The Master's Piece

On my life I swore to do this, and on my life shall it be done… no matter the cost. 

My butler came into my chamber today. 

“You have not eaten in three days, sir,” said he with a trace of British pompousness behind his lackluster concern, “and I can see the jug of water just filled yesterday is gathering dust. The only change in its liquid level seems to be of evaporation.” 

“I’m fine, David,” I replied crossly. My left hand was gracefully tracing the outlines of a familiar shape on the canvas before me. My other hand was held in front of the right side of my face, blocking a graveyard of broken canvases. 

“Sir, I only mean to say-” 

“I know what you mean,” I snapped, turning to him with fury unbidden. “Go now from here, or I will toss you and your miserable lot out on the street where the dogs may bite again at the ends of your tassels!” 

David, a stern and patriarchal figure with high cheekbones, hollow, wrinkled skin, and faded blue eyes set under a carefully managed part of white hair merely pursed thin lips and bowed slightly. “As you say, sir.” 

He was offended at my rebuke, I sensed, and for that I felt but a moment of guilt. After all, David had been there at my birth. When his hair was still a lush brown and wavy and his skin lacked any wrinkles save the little crows feet at the edges of what were once piercing blue irises, he had tended to me with the care of a father, perhaps knowing that my own father was too busy with the matters of the world to give much attention to his own children. It had gotten better after the death of my eldest sister, but… still, David was particularly genial to me. 

Yet my task was more important than these trivial rebuffs. 

I growled and realized that in my moment of absentmindedness, my hand had slipped ever so slightly, and the pencil had made a deviant mark upon the canvas. Rubber, I could use to erase the mark, yet the shadow of it would still linger, if not on the board, on my mind, and that I could not stand. 

I ripped the canvas from its backing and threw it into the pile, going there shortly after and putting my foot through the heavy paper. My room was expansive, yet the dozen or so pictures cast aside by my own hand were taking their share with haughty pride, as though they knew that the space they took in my mind was much larger than the physical area they occupied. I had already given them the bed and my dresser. I had taken to sleeping only for brief periods upon the rug. Fortunately, my chamber pot was still easy to access, yet it would not be so forever if I didn’t complete my task. 

I rang the bell beside my desk. From the other side of the long tube which acted as a method of communication in my manor, I heard David’s voice answer in its drawl: “Yes, sir?” 

Clearing my throat, I ordered, “Bring me another dozen canvases of the same size to my room posthaste.” 

“Sir… I am afraid you have used the last one.” 

My heart thudded loudly behind my ribcage. “How can that be?” 

“I have smaller canvases, and larger in storage. Would you like one of those?” 

“No!” I shouted, and I heard him cry out from the other end of the line at the sudden volume, “Sorry, sorry… David, please call on Mr. Ellingsworth, the owner of the supply shop on Mercer Street. He is bound to have some canvases of my specifications. In fact, he might be expecting my call.” 

“Very good, sir. I will send someone right away. Oh, and before you go; your sister is here to see you.” 

I grumbled, “Tell her I will have to see her another day. Tell her I’m ill.”

“Sir, she… will not take anything save an affirmative response… In fact,” David sounded incredibly uncomfortable, “she has just burst past Alice and Poole and is headed up to your chamber, looking irritated to say the least.” 

I sighed, feeling the strength wane from my thin limbs as the energy afforded to me by my task dissipated. “Fine, I suppose. Please, just get my canvases.” 

“Right away, sir.” 

I was given but a moment of respite to collect myself and sit in the chair at my desk before my door was unceremoniously thrust open. In walked my sister, a few years older than I and the middle child of our former triumvirate. Her skin was a deathly yet beautiful pale and her face tight with worry. I saw her severe green eyes as a pure reflection of our mother’s, and instinctively I cringed from her presence. 

“Arthur!” she cried. “What a state you’re in!” 

“Whatever could you mean, dear Rebecca?” I tried to keep the sarcasm out of my voice and failed. 

“David tells me you have not eaten in days, and you hardly drink anything either!” Her eyes quickly found the pile of canvases. “What on earth are you doing?” 

“Painting.” 

“Well of course you are,” snapped Rebecca. “But you have never done this.” 

I stayed silent for some time under her glare. However, my own will was so greatly taxed that I soon sighed again, deeply, and felt my breath hit the barriers of my diaphragm for the first time in far too long. In a voice much more tender than that to which my sister was accustomed, I said, “Do you ever think about Mary?” 

Her eyes quieted. “Of course… We were the best of friends as children, the three of us. It felt as though no matter what obstacle we came across, nothing could harm us if we stayed with one another.” 

