When the King Comes Home Read online

  “Anywhere. But I just had the walls done last summer, so leave them alone. The floor is slate. That will do.”

  If there is one thing every artist’s apprentice learns, it is that the hardest shape to draw is a perfect circle. But I was not an apprentice yet. I had no training, and so I did not know enough to worry about my circle. I was an ignorant girl, rawboned and ill-mannered, face hot with embarrassment over my father’s pride in me.

  So I knew no better than to sit cross-legged at Madame Carriera’s feet. I found a spot that looked right to me, and I drew a chalk circle about nine inches in diameter on the well-scrubbed slate tiles.

  She inspected the circle in silence. When she spoke at last, she sounded so gloomy that I looked up, fearful that I had done something irretrievably wrong. “It isn’t a perfect circle.”

  I tilted my head and studied it from a fresh angle. “No? But it looks perfect.”

  “Draw me another.”

  Her gloom had shaken my confidence, and my second circle wobbled. “Would you like me to try again?”

  “No.” She helped me to my feet. “That will do. You are willing to serve your apprenticeship with me? It is seven years, Hail.”

  “You still want me? Even though the second circle was crooked?”

  “It is only on the strength of your second circle that I am willing to take you at all. If all your circles were like your first, you’d have nothing to learn from the likes of me.”

  “But even the first one wasn’t perfect.”

  “Perfection abides in heaven, child. It looked perfect, that’s what matters. Reason tells us there must be some flaw, though our eyes cannot perceive it. What is reason but a rumor? It is our eyes we trust.” To Father, she said, “If she applies herself, and if she behaves herself, I will instruct her for seven years. And then we shall see.”

  TWO

  (In which I begin to work in the atelier of Madame Carriera.)

  When first I learned to grind pigment for Madame Carriera, I fretted to make the brilliant colors. Vermilion, orpiment, ultramarine—to me the very sound of their names held magic. But her old-fashioned methods won out. Long before I ground my first sinopia, I understood that all colors, be they never so exotic, fall far below the king and queen of pigments: black and white.

  Eventually I learned to find merit in the subtler colors—ocher, umber, staniel—and perhaps because I had brought it with me all the way from home, and because it was the first pigment I learned to grind, I grew to like earth of cullen best of all.

  On my first day in Madame Carriera’s service, I asked her why it was not earth of Neven, since the pigment came from Neven, not from Cologne.

  Madame Carriera fixed me with a keen glance. “When you are famous for your use of it, you may call it earth of Neven, if you wish. You may call it Rosamer brown, if you wish. You may even call it ultramarine, if the whim strikes you and you think anyone will pay attention. Not yet a while though, girl.”

  “But it’s from Neven.”

  “So are you. Yet you are living in Aravis now. While you are in my service, under my roof, you will call it earth of cullen. Is that clear?”

  “You give it the wrong name, and you don’t use my name at all, just ‘girl’ or ‘child,’ like you were calling a dog. I am in your service, and very grateful to be so, yet I’m not the only girl here. How will I know you are addressing me if you don’t call me by my proper name?”

  “‘Hail’ can hardly be considered a proper name. What was your father thinking of, naming you so?”

  “He was glad to see me, when I was born. So was Mother. It’s my name, and if you keep calling me ‘girl,’ I’m not going to answer.”

  “I shall call you what I please, baggage. If you don’t like it, you can go home.”

  “My parents want you to instruct me. If I am to use the wrong words for things just because you tell me so, I think they’d rather I went home.”

  Madame Carriera studied me, eyes hooded. “Ocher.”

  I thought it over. “Yes, Madame. Ocher.”

  “You’ve plenty of the stuff left to grind.”

  “Yes, Madame.”

  “Get back to work, then. Girl.”

  “Yes … Madame.”

  “That will do. Finish that, and I’ll show you the proper way to clean my brushes.”

  “Yes, Madame.”

  There were three apprentices in Madame Carriera’s workshop when I joined: Gabriel, Saskia, and Piers. As long as we worked well together, we did not have to get along. Yet often we did.

