by John Benson
The salesman held up the battered lantern. "Hard to tell when it was made, exactly," he said. "This model was patented in 1880, but they kept selling them right up until rural electrification in the 1920s."
"Doesn't look like it gives much light," Darcy said. Darcy was interested in light.
"Unless you were used to candles," the salesman said. "This was brighter, cleaner, lasted longer, and was more economical to operate."
An old thing. A Victorian thing. The shop was filled with junk antiques, inexpertly set out on shelves, overflowing into aisles. Someone who needed cleanliness and order would hate this place, but it allowed a feel for the old. "I would need to be able to operate it," Darcy said. "There is no lamp wick. There is no kerosene."
"Right this way," the salesman said. Darcy followed him deeper into the maze, and opened up her purse.
The goblet in the window spoke to her, the soft glow of silver, the subtlety of shape. This wasn't the kind of store she could afford, but maybe she could just go look. She entered and went up to it.
"You have a good eye," the salesman said.
Darcy knew that. She also knew that flattery was de rigueur for a place like this. "It doesn't look Victorian," she said. "This lets the shape tell the story without embellishment."
"One can only imagine," the salesman said. "Bunches of grapes and angels blowing trumpets and all sorts of clutter. This is quite a bit earlier. Georgian. George IV, actually. But a Victorian would have used it proudly, glad to show his family were well off that far back."
A thing glowing with possibilities. "I want to see it in lamplight," Darcy said.
The salesman smiled. "$2,100," he said. "Will that be cash or charge?"
Too much, of course. She knew that. "How much just to borrow it for a week? I want to sketch it. Take photographs."
"Or take it to get a second opinion on the appraisal," the salesman said. "Tell you what. Give me 10% down and take it. Bring it back in a week for a refund, or pay the balance at that time. Fair?"
Yes. She needed to see what the lamp did to it. How it might have looked to those who used it. "Fair," she said. She handed him her debit card and held her breath while it validated, because she knew she was getting close to empty. Time to see her accountant and get a refill.
The accountant looked somehow pained. "I was going to call you," he said. "It's better doing it this way. In person. You're done, Darcy. The money's gone."
There was this feeling of dizziness, of coming unmoored. "All gone?" she asked. She knew she had been getting low, but she put off the inevitable need for change.
"You live modestly," the accountant said. "You spent $22,000 last year. But sales of your art only netted $2,600. As your principal dwindled, you agreed to accept more risk. A decision which seemed sensible at the time, but then the market tanked. It's gone."
Oh. Yeah. It wasn't that she paid no attention to the news, but that she hadn't considered it might affect her. "I regret college," Darcy said. "All that time, all that money, and it was training more useful to an art critic than to a painter. Now I guess I'm screwed."
The accountant grinned at the indecorous choice of words, then gathered his professional demeanor around him. "Someone has offered to become your patron," he said. "Subsidize you so you can continue your career. But I hesitate to mention it. I got a sense of an immoral quid pro quo."
Immoral? What did that mean? Surely something less dangerous than robbing banks, something less destructive of her time than some mundane job. "Why don't you give me the number?" she asked. "I'll decide later if I want to make the call."
The accountant sighed and handed her a letter. "Good luck, Darcy," he said. "I've watched you grow up into a fine young woman. Your father would have been proud."
She couldn't help hearing the unsaid echo: up 'til now.
Raising the wick on the lamp made it brighter, but only to a point. After that it began to smoke and cloud the glass chimney. It took a while to get used to the dimness. There. Look how the color spectrum shifted toward yellow and moved with distance into browns and finally black. The silver goblet glowed as she had hoped it would, a spectacular reflection of the yellow wick on its curved surface surrounded by a wider more diffuse homage to the light. She moved it farther from the lamp, carefully considering the changes made as it retreated. A stray thought intruded on her consciousness. Rent was due in three days. She was going to have to make the call. And then she took her photographs, and began to sketch.
Everything looked so different in sunlight. Before electricity there'd been more difference between day and night. Darcy called the number, knowing she wasn't going to like this. Knowing she had very little choice. Each ring made her flinch. Part of her wanted to hang up. A larger part wanted the freedom to paint.
"Hello?"
She felt the tightness in her gut. "Hi. Darcy Hamilton. I'm told you're interested in helping me in some way."
"Yes." The voice was masculine, of course, self-assured, probably some business type. "I have made some discreet inquiries and found you are quite capable of living on $2,500 a month. I'm prepared to send you that amount, on which you will owe no tax. You will be able to concentrate on your art without much distraction."
Anything that sounds too good to be true, probably is. "There has to be a catch."
On the other end of the phone, the man laughed softly. "Alas," he said. "I'd like to be so generous, but I fear I am not. There are 168 hours in a week, Darcy. Most of them you will be free to do as you like. For one or perhaps two, you will be my slave."
