Chapter Twenty-Nine
Nicole
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE MUSE’S APARTMENTS WERE SO WELL warded and varnished Nicole had no memory of what the front looked like until she and Remi were unlocking an ornate, pale green door. They entered into a triple-height stairwell that curved up to a landing on the right.
The walls were papered in olive with tiny details in its design: amber vines and star-white flowers, delicate wine-dark birds in various stages of flight, repeating their routes all the way up to the ceiling.
There was gold leaf too, lambent and bewitched, catching light from the extravagant guttering lantern above, and the stained-glass windows that cast coloured light over the staircase.
It was like the bowers written of by the Romantics.
‘Okay, I want to live here,’ Remi whispered.
Kyan had told them where to go and what to do – unable to be seen joining them. Nicole wished he was here, even just to give them more of an idea of what they were walking into.
‘Don’t let her unnerve you,’ he’d instructed when giving Nicole the key. ‘Everything she says has a purpose, even if it sounds like nonsense.’
‘Double meanings.’ Nicole nodded, taking it in. What was her life if not double meanings, codes, and secrets?
‘If you’re not out in an hour, I’ll get inside.’
She smiled now at his parting words, and began the journey up stairs.
Anticipation danced through her stomach like the wingbeats of the mural’s birds. She was about to meet another supernatural. One who should have more information about her mother and the next step in this quest.
The top of the staircase met a mezzanine, then another set of steps to the right, where the door to the Muse’s apartments waited.
‘Ready?’ Nicole asked Remi as they reached a set of rosewood doors.
Remi merely smirked and Nicole laughed softly.
She knocked the way Kyan had shown her, so the Muse would know it was him or someone she could trust. Then Nicole slid the key in the lock – a part of her twisting with unease that the woman had been imprisoned in this way – and pushed open the doors.
Nicole immediately scanned for danger, her senses spearing through the art-choked room.
It was a lengthy, wide rectangle filled with luxuries. Directly before them was a sitting area with large bay windows to the right which overlooked the city and Liver buildings. Across was an archway with folded open mahogany doors that led into more rooms and another wall of windows.
But it was the details that stole her attention: a pearl-pink and bronze throw, as lucent as liquid metal over a luxurious silk couch.
A floral gold screen Nicole had no doubt was a real William Morris.
Flowers overflowed in all sorts of vases or crystal jars, some gently rotting and filling the warm air with a cloying, heady perfume.
Roses for undying love, peonies for compassion, all flowers depicted in Pre-Raphaelite paintings.
Easels stood proud and paint-smeared, as if waiting for a new canvas, and empty gold frames and half-finished paintings of red-haired beauties were stacked against walls.
‘Hello?’ Nicole called. She secured the door behind them and slipped the key into the back of her jeans. ‘Kyan McCarter let us in, we need to speak with you.’
‘I don’t hear anyone,’ Remi murmured, as she moved over to a long dresser to the left, full of treasures. ‘Are you sure she’s in here?’
If she wasn’t, they were in a lot of trouble.
Remi’s fingers hovered over a silver-handled mirror, then danced above a selection of ceramic pomegranates, their deep pink and red skins done in a glaze, split open to reveal an interior crust of tiny jewels.
Large, elaborate birdcages with taxidermised birds was another repeating image, and even living butterflies whose wings moved so lazily Nicole worried that they were near exhausted death.
She looked at the windows, wondering if she could open them a crack so they could escape, only to realise they were painted shut in a deep forest green. Even the walls were papered in murals that shimmered, as if alive.
‘An Art Witch made it,’ came a low, sensual voice from the archway. ‘Used Chinese mirror silk.’
Nicole turned to find the immortal beauty of the Pre-Raphaelites standing silently in the archway.
Her robe had puffed sleeves and silken cuffs, all in a shimmering olive fabric, finely embroidered with tiny burgundy and navy flowers. Silk rose slippers peeked out from the floor-length hem.
But it was her face, her presence, that struck Nicole into silence.
A dreamy beam of sunlight transformed her red hair into a gleaming copper flame.
It cascaded in Botticelli-like curls over her shoulders to her waist. Nicole wanted to describe her desperately, to save her forever in her mind.
