“You’re not going to tell me?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Instead, you’re just going to stand there and catch your death of cold?”
“It’s not cold.”
She stepped down from the window onto the wet grass outside. Alan started to rise, but then remembered his nakedness again.
“Remember to ask her about Rushkin—you know who he was, don’t you?”
Alan nodded. Isabelle had named her studio “Adjani Farm” after him.
He tugged on the sheet until it came loose from the foot end of the bed and wrapped it around himself like a long trailing skirt as he swung his feet to the floor. But by the time he reached the window, the girl was already out on the lawn, dancing about in the wet grass with her bare feet, her loose white shirt flapping about her.
“But I don’t know who you are!” he called after her.
She turned and gave him a quick grin.
“Why, I’m Cosette,” she said. “Isabelle’s wild girl.”
And then she was off, racing across the lawn, legs flashing like those of a young colt, red hair tossed back and catching the first pink rays of the sun. In moments, all that remained was a trail of footprints in the grass.
“Cosette,” Alan repeated.
Now he remembered why that pose of hers had seemed so familiar. The girl could have been a twin for whoever had sat for Isabelle’s painting The Wild Girl, which hung in the Newford Children’s Foundation. Cosette would be too young to have been the model for it, of course, but the resemblance was so strong that she might easily be related to the original model—perhaps her daughter? That was a reasonable enough assumption, except it didn’t even begin to explain her presence this morning. It seemed such an elaborate charade to play on a stranger: making herself up like the model from the painting, all this mysterious talk about himself and Isabelle and Isabelle’s old mentor.
There’d been something about Rushkin—a scandal, a mystery. It was while he was trying to remember what it had been that he realized something else: the story of Kathy’s that Isabelle had used as a basis for the painting ... Cosette had been the name of the wild girl who had followed the wolves into the junkyard, followed them and never returned.
So even the name had been made up. But why? What was the point of it all?
Alan stared across the lawn for long moments until the cold made him shiver. He shut the window and returned to bed. He meant to stay there just long enough to warm up before he got dressed, but for all the questions that spun through his mind in the wake of his odd early-morning encounter, he ended up falling asleep again.
V
Isabelle sat back from her drawing table and rubbed her face, leaving streaks of red chalk on her brow and cheeks. Her fingers were stained a dark brownish red from the sanguine with which she’d been sketching—both from holding the drawing chalks and using her fingers to smudge the pigment she’d laid down on the paper into graduated tones. The desk was littered with the dozens of studies and sketches she’d been working on since fleeing Alan’s company after dinner.
She wasn’t sure what exactly had sent her upstairs. It was partly the memories he’d woken in her, not just of Kathy, but of when they’d all lived on Waterhouse Street. They’d shared so many good times then, to be sure, but those were also the years when Rushkin had been so much a part of her life.
She was always reminded of A Tale of Two Cities when she thought back to that time. Dickens had summed up her feelings for the Waterhouse Street days perfectly with the novel’s opening line: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ....”
Rushkin. Kathy. Alan, here in her house. The funeral. The memories had risen up, swirling and spinning through her, until she’d got a feeling of claustrophobia—too many people in too confined a place, never mind that it had just been Alan and herself in the rambling sprawl of the barn’s main downstairs room. Alan and herself, yes, and the ghosts. She would have gone for a walk outside, if it hadn’t been for the rain. As it was, she couldn’t even remember what she’d told Alan. She’d just mumbled some excuse about having to work and bolted.
But once she was upstairs all she’d done was pace back and forth across the scratched hardwood floor of her studio until her restlessness began to irritate her as much as it already had Rubens, who was trying to sleep on the windowsill by her drawing table. So she’d sat down, pulled out a sheaf of loose paper and the old Players cigarettes tin that held her sanguine and charcoal, and decided to see if she could actually still draw a human figure, a fairy face.
It had been so long.
This is safe, she told herself as she first touched the red chalk to the paper. The result of the initial study she attempted was fairly pitiful—not so much because of her being out of practice, though Lord knew she was desperately out of practice, as that she was being too tentative with her lines. Frightened by what the images on paper could wake.
She placed a new sheet of paper in front of her, but was unable to put the chalk to it.
After she’d been staring at the paper for a good twenty minutes, Rubens stood up from the windowsill and walked across her drawing table. He gave her a look that she, so used to anthropomorphizing because he was usually her only companion in her studio, read as exasperation. Then he hopped down from the table and left the room.
Isabelle watched him go before slowly returning her attention to what lay in front of her. The corner of the sketch that was peeking up from under the blank sheet of paper she’d laid on top of it seemed to chide her as well.
Nothing would come of a sketch, she reminded herself. The sanguine images were harmless. It was when she built on the sketch, set the stretched canvas on her easel and began to squeeze the paint onto her palette. It was when she drew on the knowledge Rushkin had given her and began to lay the paint onto the canvas ....
