I stared, stunned at what lay on the floor before me. I was sickened by this thought: Miss Joseph had lain there, already dead, while I painted in this room today. Her sad little body had shown that horrible grimace to the ceiling while I mixed paints and tried to banter with the girls. I felt disgusted with myself.
Flint instructed one of the servants to go for the police. Then the dinner guests began arriving.
Flint turned them away.
“Madame is suddenly indisposed. She very much regrets inconveniencing you, and asks your forgiveness and forbearance.”
As for Iza Boit, from the moment she recovered from her faint, she was a whole theater of emotion.
First she screamed. Then she threw her arms around Jane and shouted, “My daughters! My daughters! To have seen such a thing. To have found it. Oh, the horror!”
Then she wept. She almost dragged Jane off her feet with her deep sobs.
Jane pushed her away.
“No, don’t. We don’t want that.”
And Jane hurried away, giving me one tear-filled look.
Next Iza siezed Mary and buried her face in her child’s hair.
“My darlings, my darlings. Oh, the scandal. The shame. You will never marry now.”
And she wept again.
Then she advanced on Julia, her arms spread and held high above her head.
Julia took one look and bolted from the room, shrieking.
Flint sent a servant to fetch her.
Then Iza turned on Florence, who pushed her so hard that she fell against one of the vases and almost toppled it.
“Leave us alone, ugly crone,” Florence shouted.
And she actually took a step toward her mother, copying the arms-high stance that had frightened Julia.
“Monster, you are a monster!” Iza Boit shrieked at her oldest daughter.
“Yes! Monster! Monster, Monster!” Florence wailed. “I am.”
And she stalked forward and attacked her mother with her claws. They fell to the floor, locked together, screaming and scratching.
With a look at me, Flint went to separate them. He siezed Iza Boit’s arms, and I pulled Florence away.
Florence glared at me silently, then craned her head around me to stare at her mother. There was a satisfied grin on the furious girl’s face.
Iza was still shrieking, calling down Biblical curses on her child and demanding to know why she herself was not loved.
“Ma’am, you must do everything you can to compose yourself,” Flint said. “The police are coming. If you are calm, they will help you to insure that there will be no scandal from tonight’s unfortunate events. You must control yourself.”
Iza Boit slapped him.
Not long after the police did come. A detective and a couple of gendarmes. They examined the body and questioned everyone, beginning with Mary.
“How did you come to find the body, mademoiselle?” the detective asked.
Mary explained, pretty calmly, though she made some mistakes in her French. The third time she did so, Iza Boit corrected her.
“Please, Madame Boit,” the detective said. “Her grammar is charming. Permit me to take her evidence.”
This set Iza off on another tirade. Her daughter’s French was and should be flawless, and the police had no right to patronize us.
“Sir, messieurs, excuse us, excusez nous.” Flint said calmly. “We shall return when we are calm.”
He picked up Iza Boit by the arms and carried her down the hall, raging at him.
Florence laughed at her mother, then tried to run out the door and was stopped by a gendarme.
The police took it all calmly. No doubt they had seen much worse. One of them took Florence by the arms and held her apart from the rest of us while she raged herself quiet. Another fetched back Jane.
Meanwhile, the detective asked everyone, starting with Jane, what we had seen and heard.
He spoke to me twice. Once along with everyone else and then privately in the grand salon.
The second time was the more interesting. It was then that I realized that I was a suspect.
He began by repeating all of the questions he had asked me before. How long had I been here? Where was I when I heard the scream? What did I do then?
When I had answered, he put away his little notebook and asked me how long I had known Miss Joseph. How well had I known her? What had we talked about? Had we ever seen each other outside the apartment?
I answered as well as I could that Miss Joseph struck me as a frightened young woman who had some kind of attachment to the Boits that kept her here in spite of her fear. I told him what she had told me, which came to nothing, and that we did not know each other apart from this place.
When I was done, he asked me, man-to-man if we had ever met outside the apartment.
“No,” I said. “I barely knew the poor woman. I did not quite like her either. I felt sorry for her. But I did not think she seemed trustworthy. Good to the children. I didn’t know what to think of her really.”
“Nor do I,” the detective said. “It would be so much easier to know what to think if there was any sign of violence, but there is none. The young woman seems to have died of fright. And you say she seemed frightened every time you saw her. She would have seemed to want to leave, but she did not.”
He had been walking away with his hands behind his back. Now he turned on me.
