Read The Serpent Garden - Judith Merkle Riley for Free Online Page A

like a dream or an imagining. The ugly thing, and the smell and evil rustling, had vanished as if the laughter had chased it away.
    Lightly I sketched in the features with the pale, rusty color; the proportion pleased me, and I moved on to sketch in the slashed sleeves and jeweled ornaments of the costume. These always give me special joy because I do love good jewelry, and nobody has better jewelry than princesses. “Well done, Susanna,” I seemed to hear in my ear. “Go on.”
    The picture drew me on as I saw it emerge from the parchment. In the shells, I mixed the body colors with water and gum arabic, then laid them on the tiny mother-of-pearl palette with growing sureness. Next came the shading colors, laid on in lines of a single hair’s breadth, so minute and close that they appeared solid to the inexpert eye. That is one of the secrets of a perfect miniature, as my father always used to say. Painters in large try to lay on the color in blobs as they would in a big portrait, and so lose the fineness of control that is necessary for a true likeness. They try to turn the form as they would in a large painting, with dark colors, violets, greens, and even black in the receding shadow, and so produce a sinister, dark muddle in place of luminous color. Father’s shading tones, which he learned from the illuminators, are rich and bright, only giving the illusion of shadow when seen next to the body color. All these are secrets the English painters have not yet discovered, which is why this work goes to foreigners. Foreigners and Rowland Dallet.
    So absorbed was I in the painting that time seemed to vanish. A wide and luminous space opened out around me, where common sounds became muffled. A still chiming, more beautiful than music, filled the edgeless space. Occasional comments of Nan, who would come in to say, “Why, that is very like!” and other words of praise, faded to the meaningless whispering of leaves far away in another world. A perfect pleasure in color occupied my physical being, more pure and perfect than any other kind of pleasure I could imagine. With a curious exactness, my tiny brushes found the precise shade and light to throw the figure from flat into round. At last I was done: in the fading luminosity, I ground the burned ivory for the black of the eye, which is almost a speck, fresh before mixing and applying it, so that it would shine from the picture with a true glance. A background of blue bice, richer than the sky in summer, set off the red hair and fresh, pale face. There were flashes of light caught in every jewel, and the rich gown shone like silk. I looked around, as if I had awakened from a dream. The afternoon was nearly gone. The sensation of watchers in the room seemed to fade. The workroom was again somber, dark, and empty of all presences, either good or evil.
    “What is that racket downstairs?” I asked Nan.
    “It’s that widow quarreling with some customers, no doubt. Don’t let it disturb you. The French gentlemen could be back at any moment.”
    “It’s done, Nan, and I like it better than anything Master Dallet ever painted. Listen at the door while I put the portrait in its case; you know I love gossip.” There were several plain, round, polished wood cases on hand. For a princess, there should be jewels, I sighed to myself. Well, never mind, if they want jewels, they can have a goldsmith make another case. But suppose they don’t come? Then God just hasn’t willed it, I thought. I’ll keep the picture as a sample of my work. “I’ll have to hide it,” I said to myself distractedly. After all, Rowland Dallet had sold my Salvator Mundi as a work by a long-dead Burgundian master.
    The shouting had grown louder. Then there was a clattering of clogs on the stair, followed by a positively rude banging on the door. Nan flung it open to confront the widow’s daughter.
    “Mother says she won’t have it laid out there. The lease give her right of use, and she just won’t