VI

i

He began to study the book as soon as he got back to the house.

It was scarcely more than a monograph; a hundred and thirty pages of text, along with ten line reproductions and six plates, which was intended, so the author, one Kathleen Dwyer, stated as: “a brief introduction to the life and work of an almost entirely neglected artist.”

Born in the first decade of the eighteenth century, Thomas Simeon had been something of a prodigy. Raised in Suffolk, in humble circumstances, his artistic skills had been first noticed by the local vicar, who out of what seemed to be a selfless desire to have a God-given gift provide joy to as many people as possible, had arranged for the young Simeon’s work to be seen in London. Two watercolors from the hand of the fifteen-year-old boy had been purchased by the Earl of Chesterfield, and Thomas Simeon was on his way. Commissions followed: a series of picturesque scenes depicting London theaters had been successful, there had been a few attempts at portraiture (these less well received), and then, when the artist was still a month shy of his eighteenth birthday, there had come the work by which his reputation as a visionary artist was made: a diptych for the altar of St Dominic’s in Bath. The paintings were now lost, but by all contemporary reports they had caused quite a stir.

“Through the letters of John Galloway,” Dwyer had written,

“we can follow the blossoming of the controversy which attended the unveiling of these paintings. Their subjects were unremarkable: the left hand panel depicting a scene in Eden, the right, the Hill at Golgotha.”

“ ‘It seemed to everyone who saw them,’ Galloway reports in a letter to his father dated February 5th, 1721, ‘as if Thomas had walked on the perfect earth of Adam’s Garden, and set down in paint all he saw; then gone straightaway to the place where Our Lord died, and there made a painting as desolate as the first was filled with the light of God’s presence.’

“Barely four months later, however, Galloway’s tone had changed. He was no longer so certain that Simeon’s visions were entirely healthy. ‘I have many times thought that God moved in my dear Thom,’ Galloway wrote, ‘but perhaps that same door which he opened in his breast to give God entrance, he left unattended, for it seems to me sometimes that the Devil came into his soul, too, and there fights night and day with all that is best in Thom, I do not know who will win the war, but I fear for Thomas’s presence of mind.’ ”

There was more on the subject of Simeon’s deterioration around the time of the diptych, but Will skimmed it. He had an hour before Adele had planned their trip to the hospital, and he wanted to have the slim volume read. Moving on to the next chapter, however, he found Dwyer’s style thickening as she attempted to make an account of what was clearly a problematic area in her researches. Paring away the filigree and the qualifications, the essence of the matter seemed to be this: Simeon had undergone a crisis of faith in the late autumn of 1722 and may (though documentation was unreliable here) have attempted suicide. He had alienated Galloway, his companion from childhood, and sequestered himself in a squalid studio on the outskirts of Blackheath, where he indulged a growing addiction to opium. So far, predictable enough. But then, in Dwyer’s constipated phrasing, came:

“The figure who would, with his subtle appeals to the painter’s now debauched instincts, render the glorious promise of his gilded youth a tarnished spectacle. His name was Gerard Rukenau, variously described by contemporary witnesses as ‘transcendalist of surpassing skill and wisdom,’ and by no lesser personage than Sir Robert Walpole, ‘the very model of what he must become, as this age dies.’ To hear him speak was, one witness remarked, ‘like listening to the Sermon on the Mount delivered by a satyr; one is moved and repelled in the same moment, air though he arouses one’s higher self and one’s basest instincts simultaneously.’

“Here, then,” Dwyer theorizes, “was a man who could understand the contrary impulses that had fractured Simeon’s fragile state of mind. A father confessor who would quickly become his sole patron, removing him both from the pit of self-abnegation into which he’d fallen and from the leavening influence his saner friends might have exercised.”

At this juncture, Will put the book down for a couple of minutes in order to digest what he’d just read. Though he now had a few descriptions of Rukenau to juggle, they essentially canceled one another out, which left him no further advanced.

