“There’s a portrait, of course,” she said, tilting her head toward the front of the house.
“May I see it?” I asked.
“If you like, but it will be there later, if you would prefer to see your room now, instead.”
“No. I can rest in a few minutes. I’d really like to see that painting.”
Nelia shrugged. “I’ll show you where it is. I have to take the wine crate out of the salon anyhow.”
“I didn’t see one. . . .”
“The wooden box I brought in with the mail. It shouldn’t sit like that for long—the room gets too warm to preserve the wine. So inconvenient—the last thing this house needs is more presentation wine in fancy crates. You can’t drink the stuff or someone will have a fit, so it just takes up room and goes bad. A waste.”
She led me back toward the room we’d left earlier and stopped at the door, pointing to a heavy frame that hung on the wall a few feet away. I couldn’t see the painting within from my angle—the frame’s thick carving obscured even an oblique view. “That’s it. Amélia painted it herself. It needs restoring, but she was so haphazard, that it’s hard to tell which bits are dirt and which are just Amélia’s poor work. She was much better at needlework and music.”
I walked toward the painting while Nelia went into the salon to retrieve the packages she’d left. I wasn’t holding out much hope about the portrait’s quality or likeness, no matter how much Nelia seemed to think it looked like Carlos.
I was surprised. Even in the subdued light of the west-facing room, the windows of which weren’t yet lit with direct sun, it was startling. The work was terrible, the colors muddy where they weren’t slashes of primary tones like a modern abstract. There was a lot of black, too, and not all of it was the color of paint. The uncanny darkness hung in streamers of Grey and gleamed in the thick body of the paint as if mixed into the oil and pigment. It could have been age that made the painting as a whole seem dark, but I thought it might have been the subject, because the man glowering out of the canvas was unmistakably Carlos.
The portrait showed him in a library or study, standing beside a table covered with books. He wore a loose white shirt under a long, pale blue garment that was something like a dressing gown. He was younger than I knew him and his hair was cut close to his head, almost shaved. His beard and mustache were much smaller and softer, just framing his mouth and not extending onto his cheeks at all, leaving his jaw and neck exposed without any sign of the scars that he now had there. His left hand rested on a human skull, the long fingers curled slightly as if caught tapping the bones in impatience. In his right hand he held something that could have been a scruffy quill pen or a badly rendered knife. The hand’s position was awkward, as if Amélia couldn’t recall exactly what a hand looked like when she got to that point. She’d worked very hard on the details of the man’s face and clothes, but the arrangement of the painting was odd, the room exquisitely detailed on one corner and barely blocked in at another. Carlos’s figure was pushed off to the left, leaving the skull his hand rested on at the center of the picture, while the man simply ended at midthigh, though there was still empty canvas below into which he could have been painted full-length. In the upper-right corner, a bird descended into the picture as if it had flown in through an unseen window and been captured by accident.
I stared at the painting and shook my head.
Nelia came back out of the salon with the wooden box and two smaller cardboard parcels in her arms. “It’s an awful painting,” she said. “I think she may have been insane by the time she finished it. But you see why I say he must be a relative. How could this Carlos look so much like that Carlos and be anything but a descendant?”
I felt something ruffle across the surface of the Grey, scattering a few ghosts, and I started to turn as a footstep sounded behind us.
“It is a disturbing likeness,” Carlos said behind me.
Nelia yelped in surprise and spun around, fumbling to keep hold of her packages. She pulled them tight to her chest and stared at him.
Carlos offered a restrained nod and didn’t smile. “My apologies. I didn’t mean to startle you. I came to see how you were—both of you. Mr. Smith has gone to bed. I think he was hoping one of you would be coming to join him soon.” He raised an eyebrow at Nelia.
She blushed and excused herself, turning and walking away at just less than a scurry, clutching her boxes in a swirl of gold and silver energy while streamers of Carlos’s black pall followed in her wake. I frowned after her for a moment, feeling dull-witted and thinking I’d just missed something other than Carlos’s not quite flirting with her.
“I think it’s a very bad painting,” I said, just to say something as my exhaustion caught up to me.
“It is yet another thing I did not know about my wife.”
“That she was a terrible painter?”
“That she had an imagination. That room was the library in her home, where she lived when I was at Coimbra. I was rarely in it and I don’t recall ever wandering the shelves en déshabillé. I don’t remember a skull or stuffed ravens. However, I may have owned some garment like that once, though not while I was at college. It appears she created this portrait from her own mind, weaving pieces of memory together with some ideas of her own—and I had thought her rather brainless. I didn’t realize her depths. Plainly, I underestimated her.” It didn’t sound like a compliment.
“Plainly,” I said, shaking off a surge of heavy-lidded sleepiness.
“I may need to speak with her again.”
“This seems like the place for it.”
“Yes. I should unbind her and Rafa here—it would be appropriate.”
“You’re getting sentimental in your old age.”
“Hardly. Practical. I can’t carry them forever and they may be useful.”
I grunted, unable to put my thoughts together fast enough to make a better reply.
Carlos looked me over. “You need rest and your spouse-in-soul expects you.” He put his hand out. “I only want to know how you do.”
I put my injured paw in his palm and shivered at the touch, feeling a little ill. “I do all right, I think. Very tired, though.”
He peered at my bandaged hand. “Hmm . . . It should be well enough with time. Sleep, and I will talk with you more later.”
“Are you sending me to bed?”
“I am.”
“May I borrow your bathrobe? Mine was lost in transit.”
He growled at me and I was too tired to care.
“Where is my room, anyway?” I asked, feeling drunk from lack of rest.
“I’ll show you. Otherwise you may wander off and lose some other bit of yourself,” Carlos said, taking my arm and walking me through the room toward a staircase.
“Is that a shot?”
“It is a threat.”
I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the walk upstairs to a bedroom, where Carlos handed me off to Quinton as if I were a found pet. “Take her to bed and keep her there until she stops babbling.”
Quinton raised his eyebrows. “Well, I was planning on doing that anyway. . . .”
“Good.” Carlos turned and stalked off in disgust.
“I think he’s mad at me,” I said as Quinton closed the door.
“Nah. If he were mad, things would start dying . . . or exploding, I think. Definitely impatient, though.”
“Why?”
“Well, it must be frustrating to finally be awake in the daytime and not be able to get anything done because your companions are too exhausted to be any help. I don’t think he’s comfortable waiting around.”
“He is capable of managing on his own.”
“In this case, I suspect he needs our assistance—or at least our presence—to get the work done. I’m not sure why I think that, but I do.”
“Hmm . . . Intuitive thinking.”
“Right now, the only thing you should intuit is the bed. As in ‘get into it.’”
“Oh, ha-ha.”