20 JUDGEMENT
And now it is time to pause, reflect and critically evaluate. If Justice represents the process of the Law, Judgement represents the decision it arrives at. It is also, metaphysically, the resolution of the Wheel and decides the reward you receive for the karma you have accrued. When "the dead" come back to life at the sound of the angel's trumpet… well, none of your past thoughts and deeds are ever past and dead. This is where they stand up to either defend or prosecute you in court.
Gillian Lansbury sighed and tried hard to conceal her disappointment. She looked down again at the simple sticker saying only REJECTED which appeared again and again on the back of all her canvasses. It would be a long walk back to the digs she shared with Danni, with an armload of paintings, and nothing to show for it.
She sighed again. Maybe watercolours really were out of fashion this year. But then, even her oil paintings had been rejected. It was depressing. For the second year in a row the judges at the Royal Art Museum Annual Exhibition had passed over her work, implicitly rating it as no better than that of the Ankh-Morpork Fine Arts Appreciation Society, despite the fact she had three years at the Art College behind her and they were just a bunch of amateurs who gathered in an upstairs room once a week to gaze on a naked model. Some of them must have remembered to sharpen pencils or put paint on their brushes, though, or they wouldn't be trying to get their work into the Exhibition.
She looked around her. Obviously with ten times more hopefuls than there was gallery space, the judges had to be brutal in their decision making. But it still felt so unfair, all the same.
She gathered her works together, feeling thankful at least that she'd had the sense to make them portable, with nothing of Koom Valley proportions. Walking out past the security trolls hired to deter protests against the artistic sensibilities of the judging committee, her heart sank.
It was raining.
And these were watercolours.
She wrapped them as best she could in her only coat, and stepped out into the drizzle, accepting this for a mere courtesy detail.
"Isn't it great, Gilly?" Danni Pouter said, as she poured two glasses of wine. "Both my sculptures are in and one's already been bought!"
Gillian sighed, accepting a glass. She and Daniellerina Pouter had been friends since arriving at the Art College together. She had spent five years marvelling at how Danni, a QAYL girl from good family, had lost her immaculate upper-class accent and developed a drawl and an argot of her own, largely street Morporkian punctuated with swearing and Widdershinist politics.
And while Gillian had stuck to old-style painting, Danni had been doing startlingly new things with the art of sculpture, ones that abandoned traditional dedication to form and composition and anatomy. And what made it galling was that Danni's stuff sold, largely to people who were either entranced or appalled at her usual angry-Lipzwiger approach to life. Very few people wanted a Lansbury watercolour, and they tended to be older ladies looking for something special for the living room wall. Her paintings sold sporadically and for less than $AM30 each.
Meanwhile, Danni's sculpture A Portrait Of William De Worde And The "Free Press" (a large iron spike on a plinth, with parchments stuck on it, variably headed "The Truth", "Justice", "Principles", "Ethics", et c) had sold for $AM 2,500. And it wasn't the only one.
Danni paused and set her elation to one side.
"Oh shit, I'm so sorry, Gilly!" she exclaimed. "Those reactionary fascist bastards turned you down again, didn't they?"
Gillian nodded. Not that reactionary or Fascist if they accept the cr.. some of the novel and innovative statuary Danni turns out, she thought. And being Shown at the annual exhibition isn't just artistic credibility, it's a meal ticket for a year. The prices on your work shoot right up.
"It happens. There's only so much space. I'm going to try the Salon des Refusées tomorrow and if that fails…"
Danni, despite her look of permanent bulldog-eating-a-nettle-sideways and her abrupt manner, was not an unkind woman to a friend.
"You mean you really will do it? You're my friend, Gilly. I don't mind keeping you until you get established, you know that!"
"You've been keeping me for two years, Danni. Ever since we graduated and shared the rent on a studio. You bring in ten or twenty times more than I do and you've been really generous, you really have, and don't think I'm ungrateful. But I've got to get out there and succeed on my own, if only for my self-respect!"
Regard Gillian Lansbury. She is twenty-three years old. Her clothes are bright and she wears a headscarf nonchalantly tied at the back and trailing two long coloured ribbons. Her blonde hair is tied back underneath the scarf but comes leaping out behind. She wears huge-lensed round glasses and equally enormous hoop earrings, with clashing bangles on her wrists and, whenever she can get away with it, on her ankles. Her clothing and demeanour screams "bohemian" at the world. She once tried Quirmoise cigarettes because they fitted the image. The subsequent fit of coughing decided her that nobody could be that Bohemian.
Daniellarina Pouter, the daughter of an eminent artist whose paintings hang in profusion about the City, was dressed in her usual ragged and paint-splattered dungarees over a man's workshirt. Her hair is cropped short, her feet are bare, and while her square face reverts to "angry frown" when it can, she is not unattractive in a certain light. She poured more wine.