  Gabriel was the most advanced apprentice, glad to be able to lord his own ability over us. He and his friends often modeled for each other. If you have ever seen a pouting Dionysus languish doe-eyed, his dark curls as rich and glossy as the grapes he holds, you have seen Gabriel. If he wasn’t the actual model, he might as well have been. He was nearly as beautiful as he thought he was.

  Saskia was next in age and ability—well able to size a panel or stretch a canvas. She preferred to work in metal. Luckily, Madame Carriera was an old-fashioned taskmistress. She believed that we must learn all the skills proper to an artist, and that included metal smithing. Saskia had profited by her training so well that she could not only paint portraits but craft the settings. Her particular delight was in medallion portraiture, such as one sees on classical coins. Her taste was for things severe and aquiline, very refined. Except for her red hair (and the temper that so often accompanies it), she looked more like a cherub than anyone I have ever known, very rosy and cozy and round. Most deceptive.

  Piers, a year younger than I, came next. He had the temperament which ought to have accompanied Saskia’s cherubic looks. I had often wished for a younger brother, and Piers would have thus suited me admirably. He had sparkly eyes and rough brown hair, with a tuft that stuck up at the crown of his head like a little handle. At first I thought I was the only one who sometimes had the urge to yank that lock of hair. As I grew to know Madame Carriera and her apprentices better, I realized almost everyone had that urge. No wonder Piers was so nimble. He had to be.

  It was lucky that Piers was good-natured, because it made it hard to be envious of him for long. Everyone had to envy him at least once a day, because Piers had art—high, true, unequivocal art—born in him. People sometimes speak kindly of my line. Well they may, for I have worked hard at my line and at times I produce works that nearly please me. Yet my line is nothing in comparison with Piers’s, and his line was the least of his virtues.

  Gabriel, Saskia, and Piers could all copy Madame Carriera’s style without difficulty. I was ordered to learn the same, but it seemed strange to me.

  “I haven’t perfected my own style yet,” I explained to Piers and the others. “How can I learn someone else’s without influencing my own?” I was careful not to utter such heresy in Madame Carriera’s hearing.

  “You don’t have a style,” Saskia said. “You’re not supposed to. You’re here to help Madame Carriera. It’s her style that matters.”

  “Are there many trees in Neven?” Piers asked solicitously.

  Piers had never cared for my stories of home and family before. His abrupt interest made me wary. “Yes, lots. Why?”

  “I thought there must be. If your style’s been influenced, that’s probably where the influence came from—all that wood.”

  It was inevitable that the other apprentices would tease me. I was a newcomer; I expected it. Indeed, with four older brothers, I was well prepared. For the first few days, Piers and Saskia had busied themselves sewing my pillow and my sheet together. They soon wearied of these mild entertainments. Gabriel preferred pranks that interrupted my studies, such as putting sand into my ocher. It was tiresome, but I held my peace.

  After grinding pigment, the next task I learned was pouncing. A pounce bag is a soft cloth sack filled with charcoal ground to the finest powder. Pat the pounce bag on any surface, the result is a puff of charcoal.

  The patterns our workshop used were m
ade of stiff paper, each line of the drawing pricked out with a needle until it was a string of little holes, which, once vigorously pounced, left a delicate line of charcoal dots upon the surface beneath. Pin, say, a pattern for the Magdelene’s draperies, or St. John the Baptist’s feet, against the laboriously prepared ground of a fresh panel, pounce until the arm wearies, and remove the pattern. The essential line, whether of draperies or of feet, is there on the panel, waiting for the more detailed drawing to begin.

  The pattern should then be shaken and brushed to recover as much charcoal dust as possible and the sheet folded away until the next Magdelene or John the Baptist is required. When the drawing on the panel is finished, all but the lightest trace of charcoal must be brushed away, lest it spoil the pigment to come. Pick out the traces in ink, let the last of the charcoal be removed, and you are ready for an ink wash to be laid down, the first truly irrevocable step in the painting.

