We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Estate, a speculative suspense novel by Sarah Jost about a woman who can enter works of art—publishing with Sourcebooks Landmark on November 19th.
Art historian Camille Leray has spent her career surrounding herself with fineries and selling pieces worth millions. But she harbors a secret: she has the ability to enter the world of the artworks, and she can take others with her. But tapping into history comes with great risks. And someone has been watching, someone who knows about her magic, and her mistakes…
After Camille ruins her career and reputation by misusing her powers, she vows to get her old life back. So when Maxime Foucault, an enigmatic aristocrat who owns a sprawling French estate, enlists her help in authenticating the statues of a mysterious artist, whose disappearance she has been trying to solve for years, she knows this could be her chance to turn her career around and get the man she’s always wanted. But something isn’t right about the Foucault family and the grand chateau they inhabit, and as Camille gets sucked into its walls, she finds a world of luxury and greed that causes her to risk losing herself, and everything she has ever known, forever.
Man being wrong, reason three: that sculpture, in the case—the one everybody is looking at—that’s not Night Swimming.
“Pretty, isn’t she?”
Rob is back at my side. He likes being crass about artworks, talking them down to provoke me. I always thought, in the ten years we worked together, that he didn’t mean it, but today there’s doubt. Things have started to feel cartoonish lately, as if I’ve been losing my grasp on reality. Perhaps Rob doesn’t really value art. Perhaps none of them truly appreciate it and I have been deluded all along.
I nod. “Oh, yes.”
“So, what is she telling you today? Hopefully that she can’t wait to be admired by the whole wide world.”
He pretends he is joking but there’s an edge of threat to his voice. Don’t do anything you might regret, Camille.
The biggest argument we had about the sculpture was just before the press release. I can still picture the scene; my frustration is still very much alive. Rob was sat very still at his desk, and I stood in front of him, increasingly tense at his refusal to listen to me. “Fuck me, Leray,” he said. “The provenance is perfect. You found the photo of it in Boisseau’s workshop, you found the note, by his own hand. Women swimming at night, C. Sorel, on loan. At the back of a soap order, in his archives—bloody hell, that was a masterstroke, and I wouldn’t have expected less from you.” He stopped, lowered his voice. “I’m about to press send, and our careers are about to go through the roof. And now you’re telling me it’s not right? Because of your hunch? You need to stop pissing about and accept that we’re both bloody geniuses about to roll in gold.”
I slammed my hands flat on the surface of his desk, mahogany polished to such a shine that I could see the reflection of my face in it. I hadn’t slept for days; shadows had been creeping under my eyes, dulling the gray of their irises. I didn’t like my body betraying my interiority, when I had made it my life’s work to cover it up. Reliable, professional, of sharp mind and even temper, read every single one of my references. But the statue was wrong, it was dangerous, and nobody was listening. I looked up at Rob, pressing down hard on the desk so my fingers wouldn’t tremble. “Something’s not right. I’m the leading expert in her work. We’ve worked together for a long time, Rob. You of all people should believe me.” That was an understatement, but I couldn’t tell him what had really happened when I tried to access the sculpture the first time. That I had been avoiding it and the toll it had taken, resisting its broken, cursed, and dangerous call ever since.
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The Estate
Rob looked at me with concern rather than anger, and that’s when I knew he had stopped taking me seriously. To be fair to him, all the evidence I had found in days and nights of frantic research had, in fact, pointed the attribution to Sorel. “You don’t know it, Leray, because it is Night Swimming. And that is the end of your ‘doubts,’ you hear me?” He banged his desk with every word he emphasized, like a military drum. As I left, he reached for a cloth to wipe off our fingerprints.
But I couldn’t let it go. I had worked with Constance’s art for years and it had never felt like that. This couldn’t possibly be Night Swimming, I couldn’t bear to see it displayed as such for everyone to see; if I didn’t do something, I was allowing them to betray her. For weeks, while things ran their course and the showcase and sale were being organized, my doubts made me spiral slowly into hell. I stopped eating, I stopped sleeping, I barely left the office, going over the facts again and again, trapped.
