Isobel had heard of the barbaric practice of wife selling at country fairs in England, a custom observed last century by the poorest classes to dissolve unhappy marriages by mutual agreement but now largely outmoded by modern divorce laws. depending on one’s view, reflected Isobel, was not marriage itself always a transaction in the marketplace? Was this not the way of the world even in the best society? Suitors bid for young brides with adequate dowries and young women hoped to ensnare husbands with substantial property and income. Every family of any reputation was on the hunt for a suitable match that would make a sound alliance of wealth and privilege.
Instead of the pride and exhilaration she should have felt at this moment, Isobel was in a state of spiritual queasiness. Her face reddened with shame. No lady of any worth put herself on display in such a vulgar manner. What was she thinking? She had persuaded her aunt to relax her moral guardianship and this farce was the result.
‘Twenty-five pounds!’ Mr Archer’s voice had risen to an incredulous bellow. The crowd were very stirred up now, breathless with amazement. Isobel could read the discomfiture in the erstwhile Lady Charlotte Bathurst, the way her shoulders tensed and her head bowed as if she wished to shun the glare of public attention. What on earth did Major Tranter think he was doing? Could this be passed off as a magnanimous gesture of public charity or the extravagance of an art lover’s intemperate passion? Or would people suspect something else? Isobel hoped that neither Grace nor Anna was present to witness this scene.
Charlotte had so far stared straight ahead as if deaf to the whole proceedings, but at this point she turned and looked directly at her husband. ‘The bid is against you, sir,’ said Mr Archer looking down from his lofty box. Major Tranter lowered his head in resignation. Whatever his motives, he had decided to withdraw. In the sixth row, the golden-haired artist leaned sideways a little and threw his arm over the back of his chair in an attitude of languid, victorious repose. ‘Twenty-five pounds! Going once! Going twice! Going three times! Congratulations, sir, the painting is yours!’
There was a polite round of applause and a fellow gentleman patted Mr Probius on the shoulder by way of approbation. Out of the corner of her eye, Isobel saw Major Tranter steal a surreptitious look in her direction as he and his wife quietly slunk away to the nearest exit. His expression was difficult to read at this distance but there was an unmistakeable air of injury and regret, possibly even humiliation. There will be an interesting conversation between those two, thought Isobel, with some sympathy for her ex-suitor.
The auction moved on to the next item. Aunt Louisa flung her arms about her niece in genuine affection. ‘Twenty-five pounds, my dear! What a very clever girl you are!’ She seemed untroubled by any scruples about this rather profligate display.
Isobel smiled. ‘Why, thank you, Aunt. I hope people did not think it too brazen for my name to be announced like that. I promise you I did not seek any publicity of that sort!’
‘Oh tosh, it does no harm at all,’ reassured Louisa Blunt, who seemed to have abandoned all notions of modesty in the pursuit of commercial profit as three committee members—Mrs Cornwall, Mrs Thierry and Mrs Drummond—appeared with beaming faces. They formed an enthusiastic circle of admirers around Miss Macleod, singing her praises.
‘Please excuse the intrusion, ladies,’ said a deep voice behind them, ‘but I thought you may like to meet the new owner of the painting in question. May I introduce our drawing master, Mr Charles Probius.’
The voice belonged to none other than the lumbering figure of Mr Cooper, the much-loved Robert the Large, hero of the working class. Next to him stood Mr Probius in the glorious mint green frock coat, dark crimson vest, lilac gloves, mustard topper and black breeches. He inclined his head to acknowledge the chorus of universal gratitude and approval from the ladies of the Fancy Fair Committee. Both gentlemen regarded Isobel with a look of benign esteem. But in Mr Probius’s dark brown eyes Isobel could see that a particularly incandescent spark had been ignited. She dropped her own eyes modestly under his warm gaze.
‘I hope my extravagance did not alarm you in any way, Miss Macleod,’ he said quietly, with a sensitivity that she noted with gratitude. ‘I hasten to reassure you—and the ladies of the committee—that my persistence was motivated not only by charity. It was intended as a gesture of public appreciation of the work itself. It is indeed a very fine piece.’
