Nine
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
—“Dover Beach,” Matthew Arnold
 
 
 
Bree folded the Wednesday edition of the Savannah Daily into neat thirds and dropped it into the recycling can.
On a second thought, she retrieved it and set it neatly on the trunk that served as a coffee table in her new offices. She hadn’t had time to pick up any other reading material and the top of the trunk looked pitifully bare. Fortunately, nothing in the short news story titled “Freak Encounter Busts Up Huey’s” identified her as the woman who started it all by diving over the table at Payton McAllister, attorney-at-law. There was a brief quote from a meteorologist about the likelihood of a sirocco-like wind sweeping through the heart of the Market District (“infinitesimal”) and a longer op-ed piece about climate aberrations due to global warming. That was that.
At least it’d happened too late to make the late news on KWYC, for which she was thankful. It had, however, provided a virtually inexhaustible topic of conversation for Antonia, who had been stuck with the bill for the pizza and demanded Bree pay her half.
Bree had paid up and offered her a choice: shut up about the incident at Huey’s, or she, Bree, would get on the phone to their parents and rat her out about UNC. Antonia snapped, “Fine,” then asked for the name of her martial arts teacher; Payton had spun through the air like a Frisbee, she’d said, which was not only totally cool, but a skill that was bound to come in handy at some point. Especially if her sister kept persecuting her.
Bree ended the conversation by going to bed.
She’d risen early after a disturbed and restless night, bundled up Sasha, lifted the painting from the wall, and left the town house for the office while it was still dark outside. Antonia almost never got up before eleven, but there was always a chance that she’d bounce into the kitchen, full of questions Bree couldn’t, wouldn’t answer.
Halfway down Montgomery, she stopped behind a Chatham County municipal garbage truck. Maybe she could bribe the driver to throw the accursed canvas into the grinder. She imagined the frame splintered, the torn canvas, and the red and maddened eye of the bird glaring at her from the mess of orange peel, decayed vegetables, and sodden paper towels.
Sasha whined from the backseat, and then barked.
It’ll find its way back to you.
“Dammit!” Bree said.
The truck engine roared clumsily down the street. She let it go. And the first thing she did when she got into the office was hang the thing back over the fireplace.
She sat on the couch and stared at it. Mrs. Mather hadn’t come down yet, and the place was silent. The painting hung there, malign, awful, a haunt if there ever was one. She desperately wanted it burned, cut up, ground to ashes, destroyed. And she just as desperately knew that she couldn’t do it alone.
She curled her hand into a fist and banged herself on the forehead in sheer frustration. The painting was just that. A painting. It was a bad copy of a painting she must have seen before, years ago, when she was little. She’d seen the original as a kid, been petrified by it, and had nightmares for years. Sort of a post-traumatic stress kind of thing. She couldn’t remember being scared by it, but people frequently forgot traumatic events, while still suffering the consequences of them. She remembered reading that somewhere. She hoped that this was true, and that it wasn’t something she picked up in the Your Health section of some half-baked popular magazine.
Maybe her mother remembered what had started her nightmares. She could call and ask her.
Or maybe not.
She set up Sasha’s water bowl, left him some kibble, and went out to complete her furniture shopping. When she came back, hours later, Mrs. Mather had been down to brush his coat and tend to the healing wounds. He greeted her at the door with a happy swish of his tail and a contented sigh. She followed him into the living room, walked up to the fireplace, and stared defiantly at the wall. The painting still hung over the mantel, a sullen mix of gray, black, and the crimson of that hellish fire.
“I’m going to take this thing outside and burn it, Sasha.”
Sasha lay down with a thump on the floor, put his head on his paws, and looked up at her sorrowfully.
It won’t burn.
Bree stared resentfully at it, then dropped down on the couch and rubbed her forehead. She hated the thing. She looked at her watch. Her first interview wasn’t due for an hour. She could keep on sitting here like a dormouse with her thumb up her nose if she wanted to. If dormice had thumbs, which they probably didn’t.
On an impulse, she got to her feet and ran lightly up the colorful front stairs to the second floor. Lavinia had seemed to know something about the horrible thing. This wasn’t all in her imagination. It couldn’t be.
The landing was dim; there was no window here to look over the cemetery and no ceiling light. Lavinia’s door was in shadow.
