apartment.
“What happened?” Kathy asked, looking at the claustrophobic closet that Izzy’s bedroom had become with the addition of the stacks of paintings and boxes. “You get evicted?”
Izzy shook her head. “No. It’s Rushkin. I got a letter from him telling me he’d be back tomorrow.”
“So?” Kathy said, echoing Alan’s response earlier. “I thought he said you could use the place when he was gone?”
“He did. It’s just ... you know ....”
Izzy shrugged, wanting to leave it at that, but unlike Alan, Kathy wasn’t one to be easily put off once she had her mind set on knowing something. “Know what?” she asked.
Izzy sighed. “It’s my numena. I had to get them out of there before he came back.”
“You really think he’s after them?”
Izzy had never told Kathy about the death of the winged cat in her dream, or how Rushkin had tried to kill Paddyjack—would have killed him, if it hadn’t been for John. She hadn’t told her about Rushkin trying to buy one of her numena paintings for five thousand dollars from her first show at The Green Man Gallery. She hadn’t told her about how Rushkin seemed to have changed after she first met him, from troll to a normal man. There were so many things she’d never told anyone about Rushkin.
She shrugged. “You know what John said, that they keep him young. That they’re like a kind of food for him.”
“Do you believe it?” Kathy asked.
“I don’t know. But why take a chance, right?”
Kathy nodded. “If you’re that uncertain,” she said, “then you did the right thing. And maybe you should keep on doing the right thing: stay away from him.”
“I will,” Izzy had promised.
Except here she was where she’d said she wouldn’t be, climbing the stairs to the studio, knocking on the familiar door. She’d left a key to the new lock in an envelope that she’d slipped into the mail slot of the apartment downstairs, but she still had a key to that door in her pocket, she realized. She should give it back to Rushkin. That would be her excuse for coming, she decided. To return the key and thank him for the use of the studio and then just go, because she really shouldn’t be here, she’d promised herself as much as Kathy that she would keep her distance from Rushkin. But then the door opened and all her good intentions were swept away.
“Isabelle!” Rushkin cried, his whole face lit up with pleasure at seeing her. “It’s so good to see you.
Come in, come in. You look frozen.”
He seemed different again, Izzy thought as she let him usher her inside. Not the grotesque troll she’d caricatured in that sketch at St. Paul’s Cathedral all those years ago, but not the quirky, stoop-backed man not much taller than herself that she remembered from just before he went away, either. The man who met her at the door was far more ordinary than that—he was still Rushkin, still unmistakably the odd bird with his too-bright eyes and his outdated wardrobe, but there was nothing either threatening or senile about him. He hadn’t grown any taller and he remained as broad in the shoulders as ever, but the power he exuded still came from within, rather than from any physical attribute.
“How ... how was your trip?” Izzy asked.
“Trip?” Rushkin repeated in a tone of amusement. “You make it sound as though I was on a holiday.”
“I didn’t know what you were doing.”
“Lecturing, Isabelle. Lecturing and touring and studying the masters, when I had the time, because one can never learn too much from those gifted ones who went before us.”
He led her across the studio to the window seat and sat her down where the air from the heat vent rose up and warmed her. Without waiting to ask her, he fetched her a mug of tea from the thermos he kept on the worktable and brought it back to where she was sitting. Izzy gratefully cradled it in her hands and let the warm steam rise up to tickle her cheeks.
“I got your letters,” she said after she’d taken a sip. “I found them really helpful.”
“Then it was worth the time I took to write them.”
“I couldn’t tell where you were when you mailed them—the postmarks were all smudged.”
Rushkin shrugged. “Here and there—who can remember?”
“I was surprised that you even had a chance to see the shows.”
“What? And miss such important moments in the life of my only and best student?”
Izzy couldn’t help but bask in the warmth of his praise. When she looked about the studio, she saw that it was full of paintings and sketches again, only they were all unfamiliar. Some looked as thought they’d been painted in Greece or Italy or southern Spain. Others reminded her of the Middle East, Africa, northern Europe, the Far East. Landscapes and portraits and every sort of combination of the two.
“I only wish I could have been in town for the openings,” Rushkin went on, “but my schedule being what it was, I was lucky to be able to fly in and see the shows at all.”
Izzy wanted to ask why he hadn’t stopped by the studio, but the question made her feel uneasy because she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer. She didn’t fear Rushkin simply for the sake of her numena or because of his temper. There was a darker undercurrent to her fear that she couldn’t quite pinpoint. Whenever she reached for it, it sidled away into the shadowed corners of her mind that she could never quite clear away.
“You’ve been busy,” she said instead, indicating the new paintings. “Indeed I have. And you?”
“I suppose. But not like this.”
She felt warmer now. Still holding her mug, she walked about the studio, admiring the new work. It never ceased to amaze her how, after all the years Rushkin had been painting—and especially when you considered the sheer quantity of superior work he’d produced—he never failed to find a fresh perspective, the outlook that other artists invariably missed. No matter how prosaic his subject matter might appear at an initial glance, he had a gift for instilling in it a universal relevance. His use of light was as astounding as ever, and looking at this new work, Izzy felt the inspiration for a dozen paintings come bubbling up inside her.
“I’d like to see some of your current projects,” Rushkin said. “Perhaps I could come by your studio one afternoon.”
“I’m kind of in between studios at the moment,” Izzy told him. “Well, when you get settled into a new place then.”
Izzy was surprised at the disappointment she felt when he didn’t try to convince her to come back and work here with him. Instead, he joined her as she walked about the studio and spoke about the various paintings and sketches, gossiping about the places and people they depicted, explaining particular problems he’d had with certain pieces and how he’d solved them. By the time she left Izzy realized that she’d learned more in the few hours she’d spent just listening to him than she had in all the time he’d been gone.
It was with real regret that she finally left the studio and trudged back home through the cold.
Izzy finally got herself a new studio at the beginning of April. It was no more than a large empty loft in a refurbished factory on Kelly Street, but she loved it. Up to that point she’d been depending on the kindness of others for studio space—initially Rushkin, then Professor Dapple—so this was the very first time she had a place of her own, chosen by herself, for herself. She paid the rent and utilities. She was entirely responsible for its upkeep. And because it was her own place—rather than Rushkin’s, which she knew she had to keep private even when none of his work was in it—this year she was able to participate in the annual spring tour of artists’ studios organized by the Newford School of Art, something she’d wanted to do from the first time she moved to the city. She didn’t have much available for sale, but everything she did have sold on the first day.
There were things she had to get used to with the new studio, beyond having to cover her expenses.
The hardest thing was losing touch with most of her numena. In the period between moving from the coach house to finally finding her own place, those whose paintings she still kept hadn’t liked to visit her in the apartment. It wasn’t private enough for their tastes. They came less and less often until, by the time she moved into her Kelly Street studio, her only regular visitors were Annie Nin and Rothwindle.
Rosalind and Cosette still came by whenever they were in town, but that wasn’t all that often. The rest of her
