The Library of Light and Shadow (Daughters of La Lune #3)
M. J. Rose
To draw you must close your eyes and sing.
—PABLO PICASSO
Hotel Carlton
58 Boulevard de la Croisette
Cannes, France
August 28, 1920
Dear Mademoiselle Duplessi,
When I visited your studio in May to sit for my portrait, I found you most agreeable, so I do hope you will consider my request seriously. According to the process your brother had described to me, I expected to receive a painting depicting my innermost emotions. I wanted to share my deepest feelings with the man I cared about. To share my dreams with him in a special, private way.
Days later, when your brother delivered the portrait to my home, I was appalled. Yes, you depicted what was in my heart but not the adoration that fills it. Instead, you painted a secret not to be shared. Especially with the man I hope to wed. It was to be kept between me and his dear former wife. Whom I loved and cared for. Whom I helped in the end—even if your horrible painting shows me in the one moment when my help looks like anything but.
I refused the portrait, and I paid your brother whatever I could and begged him to destroy the painting.
I’d assumed he did.
Until I had a visit from a friend who saw that same portrait in the Duplessi Gallery in Cannes. So yesterday, I traveled south from Paris to see for myself.
I have just come back from the viewing and am distraught that this scene of the darkest day of my soul is hanging on the wall where hundreds of people can gawk over it and gossip about me.
You portrayed me as a murderess. You turned me into a killer. You exposed only a small part of the story and left out proof of my innocence. My dearest friend was in pain. She wanted to die. To end her suffering and that of her husband, who experienced so much pain watching her.
I helped her, yes, but out of compassion.
Not because I wanted her to pass out of this world.
But you illustrated the scene with a wholly sinister aspect.
And now, because of your brother’s callous greed, how many have already been exposed to this lie? And what can I do? Retract their vision of it? I can tell people it’s your fantasy. Not my truth. Some might believe me. Others won’t.
The man to whom I am betrothed won’t.
The damage has been done. My ruination has been set in motion. I fear the authorities will come after me now.
I sit here in my hotel room at a loss. And before I take more drastic steps, I am appealing to your kind nature, begging you to remove the painting from the gallery and keep it from further viewing.
I am afraid I will not be able to withstand the judgment of those I love if they see the painting . . . if they see this half story before I can tell them its entirety.
I beg you to help me,
Thérèse Bruis
Chapter 1
Silk lined the blindfold. Deep maroon in color, so dark, like dried blood. Magenta mixed with black if I were to create it on my palette. As I slipped it over my face, I felt the smooth fabric caress my cheeks, cool and delicious.
I recognized a familiar and particular combination of feelings well up in me: expectation, excitement, and the thrill of fear. Guilt that I was peeking in on what was not my right to see and bliss at giving in to the irresistible temptation to look deeper despite a potentially dangerous outcome.
With the blindfold on, I felt more at home in the world than at any other time. Except when Mathieu held me in his arms. But those days were long past, and my life was so different now that I often wondered if my brief time with him was real or imagined.
Adjusting the elastic wrapped around my head, positioning the blindfold just the right way, I saw only darkness. Not a sliver of light invaded its black.
Around me the sounds of the party faded. In the silver and black living room high above Central Park, the guests were still laughing and talking, drinking champagne, admiring their reflections shimmering in the huge round mirror over the fireplace.
But I had left the pleasures and attractions of the party and slipped inside a shell. Cocooned, I focused on sounds of rolling waves. Memories dredged from the beach in Cannes where I grew up. The sea echoes relaxed me, lulled me . . . I let go of the tensions of the actual world, opened to the magic. I became receptive.
“Delphine, aren’t you ever going to draw me?” The impatient whine from the slightly drunk partygoer splashed into my thoughts like a rock thrown into that blue-green water.
I reacted to her entreaty more slowly than usual. I never drank when I was drawing, but that night, for some reason, I’d felt nervous and had a bit of champagne. The good French stuff, smuggled into America so that all these bright young things could drink it out of wide-mouthed glasses imported—just like the wine—from my home country. Fine Baccarat or Lalique you could crush by holding too tightly. Crystal picking up the lights and sending rainbow flickers onto the walls and the men’s starched white shirts and the women’s beaded gowns. With my blindfold on, all was possible, and if I listened hard enough, I could even hear the effervescence in that champagne bubbling to the surface.
Breaking the law was never as much fun as it was in 1925, in this other city of lights, New York. Everyone who had lived through the Great War was still running away from its horrors. Trying to forget. Skyscrapers rose overnight, changing the landscape, dreamed up from the minds of architects determined to prove that tomorrow held promise. Painters, sculptors, furniture designers embraced the rounded lines and geometric cleanliness of Art Deco in their effort to give the world order. Lovers threw out all rules of propriety. Having affairs became as acceptable as indulging in bonbons. Seduced by the allure of motoring trips, we all took off in sleek, elegant cars that shone in the sun like jewels as we tried to outrace the past. Everyone, it seemed, smoked opium or marijuana at soirees that never really ended. All of us were desperate to believe that the future could be as bright as the moon, which we watched fade in the sky while we kept partying—gay and delighted and sad and lost.
Between the fingers of my right hand, I held the silver pencil that my father had given me on my sixteenth birthday, warming the precious metal. I could feel my name, Delphine Duplessi, engraved in script on the barrel.