To Be a Glamourist
When Jane awoke the next morning, Vincent was already up and sitting at the table in their room. He wore his nightshirt, which she hoped meant that he had spent at least some time asleep, though she had no memory of him coming to bed. When he saw her sit up, he greeted her with a smile, as though nothing had happened the night before. His only nod to the events was to make arrangements to go with her to the Whitten estate rather than working with Frank as he had originally planned. Indeed, throughout the morning, Vincent seemed resolute in pretending that they had nothing more pressing than working on the glamural.
In moments when he thought he was unobserved, the ease of his manner vanished, and it was clear that his spirits were oppressed. But whenever Jane or anyone else spoke to him, he rallied and made every effort to seem unaffected.
Jane wanted to shake him.
But she also honoured Vincent for attempting to prevent his father from having an effect on him, so for their trip to the Whitten estate, she would let him be only a glamourist again. Having nothing to think of but where a fold was placed seemed a luxury beyond measure.
As the day passed, however, Jane began to reconsider the pleasures of working on a glamural. She bent over the table that Mrs. Whitten had supplied for her drawings. It felt decidedly strange to be surrounded by people working glamour and to confine herself to paper, but there was nothing for it. In truth, the glamourists from Mrs. Ranford’s and Mrs. Whitten’s estates had a degree of craft that would be enviable in London. There was Jeannette, whose skill with finer weaves was wasted as a field slave. Imogene had an exquisite sense of colour that served her well as a lady’s maid. Indeed, the largest challenge was that many of the glamourists could only be spared from their duties for a few hours at a time, so much of Jane’s effort was spent in managing the work.
Tilting her head to the side, Jane considered the ice floe she had planned to surround the stairs to the balcony. A répétition mousseux would provide the necessary transparency while appearing solid, but it might be too busy to have it as well as columns of ice going up on the bannisters.
Vincent’s footsteps approached the table, and a shadow fell across her page. “Muse…” Beads of sweat stood upon his brow from the glamour he had been doing that morning. She suspected he was suffering from the heat more than usual, since he had kept his coat on due to the presence of ladies. He leaned on the table as though consulting with her about the plans and wove a muddied silence around them. “What are we going to do about Mrs. Ransford?”
Jane lifted her head. “Oh dear.”
The pale woman stood at the side of the ballroom working on one of the ice columns. Jane had based that part of the design on a memory of visiting an icehouse on one of the grand estates for which she and Vincent had created a glamural. Packed in layers of sawdust lay milky blocks of ice harvested from the estate during the winter. The translucent striations of white and pale blue had put Jane in mind of an ethereal marble. She had intended to suggest that sense of marbling in the columns, but use the translucence to allow parts of the original ballroom to show through.
What Mrs. Ransford had rendered had the correct shape, but was an opaque white with dark blue streaks. “Perhaps she is not finished?”
“And how would you thin the folds to create the translucence at this stage without spoiling the form?”
Jane sighed, knowing he was right. “Oh—wait. Perhaps if one were to use the blue streaks to create fissures.… Imagine using an anchor thread here, like so, to bend the blue around.”
Jane moved her hands in the motions that she would use if working glamour, but kept herself carefully free of the ether. She held her left hand out at the angle of one of the blue striations. With her other hand, she turned the palm flat to the floor and pushed it under her forearm as though sliding a curtain aside.
“You see? By taking hold of the blue and white together, we might stretch it into a gossamer weight into the column. It should actually provide some depth, and … in fact, if we use Nkiruka’s muddling, as she does with the muddied silence, we might even get some diffraction.” Jane squinted at the air, trying to imagine the effect without actually looking into the ether. “Do you think that would … what?”
Vincent had the most interesting consciousness about him. A slight smile played at his lips. Compressing his lips, he shook his head and looked away.
“Why are you smiling?”