The Briarwake: The Portrait of The Unborn

rolled from the weave as Elara pulled the tapestry aside, a thin grey river that caught the lamplight and turned briefly gold. She coughed once, swallowed it, and held the lantern higher. The stone wall behind the hanging was rougher than she remembered, pocked with old damp, threaded here and there with a root so fine it might have been a vein. She pressed her palm flat against the cold and felt the house breathe against her hand, or imagined she did. Either was enough to make her pulse quicken.

The tapestry itself was heavy with age, a hunting scene worked in greens and browns that had bled into each other over decades until the hounds and the deer were nearly one creature. Her grandmother had hung it there, Elara recalled, or perhaps her grandmother had only kept it. The hall was full of things that had been kept rather than chosen, layered like skin.

She had come up here to look for the family Bible. What she had found instead was a seam in the stonework that should not have been there, and the faint draft slipping through it, and the sound that was not quite a sound, more a pressure against the inner ear. She pressed the lantern closer. The seam ran vertical, then turned and ran horizontal, the shape of a door that had been mortared shut.

Elara set her jaw. Her fingers found the edge of the tapestry and pulled it further, and the dust came again, and this time it carried a faint sweetness, like pressed petals, like something that should have rotted and had not.

The draft grew stronger. It tasted of cold iron and rain, of cellars that went down farther than any cellar ought to.

She found the portrait in the corner where the wall met the ceiling, tucked behind a second weave of faded cloth that had been pinned rather than hung, the pins so old they had left rust-coloured halos on the stone. The cloth came away in a sheet of brittle linen, and there she was.

A young woman in a white dress, seated in a chair she did not quite occupy, her hands folded in her lap with a stillness that was not painted stillness but something deeper. Her hair was dark and loose, falling past her shoulders, and across her brow she wore a crown of blackthorn woven so finely that the thorns seemed to move when the lantern flame guttered. Her eyes were grey, and they were looking at Elara, and her mouth held the smallest suggestion of a smile that was not a smile at all.

Elara stepped closer. The paint was old but not as old as the wall. The canvas had been stretched on a frame of pale wood, and the frame had been signed in a hand she did not recognise, a flourish of initials and a date. She tilted the lantern. The date sat in the lower right corner, small but certain, the numerals painted with a precision that bordered on the clerical.

Three years before her mother Cora had been born.

Elara counted the years twice, in case she had miscounted, in case her arithmetic had gone slack with fatigue. It had not. The woman in the portrait had been painted before her mother existed, and yet her mother's face was there in the line of the jaw, in the tilt of the brow, in something behind the painted eyes that Elara had seen in her own mirror at three in the morning when the house was quiet and her thoughts would not stop circling.

She had the unsettling conviction that the portrait was not finished. There was no signature in the usual sense, only the initials and the date, and one of the hands, the left, was rendered with a fluency that made the right look hasty, almost guilty. The crown sat a fraction too high on the brow, as though the artist had not been permitted to adjust it. The white dress fell in folds that suggested a body beneath them, but the body was indistinct, a sketch under the colour, and in one place near the heart there was a bloom of discolouration, a faint bruise in the paint itself, as though something had been pressed against the wet pigment from the other side.

Elara touched the frame. The wood was colder than the stone, which should not have been possible. She pulled her hand back and looked at her fingertips and they were clean, but they ached, a low singing ache that ran up into the wrist.

She should have put the lantern down. She should have stepped away and gone downstairs and poured herself something warm and thought about what she had seen. Instead she lifted the portrait from its hidden shelf and carried it to the small table by the window, where the moonlight would fall across it, and set it down, and stood looking.

The young woman looked back.

Elara's throat was dry. She had eaten nothing since dawn, and the tea in the kitchen had gone cold in its cup, and the hall around her was silent in the way that only very old houses are silent, a silence that has weight and listens back.

The dress, she saw now, was not a wedding dress. It was too simple, the neckline too high, the sleeves falling past the wrists. But the blackthorn crown was bridal in its way, or coronation, or something older than either. The thorns were painted with the same painstaking care that had gone into the face, each one tipped with a bead of paint so small it might have been a drop of real blood. She did not doubt that the artist had intended it to look that way. She doubted that he had.

She thought of the village, of the women who had been photographed in their bridal whites and then never spoken of again except in lowered voices at the post office. She thought of her sister, whose wedding had never been, whose white dress still hung in the closet at the Fenwick house wrapped in tissue paper that had yellowed since she had last opened it.

Elara sat down on the stool by the table. The wood of it creaked under her, a sound so ordinary it almost made her laugh. Almost.

