramalia, a solid shadow of odor.
The Marchese led his guest through long halls of ancestral portraits staring into the void. Doors opened onto a drawing room, a conservatory, a billiard room and so many others that Gravenall lost track. Then they reached the library. Its towering shelves reached higher even than the same long, gracious windows that illuminated his chambers. These looked not upon the lake but upon the rained-out garden. A fire blazed already, flickering off the gold lettering on the book spines, beckoning like a light in a window on a dreary night. Gravenall made up his mind to stay right here unless and until the sun decided to return, however long that might take. Stramalia had other ideas, and crooked a wiry, thin arm over the younger man’s elbow to continue the tour. Up and up a stairwell they climbed. Wide at first, story by story it grew narrower and darker, until finally they reached a closed door. The old man fumbled at his pockets until he drew out a key.
“The best I have saved for last…” The Marchese fidgeted as if about to burst, and yet his usually piercing eyes would not meet his guest’s. “Finally, my studiolo.”
Gravenall knew of curiosity cabinets but did not think that a living man would still have one, or at least not be quite this puffed up at sharing it. Perhaps this was particular to Italy, or just these hinterlands. Was his host then embarrassed? For this was a mania of his great-grandfather’s time at best, and no man could be quite that old and still among the living. The young man turned to take in Stramalia again—the bushy, white eyebrows over the twitching gaze—and took a step to enter.
He duly sighed in admiration at the coins stuck with Hasdrubal’s profile, the piano-playing automaton, a Moroccan sand rose, the stuffed two-headed caiman, a cat mummy from the time of the Pharaohs, cameos from ancient Rome, a unicorn mane pillow, ceramic plates conjuring snakes and fruits, a bronze phallic figure and a candelabra taken from the ashes of Pompeii. The two men paused before the different sculpted cabinets and made their tour around the room. Gravenall respectfully nodded, voicing the occasional question to mark his interest. His host would by turns hurry him on in front of a fascinating Egyptian posthumous portrait, or stall—so it seemed—at a banal coral formation.
As they reached a long set of red velvet drapes, Stramalia appeared to struggle between urgency and delay. His entire arm, holding onto the heavy folds of the fabric, pulling it back just as his guest approached it, trembled. Gravenall stared at his host in spite of himself, hesitated, and stepped into the adjoining room.
Once his eyes adjusted to the dust motes and half-light, he winced at what first met his gaze: display case after display case of fetal skeletons. The diminutive bones were posed in tableaux: fencing, jumping rope, or lying in tiny coffins. Visions assailed him of a creature not even fully human, and yet beloved, a tiny skull he did not baptize, whose name he never pronounced. Gravenall tried to breathe past the horror of it, backing slowly away until his thighs ran into something behind him.
He turned around to find himself staring at a reclining woman, encased in glass, a beauty to take one’s breath away, lying like Snow White on her bier, the fairest of them all awaiting the kiss that would bring her back again to life and love.
Gravenall looked over to Stramalia who stood in the doorway, holding his breath, as if awaiting his guest’s judgment of this pièce de résistance.
There she lay, dressed only in pearls, offered up entire to his eyes, mouth half-open to reveal a perfect row of teeth. Dark, silken curls lay in an arranged mess of chestnut upon her pillow, her legs half parted, in all the liquefaction of feminine passion, her perfect forms in the torsion of pleasure’s crisis, eyelashes near to fluttering, veiling a gaze lost to sensation. With the tint of her cheek, he could not compass that those half-lidded eyes remained unaware of him.
Yet the complexion fooled the eye only for a time, even in the room’s dim twilight. As he slowly realized her for a simulacrum of molded wax, he wondered how she—no, “it”—might feel under his touch. Would it be cold and hard, or melt, or would it have the soft give of flesh? He was glad the glass display case prevented him from finding out.
So troubling was she that he didn’t notice a familiarity in the profile that belied the dark hair. Almost. For as the shape of the brow, the bee-stung lips, the line of the cheek came into focus, he realized he had known her before. As that awareness dawned, he shut his eyes against memory, against the wrongness of the scene entire.
Lost in these reflections he jumped when Stramalia spoke again.
“They worked directly on bone, you know, real human bone is encased in that fair flesh. The hair, too, is real, by the by, as are even the eyelashes. Anna Morandi herself formed this masterpiece for the University in Bologna, when I attended dissections there. Look.”
The host removed the glass rectangle containing the form, framing her, protecting her. Losing himself to his enthusiasm, he lifted her skin away to show a corpse, flayed, body part by body part, unveiling her down to her entrails.
