Story XIV: The Marquesan Tattoo

On the evening he murders his wife, a London timber merchant receives a mysterious portrait—a tale of Victorian horror in five parts.

A Delivery Post-Mortem

The evening he murdered his wife, Rowan Wanamaker made a brief appearance in the R— Club library to fashion an alibi, then retired to his quarters for supper. Word of her death would not reach Pall Mall until morning, allowing the London timber merchant time to prepare for the pantomime theatre of a constabulary's inquiries.

Wanamaker built a fortune importing teak and exotic hardwoods from French Polynesia, muscling his way to extravagant wealth through both enterprise and marriage. Plantation by plantation, and bride by bride – of whom there had now been three – the timber merchant grew to be as respectfully loathed in the R— Club’s smoking rooms as he was in the provincial offices of colonial governors. Club members murmured grimly that Wanamaker accumulated his fortune through “the snatch and the match.” His late wife, thirty years his junior, the daughter of a shrewd Merseyside shipbuilder, had been felled by both.

At eleven o’clock punctually, the gentleman sent word to the club’s old footman that he was not to be disturbed under any circumstances, yet shortly after midnight, the timber merchant was surprised by a determined rapping at his door. He turned the lamp down by his desk and feigned being awoken.

The urgent knocks were not those of the constabulary, nor were they the pending, theatrical hysterics of a house maid. It was the old footman himself who disturbed the timber merchant with stammering, exaggerated apologies.

Together with a sturdy hall boy, the club’s two servants shouldered a parcel of striking dimensions that barely passed through the residential apartment doors. Wrapped in muslin and secured by rough twine, its scale was the width of a yard, then half again as tall. Even the hall boy recognized the likely dimensions of a canvas.

The painting’s provenance was a mystery. Wanamaker had neither commissioned it, nor could the staff account for its appearance at the tradesman’s entrance. The note that accompanied it came simply with the instruction to deliver the painting post-haste to Rowan Richard Wanamaker, Esq. The hall boy on night duty had discovered it and woken the porter. After a period of bickering belowstairs, the lot fell to the sleepy footman to disturb their club’s most volatile member.

“Came from the ether, sir,” the old footman explained. The hall boy nodded, his gaze held fast to the floor.

The painting’s mahogany frame had torn through a corner of its muslin protection. The servants waited for the man to consider it.

To Wanamaker, the packaging carried a faint, acrid smell of smoke — the surprise of it quickened a shudder in him.

“You are sure there is no additional invoice or documentation? There must be more—I insist.”

“No, sir. None.”

The timber merchant went silent, then sharply rapped the wooden frame with his knuckles.

“Well then, light the lamps and stand it closer to the fire so that I can view it.”

As the old footman reached to light the lamp, the hot brass fittings seared his hand. The servant gasped, breaching the club’s unspoken decorum. The outraged gentleman, who claimed to have been roused from deep sleep, had evidently extinguished the lamps only moments before. The servant was less struck by a gentleman’s casual lie than the pain of brass burned into flesh.

The hall boy, longing only to be rid of the man and return to the warmth of his bed, unveiled the painting as swiftly as he dared. After a long pause, the old footman, no more artistically inclined than the timber merchant, remarked that the oil painting’s quality was exceptional. Long ago, he’d mastered the art of flattering gentlemen.

Wanamaker ignored the man and studied the image in the pale lamplight. A muscle in his jaw twitched.

“It reeks of smoke, does it not?”

“Oh, I couldn’t say, sir. Lovely picture,” said the footman. “But you’d be cold-blooded not to see she’s beautiful.”

“I smell it, all right,” said the boy, anxiously. “But not on account of us in service. Never went near no fire of ours.”

Wanamaker made a note of the boy, then waved the two off with his fingertips. At the door, the old footman turned back.

“Mrs. Wanamaker, I believe, sir?”

Indeed, it was Mrs. Wanamaker — a full-length portrait of his murdered wife.

The Feverish and Hallucinatory

After the departure of the old footman and the boy, Wanamaker stood before the portrait of his late wife. Though the illusion of her gaze met him directly, he was forced to appraise her from below, as the portrait stood upon a low parlour table.

