Chapter Text
+1. Limnerslease
(London, 1900 AD)
The latter half of the nineteenth century is a difficult time for Aziraphale.
Leonardo da Vinci’s prediction has come to pass, but more so than even he might have expected, for every third painter now tries to paint more than their eyes can see. Aziraphale has seen enough shifts in art and literature to know that sooner or later, these Symbolist upheavals will overturn the taste for academic realism — and that it will happen first among the artists themselves.
But Symbolism itself feels short-lived, almost a herald. The Impressionist wildmen already speak of it as dated. Before that happens, the angel needs to find a Symbolist visionary, one who paints that way because something in them is forced to.
On his quest for an artist on whom to bestow Inspiration, Aziraphale sees pictures of demons that are humanoid clouds with wings of dust; demons that rise from the earth like genies, trailing tainted glory; demons that brood like warriors, haloed in Hellfire. One fiend hovers naked before the Christ on the Mountaintop, reclining on the breeze with nothing but long hair to cover its modesty, a pose that even Crowley would surely consider de trop. On the upside, the Medieval tendency to give all demons bat-wings has shifted to a trend for feathers, but even so, no painting does justice to a pair of wings whose owner hasn’t been seen since 1862.
(This is the second reason Aziraphale is having a hard time of it. Somewhere, the angel blasphemously prays, Crowley is warm, and safe, and sleeping off their argument.)
But the angel is nothing if not determined, and by the time corks are popping to welcome the new century, he finds a candidate. Not a budding painter, but a veritable Pillar of the Establishment, his reputation not merely cemented but fossilised. Critics are obsequious, ambitious youngsters touch the hem of his robe, and like every born artist, he is consequently bored out of his skull.
………………
On one of those grey-drizzle days that pass for October in London, Aziraphale stands beside the Pillar of the Establishment, a man whose white beard a magus might envy, beneath a loggia in Postman’s Park, a stone’s throw from St. Paul’s. The angel is running a low-grade miracle to keep the damp off their overcoats.
“They tell me I’m a national treasure,” complains the Pillar, whose real name is George Watts, “as if I’ll be glad to hear it. The English Michelangelo! What they mean is, one of the ancien regime. I suppose you know how old I am?”
Aziraphale, who never met Michelangelo, but once brushed shoulders with Louis Quatorze, shuffles his feet. Unlike Watts, he is unconscionably old — and artists can sense that, reflects the angel ruefully, through miracles painted an inch thick.
“I’m eighty-three years, three months, and eleven days,” says the artist. “I hate to admit it, Fell, but I may be a bad bargain. The money you’re offering would buy quicker hands, and younger eyes.”
“I’m quite aware of it,” replies Aziraphale. “But I beg you, don’t try to bad-bargain me. You dodge commissions left and right.”
The loggia is a strange edifice. From a distance, it’s a long wooden lean-to that might be mistaken for an arts-and-crafts bicycle shelter — but in intent, it’s a Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice. Celebrating ordinary people who lay down their lives for others is a George Watts hobby-horse; each Self-Sacrificing Hero is to have their own majolica plaque. But he misjudged public enthusiasm for his project, and at present there are only four plaques: three to men, and one to a woman.
“Yes, yes, I’m still fashionable, though Heaven knows why.” Watts grinds his walking-stick into the gravel. “The moth-eaten Symbolist lion, with my own room in the Tate. But once I snuff it — pffft! I won’t be cold before they’re sizing up the wall space and snubbing my brushwork.”
“Do you mind a great deal?”
Watts runs a cold eye over the memorials. “This is a fine spot for me to gripe about wall space. And I don’t rate my own brushwork highly.”
“Yet I sense that you remain ambitious, Mr. Watts. Every day you don’t advance your skills, you count as wasted. It irks you.”
A sardonic chuckle. “That’s the reason I can be sure I’m not dead. Might as well be, though, if I can’t bring myself to paint — and I warn you, I’m not easy to inspire. But the other half of your offer interests me. Go on and make your case.”
“I want a picture of something that can’t be painted. Something impossible. Something I have been warned may well be unpaintable.” Aziraphale looks at George Watts beseechingly.
