Chapter 3 #2
“Then stop sketching like him! Light strokes. Light. Decisive only when you have begun to understand the face!” She picked up Violet’s empty palette and whacked her lightly on the back of the head.
Violet persevered, determined, her brow drawn low over her eyes in concentration.
She had finished blocking out the column and Emilia’s skirts when Cristabel piped up again.
“Is that what you think her skirts look like, or is it the truth before your eyes?”
Violet rubbed out her error, quietly fuming, annoyed that the eminent Miss Bilbury, who had joined and withdrawn from the Royal Watercolour Society several times, whose rendition of hydrangeas and grapes had been widely lauded until it was discovered to have been painted by a woman, was right.
“Observe more,” said Cristabel, stern. “Think slower.”
“I only think one speed,” Violet replied miserably. “At a gallop.”
That made her tutor laugh in earnest. “Too clever, Violet, that is what you are, imprisoned by that cleverness. A painter is not smart, they are patient and receptive.”
After a while, they were both satisfied with her sketch, and Violet began to mix her pigments.
“So,” Cristabel drawled, standing behind her with a hand tucked under her chin. “You can paint something besides the woman in green.”
Violet blanched. In truth, she had become fixated on the woman who had burst into her aunt’s exhibition and accused Violet of stealing the Frenchman.
Lately, she had done nothing but try to capture the lady’s exact expression of outrage and sadness.
With every iteration, Violet noticed a troubling slippage, a transference between their faces; after a while, she was painting herself in that green dress, horrified and imploring, her broken heart on display for all the world.
“I couldn’t get her quite right,” Violet replied softly.
“Ah. Yes. That’s because this fool Frenchman has made you a mimic, not an artist in your own right. No matter. We will tear him out by the root until we find the violets hidden among these weeds.”
On the tumbled stone, Emilia whimpered. “That’s quite harsh.”
Cristabel glared until Emilia went silent. “The sitter will say nothing and squirm even less, thank you.”
With nothing but the waxwings at the edge of the wood to fill the cold, quiet air, Violet began to paint, and Emilia, for those hours, became her sole concern and obsession.
The young women had much in common—they were both two and twenty, both younger sisters to boldly energetic ladies who had married and settled, and they shared a love of art, literature, and theater.
Emilia, however, hailed from a wealthy family; she was the daughter of a colonel who had made his fortune in the West Indies, found love there, and sent his two lovely daughters back to England.
Violet, therefore, did not protest the chance to paint the lady, luminous in the autumn light, but rather, she found the ruins of Clafton unsettling and could not understand why Emilia insisted upon it.
“Can we not speak at all?” Emilia asked, jutting out her lip.
Cristabel leaned over Violet’s shoulder. “You have captured her mouth, I suppose, and that is where the likeness of a person lives. What could possibly be more urgent than art?”
Emilia visibly relaxed. “Why, finding Violet a husband, of course.” And before Violet could protest or point out that she had written off love, Emilia clobbered her way through a list of bachelors.
“What about Mr. Delridge? He is tall, although I find his very small eyes disconcerting. Or Mr. Prandle? Did you meet him over the summer?” Emilia asked.
Violet’s brush moved swiftly but gently over the paper as she began to carve out the slender shadows beneath Emilia’s chin. “How can you think of romance in a place like this?”
The black curls framing Emilia’s face bounced as she shrugged, then returned to her careful pose. “Are lovers not often trotting off to ruins in the novels you like?”
“Certainly,” said Violet, glancing up at the broken walls hemming them in on three sides.
Though Emilia sat in an advantageous wedge of sunlight, Violet herself was enfolded in the unforgiving shadows cast by what remained of the estate.
Only her hand, creating more and more of Emilia, felt a touch of warmth from the sun.
“It all seems far more romantic when it’s in a book.
A terrible fire destroyed this place, but that was well before you and Ann came to Pressmore.
We were visiting Lane the summer it happened; I can still remember the great clouds of black smoke.
There was a haze in the air for a whole week… ”
“How awful,” Emilia murmured. She looked forlorn; perhaps she felt the same chill that crept across Violet’s back and up her neck.
“The Kerrs have given up on it, I think,” said Violet, turning to the little folding table they had carried along. Upon it, she mixed her pigments, eager to capture that slight melancholy in Emilia’s expression.