The guest had heard of such figures, anatomical models that served to teach the complexities of the human body. Friends returning from the Grand Tour spoke of one in Florence, whose beauty palliated the grotesquely available recesses underneath. Surface and innards, all of wax, could be assembled and disassembled to better prepare the student of medicine for his vocation.
As much as he knew these forms existed, Gravenall was utterly unprepared to witness her bowels spilling forth what God meant to hide: folds and crevices, clefts and viscera, organ by organ unfolding, as if with a moist sheen even, until Stramalia reached her deepest of secrets, a tiny creature nesting in her womb.
He flinched and turned away, steadying himself against the nausea overtaking him.
His host chattered on. “The fetus, of course, completes the female, by way of teaching midwifery to physicians in training. This particular figure required over two hundred corpses—harder to procure than medical men would like. Only after that many dissections did her creator possess the detail of knowledge necessary to craft this piece of perfection.”
Gravenall had to catch his breath and calm his heaving stomach before he could formulate any polite question. “However did you come by it?”
“Let’s say Signora Morandi entrusted her to me, and leave it at that.” Stramalia snorted a certain satisfaction but Gravenall could hardly tell at what. Once he reassembled the creature, his fingers careful and diligent, the host gazed at it in rêverie. After some lapse of time measured only in raindrops pelting the roof, the old man finally came back to the moment and shook his head as if to clear it, murmuring something in the shell of the form’s ear, his sharp eyes however upon his guest. Did Gravenall really hear “sacerdoto”?
He followed his departing host, turning back his glance, once then twice, where shadows played tricks on the curves and hollows of the reclining figure, at the dead woman living, who had never drawn breath.
***
The bell rang for the evening meal and Gravenall descended to find the table laid in crystal and silver catching the gleam of the candelabra’s light. In the middle lay a platter of apricots and peaches and other tempting delights that such weather would have seemed to forbid.
Stramalia began without ceremony, still in fluent Latin, “So have you ever seen the likes of her?” he asked, his fervor belying an exhaustion that Gravenall had before noticed. He lifted his glass as though it were a much heavier object.
“Likes of…?” Gravenall, disconcerted, thought—beyond all possibility—he meant Sincerity,
“Of my beauty in the studiolo!”
“Ah, ah, yes, so peculiarly the product of dissections, you were saying. Yet you are no anatomist, if I am not mistaken…?” For a nobleman to so dirty his hands was unthinkable, yet the personage before him did not cease to surprise.
“Bah, my interests lie elsewhere. I told you that Anna Morandi fashioned the figure with her hands, a masterpiece, a nonpareil. Not with a man’s muscle chiseling marble but crafting the malleable matter of the female with what is ductile, melting, like her own nature. Only another member of the fair sex could have imagined and thus achieved the exactitude of mimesis, form to form, as though from a mother to her offspring. This though involved no messy process of birth. She sprung from her ministrations as Minerva from the head of Zeus. It is no accident that, not long after, Signora Morandi sculpted her own self portrait dissecting the brain, that seat of the mind, the spirit, perhaps even what metaphysicians like to call the soul. The only fetus involved was that embedded in the seat of her womanhood, eternally gestating.”
“It—” Gravenall began, searching for a response.
“—She!”
“‘She’, then, is certainly breathtaking.”
“Yes, you fair gasped when you saw her.”
After considering a moment, Gravenall continued. “With long pondering, it came to me: she reminded me sorely of a face I’d seen once, long long ago, when my grandmother took me to London to see the replicas of France’s guillotine victims: a demoiselle in a tumbril, destined to an ungodly and imminent end, all her youth and beauty of no succor. I believe I was quite in love with her, that afternoon and well beyond. I wrote my first poems to her.”
“Perhaps the suggestion of her imminent demise inspired you? So many of our poets have devoted their puissant gifts to saving the dead from oblivion. Petrarch and Laura, Dante before him of course. And yet they themselves on their deathbeds pronounce such verse as to go beyond metaphor, or at least it is said and so I believe. Death has a capacity both to rend and to seal, much as wax upon a letter’s fold.”
“The wax in London certainly turned my head.”
“A mere mannequin, hardly worth the tribute, with a paltry wooden frame beneath her clothing.” Stramalia thus dismissed the French figures that had toured an astounded Europe. “Nothing to compare to my Beatrice.”
So he had named it—her. Gravenall abandoned any and all mention of Sincerity.