“You say the Boits seemed to have some mysterious attraction for her, Monsieur Sargent. I suggest it was not so mysterious. I believe she may have been in love with someone and wished to stay near him. Perhaps you.”
“Me? Impossible,” I spluttered. “If you suspect anyone of that, you had better talk to Flint. ”
“I believe Monsieur Flint may also have been that man. If there was such a man,” the detective said. “Or it may have been Monsieur Boit himself. If this case is still unsolved when he returns to France, we will ask him.”
He rubbed his chin.
“Yes. Perhaps this mysterious thing is not so mysterious at all. If Monsieur Boit was the object of Mademoiselle Joseph’s affections, perhaps Madame Boit hated her for it. Or perhaps the children did. They all seem rather savage, do they not?”
With a cold thrill of horror, I recalled that day just two weeks past when Jane had introduced her governess to me: “This is Miss Joseph. She is going to die.”
No. That was impossible. Whatever this policeman thought, nothing he had said explained what had happened to Miss Joseph. There was another person—or entity—involved. One he did not know about. One I could not even hint at.
“She died of fright,” I said. “You said so yourself.”
“Yes. I did,” he agreed. “But how was the fright prepared and who prepared it?”
He shrugged. It was an elegant shrug. I was sure he practiced it. “Perhaps the autopsy will tell us more,” he said. “There are poisons ...”
The shrug again.
“And there is something more,” he said. “Something you are not telling me.”
What could I tell him without sounding like a nervous idiot? “Sir,” I said. “I have answered all of your questions honestly. If you have more questions you have only to ask. ”
“What do you think frightened mademoiselle?” he said.
“I do not know,” I replied.
“I asked you only for your opinion,” he said. “What do you think?”
There was an honest answer I could give, one that would not make me a fool in his eyes.
“I believe she may have been afraid of ghosts,” I said. “And I believe she may have thought this place was haunted.”
“And why do you think so?”
“For the reasons I have already told you,” I said.
“Ghosts,” said the detective. “Yes, they are always a possibility. But, I fear, an unlikely one. In any case, Monsieur, I advise you not to leave Paris until this case has been solved.”
“I have work to do in the city,” I said.
“Ah, your painting, yes,” the detective said. “I went to the Salon this year. My congratulations on Fumee d'Amber Gris.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Are you finished with me?”
“For the time being,” he said.
I had no intention of leaving Paris, or even of leaving the Boits apartment that night. If this thing could kill, then Jane and her sisters were in more danger than I had realized. I would have to risk scandal if I was going to help them.
I looked for Jane and found her huddled in the schoolroom with her sisters. One of the maids was with them, a woman who I knew only spoke French.
“I came to say goodnight,” I told them. “I can’t find Flint. I suppose he’s with the detective. Do you know where he’s put my hat and coat? They don’t seem to be in the usual place.”
Jane, who had looked up with silent appeal in her eyes, got up and said, “I know where they are. Come on, Uncle John.”
In the hall I whispered, “I’m going to do what you asked. I need you to sneak my hat and coat into Miss Joseph’s room later so it will look as though I’m gone. Can you do it?”
“Easy as pie,” Jane said. “Thank you, Uncle Sargent. It’s very strong tonight.”
“Jane,” I said, “did it kill her?”
“I don’t know,” she replied.
I went into Miss Joseph’s room and hid myself in the armoire. There was barely room for me, even with my knees up under my chin.
Slowly, I heard the apartment go quiet. The police left. Iza Boit stopped her racket. The girls went into their rooms. Their beds creaked.
Finally, there was silence.
The night was thick and heavy. I cracked the armoire door to let in a little fresh air.
Not long after, I heard someone get up.
I saw Florence pass through the room. She looked ghostlike in her white nightgown. Jane followed her.
“Get up,” Florence commanded Mary and Julia.
“We don’t want to go there,” Mary said.
“I’m sad,” Julia said. “I want Miss Joseph.”
“It will make us happy,” Florence said.
“But then we have to come back, and it hurts,” Mary said.
“Someday we will never have to come back,” Florence said. “She promised me.”
“But then where will Daddy be?” Julia said.
“In Boston,” Florence said. “Just like now. Come on.”
I heard the other girls slide out of bed. Then Jane came into Miss Joseph’s room and beckoned to me.
She passed on into the nursery.
I heard the sound of the girls’ feet whispering across the floor. There was a strange rhythm that grew faster and faster. Were they dancing?
