A Shadow All of Light (15 page)

Astolfo gave the picture of the shadow to Mutano, who rolled it up and secured it with a red ribbon. “And now, if you will examine this third rendering.” He unscrolled before Maxinnio a last drawing, a likeness of another young dancer. The pose was the same as in the picture of the silver girl, but this girl had black hair instead of blonde and the eyes that gazed sunward were of shining onyx. Though not so tall as the other girl, she was equally graceful, a creature of calm and guileless movement, with the ease of brook water.

Maxinnio looked at it with grave care. “This is an interesting fantasy of what a dancer might aspire to. No one but Petrinius could have drawn it so, but it is not a study from life. If 'twere, I would find the girl and put her to use.”

“The drawing is not taken from life, but the girl is real enough. You may be acquainted with her. She is called Leneela.”

“I think not,” Maxinnio said. “The one Leneela I know is but a little servant girl in our household. She has been sweeping stones and scrubbing floors and pots for three years now since her mother died.”

“This is she.”

“If it be she, how could I not recognize her in this guise?”

“She is so customary to your eyes that she became invisible.”

“She is no dancer, only a scullery maid.”

“She can be trained.”

“In time, perhaps, if she have ability. But time is short.”

“You speak as if you had choice in the matter. The father will claim his silvery daughter. I have offered you another to take her place. There is no cost to you except a delay in presenting your ‘Sylphs.' You can bargain a deferment.”

“That will not be simple and will incur further expense.”

“Expenses will be compensated. Again, I tell you that you have no choice. A carriage will call for the girl at first twilight. You will ascertain that she is in the best of condition and will hand her into the carriage yourself. To join a child with its parent—that is a handsome thing to do.”

“Handsome or foul-featured, it shall be done. Yet I will not forget this tiresome japery you have turned upon me.”

“I have saved your life,” Astolfo said.

*   *   *

It was early evening before the three of us came together again, sitting at a table laid out in the kitchen, dividing an enormous beef and kidney pie Astolfo had got from the cook Iratus. A cask of aged cider stood ready to ease down the meat. The shadow master had traveled earlier in the day to the château of Rutilius and arranged how the girl was to come into his household.

“I hope this will prove a fortunate event for the lass,” I said. “'Tis a sorrow, her loss to the art of the dance.”

He nodded gaily and said he was obliged to me for a happy thought.

“How so?”

“I have told Ser Rutilius that I believe her to be his natural daughter and pointed out several similarities of feature and physique. You suggested some such thing. We may well have preserved both of them from destruction.”

“Destruction?”

“One who falls in love with a shadow loves an image of the ideal. No woman can approach to the perfection of such a fond delusion. When disappointment and disillusion set in, a rank distaste for the fleshly person follows, for she will be seen as a betrayer of the ideal, a spoiler of the perfection that once gloriously existed. In a passionate man, revenge will come to seem a necessity. The blade, the noose, the poison goblet stand forth in the mind, palpable and inescapable. There is none so desperate, none so dangerous, as one whose ideals have crumbled.”

“It is well to deceive him then, in the matter of blood ties,” I said.

“If indeed we have deceived. It is yet plausible that she is his own.”

“Will he not go now to seek the mother and verify your story?”

“Alas!” Astolfo cried. “In my vivid account, the mother was strangled by a jealous lover and thrown into the harbor. The sea laves her sorrowful bones ceaselessly.”

“And this lover? Shall not Ser Rutilius look for his track?”

“Alack! He has repented himself and lives in exile in the Fog Islands, leading a solitary, miserable existence lamenting the excesses of his former life.”

“A pretty fable. But there are yet matters I do not comprehend. How was it possible for Petrinius to make the three drawings? He had seen neither of the girls and he had no way to observe how the shadow had deteriorated.”

“I knew that he would have made for his own collection a copy of the drawing he made for Rutilius. I asked him to make another, only altering it as if the shadow had started to deteriorate.”

“And the girls? I do not comprehend how he could have seen either of them without his presence at Maxinnio's establishment being remarked.”

