A Muse to Live For Read online

  Published by EVERNIGHT PUBLISHING ® at Smashwords

  www.evernightpublishing.com

  Copyright© 2019 Katherine Wyvern

  ISBN: 978-1-77339-894-5

  Cover Artist: Jay Aheer

  Editor: Karyn White

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  DEDICATION

  In loving memory of my dazzling muse and dearest friend, Danila K.

  This book would never have come to life without you, and now “...Death has made his darkness beautiful with thee.”

  As long as I live, you will always inspire beauty and art. I will never stop drawing you, I promise.

  A MUSE TO LIVE FOR

  Katherine Wyvern

  Copyright © 2019

  Chapter One

  “Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,

  Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;

  But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,

  And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, ‘Lenore?’”

  Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven

  London, November, 1884

  Nathaniel

  A mirror is an awful thing to have about one’s home.

  One can, with care, go about life lightly, without knowing of one’s own existence, which is not a bad state of affairs, considering. Invisible and insensible, one can live on. In a manner of speaking. I, of course, have been a dead man for five years. But one can go on, in a way. In a sort of muffled darkness. Careful not to make a sound, or raise any dust.

  Until one has to shave. The mirror stares back at me haggardly, telling the whole tale all over again.

  Dead. Dead to the world, and buried in these two darkened rooms.

  It is fairly poor taste to disturb the dead, and I resent the intrusion as much as any dear departed would. If only Henry would let me lie in peace.

  This mania for the music hall has become a perpetual nuisance. Hardly a month passes that I don’t have to go through this torment. It’s Henry’s way of doing me a kindness, or so he says. Says it will cheer me up. It doesn’t. It’s sickening. But I go anyway, because Henry’s ruckus if I don’t go is worse. Not in the amount of noise and exertion perhaps, but it’s more personal. At the music hall, I just float away. It’s just noise.

  It might be easier to go and spend one and a half penny at the barber shop, but I dislike the man’s hands on me. He chatters without pause; his suspiciously pliant and universal political views annoy me; and besides, I’d have to walk the length of the road in my current state of unkempt overgrown shagginess. Worst of all, I would have to pass Mrs. Crabwood’s parlor downstairs. She thinks unshaved men should come and go through the traders’ door, which I would not mind, as such, but her reproving look would be unbearable.

  I wish people were not so ready and eager to look me in the eye. If eyes are windows in the soul, should we not grace them with some privacy? There’s not one person on this earth whom I’d want to know my soul, and me theirs.

  No, better to face the soulless mirror, and my own darkness. Marginally better, at least. I find scissors and snip unevenly away, before taking up the razor. The scissors are blunt, like everything in here, and each cut pulls at the skin, as if niggling at the puckered proud flesh over a half-healed scab.

  The scab being me.

  It’s twenty minutes’ walk to Henry’s, most of it along the river. In summer it would be a pleasant stroll, under the spreading plane trees, with the boats plying on the sunny water. Now my boots plash softly into sodden fallen leaves, and slick horse muck. Still, the bare trees looming in the mist have a gaunt beauty, and for a moment, the briefest moment, I wish I had a pencil and a sketching pad with me, to jot down the twisting, muscular forms of their outstretched limbs.

  Time was when I never went anywhere without paper and pencils. But that man is long gone.

  I am just in sight of number 16, Rossetti’s house—he’s gone these last two years, poor tormented soul, with all his women and his menagerie, may he rest in peace—when a gentleman in a dark coat steps out of a cab not two yards from me and hands out an elegant lady, who turns around to shake out the folds of her gown and unwittingly looks me right in the eye. I shudder, hurrying on.

  Really. I mean it. If it’s true that eyes are windows in our soul, why do we look people in the eyes? How many people have you ever known that you’d want to share your soul with? One? Two? Twenty? Fifteen thousand? Or maybe none at all?

  ****

  Gabriel

  There is this to be said for my profession.

  I can sleep in.

  That unspeakable time of day, the early hours of the morning, when the whole world trudges along the streets with dead eyes and heavy feet, on to another day of toil, is spared to me.

  I see the tiredness of the world at the other end of the day. But by then it’s dark, and there is not much to see, and the tiredness has a different flavor. To me, that’s mostly the flavor of a man’s spendings, which I mostly spit on the pavement. You get used to it. You get used to almost anything, given time.

  Darkness or no, I must be seen of course. I am the one in the stolen foggy spotlight of the lamppost’s golden halo. But the darkness outside stares back blankly, and mostly I like it that way. I have seen enough of the world to last me a lifetime. My business needs the night, in any case.

  I wish I could say my bed is warm and comfortable, but mostly it’s lumpy, damp, and cold. But it’s mine and quiet, here at the top of the silent house. If you’d ever spent any time at all in the slums of Whitechapel, you’d know this is downright luxurious.