The march of painted angels went up one side of Lavinia’s door, over the top, and down the other. The door itself was painted a sheer white that glimmered softly. Bree hesitated a moment, then tapped on the frame.
There was a soft, shuddery movement on the other side of the door, as if something large and feathery slid across the floor. The door opened, and Lavinia stood there in a flood of pale, silvery light. A gauzy shawl enfolded her, and her dark skin seemed to glow. “Well, child! This is unexpected!”
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Bree apologized. “I had a couple of questions I thought I’d ask.”
“No bother,” Lavinia said equably. “Come on in and sit yourself down for a spell.”
Hesitant, Bree stepped inside. For a moment, a very brief moment, the second floor seemed larger than she’d expected. Much larger. A velvety gray mist veiled the floor. The ceiling soared above her. A wall fixture lit with the softness of moonlight cast a gentle shine over a variety of large and small shapes. Lavinia’s voice was a soft whisper in her head:
“Some of my littlies. You know what a lemur is? I have me a few. And these here are a couple of baby owls that lost their mamma.”
A ring-tailed lemur curled its tail over the back of a rocking chair and stared at her with huge golden eyes. Bree stared dreamily back. The entire apartment seemed to rock to a slow, sleepy rhythm. The chair rocked with it. The lemur purred. She swayed lightly back and forth on her feet, as though on the deck of a ship.
The rocking, the lunar light, the scent of strange flowers all made Bree dizzy. She shut her eyes and opened them again.
The moonlit scene was gone in a flash, evaporated like mist in the hot sun. Lavinia stood in ordinary light on wide pine floors in a small, shabby room that smelled of lavender and roses. She pulled her sweater around her bony shoulders and smiled sweetly at Bree.
The rocking chair was there, though, swaying wildly as if something had jumped up in a hurry and pushed the chair away. A bit of soft gray fur still clung to it.
Bree pressed her hands to her ears and took a deep breath. “Please keep on with your chores. I’ve got ... quite a bit to do downstairs. What I wanted to ask you ... it’ll keep just fine.”
She walked downstairs at a much slower pace than she had going up. Sasha waited for her at the foot, ears up, tail wagging gently back and forth.
“That,” Bree said with a great deal of puzzlement, “was very confusing. Lemurs? Baby owls? Where do these things in my head come from, Sasha?”
Sasha yawned, walked back into the living room, and went to sleep.
Bree rubbed her temples hard. She needed more sleep. She needed to rid herself of nightmares. She’d dumped a pile of unopened mail in her briefcase before she left; she’d it tackle now, before her first appointment of the day. Uneasily aware of the painting looming at her, she settled down to go over her unread issues of the ABA Journal.
Sometime later, a polite knock at the front door roused her from an infuriating essay complaining about tort reform. Bree got up to answer it, making a mental note to ask Mrs. Mather—Lavinia, rather—about a door chime. Or maybe an intercom. She’d decided after last night that she wasn’t going to leave any doors unlocked, anywhere.
Sasha gave her an encouraging sort of bark as she walked by. She bent down and fondled his ears, then stroked his forehead. “If you like this one, give me some kind of sign, okay? It’s Rosa Lucheta, the lawyer’s widow.”
But she opened the door to a short, thickset man with a black beard and a cane.
“Miss Beaufort?” He rolled the “r” slightly.
“Yes,” she said. “May I help you?”
“I am Petru Lucheta. Rosa’s brother.” The accent was Slavic; beyond that, Bree was at a loss. It could have been Russian, Latvian, or Serbo-Croatian for all she knew.
“How do you do,” Bree said politely.
“I am ke-vite well,” he said. “Rosa, she is, alas, not so well.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. But there was no need for you to come all this way to cancel the appointment. She could have called.”
“Rosa is not so well permanently,” he said. “She is unable to work, alas. I, however, am ke-vite able to work. I have come in her stead.”
“I see.” Bree considered Mr. Lucheta for a long moment. He had very black eyes. The beard covered most of his face, but what she could see of it had a benign, almost avuncular expression.
“You are willing to consider a man for this position?” he said anxiously. “The advertisement did not make a reference to gender.”
“Our laws don’t allow us to do that, Mr. Lucheta. Forgive me, may I ask? Are you a citizen? Of the United States, I mean?”