‘I am deeply flattered, sir,’ said Isobel, still feeling confused and a little exposed.
‘I am no expert in such matters but, for what my opinion is worth, Miss Macleod, it does the gardens proud,’ echoed Mr Cooper, in a surprisingly expansive mood, given that art was a province he generally claimed was best left to the formally educated and those who professed to have ‘taste’. ‘I would be honoured if you were to accept a commission on behalf of my wife and myself. We leave Juniper Hall in April and we wish to have something to remember her by.’
Isobel was stunned. Surely Mr Probius would be the obvious choice for such an undertaking? He knew the house intimately and must have hours to spare in which to sketch it. She suspected the truth of the matter: Mr Probius had put the idea in his employer’s head.
‘Why, sir, I would have thought Mr Probius could…’ she began to protest.
‘dear me, no,’ objected the artist. ‘I am far too busy with Mrs Cooper’s portrait.’
‘Well, then I—I—would love to,’ she replied. ‘I am deeply flattered, thank you.’
‘Very good, very good,’ said Robert with a clap of his hands. ‘It is all agreed.’
‘And so begins an illustrious career,’ Charles chimed in with a gentle smile. He addressed himself to her aunt. ‘Mrs Blunt, it is a privilege to meet the chief organiser of this magnificent affair. Please accept my congratulations.’
Louisa’s cheeks flushed pink and she giggled almost girlishly. Isobel was amused at how easily the artist charmed the dowager. In what amounted to a small epiphany, Isobel realised she had not properly evaluated Mr Probius’s charismatic good looks. Only now did she see his handsomeness reflected in the eyes of the women around her.
‘You are too kind, sir,’ Aunt Louisa said.
‘I regret I have not been able to revisit Faulconstone these last few weeks as my work has kept me occupied,’ he continued. ‘But with your consent, I would be flattered if there was an opportunity for such a meeting to take place at some future date.’
‘Of course, of course,’ said Isobel’s aunt. ‘I shall be free for such social arrangements now this bazaar is over. As Isobel will testify, it has taken up all our time.’
Isobel nodded. ‘So it has.’
‘Well, that is all settled then,’ smiled Mr Probius. ‘I shall look forward to it. And to acquainting myself with some more of your work, Miss Macleod, if I may be so bold. Now that I am fortunate to count myself as your first patron.’
Isobel looked at him from under her eyelids. He was flirting with her, right here in front of the Benevolent Society matrons and her aunt and the redoubtable Mr Cooper. But doing it with such finesse that his lovemaking was expertly disguised as gentlemanly wit and Christian charity. Both men doffed their hats and took leave of the committee ladies.
She watched the two gentlemen retreat, accompanied by Mrs Cornwall, who obliged Mr Probius by taking him to the cashier for payment of the twenty-five pounds. In one afternoon, Isobel fancied, she had managed to find not only her artistic metier but also, all being well with the world, her first true love.
The day was almost concluded with the sun low on the horizon and Venus gleaming as bright as a diamond in the twilight gloom. There would be fireworks in half an hour. Oil lamps were lit in every marquee so that they resembled the flickering spheres of giant hot air balloons.
Isobel was very tired. She could only marvel at the ceaseless energy of the charity workers like her aunt and her committee ladies, who were many years her senior. She envied them the certainty of their faith and zeal. The crowd had thinned a little in t
he mid-afternoon but, with the hot winds dropping in the early evening and the prospect of fireworks that night, families had begun to gather again near the seawall.
The harbour looked majestic in the gloaming, its waters as dense and dark as ink and just starting to catch the scattered fluorescence of the city’s gaslights. Sunset had arrived suddenly and the clouds in the western sky had combusted into their habitual fiery glory. Above them, trails of blue and acid green drifted uncertain as smoke. Isobel watched as the sky burned like hot coals, imperceptibly yielding, orange to ochre to umber, to velvet darkness.