  Mrs. Gride doesn’t like noise. She says it makes her temples ache, which is all stuff of course, but still, we all creep about as quiet as mice. No, much quieter than mice. They do not listen to Mrs. Gride’s injunctions about walking along the drugget, talking in a low voice and making no sounds. I can hear them chewing and scrabbling behind panels and wainscots at night, when the house sleeps, and I come home to my lonely room. Usually they are the only ones to welcome me back. I’m always the last one to return. I feel a bond of likeness with them. We all live at the edge, behind screens. It doesn’t stop me from throwing shoes at them when they cross the room too boldly, or go close to my wardrobe. I have little enough as it is. The mice will have to nest elsewhere. I am not a charity institution after all.

  In the morning the bed has a narrow strip of warmth in the middle, a stripe exactly as wide as my body, and I must not move, lest I stray on the flabby, cold linen outside, but still, eventually I find the nerve to reach out and fetch my cigarettes, and light the first of the day. I smoke it in bed, my one and only indulgence. I have become adept at smoking in bed without shedding ashes on the sheets or setting myself on fire.

  I watch the thin, ghostly, white smoke curling and floating towards the pale grey skylight, swirling into a puff of breath. It’s likely to be the most beautiful thing I’ll see all day.

  I have a small pile of work to do for the girls downstairs, so I finally heave myself out of bed. I don’t ask money for these small jobs. By tacit agreement, I help out, and the girls close an eye on my strangeness. It works very well for all involved.

  Later, much later, in the light of a single candle, I shave at my little mirror (an e
vening ritual, for those like me). As usual I give fervent thanks that nature hardly gave me any beard to shave. Then I shed my trousers and my waistcoat and my shirt and wear my other things.

  The stockings, which need mending again, but will do for one more night, in the dark. A small chemise. Then I put on my boots, with small heels and about a thousand fucking tiny buttons that are hell to work with stiff, cold fingers. They are old, second-hand or third, like everything I own, but well-greased and waxed and buffed to a sheen. It’s cold out there, and wet.

  And then my tight, tight corset. It needs some fancy bending to lace it up by myself, but I am limber. I pull the laces as tight as I can around my waist, feeling the shape of me change, like some creatures are said to change in the light of a full moon. The core of the corset is whalebone and steel, stiff like armor. It knows my true shape better than my body does. It hardly needs padding at the chest, hard as it is, but it suits me to pad it anyway, for the weight of it, with two silk cravats I keep for the purpose, so old, worn so soft by use, so waxy with the damp of my skin, that they almost melt to my chest. My skin is all tingling now, and it’s not the cold. Silk and steel hug me so close, so much tighter than my day clothes. I am almost naked, and yet every bit of me is more defined and clearer, like I have come into sharper, truer focus in the searching eye of a telescope.

  I paint my lashes and my eyelids, black and black, to make my eyes shine. I paint my lips red. That marks me as the whore I am, and I don’t mind.

  I am what I am.

  My wig hangs from the corner of the wardrobe. Freshly brushed, the blonde hair shines in the candlelight and waves like a ghost in the faint breeze as I open the wardrobe door. Maybe the ghost of the woman whose hair it is, who knows. She might well be dead. I don’t know what would be creepier, to wear the hair of a dead woman or the hair of a live one. Still, I’m stuck with the wig for now. I am not pleased with the color, which does not mix with my dark hair. But I got it almost cheap in Middlesex Street. It was the sort of bargain where nobody asks too many questions.

  I wear my violet skirt over a small horsehair bustle and a blouse and tight bodice. I don’t button this all the way up, but I put on a shawl, for the cold. The wig, which in summer would hitch and sweat, is almost a comfort now. I look at my mirror one last time as I tie my hair in a loose chignon at the nape of my neck, and stab it through with a horn comb. No pins. I learned the hard way not to trust a man around a hairpin. The mirror is too small to see much. My pale face, the dark circles of my eyes, the red lips, the ghostly locks. All the rest I can only imagine.

  But that is my life. Imagining myself, conjuring myself into existence … especially the parts that don’t fit in the narrow, narrow picture.

  ****

  Nathaniel

  Much as I dread joining Henry in his Saturday night escapades to Leicester Square, I find myself in fact always inordinately happy to see him. Alone in my room, in the grim, solitary comfort of my routine, it’s easy to forget how agreeable it is to sit with an old friend, eating a properly cooked dinner, talking good-humoredly about art and old acquaintances. Feeling like a living person. Almost.

  Henry is a huge man. As a boy, he attended a big public school for a while, and learned boxing, not as a bruiser, you understand, just a bit of gentlemanly sparring, but it did get him a broken nose, which sits oddly on his large, kind, glabrous face. My own broken nose, gained with much less credit when Tom Wilson banged my head down an urinal, looks more at home on me, because, in my landlady’s colorful words, I look “as stray as a gipsy” at the best of times.

  Other than the size and the broken nose there is nothing of the boxer left in Henry. He is as comfortable a gentleman as you can imagine, and a real gourmand, and he has grown rather stout in these last years.

