Helena smiled at her, and was about to say something reassuring when she realized that a man had entered the salon and was standing at the front. Rather than ascend the stage, however, he stood next to it, his expression impossible to read.
He was middle-aged, perhaps in his early fifties, and was dressed more like a banker than an artist, with a collar and tie and rather old-fashioned coat. His hair, which he wore swept back off his brow, was less conventional, for it was dark and wavy and fell almost to his shoulders, and he had a carefully trimmed Vandyke mustache and beard. She wasn’t sure if he was handsome, or merely striking. Either way, he wasn’t the sort of man one ignored.
He waited, his demeanor unchanging, until the room was entirely silent, and only then did he speak.
“I am Fabritius Czerny. I expect one-quarter of you, perhaps as many as a third, to flee by the end of this week. I make no apologies. This is a difficult course of study, and far beyond the talents of many here today. If you find the work I give you too challenging, you are free to withdraw from the course, or you may wish to join our class for beginners.”
His voice was soft and low, and only lightly accented. Under different circumstances, Helena might even have thought it beautiful.
“I will be blunt: I am not a pleasant person. I am not, as the Americans among you might say, ‘a nice guy.’ I am not here to be your friend or your mentor, and I have no interest in your thoughts or opinions.
“We shall begin from the beginning. You may think you know how to paint, but you do not. You know nothing. And so you must unlearn all the rubbish you have been fed, like so much pap, by your other teachers. You must forget all so you may learn all.”
He surveyed the room, a dark-maned lion assessing a herd of terrified gazelle, but rather than hide behind her easel, as others were attempting to do, Helena straightened her back and didn’t look away when his gaze swept across her. She was made of sterner stuff, and she’d faced disapproving stares before. Compared to the first ball she’d attended after Edward had ended their engagement? This was nothing.
“Most of you are American or English, so I shall teach this course in English. If you have difficulty understanding, ask a neighbor, and don’t even think of bothering me. You shall now embark on a series of sketches. Before you is paper sufficient for the exercise, as well as a selection of charcoal.”
Ma?tre Czerny set a tall stool upon the center of the stage and then strode to the side of the room, to a set of shelves that was crowded with objects of every color, shape, size, and substance. He selected a bowl of apples and, returning to the stage, placed it on the stool.
“You may begin. You have ten minutes. Do not bother to prepare the paper; simply draw. Draw what you see before you.”
Never in all her life had Helena been as apprehensive of a task as she was now. Withdrawing a stick of charcoal at random from the cup on her easel, she sketched a light outline—but she had chosen a piece of soft charcoal by mistake, and it left a thick, almost jet-black line on the paper. She scrubbed at it with a lump of putty eraser, and succeeded only in smearing the paper. Praying Ma?tre Czerny wouldn’t notice, she flipped the paper over, found a thin stalk of vine charcoal, and began again. Outline. Shadows. Shadows softened.
She needed to remove some of what she had added, and so add highlights, but the light in the salon was coming from two sources, the bank of windows and the electric lights that dangled overhead, and was reflected in quite different ways by the apples, which she was certain were papier-maché or wax, and by the bowl, which was made of a dark, almost opaque glass. She needed to—
“Enough!” Ma?tre Czerny carried the bowl and apples back to the shelf and returned with an ornate and heavily tarnished silver candelabrum. “Take up a fresh sheet of paper. This time you have five minutes. Begin!”
Her hand flew over the paper, trying in vain to capture what her eye saw, but she got the proportions all wrong, and she hadn’t the time to erase what she’d done, and the finer details of the silver were vanishing into a misshapen blur that bore more resemblance to a dead tree than a piece of antique silver, and—
“Enough!” He removed the candelabrum and replaced it with a wreck of a violin, its strings broken and tangled. “Two minutes!”
The shape of the instrument was easy to capture, but she’d barely sketched its outline when the dreaded order came—“Enough! One minute!”—and the violin was replaced with an enormous conch shell, pale ivory with a delicate pink interior, its curving lines so—
“Enough! That is all for the moment.”
Helena set down her charcoal, her hands shaking so badly that she had to fold them into her lap. Her sketches were crude, unfocused, and amateurish, while Mr. Moreau’s—she couldn’t help but glance at them—were elegant and effortlessly graceful.