  The more detailed the drawing, the more experienced the apprentice who worked on the panel. Madame Carriera would sometimes do the most demanding under-drawing herself, removing lines she did not like with a flick of a crow’s feather, putting in halftones and darker shadows with a stick of charcoal rubbed to a fine point with sandpaper.

  I pounced too hard at first and made the air thick with charcoal dust. I pounced too lightly after that, until Piers showed me better. I pounced very well for a short time, until Gabriel took the bag away from me and pushed it down the back of my gown. Saskia helped me extricate it, then hurled it at Gabriel as he made for the door. The mark it left on his best shirt, square between his shoulder blades, was a tribute to the keenness of Saskia’s eye and the strength of her arm.

  It was as well the paper pattern had not yet been unpinned and that it was there to protect the surface of the panel, for quite a lot of things in the room were pounced before order was restored.

  It took devoted study and much trial and error, but in a year’s time I had mastered all the elementary tasks of the workshop. I could grind pigment into the characteristic colors of Madame Carriera’s palette and lay those colors in the proper order on an immaculately prepared palette in the shades and shadows she preferred. Years it had taken her to learn the techniques that she had mastered, to use them to bring her ideas and vision to the blank perfection of the panel.

  “Who were you apprenticed to?” I asked her once, when I was bored with cleaning brushes. “Who taught you?”

  “My father trained me.” Madame Carriera’s sharp eyes softened. “In his apprenticeship, he served Troilus of Vienna, who was a great deal more demanding of his apprentices than I am. You’re allowed to grind pigment from the apothecary. Father and the other children in Troilus’s atelier had to learn the very stones of the earth to find the proper ingredients for their colors.”

  “I know earth of cullen,” I reminded her. “I don’t see the point, though. Why go digging in the dirt, looking for shades of brown, when the apothecaries have material from all over the world? It’s much faster to find the whole palette at the apothecary shops.”

  “There’s more to craft than making haste. Clean the big hog bristle brush again—do it slowly this time, and perhaps I won’t make you repeat the process.”

  “I suppose they had to make their own brushes too.”

  “No, but that’s a good idea. Make yourself a hog bristle brush like that one, good and big. I’ll give you a week before I ask to see it.”

  “Of course it would be a big hog bristle brush I’m ordered to make.”

  “Don’t mutter. Hog bristle is easy to come by. I could have been stern and ordered you to make a brush of miniver—you could buy a herd of pigs for what that would cost you.”

  Of all the lessons Madame Carriera set me, I found imitating her style to be the hardest of all. Grinding pigments, blending the colors with oil to make paints and glazes, even binding hog bristles, stiff as wire, into a brush, I managed. To see as Madame Carriera saw, to yield my line to hers, that was difficult.

  It was like learning a language for which I had no aptitude. I had to give up my way of thinking, order my sense of line and shape to another kind of vision.

  It was that long space after trying in earnest to learn that was the hardest, a long cold empty time of fearing I was unable to muster such skills, of feeling shame at my ineptitude, my ignorance. Some birds can sing, some birds cannot. I feared that my skill was limited and that I had come near to the end of it.

  Saskia encouraged me. Piers gave me all the help he could. Even Gabriel showed pity, forbearing to tease me for long weeks as I ruined panel and paper, reduced to scratching on a slate to keep from wasting materials for no reason. I grew sad and seemed always to have a sniffle, if not a complete cold. I parted my hair in the center and pulled it back into a braid so tight it made my eyebrows look surprised. I prayed and lit candles and gave up dancing. It was like a never-ending Lenten season, all striving and no assurance of Easter.

  Then one day I held my wrist a different way, made some invisible adjustment to the way my charcoal met the slate. The line I drew looked more like Madame Carriera’s than my own. The next attempt was better, the third better still. In a few days, I was back at ink washes, and this time I could see the shades of gray as she might see them, shape them in her manner. Long and long it took, before I could see her colors as I saw her monotones. I had patience for the struggle. I had learned a few words of her visual language. I could structure them as she did. I knew, at least, I could learn. The joy that knowledge gave me made my confidence soar. If I could learn a little, I could learn it all.