The gentleman sipped brandy and considered her. She was possibly younger than the day he had wed her, certainly more luminous on canvas. She posed regally, the painting situated in their bedroom, standing directly before a four-poster bed.

Ten years before, this bed of prized Marquesan mahogany had been a wedding gift from the villagers to the widower and his young bride. Wanamaker made no secret he detested the native flourishes of the woodwork. “Devilry,” he called it, and he demanded it removed at once.

The ultimatum led to a bitter confrontation with his newlywed and a torrent of scandalous threats from her. Caught off guard by her defence of the villagers, he allowed the bed to remain “until he decided otherwise.”

At the height of the dispute, he had dismissed her clique’s growing preoccupation with the natives as a ‘moral fashion,’ a phrase he’d overheard at the club. This was their first bitter confrontation, but the last where he would be surprised by her fury.

“It’s foolishness, but I’ll allow you to indulge it,” he called up from the balustrade.

“Then, while I’m a fool of moral fashion, indulge me further by not sleeping in it.”

It was the first of many humiliations over the villagers, and there was no doubt that the servants overhearing this would have believed she prevailed. It was a retreat that later filled him with anger, but it was the last such retreat, and he’d taken a firmer hand afterwards. His naive bride did not win an argument without penalty again.

In the end, her loyalties to the plantation’s islanders had served neither her nor the carved, wooden bed. On this very evening, in Knightsbridge, the two lay in ashes together.

The lumber merchant poured another brandy and ground the frosted stopper back into its decanter. They were of an ilk, these idle women, at first beautiful and giggling, charming as lap dogs with their superstitious prattle, and then vicious as hellcats.

Wanamaker turned to his murdered wife and raised his glass.

“And dust to dust, my dear.”

But the timber merchant found he was not satisfied with dust.

He needed to test the canvas and touch her.

To gauge her proportions, he reached up and pressed his hand against her hand. Her canvas dimensions were disturbingly life-like, and, it seemed to him, warm from the fire.

When he saw that she was not wearing his ring, he winced and returned to his seat, roughly angling the club wingback chair. A humiliation from the grave.

“I’ll paint one on myself,” he thought bitterly, but with no threats to serve him, he could only shut his eyes against it and sip his brandy.

How clearly he remembered the visceral charge of discovering the shipbuilder’s youngest daughter. He had been a fool, a victim manipulated by the artifice of feminine wit and a young woman’s coy, early allure. Now her painted beauty returned with disturbing force, and her proportions that time had long since distorted again beguiled him.

But it was her expression cast down at him that he found maddeningly difficult to define.

He rose abruptly a second time and studied his late, young wife more intently. In the dim light, he guided match after match before her face, pressing his hands against the canvas, running his fingers about her painted features. He scanned her as if inspecting a line-up for a pilfering villager, sharply turning jaws to face him, searching for a light-fingered thief. This settled him.

It was only after he’d rung for a second decanter and felt the glow of brandy that he noticed something disturbing in the aspect of her lips.

There was a trace of mockery there.

He pondered this for some time standing before her, swaying from drink. He could no longer stifle a rising desire to address the dead woman aloud.

“It’s the slyness that lies at the parting of your lips, is it not? It rises into the cheek.” He pressed a thumbnail into the canvas to demonstrate. “Just there.”

The paint chipped below his nail, and a blister of paint began to swell at the point of indentation and ruptured. A draught of his wife’s perfume overpowered him.

It was the same perfume she had worn earlier that evening when he surprised her in bed, delivering a tea service under the vague pretext of reconciliation. She was certainly aware it had been years since he’d stood so close to her or offered her a similar courtesy. She’d held his gaze, looking up at him as he monitored her sipping. He had smelled her perfume then.

And he smelled her now, but this was madness emanating from a lifeless portrait. It must have been a tawdry deception by the artist, the application of perfume directly to the surface of a painting, one of her artists peddling in Bohemian vulgarity.