Madonna blue, thinks the artist, with a start. This fellow’s eyes are Madonna blue. Actual Alpine gentian. Who on Earth has eyes like that? Besides, I swear they weren’t that shade five minutes ago — and I’ve a good memory for colours, even now.
“The unpaintable’s my business,” he answers slowly. “What did you have in mind, Fell? I’ll paint any subject but God.”
“I won’t ask you to paint God,” says Aziraphale. “Your humility becomes you.”
“Humility be damned; someone beat me to it. A friend’s son — the lad couldn’t have been more than eight. He heard us discussing the topic, and said that grown-ups were fools, and he’d draw God for us. He got the sharpest pencil he could, then drew round and round ‘til he cut a circle in the paper. I snapped it up for three shillings.”
The drizzle has stopped, and Aziraphale’s smile is like the sun peeping through a cloud.
“I imagine that masterpiece is not for sale.”
“I gaze on it every time someone calls me the English Michelangelo. Now, tell what you really want.”
Since he got his hands on the snuffbox portrait, Aziraphale has spent far too long thinking about the answer to this question. Miss Carriera’s miniature is a marvel, but it has shown Aziraphale the soundness of da Vinci’s advice. Crowley’s face and corporation are not who Crowley actually is. As an angel, Crowley’s core would have been his Purpose: the role he was created by God to perform, just as Aziraphale was created to Defend.
Heavenly orthodoxy states that every Fallen angel has voluntarily sworn themselves to the Purpose of Destruction. Aziraphale has an inkling that this isn’t always true.
But even if such a thing were possible, Aziraphale would not want a portrait of the angel who was torn asunder, and remade as Crowley. Yet patches of that angel’s Purpose survive in the the demon, Aziraphale is sure of it. It is that side of Crowley that he so badly needs to see.
George Watts looks at him expectantly.
“A galaxy, Sir,” admits Aziraphale at last. “I want you to paint me a galaxy — not the whole Universe, just a part of it — and a being capable of making such a thing. The restless energy they might have, and the determination. The sense that they are not God, that Creation is both an effort and an art — ”
“ — the sense that they might, just conceivably, fail.”
Aziraphale bows his head. “Intuition and brushwork are two different things, Mr. Watts, and you are are no inconsiderable artist.’
“Bah! Don’t flatter me. Let’s talk base details. You said that if I took your commission, then this folly of mine,” — Watts gestures at his Memorial — “would be maintained in perpetuity? Do I have your word on that?”
In truth, Aziraphale intends to protect Watts’ idiosyncratic project whether or not the artist agrees to paint for him. But Aziraphale hasn’t seen Crowley since that awful row in 1862, and he is lonely, and surely, a lie-by-omission can’t do much harm. With misgivings, the angel takes a card-case from his pocket. Not many people in history have been handed the business card of A. Z. Fell & Co. George Watts is number eight.
“I represent a very old firm, Sir. We may be dusty, but we endure.”
Watts tucks the card into his coat. “Then I accept your commission. Though I can’t guarantee the result.”
The painter holds out a gnarled hand, and the angel shakes it.
It’s not until George Watts has got back to his studio that he realises the arthritis that’s plagued him for twenty years has gone. And when he sleeps, his dreams are filled with stars.
………………
(A. Z. Fell & Co., London Remade, 2019 AD)
Two days after the world reboots itself, Aziraphale remembers his snuffbox.
It’s not a disaster, he tells himself, after checking every other box on the mirror-topped shelf where he keeps his collection. It just got sublimated along with everything else you were wearing, and you can’t expect even the Antichrist to put back every detail. Think of those marvellous books he gave you, you ungrateful angel. Think of how the world didn’t end.
Nevertheless, he hunts high and low in his bookshop, without result. He’s on his hands and knees under his computer desk when the bell over the door tinkles, and a pair of snakeskin boots impinge on his field of vision.
“Lost something?” inquires Crowley. “Anything I might help you find?”