I scratched my face, realizing that I had formed a haggard and misshapen beard. My mouth turned to a scowl and I found my brow furrowed. “When you think of her, what image forms in your mind?” 

“Are you asking me how I remember her?” 

“Yes.” 

She paused and sat upon an astray ottoman, her modest dress folded neatly. “I think of her when she had just gotten married. The light was in her eyes, her hair was so beautiful. I remember plaiting it for her. She had so much hair, all golden as though the sun itself was imbued in it. I think of her fair face, her gentle nature. I think of her proud stature, and the vigor with which she grasped Joseph’s hand. The two were made for one another, I think.” 

“Oh? You don’t think of her at the end of her life?” My sister declined to answer but shifted her gaze from mine. I continued harshly, “Don’t you remember her emaciated face? The fear in her eyes, the pain which echoed from every hoarse breath? The chants for a God who did not see her as worthy of grace? With any Providence, can you tell it hated her? Her arms… so thin that they held but the faintest trace of muscle. Hands permanently clawed with fingers like the limbs of giant spiders. Can you not see her like that, when her heart would flutter in her chest from the effort of speaking? Do you not remember the way she looked at us? The way she looked at Joseph? As though the very light from her soul was extinguished? Don’t you recall those final moments, when she-” 

“Arthur,” said my sister, her voice breaking. I saw the tears already running down her cheeks. 

I felt my own heart fall. “I’m sorry… I shouldn’t have said that.” 

We sat in silence for some time. Afterwards, she whispered. “I do think of her like that… sometimes. Only in my darkest dreams.” 

“I see her like that all the time,” I said. “And of father, the way he looked so weary, so defeated at the end of his life. I look at David now and I see the signs of such decay in him as well, and I cannot help but feel this this deep… torment at the comparison between that and their former strength, their former honor.” 

“It’s a part of life,” said Rebecca quietly. “No one can escape it.” 

“The Egyptians almost did,” I said in a soft voice, staring somewhere into the distance behind my graveyard of almost-paintings. “Their sarcophagi… The images they captured upon them mixed with their techniques of embalming. They immortalized their noble… as gods.” 

“Gruesome.” Rebecca shuddered.

“Or near brilliance.” I leaned forward, gaining back some of the vitality from my task. “Oh, Rebecca, can you not see? What paintings of Mary are left that do her justice? The one which hangs in my parlor is but a mockery of her grace. The one in your house is too glum. If we only had a real portrait of her, one made from love and not from dedication to an art, then she would be truly immortalized. Had I any foresight, I would have painted it myself. Yet I…” 

“You were grieving.” 

“I cannot take that excuse.” I got up and began pacing around the room, my voice feverish. “Don’t you see, Rebecca? I… I alone have the skill to do something like that! To immortalize the flesh in the oil of my paintings! And I intend to do so with myself. This is why I stay up here, chained to this humble task. I will succeed, and I will have a portrait of myself which will encapsulate every fiber of my essence, of my soul, and it will live after I have passed throughout eternity!” 

I found Rebecca’s eyes, hers now fearful while mine were triumphant. She looked at me and said baldly. “Have you gone mad? What you speak of is blasphemy! Or worse yet, it’s more akin to the experiments of dark science performed by alchemists who have forgotten God.” 

I yearned to spite God in front of her, to ask her what is God but the idol of our own insignificance? Yet then I saw how genuinely frightened she was, and for the first time I caught myself in a moment of self-awareness. A bell rung through the tube by my desk. I heard David’s echoing voice: “Sir, I have a dozen canvases for you.” 

Rushing over, I grabbed the speaking-device and said, “Thank you, thank you, David. I will take them in my room.” 

I then took Rebecca’s cold hands in my own and knelt down. “Dear sister, I would loathe to think that I have cast your mind in a gloom. Please, let me perform this task… Without it, I cannot be whole.” 

She stiffened against me. “With it, I’d wager you are less than without.” 

I smiled against her frost. “Please… I sense that I need but your blessing to find what I seek, and do not think that I will forget you in the process. You will be my next triumph; your portrait shall be just as immortalizing.” 

Rebecca withdrew her hands and looked at me sadly. “Arthur, I shall give you my blessing, but only on one condition. That you never ask me to sit for such a portrait.” 

I felt my heart ache with the thought of losing her to the same decay which had already stolen so much from me, but her blessing felt like divine action to my hands. The door opened and some men came in to deliver the canvases. Rebecca stood and said, in a voice whispering of cold yet showing mostly pity, “I take my leave now, brother. I hope I shall find you in better spirits on my next call.” 