  “Here, have some more of this. It will put some heart into you. Consommé aux ailerons.” He ladles out another bowl of thick soup for me. When we are alone, we return to our free school-years ways, and do quite well without the maid serving at table. The soup is thick with good, fresh vegetables, chicken and fried bread, and you would think it would be enough to feed us both until Monday, but no, it’s followed by a roast hare in thick sour-cream gravy, Jerusalem artichokes au gratin, cardoons in a long narrow dish, with brown sauce and marrow on toast at each end, laver, served piping hot in a little copper pan with a lamp under it, watercress salad, and a fruit cake to finish. Even Henry gives the cheese-platter a pass.

  “You don’t mind taking our coffee into the library, do you?” asks Henry when the last of the port has gone down, “There’s something I want you to see.”

  When Henry says to take our coffee to the library, he means it literally. We carry our coffee to the library ourselves. It is one of Henry’s rules that the maid is not to come in here.

  Once I thought it was just because it is so much his private den, but in fact, it’s got more to do with the wall art. In the gallery, Henry sells tasteful flowery pieces, pastoral landscapes, classical scenes. And the house is littered with the most exquisite art of this century, after Henry quietly sold off all of his father’s gloomy Old Masters.

  In his private room, most of the art is pornography. Prints, paintings, sketches, and daguerreotypes, too. One maid gave notice the first time she entered the room to clean, and he says the face of the housekeeper every time she walked in here was just too unnerving, so now he carries his own drinks to the library and lays his own fire. It is arranged that the cook comes dusting once or twice a week, as being a solid woman of some spirit, who has seen it all in her time, and is not easily put off. He pays her a little extra for the anomalous duty.

  I am covertly eyeing a startling new addition, a photograph of two strapping young sailors, one of them sucking the other’s cock, while casually handling his own, when Henry calls from behind his desk, “I have an elderly lady pestering me day and night to have this monstrosity copied for her.”

  I blink.

  Surely old ladies do not usually commission this sort of thing? But then I realize that Henry is taking a set of prints of Holman Hunt’s The Shadow of Death out of a folder on his desk.

  “Have you seen it? For real?” he asks, passing me the papers, and I nod.

  “Can you do it? Not full size, not anything like full size … say, about forty inches high, for a genteel parlor.”

  The job is mind-numbingly boring, of course, but I am so numb anyway that it doesn’t matter at all. I need to keep body and soul together, somehow, although I am not sure why, exactly. The painting is one of Hunt’s most mind-boggling works. Each single bit of it is beautiful, and yet the whole is so hideous that the mind recoils from it. Still, copying is the kind of thing I can do without any need to think, or feel. It’s just handcraft.

  “Unless you plan to start painting for real again,” Henry says, sneaking a glance at my face from under his mobile, impish eyebrows.

  He mentions it almost every time. “I didn’t kick Tom Wilson in the nuts until he squealed like a pig just so you could color rose prints and copy bad religious allegories for the rest of your life, you know?”

  “I know. But I’ll copy The Shadow, for now. It will pay the rent at least.”

  He shakes his head, disapproving, but he always finds odd jobs like this for me.

  Henry always looked out for me since school. He might have saved my life, the day Tom Wilson, the most awful bully ever breeched, hanged me upside down outside the window, threatening to drop me on Charlotte street below. I still remember, in odd jerky flashes, the upturned faces of the passersby, each pierced by the round, dark hole of a mouth opened in shock, the bodies absurdly short while the legs stepped too far out in front and back. It’s strange the things you notice when three quarters of your blood are in your head. And then there was Henry’s voice, deep already then, because he was a few years ahead of me, and while I was just a squeaker, the poorest boarder in the school, a Catholic and a Scot besides, he was one of the big boys already. Literally big. A g
reat tall youngster, like a loose-limbed bear, but a gentle bear, bless him. Gentle to me, at least. I remember his voice, and firm strong hands on my ankles, and then I was back inside the room, oh, the blessed solid floor under my feet, and then screams and screams as Henry beat Wilson until he wept. I was sick then, whether from the time I had spent upside down or the sight of blood, I don’t know.

  Henry was a strapping lad from a wealthy family of art dealers, but we became friends after that occasion, improbable as it seems. We had summer holidays in his father’s country house in Surrey, were led trembling and stammering to see Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his studio, caught a glimpse of Jane Morris from afar and fell in love instantly (or so we told each other, and perhaps we believed it, too), planned a proper old Grand Tour, and did it, mostly at Henry’s expense, because by then my grandmother had died, my tiny inheritance was all spent on school fees, paints, second-hand clothes, hats and books, and indifferent sparse meals, and I was too poor to go as far as Margate, let alone Florence, Rome, and Athens.

  Later, as I spent days painting a bit of canvas the size of a shilling (a la Millais, because I was a Pre-Raphaelite from top to toe in those days) and gained the reputation of a painter of some promise, Henry traveled to Paris, stumbled on the second Salon des Refusés, decided that his own work was nothing but rubbish, and joined in his father’s business, becoming a dealer rather than a maker of art.

  He is successful, and he lives in style, as a bachelor, in a grand house on Cheyne Walk, not fifty steps away from Rossetti’s old front door. But he never gave up on me, however shabby I may have become.