“Perhaps like Dante, both of this world and yet having quit it, visiting the beyond,” continued the host, “with her help, you might toss off a rhyme to this muse, too. At a sonnet written to her beauty and graces, she might open those eyes wide, that blush blooming full on her cheek to find herself so positioned.” He chuckled and gnawed at the cheese’s hard rind, leaving the soft insides untouched. “It would be edifying for you.”
Gravenall drew a long sip of wine, struggling for a reply. “I must disabuse you. I am no poet. I may have dabbled in my youth but that time has long passed. A silly hobby for an overly impressionable boy.” He stared at his host as he took a peach from the center dish. Gravenall tried not to notice as, instead of slicing it with his knife, the Marchese sank his teeth into it and took his time before swallowing.
“Beatrice would have it otherwise,” he stated.
The younger man blinked and deftly turned the conversation to translating the Comedy, Cary’s improvement on Boyd’s work, of his own regrettable deficiencies in the language of the country he visited, and studious application to improve. Thereby he managed to steer the subjects to less outlandish realms until it came time to retire.
Before taking the stairs to his rooms, he too took a piece of fruit. Yet it turned out, upon handling it, to be no fruit at all. At first Gravenall thought it might be some local receipt for marchpane, and opened it with his knife. Slipping the piece into his mouth, he bit not into an overpowering sweetness but into beeswax.
***
He had never told a soul how he spent his pocket money returning to the Lyceum theater’s Chamber of Horrors, striding past Mme DuBarry, Marie Antoinette, and Robespierre without a glance, until he found the tableau with his lady love, bound to her death. There he would gaze enraptured and uninterrupted until closing. Her features thus fixed themselves in his phantasie, imprinted upon it, as into the malleable substance of a young mind. Thus when, years later, his eyes fell upon the charming shop girl, he saw past what he wryly thought of as her disguise and immediately inquired of her name.
“Sincerity,” she had replied, as though she were a figure out of an allegory, and surely skin so translucent could brook no false-seeming. She had indeed proven true to him, though his father scoffed at both name and virtue, at least as far as incarnated in his son’s mistress. In their time together, however, Gravenall had penned his masterpiece, a series of interlocking rhymes about Sincerity, as one single entity, both the quality and the woman, though the woman’s face belonged at once to both shop girl selling ribbons and grand lady dragged to her death in a tumbril.
With all this teasing his brain, under the drumming rainfall, he stared at the bedroom hearth’s blaze, lost in a manor house, itself lost to the wider world. Slowly he drifted off and his dreams turned to the fire to which he had sacrificed his sonnet cycle, the fire melting the Lyceum lady into Sincerity underneath, and she in turn melting away into viscera and a stillborn son.
***
The same Giovanni, frail and hunched, woke Gravenall gently from the shallow sleep his illness afforded, and gave him, along with his hot water, a letter from the master. There, Stramalia explained that he must attend to business but would see his guest at dinner. He gave leave to his poet—the word stood out—to amuse himself as he could, with books, billiards, music, even to brave the garden under the rains. The suggestion puzzled Gravenall as he must avoid the damp at all costs. Then he shook his head at the end of the note, which urged him once more to write out his impressions in rhyme, most especially of “Beatrice.” A shudder came over him.
***
With no appetite to break his fast, Gravenall found his way back to the library, where tomes of many tongues shared shelves. The lettering along their spines announced treatises on hieroglyphics and emblemata, some volumes on medical matters, but others, too, of rather philosophical bent, Aristotle, the Epicureans, the Presocratics and other schools of ancient thought which came as no surprise given the distinctive upbringing he had spoken of. More curiously, the shelves held speculative metaphysics as well.
With none of this to his taste, the guest turned to a manuscript left open on the bureau. Latin instead of Italian, he might better read it than some of the other offerings on the shelves. Looking hard into the handwriting and the convoluted expression, he realized this was a personal treatise debating the nature of art, a Platonic meditation on forms. The book had a second half, written, he realized, in reverse. He took out his pocket looking glass, managing thus to parse it enough to gather that it concerned how images might be ensouled, should the hand crafting them attain a summit of mirror-like imitation, endowing consciousness to the inert image with incantations created at death’s precipice.
Scrying more than reading tired his weary eyes, preventing his perusal from becoming true comprehension of the queer notions there enclosed, their contorted grammar and even stranger meanings.
Moreover, the image of the reclining form interrupted his focus time and again. He thought of her on her bier, fair as a virgin martyr, such as those the Diodati côterie had described. Those hands however were not locked together in prayer, far from it. His host was right, she, it, what have you, was indeed a wonder. At her incessant back and forth into his mind, he gave up, set the book aside and gently shut the door of the library behind him.
