The Memory Painter

His life changed the year he went to Avignon, where he joined a band of sidewalk artists there and painted with chalk on a street corner. By the end of the week, he could recognize all the regulars who passed by.

He would leave a hat out and listen to coins clank inside it while he worked. There would often be bills too, and one woman always left a large one, every day. Bryan could tell from her designer suits and purses that she came from money. On the seventh day, she finally stopped and asked if he spoke French, and they had a long conversation about technique. She was a collector and asked if he did canvases. Bryan wasn’t surprised when he recognized her as Philip the Good, Jan Van Eyck’s most powerful patron. It seemed he had found him again.

Her name was Therese Montague. Her husband was the president of a cosmetics company, and she was wealthy in her own right. She offered him supplies and a space to work in if he agreed to do three paintings for her.

He slept on the floor of the art studio and worked on the canvases for several months, feeling as if he was back in Jan’s workshop in Bruges. The completed trio exceeded Therese’s expectations. She was highly connected to the French art scene, and before Bryan knew it, he had an offer to show in Paris. That was the moment he decided to make a name for himself as an artist, on the chance that the paintings would be the compass that would guide anyone with similar dreams toward him. But as his fame grew, he began to lose hope that anyone would ever understand his world—until he met Linz.

The possibility of her rejection now terrified him. He knew she was starting to question his sanity, and yet here he was sailing the northern Atlantic, believing he was a seafaring Viking who had almost discovered America. Bryan shook his head at himself and took out the foot-long wind instrument he had carved yesterday from a seasoned tree branch. It was something Bjarni liked to do—whistle on the water.