The lantern flame steadied. In its clearer light she noticed a second inscription, scratched rather than painted, on the back of the frame. She turned the portrait over with care, feeling again the unnatural chill of the wood against her palms. The inscription was in a hand she had not seen before, the letters cramped and uneven, pressed deep into the wood as though the writer had wanted them to last longer than the paint.

Two lines. The first was a name she did not recognise, a girl's name with a surname that had been scored out so violently the wood itself had splintered. The second was a sentence, and the sentence was a warning, and it said, Do not let her see you looking.

Elara read it twice. The letters did not change.

She set the portrait back down, face up, and the painted eyes followed her, and the bruise near the heart seemed darker in the lantern light, or perhaps that was the flame shifting.

Somewhere below her, in the kitchen, the clock that had not worked since her grandmother's funeral began to tick. It was a thin, hesitant sound, as though the mechanism was remembering how. Elara counted the ticks. They came irregularly at first, then settled into something close to a rhythm, and then stopped altogether, and the silence that followed was worse than the ticking had been.

She thought of going downstairs. She thought of leaving the hall entirely, of driving back to the cottage she had rented on the edge of town and locking the door and pulling the curtains and pretending the portrait did not exist. She had a talent for pretending. It was how she had survived the last two years, the long quiet after the last message from her sister, the polite distance from the Blackthorns, the slow drift away from the university where she had once believed that the answers to everything grew on stems.

She had not believed that for a long time.

The draft from behind the wall moved past her, lifting the edge of the tapestry so that it brushed her shoulder. The sweetness in the dust was stronger now, and beneath it the iron, and beneath that something else, something green and wet, the smell of a garden after a long rain when the first growth is pushing through.

Elara did not move.

The painted woman in the white dress continued to smile her not-smile, and the blackthorn crown sat heavy on her brow, and somewhere in the house a door that had been closed for years was beginning, very softly, to open.

The draft was colder now, a thin stream of air moving past her cheek and lifting the fine hairs at her temple. Elara did not turn to look at the door that was opening. She knew with the certainty of instinct that looking would change what was happening, that some thresholds once crossed could not be uncrossed, and so she kept her eyes on the portrait, on the not-smile of the woman in the white dress, on the heavy crown of blackthorn that seemed to settle deeper into the painted brow with each slow breath she took.

She had come upstairs to photograph the portraits. That was the lie she had told herself, and it was almost true. She had brought her equipment, the small digital camera she used for the podcast, the compact tripod, the softbox light that folded down to the size of a book. The podcast was a thin pretense. The real reason she had come was the one she could not say aloud: that she had to see them again, the Blackthorn matriarchs, all of them lined along the second-floor corridor of the great house like a procession of mourners who had been told to wait there for someone who would never come. She had to see them because her sister had seen them last, had stood in this exact spot three years ago with the same equipment, and had walked out of the house and into a silence that had never ended.

Elara set up the tripod first. The mechanical motions helped. Extend the legs. Lock the joints. Mount the camera. She worked slowly, deliberately, the way she had learned to work in the university lab when the cultures were contaminated and one careless breath could ruin months of work. Precision as a kind of prayer. Her hands were steady enough. They were always steady when she was working. It was the rest of her that shook.

The first portrait she photographed was the woman in the white dress, the one she had been watching. The camera focused with a small mechanical whir, and the red-eye reduction pulsed twice, and Elara bent to look through the viewfinder. The woman filled the frame. Up close, through the lens, the brushwork was extraordinary. Each strand of the white dress had been laid on with a patience that bordered on devotion. The lace at the collar was almost translucent. The hands folded across the painted lap were pale and long-fingered, the nails buffed to a soft shine, and the blackthorn crown sat upon the dark hair like something grown there, like something that had rooted.

Elara took six shots. She adjusted the white balance. She took four more. The woman's eyes in the photograph were steady and dark, and they looked, as they always looked, slightly to the left of the viewer, toward the window that did not exist in the painting but did exist in the wall of the corridor, and Elara thought, as she had thought a hundred times before, that the artist had made a mistake. The gaze should have been frontal. A portrait of a matriarch should meet the eye. That was tradition. That was the way it was done.

She moved down the line.

The second portrait was of a woman in deep green, a Blackthorn by the look of her, the same strong jaw and dark brows, the same stillness in the mouth. Elara photographed her too. Three shots. Five. The woman in green also looked slightly to the left, toward the same window, and Elara frowned and moved on.

The third portrait was of an older woman, heavy-jowled and severe, in a high-collared dress of black silk. She too looked to the left. The fourth, a young woman with a single tear painted on her cheek, looked to the left. The fifth, an elderly woman whose eyes were almost lost in the folds of her lids, looked to the left. The sixth, a girl of perhaps twelve with a ribbon at her throat, looked to the left.

