Chapter Three
Three
Henry strode into the library to meet the painter, carrying his walking stick, because when he posed for the portrait, he would need something to do with his hands.
The usual scents of wood wax and that curious vanilla of old printed pages had been replaced by a sharp scent that filled his nostrils.
“Good morning, Your Grace,” Wilke said, from where he stood in front of an easel. He was a bear of a man, his face partially concealed by a thick brown beard. The week before, he had rolled up the colorful carpet and had spread heavy cloths under the east-facing windows.
Henry walked over and surveyed the tins, brushes, rags, and tubes on the floor. “What is that malodorous…odor?”
“Turpentine, Your Grace,” Wilke said, pointing to an open jar. “Take care not to knock it over. It’s very flammable.”
Henry stiffened. “What? There are over a thousand books in here!” He’d collected many of them himself; rare volumes, and seminal works of natural philosophy. “Would you have it all go up in blazes, like the library of Alexandria?”
“I store everything in your root cellar when I’m not working,” the painter said implacably. He held out a hand toward the canvas. “Would you like to see what I’ve done so far?”
Disgruntled, Henry stepped around to look at the canvas—and then took in a sharp breath of astonishment. In the center of it, he was depicted as a gray, vaguely man-shaped cloud, with a few thin outlines in red. But the backdrop of his study was recreated in paint in stunning detail.
The window with the velvet curtain pulled to one side, revealing the countryside under a gray sky.
The many books, of course, and those curiosities that Charlotte had arranged among them.
The ancient red-and-black vases from Greece.
A globe of the moon, with all its known features: the Sea of Serenity, the Sea of Tranquility.
Even the deck of cards on a low shelf had made it into the picture.
Hopefully, no one would take that to mean he was a gambling man.
Charlotte had enjoyed the solitary card game of Patience, and Henry had not touched the deck after her death.
On its stand on the table, in real life and in the canvas, sat his beloved astrolabe. Charlotte had once suggested this very place would be a fine backdrop for a portrait, and he had to admit now that she’d been right.
“You have made remarkable progress,” Henry admitted. He couldn’t help but feel that the unfinished painting had already revealed him…as a specter, haunting his own home.
“Thank you, Your Grace. What is that brass device, anyway?” Wilke asked, nodding toward the astrolabe in its stand. “It looks like a clock with its face off.” He picked up a paint tube and squeezed a small cylinder of white paint onto his palette.
“I suppose it does,” Henry said. The round astrolabe was the size of a dinner plate and not much thicker, its mechanisms unfamiliar to the modern eye. “Let me show you how it works.” He reached for it.
“No!” the artist said.
Henry’s head shot up at the man’s impertinence, and Wilke grimaced. “Your pardon, Your Grace, but nothing may be moved until I am finished. If you would be so good as to stand behind the table, near that device…?”
“Of course.” Swallowing his annoyance, Henry took his place and stared down at the astrolabe. “I was about to say that this is several hundred years old…older than any clock. But instruments like these are the reason that clocks go clockwise.”
Wilke frowned and shook his head. “Clocks don’t go backward because time doesn’t go backward.”
The comment sent a pang of yearning through Henry’s chest. Not yet, he thought.
“But how do you know that left is backward?” he asked, and was gratified to see the artist open his mouth to answer and shut it again. “This was used for many things, including identifying the stars in the sky.”
“They can’t have known much about the stars back then,” Wilke said, swirling bits of red and ochre into the white with his palette knife.
“They did not have the vast knowledge we have now,” Henry allowed. “Only a few suspected that the Earth revolves around the sun. But they knew what they could see with the naked eye. And they knew that the Earth spins on its axis.”
The artist lifted his head to stare at Henry for a moment as though studying an object, then lowered his head again and added a touch of black to the mixture, graying the pale tone. Henry was aware that his complexion had grown duller over the last couple of years.
Then Wilke turned away to draw back another curtain, asking, “What do you use the astrolabe for, Your Grace?”
“Ah, well. Chiefly, I admire its craftsmanship. But it can also be used to deduce your longitude and latitude, or the hour and the day. Of course, for us, it’s a simple matter to know where we are in time and space.”
The instrument had been a gift from his late wife, and speaking of it filled him with longing. He resisted the urge to pick it up, after all.
But it couldn’t hurt to touch it…
As soon as he did, his vision blanked.
The floor was no longer under his feet. His senses spun; his stomach lurched. Had he fainted, after all, from the turpentine?
No, he was still standing, but hunched over, leaning heavily on the walking stick still in his grip. Some beast, some hellhound, roared.
He opened his eyes and looked around him.
This was not his library.
The yellow room had an oversize, overstuffed chair and sofa as well as a dining table with four wooden chairs. A hunting dog trotted over to him and put his paws on his knee, his tongue lolling out of his open mouth.
What just happened?
Where in God’s name was he?
A half-naked woman with sandy-brown curly hair emerged from a side doorway, a glass of red wine in her hand, singing out in a high voice, “What’s the matter, buddy?”
Her generous thighs and shapely calves were on full display. A sack-like, oddly printed garment could not conceal the shape of her full, unencumbered breasts, and it barely covered her fairest flower. Henry’s mouth fell open, staring at the wanton nymph.
In the next moment, her gaze fell on him. She jumped like a frightened cat and let out a deafening shriek that made him stumble back a step.
Then she threw the contents of her wineglass at him, soaking his face and white shirt.
“What are you doing here?” she screamed at him. She was plainly terrified, but Henry was enraged by her affront and the shock of it all.
He thundered back, “Where am I?”
Her fine, expressive blue eyes widened as she looked him up and down. Then her countenance brightened with—excitement? Disbelief? She covered her mouth with her hands.
“Oh my Goddess,” she murmured. “It’s you.”