But the artist was close enough to her to know her perfume. The more he considered this, the more convinced he became that he had known her well.

He spoke to her aloud for a second time.

“In time, your painter would have loathed you as much as I did.”

But it struck him momentarily that the painter might have adored her, and it was the painting’s viewer whom he despised.

He scratched his nails over small rippled bubbles of paint, daring himself to pierce them, but he found himself too unsettled. As he softly scratched and considered the limits of his own courage, his glance was again drawn to the parting of her lips. An unpleasant realization struck him with force—it wasn’t simple contempt revealed in the detail of her lips.

It was rage.

He recoiled with the thought, then mastered himself. This was rubbish. He was overheated. There was something feverish and hallucinatory in the events of the evening, or in the brandy, or in the arrival of this unexpected portrait.

“A fortnight of your world grieving and you’ll be forgotten.” He gestured at her as he stumbled away in retreat, but could no longer meet her stare and felt himself once again looking up at her as if from a balustrade.

The gentleman lurched into a flurry of muddled action. He pulled the weighty muslin wrap from the floor and threw it roughly over her like a curtain, replaced the decanter and dimmed the gas. Besotted as he was, he lay down fully dressed and covered himself with a velvet blanket.

“Elisabeth Wanamaker,” he whispered to himself, lying motionless, drawing the velvet blanket tightly about him. “My god.”

Dawn crept in as the fire faded to ash. The morning’s orange light slid across the muslin, covering the portrait delivered “post-haste to Rowan Wanamaker, Esq., gentleman of the R—Club of Pall Mall.”

Buried in Poplar

In the weeks that followed Elisabeth Wanamaker’s murder, the constable’s investigations into the timber merchant’s alibi and whereabouts were duly performed, if half-heartedly. When the oppressive condolences no longer demanded his attentions, Rowan Richard Wanamaker resumed his affairs as a free man, a bachelor who’d learned his lesson for the third time.

But despite the lavish funeral—a detail twice underlined in the constable’s notes—speculation around the nature of her fiery death and parsimonious entombment spread through the R— Club and far beyond.

“Well, was or wasn’t cold-blooded,” they whispered in the R— Club kitchens, “the man still buried her in common poplar.”

Before departing London for British New Guinea on long-deferred affairs, Wanamaker made arrangements that his wife’s portrait be relocated to a lately acquired mansion flat in Knightsbridge. During his absence, however, the old footman at the R— Club slyly arranged that the portrait be unveiled from its muslin and hung over the hearth of his temporary quarters.

“A beautiful woman shouldn’t be under wraps,” he explained to the boy as the two hoisted her into a view dominating the room. The broader implication was not lost on the boy, and he was quick to respond in kind.

“Poplar, I heard,” said the boy, while they adjusted the portrait’s angle. Neither exchanged glances.

In this exchange of silent gossip, neither footman nor hall boy noticed that they had hung the portrait wires perilously on its fittings.

§

In late spring, after settling a rash of matters with his colonial interests in Papeete, Wanamaker returned to London. The harbormaster and the resident magistrate had used his absence to their advantage, but matters were rectified. The workers had not been so bold, and the plantation ran itself agreeably.

During the interval abroad, he’d thought but briefly of his murdered wife or her disturbing portraiture, but as he stood on the foredeck of his steamer and spotted the matchstick masts bobbing in the Pool of London, an abrupt memory of her insolent expression rekindled.

Preparation of the mansion flat in Knightsbridge had been delayed, so the gentleman returned to his apartment at the R— Club. He ordered his trunks, ledgers, and freight books unpacked and surveyed his quarters.

He was shocked to find his wife’s image hung over the hearth without his instruction, on account of both the impertinence and his late wife’s towering command of the room. He could not tolerate the scandal of ordering her removed. There are limits.

“Between the devil and the deep, ain’t he?” the footman muttered to his charge, closing the trunks.

She was more alluring than he’d remembered, but in equal measure her beauty had taken on an unmistakably ghoulish insolence. He refused his supper and prowled the room at feral pace, stricken by a polarity of lusts: the desire to stand below her and witness her astounding beauty—and the urge to diminish her for impertinence.