Elara stopped in the middle of the corridor.

She lowered the camera. She stood very still, listening to her own breath, and then she lifted the camera again and aimed it at the wall opposite the portraits, at the empty wall, and she took a single shot, and then she lowered the camera and walked to the end of the corridor where the seventh portrait hung, the largest, and she aimed the camera at the white wall to the right of the frame, and she took another shot, and she did not look at the display screen, not yet. She turned the camera around in her hands and studied the small glowing rectangle, the thumbnail of the first shot, the wall with nothing on it, and then the thumbnail of the second shot, also a wall with nothing on it.

She raised the camera to her eye and looked through the viewfinder at the seventh portrait, the largest one, the woman in the white dress who stood at the end of the procession like a bride waiting for a procession that would never arrive.

The woman's eyes, in the viewfinder, were looking directly at her.

Elara's breath caught. She lowered the camera. The woman's eyes, on the painted canvas, were slightly to the left, toward the window, exactly as they had been every other time she had stood in this corridor. She raised the camera. The eyes looked at her. She lowered the camera. The eyes looked left. She raised the camera. The eyes looked at her. She lowered the camera. The eyes looked left.

Her hands were beginning to shake.

She stepped back. The painted eyes, in the viewfinder, remained fixed on her. She stepped to the side, almost to the wall, and the gaze followed, smoothly, without the slightest jerk, the way a living eye would move and not the way a painted one ever should. She stepped back to her original position and the gaze returned to center. She stepped left again and the gaze slid left to meet her.

Elara lowered the camera to her chest and held it there with both hands, the way one holds a child.

She did not run.

She had run from enough things in her life. She had run from the university when the grant had dried up. She had run from the house she had shared with her sister when the rooms had become too loud with absence. She had run from the Blackthorns when they had refused, politely and then not so politely, to tell her what they knew about the last days of her sister's life. She was not going to run from a painted woman on a wall. Not yet. Not until she understood.

She set the camera down on the floor, carefully, the way one sets down a sleeping thing, and she approached the seventh portrait.

Up close, the brushwork was even more extraordinary. The artist had used a technique she had seen only once before, in a museum in Edinburgh, a layering of glazes so thin that the linen of the canvas seemed to glow from beneath. The light in the painting came from nowhere and everywhere, the way light comes in dreams. The white dress was not white at all, up close. It was a hundred shades of cream and ivory and the faintest suggestion of blue, and the blackthorn crown was not black but a deep, bruised purple, the color of a wound that was still healing, and the eyes were not dark, as Elara had always thought, but a deep brown shot through with threads of amber that caught the light and held it.

The eyes were looking at her.

Not toward the window. Not slightly to the left. At her.

Elara raised her hand. She did not decide to raise it. Her body decided for her, the way bodies decide when the mind has gone somewhere else. Her fingers hovered an inch from the painted surface, and she could feel the cold coming off the canvas, the way one feels cold coming off a window in winter, and she thought, absurdly, that the painting was breathing, that the cold was the exhalation of something that had been holding its breath for a very long time.

She touched it.

The varnish was wet.

Not damp. Not tacky. Wet. The way a painting is wet when it has just been finished, when the final glaze has been laid on and the artist has stepped back and the linseed oil is still lifting the color to the surface. Her fingertip came away faintly ambered, and the surface of the painting dimpled under her touch and then smoothed, and Elara stood with her finger raised and a small bead of varnish shining on the pad of it, and she did not move for a long time.

The smell in the corridor had changed. The sweetness was gone. The iron was gone. The green, wet smell of new growth was gone. What remained was linseed oil, and beneath it the mineral smell of pigments, and beneath that something she had smelled only once before, in the lab at the university when a colleague had cracked open a sealed jar of preserved specimens from a collection that had been closed for seventy years. The smell of things that had been kept too long in the dark.

The seventh portrait stared back at her. The amber threads in the eyes seemed to shift, to swim, and Elara thought, for one clear moment, that she could see a face behind the face, a younger face, a face she almost recognized, and then the painted features settled, and the not-smile returned, and the blackthorn crown sat heavy on the painted brow.

Elara lowered her hand. She wiped the varnish on the leg of her trousers, slowly, watching the amber stain spread into the fabric, and then she picked up the camera and took a single shot of the seventh portrait, close, the lens almost touching the canvas, and then she took a step back and took six more, and then she walked down the corridor without looking at the other portraits, without stopping at the sixth or the fifth or the fourth, all the way to the top of the stairs, and she stood there with her hand on the banister and her heart beating in her throat.

