Breath and Bones by Susann Cokal Read Free Book Online Page B

cascade of hair. Then, having outlined his magnum opus, he threw away his pencil and with a cry raced out into the street.
    Famke, shivering, quietly picked up the pencil and put it with his other painting things. She wrapped herself in a blanket and stood before the canvas, trying to see, in the rough lines of black against stark white, the image of herself that would eventually live there.
    To her, the space looked nearly empty.

    Once the real work got under way, Albert could scarcely tear himself away from his
Nimue
. He swore that she would hang in the English Royal Academy’s annual exhibition, win him respect and commissions,
and
convince his father to continue the financial support—if Albert even needed it after his success-to-be. He congratulated himself on having chosen such a quintessentially English subject as Merlin, believing that the familiarity of the myth would help his cause.
    He divided the canvas into small spaces a few inches square and took one as each day’s assignment; sometimes he exhausted daylight trying to cover his allotment. Famke thought he was slow because his brushes were so fine that some used only a single hair, but these were part of his way of working and she said nothing about them.
    Painting, Albert started at Famke’s fingertips and worked his way slowly downward, spending as much time on the background portion of each square as he did on Famke’s body. No matter what he was rendering, shestood there locked in her dramatic pose, her stillness and exposure reassuring him that he was indeed at work. If he wanted to talk, she listened.
    He liked to tell her stories: of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their ladies, of the Nordic myths she’d never heard, and of unusual events all over the world. Famke’s interest in Nimue’s lack of hair Down There suggested the tale of John Ruskin, the Brotherhood’s father-figure, who had been divorced because of unexpected difficulty with that unaesthetic region. “He had never seen a real woman without clothes—he had only seen painted ones—and he was ill prepared for it! On his wedding night, he ran from the room in a fit, and they lived together chastely until she sought annulment.” Famke laughed until she fell off her platform.
    That story reminded Albert of the Norse myth in which the trickster Loki had stolen Thor’s hammer and cut off the hair of his wife, leaving the thunder god powerless and his wife both lightheaded and angry with her husband. And then he remembered that, just a few years ago, a French matron had received a life sentence for murdering her husband, based largely on the fact that, like any good housewife, she had entered the prices of her murder weapons (shovel, hammer, boar trap) into her account book. Around the same time, an American circus master had marched twenty-one elephants across a New York bridge to test the strength of the steel. Albert dreamed aloud of pictures he might paint from these tales, collected from newspapers and pot shops in his native land. Famke listened hard, though she couldn’t visualize the pictures he described and sometimes the blood puddled so in her limbs that she could barely think, much less translate the stories in her head. She concluded that she would never know much of the world; and so she let her mind go blank and simply posed.
    Albert’s conscience was pricked one day when she fainted clear off the platform, disturbing the careful arrangement of pillows and giving herself a large red welt on one leg. After that, he told her to listen for the church bells and to make sure she had a pause every hour. Then, while she stretched, he could clean his brushes, mix more paint, or occasionally make one of the crazed runs through the street that restored balance to the hand that held the brush, discipline to the eye that plotted composition and detail.
    Famke’s fall also made him realize how deeply dissatisfied he was with