“Petrinius did not see either girl.”

“How then did he make their likenesses?”

“He made none.” Astolfo swallowed heartily from his mug of cider, set it down, and wiped his mouth with his wrist. “But there are others in this land who can draw besides that vain and impertinent artist. In fact, I have been known to dash off a sketch now and then, sometimes in the manner of Manoni, or the Anonymous Citadel Master, or even in the style of Petrinius himself.”

“You produced those fine drawings? But you did not see the silver dancer. You were in the salon below, distracting Maxinnio from my prying.”

“I made attentive note of your description of her,” he said. “And then, of course, there was Petrinius's rendering of her shadow. Look you, Falco, if a person may cast a shadow, why may not a shadow cast a person?”

“A shadow may cast—”

“Can cast the
image
of a girl, at least. Think upon your own lustful and lurid fancies. Do they not drive you out into the town in fair weather or foul? Do they not compel you to deceive yourself that a sooty tavern wench is the ideal of grace and beauty? The shadow-ideal in your mind casts Greasy Joan as the rose-cheeked handmaid of Venus. The shadow is the engine of your conception of the actual.”

Mutano nudged me with his toe. He carved in air the hourglass shape of a voluptuous female. He rolled his eyes and licked his lips and panted heavily, miming Uncontrollable Lust. Never before had I disliked him so earnestly.

The continual rites of physical punishments and spiritual rigors had at last become too cumbrous to be borne. I resolved to request—to demand, if need be—a commission that I could fulfill under my own volition and by my own, personally conceived means.

 

IV

The Creeper Shadows

Haughty, hard-eyed, horse-faced: I formed no favorable impression of this tall woman in her long gray smock the slender young footman had summoned forth. I was not tuneful in temper anyway and when she inquired my name and station, I handed her Astolfo's letter of introduction without other response. She swept away, leaving me alone in the foyer.

She had reckoned me a servant like herself, but I took pride to stand as confidential aide to Astolfo, especially upon this occasion when a possible venture had been entrusted to my hands. I had dressed with particular care in forest-green doublet, tawny trunks, and shining black calf-length boots still spotless of mud, even though I had walked from Astolfo's mid-town villa across Tardocco to this manse of the Esquire Sativius on the outskirts. Red gloves with silver piping I had donned and my wine-red cap sported a brash white plume. It should be obvious that I was no menial, yet that equinous woman had taken but cursory notice of my finery. I was overdressed, but in that time I still suffered from the embarrassment of the ridiculous motley I was forced to wear at the palace of the three-personed Countess Trinia. I had resolved henceforth to present a more fashionable appearance.

She did not hasten to return, and so I took leisurely stock of my surroundings. The house was a rambling two-story edifice of weathered gray brick. A bay window checkered with glass and alabaster panes fronted the protruding second story that overhung the portico with its sturdy oaken columns. The foyer floor was of unpolished flagstone and the door that led to the farther rooms was of lightly varnished chestnut. In short, here was just the sort of domicile one would expect to enter when visiting the wealthy merchant rope-dealer Matteo Sativius.

I drew four deep breaths, anxious because this was the first commission of any true import that Astolfo had entrusted solely to my care. Five swift and crowded seasons I had spent in his employ: five seasons of grueling training under the large and horny hand of Mutano, five years of scanning closely printed books and manuals, of undertaking grubby, piddling tasks and assignments, of enduring unending if cheerful contumely and admonition. This harsh period had steeled my disposition, I fancied. It was a course of life much like preparing for a priesthood, except that at the end of it, I hoped to amass wealth in golden hillocks instead of an airy bower in a painted paradise. I had learned a great deal, though not as much as I would need to know. But I had finally acquitted myself satisfactorily in the business with Countess Trinia, and I had shown some spirit in dealing with the puppet shadow that threatened the existence of the puppet master Drolio, and I had exhibited, according to the maestro, some power of reasoning in the matter of the Mardrake toys that cast such gigantic umbrae over the children to whom they had been given.

