Chapter Forty-One #2
She watched Dian, turned away from her, staring at the tall rows of bookshelves, the oil paintings in their ornate frames.
George Stubbs’ Unicorn in the Woods was particularly famous.
Frida knew it was worth a fortune, not that the others would have fetched less.
Turner, Holbein, Poussin, Blake, Reynolds, Fuseli .
. . most were personally commissioned, and all were of extraordinary creatures of some ilk.
Shadows flickered across Dian’s statuesque form, their hoary cobwebs limned with gold from the fire, and their green hair looked almost autumnal.
A painting incarnate. For some reason, she stiffened at the thought.
She moved across the room, running her fingers across the ancient leather top of the desk and staring at the windows behind.
They looked east, towards the gardens where many of the ECs had been housed, but floor-to-ceiling curtains were pulled against the night, a lush oak-green velvet which matched the livery of the servants, and the colours of the Beaufort coat of arms. Beneath her boots, wooden floorboards were polished within an inch of their lives, covered with thick carpets.
She hadn’t been able to stand on them a decade ago, they’d been roped off.
She’d thought they were beautiful when she’d been fourteen.
Now she didn’t want to tread on them, and she wondered if they’d been shipped here by the East India Company.
She wished, in her time, the National Trust would send them back to wherever they’d come from.
She glanced again at Dian, their cobwebs flickering softly, highlighting the dips and curves of their body in the blazing light of the fire.
Against their thousand greens, the oak-green of the curtains looked washed out and plain.
They were moving along the wall of bookshelves, absently touching the soft, downy hair around their ears where it had been shaved.
She wondered how many of these books had ended up in her version of the library.
She wondered if Botherington’s awful book with the knight on the cover was here.
She prayed it wasn’t. It was all she could do to watch Dian trail their fingers over the books, her heart aching with the sense that, in less than a few minutes, she’d ruined everything.
She’d told them to drop their magic, and they’d done it.
Now the intimacy between them had evaporated, and she didn’t know how to call it back.
She looked down uncomprehendingly at the hand Dian had been holding and wondered if they’d been counting the seconds until they could let her go, after all.
On a side table next to her, there was an open leatherbound book, as if someone had left it there to come back to.
She ran her eyes over the other items placed neatly along the mantle.
A silver engraved box, a carved jade statue of a voluptuous woman.
A mounted stone spearhead, a ceremonial clay pot.
On one wall, she stopped short at the sight of a cloak made of bird feathers, scarlet, sky blue and the green of sunlight through trees.
Like Dian’s bright hair, the colours looked out of place here.
As a child, Sir Joshua had gone to Brazil with his father.
She wondered if this cloak was a remembrance of that trip.
When she snuck a look back at Dian, she found them seated on the edge of a velvet armchair.
A fairy in Sir Joshua’s armchair. She might have cracked a joke about it, if she’d known how.
Dian was staring into the crackling fire, their eyes liquid black.
Unreadable. She gazed up at the wall again.
Next to the feathered cloak, above the desk, there was an illustrated map.
She didn’t look at it though. She was too tired.
Hesitating just for a moment, she pulled out the chair behind the desk and sat down with a thud.
This, too, had been roped off. Now it wasn’t, and she ran her hands over the carved armrests, the same dark ebony, imagining that Sir Joshua might have sat in this very seat, mere hours ago.
She stared at the well-scuffed leather on the desktop.
Deep oak-green of course, to match everything else.
Sir Joshua had style. A neat stack of papers sat on the left-hand side of the desk.
‘Is there magic in that?’
Frida’s head snapped up as if she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t, but Dian wasn’t looking at her. Their face was tilted upwards, the graceful line of their throat exposed as they stared at George Stubb’s painting above the fire.
‘Magic?’ Frida asked nervously.
Dian inclined their chin.
She, also, gazed at The Unicorn in the Woods.
George Stubb’s unicorn was alone in a willow grove.