The door at the end of the corridor, the one that had been opening, was closed again.

She did not go back to check. She walked down the stairs, one at a time, the way one walks down stairs in a house where one is not sure of the footing, and she set the camera on the hall table and she opened the front door and she stood in the doorway with the cold air of the afternoon on her face and the smell of the garden, real garden, real soil, real green, coming up from the ground.

She thought of calling someone. She thought of calling Adelaide Blackthorn, who would not pick up, or June Halsey, who would pick up and say nothing useful. She thought of calling Silas Croft, who would listen in his slow, grave way and say something that would land in her like a stone and then sit there.

She did not call anyone.

She went back inside. She picked up the camera. She went back upstairs.

Elara went back to the seventh portrait the way one returns to a bruise, not to heal it but to map its exact edges. She set the camera to manual and worked the ring until the aperture breathed wide, and the corridor fell into a shallow amber haze, the dust motes turning in the slanted light like seeds in a jar. She took her shots from the left first, then the right, then centered, then low, crouching until her knees pressed the floorboards and the wood grain bit through her trousers. She took a shot of the Briar Mother's hands, the pale undersides of the fingers, the way the right thumb rested against the dark wood of the crown as if the wood were warm. She took a shot of the eyes. She took a shot of the mouth.

She stood up too quickly. The blood left her head in a single long pull, and she put her hand out and found the wall, and the wallpaper under her palm was cool and faintly damp, and somewhere behind the plaster she heard a sound that might have been a pipe or might have been the house settling or might have been something else. She did not move her hand. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth and waited for the floor to stop tilting.

Then she heard the front door open downstairs.

Not the soft click of Adelaide Blackthorn, who moved through her own house like a held breath. Not the careful tread of June Halsey, who would have called out by now. This was the sound of a man coming in without knocking, the heavy heel-strike of work boots on the slate of the entryway, and then the quick shut of the door against the wind, and then the silence of a man listening.

"Elara," Silas Croft said, from somewhere below her. Not a question. Not quite a summons.

She stepped out of the alcove and went to the top of the stairs. She did not call down. She stood with one hand on the newel post and looked over the banister and watched him move through the hall below, a tall shape in a coat the color of wet bark, his hat already off and held against his chest, his face turned up toward the landing with the look of a man who has come a long way and does not want to be where he has arrived.

He saw her. He did not wave her down. He walked to the foot of the stairs and put one hand on the banister and stood there, breathing through his nose, looking at the second floor the way one looks at a place one has been warned about.

"I have to come up," he said.

"Then come up," she said.

He climbed slowly, his boots loud on every tread, his free hand trailing the rail. He came up the way he did everything, with the deliberate weight of a man who had learned not to trust his own footing. When he reached the top he stopped and looked at her, and his eyes went past her down the corridor to where the seventh portrait waited in its alcove.

He went very still.

"Silas," she said.

He did not answer. He walked past her. He walked down the corridor with the slow, deliberate stride of a man walking toward something he has spent years walking away from, and she followed him at a distance of three paces, the camera in her hand forgotten, her mouth dry with the particular dust of old houses.

He stopped in front of the portrait. He stood for a long moment with his head bowed, his hat still pressed flat against his chest, and then he lifted his head and looked at the Briar Mother's face, and she saw something move through him that was not surprise and was not recognition but was older than both, something that had the texture of a thing seen too many times in the dark.

He put his hand out. He touched the frame, not the painted face, only the gilded wood, his fingers resting at the corner where the blackthorn branches curled into the molding, and then he drew his hand back as if the wood had bitten him.

"When did you find it," he said. Not a question.

"This morning," she said. "It was behind a panel. Adelaide didn't know it was there."

"Adelaide," he said, and the word came out of him with the weight of something set down. "Adelaide doesn't know what's in her own house. Adelaide hasn't known for twenty years."

He turned to her then, and his face had the look of a man standing in a field after lightning has struck close, the stunned, mineral stillness of someone whose hearing has not yet come back.

"You're going to listen to me," he said. "You're going to listen, and you're not going to argue, because I have argued with this house and I have lost."

"Silas."

"That portrait," he said. He pointed at it without looking at it, his finger trembling slightly in the air. "That portrait did not exist. I was in this house in October. I was in this corridor in October. I walked the length of it. I looked at every frame. There were six. There were six and there have been six since I was a boy, and there are not seven. There has never been seven."

"Silas," she said again. She kept her voice level, the way one keeps one's voice level in the presence of a man who is approaching some kind of edge. "I opened the panel myself. I watched the plaster fall. The frame was behind it. The canvas was behind it. There is dust in the grooves that is older than either of us."

