The Painted Lady by Bárbara Metzger

friend sleep well, or does he perhaps take laudanum to help? Other opiates?”
    “Yes, no, no.” Kasey started drumming his fingers on the desk until the older man stared at his hand in silent censure. The duke put his hand in his pocket.
    “Is there any possibility anyone might be trying to poison your friend? Some slow-acting agents have been identified as altering their victims’ mental states before eventually causing death, you know.”
    “Great gods, no! Why would anyone want to kill me? That is, my friend.” He gave it up. “No, the only one who stands to profit from my death is my brother, and I swear the nodcock has nothing deeper in mind than a larger allowance. I doubt his mind goes any deeper, in fact. But I have already considered all the possibilities you’ve named, Sir Osgood, except for the poison, and none of them answer. I even entertained the notion of ghosts, goblins, and ghoulies, things from beyond. Pixies, poltergeists, ensorcelled princesses. Do you believe in such things?”
    “More importantly, do you believe in them?” Kasey shrugged. “A person’s spirit might travel elsewhere after they die, but I daresay I would just as soon wait to find out the truth of the matter. Is there a possibility that my vision is something like that?”
    Now Sir Osgood looked away. “ ‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ Anything is possible, Your Grace, but I myself have never seen angels dancing on the head of a pin, leprechauns guarding pots of gold, or nude women speaking from paintings.”
    “She was not entirely nude, recall.”
    “Ah, that makes a great deal of difference.”
    It did not, of course, make a tuppence worth of difference. Whether the woman wore battle armor or a bridal gown, she should not have spoken to him. “So what do you think it is?”
    The doctor thought it was the most interesting case to come his way in years, one that could restore his reputation and his wealth. Not that anyone would know he was treating a duke, of course, but the duke himself would stand as reference, if Bannister could cure him, naturally. “Barring evidence to the contrary,” he said now, “such as others seeing the same spectral appearance, or an edict from the Creator Himself, we must assume your vision is an hallucination, a mirage, if you will. Hunger and thirst and heat can make desert wanderers create whole villages around water holes, complete with camels and tents.”
    “But I was neither hungry nor thirsty nor overheated.”
    “No, but a wearied mind, a hungry soul, a parched spirit can have the same effect, you know.”
    “Yes, she said something of that nature.”
    “She? You have perhaps consulted a Gypsy, Your Grace? Now, that I cannot condone.”
    “No, the woman in the painting told me I was needful of something. She would not say what, of course, or you may rest assured I’d have found it by now, to end this confounded confusion.”
    “Let us forget whatever that ... apparition said to you. She does not exist, remember?”
    “That’s what I told myself, until she winked at me.”
    Sir Osgood held up his hand. “No, she did not. That is, the painting is no more than a painting. By repeating your hallucination, you give it more weight in your mind, such as a child might, imagining a bogey under the bed night after night until the infant is paralyzed with fear. There is nothing hiding under your bed, Your Grace, nothing at all.”
    No, his monster was hanging on an easel, but Kasey did not say so. He nodded his agreement.
    “There is no such thing as a kobold on canvas.”
    The duke had not, however, driven all the way to Maidstone to be told that his phantasm was a fake. He dashed well knew he was insane, or he wouldn’t have come in the first place! “Now what?”
    “Now,” said the good doctor, almost rubbing his hands around the money they’d soon be counting, “now we eliminate the