But here he sat, frozen, almost fearful.
I read once that in some corners of the world, where tribes lived untouched by modern life, it was forbidden to take someone’s likeness. Either drawing or photographing, to capture someone’s face, you might accidentally capture their soul.
I sharpened my pencil. “I’ve never done this, you know. You could end up looking like a Martian.”
This seemed to make him nervous. He wiped his brow. “When drawing a face, the shapes are the most important.” He cleared his throat. “It’s like a skeleton. If you have it right underneath, the rest will follow.”
I turned to a fresh page in my sketch pad. “You don’t always have to be a teacher. Sometimes you can just be a friend.” I propped up the pad on my knees.
He dipped his head. “I’m sorry.”
“Head up and sit still!”
Silence stretched, though less companionable than our usual quiet. Even the insects were subdued. A green chestnut fell.
“Do you—” I began, as he said, “Have you—”
He nodded. “Go ahead.”
I hesitated. “Luc…do you think my mother thinks of me?”
He didn’t answer directly, but instead asked, “What made you think of that?”
I pulled my braid over my shoulder. “I’m never not thinking of it.” I adjusted the sketch pad. “But she used to sit with her paintbrush outside under a tree, like this.”
A bee buzzed near his ear, but he didn’t flinch. I sketched the bee into my drawing.
“Is that why I always find you out here, under the chestnut tree?”
“That, out here, I’ll feel closer to her? That I might capture a little of whatever she always tried to capture?” My pencil traced the curve of his face. “Maybe.”
“What would she paint when she was outside?” He smiled. “Buildings?”
If she painted, she never showed me. All I saw were those empty canvases. “I don’t know.” I’d watch her from the window, all dressed in pink and perched on a stool before her easel. Nanny Proud would let me watch as long as I liked, but Miss May would pull me away by the hair. “But she looked so lovely and so happy out there in front of her easel. Inside the house, with Father, she never looked happy.”
He stretched, but kept his head still.
“It was almost as though she loved the idea of being an artist as much as she loved creating. She loved to set up her easel just so, to sharpen her pencils, to hold her palette.”
He brushed a blade of grass from his shoe. “She missed her days at the School of Art?”
“She missed a lot of things, I think.”
His gaze slipped sideways and he was quiet. “I’m sure she still does,” he said finally. “Miss things.”
I couldn’t trust myself to voice my hope. Instead, I let the scratching of my pencil and the coppery buzz of cicadas fill the silence, until Luc cleared his throat.
“Your turn.” I remembered. “What were you going to ask earlier?”
“Your grandfather, have you heard from him?”
“No.” I kept my gaze on the sketch. “He’s off playing with languages somewhere.”
“Didn’t he raise your mother? Maman said that when they were girls, playing on the banks of the Tummel, it was Monsieur Muir alone up there at the big house.”
“Exactly. He’s already raised one child. Why would he want to raise another?” My pencil dug into the paper. “Mother always said that he wasn’t very good at it anyway. That he kept to his work and left her to the nannies and governesses.” So much like Father, who hardly ever came out of his study after Mother left, who rarely came to see me recite in the schoolroom. And yet I had the comfort of knowing he was there, that he was looking out at the same stars I was. “Anyway, it’s been six years since we’ve seen each other. We’re practically strangers.”
“So are you and I,” he pointed out.
“And yet I’d stay forever, if you asked me.”
The impulsive sentence hung between us. A thrush took up singing somewhere above. For half a moment I wondered if he would ask me.
I cleared my throat, smudged a line on my drawing. “Would you like to take a look?” Without waiting for his answer, I flipped the sketch pad around.
I waited with fingers tight on the corners of the pad, watching him. Already I could see errors and I knew he could, too, the way his eyes tightened in the corners. He was thinking of polite things to say.
“This is silly.” I tried to turn it back, but he caught the edge of the pad, his fingers brushing mine.
“No, it’s quite good.”
“It’s not.”
“This is only your first time, after all.”
“You’re lying and I should stick to buildings and fruit.” I moved to tear it from the book, but he stopped my hand.
“Okay, the lines beneath. The shapes.” He lifted my hand from the paper and put the pencil back under my fingers. “The circle behind the apricot.”
His fingers were warm. “That’s all?”
“Start there.”
I squinted down at the paper, erased, drew, erased again. It took shape, almost. He watched, patient. Finally I threw down the book. “It’s not…never mind. Why am I even trying this?”
He picked it up. “Stop being frustrated.”
“Stop being nice. I’m not an artist. I’ll never be Mother.”
“No. But you’re Clare.” He took my pencil and used the back end to trace the lines of my drawing. “It’s the cheek, right there. And see the line of my jaw? It’s not that round. You’re almost there.”
“Lines and circles, lines and circles,” I murmured under my breath. The bones underneath. “Let me see.”
Eyes closed, I leaned forward and put my hands flat on his face.
I think he stopped breathing.
I know that, for a split second, I did.
I had more important things to worry about right then. Like the fact that my heart was near to pounding out of my chest. That his cheeks were soft and rough, all at once. That he was close enough for me to feel his breath on my face. Close enough that I could kiss him.
I opened my eyes. He watched me. His were brown, ringed with gold. “So that’s your face,” I said softly. I licked my lips. “I understand now.”
I counted three heartbeats, three seconds of wishing, three seconds where I thought that he really would lean forward.
“When you didn’t want me to draw you earlier…”
“Yes?” he asked.
“…were you afraid to be captured to paper?”
He exhaled. “I’m already caught.”
His eyes looked everywhere on my face. Beneath my fingers, his cheeks were warm. I could see the light catch on his eyelashes. His lips moved.
I was counting breaths, one two three, when I heard her.
“Luc!” Madame’s voice carried all the way from the house.
He didn’t move, didn’t even seem to hear her. He closed his eyes.
“Luc René Rieulle Crépet!”
His eyes flew open, wide, guilty. He jerked back, leaving my hands empty in the air. I could still feel the warmth of his face.
Madame strode across the lawn. She wore a tall turban of brilliant blue silk and looked as imposing as a voodoo priestess. As she approached the chestnut tree, I scrambled to my feet.
“I was just drawing his face, Madame.” I fumbled in the grass for my pencil. I didn’t even remember dropping it.
She didn’t even look at me. “Luc, you have a visitor.”
It was then that I noticed the man behind her. He was tall, not much older than Luc, with smooth dark blond hair and a khaki suit. Draped over one arm was a motoring jacket and a pair of goggles. He looked rich and relaxed in his sporting duck, like a gentleman about to yacht or take the automobile out to shoot. Luc yanked off his striped scarf and stuffed it in his back pocket as he stood.
“Bauer, what are you doing here?”
“I was in the area,” the man said, with a raise of an eyebrow and a German accent. “I thought I would visit your château.”