I looked at her. “Wow. That’s a really long answer,” I said, “to a yes-or-no question.”
She grinned. “Brat,” she called me, and bent to her work. “Now, let’s see what’s going on here with this canvas.” Lifting the stretcher free of the bigger gilt outer frame, she set it gently on its own on a clean section of the table. “Well, that’s really weird. There are two . . . no, three . . . there are three layers of canvas here. What’s going on with you?” she asked the painting, then turning to me said, “I’m going to take it right off of the stretcher, okay?”
It took time.
She’d been right. There were three separate layers of canvas—the painting itself on the front, and a plain liner right at the back, but the layer we found in between them was what left me speechless for more than a minute.
At last I recovered enough to ask Wendy, “Have you ever . . . ?”
“No,” she said. “Never.”
There hadn’t been any adhesive between the three layers, and now we knew why. Because fastened to that middle layer was a single sheet of paper, with a drawing on it. And that drawing, done in what looked to be graphite—“black lead pencil,” as they used to call it—was an almost perfect copy of the painting.
Almost.
In the painting, there were three men working on the Bellewether—an older, white-haired man, a younger man, and one aged somewhere in between them, all dressed in the fashion typical of this part of America in the mid-eighteenth century.
But in this drawing, that third man was wearing a soft cap and wooden shoes and a distinctive waistcoat that, in combination, made me think that he might just be an Acadian.
And also in the drawing there were two men not included in the painting.
One, from his skin tone and features, appeared to be black. Tall and finely dressed, he also seemed to be directing what the other men were doing.
The second man wore a sharply cocked black hat pulled low over his eyes, and a coat that stood out from the clothing of the others by its lack of shading, which suggested it was white. The coat’s sides were split at knee level, and the corners of its hem turned back and hooked up to allow for freer movement of his legs. And on his legs, incredibly, he wore mitasses—distinctive full-length leggings that, from how they fitted, looked to be of the same deerskin as the moccasins he wore upon his feet. I knew this uniform. I’d researched it enough when I was at the Hall-McPhail Museum. Catalogued the pieces of it that we’d had in our collection.
He was not a commonplace French soldier, but a soldier from the Troupes de la Marine.
A tiny chill that went beyond discovery climbed my spine. The ghost had been trying to tell me this, when he’d kept turning my painting around. He’d been trying to get me to look at the back. He had known this was there.
He had known.
Wendy’s focus stayed fixed on the art itself. She said, “This might have been a sketch John Pigou made before starting his painting, but I don’t know. This doesn’t look like the same artist’s hand, to me.” She didn’t try to pry the drawing loose from where it had been mounted, but she did turn its supporting sheet of canvas over, gently.
There was writing on the back.
And as I read the words, the tiny chill I’d felt became a shiver.
The sloop Bellewether, the pencilled note read plainly, being overhauled at Snug Cove in the last years of the French war. Drawn from life, it said, by Captain Wilde’s sister.
Lydia
Her fingers rejoiced at the feel of the paper. This morning they’d been in the dirt, pulling turnips, and for these days past they’d been pricked with her mending and wearied with housework. They’d washed countless apples, pared apples, cut apples for sauce, done it over and over until they had ached, and had narrowly missed being scalded today on a potful of boiling chicken. They’d earned the right, she thought, to hold the portcrayon, as surely as she’d earned the right to steal this hour for herself.
She might have chosen anything to be her subject, chosen any corner of the property to sit and draw in solitude, but she’d come here, to sit upon the fallen log that marked the boundary of the beach, and draw the men at work upon the Bellewether.
They hadn’t noticed her. To guard against the cold wind from the bay she wore her grey wool hooded cape over her plain brown petticoat and jacket, so there would have been no flash of colour to attract their eyes as she’d approached. There on her log she would have blended with the hues of the late autumn woods behind her, and she’d had the perfect freedom to observe their interactions.
Mr. Ramírez was clearly in charge today. He and Joseph, bonded by their skills and their experience, worked well with one another, each man leading in his turn depending on which task most closely fitted with his expertise. This afternoon, Mr. Ramírez held the plans, and everybody looked to him.
She’d drawn him first. She’d tried to capture something of his presence in the thin, dynamic lines before she’d moved on to French Peter. He’d been easier to render, with his solid form and simpler clothes. But there’d been nothing simple about drawing Mr. de Sabran.
New York had altered things. It was as if she had been given spectacles with lenses of a new and different colour, and in looking through them now she found that everything was changed.
It had begun, she thought, that day at the de Joncourts’ when Mr. de Sabran had been upstairs with his sergeant, and Captain Bonneau had sought to charm her in the parlour. That he’d been unsuccessful had amused the eldest daughter of the family—Jeanne, her name in French was, though she’d introduced herself as Jane—who had remarked, “He thinks quite highly of himself, Miss Wilde. You’ll wound his pride.”
“My pride is unassailable,” Captain Bonneau had promised.
“Yes,” had been Jane’s smooth reply. “It is a failing common to your people.”
He had laughed. “I think it shocks Mademoiselle Wilde to hear you offer me such insults.”
Lydia had not intended anything to show upon her face, and she’d apologized. “It’s only . . . I assumed you were both French.”
“Ah. Yes, we are,” Captain Bonneau said, “but my hosts, regretfully, are Huguenots, and Protestant. A different faith.”
“A persecuted faith,” said Jane. “My father’s family fled from France, and lived in London for a time, then Ireland. And now here.”
“You want to watch them very carefully,” Captain Bonneau remarked to Lydia. He winked. “They will take over and control New York. Already one of them has been made governor.”
She had not given much thought to the heritage of Governor DeLancey, even with the war, for it was widely known that he’d been born here in New York, and there were none to doubt his loyalty. But she had always looked upon the French as being all one people, so to be confronted lately with all these divisions into neutral French, Canadian, and Huguenot was something very new.
Captain Bonneau appeared to understand her thoughts, because he said, “A common language does not make a common people, sadly. But it also is a truth the man who is your enemy today may be your friend tomorrow. Mademoiselle de Joncourt, here—her grandfather and mine would have been fighting one another.”
Jane de Joncourt nodded. “Very likely.”
“And today,” the captain said, “we sit here drinking coffee in this parlour, so they would be scandalized. But this, I think, is nicer. We move forward, yes? And so it will be, too, one day, with your side,” he told Lydia, “and mine. You are too young, perhaps, to see this now. You cannot have much more than eighteen years . . .”
“I’m twenty.”
“Twenty. Ah. Then you are maybe old enough. And you”—he turned to Jane de Joncourt—“may find you are sorry to be rid of me, when I have been exchanged.”