Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(89)

“I don’t know who lives here,” Jordan confessed, “but I love them. In my mind, they’re old lovers who can’t stand to live with each other but can’t stand to live entirely without, and so they keep this place as a sort of pact to see each other for one week each season.”

As she began to unpack her bag, Declan wandered from easel to easel, looking at the paintings on them. Landscapes, mostly, some fiddly cityscapes of DC-area landmarks. The walls behind them had photos of places all over the world in black and white. He looked for evidence of the old lovers who couldn’t stand to live with or without each other but saw only one older woman smiling at the camera. She seemed in love with her surroundings, not with the picture-taker.

“I’m going to paint in the dark,” Jordan said. “Even I don’t want to see what I create left to my own devices.”

He turned to find her standing at one of the easels, a blank prepared board propped up, her little paint palette open with eight colors squeezed on it within brush’s reach on a spindly table beside her. The jar of Tyrian purple was there, too, unopened. He just looked at her there, standing with her things and her canvas waiting for his face, and he thought of the town house back in Alexandria with his brothers in it.

“You don’t really mean that this is your first original,” Declan said. “It can’t possibly be.” He remembered how quickly she had copied the Sargent at the Fairy Market. How thoroughly he’d been fooled by The Dark Lady. One didn’t get that good at being other people without a lot of practice.

Jordan loaded her brush with paint. “I learned by copying. And then I copied for a living. I think some forgers would say their paintings ‘in the style of’ are originals, but they’re telling themselves bedtime stories. So you’re my first. Park your bum,” she said, and gestured to the armchair opposite her.

“How?”

“With your arse and glutes.”

He laughed, explosively, turning his face to do it, and she laughed, too.

He sat.

“How still do I have to be?”

“You can talk.” She looked at the blank canvas. She let out a breath and shook out her hands.

“Whoo.”

She began. He couldn’t see what she was doing, but it was no hardship to sit quietly and watch her work. Her attention flicked from her canvas to him, checking reality against her creation and vice versa. It was a strange feeling to be studied after years of attempting to avoid it. He wasn’t sure it was good for him. It was like dabbling in his father’s criminal machinations; he could tell that there was a large part of him that secretly liked it.

“There are letters from Sargent’s sitters,” Declan said eventually.

The corners of her mouth rose, although her eyes stayed on the painting. “Tell me about them.”

He did. He told her about how the people who would be the subjects of future Sargent paints wrote that they would come for sitting after sitting only to watch him face an empty canvas, doing nothing. Hours upon hours spent in the company of a painter who wasn’t painting. Just facing down that empty canvas. Staring at them. A wizard without magic. An orchestra quiet in the pit. He told her about how they wrote that after a certain point, Sargent would suddenly attack the canvas, painting with ferocious energy, dashing at the canvas to slam paint down before retreating to eye it, circling for the next round. He told her how the letter-writers said he’d shout and curse at the canvas as he painted, how it was as if he was possessed, and they were half-frightened of him and his genius. He told her about how if he put down even a mark he didn’t like on the subject’s face, he would scrape the whole thing away and begin again. The only mark worth keeping was the spontaneous one.

“Is it really spontaneous, though, if you’ve done ten spontaneous marks and erased them before it?” Jordan asked. “I think that’s just not showing people the work in the margins, isn’t it? You’ve practiced spontaneity. You want the viewer to respond to the unfretful line, even though it took fretting to get there. You’re making it about them instead of about you. True performance. What a master.”

She was telling him something about herself.

“No one knew him,” Declan said. He was telling her something about himself. “All those letters and all the records we have about him. He was such a public figure, he lived not long ago, but they still don’t know for sure if he had any lovers.”

Jordan put her brush into the turpentine and pressed the bristles against the side of the jar until the paint billowed dark.

“He had at least one,” she said. “Because I love him. Here now. Come see yourself.”

He got up, but before he got to the canvas, Jordan stood to interrupt him with a hand flat on his belly. He was very still. The room smelled of turpentine and the warm, productive scent of the paints; probably they should’ve cracked a window. The concrete greyhound kept sniffing the air and the friendly city night light kept sneaking in around the drapes and Jordan’s palm stayed flat against his skin, not through his shirt.

He felt a bright humming energy all through him, something he hadn’t felt in a very long time. His stomach was a ruin. His life in black and white; this moment in color.

Declan’s phone buzzed.

He sighed.

Jordan stepped back, bowing a little, giving him permission, the moment instantly deflated by how little work the phone had had to do to capture his attention. He took his phone from his pocket and looked at it.