He settled on the former, mounted a footstool beneath her image, and inspected her more closely.

He reached up to touch her oil-rendered lips. The surface about her mouth had grown subtly raised. His fingertips sensed a bubbling there, a blistering ripple of blemishes. His mind raced with macabre horrors, but the idea that her mockery might be the product of the poor application of paint and not the supernatural steadied him.

“Your tarot and talismans had begun to spill over to me, woman.”

Something like a forced cackle emerged from his thin lips. In a burst of motion, he retrieved a jewel-encrusted letter opener from the Davenport—a wedding present from the young bride’s father. “May our communications be ever felicitous” was inscribed on its handle.

Wanamaker edged its tip into the distended bubbling at the parting of her lips, then drove further upward into her cheek. The pressure applied to the stretched canvas distorted her expression into a mask that rendered her appearance grimly laughable.

But as he released the pressure of the letter opener at a rate to preserve the distortion, her confidence and contempt resurged twofold. Momentarily her expression twisted into a tortured sneer. Loose chips of oil paint dangled from the parting of her mouth, and, once again, with the puncture of the painting’s blisters, a sickening rush of perfume bloomed in his nostrils.

“My god, woman, you smell like the theater.”

And yet, he stood there rapt, spinning the opener in his hand. It was as if he anticipated the ghastly events, if only dimly.

“I shall cure you of this recent flaw,” he informed her. “Haven’t I always kept my word?” he hissed and raised his index finger to her as a warning.

His attention caught by a flake of paint peeling loose from the canvas. Again he pressed the flat of the letter opener to the canvas and carved a crude, blistered path from the mouth to the cracked edge of her cheekbone. Where the cheek more stubbornly resisted, he scoured and pried at the hardened paint.

He knew the tides of this anger, even welcomed them—a matrimonial fury, dark and ancestral. The pattern had played out before; it would play out again; he had the eerie certainty that he would eventually destroy this painting in full. The matter was beyond the sovereign domain of his will.

The first chipped flecks broke free and scattered to the foot of the hearth.

Wanamaker was surprised to discover a small clearing below the surface of the excavation. Upon the canvas of this exposure, the chipped paint revealed a second layer—this one illustrated—beneath the first surface. A painting below painting and skin below skin. Though no larger than a parlour puzzle piece, and though the image itself was vague, its style and pattern was unmistakable.

Beneath the paint he had revealed a tattooed illustration by a Marquesans, one of the many barbarous arts of his plantation workmen.

§

These patterns awoke profoundly unpleasant memories: his wife's scandalous affection for these men, her public defense of them, her insistence on turning their occasional groans into martyred cries.

She had become particularly sympathetic to one of them, a pet covered head to toe in their sorcery. She swooned over his gruesome wood carving and littered the rooms with his savage totems.

For too long he tolerated the willfulness. In her idle time—time he would have done well to schedule for her—she had grown infatuated with his handiwork and the self-mutilation of the tattooed villager.

Her patronage was not lost on the genteel.

Gossip spread in the verandas and parlors of the Queen Victoria that the timber merchant’s wife had herself been tattooed or otherwise defiled. As headstrong or as guilty as she was, his young wife did nothing to gainsay it.

The disappearance of the docility that had once drawn her to him—and to her father's estate—reached its inevitable breaking point. Her arrogance left their marital relations beyond mutual interest or repair.

A conflict over these relations with her pet brought matters to a head.

Under express and punitive command, the merchant’s plantation foreman reported that the man had been witnessed exposing the mythologies of his bare back to a gathering of Englishwomen—the “tea spiritualists,” they were called at the Victoria.

The foreman, with hands trembling from the dread of delivering this news, informed Wanamaker that his wife was possibly numbered amongst them.

Wanamaker returned to his home, conducted his Elisabeth Wanamaker to her chambers and stripped the woman down to her wedding ring. He ordered a housemaid—a younger one he trusted to gossip—to satisfy him that her skin was free of devilry.