“Oh, yes. I mean, yes, I understand you. No, I am not a citizen. I have a g-r-r-reen card and I will be eligible for citizenship quite soon.” He cleared his throat, glanced from side to side, and shifted his cane from his right hand to the left in the politest possible way. “May I come in?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to keep you standing here on the stoop. Yes, please come in.” She turned, hearing the shuffle-thump as he walked behind her. She felt like Ishmael listening to the one-legged Ahab roam the decks of the Pequod.
“We’ll have more furniture soon,” she said over her shoulder. “I ordered a desk and some filing cabinets from Office Max this morning, and they’ll be here sometime tomorrow. And our phone lines will be installed by Friday afternoon, at least that’s what Southern Bell promised, and they’re usually pretty reliable.”
The shuffle-thump came to an abrupt stop. “I see you have the Rise of the Cormorant.”
Bree whirled. “I beg your pardon?”
He used his cane to point at the picture. “That. I haven’t seen it in many, many years.” He limped closer. “T’uh. One of the copies, I see. Hm.”
Bree sat down. Her knees were a bit trembly. “One of the copies?” she said. “As if, I mean, are there a whole bunch of copies?”
He folded his hands on his cane and gazed affably at the leather chair.
“Please, of course. Sit down.”
“Thank you.” He sat in a very formal way, with his back straight and his cane placed horizontally over his knees.
Bree tried to behave calmly, but she knew her voice was shaking. “You’ve seen this painting before? And you said something about a whole bunch of copies? Is it famous?”
“Do you mean, are there a whole bunch of copies, as there are a whole bunch of copies of Vincent’s Sunflowers or Pablo’s Dove of Peace? Art that has been carelessly replicated in volume? Is this a piece of art that is famous in that way? That is what you are asking me?”
“Yes,” Bree said, finding this intimate way of referring to dead artists a little disconcerting. “Although I don’t know this picture at all and I do know those others, of course. Everybody does. It can’t be that famous. Or not as famous as the other pictures you mentioned.”
“In some circles, it is that famous. As for copies, there are not so many. But you already know this, I think.”
Bree shook her head. “I don’t know a thing about it. I wish I did. It’s called what? The Rise of the Cormorant?”
“Yes. It refers to the bird, you see, who flies over the ship.”
Bree bit her lip. For some reason, the answer to this next question was critical. “Who painted it?”
“The Patriarch, of course.” He turned to her. “You didn’t know this?”
“What Patriarch? Who’s the Patriarch?”
Petru tugged at his beard. “I’m sorry. Perhaps I’ve said too much for the moment. I was under the impression that ownership of the painting has passed to you.”
“I hate the thing,” Bree said. “Own it?” The depth of her fear and hatred surprised her. “I’d rather own a rabid dog. I don’t want it. I loathe it. I’ve tried to wreck it and I can’t. I can’t even give it away.”
“No?” Petru said with interest. “You’ve tried this? To pass it along to someone else?”
Bree shuddered. “Never. How could I foist that thing on someone else? I meant I can’t see myself having the gall to give it to somebody.” She took a deep breath and burst out, “It’s wicked!”
Petru tugged at his beard. “The subject is wicked,” he agreed. “The painting itself is not wicked—it merely is what it is.” He tilted his head, considering, “What is the worst thing you feel when you see the Rise of the Cormorant ?”
Bree stared at it defiantly. “I dream about the damn thing, you know. And the dream’s always the same. If I could just swim fast enough I could keep the people from drowning. That’s what I feel when I look at it; balked, angry, and helpless.” To her extreme annoyance, tears sprang to her eyes. Antonia was right, Bree cried from rage and frustration much more often than she should.
Petru patted her hand in a comforting way. “This is very Russian, you know. To feel as deeply as this. It’s a good thing.”
“I don’t believe there are any Russians in our family,” Bree sobbed, “but I appreciate the thought.”
Petru chuckled a little, dug into the pocket of his suit coat, and emerged with a clean tissue. Bree accepted it with thanks and blew her nose. It smelled of lemons. She leaned against the couch back and looked up at the ceiling rather than confront the painting again. “I just want it out of here.”
