A Red Herring Without Mustard

“To tell you the truth,” she went on, lowering her voice to a confidential whisper, “the smell of her chemical preparations sometimes drives me out of the house, but then, it’s all she has, poor dear.”

Chemical preparations? My ears went up like those of an old warhorse at the sound of the bugle.

“Mostly sulfur,” she said. “Ursula uses the fumes to bleach the willow withies. They end up as white as polished bones, you know, but oh dear—the smell!”

I could foresee that I was going to have a late night poring over books in Uncle Tar’s chemical library. Already my mind was racing ahead to the chemical possibilities of salicin (C₁₃H₁₈O₇)—which was discovered in willow bark in 1831 by Leroux—and good old sulfur (S). I already knew from personal experience that certain willow catkins, kept in a sealed box for several weeks, give off the most dreadful odor of dead fish, a fact which I had filed away for future use.

“Through here,” Mrs. Harewood said, ducking to keep her head from banging on an exceptionally low beam. “Mind your head and watch your step.”

Her studio was a glorious place. Clear north light flooded in through the angled transom windows overhead, making it seem like a room suddenly stumbled upon in a forest glade.

A large wooden easel stood in the light, and on it was a half-finished portrait of Flossie, the sister of Feely’s friend Sheila Foster. Flossie was sitting in a large upholstered chair, one leg curled under her, petting an enormous white Persian cat that nestled in her lap. The cat, at least, looked almost human.

Actually, Flossie didn’t look that bad, either. She was not my favorite living person, but I didn’t hold that against her. The portrait captured perfectly, in a way that even a camera can’t, her air of highly polished dopiness.

“Well, what do you think?”

I looked around at the tubes of paints, the daubed rags, and the profusion of camel-hair brushes that jutted up all around me from tins, glasses, and bottles like reeds in a December marsh.

“It’s a very nice studio,” I said. “Is that what you wanted to show me?”

I pointed a finger at Flossie’s portrait.

“Good heavens, no!” she said.

I had not noticed it before but at the far end of the studio, away from the windows, were two shadowy corners in which perhaps a dozen unframed paintings were leaning with their faces against the wall, their paper-sealed backsides towards the room.

Vanetta (by now I was thinking of her as “Vanetta,” rather than “Mrs. Harewood”) bent over them, shifting each one as if she were riffling through the record cards in a giant index file.

“Ah! Here it is,” she said at last, pulling a large canvas from among the others.

Keeping its back towards me, she carried the painting to the easel. After shifting Flossie to a nearby wooden chair, she turned it round and lifted it into place.

She stepped back without a word, giving me an unobstructed view of the portrait.

My heart stopped.

It was Harriet.

FOURTEEN

HARRIET. MY MOTHER.

She is sitting on the window box of the drawing room at Buckshaw. At her right hand, my sister Ophelia, aged about seven, plays with a cat’s cradle of red wool, its strands entangling her fingers like slender scarlet snakes. To Harriet’s left, my other sister, Daphne, although she is too young to read, uses a forefinger to mark her place in a large book: Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

Harriet gazes tenderly down, a slight smile on her lips, like a Madonna, at the white bundle which she holds supported in the crook of her left arm: a child—a baby dressed in a white, trailing garment of elaborate and frothy lace—could it be a baptismal gown?

I want to look at the mother but my eyes are drawn repeatedly back to the child.

It is, of course, me.

“Ten years ago,” Vanetta was saying, “I went to Buckshaw on a winter day.”

She was now standing behind me.

“How well I remember it. There had been a killing frost overnight. Everything was covered with ice. I rang up your mother and suggested that we leave it until another day, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She was going away, she said, and she wanted the portrait as a gift for your father. She meant to give it to him as a surprise when she returned.”

My head was spinning.

“Of course, she never did,” she added softly, “and frankly I’ve not since had the heart to hand it over to him, the poor man. He grieves so.”

Grieves? Although I had never thought about it in precisely this way, it was true. Father did grieve, but he did so in private, and mostly in silence.

“The painting, I suppose, belongs to him, since your mother paid me for it in advance. She was a very trusting person.”

Was she? I wanted to say. I wouldn’t know. I didn’t know her as well as you did.

Suddenly, I needed to get out of this place—to be outdoors again where I could breathe my own breath.

“I think you’d better keep it, Mrs. Harewood—at least for now. I wouldn’t want to upset Father.”