Jack had moved a few feet along from Benjamin’s portrait and was now working on the last empty stretch of wall. The pictures around the room followed a rough sequence of events leading from Jack’s time in London before Hubbard had made him a vampire all the way to the present day. The easels in the window were the starting point for Jack’s troubling image cycle.
Matthew examined them. Each held what artists called a study—a single element of a larger scene that helped them to understand particular problems of composition or perspective. The first was a drawing of a man’s hand, skin cracked and coarsened through poverty and manual labor. The image of a cruel mouth with missing teeth occupied another easel. The third showed the crisscrossing laces on a man’s breeches, along with a finger hooked and ready to pull them free. The last was of a knife, pressing against a boy’s prominent hip bone until the tip slid into the skin.
Matthew put the solitary images together in his mind—hand, mouth, breeches, knife—while the St. Matthew Passion thundered in the background. He swore at the abusive scene that instantly sprang to mind.
“One of Jack’s earliest memories,” Hubbard said.
Matthew was reminded of his first encounter with Jack, when he would have taken the boy’s ear if not for Diana’s intervention. He had been yet another creature to offer Jack violence instead of compassion.
“If not for his art and music, Jack would have destroyed himself. We have often thanked God for Philippe’s gift.” Andrew gestured toward the cello propped up in the corner.
Matthew had recognized the instrument’s distinctive scroll the moment he clapped eyes on it. He and Signor Montagnana, the instrument’s Venetian maker, had dubbed the cello “the Duchess of Marlborough” for its generous, yet still elegant, curves. Matthew had learned to play on Duchess back when lutes fell out of favor and were replaced by violins, violas, and cellos. Duchess had mysteriously disappeared while he was in New Orleans disciplining Marcus’s brood of children. When Matthew returned, he had asked Philippe what had happened to the instrument. His father had shrugged and muttered something about Napoleon and the English that had made no sense at all.
“Does Jack always listen to Bach when he draws?” Matthew murmured.
“He prefers Beethoven. Jack started listening to Bach after . . . you know.” Hubbard’s mouth twisted.
“Perhaps his drawings can help us find Benjamin,” Gallowglass said.
Matthew’s eyes darted over the many faces and places that might provide vital clues.
“Chris already took pictures,” Gallowglass assured him.
“And a video,” Chris added, “once he got to . . . er, him.” Chris, too, avoided saying Benjamin’s name and simply waved to where Jack was still sketching and crooning something under his breath.
Matthew held his hand up for silence.
“‘All the king’s horses and all the king’s men / Couldn’t put Jack back together again.’” He shuddered and dropped what little remained of his pencil. Andrew handed him a replacement, and Jack began another detailed study of a male hand, this one reaching out in a gesture of entreaty.
“Thanks be to God. He’s nearing the end of his frenzy.” Some of the tension in Hubbard’s shoulders dissipated. “Soon Jack will be back in his right mind.”
Wanting to take advantage of the moment, Matthew moved silently to the cello. He gripped it by the neck and picked the bow off the floor where Jack had carelessly dropped it.
Matthew sat on the edge of a wooden chair, holding his ear near the instrument while he plucked and worked the bow over the strings, still able to hear the cello’s round tones over the Bach that blared from the speakers on a nearby bookcase.
“Shut that noise off,” he told Gallowglass, making a final adjustment to the tuning pegs before he began to play. For a few measures, the cello’s music clashed with the choir and orchestra. Then Bach’s great choral work fell silent. Into the void, Matthew poured music that was an intermediary step between the histrionic strains of the Passion and something that he hoped would help Jack regain his emotional bearing.
Matthew had chosen the piece carefully: the Lacrimosa from Johann Christian Bach’s Requiem. Even so, Jack startled at the change in musical accompaniment, his hand stilling against the wall. As the music washed through him, his breathing became slower and more regular. When he resumed sketching, it was to draw the outlines of Westminster Abbey instead of another creature in pain.
While he played, Matthew bent his head in supplication. Had a choir been present, as the composer intended, they would have been singing the Latin mass for the dead. Since he was alone, Matthew made the cello’s mournful tones imitate the absent human voices.
Lacrimosa dies illa, Matthew’s cello sang. “Tearful will be that day, / On which from the ash arises / The guilty man who is to be judged.”
Spare him therefore, God, Matthew prayed as he played the next line of music, putting his faith and anguish into every stroke of the bow.
When he reached the end of the Lacrimosa, Matthew took up the strains of Beethoven’s Cello Sonata no. 1 in F Major. Beethoven had written the piece for piano as well as for cello, but Matthew hoped Jack was familiar enough with the music to fill in the missing notes.
The strokes of Jack’s charcoal pencil slowed further, becoming gentler with each passing measure. Matthew recognized the torch of the Statue of Liberty, the steeple of the Center Church in New Haven.
Jack’s temporary madness might be slowing to a close as he moved toward the present day, but Matthew knew he was not free of it yet.
One image was missing.
To help nudge Jack along, Matthew turned to one of his favorite pieces of music: Fauré’s inspiring, hopeful Requiem. Long before he’d met Diana, one of his great joys had been to go to New College and listen to the choir perform the piece. It was not until the strains of the last section, In Paradisum, that the image Matthew had been waiting for took shape under Jack’s hand. By that point Jack was sketching in time to the stately music, his body swaying to the cello’s peaceful song.
“May the ranks of angels receive you, and with Lazarus, / Once a poor man, may you have eternal rest.” Matthew knew these verses by heart, for they accompanied the corpse from church to grave—a place of peace that was too often denied to a creature like him. Matthew had sung these same words over Philippe’s body, wept through them when Hugh had died, punished himself with them when Eleanor and Celia had perished, and repeated them for fifteen centuries as he mourned Blanca and Lucas, his warmblooded wife and child.
Tonight, however, the familiar words led Jack—and Matthew with him—to a place of second chances. Matthew watched, riveted, as Jack brought Diana’s familiar, lovely face to life against the wall’s creamy surface. Her eyes were wide and full of joy, her lips parted in astonishment and lifting into the beginning of a smile. Matthew had missed the precious moments when Diana first recognized Jack. He witnessed them now.