Upon my return to my childhood home seven weeks ago, I had reclaimed the farthest corner of the conservatory as my art studio. I had spent a week shifting and adjusting things just so, and another preparing canvases and pigments, but truly I’d been stalling for time, hoping my desire to paint would return. It seemed I’d been finding one way or another to stall ever since. The days I did manage to put brush to canvas usually ended with a terrible headache and a gnawing pain in my gut, if not an outright temper tantrum.
I so desperately wanted to recapture my ability, my passion for painting, and I hated myself for losing control of my emotions when things did not go my way. But most of all, I lived in fear and dread that my talent wouldn’t return, that it had deserted me forever. My entire life, since the moment I discovered I could copy the people around me on paper, had been devoted to this one pursuit. If it had deserted me, like my mother, like Will, then I didn’t know what I was going to do.
I stood at the edge of my studio space, with the late afternoon sun shining brightly down on it, and delayed again. I could turn around and go find something else to occupy my time—play the pianoforte or my viola, or answer my correspondence. Avoid the confrontation and the prospect of my failure another day. Or I could force my feet forward, don my apron, and mix my paints.
I breathed in deep, the gentle scents of the plants and flowers behind me competing with the sharp odors of turpentine, gesso, and linseed oil in my studio. I felt queasy at the prospect of picking up a paintbrush, but my brother’s words kept ringing in my ear. I could hear the concern, the confusion. The accusation. There was no choice. I had to find my way past this. And if that meant painting until the muscles in my fingers would no longer grip a brush, practicing over and over again every skill I’d ever learned, then so be it.
I forced my body forward, breathing through the swell of nausea as I slipped my apron over my head and tied the strings behind me. After securing the kerchief I used to protect my hair, I flipped back the covering over the canvas on my easel and smiled in reluctant agreement. Trevor was right. This landscape was worse than the one hanging in Uncle Andrew’s receiving room.
I lifted it from the easel and moved toward the corner to prop it against the wall out of the sun. Why I took such care to preserve its color, I’m not sure, except out of habit. I chose another canvas instead, this one a portrait I had begun a few weeks prior of the cook’s granddaughter. The rudiments were there, the basic outline. Now I simply needed to fill in the details, I told myself. Nothing to be concerned with. I’d done this hundreds of times before.
I was bent over mixing the paints I would need for the little girl’s dress when I felt a now familiar brush against my legs.
“There you are,” I said, acknowledging the gray tabby. “I wondered when you would turn up.”
He purred as he rubbed his body against my ankle one more time before crossing the room to what had become his usual spot in the corner of the wicker settee at the edge of my studio space. He hopped up and circled twice before settling in the bed of blankets I had given him during one of my more fanciful moods. After dark it grew cold in the conservatory, and I’d worried that on the nights he failed to find his way into my bedchamber, he would be chilled. It was silly really. The house cat was one of our mousers, and was supposed to stay belowstairs with his other mouse-hunting compatriots. But he was a sly one. It didn’t matter how many times he was banished to the kitchens, he still found his way back upstairs, and attached to my side.
I didn’t know why. I hadn’t been the most welcoming of humans when he first turned up in my studio during the week I returned to Blakelaw House. I’d never had a pet. And though I didn’t dislike animals, I wasn’t particularly fond of them either. I appreciated them more for their usefulness—like the horses we rode, or my brother-in-law’s two greyhounds he used to hunt, or the mouser cats in our kitchen—than for their companionship.
But the tabby hadn’t seemed to mind my surly disposition, and simply ignored my attempts to banish him. He didn’t even seem to mind my temper tantrums. So I let him be. He rarely got in the way. And, I had to admit, I sort of enjoyed his silent company. It did make the day and the night a little less lonely.
I smiled at the mouser, who watched me with his golden eyes. I could have sworn he wore a satisfied smirk.
I lifted my palette and approached the canvas. Then after dipping my brush in the Prussian blue, I took a deep calming breath, and carefully began to apply the color as the base to the folds of the little girl’s dress.