Chapter 10 #2
“I don’t know much about this either,” said Sarah, and I was glad I wasn’t the only one overwhelmed by all the beauty on display in this vast space. “I’m a book girl, not a gallery girl. Library cards, not museum memberships.”
“Me too,” I said. It occurred to me that here, I wouldn’t be hallucinating any visions of my mother—she hadn’t been a museum-membership type either. More a “My toddler could paint that, and you’re putting it on a wall and charging admission to look at it?” type. I could almost hear her snort.
“Art is for everyone,” the Gallerist said, very much making an Eleventh Commandment out of that statement.
“It is not only for collectors, snobs, experts, college graduates, or the well-informed. If you can see it, touch it, or in any way appreciate it, it is for you. Do not ever let anyone make you feel out of place for looking at a work of art. Canapé?” Waving to a plinth where there sat a silver tray of smoked salmon canapés, mini crab cakes, little quiches, and deviled eggs, and I started laughing because of course.
The Astral Library was replete with book snacks, everything from fresh-baked cookies to finger sandwiches; stuff you’d eat when cozying up with a book—naturally the Astral Gallery was stocked to the skies with food you’d find at a gallery viewing.
I helped myself to a crab cake, took a glass of champagne from the tray next to it because of course there was champagne too in slender crystal flutes, and turned to toast Sarah. “Cheers,” I said.
“I think you’d fit into a Monet landscape nicely,” the Gallerist was telling Stephanie, drawing her little satin-gloved hand through their white-coated elbow.
“Impressionist painting worlds are very gentle, very soothing to the senses. And who doesn’t like a trip to Giverny this time of year?
The hyacinths should be in bloom, and the tulips. ”
“I’ve never been to France,” Stephanie said, looking cautiously anticipatory.
“If you wouldn’t mind staying with the others, Alix,” the Gallerist called to me, drawing Stephanie through a doorway where I could see an entire lily-padded room full of Monets, “I’ll just nip through and get Stephanie settled . . .”
“I’m on it,” I said, saluting with my champagne flute, and felt pleasantly useful as I turned back to the little gang of Patrons. “Come on, ducklings. Let’s find you all paintings to hide out in.”
Larry was easy to place—by the time the Gallerist returned sans Stephanie, trailing the scent of French hyacinths, I was delighted to show them that the boy in the Huck Finn overalls was standing transfixed before a painting of a knight in silvery armor and sweeping red cloak, pale horse champing beneath him.
“What’s the painting?” I asked, fascinated.
The knight’s visor was raised, and he looked tenderly upward at the golden-haired woman in white samite (how often in the ordinary course of life do you get to use a word like samite!) leaning over a castle parapet to tie her favor around his mailed arm.
The colors were as rich as wine, the figures moving ever so subtly: I saw the pale stallion’s ear twitch, the maiden’s gold hair flutter as she leaned forward.
“God Speed by Edmund Blair Leighton,” the Gallerist told me.
“Painted 1900, after the heyday of the Pre-Raphaelites but very much in that style. Often dismissed as being a bit chocolate box, but I’ve always thought of him as a painter with a fine sense of story.
What does it say to you, Larry?” So often that kind of question sounded pretentious, I thought: Does the art speak to you?
followed by a condescending side-eye if your answer wasn’t high-brow enough.
But when the Astral Gallerist spoke those words, they sounded entirely serious and matter-of-fact: Yes, the art is talking; what are you hearing?
And maybe I was a book girl rather than an art girl, but I found I had a new opinion here, fast and firm: art should talk, and it does. These paintings were still stories, after all, just like books. Only the medium of telling the stories was different.
The Gallerist was still waiting on Larry’s answer.
“I—think it’s saying I could go on a quest like a knight?” Larry whispered, still staring at the painting. “I’m not sure I’d want to go around questing all the time, I mean, but I could do it for a little while?”
The Gallerist smiled. “Bien s?r.” And held out an elegant hand.
I hadn’t seen Stephanie enter her Monet garden (where I hoped she was wandering among the hyacinths breathing in a little French peace and listening to the frogs croak on their lily pads) but I watched at Sarah’s side now, enthralled, as the Gallerist took Larry by the hand and simply stepped into the frame of the painting.