Rukenau was a man of power and influence, that much was clear, and had no doubt powerfully affected Steep. Could Living and dying we feed the fire not have been a line from a satyr’s sermon? But as to what the source of his power might be, or the nature of his influence, there was little clue.

He returned to the text, sprinting through a few paragraphs that attempted to put Simeon’s work in some kind of aesthetic context, in order to pick up the thread of Rukenau’s involvement with the painter’s life. He didn’t have to go far. Rukenau, it seems, had a plan for Simeon’s wayward genius, and it soon showed itself. He wanted the painter to make a series of pictures

“evoking,” according to Dwyer, “Rukenau’s transcendalist vision of humanity’s relationship to Creation, in the form of fourteen pictures chronicling the building—by an entity known only as the Nilotic—of the Mundi Domus. Literally, the House of the World. Only one of these pictures is known, and it indeed may be the only one surviving, given that a woman friend of Rukenau, Dolores Cruikshank, who had volunteered to pen an exegesis of his theories, complained in March of 1723 that: ‘between Gerard’s meticulous concerns for a true reflection of his philosophies, and Simeon’s aesthetic neuralgia, these pictures have been made in more versions than Mankind itself each one destroyed for some puffing flaw in conception or execution . . .’ ”

The one extant painting had been reproduced in the book, albeit poorly. The picture was in black and white, and washed out, but there was enough detail to intrigue Will. It seemed to depict an early portion of the construction process: a naked, sex-less figure who appeared to be black-skinned in the reproduction (but could just as easily have been blue or green), was bending toward the ground, in which numerous fine rods had been stuck, as though marking the perimeters of the dwelling. The landscape behind the figure was a wasteland, the dirt infertile, the sky deserted. In three spots fires burned in a crack in the earth, sending up a plane of dark smoke, but that only seemed to emphasize the desolation. As for the hieroglyphics that Frannie had described, they were carved on stones scattered throughout the wilderness, as though they’d been tossed out of the sky as clues for the lone mason.

“What are we to make of this peculiar image?” the text asked.

“Its hermeticisim frustrates us; we long for explanation, and find none.” Not even from Dwyer, it appeared. She flailed around for a couple of paragraphs attempting to make parallels with illustrations to be found in alchemical treatises, but Will sensed that she was out of her depth. He flipped to the next chapter, leaving the rest of Dwyer’s amateur occultism unread, and was halfway through the first page when he heard Adele summoning him. He was reluctant to put the book down, and even more reluctant to go and visit Hugo a second time, but the sooner the duty was done, he reasoned, the sooner he’d be back in Thomas Simeon’s troubled world. So he set the book on the chair and headed downstairs to join Adele.

ii

Hugo was feeling sluggish. He’d had some pain after lunch, nothing unusual, the nurse reassured Adele, but enough to warrant a dessert of pain killers. They had subdued him considerably and, throughout the three-quarter hour visit, his speech was slow and slurred, his focus far from sharp. Most of the time, in fact, he was barely aware that Will was in the room, which suited Will just fine. Only toward the end of the visit did his gaze flutter in his son’s direction.

“And what did you do today?” he asked, as though he were addressing a nine-year-old.

“I saw Frannie and Sherwood.”

“Come a little closer,” Hugo said, feebly beckoning Will to the bedside. “I’m not going to strike you.”

“I didn’t imagine you were,” Will said.

“I’ve never struck you, have I? There was a policeman here, said I had.”

“There’s no policeman, Dad.”

“There was. Right here. Rude bugger. Said I beat you. I never beat you.” He sounded genuinely distressed at the accusation.

“It’s the pills they’re giving you, Dad,” Will gently explained, “they’re making you a little delirious. Nobody’s accusing you of anything.”

“There was no policeman?”

“No.”

“I could have sworn . . .” he said, scanning the room anxiously. “Where’s Adele?”

“She’s gone to get some fresh water for your flowers.”

“Are we alone?”

“Yes.”

He leaned up out of the pillow. “Am I . . . making a fool of myself?”

“In what way?”

“Saying things . . . that doesn’t make sense?”

“No, Dad, you’re not.”