To his surprise, he found her skin was undefiled, but his young wife was neither scandalized by her treatment nor rid of a mounting obstinacy. His wife held his gaze through the whole sordid business, until the maid whispered in her mistress’s ear.

“Look away from him, ma’am. Your innocence needn’t weigh heavier on you than it does.”

Wanamaker ordered the home searched top to bottom and cleared of heathen art. The woodwork was torched on the grounds in the presence of the assembled staff. Her native was released from his duties and stripped of the modest status she had secured for him within their home.

The craftsman among his people was banished in the devilry of his painted nakedness.

“Let his sorcery cover his immodesty.”

Wanamaker was, however, cautious. He spared the laborer the most grievous punishments because his foreman cautioned Wanamaker about the man’s rank among their tribe.

“He has high standing as a tuhuna tā tatau among our people. We are a superstitious lot, as you know,” the foreman said with calculation. “We’ll have our hands full.”

“We?” Wanamaker retorted to the foreman.

The foreman corrected himself, with a more deferential apology.

“You, sir. You will have your hands full.”

Wanamaker forbade the villager to approach a civilized woman again or persist in the defilement of his people. “Not while he stands on the Christian soil of Britain.”

“Ejected like Lot, as you say, sir.”

Yet Wanamaker’s anger would not settle, and his wife's rank disobedience throughout the evening gathered force.

“A curse on your own flesh, Rowan Richard,” she shrieked at him with hellish protests. If the beast hadn’t defiled her body, without a doubt, he had defiled her Christian heart.

“Strike me, you coward, but don’t dare speak to me of barbarity, Rowan Richard,” Elisabeth Wanamaker hissed at him, a hellcat, indeed.

§

Now, standing on a modest footstool before her portrait, a letter opener driving beneath the surface of her painted skin, he recalled these bilious humiliations. He stabbed the tip of the letter opener through the canvas. It gave way like skin.

With this, Wanamaker felt the sudden, piercing flare of a fever blister at the corner of his mouth.

It arose at the same precise point as the insolent parting of his wife’s lips. The pain then coursed further into his cheek, along the exact path where he had scored her. Again, he stabbed at the canvas and again the pain erupted.

This misery ran beneath the expanse of his beard. He rushed to the mirror, where he parted a thicket of beard to expose a rutted channel. Even in the dim light of the gas lamps, he discerned scarlet skin and recoiled at the sight of its gouge. Matters escalated rapidly, and it was as if some acrid and bitter perfume rose from within his very flesh.

Terrors surged within him.

He did not dare to look back at his wife staring down at him impassively. He rang for a basin of ice water and a compress. When the housemaid entered, he ordered her to cover his wife’s features with the muslin wrap.

When at last she fully covered the wife, he found he was too terrified to dismiss her. Offering no explanation, he demanded she stand idly near him.

“Face away from me.”

He sat with his head in his hands. At last, the heat in his cheek subsided.

“Oh, wasn’t she lovely, sir? Is that her perfume, sir?” she said.

Wanamaker ordered her out, but she angled towards him on her departure.

“Shall I first open a window, sir? The air is close here.”

It was only for the flicker of a moment, but the housemaid dared to look at the gentleman who’d laid his wife to rest in common poplar.

In the nights that followed, Rowan Wanamaker became a man obsessed. He found himself caught between the oscillations of bravado and terror. A lust would surge to expose the tattooed secrets below her painted surface—then an opposing dread countered, of pain gouged from his flesh.

Through the sweltering London summer this mania escalated, and the timber merchant neglected the affairs of his enterprise. In the evenings, he drank, sitting in a wingback chair angled near the hearth. He glowered at the shrouded portrait. At times, he staggered to the painting and ran his hands over its muslin covering. The sensation of the fabric was cool, but he could not bring himself to remove it.

The tide shifted inexorably towards resolute action. After an evening of considerable drunkenness, the timber merchant convinced himself of his capacity to endure the greatest of agonies. He appealed to his courage with urgent murmurings. The earlier sensations had been the product of the fatigue of travel or, more probably, the ravings of a fevered mind.