Isobel had loved the night as a child; a time for family closeness at the fireside and for sleep after long days in the gardens at Grangemouth and Rosemount. But ever since her mother had died, night had amplified her feelings of loss and loneliness. The empty blackness made her think heretical thoughts: of life’s finiteness, of the endless sleep of death with no consolation of angels or God’s eternal love. And after the death of her mother, the night had also brought her such vivid dreams, frightening, sublime, strange and unsettling.
But tonight she did not feel any fear, only a sense of intense anticipation. She no longer stood on tiptoe like a child to stare out her bedroom window and look at a black harbour and an incomprehensible sky of stars. Ballandella had given her stories from the sky. And while they were not Isobel’s stories they had helped her believe, and hope, that the world was rich in meaning. One just had to be ready to read the signs. Today the signs had been shown to her. She faced the dark night as a young woman, no longer a girl. She now stood tiptoe on the threshold of her womanhood. She had read the signs and knew what they signified. For better or worse, she was an artist. For better or worse, the slender golden thread of her destiny had snagged on this man Charles Probius. For what purpose? What else but love. Or was love only a pretext for a greater intention? Time would tell. Time always did.
Aunt Louisa was busy with the cashier, and Isobel had finished helping box up the few unsold trinkets and treasures from Mrs Long and Mrs Smart’s stall. ‘Enjoy the fireworks. I’ll be another half hour or so,’ her aunt instructed, leaving her in the company of Mrs Palmer, who had spent all day in the food tent dispensing a Niagara of tea. ‘Can I?’ asked Isobel, nodding towards Madame Vadoma’s tent. ‘Just for fun?’
‘Of course, dear,’ smiled Mrs Palmer indulgently.
Isobel passed through a crimson silk curtain and came into the inner chamber of the fortune teller’s tent. In the half-light of a bronze lantern overhead and the pearlescent glow of a large glass ball sat a woman. Her hair was long and white in untidy tresses, dressed with brass ornaments like coins, and her head was encased in a blood red scarf. About her shoulders clung a purple shawl run through with silver threads and printed with many obscure motifs, possibly birds or animals.
Isobel had idly imagined that, for the purposes of the fair, the Benevolent Society of New South Wales, a pious Christian charity, would have hired a young actress to dress up as a Romany soothsayer. As she contemplated the swarthy face of the old woman seated in front of her, Isobel was sure that this was not the case. This woman was clearly no actress. Isobel surmised she was from India, having seen pictures of the natives of the subcontinent. The woman motioned for her to be seated and asked for sixpence, which was quickly spirited away into a bag in her lap. ‘What kind of reading do you seek?’ she asked with half-closed eyes, whether from fatigue or to give an air of mystery it was hard to tell.
‘What choices do I have?’ Isobel asked a little nervously.
The woman sighed. It had been a long day. ‘The future can be foretold in many ways,’ she said, ‘The Egyptians and Greeks taught us to read it in fire, in water, in numbers, in the entrails and flights of birds, in the spirits of the dead, in the map of the human hand. The diviner Artemidorus says that the future speaks to us through our dreams if we have but the wit to understand.’
‘I have many strange dreams,’ whispered Isobel, almost to herself.
There was a moment’s silence. Isobel realised the woman was studying her closely. ‘What do you have there, hidden beneath your blouse? I can feel its presence,’ she said, leaning into the circle of light beneath the lantern, a new note of intrigue, even eagerness, in her voice. Isobel smelled a syrupy musk on the air. The woman’s face was ageless. Her forehead was unlined but there were pronounced creases about her eyes, a youthful bloom on her cheeks but a fleshy heaviness about the jaw. The woman’s hand reached out towards Isobel. ‘A gift. From your mother.’
Isobel gasped. How on earth could this woman know that?
‘Please, let me see it. If you wish to know your future.’
Isobel turned away and unpinned the opal dragonfly from beneath her blouse. She then held it out into the light for the old woman to see. The fortune teller’s eyes glistened.
‘Scrying stones. Opals. But I have not seen the likes of these before. A strange gift.’
The woman looked pained for a moment as if wrestling with a difficult decision. She breathed heavily and a little too fast. ‘How long ago did your mother die?’