To sketch her – no, paint. To try and capture the colours.
The pale cream of her skin and the exact shade of her hair.
My god, if she didn’t get it right she might go crazy—
She wanted to stare for the rest of her life.
To understand every otherworldly detail.
How the Muse’s features were so strange but together so world-altering in their beauty.
The longer nose. The deeply undulating lips, full and voluptuous, as if someone had taken a paintbrush and languidly, lovingly, crafted them.
And her large eyes. There was no guile there, no sharpness, only a world to fall into …
She felt a touch on her arm. Warm, soft, but firm. Then the gentle dig of nails.
Remi.
Nicole startled and blinked, realising she’d been staring and spiralling.
The Muse’s face didn’t change, and yet she could feel the woman smiling at her.
‘I – we’d—’ Nicole began, but her mouth felt stuffed with cotton.
‘Lures don’t work quite the same on other lure-creatures,’ Remi said, aiming a warning look at the beauty. She didn’t seem as fazed by the supernatural who saturated the very air in the room.
A warm flush of embarrassment spread up Nicole’s neck, and she took a moment to recalibrate as the Muse’s eyes floated to Remi.
‘You must forgive me, I won’t play so much.’
As if a tidepool slowly stilled and stopped its drugging tug, the Muse dampened herself somehow. Nicole felt herself restabilise. Part of her was grateful, the other part deeply sad.
‘So,’ the Muse said, in an almost haunting monotone that hummed through Nicole’s bones. ‘Kyan has sent me two artists. How wonderful. Will you sing while she paints?’
Nicole cleared her throat. ‘No. We’re not here to paint, we’re here because my mother left a message with you and we need your help. Her name was—’
‘Freya,’ the Muse answered. She examined Nicole for a searing moment before slowly sinking into a Louis XIV armchair, its fabric lambent as gold leaf. She gestured with the merest waft of her pale fingers for them to take seats on the ornate couch opposite.
Nicole sidestepped closer and sank down as Remi joined her.
‘Yes,’ Nicole said. ‘You knew her?’
‘Oh, Freya was instrumental in helping underground women’s painting societies until they were able to announce themselves to the fragile male minds of the time.
Heaven forbid a woman puts paint to canvas …
Yet it was the men who were so feverish in their expressions, their passions, that many of the poor human girls could not survive their mad affections: like dearest Elizabeth. ’
She looked away for a long moment. Her glorious features were almost unmoving, but a sort of eternal bleakness entered her eyes.
‘Did you know that was her name?’ she continued.
‘Elizabeth Siddal. Millais kept her in a bathtub to serve as his drowning Ophelia until she got pneumonia. I could survive their single-minded quests for beauty, she did not. I made sure the other girls did.’ She raised her delicate chin to a painting on the mantel Remi had lingered over.
A Black woman, nude and depicted as a Siren on a seashore, her skin radiant, her textured hair strung with pearls, a spill of shells and treasure making up the glinting beach beneath her.
‘Who was she?’ Remi asked.
‘One of the lesser-known human muses of the Pre-Raphaelites, Fanny Eaton. She escaped their clutches, thankfully. Last I heard, she’d lived a long life, far away from here.’
‘That’s why you drove the artists mad,’ Remi realised, understanding shading her tone. Nicole thought of the terrible and tragic lives of many of those painters and the women who had been their lovers, wives, muses.
The Muse’s eyes slid to her best friend. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
A lie. That must have been why Kyan was sent to hunt her all those years ago.
‘I was their Lamia; their poisoner. Their Circe who turned men to pigs and Aphrodite who bent the will of men so they could no longer be held responsible for that curse called lust. Their Helen and Lilith and Eve, capable of damning civilisations with nothing more than beauty and temptation. Or their Nymphs, those dreamy secret-keepers. But my powers did not make them do anything; their own hunger and greed did. What happened to them was their own artifice.’
She looked over the city.
‘But what is history, if not the long script of blame placed on a woman’s body?
What is beauty, but the revealer of the viewer’s evil?
How it draws out jealousy. Unwanted desire.
