Varnish

Barnaby is outside your door at seven o'clock exactly, leaning against a black 1970s Mercedes so polished you can see the moon in it.

"Good evening," he says. "Madam informs me that she texted you. Twice. With correct punctuation."

"She did." You heave your conservation kit into the trunk. "You told me she didn't text."

"I told you she does not text. She did text. I'm as shocked as you are." He opens the back door for you. "Kindly don't encourage her. She'll start using exclamation points and I'll have to retire."

You think about the messages on your phone. The conversation from last night that you read four more times this morning instead of sleeping. You still don't know exactly what you are to her. You know you're in the car.

Hattie, who watched all of this from the studio window with her arms folded, yells, "Text me every half hour!" as you pull away.

The studio on the third floor of Blackwood House was a ballroom once. You can tell by the sprung wood floor and the plaster garlands along the ceiling. Now the chandeliers are gone, the walls are bare, and the north side of the roof has been replaced by a long, slanting skylight full of stars. Someone has set up two worktables, an adjustable easel, a magnifier lamp, a fume extractor, a UV lamp, and a full rack of solvents that makes your heart beat faster for completely professional reasons.

"I had Barnaby order from your supplier's catalog," Vesna says, from the doorway. "Everything with a five-star review."

"These are museum-grade." You pick up a jar of ultra-fine microcrystalline wax like it's a diamond. "Some of this is backordered for months."

"I asked nicely, Ava."

"How nicely?"

"Barnaby asked nicely," she amends. "I paid."

She's in black again, a silk shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, her hair loose. She looks like she should be on the cover of a magazine that costs fifteen dollars. You turn around and look at the portrait very hard.

"I'll start with a solubility test," you say. "Small swabs, corners only, to find what takes the varnish off without touching the paint. It's slow."

"I've been waiting three centuries. I can stand a slow evening."

"And I need you to sit."

She raises one black eyebrow.

"For the eyes," you explain. "Eventually. I'll need to study your face. In the same light, from the same angle. I might as well start learning it now."

Something flickers across her face. Then she crosses the room and sits in the chair you've placed by the window, folds her hands in her lap, and turns her head exactly the way the woman in the portrait turns hers. She's done this before. Three hundred years ago, she sat like this for someone.

You pick up a cotton swab and a vial of solvent. You start on the lower right corner.

It's quiet for a long time except for the soft scrub of cotton on varnish and the faraway sound of a trolley tour on Bull Street. The swab comes away amber. Under it, a coin-sized patch of red silk glows like it was painted yesterday.

"Oh," you whisper.

"What?"

"The color. Under all that yellow. It's still alive." You roll a fresh swab. "Whoever painted this was extraordinary."

Vesna doesn't answer. When you glance up, she's looking at the window.

"Tell me something," she says eventually. "About you. I know your work. I don't know why a conservator with your training is cleaning seascapes for dentists in a carriage house."

You keep your eyes on the canvas. "I was at a museum in New York. Big one. I spent eight months on a Flemish altarpiece and found a signature everyone had missed. A woman's name. It was going to be my paper."

"And?"

"And my girlfriend at the time was the senior conservator on the project. She presented it at a conference in Vienna. Without my name on it." You shrug, which is hard to do while holding a swab perfectly steady. "We'd been together three years. I found out from the program."

The room goes very quiet.

"What was her name?" Vesna asks, in a tone of voice that makes you suspect she isn't asking out of curiosity.

You laugh, startled. "I'm not telling you that."

"Pity." She settles back. "I'm told Vienna is lovely this time of year."

"Are you threatening my ex?"

"I'm discussing travel." Her mouth curves. It's the first real smile you've seen on her, and it's devastating, a little crooked, completely unfair. "Go on. You left."

"I left. Came home to Savannah. Hattie and I opened Sweet Bay. It was supposed to be temporary." You dip a new swab. "It's been two years."

"She was a fool, Ava," Vesna says. "Your girlfriend. The one with no name."

You don't know what to say to that, so you say, "Your turn. Tell me something about you."

She considers. "I can't taste anything."

You look up.

"Food. Wine. It went first. Some time around the French Revolution, I think." She says it lightly, like she's talking about a lost umbrella. "I remember things. Peaches in July in my mother's garden in Ragusa. Bread on the Rialto. I remember that they were wonderful. I can't remember the wonderful."

"Is that because of this?" You nod at the canvas. "Because it's unfinished?"

Her eyes meet yours. Gray, steady, giving nothing away. "Keep working, restorer."

By two in the morning you've tested every corner and you know your solvent. You've cleaned a strip along the bottom edge. And you've reached the overpaint.

It's ugly work. Thick brown-green paint laid on with a heavy hand across most of the left side of the canvas, from the woman's elbow to the window. It's later than the original. The cracks don't match, and the binding medium feels different under your magnifier. Nineteenth century, maybe.

"Someone tried to fix this before," you say.

"In Paris. 1893." Vesna's voice has gone very flat. "It didn't go well."

"I can see that. They didn't fix the damage. They covered it." You frown. "Or covered something."

You switch off the overhead lights. Vesna doesn't move, but you feel her attention sharpen in the dark. You turn on the UV lamp and sweep it slowly over the canvas.

Under ultraviolet, old varnish glows a sickly green. Retouching and overpaint go dark, flat purple-black, like ink. You see the outline of the 1893 work clearly now, a dark shape over the left side.

And through it, faintly, because the overpaint is thin in one place where it's worn, you see the ghost of something underneath. Lines. Underdrawing. A shape.

You lean in with the magnifier.

It's a hand.

Not the woman's hand. A second hand, reaching in from the edge of the frame. Slender fingers lie across the back of Vesna's unfinished hand, holding it. On the third finger is a ring, sketched in two quick strokes. And just below it, in tiny, careful letters worked into the pattern of the brocade, two initials.

C.Z.

Behind you, in the dark, you hear Vesna Blackwood stand up.