— 3 —

 THE EMPRESS 

Behind the Shown’s main lodge was a glasshouse, and then a walled garden dominated by a large, noisy fountain. The day following the twins’ arrival, Nell entered through the garden archway and halted in surprise: bodies were everywhere. Reclining on rugs, propped up on pillows, shrouded in blankets, spreadeagled, sprawled on patches of grass or on the naked flagstones—forty or fifty people covered every available inch of the sun-warmed ground. It was late afternoon. She looked for the hungry boys from last night but saw no children amid the crowd. It took her ages to spot her brother, in a corner, half-hidden by a shaggy topiary bear. He was deep in conversation with a young woman who lay on her elbow beside him. With one hand Lark clasped a blanket around his shoulders. With the other he stroked the hair of a second young woman, whose head rested in his lap. Neither of them was his dancing partner from last night.

The scene put Nell in mind of mass enchantments, of the bespelled castle household in The Sleeping Beauty. It would take her some effort, she thought, to extract her brother from this fairy-tale milieu. She’d awoken with the conviction that their cousin Oceanie had been right. The Shown was no place for her and Lark, no proper place for the advancement of an artist’s career. It wasn’t too late to change their plans. Oceanie would help them find a place in London, and they could meet with Uncle Corvo from there.

She skulked at the entrance until she caught Lark’s eye and waved at him to leave his new friends, but he beckoned her over instead. After a brief war of facial expressions, Nell gave in and, not sure how else to proceed, untied her shoes and left them next to the archway. Lifting her skirt, she picked her way among the bodies—nobody paid her any attention when she apologized—until she reached her brother’s corner.

“Sit,” he said, gesturing to a spot behind the sprawled women. But it was adjacent to a wall latticed with canes of climbing roses, heavily overgrown and lancing out into the air. To avoid being impaled, Nell had to perch on her knees and lean over Lark’s shoulder. A deep, loud vibration drew her attention to the hundreds of honeybees drifting about the garden—honeybees in March!—touching down on the humans as often as on the flowers. Their furred bodies caught the light over Nell’s head.

“This is Zoë,” Lark said of the woman in his lap. “And that is Zenia. Twins, like us.”

Zenia turned her head up to Nell, blinking into the light. “That is why Corvo wants you,” she said sleepily. “Twins are very powerful.”

“We are powerful, it’s true.” Lark widened his eyes at Nell. It was clear he was hugely enjoying himself.

“Just think of all the ancient twin gods,” Zenia went on. “Isis and Osiris, Artemis and Apollo. What is it Corvo says? ‘There is no creation without division.’ ”

Corvo, Corvo, Corvo. These people seemed never to open their mouths except to speak of Corvo. Nell had been trying to remember what she knew about the man, to hold up that scant knowledge against the reverence everyone seemed to have for him in the Shown. He was not their uncle by blood but an old family friend who had adopted Oceanie after her parents died. If the twins had ever met him before their move to Canada, they didn’t remember it; they’d never even seen a photograph, despite Corvo’s fame. Their mother, Cosima, had told them all about his magnificence, though: His towering intellect, his important contributions to English politics and letters. His kindnesses to her, a lonely émigré, and his fathomless generosity in sponsoring Lark’s development as an artist. Whenever a letter arrived from Corvo, it would be carried for days in the pocket of Cosima’s apron before being carefully hidden away. After her death last year, the twins had hunted unsuccessfully for her cache; Lark thought it likely she’d been burning the correspondence for even greater secrecy.

“No, it isn’t their twinship. He wants them because of the pictures.” Zoë had lifted her head from Lark’s lap to shoo a bee from her hip. There was a purple ribbon tied around her neck, and one around Zenia’s too, same as the ones everyone was wearing yesterday. Zoë’s pupils glittered darkly behind her half-closed lids. “For the exhibit, remember?”

“Do you both make the paintings, or just him?” The voice, male, came from somebody curled under a fur coat several feet away.

“Only me,” Lark said, “though Nellie is my muse. I can’t paint at all unless she is with me.”

Zenia sighed. “Twinship. You see?”