He found the studiolo and walked without a glance past the first collection, past the engravings of Pompeii, the hue-changing cup from a patrician grave and its sculpted grotesques, the wide-eyed Egyptian tomb portraits, the so-called salamanders, all this bric-à-brac that Stramalia had named and explained in both haste and hesitation. Back, and back farther still, he penetrated until arriving at the heavy red drapery. Gravenall drew a breath as deep as his lungs allowed and pulled it aside to enter the final chamber. He slipped past the gruesome little skeletons to the form. Before it, even the tiny bones at their antics receded from his consciousness as did the dust motes, and even the rain pounding on the roof.
Gravenall wondered what, as compared to the sightless stare of Grecian marble, those eyes, veiled under languorous lids, might have seen, be seeing, forgetting them to be glass embedded into wax. He kneeled to peer inward at them, as far as the sleepy gaze permitted, and tried to divine their color—Sincerity’s periwinkle hue or something other, a color that defied definition. He put out of mind the viscera waiting to spill forth from below, to erupt into the crimson of tissue and tendon, muscle and mucous; he put out of mind the child she held within, building tissue and organ, and yet not. He focused instead on the nature of what those glass eyes must have beheld, what was the nature of her vision, as a creature so perfectly alive but for breath must, in spite of the glass of her orbs, perceive.
How had she stared up originally at the woman who had made her? Pleading? Pleading what, then? To leave off and abandon the project of her creation? Or to complete her with breath and life? How could a creature so mirroring flesh and soul be a pure product of cold science? How long he spent contemplating these questions he could not tell but when the dinner bell sounded, he was kneeling still.
***
Gravenall dressed and came down to find his host. He left aside his encounter with the form, speaking instead of his find in the library.
“I took the liberty of looking into a volume you yourself may have been reading as it was open on the desk, I couldn’t entirely grasp the matter but was fascinated by what I did understand…”
His host replied in a voice less vibrant than before, hoarse, from a form more bowed than Gravenall had previously noticed.
“Ah, I’m glad you found it—I had set it aside for you. What you had in your hand is the notebook, known formerly to one man alive, now to two, written by the very hand of Paracelsus, commenting and translating Hermes Trismegistus. What did you make of it?”
“Neither head nor tail I’m afraid, between the hand and the grammar, not to speak of the backwards script.” He had not been quite so stupid, but preferred to leave his host with that impression.
Stramalia laughed. “Ah yes, the second half. The ancients, the Egyptians, the Etruscans too, so says Annius Viterbo, knew the power of incantation. If we read closely Paracelsus’s gloss on the Thrice-Great Hermes, side by side with Kircher and Agrippa, then we begin to understand incantation as more than words, but as summoning spirit, as that which holds body and soul together, that which can bring certain substances into a higher state of existence, and give consciousness a longer life to enjoy. As for the incantation’s creator, the nearer death looms, the greater the power he endows to his words until on the very deathbed, this incantation becomes an ineluctable force for animation.”
“I fear I’d need more than a simple looking glass to gather all that from the book’s reverse script.”
“A mirror is key. The perfect effigy, faultlessly mimetic, showing to the life the image it thereby contains, though perhaps not entirely. Sometimes I ask myself, if I put a mirror in Beatrice’s hands, would she raise it to her face and wonder at her beauty, fogging the glass with her breath?”
“I must insist, we speak here not of a woman,” Gravenall replied, doubting his own words, “but a wax.”
“It is wax that gives us the candlelight we cannot easily do without, by which I can see into your eyes, which some say open to the soul. You saw in the anteroom of the studiolo, those late mummy portraits. Their medium is encaustic, which is to say the painters dipped their pigments and brushes into wax, a substance that melts and reforms, the better to give to the viewer the impression of pulse and flesh to a being that has gone on past the pale of this life, this plane. According to a tale told by Pliny the Elder, the first Greek artists to work at likenesses worked in wax masks. For these same reasons the makers of ex votos also use wax, so resembling the reality of the body’s pain that the Divine must hearken to its suffering and send relief. Plato speaks of wax as that from which we were modeled, that newborns most resemble. We might go still further back and further still to bees and their flowers, the ur-stuff, the primordial matter that makes up this world, and its ephemeral but eternal mystery of fluxus, of change changing. Your English tongue, I believe, speaks of the moon that wanes and waxes.” He took in his hand another artificed fruit from the platter and nibbled it. “Perhaps you can wax poetic, hah!”