Which a dozen or so studies later, she found herself longing to do. With a deep steadying breath, she’d finally managed to close her mind to all extraneous thoughts and simply let her hand speak for her, red chalk on the off-white paper, drawing the inspiration for what appeared on the paper from her mind, from years of having suppressed just such work. When the power went and she lost her electric lights, she simply lit candles and continued to work. The expectant surface soon filled with figures—sitting, walking, lounging, smiling, laughing, dancing, pensive ... the entire gamut of human movement and expression. The joy of rendering returned with such an intensity that it was all she could do to stop herself from beginning a painting that moment.
But it was too soon. She’d want to find some models first—Jilly could help her there. Isabelle was so out of touch with Newford’s art scene herself that she wouldn’t begin to know where to look. And then there were the backgrounds—another reason she’d have to go to the city. She should probably rent a studio there for the winter.
Still sketching, hand moving almost automatically now, she began to plan it all out in her mind. She would insist to Alan that she keep the originals at all times. She would provide him with the color transparencies he required, but the paintings themselves wouldn’t leave her possession. That would keep them safe—at least so long as she was alive. But what would happen to them when she died? Who would know how to
No, she told herself. Don’t complicate things. Don’t even think, or you’ll close yourself up before you even put down the first background tones.
With her fingers limbered, the lines were appearing on the paper as they were supposed to: firm, assured, with no hesitation. She found herself sketching Kathy’s features—not as they’d been later in life, but when Isabelle had first met her, when they were both still in their late teens, hungry for every experience that the Lower Crowsea art scene could impart to them.
She tried to think of which stories she would illustrate and realized that if she was going to take on the project, she’d want to do all of them. What would be really hard was deciding on simply one image for each piece.
There was enough imagery in just one of Kathy’s stories to provide for dozens of illustrations.
She’d have to read the books again. And then there were the new stories Alan had told her about.
She’d
Isabelle laid the sanguine down and stared at Kathy’s image looking back up at her from the paper, regretting now that she had never been able to find the courage to do this when Kathy was still alive, that she’d let the broken promise lie between herself and her friend’s memory for so long. But she knew what the difference was, she knew why she’d make the attempt now.
“It’s for your dream,” she told the image. “To make that arts court real. That’s what’s giving me courage.”
Though if she was truly honest with herself, it was also to set to rest her ghosts, once and for all. They came to her in her dreams, both Kathy and Rushkin, never with recrimination in their eyes, or voices, but they left her feeling guilty all the same for the choice she had made after the fire to bury all that Rushkin had taught her.
Except for Kathy, no one had really understood why she had to put that part of her life behind her, had to find a new way to express the wordless turmoil that had always been a part of her, the confusion that could only be explained and relieved through her art. Certainly not Rushkin. And he should have.
Only he and Kathy knew the true story. She’d never told anyone else, not even Jilly, who, with her penchant for the odd and the unusual, might have seemed the most obvious choice. Jilly who saw wonder and magic where anyone else would only rub their eyes and look again, carefully editing what they saw until it fit within the realm of what they’d been taught was possible.
Isabelle couldn’t have said why she hadn’t confided in Jilly; over all those long phone conversations they’d had since Isabelle moved back to the island, they certainly shared everything else in their lives. But it seemed too ... secret. Kathy had known, because she’d been there from the beginning, and Rushkin—if it hadn’t been for Rushkin, none of it would have happened in the first place.
Initially, Rushkin’s teachings had seemed so amazing, like stepping into an enchantment, or receiving a gift from faerie. Then after the fire, she just couldn’t speak of it. The secret didn’t die, but it locked itself away inside her—just as she locked away the impulses to render realistically.
The abrupt change into the abstract had garnered her the worst reviews she’d ever received, before or since. The only one in Newford’s art community who had simply accepted the new paintings for their own worth, rather than judging them against the work Isabelle had done earlier in her career, had been July.
She’d dropped by Isabelle’s studio—half of a loft she was sharing with Sophie Etoile in the Old Market—one afternoon a few weeks before the show. Wandering about Isabelle’s side of the small loft, she’d viewed the works-in-progress and finished canvases with an unprejudiced eye.
Jilly had been surprised, certainly, but also moved by the power of some of the work. Granted, there were paintings that were noble attempts, and nothing more, but there were also some that conveyed everything she’d ever said before, only now in primal, throbbing colors and abstract designs.
After Jilly had complimented her on the new work, Isabelle had admitted her nervousness concerning how the new paintings would be accepted.
“But are you happy with this direction your work’s taken?” Jilly had asked.
“Oh, yes,” Isabelle had lied. “Very much so.” It would be years before the lie would come true.
“Then that’s all that counts,” Jilly had told her.
Isabelle had had cause to remember and be comforted by those few simple words many times as she worked to reestablish her earlier position in the Newford art community. What had dismayed her earlier admirers, she slowly came to understand, was not the new work itself, but what they perceived as the frivolity of her turning her back so abruptly on the old. Once they saw her seriousness, she began to win them back, one by one.
All except for Rushkin. He hadn’t expressed approval or disapproval. Long before the show opened, Rushkin was gone. Out of her life, out of Newford; for all she knew, out of the world itself, for no one had ever heard of or from him since.