  The days, which had seemed so burdensome and long, grew too short to contain all I wished to do. I combed out my hair and let it float in a dark unruly cloud down my back. Piers pulled it now and then, repaying me for the times I couldn’t resist a tug at his. I felt taller and stronger, and I never caught cold. The world widened around me, no longer confined to the workshop or the garret.

  Madame Carriera’s house was in the oldest part of the city, at the end of Giltspur Street. The house had once belonged to a goldsmith who kept a shop on the ground floor. She had made few changes to the place.

  The level above the shop contained the salon, where Madame Carriera received callers, and her private quarters. The level above that, which was high enough that the windows actually let in enough light to work by, contained Madame’s studio and workrooms. Above that, at the very top of the house, were the slant-ceilinged garret rooms.

  Gabriel and Piers had a small room at the front of the house, while Saskia and I shared an even smaller room at the back. The light would have been excellent, had the windows not been painted shut and then encrusted on the outside with years of dust and grime. In the summer, the heat was cruel; in the winter, the cold a constant source of misery. When we complained, Madame Carriera acidly remarked that she did not expect us to spend much time in our rooms.

  When I remembered them, I missed my family. Madame Carriera kept me too busy to brood, but sometimes I missed them very much. When, after just a few days, my father left me to return to Neven, my heart had felt bruised. Yet how could I regret staying in Aravis? It was my heart’s desire to live there.

  Aravis was at that time a thriving, beautiful place, one of the wonders of the world. Of course it is still beautiful in its gaunt way, but the culture, the society, the splendor, and the pride that every citizen knew in my day—all that is past and gone. Modern manners, that is what we have now instead of culture, drabness instead of splendor.

  In those days, there was little formal activity at court. The king was old and ailing. The business of rule he surrendered to the prince-bishop, who thus represented church and state in one person. There were no obvious heirs, but no one doubted that the prince-bishop would choose the proper successor and control the next king as utterly as he had this one.

  Stability, and confidence that stability would continue, was the great treasure of Aravis. The provinces that made up the Lidian Empire all l
ooked to Aravis for direction. Aravis, in the person of the prince-bishop, provided it.

  Aravis was rich in more than mere stability. There were some beggars, to be sure, but nothing to what we see these days. There was the usual amount of daily misery, there must have been, but we did not go looking for more by mourning each day that passed and making boast of our own sins.

  The prosperity of Aravis was founded in trade, yet the merchants who made the city rich were no misers. Openhanded, they vied to demonstrate their worth through their devotion to the arts. No mere pious donors of votive objects, these merchants. They let their names be enhanced by all the arts. It was possible for a hard worker to earn a good living in those days. There were mummers and dancers and actors and singers, and the very liveliness of the city made the competition fierce. The degree of art and skill displayed, even by a band of mummers, made merely walking the length of a street fair a rare entertainment.

  When someone wished for Madame Carriera to paint a portrait, the client did not simply saunter in and ring for service. Far from it. Most of Madame’s patrons were folk of wealth, a few of them of high degree.

  She was usually invited to wait upon them, which she sometimes would consent to do. More often, an exchange of messages would establish a mutually convenient time, and Madame would receive her prospective patron in her salon. She reasoned that most of the work was done in her own studio, so the subject would have to find his way there eventually. Why not start out with the upper hand if she could possibly arrange it?

  It was such a negotiation Madame Carriera had embarked upon, a diplomatic campaign that would culminate in at least three sittings in a good north light, with Lord Stanimir, in February of my second year of training. She dispatched me with a message to Lord Stanimir’s quarters in the palace. I had never been inside the palace before, though of course I knew precisely where it was. It loomed over Aravis.

  I was leaving Giltspur Street for the palace when Gabriel caught up with me.