“Sheer madness,” he intoned. He resolved to tolerate any sympathetic tortures that might arise upon his flesh.

And so concluding, he cast aside a decanter and raced to his desk drawer, where he seized his father-in-law’s bejeweled letter opener. In a headlong bolt, the timber merchant then threw himself at his murdered wife’s shroud. He clambered upon his footstool to face her. Balanced there precariously, the gentleman summoned his fortitude and yanked the ash grey muslin to the floor.

“A harlot’s garb,” he sneered, before daring to look back at her.

There she stood.

But where he had expected to confront her viperous smirk, he was struck rather by the placidity of her expression. Despite the chips torn from her marred cheek, she remained rendered as she was in youth, comely, even beseeching, daring him to disrobe her.

“Your mettle has been rewarded. You have been a fool to fear her,” he told himself.

His confidence fully restored, the gentleman carved lustily. “You have the endurance to suffer agonies.” His attack recommenced on the surface of the oil painting, along the expanse of her bare, descending arm. If nothing further lay beneath the blistered surface of her forearm, he would be done with her directly.

“Or perhaps I’ll hang you in the foyer like this,” he laughed, roughly gouging at her painted skin. When he leaned in and supported himself with the picture frame, he found it warm to the touch, but his progression was unstoppable. His strained mirth exhausted, he counseled his will uneasily and at repetition. With every hard scrape of the letter opener, he intoned her name.

“Elisabeth Wanamaker… Elisabeth Wanamaker…”

He ground her forearm free of its blistering. There, below the outer surface of her white gloved hand, lay exposed a second image—an inner hand, depicted in the devilry of Marquesan tattoo. A hand below a hand, delicate and pallid.

He distinguished an unmistakable teacup of household china. It dangled limply from the tips of her fingers on the threshold of balance.

The appearance of the teacup, half-buried and subliminal, dredged the horrors that had held him firmly at bay. Sudden spikes of needled pain raced along the back of his own hand, a phantasmagoric echo that drove the letter opener clattering from his grip. The skin on his hand was now as scarlet and blistered as the surface of the portrait. He clawed at the bubbled surface of his own hand, dreading what damnations he might discover there.

He raged in anger at the image of his wife. “Elisabeth, your fate was just. Even in death you remain a living infection.”

The timber merchant leaned to the light of the hearth to inspect his revealed wound. Below the red surface that now ran from the back of his hand to his fingertips, the wraithlike trace of a tattoo began to manifest upon his own skin. Gradually the image revealed itself. He saw that the barbaric image contained the selfsame, sinister pattern of the china cup with which he had served her on the eve of her fate.

More ghastly still, his wife’s fingertips began to loom upon his own. He gasped, lurching to a mirror by a gaslight and firmly parted the hair of his beard. In the buried hues exposed there, he revealed Roman lettering, the horological dial of his wife’s watch.

The watch hands were set at IX, the approximate hour of her death. Compounding his fright, the acrid scent of poisonous nightshade flooded his senses.

A sepulchral quiet fell. The gentleman could hear only distant coughing beyond his doors, then the muffled chime of midnight from a far-off grandfather clock.

The stillness that followed overwhelmed his faculties. Reeling into the hallway of brass and paneled walnut, he cried for the club’s old footman; but when the servant arrived still in a somnolent daze there was, to the man’s great confusion, no task at hand.

“My apologies. There’s a sharp smell, sir. Is there something that we have neglected? I can wake the boy.”

Wanamaker’s misery grew unsupportable. He struggled to cover her again with the muslin, but the torments etched across his tattooed hands overwhelmed him. The old footman pressed in closely to be of service.

“May I help you, sir? There you go, sir. Don’t trouble yourself.”

“Cover her now. With that gray rag.” Wanamaker’s eyes were closed and he could only indicate vaguely with his freshly scarred hand.

His back turned safely from the gentleman’s gaze, the old footman relaxed his professional mask at once and studied the softness of the murdered woman’s features. He feigned a struggle with the muslin to study her scarred surfaces more closely.

