She checked her watch and sighed. She would remain awhile longer, searching. It was already past four and dark outside, but she decided that she could not leave until she had conducted a thorough search of the cottage, even if it meant driving later in less-than-safe conditions, picking her way with care along the rough roads. As the air around her seemed to become accustomed to her presence, it occurred to Maisie that those who came before her might have visited in search of something of great import.
She moved the MG to a place behind the second carriage, where a surprisingly strong lean-to had been constructed and sheltered not only a carefully stacked pile of driftwood, but a privvy, and a barrel where water was collected from a clever gutter system. Maisie was able to park under the lean-to, and smiled as she walked around to the front of the cottage. It would seem that, contrary to Stratton’s assessment, this was one artist with a very practical streak, if one took into account the work involved in adapting the two carriages—work that she suspected Nick had completed himself.
Locking the door behind her again, Maisie pulled the blinds, made up a fire in the cast-iron stove and put the kettle of water on to boil. As the room warmed, she opened the door to the studio to allow heat to circulate so that she could move around in comfort. She looked around the home that Nick Bassington-Hope had created. No, none of this was the work of a man who would have had a slap-dash attitude toward the construction of a scaffolding platform.
RETURNING TO THE sketchbooks she had just opened when Amos White banged on the door, she saw they contained work from Nick Bassington-Hope’s early days—charcoal drawings and watercolors that lacked the mature interpretation of later years—and also more recent work that seemed to demonstrate a more confident hand. Maisie looked through the sketchbooks and felt certain that there should be more. Calculating that Nick would have used perhaps more than a hundred, or two hundred books, she began to search again, though there were precious few places for storage in the carriages. It was under the bed that she found a series of apple crates containing more sketchbooks, along with the many works of fiction and nonfiction he had acquired over the years. On hands and knees Maisie pulled out the crates, set them alongside the fire, and, sitting on the floor with the lamp on a side table, she began to leaf through their contents.
Unlike the rest of the cottage, in which everything seemed to have its place, the sketchbooks had not been catalogued or kept in any order, and if Maisie had to guess, she would have concluded that they had been worked through quite recently. Recalling her conversations with Georgina, she wondered whether the Bassington-Hopes had expected to find something that might indicate the location of the lock-up—something she rather wanted to find herself.
Nick’s early sketches were of pastoral scenes, of horses in Kentish fields, of farms and oasthouses, of cattle ambling toward the milking shed in late afternoon and of women gathered outside farm buildings, their jackets secured by string, laced boots muddied under heavy cloth skirts with pinafores. Strong as men, they were running newly washed hop-pokes through a mangle, two turning a giant handle, two feeding the sacking through twin rollers. There were detail sketches, a face here, a nose there, the arm of a farmworker or a child’s dimpled hand held by the worn, working hand of her father. And then came the war.
Maisie could barely bring herself to look at the sketches, and as she did so her head began to throb, the scar on her neck aching in unison. She could not continue, but turned instead to work completed in the time following Nick’s return from France, the time when, still recuperating from his wounds, he was called upon to work for the cause of war in designing propaganda literature. This time the sketches inflamed Maisie. She moved back from the fire, so heated was her response to the slogans revealed as she flicked through the pages. A small boy sitting on his father’s knee, and the words, WHAT WAR STORIES WILL YOU TELL, FATHER? A young man with his sweetheart, the woman looking away toward a man in uniform: ARE YOU STILL HER BEST BOY? Then another, a German soldier breaking down the door of a family’s home: YOU CAN STOP HIM NOW! Maisie had seen the posters herself in the war, but had never questioned who might have drafted each idea, never thought of the man who had challenged others to join the fight and who compelled those at home to push them toward service.
And here in her hands were the ideas as seeds. For each poster she had seen on a railway station, at a picture house or on a board outside a shop, there were ten, fifteen sketches, if not more, with the design at a different stage of development. At first she felt anger toward the artist. Then she found herself wondering if he’d had a choice, and, if not, how he might have felt, knowing the ultimate, deadly outcome of his work. As the fire inside abated, Maisie moved closer to the stove again and wondered what remorse, if any, might have shadowed Nick Bassington-Hope each day.
The sketches from his time in America were most interesting to Maisie, not only because they illustrated a land far away, but because they revealed a man who seemed to have found a peace of mind. Magnificent canyons backlit by a sun high in the sky; trees of such grandeur that she could barely imagine walking through the forest; then the plains—even in mere sketchbooks, with pencil and charcoal, with pastel chalks, with watercolor, she could almost smell the heat, the breeze pressed against fields of corn or whipped up spray on a river as it was forced downward across fearsome rapids. Again, Nick Bassington-Hope had drawn segments in detail, perhaps one of water rushing across a single rock, or of a branch, perhaps part of an eagle’s wing. And there, penciled into the corner of a single page, the artist had written, “I can dance with life again.” As Maisie closed one sketchbook and reached for another, she realized that tears had fallen, that the work of an artist she never knew was touching her deeply. His travels to the other side of the world had saved Nick Bassington-Hope’s very soul.
Taking up a collection of sketchbooks tied with string and marked CONSTRUCTS, Maisie dried her eyes and was intrigued as she flipped through the pages, for it appeared that not only had the artist planned his murals and triptych pieces with utmost care, but he had anticipated each step involved in exhibiting them, even down to the last bolt and anchor required to secure a piece. So, she was right, he was no fly-by-night who took chances, but a careful executor of his work. One might also remark that such attention to minutiae was an obsession. Flicking through, Maisie noted that the details here were of past exhibits and that there was nothing pertaining to the unveiling at Svenson’s Gallery. Had it been removed? Or was it still here? Or at the lock-up?
Maisie pushed the books to one side, rose to her feet and placed her hands on the back of first one chair, then the other. She smiled, for as she touched the chair on the left of the fireplace, it felt warm against her fingers—but not in a way that would indicate proximity to the embers. It was a different heat, a sensation that another person would likely not feel. As she rested her hand on the leather chair, Maisie knew it was Nick Bassington-Hope’s preferred seat, that he would have chosen this chair before the other, always. She sat in his place, closed her eyes and, with her hands resting softly in her lap, took three deep breaths, each time inhaling to the extent of her lung capacity before breathing out. Then she sat in silence, with only the crashing of the waves outside and closer crackle of burning driftwood for company.