"So you'll be going, then? I understand. It's a steady job, I suppose, and it gives you time to do your own thing and maybe refine your style. And you're always welcome here! But Gilly, take my advice and branch out a bit. Be adventurous! All that crap about proportion and anatomy and scale and classical ratios is so… Century of the Woodlouse! There's no call for it in modern expressionist art, not any more. It's outmoded! Part of patriarchal repression expressed via the visual and tactile media…"
Gillian had heard her friend go on like this many times before. She let her mind slip away and sipped her wine…
Müning, Überwald. Frau G. Gefaligheit's Chalet Academy For Young Girls of Breeding. Six months later.
The new Art Mistress moved among her class of young girls of breeding, praising here, offering guarded criticism there, taking a brush and showing a slow learner how to hold and apply it to get the desired effect, and feeling bored out of her wits.
The first two or three months in the finishing school in the mountains hadn't been too bad, and the view at first had been spectacular. Then it had become dull. Dull, dull, dull. Especially since art teaching revolved around painting, the school having no budget or inclination for anything so proletarian as pottery or as unfeminine as sculpture.
And painting revolved around portraits ( drawing and painting each other) still lifes (such fruit and flowers as were available in Überwald in winter) and landscapes (such landscapes as Überwald had to offer in winter(1)).
Frau Gefaligheit had forbidden abstracts as too avant-garde and genteely sneered at any mention of the Ankh-Morporkian demon-prodigy Daniellarina Pouter, both in the local SudÜberwaldeanZeitung and in those copies of the Ankh-Morpork Times that made it this far out. Apparently Danni was going from strength to strength and was now a wealthy young artist, and a Young Klatchian in support of the avant-garde. Gillian had not mentioned to the Headmistress that she was an old friend of Danni's. She thought this was just as well.
Moving through her pupils – titled girls together with daughters of the rich who, after basic education elsewhere, were marking time here having their genteel skills rounded out for marriage– Gillian noted her particular classroom horror, Elsa, Die Gnadige Jungfrau von Turm und Hachnes, was idly sucking the bristles of her brush to raise a good point. It was one of her many bad points, and Gillian was tired of trying to educate her out of it. Let the damn girl suck her brush. She had the Junkers mentality(2) and Gillian felt, as a mere Miss, she was just another Landser to be slighted and belittled. Gillian had never been more in agreement with Danni's sentiments about oppression of the proletariat, even though neither she nor Danni had been proletariat in their lives.
It was much later that day when the emergency happened. Gillian was getting ready for bed, having checked that the shutters were firmly closed and the aesofetida and garlic paste had been applied to all windows and doorframes.(3)
She checked the garlic, lemongrass and asoefetida pot-pourii was fresh and left it at her bedside, filled the gardener's spray-mister with holy water and checked the nozzle setting was just so, adjusted the holy symbols of choice she was wearing at her neck – four, representing the Disc's principal faiths - and went to check on the girls' dorm she, as junior teacher, was responsible for.
Here she found consternation, and the young Elsa Turm und Hachnes rolling on the floor in painful fits while the other girls milled around her in a shrieking confused mass. Gillian was the one who in her generation had been ritually picked out as the serious one, the mature one, the one who could handle any emergencies and crises. She had thought this wholly unfair, but had realised some destinies are thrust on serious-looking girls who wear glasses whether they want them or not. She'd certainly spent a lot of time extracting Danni Pouter from fights and steering her home when she'd drunk far too much.
A girl doubled up in fits and suffering painful stomach contractions was easy by comparison…
Re-establishing order over some very hysterical girls and sending the sanest one to find the school nurse, she tended to her patient, noting that whatever it was, it was definitely affecting the stomach and bowels. The haughty Elsa might be a bit less haughty and more humble when she was over this…
And then she was moved on a stretcher to the school san, with an elderly porter who would be of no interest at all to vampires roused from his bed, and sent to raise Müning's doctor.
"And be sure it's a human doctor! We're inviting him in, remember!" the Headmistress shouted into the night.
Doktor Rauss-Elysium was definite in his diagnosis.
"Not food poisoning, liebe Frau. Not unless the arsenic was introduced into her food. If so, why is she the only one?"
"Assassins?" gasped the old Headmistress. "I hear her family may be subject to contract."
"If so, dear lady, you will be sure to get the school fees in advance." the Doktor said, drily. "Now if you will excuse me. There is a bed I would like to sleep in."
Gillian frowned. A suspicion was dawning at the back of her mind…
Elsa von Turn und Hachnes recovered. Meanwhile, Gillian Lansbury had made a discovery that would affect the whole course of her life.
In earlier ages, artists had had to make all their own paints from scratch. This had required almost an Alchemist-level understanding of raw materials available to make colours and fix them to the surface being painted. Gillian and Danni had been among one of the first generations of artists to be able to walk into an art supplies store and buy their paints in tubes off-the-peg. Therefore, Art College teaching in the manufacture of the paint they used had been cursory, almost non-existent.