“You’d tell me wouldn’t you?” he said. “Yes, you would. You’d tell me because it’d hurt and you’d like that.”

“That’s not true.”

“You like watching people squirm. You get that from me.” Will shrugged. “You can believe what you like, Dad. I’m not going to argue.”

“No. Because you know you’d lose.” He tapped his skull.

“See, I’m not that delirious. I can see your game. You only came back when I’m weak and confused, because you think you’ll get the upper hand. Well you won’t. I’m your match with half my wits.” He settled back into his pillow again. “I don’t want you coming here again,” he said softly.

“Oh for Christ’s sake.”

“I mean it,” Hugo said, turning his face from Will. “I’ll get better without your care and attention, thank you very much.” Will was glad his father’s eyes were averted. The last thing he wanted at that moment was for Hugo to see what an effect his words were having. Will felt them in his throat and chest and gut.

“All right,” Will said. “If that’s what you want.”

“Yes, it is.”

Will watched him a moment longer, with some remote hope that Hugo would say something to undo the hurt. But he’d said all he intended to say.

“I’ll get Adele,” Will murmured retreating from the bed, “she’ll want to say goodbye. Take care of yourself, Dad.” There was no further response from Hugo, whether word or sign. Shaken, Will left him to his silence and headed out in search of Adele. He didn’t tell her the substance of his exchange with Hugo; he simply said that he’d wait for her at reception.

She told him she’d just been speaking to the doctor and he was very optimistic about Hugo’s progress. Another week, she said, and he could probably come home; wasn’t that wonderful?

——

It was raining now. Nothing monsoonal, just a steady drizzle.

Will didn’t shelter from it. He stood outside with his face turned up to the sky, letting the drops cool his hot eyes and flushed cheeks.

When Adele emerged she was in her usual post-visit flutter.

Will volunteered to drive, certain he could shave fifteen minutes off the travel time and be back with the Simeon book before dark. She babbled on happily as they went, mainly about Hugo.

“He makes you very happy, doesn’t he?” Will said.

“He’s a fine man,” she said, “and he’s been very good to me over the years. I thought when my Donald passed away I’d never have another happy day. I thought the world was at an end. But you know, you get on with it, don’t you? It was hard at first because I felt guilty, still living when he was gone. I thought: That’s not right. But you get over that after a while. Hugo helped me. We’d sit and talk and he’d tell me to just enjoy the little things. Not try and understand what it was all about, because that was all a waste of time. It was funny that, coming from him.

I always thought philosophers were sitting talking about the meaning of life, and there’s Hugo saying don’t waste your breath.”

“And that was good to hear, was it?”

“It helped,” she said. “I started to enjoy the little things, the way he said. I was always working so hard when Donald was alive—”

“You still work hard.”

“It’s different now,” she said. “If something doesn’t get dusted, I don’t fret about it. It’s just dust. I’ll be dust one of these days.”

“Have you got him to go to church?”

“I don’t go anymore.”

“You used to go twice on a Sunday.”

“I don’t feel the need.”

“Did Hugo talk you into that?”

“I don’t get talked into things,” Adele said, a little defensively.

“I didn’t mean—”

“No, no, I know what you meant. Hugo’s a godless man, and he always will be. But I saw the suffering my Donald went through. Terrible it was, terrible, to see him in such a state. And I know people say that’s when your faith gets tested. Well, maybe mine did and it wasn’t strong enough, because church never meant the same to me after that.”

“God let you down?”

“Donald was a good man. Not clever, like Hugo, but good in his heart. He deserved better.” She fell silent for a minute or so, then added a coda, “We’ve got to make the most of what comes along, haven’t we? There’s nothing certain.” VII

Will spent the rest of the evening with Thomas Simeon, burying himself in this other life as a refuge from his own. It was no use brooding on what had happened at the hospital, with a little distance (and a couple of heart to hearts with Adrianna), he’d be able to put the experiences in a sane perspective. For now, it was best ignored. He rolled a joint, pulled his chair over to the open window, and sat there reading, lulled by the spatter of the rain on the roof and sill.