The silence that followed hung between them, heavy as the outside rain hammering down on the roof, at the windowpanes. Gravenall could not fill it and for once felt thankful when his cough took him. And yet it subsided just as suddenly. He was able to bring his breath back under control and fill his weak lungs with the air he needed. He began to speak, he knew not how, nor what, but before he could articulate the first word, his host’s brief punctuated laugh erupted into a crisis of suffocation for the cough that overcame the old man.
***
Retiring to his chambers, the tension left him, tension he had not fully measured, muscles taut with the senseless discourse of his host. Yet no sooner did he exhale his relief than he noticed the disarrangement of his notebooks. Another hand, he could see at a glance, had attempted to retie the love-knotted bow of Sincerity’s letters that she and he only had the secret of. The same hand had left his papers out of order, at a different angle on the desk.
His muscles tightened anew. His father had lamented curious servants as the curse of every grand home, words he lived by and that frequently caused friction with his youngest son. Gravenall hated to think his genitor correct but this discovery regrettably vindicated him. Come morning, private matters would go in the trunk.
Meanwhile, lying in bed he repeated, where others might say prayers or count sheep, his conjugations until he managed to fall asleep.
***
He awoke on his own, rested, invigorated, a sensation he could not last remember. He had slept the kind night through, not once waking from the strangling damp. What that portended, he could not tell, but it defied all his doctors had forewarned.
His eyes falling upon his papers, he then recalled the previous night’s misadventure, promptly putting it all away in his trunks. As he shut tight the lid, Giovanni knocked and entered with the necessary for his toilette. The fellow looked down at Gravenall’s actions. Was that surprise? Alarm?
“Occulta non possunt temptare. What is hidden cannot tempt.”
The servant replied only that the master invited Gravenall to meet him in the studiolo as soon as he felt presentable.
He followed the hallways and the stairwells he knew would take him to the studiolo. On his way, he glimpsed staff in corners, in the shadows, murmuring as their eyes turned his way and back again, furtive sidelong glances that disquieted. He wondered if he should speak of it to the Marchese.
When he arrived at the rendez-vous, however, he found himself alone but for the form. Confounded by her impossible resemblance to the two, no, the one woman he had loved, he stared. In her features, Sincerity and the Lyceum figure transmuted one into the other by turns as he waited on his host. And waited. He had not a timepiece, and could not tell how long since his arrival there. Time stretched out its long-fingered grasp and let the sand fall through. Hours passed. The studiolo held no clock and only the rain sounded out the passing instants in their interminable succession.
As he stared at the form, words came to him, as of old—he swallowed them down. He rhymed no more, had sworn not to.
On the point of leaving, Giovanni appeared. He relayed Stramalia’s apologies, praying him to wait but a little longer. The servant faithfully delivered the message but Gravenall had to wonder how the pressing look changed the sense of what was said.
The man kept a respectful distance, and a thought occurred to Gravenall. He invited Giovanni to come closer. He shook his head with a look of dread. His eyes fell upon the form then hurried back to Gravenall’s own gaze. When he made to leave, the guest did not prevent him.
He stood there, feeling an ass, and the waste of his time. He had to admit, though, that he had little else to do and what was his entire purpose at this old pile of stone but to wait? At some indeterminate point, Gravenall had had enough. Other concerns had clearly caught up with his host and he decided he would excuse his “impatience” at dinner. He wondered if he should ask for an explanation in turn when the hairs upon his nape stood to. A cloying odor of aged flesh reached him.
“My apologies for keeping you. I thought you might spend that time usefully. Have you made any verses to her, even just in your head, to occupy the time?
Gravenall could not stop himself from staring. How long must he brook this bizarre obsession? It only reminded him of his vows and their reason, the playful little skeletons in their cases dancing around them. He felt anew the loss of Sincerity, of their son, the exquisite suffering of grief.
“Ah, well,” sighed Stramalia, “I will be much occupied these next days. You will have all the time in the world to create, to amuse yourself with whatever stanzas strike you, perhaps even an epithalamium? One never knows.”
“Is someone here soon to marry, then?” Gravenall caught at this like at driftwood in a shipwreck, some bit of social niceties to save them both.
“I have often pleaded business to excuse my absence and lack of hospitatity, but to tell all, my own nuptials may not indeed be far off and that has necessitated preparations.”
Gravenall expressed his felicitations. Stramalia smirked, a self-satisfied groom-to-be.
“There are those predicting rather my funeral than my wedding, which is of course the obverse of the coin, minted as it is from a mold of wax. We shall see, we shall see.”