Obsession. Madness. Beauty is a powerful unmasker, and yet the one who reacts to the beauty is never damned …
So now I am here. Trapped … as if in a house of water. ’
Like she was slowly drowning.
‘I’m sorry,’ Nicole said, her chest tight, a hot pool of anger rippling in her gut. She saw the same pain reflected in Remi’s eyes. ‘If there’s anything we can do—’
‘You can paint me, young mythographer. But first, there’s the matter of Freya’s present. If you get me something, I’ll give it to you.’
‘Get you what?’ Nicole asked. ‘A gift?’ Nicole dug out the list of items her family could give and Kyan had offered.
‘No gift. A flower.’
Nicole blinked.
‘I’m waiting for the catch,’ Remi said, her suspicions back.
Something like a smile flickered on the Muse’s iconic mouth. ‘That’s all I can tell you, I’m afraid. It’s glass. And I want it back.’
A – a flower?
A glass flower.
It wasn’t what she’d expected, and Nicole found herself strangely disappointed. She’d never heard of anything like it before. Was there something in the museum? Perhaps the gallery?
‘Did someone take it from you?’ Nicole asked, reaching into her satchel to pull out her notebook. ‘Who? When?’
The Muse laughed a single breathy note, despite the fact Nicole realised the woman wasn’t breathing at all.
‘I’m afraid I cannot say more. You must be tested, after all.
This knowledge cannot be handed out to just anyone.
Some powerful Empyreals can change their faces.
’ Her eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly.
‘You may just look like Freya. Kyan may have been deceived into giving you my key. Thus, a true mythographer’s daughter should be able to figure out Freya’s masterpiece in blood. ’
A prickle of anticipation danced along the back of Nicole’s neck at the phrasing.
Not only did it mean they were in the right place, but the blood in the portrait was what was tying this mystery together. Based on the Muse’s use of the term ‘mythography’, that meant the clue must be hidden in art.
So, was this flower painted?
‘How do we know you’ll give us what we came for?’ Remi asked.
A flash of anger like a sudden blot of amber daubed in the Muse’s eyes. ‘Because I have always protected the secrets of artists. But this one – it’s like a butterfly, battering itself against a window. I worry it will soon break against the glass.’
Nicole frowned. Was she worried that the secret, if not shared, would die? Be lost to time?
‘Thank you,’ Nicole said, rising.
‘May the Túatha Dé guide you.’
Remi stilled as Nicole did, and Nicole turned with a question in her eyes.
The Muse’s head tilted slowly in interest. ‘The Túatha Dé are the gods of the arts, after all. Did your father not tell you the old stories?’ The Muse made a disapproving sound, before offering something as if from nowhere. ‘For Freya.’
Nicole blinked at the delicate poppy, its blood-red petals thin and silky. ‘Thank you,’ she said, taking it gently.
‘And, my girl, do not resist the temptation so much. Too much longing is bad for the heart.’ She tapped her own with a whisper-soft pat, her nails long and perfectly pointed. ‘Indulgence is one of the pleasures of being alive. And, love—’ She almost sighed. ‘One of the purest.’
There was no smile on her face, only the glint in her eyes: a type of dark wakefulness. How much she saw, but didn’t get to see.
‘Oh, and if you find my flower, and I send you back on your way with your treasured information, come back when it’s all over. I’ve been waiting for someone to send me a new painter.’
When they reached the bottom of the stairs and opened the door, the fresh warm air and brightness of the street nearly made Nicole wince. She felt the wards tug as they stepped out.
‘I want to let her out,’ Nicole said quietly.
‘I know, me too,’ Remi said. ‘Maybe once this is over, once—’
Once the Wake is gone, Remi meant. Maybe then the Muse could be free. Maybe she could live with Verin and Elisabetta. But would that not be another cage? Another ‘house of water’ for her to quietly drown in? The strange phrase turned around in Nicole’s mind as she nodded in agreement.
But with this vague mystery and the ticking clock of the Wake’s awareness, she wasn’t sure she saw a way to get there.
When Nicole’s fingers met the cool, elaborate handle of the Muse’s forgotten townhouse and pulled it shut, the snick of the lock sounded too much like the breaking of a neck.