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.