***
Putting aside these considerations, he sat in the library at his notebook. Well past the long-ago pages of verse, he copied out his vocabulary exercises, a line here, a paragraph there in an Italian becoming bit by bit clearer to him. In spite of himself, he tried a bit of terza rima and then blacked out the trespass against oath. Cursing himself, he returned to his practice, noticing out of the corner of his eye that the servants still stared with fleeting looks of undecipherable nature, resentment at his suspicions, perhaps. There seemed to be more, however.
When Giovanni entered to build up the fire, Gravenall decided to smooth over relations by a humble request to practice his Italian. With the old man’s assent, he began with simpler phrases of breakfast and dinner, times of the day, then basic needs and duties, with familial relationships.
Measuring himself by the fellow’s replies, Gravenall had clearly progressed, making himself understood and in turn understanding something more than he had even days previously, a world previously, with the innkeeper. Emboldened, he falteringly asked about the figure in the studiolo. Giovanni began to look about, as if anxious to continue with his work. Gravenall reproached himself for keeping the man.
Instead of leaving, the servant spoke again, his tone much lower than before. “The captive lady appeared here back in my grandfather’s day. He told me of it at his knee. He told me that as an unliving creature made of the sacrificed dead, she had power of life and death over those who love her, and those she chooses to love. Her influence is inescapable. They say who gazes upon her must love her and it must be true, for my grandfather witnessed the master’s will, written so that the captive lady inherits all his worldly goods and lands.”
Gravenall doubted his comprehension, or at least suspected that he rather overheard the tales that country people told of what they themselves could not grasp.
Giovanni hurried on. “Since she has not inherited, since she yet lies there and the master lives still, she must love him, for he was, even then, my long-dead grandfather said, much older than he. How old he is now, who can tell? I have attended him since my youth and have never seen him ill, nor did my grandfather, who told me it was her love that did this.”
The man breathed as though relieved of a great load. “I have told you what you must know here. But now I must return to my duties. Forgive me.”
Alone then, Gravenall did not know what to think. Delusion seemed the law of this isolated land, from master down to servant. Even the library, with its freakish treatise was no better than the mind that had collected it. He turned to more rational tomes, to Vesalius for instance, thumbing from last page to first, flipping the gilded edge along until the frontispiece stared him in the eye: a dissection of a gravid woman. He slammed the volume shut, sore tempted to toss it to the flames. A brightening of the room distracted him from following through.
He went to the long windows and saw a brief clearing of the skies would allow for a small turn in the garden.
He inhaled the scent of turned loam and fresh green, along the terraced flower beds. Their inhabitants drooped tightly closed buds against the next onslaught of rain. The topiary interspersed with dripping statues stood impressive and shadowless in the weak light. Gravenall followed the footpaths upwards to a belvedere and sat a moment, surprised that the climb had not defeated him. An overgrown rose bush snaked a branch down one of the sides of the edifice, yet only one of its blooms had survived the assault of the recent downpours. The color of pulsing blood, its petals opened, shy as that sun, perfect in its kind. His lungs surprised him yet again with permission to inhale deeply of its perfume, without his usual staccato descent into suffocation.
He stared at the rose, an idea coming to him. Yet the creature at the top of the stairwell was no creature at all, no sentient woman to cherish a flower. She was merely a form, possessed of no capacity to appreciate a humble gift of a one-time poet. He turned to leave, shaking his head at his foolishness. The decision stood him in good stead, for the skies recommenced with their dismal weeping, gathering momentum as the seconds passed. At the window’s threshold, he thought again, and plunged back under the rain. He reached for the rose, plucked it, and bore it down the maze of hallways until he reached the studiolo.
***
Returning to his rooms to dry off and change his sodden clothes, he found his papers once more disturbed, his trunk open to his notebooks. They may have seemed in place this time, but he had been sure to sprinkle a bit of talcum on them. Fingers had attempted to smudge away the powder of its trace, of their guilt. The imprint, however, remained.
Who then could want to look at the mistakes in his efforts at Italian? Or even more bizarrely, his old letters? Could it be his letters of introduction that tempted someone? He could not figure, nor could his instinct impugn Giovanni.
Before he could long reflect, the dinner bell sounded.
***
“How is your health, my dear Gravenall?’ greeted the Marchese, nibbling fruit that was no fruit. The host took a sip of wine, and turned his mouth down, nodding at the harmony of flavors, his watery eyes fixed on his guest. “And further to that, your writing?”