It all came to a head three days ago: when I came into the office, trying to plead with Rob once more to take the sculpture off the sale.
“I know you don’t believe me, but it’s—dangerous, Rob. We can’t have that out there. And she wouldn’t make anything like that.” To my shame, I started sobbing. I didn’t even know what day it was, when I last slept. All I could think of was what had happened that first time I tried to tap into the sculpture. Rob took one look at my crumpled shirt, my hair sticking out in all sorts of places, my clammy skin. He handled me calmly, almost kindly, which was worse. He said I had been working too hard and told me he was signing me off for a month on “gardening leave.” That he didn’t expect me to come to the showcase today. He meant that he forbid me to come. Like some of those terrible, awkward fakes we sometimes are asked to look at, I was best locked up inside a shameful cupboard.
“What’s the name of your friend again?” I flinched at his (accurate) use of friend, singular. “The baker?”
“Lowen.”
“Is it Cornwall that he lives in now? Why don’t you go and spend a few days with him, you know, get some sea air, blow the cobwebs away.”
I nodded, too stunned to really listen to him.
“And, Leray?” His voice caught me again as I slipped out of his office, feeling like I’d just been punched in the gut so hard that there soon would be nothing left of me for the internal bleeding. “You are good at this. Maybe a bit too good. Sometimes we can get cocky, and our hunches start to betray us.”
* * *
Rob doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he mentions my “hunch.” None of them have ever known what I can do, and why I appear to be so good at my job.
Fine art is more than the sum of its parts. It’s more than catalogues raisonnés, dates that fit the story, gallery archives, sales records, materials and pigments, even skills. Art comes to life in those flashes of human connection; it is a mini-portal from the viewer’s soul into an artist’s world. To connect with art, to allow it to speak to you deeply, is a spiritual, if not supernatural, experience.
And for me, it is even more so.
Since I was little, I have been able to enter the world of art. As if by magic. When I tap into a piece, I’m able to visit the world of the artist’s mind when they created it. For a little while, I can walk into their internal, to me very physical, landscape, made of the memories and feelings they poured into that specific piece. Their experiences play out for me on a loop, their emotions imbue everything I walk through. It is something I have come to realize only I can do. A glitch, a wonderful gift once bestowed upon an emotionally starved child.
My gift, and my way of working it, took me years to refine. The first time it happened was with a classmate’s drawing in preschool. We had all spent the afternoon drawing clumsy lines barely identifiable as objects from the real world. I wanted the girl next to me, Hannah, to be my friend. I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t know how to get her to notice me—I yearned for her and her friendship so much that, one afternoon, when everybody else was playing, I crept up to the desk and stared at her drawing. I think I intended to steal it, but as I stared at it, something else happened. It was like my own feelings, my straining to connect with her through what she had made, opened a door that sucked me in. It was mild then, unrefined, but I saw it in my mind’s eye: her mother’s golden hair and the warmth of her hand on Hannah’s head, her doting father, who had just repaired her Barbie, and her ginger cat, Tiffin. I saw that Hannah had intended to draw them as they ate the vanilla-strawberry birthday cake with sprinkles that her mother had made for her. This was so different from my own home life. I would have happily stayed in that loop all afternoon, but our teacher gently nudged me out of it. Go and play with the others, Camille; it’s no good staying by yourself all the time. Everybody needs friends. I blinked, then approached Hannah and told her how I loved ginger cats and strawberry cakes. We were friends for a whole week after that.
At the beginning I used my gift to do precisely this: try to connect with people, but also enrich my own life with their feelings. The humble, everyday drawings and paintings and bits of arts and crafts became a way for me to escape the drabness of my own family life, its loneliness. It brought color to my existence, taught me feelings my parents weren’t sharing: joy, compassion, love.