Speculation ran rampant in the Newford art circles as to where and why he’d gone, but it never went beyond rumor. Isabelle suspected that the fire had killed something inside him, just as it had inside her.
She’d lost innocence, her sense of wonder. She didn’t know what he had lost, but she suspected its absence had put as deep an ache inside him as her own loss had put in her. For all his unsociability and sudden rages, he had understood, better than anyone Isabelle had met before or since, the intrinsic worth that lay at the heart of all things, the beauty that grew out of the simple knowledge that everything, no matter how small or large it might be, was the prefect example of what it was. It was the artist’s sacred task to illuminate that beauty, Rushkin had told her, to create a bridge between subject and viewer; to craft a truthful vision that left both the artist and the audience wiser, allowing them to wield the weapon of knowledge in their daily confrontations with an increasingly hostile world.
Isabelle sighed. Sometimes she missed her old mentor so much that it hurt. But then she’d remember the other side of him, the part that swallowed the good memories with hateful shadows: his elitism and his towering rages. His small cruelties and his hunger to control. His hunger ...
As inevitably happened when she thought of Rushkin, she couldn’t understand why it had taken her so long to extricate herself from his influence. It hadn’t simply been her greed to learn all she could from him. But what exactly had been the hold he’d had on her? How could one man be responsible for so much that was good in her life and so much of the misery and pain?
She sighed again, staring out the window. Morning twilight was growing lighter by the moment. As she watched, the long shadow cast by the barn withdrew toward its foundations. The dawn chorus sounded—more muted every day as, species by species, its choristers migrated south. But at least the day was dawning sunny, the storm was gone and the power was back on. It looked to be the morning of a perfect autumn day.
She didn’t feel nearly as tired as she thought she should after spending a sleepless night. Her eyes were a little itchy and her back was stiff from being hunched over the drawing table for so many hours, but that was about it. She rubbed at her eyes, then looked down at her hands and realized what she was smearing all over her face.
“Lovely,” she muttered.
Standing up, she stretched and went into the washroom to take a shower before going downstairs to wake Alan. She’d make him breakfast before rowing him back to the mainland. But first they’d have to talk some more. She hoped he’d be able to meet her demands—she wasn’t asking for much—but even if he didn’t, she knew she’d take on the project because it was long past time to fulfill that broken promise.
She would do it.
For Kathy and her dream of the lost children’s arts court.
And for herself, so that she could try to regain defunct courage and so be brave enough to accept the responsibility of a gift she’d once been given.
Alan woke groggily to the sound of tapping on the guest-room door. He struggled upright in a tangle of bedclothes, disoriented, body and mind still thick with sleep.
“Breakfast’s almost ready,” Isabelle called through the door.
“I ... I’ll be right out,” Alan managed to mumble in response.
He listened to her footsteps recede before he slowly swung his feet to the floor. His gaze traveled to the window, but all it found was sunshine streaming in through the panes, giving the room the air of an early Impressionist’s painting, all bright yellow light with deep mauve shadows pooling where the sunbeams didn’t reach. There was no wild girl with her red hair and oversized man’s shirt.
Rising from the bed, he crossed the room to look out on the lawn outside the window. The sun had already burned off the dew, so th
e faint path of footprints he remembered from his dawn visitor was gone as well.
If he’d even had a dawn visitor, he thought, turning from the window.
The whole encounter lay like a dream in his memory now. It seemed far more reasonable to believe that he had simply imagined Cosette and her odd conversation. His sleeping mind had conjured a patchwork individual out of Kathy’s story and Isabelle’s painting to visit him in his sleep and voice the curious mix of desire and bafflement he felt whenever he thought of Isabelle.
He felt better after he’d had a shower—more alert, if a bit scruffy from being unable to shave. When he joined Isabelle in the kitchen, it was to find she’d prepared him a huge country breakfast: pancakes, eggs and bacon, muffins, coffee and freshly squeezed orange juice.
“You didn’t have to go to so much trouble,” he said.
“It wasn’t any trouble,” Isabelle assured him. “I enjoy cooking.”
“I just thought that after working all night, the last thing you’d feel like doing was putting together a spread like this.”
Isabelle turned from the stove, the surprise obvious in her features. “Now how did you know I’d been up all night?” she asked.
Alan heard the wild girl’s voice in his mind. It’s almost time for the dawn chorus and she’s still up there, filling sheet after sheet with sketches.
Except he’d decided that he had dreamed her—hadn’t he?
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I heard you walking around or something.” When she raised her eyebrows quizzically, he added, “You did tell me yesterday that you’re the only person living here on the island, didn’t you?”
Isabelle nodded, but Alan thought he could detect a guarded expression slip into her eyes.
“Why?” she asked, her voice mild. “Did you see somebody?”
A half-naked adolescent girl, that’s all, Alan thought. You know, the one from your painting. She came to me in the middle of the night, dispensing her own version of advice for the lovelorn.
“Not really,” he said. “I just had a very vivid dream—you know the kind that seems so real it’s more like a memory?”
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