I silently unfolded myself and crept across the floor on my hands and knees. I looked around the door.
The Boit girls were twirling silently, with Florence in the middle of her sisters. Like sad, lost planets revolving around a dark star. Each one had one arm extended toward the ceiling and another pointing to the floor.
I knew that pose. It was the dance of the whirling devishes, the Moslem mystics who dance to unite heaven and earth. I’d seen them once on a short trip to Tunis. Where had the girls learned it? Or had they created it themselves?
Was this all that had frightened Miss Joseph? Had she merely been terrified by some slightly wicked game? Then perhaps the girls had killed her with some prank that had gone wrong.
Then I began to feel a change in the darkness, and I knew Miss Joseph had been afraid of much more than what I saw.
As the Boits danced they seemed to be twisting space around them tighter and tighter. No, that was wrong. They were coiling it. Somehow, they were changing something in the air, in the nature of reality itself. I could feel its strength reaching out, touching me.
I stood up.
“Do your damndest,” I said to myself, to the night and whatever moved in it.
“She’s calling,” Florence said, and stopped dancing.
With her arms out before her, high above her head, she walked out the nursery door.
It stood open. It couldn’t have been open all this time. But I had never heard it open.
Jane followed her sister, copying her pose. Then went Mary and Julia. I followed.
I knew I was still in the Boits’ apartment on the Avenue de Friedland. I could see the walls, the carpet, the doors on either side of me. I knew this. But I also knew that I was somewhere else, that the things I saw had ceased to be real—or at least were no longer the only reality I was in.
We might have been passing through some forest that was ancient when humanity was young. Down some dark mine. Anywhere but where we seemed to be.
We came to the staircase and went down. The girls’ feet seemed to be floating, they were so light on the steps.
But a wave of their lonely longing washed back over me. It was in their drooping shoulders, their twisting heads, their outstretched fingers, less than half seen in that terrible night. I could feel a hollow, bitter thing that had no name surround me, and fill me.
How could children bear this? I thought. How long could I? And how did I know so perfectly what the girls were suffering?
At the bottom of the stairs, I felt that like feeling rise up in me. I was sinking into it. It was different from the girls' pain, but part of the same agony. And it was something I had always known was there, though I had never touched it before. New and familiar.
It was a longing, beyond any words, for love. A longing that, I suddenly knew, had driven me to give my life to the painting of beauty. I almost stumbled under the weight of it.
The darkness began to throb with the intensity of our feeling. It was within us and outside us. I could sense it becoming stronger and stronger, though its pulse was below the threshold of hearing.
The foyer gleamed dimly with the light from the street. There was just enough to see the huge Japanese vases, looming larger than ever. Florence stood between them, her arms high and desperate.
“Open, sesame,” she whispered.
“Open, sesame,” repeated Jane.
“Open, sesame,” said Mary.
“Open, sesame,” lisped Julia.
Darkness visible. The words, recalled from Milton's description of hell, came to my mind as I stared at the vases, at the girl standing between them.
Was this some private hell the Boits were conjuring? If it was, they were not afraid of it. They copied Florence's stance.
There was nothing around me, nothing beneath my feet. There was nothing but longing. My daylight self was gone, as far off from me as if I were in some other world. And in that moment, all pasts seemed equally likely, all futures equally possible, and all time to be concentrated in one endless moment of need and sorrow.
And in that darkness visible, I saw above us an arch take form, flowing upward from the vases. By some trick of perspective, I saw two heads there, facing in opposite directions. Their eyes were closed, though they smiled down on us. But these were not the faces of Janus. They were the faces of the sphinx.
“The Janus Gate,” Florence uttered.
“The Janus Gate,” her sisters said.
And then darkness was darkness no longer.
I was no longer in the same place. I did not know where I was, but the light of it grew stronger and more beautiful. I had the impression of—I can’t say—temples, fantastic gardens, strange creatures comical and beautiful all around, but without definite shapes. And then, ahead of me, if such things as direction had any meaning, I saw her.
She was dressed all in white, as I had painted her. I could smell the incense rising from before her feet. Her face was turned away, and her strange pale skin seemed to be the source of all the light I saw.
“Come on, Uncle Sargent,” Jane’s voice said.
The figure turned toward us. She raised her veil above her head and lowered her face slightly to inhale the scent of warm perfume.
“Welcome,” she said in the most beautiful voice I had ever heard. “Behold your creation.”