A breeze lifted music above the insects’ buzzing and the splashing of the fountain. Nell couldn’t see who was strumming the instrument or who was singing along to its melody. The scent of daphne and paperwhites was strong and sweet. Lark had never called her his muse before. Where had he picked up that word? Had he practiced describing her that way with his friends aboard the Montcalm? It made her very conscious of her dull brown hair, her pointed chin and nose, her general smallness. The stodgy striped blouse and narrow skirt she’d chosen from her suitcase were wildly out of place in the garden. Everyone here was dressed in loose, draped garments like the trousers and tunic in which Oceanie had met them at the pier. Shades of ocher and yellow and white, though, not indigo like Oceanie’s. Nell looked out among the shrubbery for her cousin but saw no one in blue. Everyone was barefoot or wearing soft, shapeless leather slippers, and their hair was long and loose, even the men’s. Nearly all of them looked better suited than Nell to the role of artist’s muse.

There was movement at the other end of the garden: a mass stirring of bodies, a shifting of rugs and furs. The music and murmuring ceased. In its place came a sound like an amplification of the bees’ music, but human: a dissonant humming, everyone holding his or her own note. The disturbance spread in a concentric wave from its invisible point of incitement until it catalyzed those closest to Lark and Nell, so that in less than a minute all the people in the garden had roused themselves to kneeling, blankets shed from their shoulders, hands cupped in their laps. Everyone was humming, and all eyes—wide and alert, where only moments ago heavy-lidded and somnolent—were trained toward the house, fixed on the open doors of the solarium.

It was Corvo Ringold. Nell knew it even before he appeared in the doorway and lifted his face to the afternoon sun. A man dressed all in white, with silver jewelry glinting on his chest. Feet slightly apart, shoulders back, the stance relaxed yet energized—a swimmer before the plunge. Even from that distance there emanated from him a palpable calm and assurance, so that Nell sensed those around her breathing more deeply and humming longer between breaths. She expected Corvo to address the crowd, so concentrated was the collective force of its attention upon him, and was surprised when he simply moved forward into its midst. Softly he greeted one individual and then another as he clasped their hands and helped them to their feet. Then the humming waned and everyone was rising, gathering belongings, waving away the bees, helping each other up, shuffling off in threes and fours through the archways or the glasshouse doors.

Corvo disappeared within the throng, and Nell, searching for a further glimpse of him, locked eyes instead with a stunned-looking sunstruck boy with pink English cheeks and a purple-ribboned throat. The boy smiled at her as if in recognition, as if she were already his sister or his dearest friend.

“I’m not a bit hungry,” Zenia said. She reached down to brush bits of grass from Nell’s skirt.

“You had better eat anyway,” the young man with the fur coat said. He took Nell’s hand and introduced himself as Phoebus. Then he led them toward the house. “Yesterday we ran out,” he explained. “Whatever is served, you’d best eat it in case the next meal comes late.”

Later Nell learned that Phoebus’s real name was Albert, and that Albert’s mother was a theater actress, his father a tycoon. Later still she would read that Corvo had often sought out the offspring of England’s wealthiest and most famous for the Shown, so that he could exchange the bright gift of his attention for the use of their cars, for fancy meals, for visits to their holiday homes, and eventually for the balance of their bank accounts.

An older man wearing soiled clothing and clutching a broom appeared in the garden and began sweeping the stone walk. His strokes were so vigorous that his long, graying hair flew around his head, and several people veered into the flower beds to avoid being struck. He came closer, and although Lark stepped aside, the man followed him and swung the bristles over the tops of Lark’s bare feet. As Lark put out his hand to the man’s shoulder to steady himself, the man suddenly leapt back and flipped the broom horizontally, holding it out as though to fend him off.

“It’s all right, Pilgrim,” Phoebus said. He put an arm around Lark’s shoulders. “This is Corvo’s nephew. See, no need to worry. He’s all right.”

The man lowered the broom. “Here you are,” he said. His voice was as thin and dry as bristles on stone.

“This is Pilgrim,” Phoebus said. “He gets anxious with newcomers.”