"I don't care about the dust," he said. His voice had dropped, gone quieter rather than louder, and she understood in the prickle along her arms that this was worse than shouting. "I don't care what you saw. I care what I know. Six. There have always been six. My mother counted them when I was small. She pointed to each one and she named the woman in it and she said the sixth was the last, the last of them, the end of the line. There was no seventh."

He stepped closer to her. He smelled of the outside, of cold grass and pine resin and the faint mineral tang of the cemetery, and beneath it the human smell of a man who had walked a long way in a short time.

"I want it burned," he said. "Today. Before sundown."

"Silas, you can't be serious."

"I am always serious," he said. "I am the most serious man you will ever meet. I am so serious I cannot sleep at night. I am so serious my daughter has learned to read the weather of my face before she has learned to read her books." He took a breath, and the breath shuddered once on the way in. "I want it taken off the wall. I want it carried out of this house. I want it set in the yard. I want it set on fire. I want it burned before the sun touches the tree line."

"Elara," he said, and he used her name the way he used it when he was being gentle with her, which was rare, which was almost never, "I am asking you. I am asking you to do this for me."

She looked at him. She looked at the portrait. She thought of her sister. She thought of the way Adelaide had stood in the hallway that morning with her hands folded over her stomach and her face turned toward the corridor as if she were listening for something she had been listening for, patiently, for years.

"No," Elara said.

He flinched. It was a small motion, the smallest possible version of a man pulling back from a blow, and it hurt her to see it, and she did not soften.

"I hear you," she said. "I hear what you're saying. Six, not seven. It wasn't there. It came from somewhere. I hear all of that. I am not going to burn it."

"Elara."

"Silas, listen to me. Listen. My sister is gone. My sister walked into the wood six months ago and she has not come back and there is not one piece of her that has come back, not a scarf, not a shoe, not a strand of hair. There is nothing. And in this house there is a portrait of a woman I have never seen, painted in a style I cannot date, holding a crown of blackthorn, and she is looking at me from behind a wall that wasn't a wall this morning. And I am not going to burn it. I am not going to bury it. I am going to photograph it and I am going to study it and I am going to find out who she is and what she wants and why she waited for me to come back to this town to show me her face."

Silas was quiet for a long time. He stood with his hat pressed against his chest and his shoulders curved inward, and she watched the breath move through him and the thought move through him and the refusal move through him, one after the other, like weather.

"You don't understand what you're doing," he said, finally.

"Then help me understand," she said. "Sit down. Tell me about the sixth portrait. Tell me about your mother counting them. Tell me why you walked this corridor in October. Tell me why you're here now, Silas, on this afternoon, in this house, asking me to set a painting on fire before the sun goes down. Tell me, and I will listen."

He looked at her, and she saw the war in him, the old war, the war between the man he had been and the man he had become and the man he might yet be if the world gave him the chance. She saw his hand tighten on the brim of his hat. She saw the tendons in his neck stand out. She saw him almost speak.

Then he put his hat on his head. He drew it down low over his brow. He stepped past her without another word and walked down the corridor and down the stairs, and she followed him only as far as the landing, because she understood that this was the part of him that needed to leave, and you did not try to hold a man who was leaving, you only watched him go and counted the number of his steps and made sure he took them all.

She listened to the front door open. She listened to the cold air come in from outside. She listened to his boots on the slate, and then on the gravel, and then on the road, growing softer and softer until they were only the suggestion of a man walking, and then not even that.

She stood on the landing for a long time with her hand on the banister. The house settled around her in its small, familiar groans. The light from the west-facing window at the end of the corridor had gone the color of weak tea, and the seventh portrait waited in its alcove behind her, patient as a held breath.

She did not go back to look at it. Not yet. She walked to the window at the end of the corridor and looked out, and she saw Silas crossing the lower field on the path that led toward the cemetery, his coat flapping once at the knee where the wind caught it, his head down, his hands in his pockets, a man carrying something he would not set down.

The sun was two hands above the tree line. She had that long, and no longer.

She turned from the window and went back down the corridor to the portrait, and she stood in front of it, and she lifted the camera, and she took the picture she had come back upstairs to take, the one of the Briar Mother's face, close, the lens a breath from the canvas, so close she could see the ridge of a brushstroke where the painter had pressed too hard, so close she could see the dark grain of the wood beneath the varnish at the edge of the frame.

She lowered the camera. She did not look away.

Outside, the sun went on dropping toward the wood, and the shadow of the house lengthened across the garden, and somewhere on the path to the cemetery a man walked with his head bowed and his hands in his pockets and the weight of a name he had not yet spoken settling into him like rain into dry ground, and the portrait watched them both, and waited.