“More color,” she heard Cristabel mutter. “In her eyes, do you see the hint of carmine? Do not paint vacancy where there is life.”
And Emilia was full of life. Young. Vibrant.
So, it wasn’t surprising that her sadness converted seamlessly into joy.
“Oh, no, there you are wrong, Violet. Have you not heard the news? It is all over Cray Arches. The gossips at Gray and Simon are beside themselves!” Gray and Simon, a shop for hats and accoutrements, was where Violet and the other young ladies of the village spent an inordinate amount of time agonizing over ribbons and buttons; Winny practically lived there.
“Mr. Kerr has returned from abroad, and it’s said he has been seen spending money from here to Lighthorne Heath on the best stone and timber. ”
Another tickle of frost raced up Violet’s spine at the words Mr. Kerr, for the only Mr. Kerr she knew about had died in this doomed and dilapidated place. Although now that she thought on it, he had been Sir Kerr, which meant…
A dreadful image flashed before her: the back of a head, sandy brown, the silhouette of a towering man with a devastating manner about him. Derivative and silly, he had sneered directly at her art. And for no one.
She was thinking too much again. Cristabel drew close.
Put it—him—and his scornful opinions from your mind.
“I never pay attention to what the Kerrs do,” Violet sniffed.
“But why should that be so?” Emilia pressed. “There are two eligible men in the family, are there not? Yet nobody will tell me the first thing about them, all because of some ridiculous feud…”
Violet’s head snapped up. “I love you like a sister, Emilia, and you have not lived here long, so I will not tell Lane of this.” Emilia’s sister, Ann, had married Violet’s cousin Lane just two years earlier at Pressmore.
Thus, she could not expect Ann and Emilia to feel the kind of loathing decades of enmity engendered.
“You will notice none of the Kerrs attended Ann and Lane’s wedding, and there is good reason for it—”
“Well, yes, they were not invited,” Emilia interrupted. It was her turn to sniff.
Shaking her head impatiently, Violet slashed her brush across the canvas, applying the lightest piece of the sky visible above the ruins.
It was gray there, and getting grayer, thicker clouds gathering.
She did not appreciate Emilia’s skeptical eyebrows.
This was family lore, and family lore was sacred.
“You mustn’t make light of it, especially in front of my aunt.
You see, it began long ago when Lady Edith Kerr, then unmarried, thought she had well and truly won Mr. Richmond.
Of course, she was wrong, and he was besotted with Aunt Mildred.
Drinking vinegar would have made Lady Edith less sour, and she spread vile rumors about Mildred and the family.
Then, there was the hedge maze disaster—”
“What could possibly be serious about a hedge maze?” asked Emilia.
“It does sound frivolous,” Cristabel added, which won her a scathing glare from Violet, aimed over her shoulder.
As her words became more heated, her brush swished faster.
“Aunt Mildred now has the finest hedges in the county, which did not sit right with the Kerrs, who had boasted to anyone with ears to listen that their gardens would never be outdone and Clafton never outshone. I think we both know how that turned out.” She paused to gesture vaguely around herself with the brush, then dunked it in water.
“I heard Lady Edith nearly fainted when your sister, Ann, had the Grecian temple built…” Here, Violet paused, and Emilia raised an eyebrow.
“And Sir Kerr, who was always excessively proud of his well-stocked pond, never extended an invitation to fish to our uncle or to Cousin Lane.”
This list did not seem to move Emilia even a little. “These hardly seem like meaningful trespasses.”
Violet painted faster and faster. Now came the very tops of the broken walls, glazed with buttery light; now the faintest cool red of the leaves that tried to infringe upon what had once been a soaring room fit for dinners and balls; now the halo of blue signifying the top of Emilia’s head…
“And the fire that ruined them. Everyone knows it was done by the youngest boy, Francis—”
“Freddie,” Emilia corrected, breathless. After all their talk, she had finally gone still.
“Yes, thank you, Freddie. He’s feral, that one.
You mustn’t think him eligible, not for me, not for you, not for anyone.
He isn’t fit for the Vauxhall cages, let alone polite society.
He’s lamed two horses racing through Anselm and Cray Arches, and we all know his antics will kill Lady Edith any day now. ”