There’s a strangeness to the demon’s voice — his bantering tone is mixed with something warier. Aziraphale backs out from under the desk, miracles the dust from his trousers, and puts on his best smile. The lost miniature doesn’t matter, really. Not when he has the original.
“Nothing vital, dear boy, it’s just that this old place is fearfully cluttered, and I’ve been meaning to do some spring cleaning for the last decade or so, and — ”
“Spring cleaning? Point one: it’s August. Point two: you were definitely looking for something.” The demon takes a deep breath. “And point three, I think I know where to find it.”
Crowley stoops to a shelf just above floor level, pulls out a copy of Mrs. Beeton, unhooks the pocket dimension he’s tucked behind it, and stands up with the snuffbox in one hand. Embarrassment rolls off the demon in waves…and without any obvious intent on his part, the secret compartment flies open, revealing a tiny copy of his own face.
There is an awkward silence.
“I swear on my Fall, angel, I didn’t search your things. This was floating in mid-air when I got back here — and it didn’t seem clever to leave it, in case Heaven finished me off but Hell didn’t get you. I mean, even Sandalphon might put two and two together if he saw this. And like I said, it was floating. As if something wanted me to find it.”
“Perhaps something did.”
“Are you sure that something wasn’t you? Because it seems you’ve been carrying around a picture of me, in secret, for over three hundred years. In Paris. During the Blitz. When you gave me the Holy Water. All that bloody time.”
There is an obvious implication to be drawn, but Crowley doesn’t come out with it. When he closes the box, the tiny click sounds loud.
“Of course I wasn’t always carrying it!” exclaims Aziraphale. “I’m not a total idiot! Besides, it might have got damaged! And. Well. It is possible that I have a tiny confession to make.”
“This isn’t the only picture you’ve had made of me, is it?”
Aziraphale shakes his head, mutely.
The demon processes this. “You’re right, you have got a confession to make. Who else did you ‘inspire’, angel? Gustave Doré? William Blake? That Russian weirdo who was obsessed with the Temptation of Christ? Because let me tell you, I wore considerably more clothes for that job.”
“This may be difficult to believe, but I haven’t been responsible for every depiction of you in history.”
“And now I don’t know whether to be relieved, or disappointed.”
Crowley puts the box into Aziraphale’s outstretched palm, and meshes their fingers together briefly. There are thousands of years of unsaid words in the gesture.
The angel swallows. “Crowley, could you take me out for a spin in the Bentley?”
“You always know the answer to that one. Where’re we off to?”
“I think it’s time to visit an old friend’s place in Surrey.”
………………
As the Bentley eats up the A3 like licorice, Aziraphale tells Crowley the whole saga. The huge Anatolian clay Serpent that started it all. His repeated run-ins with the cult of the snake-in-a-basket. His discovery of the Shadow of Velathri, and the effect it had on him. His strange desire to know and accept everything all that could be known about Crowley’s history, and the even stranger certainty that the desire was not, as he once feared, blasphemous — a belief that grew even stronger when Crowley arrived in Tadfield against all odds, cool as a gothic cucumber against a backdrop of flames.
The awkward business of Kilpeck church makes Crowley laugh like a drain, but Aziraphale’s failure to convince Leonardo da Vinci makes him swear.
“Bless it, angel, couldn’t you have used a little miraculous persuasssion. I bet he ssecretly sketched both of us, the sneaky sod. Now we’ll never know.”
“But if he had agreed,” says Aziraphale reasonably, “instead of talking me out of it, then I would not have sought the services of the renowned Miss Carriera. I might never have owned that snuff-box, you might never have found it, and the picture I really want you to see might never have been painted at all.”
When Crowley’s feelings run high, they express themselves via the accelerator, and he takes the road towards the North Downs so fast that the Bentley gets more airtime than befits a lady born the same year as Joan Collins.
“We don’t have to get there urgently!” protests Aziraphale, bracing himself against the roof of the car. “The painting isn’t going anywhere! You might not even like it!”
The car shoots past Guildford like a vintage bullet, heading for a place called Limnerslease.