Now standing as well, I cried after her, “You shall! By my own hand, you shall!” 

After the men were paid, David tried to send me up some food - a hearty stew and some fresh bread. I stubbornly refused to eat, my hands itching to draw and paint, but he threatened - yes, threatened! to call my doctor if I stayed my course. So I wolfed it down and drank whatever water he suggested, and then… I got to work. 

The first three canvases I broke through in three days. The stencils were not clear, the lines blurred, my own features distorted. I had an image in my mind, an image I had seen once while looking in a mirror on a clear day. It was in Amsterdam, and the houses were behind me and the rivers alight with the fire of a summer day. 

I shook my head to rid myself of the memory of anything save me, save my face. I had decided to paint my body as well, and in that I found great ease, for the suits I wore were fitted so precisely that I could feel each stroke of my pencil as the tightening of a tape measure used by my esteemed tailor. 

At last, on the fourth day, real progress shone. I began the stencil in the early hours of the morning, and I had completed it by the evening. No broken canvas, no erased lines, just fluid perfection. I’d never reached this point before. After some steadying breaths, I took my steady hands and began painting. I used my dark colors first. I had decided that the background was going to be the street of Amsterdam in as great detail as I could give it. I placed each crooked house just as it was in my vision. To me, they looked like piano keys halfway to striking the chord. I took painstaking care to manufacture each little window, to even draw what I recalled to be a tabby cat, far too rotund for any longevity, lounging upon a distant balcony. Closer to me, there was of course the stone wall which prevented drunks from falling into the canal, at least in theory, and then the far sidewalk, filled with little stands of fruit and vegetables and tulips. I remembered the faces to great precision, yet it was not them that I was immortalizing. 

Leaving them in their ambiguity, I found myself needing only… myself painted. Yet the hour was growing late. I put my brushes down, not ready to paint in the darkness, and I curled up on the rug. I noticed some newfound aches and pains in my joints. I considered calling David - see how rejuvenated I was from my success, to be so ready to now take account for my health. However, then I thought of speaking with a doctor, of perhaps being mandated something as profane as bedrest. Bedrest? Now? When my masterpiece was on its precipice, teetering between genius and destruction? 

So I slept lightly and awoke in more pain than I can remember feeling. After struggling to my feet and, for some reason, struggling to draw clear breaths, I found myself face to face with the broken canvases. Yes… I thought, Perhaps sleep in a real bed is overdue… 

Regardless, my eyes located my painting, the background now dry. All that was remaining was the central point, the focal point. 

I began with the legs, long and hidden behind the pants of a maroon suit. My boots were black, my socks hidden. I marvelled at how my hand managed to capture each flicker of light, each shadow with such brutal accuracy, almost pushing me to disgust at my own skill, as though such a thing should not be possible. Yet I soldiered on. Then came the most dangerous part. My face. My self-portrait. Yet I did not fear. My breath grew thin as I painted each line with confidence and exactness. My thin cheeks, my prominent bones. My hard jawline, lacking the beard it now possessed. My crystalline green eyes underneath delicate brown eyebrows. My long flowing brown hair, the envy of so many in my youth. It was drawn back beneath a tall hat, whose likeness was perfectly captured, and my small ears peeked out from between the curtains of hair. I put the last touch on it; the mole under my right eye, and I felt a sudden bout of faintness. I could but gaze upon the beauty of my magnum opus for a brief second before I fell.

***

The next time Arthur Morsby’s door was opened, it was by force. His sister called on him the next day, for a darkness had seized her heart, and David had been summoned to break the thing down. Once behind it, Rebecca promptly fainted, collapsing into Alice’s arms. David called off the other servants, for he himself was horrified at what he saw. There was a body before a canvas, so decrepit and loathsome that it looked like the product of some theater production rather than a human being. Its spine had curled itself into the fetal position, the arms were bent and as thin as bone, the floppy skin covered with spots. The hands were clawed and the left held a brush loosely. The face… The face was too desolated to gain any insight into what it was. White hair, loosely attached to a scalp. Sunken cheeks and eyes. A toothless mouth. Truly, a lost creature lay there. 

David’s eyes found the canvas, and he took in a sharp breath. For there, glorious, stood his master. Every detail of his being, of his soul, was captured relentlessly. There, in the oil paints, stood the soul of the thing which lay on the ground, and David understood, and his heart broke to understand it. Rebecca would see her brother again, perhaps for eternity if this painting should be hers to keep, yet she would never talk to him. Nor would David, for his master, the boy he helped raise, had trapped himself in oil paints.