He’d left off reading with Dwyer moving from occult waters, where she’d plainly been out of her depth, back into the relative comfort of simple biography. Simeon’s ever-reliable friend Galloway reappeared at this juncture, having been moved by “the commands of friendship” (what had gone on between these two? Will wondered) to separate Simeon from his patron, Rukenau, “whose baleful influence could be seen in every part of Thomas’s appearance and demeanor.” Galloway, it seems, had conspired to save Simeon’s soul from Rukenau’s clutches; an attempt that, by Dwyer’s description, amounted to a physical abduction: “Aided by two accomplices, Piers Varty and Edmund Maupertius, the latter a disenchanted and much embittered acolyte of Rukenau, Galloway plotted Simeon’s ‘liberation’ as he was later to describe it, with the kind of precision that befitted his military upbringing. It went without incident, apparently. Simeon was discovered in one of the upper rooms of Rukenau’s mansion in Ludlow, where, according to Galloway: ‘we found him in a piteous state, his once radiant form much wasted. He would not be persuaded to leave, however, saying that the work he and Rukenau were doing together was too important to be left unfinished. I asked him what work this was, and he told us that the age of the Domus Mundi was coming to pass, and that he would be its witness and its chronicler, setting down its glories in paint that popes and kings might know how petty their business was, and putting aside their wars and machinations, make an everlasting peace. How will this be? I asked him. And he told me to look to his painting, for it was there all made plain.’

“Only one of these paintings was to be found, however, and it appears that Galloway took it with him when he and his fellow conspirators left. How they persuaded Simeon to leave with them is not reported, but it is evident that Rukenau made some attempt to get Simeon back and that Galloway made accusations against him that drove him into hiding. Whatever happened, Rukenau now disappears from this story, and Simeon’s left—which has less than three years to run—takes one last extraordinary turn.”

 

Will took advantage of the chapter break to go downstairs and raid the fridge, but his mind remained in the strange world from which he’d just stepped. Nothing in the here and now—not the brewing of tea nor the making of a sandwich, not the din of raucous laughter from the television next door, or the shrill delivery of the comedian who was earning it—could distract him from the images circling in his head. It helped that he’d seen Simeon with his own eyes, living and dead. He’d seen the desperate beauty of the man, which had so fixated Galloway that he’d ventured where his rational mind had little grasp, to pluck his friend from perdition. There was something sweetly romantic about the man’s devotion to Simeon, who was plainly of another order of mind entirely. Galloway did not understand him, nor ever could, but that didn’t matter. The bond between them was nothing to do with intellectual compatibility. Nor, all smutty suspicions aside, was this some unspoken homosexual romance.

Galloway was Simeon’s friend, and he would not see harm done to one he loved: It was as simple, and as moving, as that.

Will returned to the book with his sustenance, unnoticed by Adele and, settling back beside the window (having first closed it, the night air was chilly), he picked up the tale where he’d left off. He knew, or at least thought he knew, how this story ended, with a body in a wood, pecked and chewed. But how did it arrive there? That was the substance of the thirty remaining pages.

Dwyer had kept the text relatively free of personal judgments so far, preferring to use other voices to comment on Rukenau, for instance, and even then scrupulously quoting both supporters and detractors. But now she showed her hand, and it was no stranger to the Communion rail.

“It is in these last years,” she wrote, “recovering from the unholy influence of Gerard Rukenau, that we see the redemptive power of Simeon’s vision at work. Chastened by his encounter with madness, be returned to his labors with his ambition curbed, only to discover that with all craving for a grand thaumaturgical scheme sated, his imagination flowered. In his later works, all of which were landscapes, the hand of the artist is in service of a greater Creation.

The painting entitled ‘The Fertile Acre,’ though at first glance a melancholy night pastoral, reveals a pageant of living forms when studied closely—”

Will flipped the page to the reproduction of the painting in question. It was far less strange than the Rukenau piece, at least at first glance: a sloping field, with rows of moon-sculpted sheaves receding from sight. But even in the much-degraded reproduction, Simeon’s sly skills were in evidence. He’d secreted animals everywhere: in the sheaves, and the shadow of the sheaves, in the foliage on the oak tree, in the cloak of the harvester sleeping beneath the tree. Even in the speckled sky there were forms hidden, curled up like the sleeping children of the stars.

