Chapter 24
There was, somehow, a storm in the painting.
Flowers trembled on their shaded stems, and Vern’s lantern swung on its gilded bracket until the candle flickered out.
Silver smoke dashed from it in scumbled strokes, as though someone had dragged a dry brush across the cottage.
With the flame extinguished and the moon lost beneath layers of thickly painted clouds, Florrie could hardly see the way ahead of her.
Still, she pressed on, shielding her head beneath the broad bells of her sleeves as she checked the cottage and the trees and the various corners of the garden that Vern tended to frequent.
She considered calling his name, but felt loath to summon him if he didn’t want to be found.
Besides, she didn’t imagine he’d hear her over the wind.
Florrie’s skirts billowed beneath her as she crept to the ruins – and she barely had the presence of mind to realise she must look an awful lot like the subject of a classical gale portrait.
Streaks of rain (literal streaks, like the diagonal brushstrokes often used in stormscapes) began to fall, and she could even hear an impossible rumble of thunder.
Would lightning follow, as it always did, even if Ceru’s forged painting featured nothing more than a misty evening sky?
Florrie quickened her pace, tearing through the columns and behind the archway until she reached the same ruined wall Vern had recommended for their use just a short time ago.
By all standards of the genre, it was a most peculiar ruin to include in a portrait. There was, indeed, a flat wall beneath a few crumbling buttresses that supported the bones of a facade that looked like it had once held a rose window.
Cradled in the window’s casing was not tracery and stained glass but Vern himself, his silhouette barely discernible in the darkness. As a flash briefly illuminated the composition, Florrie could see he held his spindle – yet it wasn’t moving. She’d never seen him so solemn and still.
“Vern!” The storm swallowed her cry in an instant.
When Vern did not respond, Florrie sped to the edge of the ruin and began scaling the nearest buttress.
(Thankfully, the fifteenth-century fondness for gently sloping support beams ensured her ascent was less perilous than it might have been.) The wet lichen on the stones scrunched pleasingly under her gloves.
A single bolt of spiky lightning gave her a clear view to the top.
She recalled how a prominent historian had once proposed that the perfectly diagonal, stylised lines of lightning in stormscapes weren’t quite accurate representations of the phenomenon.
Regardless of its naturalism, the bolt seemed to startle Vern to life.
“Florrie?” he called, reaching to pull her up. “Oh, please be careful!”
Florrie took his hand and shimmied along the stone support, clinging to its corbelled sides until she joined him in the ruined window.
“May I sit with you?” she asked. “Or would you prefer to be by yourself?”
Vern inclined his head, which was a frustratingly vague answer. Florrie did not, however, have a chance to ask him again, because then he was in her arms – and he was sobbing.
Seeing someone else – Vern, of all people – so distressed felt like watching herself from the outside. She could imagine how his throat ached as he breathed so roughly, and the way his shoulders must feel, like they were about to collapse, but she didn’t know how to alleviate any of it.
Consequently, Florrie simply held on.
She didn’t know how long they had balanced there on the ruin. It was long enough, though, that the thunder had diminished into a quiet rumble and the rain had become a stippled drizzle.
Vern raised his head at last. The rain had plastered his curls to his forehead, and more water – or tears – trembled on his pale eyelashes.
“I’m so sorry, Florrie,” he gasped in a wavering voice. “I don’t think I can do it.”
“You needn’t apologise.” She stroked the side of his cheek. “I ought to be the one apologising. I should have said something to Ceru, but I couldn’t quite speak up…”
“No, it’s not that, it’s merely…” Vern tucked his head against the soft wool collar of Florrie’s dress as he gathered his thoughts.
“When I pictured leaving the painting,” he eventually continued, “I thought it would be like opening a door. Simple and final. Perhaps a little bittersweet, at first, but the rewards – the gift of being out there, with you – seemed to outweigh any sadness I’d feel.
As it turns out, that’s not exactly what happened. ”
“That’s only natural,” said Florrie. “You know every flower and star and fallen stone! This is your home.”
“I wish it were that simple,” he murmured. “That I was merely leaving my home. But, Florrie, when Ceru said… When he said he wanted to – to…”
He opened his mouth and shut it again, as though he needed to speak words that were physically impossible to utter.
“Destroy the painting?” Florrie supplied, gently.