But she found what she wanted by piecing together material from the Great Artists' journals and working notes, together with access to geological and mineralogical dictionaries and glossaries, together with an Alchemy primer.
Most white paints, whether oil or watercolour, were deadly poisonous. Lead dioxide made a very good white, as did certain arsenic compounds. Agatean White oil paint used arsenic salts; Ivory White used lead. Gillian reflected on this.
But you'd better not suck the brush to get a good point on the bristles.
An idea was beginning to form in the depths of her sensible soul. She was tired of being poor, of working for five dollars a week plus board for being in call twenty-four and eight. She felt jealous of her old friend Danni for breaking into the big time as an artist. Rebellion stirred in Gillian Lansbury's soul. And it had been her employer's suddenly querulous and fitful use of the word "Assassin" that had put it there. At present it was just an idea. But she now knew where to do the necessary research.
She bent to her books again and reached for a pen.
Six months later, Gillian had left the School and was now a private tutor in art. She took classes, both groups and individuals, and for ninety per cent of the time was nothing more than a private teacher.
Other assignments were mentioned or hinted art late at night, and this was where her special paintbox came out.
Gillian had worked hard, after the incident at the finishing school had opened her eyes to a different possibility, and she was now as skilled in sourcing ingredients and blending her own paints as any Old Master.
Agatean White, Ubu Yellow, Cadmium Orange, Cobalt Blue, Cyanic Green, Cinnabar Red, and many others, all took pride of place as tools of a darker trade. One where she actively encouraged the client to suck his or her brush to a point.
It was easier if the client were genuinely loathsome or disgusting or had done some evil or heartless thing. Had she but known it, she was following in the same footsteps as the so-called Marriage Guidance Counsellors, lady Assassins who had made a living from inhuming wife-beaters and child-abusers.
She was following them in every way applicable.
She moved around a lot so as not to arouse Watch attention. The first time it happened, a distraught art teacher standing shocked by the corpse of a pupil who had had a heart attack during the lesson was merely happenstance.
On one occasion she varied it by painting a portrait of a particularly repulsive client, using paints which as they dried over two or three days would release noxious gases into his study where the painting hung behind his desk. By then she was long gone, legitimately teaching art to pupils elsewhere.
And finally she returned to Ankh-Morpork, six inhumations later and somewhat more materially comfortable, intending to hook up with Danni for a drink.
She got no further than Filigree Street, where a black-cloaked Assassin fell in step with her on either side.
"You have an appointment to see the Master." she was told.
Her paintbox had been courteously taken from her and had been thoroughly examined by the veteran poisoner, Mr Mericet.
"Every paint is a deadly poison, my Lord!" Mericet reported. "Even those colours hitherto thought harmless have been formulated as poisons. Such skill! Such style! Such…art!"
"And you can even paint with them." observed the retiring Art master, Mr Court. "I believe a problem is resolved."
Lord Downey smiled benignly at Gillian.
"You inhumed without Guild authorisation. You compounded the crime by receiving money for unlicenced killing. You even undercut the Guild on two of your contracts. You really leave me no choice, my dear young lady."
Downey passed over a sheet of paper.
"I am offering you the contract of Guild School Art Mistress. It is anticipated that when Mr Court retires in two years time, you will be in place to succeed him."
Gillian signed without reading the document. She was relieved; she'd heard the Guild could be a lot more emphatic with unlicenced Assassins.
Downey took back the signed contract.
He smiled benignly at her.
"Of course, all this is contingent on your passing the Mature Students Selection Course and qualifying as a full Assassin(4)." He remarked. "Which you have just signed up for. Don't look so concerned, miss Lansbury, the pass rate last time was seventy per cent. And this School needs an Art teacher!"
Gillian sighed. She heard out the rest in a daze – you will be found a room here in the Guild, you are not to leave the premises unescorted, the City Watch are aware of you and may arrest, however there is a very good Art section in the Black Library, should it interest you. Readers' tickets will of course be issued.
Things were looking up…
(1) The school got through a lot of white paint. Any lingering awe of Überwaldean landscapes had ebbed out of Gillian on viewing the umpteenth inexpertly applied snowscape presented by a pupil.
(2) Apparently the Junkers Mentality involves dumping large and injurious amounts of unpleasant things over the heads of üntermensch and peasant landser from a great height – just because you can.
(3) You're running a finishing school. In Überwald. A place where up to eighty young girls of ages eighteen-to-twenty will be studying and living and who can be relied upon to float about at nights in underwired nightdresses. And you ask why anti-vampire precautions are necessary? Friend, you are running a vampire magnet.
(4) For details of the Mature Students' Course, see my story The Graduation Class.