A moment of that Impressionist blurring as the colors swirled, and then they were gone and it was just the knight and his damsel.
I took a step forward, hunting among the richly painted figures . . .
“There.” Sarah pointed, and I saw. In the shadow of the castle gate beyond the knight, under the raised portcullis, there had previously been the colorful outlines of more knights marching off into the world outside, vivid-hued pennants on sharp-tipped spears snapping over their heads in the breeze.
Now there was a half-visible figure in white slipping through those serried ranks, and an even less visible figure of a young squire behind them wearing the same colors as the knight on the pale horse.
“He’s off on a quest,” I said softly, feeling my throat get thick. “Have fun storming the castle, Larry.”
“Hope he doesn’t get killed in a siege or eaten by a wyvern before he can go back to Tom Sawyer territory,” Sarah said.
“In a world like that?” I nodded at Leighton’s painting.
“That’s not the real Middle Ages with all the famine and plague and war.
It’s the nicer, prettied-up version where the kings are always good and just, the knights actually fight for the common people instead of crushing them underfoot, and the maidens always get saved before anything horrible happens to them. ”
“You’re a real believer in all this, aren’t you?” Sarah waved a hand, encompassing the Astral Gallery, the Astral Library, the Gallerist and the Librarian—all of it.
“Aren’t you?” I smiled. “You had what looked like a pretty near perfect life in Conan Doyle’s London.”
“Until I learned my husband can maybe still get to me there.” Her face was hard. “What’s the point of these places if they offer sanctuary but can’t actually deliver it?”
“They’re trying,” I said gently. “The Librarian moved you here, didn’t she? Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“It tells me what I already learned from being married to Ty. That you can’t count on anyone.
Including them.” Her voice was rising, nearly a shout.
“In the end, it’s just you. It’s always just you.
” Sarah looked at me, hazel eyes burning hard and bright with betrayal.
“Don’t sell your soul to the Library, Alix.
It’s nothing but a pretty space. It’s not going to look after you, so look out for yourself. ”
“Is that what you’re doing?”
“Yes,” she said without hesitation. “I’d let that entire place burn down, and this one too, if it meant keeping myself safe from Ty.”
I didn’t quite know what to say to that.
I wanted to argue with her for being so self-centered; I wanted to sympathize because I knew what it was to have to be self-centered because no one else was ever going to center you.
I wanted to wipe that hard look off her face, and part of me wanted to do it with a slap and part of me wanted to do it with a hug.
I wanted to tell her she didn’t understand, and I wanted to tell her I understood exactly what she meant.
But I didn’t get a chance to do any of those things, because the Gallerist stepped back out of the Leighton painting, smiling.
“Our last duckling,” they said, looking at Sarah. “I understand you come from the world of Monsieur Conan Doyle, yes? I can place you inside one of the drawings by Sidney Paget if you like; his illustrations ran alongside the stories when they were originally published in The Strand—”
“No,” Sarah said decisively. “If Ty found me in Sherlock Holmes’s world one time, that’s the first place he’d look if he somehow tracked me here.
I need something as far as possible from anything he associates with me.
” She about-faced and did a march down the long line of paintings, looking from frame to frame.
I followed, getting distracted by a wall of Pre-Raphaelite portraits—one of them, I could have sworn, was the Rossetti painting Beau had modeled my blue gown from.
Beau, I thought, even as the dark-haired beauty in the painting saw my dress and gave a tiny approving quirk of a smile, would have been entranced by this place.
“This one,” Sarah said, bringing me out of my brief reverie as she came to a stop in front of a huge, exuberant canvas. “Roman Empire, right? Ty knows I hate Roman Empire stuff. Mostly because he never stopped playing Rome: Total War at top volume when I was trying to sleep.”
I looked at the painting, so big and bright it nearly pulsated with life.
A vast shining city, all columns and porticoes and temples in gleaming white marble, in the full throes of celebration: a parade of soldiers behind a man in a red-purple cloak riding along in state in some huge victory parade.
Betasseled elephants and golden canopies; a queenly woman watching from a dais surrounded by leaping fountains; a harbor thronged by silken-sailed gilt barges; crowds of onlookers in togas and tunics, cheering themselves hoarse beneath the statues of their blind marble gods. Looked like ancient Rome to me.