Astolfo had told me little of this present affair in hand. “'Tis some difficulty concerning the umbrae of offspring,” he said. “I am otherwise occupied just now and so I leave all to you. There may be a plumpish fee. This Sativius is reputed generous.”

“Will Mutano accompany me?” I asked, thinking that if there were danger involved I should be glad of the presence of my overlarge drillmaster.

“Mutano has in train a serious personal business,” Astolfo said. “He may require your assistance as it progresses. He is already enlisting the aid of Creeper.”

“Of Creeper?” I was not easily surprised these days by what I learned from Astolfo, but now I was astonished. Creeper is the largest, oldest, and blackest of all the sixteen cats that haunt the grounds and outbuildings of the manse. Mutano had never evinced fondness for Creeper or for any other of the feline troop.

The shadow master shrugged his rounded shoulders, spread his nimble hands in a dismissive gesture, and said, “They are spheres unto themselves, the man and the cat. I know only that Mutano is engaged with the animal for endless hours, and I know the nature of the task he has set himself and that he holds it to be of the greatest importance.”

“He wishes me to aid him?”

“So he has signaled.”

That was another imponderable conceit, that my master in the art of the sword and of the shadow-sundering blades, of purse-snipping, lock-tickling, and so forth, might desire, even perhaps require, my assistance. He had always fixed me in sardonic regard.

The train of my suppositions broke sharply when the gangly gray-smocked woman returned. She handed me unopened Astolfo's introductory letter and with the crooking of a finger bade me follow her through a large salon muffled with carpet and darkened with wall hangings, up the stair, and around a gallery into the room of the bay window. She ushered me into the presence of the Esquire Sativius and his spouse, Funisia, and retreated toward the doorway, making me feel rather as if I had been deposited before the older couple as a lump of merchandise to be considered for purchase.

It did not suit me that the light from the bay window flooded their figures from behind, making their faces dark, so I began to sidle little by little, making a leg here and a bow there, in a half circle until the light was more in my favor.

Making much show, Sativius broke Astolfo's seal, unfolded the heavy page, and took his own good while perusing what would have been only a short message. When he had done, he gazed upon me with a frown that almost knit his bushy white eyebrows together. I judged him to be of sound middle age, with his salt-and-pepper beard jutting over his wimpled collar and his smooth hands emerging from starchy, frilled cuffs. He wore a ceremonial short sword.

“I had expected your master to come to my summons,” he said. His voice was soft but held reserves of authority.

“Maestro Astolfo tenders his regrets,” I replied. “A mortally urgent business closely touching upon his person prevents his presence. I am his confidential secretary Falco, as I think his letter informs you. I am authorized to act on his behalf in every particular.”

He turned to look at his wife Funisia. She was somdel younger than her man, with a face that retained much of its youth, a comely countenance. In figure she was not tall, but there was a grace about her that suggested height. Her dress was modest, with a full skirt, dark blue silk bodice open only at the clavicles, her dark hair worn in a braid coiled around the crown. Her only jewel was a small diamond set in a wedding ring. Demurely she met her husband's gaze with a smile and a brief nod.

“You will make report to Maestro Astolfo complete with all detail?”

“Assuredly.”

“In brief, then, the case is this: Funisia and I are the parents of twins, the one a boy and older by less than an hour, t'other a girl. Except for the difference of the sexes, they are identical. They are devoted each to the other and are reluctant to part company for any reason, even for those of necessity of nature. They never argue or quarrel; even their sharpest disagreements are sweetly couched. We have doted upon them perhaps too closely, they being the offspring of our middle years. Yet, tightly as we kept watch, we failed to note a fault in their two physiques and were astonished to find it out. It came to our notice only this sennight past.”

“Is it not a defect a medico might reflect upon?” I asked.

“Only one of our children possesses a shadow,” Sativius said. “The other is quite bare of any umbra whatsoever.”

I stood silent for a moment, trying to fix the conceit in my mind. “One shadow only between them?”