A spectral beauty, pale and composed, held his gaze in the flickering gaslight. The footman shivered.

“By the snatch or the match,” the footman thought, and turned away.

A Heathen’s Ring

In the grim days that followed, the damnable illustration upon his flesh made it impossible to venture from the tightly curtained darkness. In the burning of the gaslights, he looked bitterly upon the tattooed defilement of his flesh and features.

The timber merchant settled upon a revised scheme of attack on the portrait to reveal her palimpsest infidelities. He would steady himself by heady draughts of morphine and marshal a final attempt to lay bare his wife’s wickedness.

“If need be, let my own body be covered in primitive filth, woman.”

But even as he hardened his resolve for this fiendish archaeology, he knew that beneath the muslin covering, the placidity of her accusatory gaze remained unaltered by the temper of his words.

§

As the clocks of the R— Club struck the hour of her death, the gentleman sipped at the cool vial of morphine. Thus emboldened, he rose to her clasping the father’s letter opener, discarded her muslin, and scraped at the blistered paint across her waist. The chips of blistered oil paint surrendered readily to his menace.

By dawn, in the haze of a final draught of morphine, he had scraped sufficiently at the staid posture of her outer form to reveal the huddled, fetal form within. His late wife crouched within the confines of the outer wife’s chest. Wrathful and accusatory, her depicted bare flesh glowed there as if projected by the candlelight of a phantasmagoric lantern.

Her illustrated right arm descended simian-like at her side, still clutching the teacup. The left, its veiled image still sheathed, was directed aloft above her head toward an unsettling mystery obscured by the Victorian clothing of civilized portraiture. The feral tucked inside the genteel.

Even beneath the remaining paint, he was certain of a sorceress’ devilry in the hard clutch of an upraised hand.

Wanamaker renewed his assault. As if under the knife of his own hand, he felt his own face burning in devilish symmetry. He exposed her tattooed eyes, accusatory and arrogant, locked upon him with an unflinching stare. She looked at him with the same wrathful, female contempt as when he had informed her of the Marquesan’s destruction.

“You’ve lost your illustrated brute,” he had hissed cruelly at dinner across an expanse of candlelight and white tablecloth. The room had been redolent with the pungency of smoke.

His wife had risen imperiously from the table and taken him in, not with grief but with smoldering rage.

“Oh, Lord, mark my words, Rowan Richard. Fate will not be stayed. The masters of the tuhuna tā tatau will suffer you to regret it.”

The moment sealed the woman’s fiery doom, but at that moment, malevolence failed him, and he found no dark smile to convey his mastery over her.

Now, as he raised himself sufficiently before the portrait to bring his face to the dark revelation of her tattooed mouth, the smell of varnish and the fumes of burning mahogany staggered him.

He turned to the large mirror of the study and looked at his painted face from across the room. In the surging horror of the illustrations he saw there, he began to fumble at his shirt, clawing at the heat of its brass buttons. He began to lose his footing and groped for the painting’s frame but found no purchase.

The life-size portrait slid from its support and crashed to the stone hearth. His own legs gave way from the footstool, and he found himself lying directly upon her image, the mahogany frame splintered under his weight. He crawled over the buckled canvas towards the woman’s treacherous gaze, clutching the letter opener in his hand, preparing for her final revelation.

An acrid smoke streamed from the handle of the letter opener, the carved savagery of the mahogany handle crackling from the heat. The pain became intolerable, and the tool slipped from his grasp.

Still he resolved to expose the last secrets of what she held in her upraised hand, a hand clenched so tightly it seemed to distort the very canvas where it was inscribed.

In the devilish forge of the portrait, he clawed at his wife’s image with his fingernails, following the path of blistering above her cheek. His nails raked from the watch's gleam near her cheekbone toward her temple, where the final mystery of her upraised hand remained shrouded.

§

Above her cheekbone, on the back of his wife's tattooed hand, he discerned the face of the Marquesan infidel. The man fixed him in a stare with banked, fiery rage, a snakelike anger coiled to strike at the first opportunity.