"Prostitution," she said. The word just came out. She thought she had only thought it.
"Without the risks associated with life on the street," the man said. "Without the risks associated with multiple partners. You're a very pretty girl. You could always marry for money, I suppose. But then you'd have to put up with him a lot more than a couple of hours a week."
"I have to think," she said. "This is so sudden." Although she was running out of time.
"Are you tempted," he asked, "perhaps just a little?"
"Yes," she said. Ashamed, but it was true.
"I'll be in touch," he said.
But there was something else she needed to know. "Wait. Before you hang up, you said 'slave.' What would your slave expect?"
"She would be punished and raped," he said.
"Oh," she said. She sat there in the bright morning and trembled, because she feared what he might do. Feared that her need to paint was so strong that still she might say 'yes.'
She went around in a sort of daze. She thought she might be hungry, so she started eating an apple, but when it was half gone she found she liked the shape of it, half perfect and half ravaged, and sketched it instead. The doorbell rang. There was a truck parked out at the curb and a workman with a clipboard. A cigarette hung out of his mouth. She tried to stay upwind.
"Darcy Hamilton? Sign here."
She signed, curious. The man grunted and waved. Another came off the truck with a dolly and a fairly big cardboard box. A man in a DHL uniform walked up behind them. "Oh good," he said. "Someone to sign for this."
One of those cardboard delivery folders like for overnight mail. Darcy signed. The men with the box put it in her house and drove away. What was all this?
The DHL package had an easy-open strip. Inside was a rectangle of pink paper. A cashier's check made out to her for $2,500. She got a box cutter from her junk drawer to open the box. Inside was what could have been a piece of exercise equipment were it not for the obvious wrist and ankle restraints. It was an instrument of torture.
Fear gripped her. It was three feet high with metal A-frame legs and a curved padded leather top. The victim would bend across it, ankles strapped down on one side, wrists secured on the other, helpless and ready to be screwed or whipped. Or both. Oh, God. At least he was letting her know up front what she'd be in for. She went to get her car keys. She had to return her borrowed silver. On the way back she could drop by the bank and make a deposit. Or not. She could just tear up the check, pretend this never happened. Sure. And be evicted. Be on the street. She could decide while she drove.
The second call was harder than the first, even though all the decisions had been made. The fact she could just have taken his money and given him nothing taunted her, but that would only put things off by one mere month. And besides, rich and decisive people make dangerous enemies.
"Hello?"
"I deposited the check. I... I guess that means I am at your disposal."
"Good," he said. "I'll meet you at your place. Friday, eight o'clock."
Three days. Three days to fret and ponder and regret. "Yes, sir," she said.
Her master chuckled.
The upright piano glowed softly in the museum's subtle light. The case was mahogany embellished by inlaid marquetry of satinwood and rosewood. Great embellishers, those Victorians, though this worked better than most, managing to be more elegant than garish. She took in the pleasing bulk of it, the space it took up along the wall. Never content with understatement, they would have put things on top. The museum's little sign warned that it was being displayed mainly as an example of the cabinet maker's art, since the instrument within was sadly ordinary. How typically Victorian, to lavish the bulk of the money only where it would show. Look at that scroll work on the stubby feet. Darcy imagined how it would look in lamplight, and began to draw.
A knock at the door. She felt a pang of regret and fear and sexual excitement all at once. Here she was, clad only in a robe, waiting for some stranger who would do mean things to her. How very forward of her. How very naughty. She opened the door. The man was mid-forties, conservatively dressed. He had a bouquet of flowers in one hand, a cardboard mailing tube in the other. She felt suddenly quite shy. "Come in," she said. "I knew you would want me undressed, so I decided to make it easy for you." She took the bouquet and moved to the kitchen to find a vase.
He examined her living room. "I expected an artist's pad to either be very elegant or very avant-garde," he said. "This is oddly ordinary."
She came back in and put the vase of flowers on an end table. "If I'd bought pretty things my inheritance would have run out even sooner," Darcy said. "When I want to see nice things, I have museums and art galleries, and even antique shops."
His smile was perhaps a bit sardonic. "Ah yes. I understand. Sometimes it is enough to visit pretty things from time to time, one need not take them home. Shall we?"
She could feel that she was blushing. "I had to put it in my work room," she said. "Anywhere else I'd be tripping over it, or have to explain it or both. This way, please."
She led the way into her sanctum, where his mean apparatus waited patiently, covered by a sheet. "I like the idea," he said. "Even covered over the bulk of it will remind you as you work that you pay a price for the freedom to create. Who knows, it may even inspire you." He pulled open the cardboard tube. It opened with an almost musical thunk and spilled out a long thin cane with a curved handle. She looked at it as if confronting a viper.
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