………………
Limnerslease is the house where George Watts spent the latter part of his life. His wife named it in Old English: ‘Limner’, for a painter, and ‘lease’, for the act of setting something free: a captive, or a debtor, or a hawk. It’s a Victorian pastiche of an Elizabethan manor, complete with fishpond, orchard, and what looks like a barn but is really a gallery, built by Watts in case posterity had second thoughts about its English Michelangelo.
He’d not been wrong: dissing the dead lion had boosted the career of more than one critic, and ten years after his death, the Tate decided it could do with George Watts’ wall space. His unfashionable paintings ended up here, in this Surrey backwater.
The Bentley turns into the main gate and crunches its way up the drive. By the time it stops outside Limnerslease, the lady on gatehouse duty has rung through with exciting news: the legendary Mr. Fell is paying them a visit.
All that is known at Limnerslease about Mr. Fell is that he represents a sponsoring firm so discreet as to be practically nameless, and that for the past century or so, that firm has made regular donations to the Watts Foundation. Mr. Fell turns up to admire the paintings perhaps once every ten years. Mr. Fell is known to enjoy cream teas. Mr. Fell arrives by bus at ten to three, and he always visits alone.
But today is a day of revelations. Today, he has arrived in a car — and such a car! — but just before closing time. And he has brought along a date.
The other man is so much his polar opposite that the staff of Limnerslease conclude that this sharp, nervy fellow must either represent a rival firm, or be a staunch Minimalist whom Mr. Fell hopes to convert to the Symbolist cause. The Man of Mystery wear sunglasses indoors but even so, his eyes are obviously all for Mr. Fell.
Mr. Fell’s reputation for charm is well-deserved. He know everyone’s name (he asks after volunteers who retired ten years ago, or even twenty). Despite turning up at ten past five, just as most art-lovers are leaving, he pleads so prettily for time with the paintings in private that none of them have the heart to deny him. And never in living memory has he turned up with someone else; there’s no disguising that this is serious. As a final heavy hint, Mr. Fell mentions that it’s a truly beautiful afternoon out there. Everyone leaves the pair of them to it.
Suspended against sage-green walls, Watts’ paintings have chunky gilt frames, and chunkier titles: The Dweller in the Innermost, The All-Pervading, and After the Deluge, a pleasanter scene than anything either the demon or the angel remember of it. Crowley raises an eyebrow at three vast Eves — Tempted, Triumphant, and Repentant — that seem to have been painted not in oils, but in strawberry fondant. He slows before a picture where Death is shown not as a skeleton, but a woman with a baby, the new life for which she is clearing the way. He chuckles at a sculpture of a naked man riding a horse bareback.
“It’s called ‘Physical Energy’,” says Aziraphale, pleased that Crowley has found something to his fancy.
“That’s weird, ‘cos the plaque thingy says ‘A Farewell to Balls’.”
“Well, really! You miracle that back right now.”
But when they reach one particular painting, the demon stops in his tracks. Takes off his sunglasses. Folds them slowly.
“Well, here it is,” says Aziraphale nervously. “The Sower of the Systems. I like to think it does the subject justice.”
Crowley doesn’t speak; he only looks.
Unlike a lot of George Watts’ paintings, this one isn’t huge. The Sower of the Systems is crammed into a canvas no bigger than four feet by three. At first, it seems an abstract work, until the sweeps and folds resolve into a humanoid figure — wingless, robed, and of cosmic scope — in the process of building a galaxy. The face of the Sower is turned away, and all its personality is expressed in its physical attitude. The sweep of its hands bespeaks vast power, but the head is bowed in reverence. Mighty it may be, this creature trailing stars from its palms, but it is not Almighty. The sinews of the great angel strain with concentration, and red hair streams behind it like a nebula.
“Crowley?” says Aziraphale, after a long silence.
“This is me,” admits the demon at last, “or was me. More or less. He really went and did it.”
“Did he get it right?”
“I don’t remember everything, angel. But I always knew I’d made all that stuff, I just forgot what it felt like to make it. And now I remember, a little.” Crowley’s fingers twitch.
“Not too much?” Aziraphale’s face is etched with concern. This is indeed what he asked George Watts if he could depict: the gestures of creation on a cosmic scale. No face. No suggestion of a name. Only a hint that the Sower is a more imposing angel Aziraphale himself has ever been.