A male with a lavender sheen across his hooves stood amongst the trees with his head down, as if he’d galloped himself to exhaustion to get there.
Whether chasing something, or being chased, it was unclear since there was no one else in the painting with him.
Just the unicorn and the willows. In the LEZ, Issy had willow trees in her enclosure and Frida suddenly wondered if this was the reason why.
She’d always thought it was because they looked pretty, but that was silly, wasn’t it?
Everything Management did was for a reason.
Maybe they’d wanted people to connect Issy with this painting.
For some reason, this filled her with disquiet.
‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘There’s no magic. Just art.’
Dian nodded, but it was clear they didn’t believe her.
She sank down deeper into Sir Joshua’s chair and wondered where he was.
America. Japan. Sumatra. Downstairs. She didn’t know which she hoped for, anymore.
The flicking firelight cast eery shadows over the painting.
What was the definition of magic, anyway?
In her time, people didn’t even say the word.
Why though? Because they were jealous of it?
Because they were ashamed that they’d wiped it all out? Because they were afraid?
‘It’s a painting of the unicorn from the garden, isn’t it?
’ Her voice was flat from holding everything inside, her emotions and magic on lockdown.
‘Before . . .’ She trailed off. Before his horn was stolen.
Dian gave another nod, and she ran her fingers through her hair, her rosewood box scarily close to cracking.
Everyone had always wondered how Stubbs had managed to make his stallion so realistic.
The tour guide had said he’d just used a male horse.
Why hadn’t anyone known there’d been a male unicorn here?
Particularly as this painting was heralded as a masterpiece, the unicorn representing the very spirit of freedom.
Maybe there was magic in it, she thought, with a sudden raging fury.
It certainly seemed like a spell to capture someone’s soul so thoroughly in paint and leave it trapped forever in a golden frame.
‘I could never understand why he looked so sad,’ she finally bit out, choking on the words.
This painting was the biggest lie of all. ‘I get it now.’
‘He is heartbroken.’ Dian’s voice cracked.
Suddenly she wanted to throw the painting in the fire.
Instead, she hastily leafed through the stack of papers in front of her to distract herself.
They were in here to try and find some answers to the wards, some answers to the Jewel, anyway.
What better place to start? It gave her something to do with her hands, too, which were trembling traitorously, and her head wouldn’t stop spinning.
There was a grandfather clock in the corner, and the slow ticking of the hands was hypnotic, a terrible reminder of the ticking clock in her own library.
Moth was so quiet, she wondered if he was asleep, or hiding.
She focused on the words written on the ivory paper.
Picking one up, she ran her fingers over the surface.
It felt so different to modern paper. More like cloth, the weight infinitely heavier.
Black pen strokes, a measured, neat hand flowing in tight lines.
Sir Joshua’s, she realised, a spark of her old excitement rearing back up.
Pulling the sheet closer, her eyes moved back and forth over the words.
Although each letter looked as if it had been placed with infinite care, she struggled to make sense of any of it.
As if the letters danced before her, taunting her.
She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms and tried again. She could smell the faint scent of sandalwood, hear the popping of the fire.
The 25th day of July, 1837.
She stared.
The date, the top line of a letter.
Suddenly, the fog in her head cleared. It wasn’t 1837.
It couldn’t be. Her grip on her magic slipped a bit in her shock.
Somewhere, a moth was circling one of the oil lamps in a gleeful spellbinding panic, a mouse instructing another mouse where to find food, and in the fire, an insect gave a shriek and then died.
She stared at the date. If this was right, and she hadn’t misremembered the history, then the terracotta dragon hadn’t been here for a day or two.
Not a week, not even a month. She’d been here two years.
Unable to believe it, thinking she must have made a mistake, she scoured the rest of the desk, finding other papers bearing dates from the summer of 1837.
She sounded out a single word, low at the back of her throat. ‘Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.’
Her eyes returned to the first paper.
Dearest Horatio,