“The only way to remove the painting from your life is to find someone else to accept it.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Bree said, a little crossly. She was embarrassed at breaking down in front of a man who might be going to work for her; then she was embarrassed at her testiness. “I do apologize, Mr. Lucheta. I’m not usually this volatile. Please tell me all you can about the painting.”
“The Patriarch created the Rise of the Cormorant as a warning, and as a test. The warning is, of course, that the cormorant is always on the rise. The test—the test is most interesting. There are those, Miss Beaufort, who would gaze upon those drowning souls and sail as fast away from rescue as they could. And there are those who beat the bodies with their oars and hope to drown them faster. And there are those who scream with rage that they cannot help fast enough.”
“You forgot those who’re scared pea green,” Bree said with painful honesty.
Petru laughed a little. “Fear, like tears, is very Russian.” He twinkled with satisfaction. “All deeply felt emotions are very Russian.”
“But which Patriarch? There’s a Patriarch in the Greek Orthodox Church, and in the Russian one, too, isn’t there?”
“And for my people as well,” Petru said. “I am a Jew. But no, the Patriarch of whom I speak is one of the Patriarchs of Angels.”
“I haven’t heard of that religious sect before,” Bree said. “Does it come from Western Europe or Eastern?”
“God is universal. The Patriarchs of Angels are universal, too. There are no artificial divisions in the Spheres.”
“I see,” Bree said somewhat dryly. There was a look in Petru’s eye she didn’t like at all. Religious cranks were not her favorite kind of people. She balled the tissue in her hand and looked around for a wastebasket. She’d forgotten to buy a wastebasket.
“And of course, there’s the cormorant.”
“Of course,” Bree agreed. “A large diving bird, isn’t it? You can train it to fish, I think.”
“It is a fisher of men’s souls,” Petru said. Then, in a sonorous voice that rolled through the little room like a kettledrum, he quoted: “The angel ended, and in Adam’s ear / So charming left his voice, that he a while / Thought him still speaking, still stood fixed to hear.” He beamed at her. “Like the painting, the Patriarch commissioned this. John’s greatest work, I believe.”
“John?” Bree said, utterly baffled. “John who?”
“Milton. Paradise Lost. ”
Bree bit her lip hard and said, “I see,” in a strangled way.
“You are laughing,” Petru observed without any sign of being offended. “La, la. There it is.”
“I do apologize, but—” She stopped in mid-sentence. Petru looked at her. “But what?” he said encouragingly.
“Nothing. Nothing.” She put her hand up to her eyes, as if to shield herself from a bright light. Nothing made sense. “I’ve been running around like a headless chicken, getting the office set up. I’m a little overtired, that’s all.”
Petru didn’t move. But Bree had a sudden horrific fancy that he’d turned into something different. He wasn’t a shabby, down-at-the-heels refugee, but a solid piece of the dark. She forced herself to open her eyes and look at him.
He smiled at her with such irresistible good humor that she had to smile back. “There is no need to hire me at all,” Petru said, comfortably. “Sometimes it is difficult for those from different life experiences to adjust to one another. And many of you Americans are just a little bit suspicious of we Russians, are you not?” He shrugged. “I can assure you I am not a member of our mafia, or of our KGB, and that my heart no longer belongs to the Communist Party.” He started to get up.
“Of course I’m not suspicious of Russians,” Bree said. Only of people who referred to dead poets as if they’d had dinner with them last night, she thought. But she didn’t say that aloud. “Please don’t think that. It’s absurd.” She pulled herself together with an effort. She’d called this man in for an interview, dammit, and that’s what she was going to do. Interview him.
Except she hadn’t called him, she’d called his sister. She stared at him, eyes narrowed. That is, if he actually had a sister named Rosa. Suddenly, she wasn’t sure of anything.
Sasha got up from his corner with a grunt, and hobbled past Bree to Petru Lucheta. He stuck his nose on the man’s knee, accepted a pat, hobbled back to his corner, and went back to sleep. His message couldn’t have been clearer if he’d spoken aloud:
There’s nothing to worry about. A little eccentricity never hurt anyone.
Bree took a breath, held it, and decided to trust both her dog and her inner voice. “Do you have a résumé, Mr. Lucheta?”
