“Perhaps he guessed. Some writers are very good at that, I hear.”
“Perhaps he guessed Van Dyck liked his eggs poached in cream and sprinkled with nutmeg? Perhaps he guessed Van Dyck entertained his closest friends with a portrait of Lord Harwich painted with horns and a snout?” Mertons lowered his voice to a whisper. “Perhaps he guessed Van Dyck needed a brisk paddle to ensure the structural integrity of his ‘monument to Cupid’?”
“Oh dear.”
“And it’s worse than that.”
“I’d rather not hear.”
“Stratford gave himself carte blanche to fil the rest of the book with whatever lies he wanted. He cal s it a
‘fictography.’ Do you see? A fictional biography. An abomination, if you ask me. Why can’t writers stick to the truth?” Mertons returned his gaze to his ever-present clipboard. As tal as a boat pole and nearly as thin, with a crown as hairless as a baby’s, he looked about as much like an apprentice painter in 1673 as he did a centurion at the Battle of Thermopylae. Nonetheless that was the cover the Guild had instructed Peter to provide him.
“And why does Stratford come to me?”
Mertons shuffled his feet. “We don’t know.”
“Don’t know?” Peter cultivated surprise. This was his favorite part of the story since the answer could not be found on the clipboard or anywhere else.
“No. Perhaps he’s broken the security algorithm.
Perhaps he’s found a tube we’re not aware of. Al we know is this biography—pardon me, fictography—wil change the way thousands of people feel about Van Dyck. So our job is to stop Stratford from writing that book. The book is nothing but lies.”
“Nothing but lies? You mean Van Dyck didn’t pass around a portrait of Lord Harwich?” Peter had seen it himself once. He declined to cal to mind the other, more picturesque details of his col eague’s personal life.
Mertons flushed. “There’s a difference between tel ing a story and appealing to the prurient interest of readers.
Stratford takes the story, embel ishes it, and with The Girl with a Coral Earring makes the entire seventeenth-century art world seem like some sort of giant sultan’s tent in which artists run, satyrlike, over pil owed beds, chasing wil ing and unwil ing women to their reputational doom.”
Peter considered the artists he had known, including himself before the settling influence of Ursula, and found the description to be more accurate than not.
“I see you are amused.” Mertons crossed his arms. “I wonder if you would feel the same if the subject of the biography was you.”
biography was you.”
Peter stiffened. He hated to admit it, but Mertons was right. Seeing his own life splashed across the pages, stripped bare for the amusement of a reading public who would not care what parts were true, or regretted, so long as the salacious bits of intrigue kept them turning pages, would be more than he could bear. There was a special place in hel for a writer like Stratford, who picked the bones of the dead to further his own career, and Peter supposed he should be glad he’d have a hand in bringing the blackguard down. But the thought brought him little joy, trapped as he was in one of the most unhappy times of his former life. He wished another artist in the Afterlife had been given the unusual opportunity. He glanced again at the clock. “And here, in this studio, in this particular time, is the only—what do you cal it?—point of intersection?”
“No, there are a number of intersections in Van Dyck’s life as wel , but the Guild is just about to place him in his new life, and, as you know, we cannot retrieve him once that has been done. You, being between lives, are available. Though perhaps when you said ‘in this particular time’ you were referring to this time in your own life?”
Mertons unclipped the mass of paper in