Pilgrim squinted into Lark’s face. “You look just like her.”

“Like whom?” Lark said.

“Like her, of course. Cosima.”

“Cosima. My mother?”

“Of course, of course. And where is the other one?” The broom fell with a clatter as Pilgrim lunged toward Zoë, who recoiled and raised her hands to avoid his touch. Zenia had already gone into the house, and now Zoë sidestepped Pilgrim and followed her.

Nell stood beside her brother. “I’m Nell,” she said.

“How do you know our mother?” Lark said.

But Pilgrim had bent to retrieve his broom, and when he straightened, he was no longer looking at the twins but at Corvo Ringold, who had emerged in their midst. “All right,” Corvo said very gently. “Go on now, old friend.”

Pilgrim set off, dodging among the shrubs, broom trailing and shirttails flapping, until he exited the garden through an archway.

“You’ve met our Pilgrim.” Corvo clasped Nell’s upper arms and softly kissed each of her cheeks, so that her senses brimmed with the prickle of his beard and the grassy scent of his skin. He repeated the gesture with Lark. “Welcome to the Shown,” he said.

He touched Phoebus on the arm, and the young man turned and put his palm against the side of Corvo’s neck. The two men looked into each other’s eyes for a long, solemn moment, and then Phoebus moved away.

“Tea awaits us inside,” Corvo said, “but first I wanted a moment to greet you in private. You were comfortable once you arrived. Oceanie left you a meal.” These did not sound like questions, but Corvo had paused and was looking from brother to sister.

“Yes, thank you,” Lark said.

Corvo’s blue eyes brightened, the fine lines at their corners deepening. Not a smile exactly, but a lifting of his face, an expression of relief. “I am very glad to have you back after all these years.” His hand came to his chest with a clink of silver. “I begged Cosima to return to us. Begged her. But she wanted her adventure, and now”—he shook his head—“we have lost her.”

Lark reached a hand toward Corvo’s arm, hesitated and then put it back by his side. Strange to see him so uncertain. Nell guessed he was doing the same thing as she was: searching Corvo’s face for a family resemblance and then remembering there was no blood relationship. “We are glad to be here, Uncle,” he said finally, trying the appellation anyway.

“Call me Corvo, please, like everyone else does.”

They strolled together through the now empty garden. Tiny blue moths frolicked around Corvo’s shoulders, drawn to his white coat. More of a robe than a coat: a soft, featherlight wool garment that floated to his shins. Nell darted looks at him so as not to stare rudely.

“The truth is, Lark, here in the Shown we all feel we know you quite well already, through your talent, your transcendent artworks. You will see your paintings adorning nearly every available surface in this place. The only empty walls are where we’ve already removed the pictures to London for the exhibition.”

One of Corvo’s silver necklaces was a series of large, interlocking disks. The other, shorter one was a curved tube threaded onto a thickly braided purple cord. The tube was etched with symbols, hieroglyphics of some sort.

“You were only twelve or thirteen years old when Cosima sent the first of your paintings to me. You remember it.” His hands came up to his face, the fingers covering his eyes and mouth. “The ladies’ gloves strangling that poor girl. I have to tell you I was rather spooked by the sight of it.”

“Spooked,” Lark echoed.

Nell thought, Not strangling. Mummifying. Sunday-best gloves of the softest, whitest kidskin, maybe a dozen of them, molded to her face to blind and silence and preserve and embalm her.

“Your work—all of it, every painting—captures something elemental and raw about reality, about human existence. In the Shown we call this reality ‘naked,’ or ‘unmasked.’ We spend much of our time here striving to perceive the world for what it really is, stripped of its illusions. And your artworks help us to do that. For years now the perceptants have been telling me how much your art reveals to them, how naturally it points them the way. More and more your work has become associated with our teachings. It’s as though you’ve been my pupil all the way across the Atlantic, studying my book and practicing its methods from afar. And now I have brought you to my side at last!”

