The Marquesan Tattoo Part II: “The Feverish and Hallucinatory”

On the evening he murders his wife, a London timber merchant receives a mysterious portrait—a tale of Victorian horror in five parts. Part Two: The Feverish and Hallucinatory

⬅️ Previous — The Beginning — Next ➡️

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, theatrics to scandalize, the application of perfume directly to the surface of a painting, the mark of an artist peddling in Bohemian vulgarity, he thought.

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.”

Next Chapter: “Buried in Poplar” ➡️