Isobel’s eyes met the woman’s. Almond green. Still as pond water. ‘Just over one year.’
‘And why do you still wear her brooch?’
It was a good question. Why did she? Because she missed her mother, loved her. That was the simple answer. Isobel felt irritated now. She had come into Madame Vadoma’s tent for a lark, an idle moment of fun at the end of a long day’s work. This was no fun.
‘Please don’t worry about it. I’ll go.’ She rose from her chair and turned to leave.
‘You don’t wish to know what the opals have to tell you?’ asked the woman.
There was something about the way she phrased the question that commanded Isobel’s attention. She was half-convinced, despite her initial resistance, that the dragonfly was the source of her dreams. dreams she barely understood.
She resumed her seat.
‘Put the brooch on the table,’ the old woman instructed. Isobel did as she was told.
‘Silence.’ The woman laid her hands either side of the brooch and stared at the opal dragonfly with a steady gaze. Isobel sat back in the shadows on her side of the table. Aunt had said she would be half an hour. There was time. Her own breathing deepened into a slower rhythm, as she was anxious not to break the woman’s concentration.
The long silence that seemed unnatural and awkward at first in this close chamber became little by little a delicate bubble of shared silence that deepened and deepened. Outside were the wild screeches and pops of the fireworks overhead and the cheers of the onlookers. But all that belonged to a remote world, almost unreal, fantastical. The real world was in here, in the sepia glow of the bronze lantern, in the intense gaze of the almond-green eyes of an old woman. She began to speak in a continuous, flowing stream of words.
Time shifted into another rhythm, another river, another flow, an eternity. ‘Water. You live by water. A house by water. And a garden. A garden you love. A garden that is a whole world. A garden that is all your world. But you must leave. You must leave now. You must go. To another place. So many you have loved. They have all left. Your mother. Your brother. Gone. And now two more brothers. Over water. And a sister. Over water. They are lost to you.’
The words were intoned as if in prayer, as if chanted, toneless but crystal clear. They fell from the woman’s mouth like drips from a tap, each one splashing into the silence. Isobel wanted to speak but dared not. The woman was in a trance now, her eyes, both still, green pools, unblinking, her face softened like wax, unmoving. ‘You are lost to them and they to you. This is what appears. I speak of the past. I speak of now. Your father is now lost to you. His love is lost to you. His protection is lost to you. There is a woman. There are women. In a circle. They protect you. They protect you now. They are your sisters. Your new sisters.’
Isobel closed her eyes. The words fell, crashing into the silence, each phrase deafening, crushing, so painful to hear. T
hey could not possibly be true. How could they be true? There came a loud buzzing in her ears. Was she going to faint? Was her blood deserting her, rushing away, filling her skull and body with air, with light, with nothing at all? Please, let me faint, let this stop, she said to herself. Please stop this, it is unbearable.
The woman’s voice droned on, as if bereft of sense, as if abandoning any purpose in speaking, as if just dropping these words like droplets into a well, like pebbles on a path for Isobel to follow, but only if she wishes, it is not important, it is so important, it is meaningless, it means everything. Only she can choose. The buzzing grows louder.
‘I speak of the future. The future not set in stone, not carved in marble. Of what will come if nothing is changed. Of a man that you love who sees you clearly. And the man that you love who does not see you clearly. And of the man that you never loved who watches and waits. There will always be water. So much water. Your life flows like water. Its current is strong.’ The woman’s voice began to waver, to become her own again. Isobel could feel a struggle inside the trance, see a restlessness behind the eyes, a tic in the woman’s waxen face, as if she was willing herself to break free, to stop the flow of words, as if she suddenly heard them and grasped their sense and understood how they were striking the young woman. Like stones.
‘Your life is long. Your life must change. Your life will change. You will endure. You will find peace. You will find love. You will find what you are looking for. But everyone. Everyone you love. Everyone you love will…’ The voice stopped. There was silence.
Isobel opened her eyes. Her voice was a hoarse whisper. ‘Will what?’
The Opal Dragonfly Page 22
