The Butterfly Artist, Page 2

Lancelot?”

  Chadwick smiled and threw a pillow at Neville. “Anon tomorrow, foul jester!”

  “You see, Chad, that’s what I mean. Tomorrow! It’s just not done that way. Where’s the false coyness, the mechanically fluttering eyelids, the nuance, the wait? I mean – not even a word to her father, I suppose.”

  “Her father is deceased.”

  “Technically speaking, yes,” Whitaker smiled. “No, really, she’s not normal.”

  “I know.”

  “And neither are you, obviously. How did you ever survive childhood in Kinderzeit? Things being so strict there.”

  “That I don’t know.”

  “And you won’t know unless you do your commissioned paintings,” Neville stretched his back and arms. “You do have to pay for a ship back, eventually.”

  “Eventually,” Giles slapped his palms to his knees. “Yes, you’re right. Time to concentrate on the day’s work.”

  “Chad?”

  “Yes, Nev.”

  “That girl is nothing but trouble.”

  “We shall see.”

  Papilio Odius

  “Papilio Odius, my boy – the gold of this expedition,” Doctor George Chelsea squinted through the magnifying glass, careful not to mar the white skull marking on the black butterfly’s back as he pierced it through with a specimen pin. “You have no idea how much the metropolitan museums will pay to display this little creature.”

  “No sir,” Giles replied.

  “Well,” he adjusted the pin a bit, “with your share you will have paid for this trip three times over. It’s amazing what exotic items fetch on the northern markets.” He turned his balding head toward Giles. “That is, if you illustrate the things properly.”

  “I had best get to work, then, sir.”

  His hand shook. The lip of the ink jar tinkled with the tip of his quivering quill.

  “Chadwick!” The voice of Master Kerrick, his art instructor, echoed in the adolescent section of his brain.

  “What is this refuse? Can you not draw what is real? You are far too imaginative to ever be a proper artist.”

  He dipped the quill and poised it, dripping, over the parchment. Black ink splotches bled red to blood.

  “Life. Life, young sir Giles,” Doctor Siltree, family friend, artist, veterinary surgeon, held a straight razor over a bleeding sheep cadaver. “This is what is missing from your art, my boy. If only you could, you would, capture life! Then you will achieve the recognition you so crave.”

  The surgeon lowered the instrument, deftly lacerating tendon from bone with quick swipes of the blade.

  “But how? I’ve taken all the classes, I’ve learned from the best teachers, I’ve . . .”

  Siltree held his hand up to Giles’ mouth, almost magically causing the words to freeze at his lips.

  “Simply live, young Chadwick. Live.”

  The ink spread through the paper’s capillaries. He thought it formed a skull in the negative, a black bone box grinning lip-less as if charred in some conflagration, mocking his inability to coax realism from the borderland between the medium and material of ink and paper.

  To live – this is why he took Chelsea’s offer and left his homeland. To live.

  The ball dance mask joined the other skull, staring at him in mockery from it’s hook-home on the wall.

  The butterfly girl filled his vision.

  “Thursday . . . west of the river . . . leading to Anjema.”

  “To Anjema.”

  Beckwith Road

  “Is it safe?” He brought the white horse alongside her grey-spotted mare. The tropical sun reflected off his steed, causing him to squint from bright-blindness.

  “Perfectly,” she smiled.

  “But I have heard that there are wandering bands of miscreants out here, beyond the government’s reach. Ka-something.”

  “Kabilari.”

  “Yes, Kabilari. Shouldn’t we take precautions?”

  “Precautions? Perhaps I mistook you for an adventurer. Or are you just another trembling pansy intellectual, bold from the armchair, but fearful to leave your ivory tower?” She teased him, winking.

  “Ms. Beckwith, I am concerned for your safety.”

  “I will be fine, Mister Giles. This is my home, remember. If anyone should fear the unknown, it should be you. Besides, there are no Kabilari operating in this area. They are all to our west, well in the interior. They rarely come into these hills and then only to raid for food.”

  Giles had read as much from the literature provided him on his long flight to Ngome by airship: