I could foresee that I was going to have a late night poring over books in Uncle Tar’s chemical library. Already my mind was racing ahead to the chemical possibilities of salicin (C13H18O7)—which was discovered in willow bark in 1831 by Leroux—and good old sulfur (S). I already knew from personal experience that certain willow catkins, kept in a sealed box for several weeks, give off the most dreadful odor of dead fish, a fact which I had filed away for future use.
“Through here,” Mrs. Harewood said, ducking to keep her head from banging on an exceptionally low beam. “Mind your head and watch your step.”
Her studio was a glorious place. Clear north light flooded in through the angled transom windows overhead, making it seem like a room suddenly stumbled upon in a forest glade.
A large wooden easel stood in the light, and on it was a half-finished portrait of Flossie, the sister of Feely’s friend Sheila Foster. Flossie was sitting in a large upholstered chair, one leg curled under her, petting an enormous white Persian cat that nestled in her lap. The cat, at least, looked almost human.
Actually, Flossie didn’t look that bad, either. She was not my favorite living person, but I didn’t hold that against her. The portrait captured perfectly, in a way that even a camera can’t, her air of highly polished dopiness.
“Well, what do you think?”
I looked around at the tubes of paints, the daubed rags, and the profusion of camel-hair brushes that jutted up all around me from tins, glasses, and bottles like reeds in a December marsh.
“It’s a very nice studio,” I said. “Is that what you wanted to show me?”
I pointed a finger at Flossie’s portrait.
“Good heavens, no!” she said.
I had not noticed it before but at the far end of the studio, away from the windows, were two shadowy corners in which perhaps a dozen unframed paintings were leaning with their faces against the wall, their paper-sealed backsides towards the room.
Vanetta (by now I was thinking of her as “Vanetta,” rather than “Mrs. Harewood”) bent over them, shifting each one as if she were riffling through the record cards in a giant index file.
“Ah! Here it is,” she said at last, pulling a large canvas from among the others.
Keeping its back towards me, she carried the painting to the easel. After shifting Flossie to a nearby wooden chair, she turned it round and lifted it into place.
She stepped back without a word, giving me an unobstructed view of the portrait.
My heart stopped.
It was Harriet.
HARRIET. MY MOTHER.
She is sitting on the window box of the drawing room at Buckshaw. At her right hand, my sister Ophelia, aged about seven, plays with a cat’s cradle of red wool, its strands entangling her fingers like slender scarlet snakes. To Harriet’s left, my other sister, Daphne, although she is too young to read, uses a forefinger to mark her place in a large book: Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
Harriet gazes tenderly down, a slight smile on her lips, like a Madonna, at the white bundle which she holds supported in the crook of her left arm: a child—a baby dressed in a white, trailing garment of elaborate and frothy lace—could it be a baptismal gown?
I want to look at the mother but my eyes are drawn repeatedly back to the child.
It is, of course, me.
“Ten years ago,” Vanetta was saying, “I went to Buckshaw on a winter day.”
She was now standing behind me.
“How well I remember it. There had been a killing frost overnight. Everything was covered with ice. I rang up your mother and suggested that we leave it until another day, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She was going away, she said, and she wanted the portrait as a gift for your father. She meant to give it to him as a surprise when she returned.”
My head was spinning.
“Of course, she never did,” she added softly, “and frankly I’ve not since had the heart to hand it over to him, the poor man. He grieves so.”
Grieves? Although I had never thought about it in precisely this way, it was true. Father did grieve, but he did so in private, and mostly in silence.
“The painting, I suppose, belongs to him, since your mother paid me for it in advance. She was a very trusting person.”
Was she? I wanted to say. I wouldn’t know. I didn’t know her as well as you did.
Suddenly, I needed to get out of this place—to be outdoors again where I could breathe my own breath.
“I think you’d better keep it, Mrs. Harewood—at least for now. I wouldn’t want to upset Father.”
Hold on! I thought. My whole life was given over to upsetting Father—or at least to going against his wishes. Why now was I filled with a sudden desire to comfort him, and to have him hug me?
Not that I would, of course, because in real life we de Luces don’t do that sort of thing.
But still, some unknowable part of the universe had changed, as if one of the four great turtles that are said to support the world on their backs had suddenly shifted its weight from one foot to another.
“I have to go now,” I said, backing, for some reason, towards the door. “I’m sorry to hear about Brookie. I know he had lots of friends in Bishop’s Lacey.”
Actually, I knew no such thing! Why was I saying this? It was as if my mouth were possessed, and I had no way of stopping its flow of words.
All I really knew about Brookie Harewood was that he was a poacher and a layabout—and that I had surprised him in his midnight prowling. That and the fact that he had claimed to have seen the Gray Lady of Buckshaw.
“Good-bye, then,” I said. As I stepped into the hallway, Ursula turned rapidly away and scuttled out of sight with a wicker basket in her hand. But not so quickly that I missed the look of pure hatred that she shot me.
As I bicycled westward towards Bishop’s Lacey, I thought of what I had seen. I’d gone to Malden Fenwick in search of clues to the behavior of Brookie Harewood—surely it was he who had attacked Fenella Faa in the Palings, for who else could have been abroad at Buckshaw that night? But instead, I had come away with a new image of Harriet, my mother: an image that was not as happy as it might have been.
Why, for instance, did it gnaw at my heart so much to see Feely and Daffy, like two contented slugs, secure and basking in her glow, while I lay helpless, wrapped up like a little mummy in white cloth; of no more interest than a bundle from the butcher?
Had Harriet loved me? My sisters were forever claiming that she did not: that, in fact, she despised me; that she had fallen into a deep depression after I was born—a depression that had, perhaps, resulted in her death.
And yet, in the painting, which must have been made just before she set out on her final journey, there was not a trace of unhappiness. Harriet’s eyes had been upon me and the look on her face had shown, if anything, a trace of amusement.
Something about the portrait nagged at my mind: some half-forgotten thing that had tried to surface as I stood staring at the easel in Vanetta Harewood’s studio. But what was it?
Hard as I tried, I couldn’t think of it.
Relax, Flavia, I thought. Calm down. Think about something else.
I had long ago discovered that when a word or formula refused to come to mind, the best thing for it was to think of something else: tigers, for instance, or oatmeal. Then, when the fugitive word was least expecting it, I would suddenly turn the full blaze of my attention back onto it, catching the culprit in the beam of my mental torch before it could sneak off again into the darkness.
“Thought-stalking,” I called the technique, and I was proud of myself for having invented it.