He recalled the midnight destruction of the Marquesan's meager home and property. These memories mastered him. He recalled the varnished pole and the face of the wretched man lashed to it. The agonized native had looked at him then with the same disdain as he was illustrated now, a contempt sketched in the markings on his faithless wife's raised hand.

Still the lumber merchant scraped.

As he clawed at her temple with his fingernails, he exposed the first mystery of her grasping. She held the white root of a common Lucifer match. His desire to unveil her secrets overwhelmed him, and he could not rid himself of the devilish canvas. Overcome, he surrendered the last of his energies to his sulphurous fate. He could only gaze at her now, cheek pressed to portraiture, as she revealed the last of her infernal mysteries. Memories drifted in the vapors and smoke about him.

The reek of sulfur dizzied him, as it had when he set fire to the gauzy curtains shrouding his insensate wife in their bed. The tincture of poisonous nightshade erupted in his nostrils, a potion slipped into her tea. As he exposed the rising length of the wooden match, the pungency of smelling salts staggered him, the same smelling salts by which he had confirmed her torpor.

Wanamaker was left with nothing now but the sense of sight and the infernal heat of his own combustion. Smoke swirled about him, treacherous flames readying to unfurl.

It was at the tip of the match that he saw the artistry of his wife, the mark of his wife’s refined signature sealing his ruin. It was she that had forged her very image from the damnations of hell, learning the savagery of their primitive art. He scraped at the red tip of the match, and through the clawing scrape of a broken fingernail, the Lucifer match erupted with a sulfurous pop.

His mouth snapped open in terror at its luminescence.

Hot red flames blazed from the paint-scraped pigments embedded beneath the tips of his nails. No strength remained in the man to save himself. Ochre flames engulfed the husband, as they had with each of his wives—three of them in turn—each beneath the flaming canopies of well-varnished mahogany.

He summoned a last energy to lurch forward on the nakedness of his wife’s tattooed frame, his face pressed against the canvas of her rendered left hand.

It was then he saw his wife’s barbarous artistry in full. In place of the engagement ring he had granted her for marriage, there was illustrated a fine band of tattoo, circling the identical perimeter of a wedding finger.

It was the heathen’s painted ring, masked beneath her Christian band, closer to her flesh than his own. The timber merchant realized that neither he nor the housemaid had laid bare her defilement through the cunning of infidelity.

His breath choked and puffed as he lay spent. It was in his last gasp that he heard the splintering cracks of mahogany racing through the contours of his own limbs.

The daughter of the shrewd Merseyside shipbuilder had taken the life of her infidel husband—by the match.

§

It was the house boy who discovered the ashes of Rowan Richard Wanamaker, the blackened cinders of the picture frame strewn on the stone of the hearth before the gentleman’s wingback chair. The boy cried out for the old footman to come.

The two huddled over the remains of the loathed man, and the footman tested the charred ash for warmth, recalling the heat of the gaslights that had burned his palm.

The gentleman’s ashes were cool, their dark energy now spent. He wiped his hands clean of them, then gathered pieces of the splintered picture frame, setting them thoughtfully onto the irons of the fireplace. As he did, the old footman thumbed the last patterned swirls of mahogany. The remnants of the beautiful woman’s portrait frame were carved roughly, but with artistry.

The old footman knew wood.

“Sweep the master’s ashes into the flames, boy, and never a word on your life.”

“With pleasure, sir,” the boy nodded.

The two spoke in the universal silence of the servant class.

In the weeks that followed, the disappearance of the timber merchant became a subject of passionate discussion in the gaslit libraries of the R— Club. Elsewhere, the constable’s investigations were summarily concluded.

By quarter year's end, news of his fate had traveled to the Far East, whispered in the smoking rooms of Pacific-bound steamers. From there, satisfied gossip of Rowan Richard Wanamaker’s demise was murmured in the garden parties and cricket grounds of the colonial governors.

At long last, word of the lumber merchant’s disappearance reached the Marquesan native’s village. Other than the trace of a smile at the parting of their lips, news of the London gentleman’s death was received in ashen silence.