“Call me Petru, please. I have here my passport, my sister Rosa’s address in this city, where I live, and my license to practice law in Petrograd.” He pulled a sheaf of documents from his suit coat, and placed them on the coffee table on top of the newspaper. The article about the wind damage at Huey’s was uppermost. He looked at it, looked at Bree, and smiled like a bearded cherub.
Bree ignored the smile and examined the passport and the license, a piece of vellum with a gold seal. The vellum was in the Cyrillic alphabet. So he was Russian. And claimed to be a lawyer. She didn’t read Cyrillic; for all she knew the poor man was licensed to sail three-masted schooners rather than practice law.
“I can’t offer you a professional position,” Bree began apologetically.
He held up one pudgy hand. “Of course you cannot! And I, I cannot practice law here, in your country, at least not for a great while yet. No, no. It’s for the assistant to your good self that I come.”
“A great while yet, you said? Do you mean that you’re studying for the Georgia Bar?”
“Yes. At night. It is as well that I read English with much more adeptness than I speak it.” He raised his chin. “Ah. I hear, perhaps, your delivery person at the door.”
Bree jumped to her feet. There was a knock at the door, a modest rat-a-tat-tat. But Office Max wasn’t due to deliver the supplies and the filing cabinets she ordered until tomorrow. And Ronald Parchese’s appointment was for four o’clock; it was just after two right now.
Bree opened the front door to a pair of delivery men with DASHETT DELIVERY embroidered on their coveralls. The one with the name “Eustace” stitched above the Dashett logo held a clipboard and thrust it at her. “Mrs. Winston-Beaufort?”
Miss Beaufort, yes,” she said, as she scribbled her name on the sheet. “This is great. I didn’t expect you guys until tomorrow. Please bring the desk on in here. The filing cabinets go in the dining roo—I mean, the conference room.”
“No desk, ma’am,” Eustace said. “We got boxes, we got bookshelves, but we got no desk.”
Bree frowned and looked at the sender’s name on the manifest. Professor Cianquino. “Oh, no,” she said.
“This not your stuff?” Eustace asked with patient indifference.
“It’s not my stuff,” Bree said crossly. “But it is stuff that’s been sent to me. I suppose it’d be really rude to send it back. Would you stack the boxes in the kitchen, I mean the break room, please? And the bookshelves can go along the wall opposite the fireplace. I needed some anyway.”
“Your law library is arriving,” Petru Lucheta said, as he got to his feet with some difficulty. “This is excellent. I am, of course, conversant with the computer, but it is a much greater pleasure to handle books.”
He and Bree both stood out of the way as Eustace and his colleague brought the boxes in on dollies.
“I don’t really have a law library, as such,” Bree confessed. “I have a few reference volumes, like Black’s and a few of my textbooks from school, but I depend on Lexis for researching case law. This”—she gestured at the stack of cardboard boxes disappearing into the break room—“is a gift from an old friend, a retired law professor, who seems to have gotten it from my uncle. It’s more of a curiosity than anything else, and,” she added with considerable frustration, “I really don’t have room for it.”
Petru, who had ignored the latter part of this speech, stopped Eustace, withdrew a volume from the box at the top of the stack, and examined the spine. “Aha. It is as I had hoped! Lexis,” he added, “does not have available the Corpus Juris Ultima. At least, not yet.”
Bree closed her eyes. She heard Petru shuffle-thump to the kitchen. “Alas!” he called to her. “This version is not in Latin! We will just have to cope, dear Bree!”
 
“You’re not from Russia, or anything,” Bree asked Ronald Parchese rather anxiously, several hours later.
“Russia?” he said, even more anxiously. “No. Do I need to be to get the job?” Ronald was slim, without being skinny, and had the sort of clean-cut looks that prompted her mother to talk longingly of grandchildren: blond, fair-skinned, with pale blue eyes and a boyish face. He was elegant, too; his black trousers were well-cut, and his striped shirt immaculate. He made Bree feel dowdy in her all-purpose trouser suit and white T-shirt.
“I didn’t mean actually Russian,” she said, to his further bewilderment. “I was just wondering if you were a Southerner like me, or if you’ve come to Savannah from somewhere else. But you say you’ve lived in Savannah all your life?”
“Every second, Miss Beaufort. Except for my little trips.”