“Yes,” Vern said with a shudder. “When he said it – well, it was the most peculiar thing. I suddenly felt ill. Like I could barely stand. And in my mind – you won’t believe it, but…”
“Tell me. Please.” She could immediately identify the feeling she was now experiencing – the sudden relaxation of her shoulders and fists, the slowing of her racing pulse – as relief.
“It was like a great scream only I could hear. The most awful sound you could imagine. Then I came over here, and, well…” Vern gestured to the sky. “You’ve noticed the change, I’m sure. I’ve experienced my first storm! That’s certainly never happened before.”
“Why, it must be the essence of the painting!” Florrie exclaimed. “That consciousness Ceru described when we were at Lord Mauve’s. Wouldn’t that explain everything? This enchanted entity, whom you’ve felt looking after you – you felt its terror, didn’t you?”
“I wish it were even that simple.”
Before Florrie could continue developing her argument about the painting’s essence, Vern ducked out of her embrace and rose to his feet. As she watched, rapt, he scaled the nearest gable and balanced on its fern-shaped finial.
“What in the world are you doing?” she exclaimed, but he simply smiled. Then he leaned to one side, turned up his chin and held out his hand to the elements – just as Lord Mauve did in the original painting.
The wind calmed into a mere zephyr. The rain vanished.
“When I heard that scream,” Vern proclaimed, his voice resounding through the garden, “I understood everything. My entire life, as it happens. The reason why I can’t leave the painting is because it’s part of me.”
“The painting’s part of you?” Florrie echoed.
“Well, in a manner of speaking. It’s all connected, and it’s all me and I’m all it – and that’s why I’m afraid.”
His voice broke, and Florrie could see even from her low vantage point that he was about to start weeping again. As the rain had stopped and the stones were slightly less treacherous, she climbed up to join him.
Vern lifted her onto the enormous finial, which felt delightfully transgressive – the Conservators’ Code was also extremely strict about the recreational climbing of architecture. She took his hands, hoping his trembling wouldn’t send them both flying off the ruin.
“What are you afraid of?” she asked.
“That we’re impossible,” Vern said. “You and me. It was unbelievable enough that you could love someone trapped in a painting—”
“Yet I do!”
“And that is wonderful, Florrie, the most wonderful thing imaginable, but, as it happens, I’m not trapped here. I’m not just a Fairy in a painting. Somehow, against all possible reason, I… well, I think I am the painting.”
There was, Florrie knew, an exceedingly popular thirteenth-century style known as gold-ground figuration.
In such portraits, thin sheets of gold leaf were lovingly applied to the background of the painting before the rest of the scene was painted – giving the impression that the figure was surrounded by an aureate glow.
The Resolute Portrait of Vibrant Lord Vernal Mauve Among the Ruins was not an example of gold-ground figuration, but Florrie suspected even the most distinguished connoisseur could be fooled by the current state of this painting.
Gestural strokes of starlight swept in from above, highlighting Vern with an amber gleam that shimmered from his hair to his boots.
As he shone, flowers sprouted from the cracks in the ruins and leaned towards him, drawn in like he was the sun.
The soft spirals of the wind spun around his hair, the clouds feathered out to form a gradient with the heavens, and Florrie just watched – observed, inspected, scrutinised, evaluated – while feeling so overcome that she could hardly breathe.
“Oh, Vern,” she whispered. “Don’t you know that I love the painting?”
She felt the distinctive softness of a petal brush against her glove and glanced down to see a tawny blossom emerging from the nearest stone.
It was, she realised, a Wise One’s Tower – or a painterly facsimile of one, with rose-gold dots and lines sufficient to suggest the staircase and the turrets and the crenellations.
Florrie removed her glove, extended her fingers and let the familiar flower bloom into her hand.
“Since the moment I first fell through that frame, I’ve loved being here,” she continued. “If all this – this wonderful, beauteous place – happens to be you… well, in an odd way, I understand that.”
“It doesn’t feel like a burden?”
Florrie left the flower to its flourishing and looked right into Vern’s eyes. This time she could glimpse the vague, colourful reflections of the blooms around them.
“No,” Florrie said. “It feels like a refuge.”
She wrapped her arms around the curve of Vern’s waist and held on as he lowered them both to sit on the small gutter extending from the pinnacle.