“Enough.”
The demon goes up close to the painting. Inspects the rough brushwork. Traces the trajectory of a newborn star.
“I made things, back then.” he admits. “Wonderful things. I was an artist once.”
“Once, dear boy? Why not again?”
“Demons aren’t supposed to create stuff. Corruption, yeah, but not creation. Hell made sure that didn’t happen. They made good and sure.”
“Did they punish you for trying?” asks Aziraphale carefully.
“Punish? Oh, they didn’t punish us,” says Crowley. Never, in all their long association, has he spoken about this consequence of his Fall. Not once.
Aziraphale thinks of his own trip to Hell, where hate sucked all originality from one’s thoughts, and it took fiendish determination to mend a ceiling leak, let alone make anything. Then he thinks of Crowley’s taste for mischief, and how his clothes always hide a flash of red — lining a collar, or in the seams of a glove. He thinks of how dark glasses might hide one’s eyes, but they also desaturate the world, dulling the urge to respond to its glory. Deliver us from temptation, thinks the angel, and is moved to his Heavenly core.
“They just made you believe, for thousands of years, that there was no point,” says Aziraphale at last. “But they never quite succeeded, did they?”
Crowley turns away from the Sower, and shrugs. “You tell me.”
“I’ll tell you nothing of the sort,” replies the stern angel. “You’re no longer Hell’s property. You can find out the answers yourself.”
And Aziraphale walks off determinedly in the direction of the gift shop, his ancient brogues echoing on the floor.
“Angel, what the devil are you up to — ?”
But the answer is obvious: Aziraphale is arming himself for combat, and his foe is Crowley’s doubt. Like every other gift shop in Britain, the one in Limnerslease sells heritage soap, coffee-table books, and the sort of toffee that comes with a tiny hammer, but it also carries art supplies. When Aziraphale heads with ghastly inevitability towards the felt-tip pens, Crowley can stand it no longer. He picks out a sketchpad, rejects the boxes of charcoal, lingers over the pastels, and settles on one 2B pencil, a sharpener, and a putty rubber. There is no-one behind the counter, but Aziraphale leaves scrupulously exact change beside the till.
As they leave the little gallery, the volunteers of the Watts Foundation suddenly wonder why they’re all standing outside, admiring the herbaceous borders, and file back into the house.
Look, it’s not as if Aziraphale snapped these nice people into trances, or anything like that; he merely suggested that it was a beautiful afternoon. And it is. It is a magnificent afternoon, tapering into an early August evening, and the gardens are indeed lovely, and here seems as good a place and time as any to see if there is further potential to the name of Limnerslease — the place where the artist is set free.
In the middle of the fishpond below the gallery is a chinoiserie duckhouse, inhabited by a motley flock of mallards, mandarins, and a couple of escapee Aylesburys. The half-timbered manor overlooks it, and so (not wanting to impinge on anyone’s privacy) it’s possible to see that Mr. Fell and his companion are now sitting side by side on a stone bench.
They are close enough together that Aziraphale’s head touches Crowley’s shoulder. Neither of them speak, and it’s possible that neither of them breathe. When they swapped semblances two days ago, it was an act of creative desperation. This is a less showy experiment, but almost as weighty in its implications.
Crowley rests an ankle on one knee to support his sketchbook. A newly-sharpened pencil is in his hand, and like any good draughtsman, he starts by laying out the anatomical framework of his subject. He frowns in pleasurable concentration, and the pencil moves in increasingly-confident sweeps.
Perhaps his first subject should be the angel, but there’s plenty of time for that when he’s had more practice (there is plenty of time for a great many things, when both of them have had a little more practice). Perhaps his first subject could be the Bentley, if the old girl wasn’t vain enough already. And if George Watts was making this story into a hefty Symbolist fable, then the demon’s first subject would surely be an apple tree.
But since this is a story about Crowley and Aziraphale, it’s inevitable that first art Crowley creates in thousands and thousands of years is a small pencil study of a duck.
………………