Until, age nine, I found fine art. Paintings and sculptures that artists had made, whose only function was to be beautiful, to sublimize an aspect of the human experience. That changed everything, opened up a new world whose sensations went much deeper than the love a grandma poured into some cinnamon biscuits in her grandchild’s lunch box. The hit was extraordinary—like nothing I had ever experienced. From that point on, I sought the company of the finest works of art. I strained to refine the use of my gift to explore the depths and vivid, detailed worlds of real artists, geniuses whose every breath spurred them to create. Whose raison d’être was to pick up a brush or dig their fingertips into clay, make their vivid internal worlds come to life. Those worlds were limitless, dizzying, addictive.
And it was all thanks to Maxime Foucault, who introduced me to it.
Now, in my midthirties, I have refined my gift, learned to be selective of what I use it for. I’ve been lucky to carve my way into a career in fine art, and my gift informs my work. My process is controlled, and I work through the steps methodically, like you would put on gloves, open a toolbox, and take the sharp implements out one by one.
First, I must attune to the sculpture. I prefer to be alone; I work best intensely, with no distractions. I start by spending time with the work, observing it, measuring it, starting from the outside until I know it well enough to pierce the surface, and everything else melts away.
As I attune to it, water rises and my real surroundings fade as well as the work itself. I find I’m standing at the edge of a pond at night, full of voices and echoes. When I dive in, I must swim to follow the light at the bottom, emerging into the artist’s reality, a symbolic upside-down land of the artist’s mind when they made it. It can be a beach, it can be a house, a field, or a dreamlike checkerboard. Over the years, I have managed to attune so precisely that I can conjure the artist, just the way you can will things to life in a lucid dream. Sometimes they say and do things that make part of their memories, the fabric of the piece, but I can’t respond. Everything in the landscape is feeling, meaning, and I inhabit it completely, as a witness. I absorb it, understand the piece and its significance to the artist’s life.
I call this world “Avalon,” no matter what form it takes, the name of the mythical island where King Arthur was taken to rest between life and death. That’s the name I chose when trying to make sense of my gift as a young teenager, when I realized this wasn’t normal. It took me a while to come to terms with the fact that nobody else seemed to have the same experience. All I could find was Stendhal syndrome, which has never been medically proven, but is rumored to come on when people are overly affected by artwork, leading to fainting, confusion, even hallucinations. It wasn’t the same for me, I knew. My experience was too real.
To return to my reality I must swim back, and I regain awareness with a new understanding of the art. Time works differently in Avalon; whereas I feel that I spent hours there, and I come back exhausted and buzzing, on a high nothing else can come close to. To an external observer, it looks like I’ve had a small seizure, some kind of absence lasting only a few seconds. I know this because Lowen is the only one I have ever allowed to see the process. I still don’t know if he believed me, even though he said he did.
So I hide my gift, using it secretly for the art I’m in charge of selling: my ambling in Avalon feeds the story I present to buyers, allowing me to make the piece come alive with meaning, with emotional relevance. I make sure the art I sell is personal. I see myself as a conduit, in charge of telling people the truth about a piece, why it mattered so much to the artist and why it should matter to anyone who buys it. I’m no different from any other outstanding auctioneer who works with integrity and cares deeply about the human experience. Except I always know the truth for sure. Well, until recently.
If anybody in the art world found out about my gift, they would think I’m mad, some kind of hippiesque charlatan, and I would lose all credibility as an expert, no matter how good my knowledge actually is and how many hours of actual research and labor I’ve put into building my career. Over the years, to compensate and hide my insider knowledge, I’ve made sure to work twice as hard as anybody else to earn my reputation and their respect. At Courtenay, I’m the one everyone jokes about keeping a sleeping bag and hair straighteners in the office. My life is art, appraising and selling. My whole life.
I never thought it would be taken away from me, until this wrong Night Swimming landed on my desk. Now I can’t look at it without fear, but I can’t let it be sold as Constance Sorel’s; that sculpture feels like nothing she’s ever made, and the night I tried to tap into it left me scarred and terrified. I know I need to try once more to tell them the truth. Even if it has to be desperate and public.
Excerpted from The Estate, copyright © 2024 by Sarah Jost.
