Frustrated not to better understand his response to the work, he returned to Dwyer's text, skipping the art critique - which was mercifully short - and moving on to pick up the biographical threads. Whatever she'd claimed about the mellower Simeon, the facts of his life did not suggest a man at peace with himself.
'Between August of 1724 and March of 1725, he moved his lodgings no less than eleven times, the longest period he spent in one place being November and December, which he passed in a monastery at Dungeness. It is not clear whether he went there intending to take vows. If so, it was a passing fancy. By the middle of January he is writing to Dolores Cruikshank - who had been one of Rukenau's cronies three years before but was now, in her own words, quite cured of his influence -and states:
' "I am thinking of leaving this wretched country for Europe, where I think I may find souls more sympathetic to my vision than ever I have found in this too rational isle. I have looked everywhere for a tutor who might guide me, but I find only stale minds and staler rhetoric. It seems to me, we must invent religion every moment, as the world invents itself, for the only constant is in inconstancy. Did you ever meet a doctor of divinity who knew this simple truth; or if he knew it, dared speak it out? No. It is a heresy amongst learned men because to admit it is to unseat themselves from their certainties, and they may no longer lord themselves over us, saying: this is so, and this is not. It seems to me the purpose of religion is to say: all things are so. An invented thing and a thing we call true; a living thing and a thing we call dead; a visible thing and a thing that is yet to be: All Are So. There was one that we both knew who taught this truth, and I was too arrogant to learn it. I regret my foolishness every waking hour. I sit here in this tiny town, and look West to the islands, and pine for him like a lost dog. But I dare not go to him. He would kill me I think, for my ingratitude. Nor could I fault him for that. I was misled by well-meaning friends, but that's no excuse, is it? I should have bitten off their fingers when they came to take me. I should have choked them with their prayer-books. And now it's too late.
' "I beg you, send me news of him if you have any, so when I look towards the isles I may imagine him, and be soothed."'
This was powerful stuff; but difficult for Will to sympathize with. He had made his way in the world largely by defying tutelage, so this yearning for a teacher, so passionately phrased Simeon might have been speaking of physical desire, seemed to him faintly preposterous. To Dwyer also. 'It was,' she wrote, 'an indication that Simeon was undergoing a profound psychological upheaval. And there was more; a good deal more. In a second letter to Cruikshank, written from Glasgow, less than a week later, Simeon's over-ripe imaginings are running riot:
' "I heard from a certain source that the Man of the Western Isles has finally turned his golden architect to his purpose, and has the foundation of Heaven laid. What source is this, you ask? I will tell you, though you may mock me. The wind; that is my messenger. I have inklings from other sources, it's true, but none I trust as much as the wind, which brought me nightly such reports of all our Certain One has done that I began to sicken for want of sleep, and have retreated to this foul Caledonian town where the wind does not come with such fresh news.
' "But what use is it to sleep, if I wake in the same state that I lay down my head? I must mend my courage, and go to him. At least that is what I think this hour. The next I may be of another opinion entirely. You see how it is with me? I have contrary thoughts on every matter now, as though I were divided as surely as his architect. That was the trick by which he turned the creature to his purpose, and I wonder if he sowed the same division in my soul, as punishment for my betrayal. I think he would do that. I think he would take pleasure in it, knowing I would come after him at last, and that the closer I came the more set against myself I would become."
'Here,' Dwyer wrote, 'is the first mention of suicidal thoughts. There is no record of any reply from the pen of Mrs Cruikshank, so we must assume she judged Simeon so far gone he was beyond her help. Once only, in the last of the four letters he wrote to her during his Scottish sojourn does he refer to his art:
' "Today I have conceived a plan as to how I may play the prodigal. I will make a portrait of my Certain One upon his island. I have heard it called the Granary, so I will make the painting surrounding him with grain. Then I will take it to him, and pray that my gift assuages his rage. If it does then I will be received into his house and will gladly do his bidding until I die. If it does not, then you may assume I am dead by his hand. Whichever is the case, you will not hear from me after this."
'This pitiful letter,' Dwyer here remarked, 'was the last he ever wrote. It is not the last we hear of him, however. He survives for another seven months, travelling to Bath, to Lincoln, and to Oxfordshire, relying on the charity of friends. He even paints pictures, three of which survive. None of them fits the description of the Granary painting he is planning in his letter to Dolores Cruilcrhank. Nor is there any record of his having travelled to the Hebrides in search of Rukenau.
'It seems most likely that he gave up on the endeavour entirely, and went south from Glasgow in search of more comfortable lodgings. At some point in the travels, John Galloway tracks him down, and commissions him to paint the house he and his new wife (he had married in September of 1725) now occupy. As Galloway reports in a letter, to his father:
' "My good friend Thom Simeon is now at work immortalizing the house, and I have high hopes that the picture will be splendid. I believe Thomas has it in him to be a popular artist, if he can just put aside some of his high-flown notions. I swear if he could he would paint an angel blessing every leaf and blade of grass, for he tells me he looks hard to see them, noon and night. I think him a genius, probably; and probably mad. But it is a sweet madness, which offends Louisa not at all. Indeed she said to me, when I told her he looks for angels, that she did not wonder that he failed to see them, for he shed a better brightness than they, and shamed them into hiding. " '
An angel blessing every leaf and blade of grass - there was an image to conjure with, Will thought. Weary of Dwyer's prose now, of guesswork and assumptions, he returned to The Fertile Acre and studied it afresh. As he did so he realized the connection between this image and his own pictures. They were before and after scenes; bookends to the holocaust text that lay between. And the author of that text? Jacob Steep, of course. Simeon had painted the moment before Steep appeared: all life in terror at Jacob's imminence. Will had caught the moment after: life in extremis, the fertile acre become a field of desolation. They were companion creators, in their way; that was why his eye came back and back to this picture. It was painted by a brother, in all but blood.
There was a light tapping at the door, and Adele appeared, telling him she was off to bed. He glanced at his watch. It was ten-forty, to his astonishment.