“Here,” Dwyer wrote, “is a mellower Simeon, painting with almost childlike pleasure the secret life of the world; drawing us in to peer at his half-bidden bestiary.” But there was more to the picture, Will sensed, than a visual game. There was an eerie air of expectation about the image, every living thing it contained (except for the exhausted harvester) in hiding, holding its breath as if in terror of some imminent deed.

Will returned to Dwyer’s text for a moment, but she had taken her critique off on a hunt for painterly antecedents, and after a few sentences he gave up and returned to the reproduction for further study. What was it about the picture that so intrigued him? It would not have been remotely to his taste if he’d simply happened upon it, knowing nothing of the painter.

It was far too coy, with its prettified animals peering out from their bolt-holes in the paint. Coy, and unnaturally neat: the corn in military array, the leaves in spiral bouquets. Nature wasn’t like that. The most placid scene, examined by an unsentimental eye, revealed a ragged world of raw forms in bitter and unending conflict. And yet, he felt a kinship with the picture, as though he and its maker were, despite all evidence to the contrary, men of similar vision.

Frustrated that he could not 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 among 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 toward 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 that 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 overripe 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, traveling to Bath, to Lincoln, and to Oxfordshire, relying on the charity of friends. He even paints pictures, three of which survive. None of them fit the description of the Granary painting he is planning in his letter to Dolores Cruikshank. Nor is there any record of his having traveled to the Hebrides in search of Rukenau.

“It seems most likely that he gave up on the endeavor 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.

“Goodnight then,” he said to her, “sleep well.”

“I will,” she said. “You do the same.” Then she was gone, leaving him to the last three or four pages of Simeon’s life. There was little of any consequence in the remaining paragraphs.

Dwyer’s researches ran out of steam two months or so before Simeon’s passing.

“He died on or about July eighteenth, 1730,” she wrote, “having reportedly swallowed enough of his own paints to poison himself.

This, at least, is what is widely assumed to be the truth. There are in fact contradictory voices in this matter. An anonymous obituary in The Review, for instance, published four months after Simeon’s death, hints darkly that ‘the artist had less reason to die than others did to silence him.’ And Dolores Cruikshank, writing to Galloway at about the same time remarks that ‘I have been trying to locate the physician who examined Thomas’s corpse, because I heard a rumor that he’d found curious and subtle dislocations in the body, as though it had been subjected to an assault before death. I thought of the “invisibles” you told me be had been so fearful of when you’d taken him from Rukenau’s place. Had they perhaps mounted an attack upon him? But the physician, a Doctor Shaw, has disappeared apparently. Nobody knows where, or why.’

“There was one final oddity. Though John Galloway had made arrangements for his agents to collect the body and have it removed to Cambridge; where he’d arranged for it to be buried with due honors, when they came to do so the remains had already been spirited away. Thomas Simeon last resting place is therefore unknown, but this writer believes his body was probably taken by land and sea to the Hebrides, where Rukenau had chosen to retreat. It is unlikely, given Rukenau’s iconoclastic belief, that Simeon was buried in hallowed ground. It’s more likely he lies in some anonymous spot. It is only to be hoped that he rests well there, the travails of his life ended before he had truly made any mark upon the art of his time.

“John Galloway was killed in 1734, accidentally shot during a military exercise on Dartmoor. Piers Varty and Edmund Maupertius, who assisted Galloway in the abduction of Simeon from Rukenau’s house, both died young: Varty perished of consumption and Maupertius, arrested for smuggling opium in Paris, died of a heart attack in police custody. Only Dolores Cruikshank lived out her biblical span, and more, dying at the age of ninety-one.

Much of the correspondence quoted here was in the possession of her heirs.

