Take this, in remembrance of one who will always love you.
And his eyes filled with tears, damn it, so that when he looked down at the miniature itself, he couldn’t even see her. Couldn’t see the rare and perfect details of her face, the expression in her eyes. But he didn’t need to. He knew every brushstroke. He’d painted her himself, exactly as he wanted to remember her. Almost as if he knew he would need it one day.
Through the glass of the doors—or maybe it was the skylight—came a faint roar of delight. Dong, dong, sang the bell of a distant church spire. Fashionable St. James’, probably, where his sister had married her prey, that tall blond man with the nice kid who always tagged along, hoping someone might give a damn.
Eighteen ninety-four. Time to move on.
Harry draped the velvet square back over the miniature and the folded note, and he placed them carefully into his inside jacket pocket. In the cavity above the mantel, he placed the Pinkerton report, and then, after an instant’s hesitation, the scribbled notes he’d written to Olive but never sent. Maybe she would stop by one day and find them. You never knew.
He placed his two hands on the mantel and stood there a moment, contemplating the three terra-cotta squares—the crimson figure of Saint George, sword raised in triumph to the sky—until he couldn’t stand it anymore and turned to the corner of the room, a few yards away.
He’d meant to throw it in the fireplace, but his arm had been more forgiving—or more sensible—than his furious head, and the little box had fallen in among the canvases stacked to the right, well away from the danger of the coals. At the time, he had thought about going to retrieve it, but instead he had gathered up his supplies and left the thing where it fell.
Now, as he moved the wooden frames aside, he thought it would be a miracle if the box was still there. He’d spent far more than he should, for a man planning to support a wife and mother-in-law abroad, and how could a small fortune like that remain unmolested, no matter how obscure its location?
But there it was, the little square box that had once contained all his earthly ambitions, wedged between a blank canvas and the plaster wall. He bent down and picked it up and rotated it between his fingers. The velvet was still soft and new.
He didn’t open it. He didn’t think he could. He carried it to the fireplace and reached inside the cavity below Saint George, until his fingertips brushed against the wall, and he left the box there. At the very back, so you couldn’t just see it there. You had to hunt for it. You had to want it badly.
He replaced the brick, which went in a little more stiffly than it came out, and turned to look over the room one last time.
In his haste, he hadn’t taken everything. He’d left all his sketches of Olive in the Chinese cabinet, and all of his old painted canvases. Some of his paints and charcoals, too. Well, let them stay. Maybe the new owner would have some use for them.
He walked briskly to the door and hurried down the stairs, refusing to linger over the place where he had seen Olive’s face for the first time, or that heavenly spot where he’d taken her against the wall because he, in the impatient lust of new love, couldn’t possibly wait another second, and she—equally eager—had just about swallowed him up with her passion. (He remembered resting against her afterward, listening to the beat of her heart, taking her breath into his lungs, and thinking that he was the luckiest man in the world, that you couldn’t connect with a human being any more perfectly than that. And sure enough, he’d been right.)
When he came to the fifth-floor landing, he paused.
He had finished the mural in the middle of the night, the day before he’d received the letter from the Pinkerton agency, and he hadn’t looked at it since. In fact, he had very nearly taken a bucket of turpentine and erased those na?ve and idealistic images from the face of the earth. He had been ashamed of them, ashamed of his own quixotic romanticism, his schoolboy illusions. And what he drew and painted in Cuba bore no resemblance to medieval allegory; he was ruthless now in his realism, unflinching, hard, clear-eyed, a different man. He wanted to show the truth.
But a year had passed, and now he was curious. Had they kept the mural in place, or had somebody painted it over? And if the mural was gone, then was the old Harry gone, too? Was his past erased, and only the present remained?
If this child of his—this new life he had created with Maria in a paroxysm of grieved longing for another woman, and another life—if this child came looking one day for his father’s beginnings, would he find nothing at all?