Was this his intruder after all? The culprit who had riffled through his affairs? For all he pretexted business during the day— with Gravenall occupied by library, spinet, and billiards—it left his host free use of his own chambers.
The guest chose his words carefully and formed his lips round them clearly so as to prevent any and all miscommunication.
“I do not write. I cannot write. I shall not write. I know not what possesses you to keep after me with these requests, with these assumptions, but with all due respect to your hospitality there is no way towards my creating rhymes or whatever verses to satisfy this most single-minded and peculiar preoccupation with my former habits. I must pray you, beg of you even, if I must, to cease with these entreaties, and mention them no more after this.”
“As for that, we shall see.” Stramalia tossed down his napkin to the plate that had not yet been filled, rose, and departed.
***
The following days of absence signaled perhaps the extent of offense Gravenall surmised he had caused, or perhaps his suit to some unfortunate fiancée at whatever distance. He found he did not care— not at all. In fact, the solitude eased his comfort. And the odd part was that rhymes did come to him. They came unbidden, while poring over Sincerity’s letters, yet again.
To thwart them, he decided to put aside the beribboned quire of the past and instead looked to future society by practicing his subjunctive verbs. In those hours and minutes he usually devoted to Sincerity’s words, the rhymes continued to insist their way into his brain in their stead.
He refused to write them out, but they trotted in his head like a mindless melody that would not subside, like this everlasting rain driving him to the brink. Would it be so criminal to jot them down? So very wrong? Just so that they might leave him in peace once and for all?
He set about scribbling a few words of Sincerity’s fair features but all he could see was the figure. He resisted no more and went to her.
**
He arrived in the studiolo to be surprised by his host’s back. He saw his arms gesticulating, his hands in rapid movement. Coming softly closer, he heard him speaking, nay, addressing the form, who lay in front of him without her enclosure.
He made out few words, but sure he did understand at least those: “betrothed” “death” “to live” “poet.”
The old man stormed for all the world like a jealous lover, throwing the rose to the floor with what little force animated him. For despite his rage, Gravenall could sense his growing weakness. No wonder death preoccupied the senescent man, confiding in this figure about his spouse to be when he himself stepped ever closer to the grave.
As if on cue, Gravenall saw his shoulders quake as he dissolved into a coughing fit, more serious even than Gravenall’s own. The guest backed away slowly, sight unseen, out the door and back to his chambers, to ponder the mystifying soliloquy of his host.
***
When Giovanni woke him the next morning, he told him of the master’s absence for the following days, occupying himself with his upcoming wedding. He did not say when they would meet again, but something in the servant’s face went against the grain of his words. As he left, he turned back, and looking at the guest whispered “Beware. What I have told you, remember and beware.”
Once the servant departed, Gravenall took the miniature out of the trunk, Sincerity’s image, the scene with her hair. He thought and thought long, trading it from hand to hand beside the warmth of ire and the rain streaking down on his windowpane, then locked up his papers, keeping the key close in his vest pocket with his dead mistress’s likeness.
He could not help but reflect again on the superstitions that rose from the servants hall, those Giovanni reminded him of. He took the stairs by two steps with each stride.
***
Alone… or not, he could hardly say anymore, he took out the locket and compared the features one with the other, wondering at their similarity. Rhymes beset him. He ignored them to study the figure who, without her glass case, lay before him like an invitation.
Her flesh tones recalled those of the dead woman long ago putrefying beside him, her humors no longer coursing through her to bring the same blush that now lit up the cheek of the form. He looked again at the image of Sincerity, and found less that the figure resembled her than that she resembled the figure.
A stray sunbeam passed through the windowpane and changed the quality of her flesh into a prevailing translucency, tempting the touch. He reached toward her, not even knowing his own intentions.
As he did so, from his brain bubbled up rhymes once more. He could no more forbid them from forming than he could prevent the rhythms of his own breath, a regular respiration he recalled from running with his hoop and cane in short pants to his grandmother who took him to the Lyceum.
Before he could assay the wax against his touch, he drew back his hand, turned, and ran, the rhymes in his head following him all the way to his chambers.
***
He must put them down. He must write, must, or else the rhymes in his mind would drive him out of it. He dipped his pen into ink and began his sonnet, in fact the first sonnet of a cycle laid out in his imagination as though he himself were but a vessel to its eruption on to the page and into being.