“As for Gerard Rukenau, despite four years of attempts by this author to uncover the truth behind his legendary existence, little beyond the information contained within these pages could be found.

There is no trace of the house in Ludlow from which Galloway supposedly abducted him, nor are there extant any letters, pamphlets, wills, or other legal documents bearing his name.

“In a sense, none of this matters, Simeon’s legacy . . .” Will’s concentration drifted here, as Dwyer again tried to fit Simeon’s work into an aesthetic context. Simeon the prophetic surrealist, Simeon the metaphysical symbolist, Simeon the nature painter. Then the text just petered out, as though she could not find a personal sentiment that suited her, and had simply let the text come to a halt.

He put the book down, and looked at his watch. It was a quarter after one. He didn’t feel particularly tired, despite all that the day had brought. He wandered downstairs, and went to search the kitchen for something to eat. Finding a bowl of rice pudding, which had been one of Adele’s coups as a cook, he retired to the living room with bowl and spoon to indulge himself. Her recipe hadn’t changed in the intervening years: The pudding was as rich and creamy as he remembered it. Patrick would go crazy for this, he thought, and so thinking picked up the phone and called him. It wasn’t Patrick who answered, but Jack.

“Hey, Will,” he said, “how ya doin’?”

“I’m okay.”

“You called at the right time. We’ve got a little meetin’ goin’ on here.”

“About what?”

“Oh you know . . . stuff. Adrianna’s here. Do you want to talk to her?” He got off the line with curious haste, and put Adrianna on. She sounded less than her best.

“Are you okay?” he said.

“Sure. We’re just having some serious conversations here.

How are you doing? Have you made peace with your dad?”

“Nope. And it’s not going to happen. He told me point-blank he doesn’t want me visiting him any more.”

“So are you going to come home?”

“Not yet. I’ll give you plenty of notice, don’t worry, so you can lay on a big Welcome Home party.”

“I think you’ve partied enough,” she said.

“Uh-oh. Who have you been talking to?”

“Guess.”

“Drew.”

“Yep.”

“What’s he saying?”

“He thinks you’re crazy.”

“You defended me, of course.”

“You can do that for yourself. Do you want to speak to Pat?”

“Yeah. Is he around?”

“He is, but he’s not . . . doing too well right now.”

“Sick?”

“No, just a little emotional. We’ve been having a heavy conversation, and he’s not in great shape. I mean, I’ll get him for you if it’s urgent.”

“No, no. I’ll call back tomorrow. Just send him my love, will you?”

“Do I get some too?”

“Always.”

“We miss you.”

“Good.”

“See you soon.”

When he put the phone down, he felt a pang of separation, so sharp it caught his breath. He imagined them now—Patrick and Adrianna, Jack and Rafael, even Drew—going about their business while the fog crept over the hill and ships boomed in the bay. It would be so easy to pack up and creep away, leaving Hugo to heal and Adele to dote. In a day he’d be back amongst his clan, where he was loved.

But there would be no safety there. He might forget the hurt of this place for a few days; he might party himself into a stupor, and put the memories out of his head. But how long could that forgetfulness last? A week? A month? And then he’d be taking a shower or looking at the moth on the window, and the story he had left unfinished would come back to haunt him. He was in thrall to it: That was the unpalatable truth. His intellect and emotions were too thoroughly engaged in this mystery for him to leave. Perhaps at the beginning he’d been merely a conduit, as Jacob had dubbed him, an unwitting sensitive through which Steep’s memories had flowed. But he had made himself more than that over the years. He’d become Simeon’s echo: a maker of pictures that showed the spoiler’s hand at work. There was no escaping that role, no pretending he was just a common man. He had laid claim to vision and with it came responsibility.

If so, so. He would watch, as he had always watched, until the story’s end. If he survived, he would hear witness as no one had ever done before: He would tell a tale of near-extinction from the survivor’s side. If not—if he was dispatched into an unnatural grave by the very hand that had made him the witness he was—then he would at least go knowing the nature of his dispatcher, and lie, perhaps, more quietly for the knowledge.