The three of them entered the solarium, where a fog of condensation muted the sunlight and lent a tropical humidity to the air. There were citrus trees, heavy with fruit. Corvo plucked a lemon, scratched its skin and brought it to his nose. He held it out to Lark. “I wonder how would you paint this, for instance. How would you capture this scent?”

Lark took the fruit and sniffed it. He passed it to Nell. Sweeter, less astringent and more honeylike than the smell of a lemon imported to Ontario. Did the Shown’s leader magick its agriculture the way he magicked its weather?

Corvo answered his own question. “You would paint more than merely the color and the texture of the lemon, I think. You would evoke the splaying open of our human senses in the face of something so extraordinarily stimulating. You would reveal the relationship between the lemon and our bodies—our tongues, our teeth.”

A pair of French doors led them into a wood-paneled room with bookshelves and low, leather-covered furniture. Nell blinked in the dimness. A whistled greeting drew their attention to a green parrot perched in an ornate cage on a stand. Lark whistled back and asked the bird’s name. Corvo ignored him, pausing instead to point out two still lifes above the fireplace, depicting a bowl of grapes and a floral arrangement—Nell hardly recognized the second piece, it had been sent off so long ago—before leading them out of the room and down a long hallway. It was deeply disorienting to Nell to hear someone talking about Lark’s pictures, offering up opinions and assessments of them. It was the very first time, she realized. No one in Canada had ever been shown the paintings, let alone observed what themes or perspectives they might express.

“We will discuss the exhibit, of course,” Corvo continued. “I’d like your ideas about how to display your works in relation to the other artists’, how to emphasize the uniqueness of your vision while setting it in the proper context of Surrealism in Europe. But first you must settle in and get acquainted with the young people in our home. It is your home now too.”

He stopped them before another set of open doors, beyond which voices were chattering. He leaned close to Lark and spoke in a low, urgent tone. “I have new work for you. A commission—a large one. A grand project that will share our teachings with the world! It will take some time to complete, and we’ll need to work together quite closely. So I hope you will be willing to stay here with us for some months. Through the end of the year at least.” He straightened and turned to include Nell. “And you are welcome too, of course. My niece.” He touched her cheek. “How beautiful you are.”

The blood fizzed in Nell’s skull. She had been waiting beside Lark and fairly vibrating with the wish to be addressed. Yet now that Corvo regarded her directly, it was almost too much, like staring into a searchlight. Her heart tripped in a weak, rabbity way and she felt the urge to twitch away from him, to bolt. She cast her eyes down to her feet and noticed she had forgotten her shoes out in the garden. When she looked up, it was already over. Corvo was moving past her, regarding Lark again, and she was instantly thrown back into shadow. Quickly she thought up something to say. “We were happy to reunite with our cousin last night. Will Oceanie be coming to tea?”

“Oceanie.” Corvo flicked his fingertips over his brow in an odd gesture of aggravation, or dismissal. “We will see.” He placed a hand on each of their backs and guided them through the doors into a large dining room with a long table. Three ornate chandeliers hung from the ceiling, crusted with yellow wax. The room wasn’t as crowded as the garden, or at least not anymore; only twelve or fifteen perceptants lingered over small bowls of soup and plates of sliced oranges. They set down their spoons when Corvo entered and fell to humming that same dissonant one-chord chorus with which they’d greeted him in the garden. Their collective expression as they gazed at their leader was one of ravenous adoration. Nell was able to study one face and then the next, all around the table, because not a single person was looking at her or Lark.

Only after he’d announced their names—“Lark Ringold, creator of our sacred pictures,” Corvo called him, and she was “his sister, Nell”—did the perceptants notice the twins and offer their hands and words of welcome. Nell forgot each of their names as soon as it was uttered. They blurred together, the perceptants: their loose clothing and long hair, their sun-freckled faces and dazed expressions, the purple bands they wore around their necks—a pacific sameness.

A girl who called herself Fortuna gathered up some empty dishes and asked the newcomers to follow her to the kitchen. Nell felt a nip of worry at leaving her uncle behind, a sudden, baseless conviction that she might never see him again. She turned for a last look, but Corvo had already disappeared into the hall.