Forsworn, apostate, he scribbled and scribbled until the ink blotched and smeared his fingers, dotting the pages sprawled over his desk, one after the other, not so much as a single word crossed out, the lines coming as easily as if another voice were dictating it to him, a woman’s voice, far away but coming closer. On and on he wrote until dark and day again, turning over the first sheets when he had covered over the last with his stanzas. Finally done, as some pallid excuse for sunlight broke through the glass, he sat back in the armchair, spent.
***
Giovanni brought in hot water as well as breakfast, for the Marchese had not shown his face. The servant had no news.
The morning passed with Gravenall in the library browsing titles half-heartedly, too exhausted to make much use of his intellect. Given the night’s exertions, at early afternoon Gravenall retired for a brief rest to put paid to a sleepiness that overcame him. It left his body as soon as he opened the door. For there knelt Stramalia toying with his trunk, indeed raising its lid with some sort of skeleton key in hand. The stench of him, no longer the sickly sweet odor of an ancient body but rather something that filled the room. He saw him fingering Sincerity’s letters then tossing them aside, in search of something, his night’s creation grasped in the knotted knuckles of the old hand.
He nearly struck the man. Only his age and frailty brought Gravenall to reason, seeing the slight frame convulsed with cough. Once the host could speak again, he straightened himself to what height he could attain and summoned, then bid, then pleaded with his guest.
“You must come to see Beatrice,” his small, hoarse voice implored. “You will then understand.”
***
The two men came to her, laid out without her glass, four candles lit as though at the compass winds of cardinal points.
“Now versify!” Stramalia commanded now, instead of beseeching him. Gravenall, however, could but pity him, as the old man forced this pathetic attempt to compel him. “Recite your rhyming words, chant them! I know you have written them. I have seen them and have waited long enough! I shall have these incantations of the dying and their inherent force for life, for my own and for my spouse’s.” He ignored his guest’s stupefaction “First we must wed. We must cleave one to the other and become one flesh, one substance!”
Gravenall thought better of reckoning with the Marchese as he approached the form.
Leaving her face intact, zone by zone Stramalia removed her breasts, her belly, her organs. His hand passed over her, his gestures acting almost as a seduction, as one might remove one’s mistress’s layers of dress to find her womanhood waiting. Above the viscera the form’s beautiful face awaited, expectant.
The poet’s Italian was good enough now to understand his host’s declaration to the form.
“I take thee as my wedded wife to love and honor…”
The master bent to kiss it, when a tide of phlegm and blood overtook his lungs. His body heaved with the effort to grasp air. He gasped, his eyes wide with surprise, even reproach and betrayal. His mouth, opening and closing like a fish just caught from the waters, unable to take in vital fluids. Was it but minutes later that he fell with his full weight upon her then slid to the floor? Or much longer? Gravenall could not tell but when he had gathered himself together from the shock, he went to the old body and put his tiny looking glass under the nostrils. The mirror remained still and serene as a lake surface by fair weather.
The poet reached toward what nested in her open womb, brought it to his breast. With his other hand he replaced the plates of body parts, all the while cradling the little wight. He returned each swathe of tissue to its proper place, restoring her to fullness, reciting all the while his poem, his incantation, he knew not which. The flickering candlelight gave the impression of fluttering eyelids. He placed the mirror under her nose.
Nothing. He didn’t know what he had believed might happen but the mirror remained undisturbed by any trace of respiration.
As if to assuage his grief anew, he cradled the small heft in his arms, calling it by the name its mother chose, whispering “Eleazar” and rocking it as if to sleep. He paid no mind to the sense that the weight grew, that his arms carried not molded wax, but flesh and bone and blood. From this heft broke a lusty cry piercing the poet’s ears with its first breath. He took it from him to see motherblood staining his shirt with its scarlet force.
Cradling it close he bent again to the form. Against expectation, against hope, against even shame, he recited this time the other rhymes, those he also knew by heart, the simple couplets that Sincerity had penned to him in her letters.
And that throat, the vein marbling it, like the course of a rivulet, such as spring brooks after winter melts, began, he thought, unless he had indeed lost his senses, to pulse, he could not help but add “again”. He knew the face staring at him, recognition in her woken eyes.
FIN
"Effigy 1816" first appeared in Masque and Maelström: The Overzealous Reinterment of Edgar Allan Poe, Jessica Augustsson ed., Jay Henge Publishing, 2026.
Image: "Medicean Venus," Clemente Susini at La Specola workshop Florence, Italy (1780–82) (photo © Joanna Ebenstein, courtesy of Museo La Specola, the Natural History Museum of Florence)
If you enjoyed this story and would like to buy me a coffee click here.
.jpg)
Comments
Post a Comment