“Little trips?”
“I try to get to Italy every year. My people were from there originally, you know, but not for years and years and years.”
“I see.”
“You aren’t looking for a foreign national for any reason? Because I would think that my trips to Italy would count.”
“Oh, no, no.” Bree felt herself beginning to stutter. “Forget I said anything about alien venues. Look, I’d like to take a second and read your résumé. Would you like a cup of coffee while I do that?”
“I’ll take care of the coffee,” he said. He rose lithely to his feet. “What sort of equipment do you have in the break room?”
“Just a Mr. Coffee. But the beans are from Starbucks.”
“Tsk. Not good. We’ll have to look into a Melitta. Right now, I’ll see what I can do.”
Ronald headed toward the kitchen, followed by Sasha, who’d taken to him immediately. Bree looked over his résumé. His word-processing skills were sensational. He’d taken a course at the Chatham County Community College in legal terms, and he had a two-year administrative assistant’s degree from a local secretarial school. And she liked him. “Your braids,” he’d said after they had shaken hands and sat down together for the interview, “are a stroke of genius. Who had the nous to pull that off?”
Ronald Parchese on paper was a nice all-American kid. She’d hired Petru. She hadn’t really had a choice. In some obscure way, at such a remote level of consciousness that she almost didn’t recognize it, a sorting process was going on and Petru was inevitable, like Mrs. Mather was inevitable and the sixty-volume copy of the Corpus Juris Ultima stacked on her kitchen counters.
She wanted somebody NOT inevitable. Like Ronald, who didn’t have a clue about all the stuff that was gathering around her like a silken net. He hadn’t even glanced at the Rise of the Cormorant, for instance, or if he had, he hadn’t said a word.
So why not two assistants? One for whatever the Skinner job was really all about, and one for the Brianna Winston-Beaufort who was going to continue with a normal law practice long after the weirdness of the Skinner case was over.
The retainer from Liz Overshaw gave her a head start on expenses; and she’d saved enough before she’d made the move to Savannah to run her office for six months with an assistant. But she hadn’t budgeted for two. She wasn’t even going to have enough work for two until her practice built. If it ever did.
Ronald came back with a tray, which he settled on the trunk. He glanced indifferently at the newspaper headline about Huey’s, handed her a cup of coffee, and settled comfortably into the leather sofa with his own. “What do you think? Are my qualifications okay?”
“I’d love to hire you,” Bree said promptly. “But I’m not sure you’d be comfortable here.”
He flushed a bright, angry red. “If it’s because I have a domestic partner ...”
“Of course it isn’t that,” Bree said indignantly. “Do I look like a bigot to you?”
“You’d be surprised at what bigots look like,” he snapped.
“I probably would. But they don’t look like me. Or my sister,” she added.
Ronald’s complexion returned to normal and the tremor left his voice. “Does your sister work here, too?”
“God, no! But she lives with me and she bounces all over. She’s like a tennis ball loose in the room. You keep tripping over her. She’s bound to bounce in and out of here several times a week.”
Ronald’s eyes brightened. “I know exactly what you mean! You love her, but brattiness rules.”
“Exactly.” Bree set her cup down and sighed. “The reason I’m not sure you’d like it here is because you’re too normal. I can’t tell you,” she added passionately, “how much I want someone as normal as you are to be here every day when I walk in the door.”
“There’s a first,” Ronald muttered. “If you could call my mother and tell her that, I’d appreciate it. So what’s with me being so normal?”
“I’ll show you what I mean. Let me just ask you something.” Bree leaned forward, smiling. “You see that picture over the fireplace?”
“Do I not!” Ronald said. “I didn’t want to say anything, but really, Bree, it’s just hideous. How could you!”
“Ha!” Bree said. “I thought so! Please, please, please come here and work for me! The first thing we’re going to do is get rid of that horrible thing. I don’t seem to be able to get rid of it all by myself.”
Ronald lowered his coffee cup and looked at her in dismay. “Well, my dear, you can’t, of course. It’s one of the copies of the Rise of the Cormorant.”
A slight wind rose from the corners of the room and stirred his hair. Bree wanted to scream, or smack herself in frustration.
Instead, she offered Ronald Parchese a pitifully low salary, which she promised to increase as soon as she was able.