Rebecca Wentworth's Distraction Page 5

  “I see,” he said, leafing through the bound prints.

  He went over to canvasses neatly stacked on their sides and began to flip slowly through them. He pulled one out and held it up for Miss Norris and himself to consider. It was a view of a bedchamber corner, the foot of the bedstead facing a window in gray dawn. The terrible, powerful face of a bearded old man leaned against the window, as if looking in at the occupant of the bed. The face was pale, almost ghostly, with a ring of seven mystic eyes, like planets, in halo about the hoary head.

  “God at My Window,” Miss Norris said flatly, announcing the title.

  He looked at it carefully, put it aside, and pulled out another. Here, too, was a bearded man, this one rising naked out of a wide river, palms upward, looking worshipfully toward birds circling and roosting by hundreds in the foreground trees.

  “The Prophet Amos Contemplates Creation,” Miss Norris announced.

  He said nothing to these verbal renditions but put this one aside, also, and pulled out still another: Two young men, apparently corpses, lay on their deathbeds, their souls rising out of their bodies and singing as they ascend heavenward in an attitude of prayer. The faces of the souls were joyful and quite particular, as if Rebecca had known them in life. He looked at Miss Norris and raised an eyebrow.

  “This one caused particular discomfort to Colonel and Madam Browne,” she said, instead of announcing a title. “These are Rebecca’s two . . .”—she seemed to search for a word—“brothers, who died in the recent throat distemper.”

  “I see,” he said. He returned to the painting. “But is it not a happy issue of these tragic deaths? Surely they are bent heavenward.”

  “Still, sir, the parents found it frightful, so soon following their demise. The wounds of mother and father were still open.” She looked to see if he followed her. “That she should see them ascend, was perhaps a part of the trouble as well. I think it is not so difficult to understand their reaction.”

  “But is not this canvas a glorious rendition of what she hoped or surmised of her brothers’ last hour?”

  “She always insists ‘I paint precisely what I see.’ You must understand: To her these paintings and drawings are all no mere transmogrifying to canvas by way of technique or simple fancy. Such visions she always maintained are as real to her as I am to you, standing here in this moment.”

  “How can that be so, Miss Norris?”

  “Whether it is so is not the question. Why, sir, she is a dear little visionary. Is that not clear?”

  He considered her words a moment, wondering if the child might be mad. “And these perceptions, her beatifications? Rendered as an afterthought, so to speak, upon board and canvas?”

  “And as many on drawing paper. And why not? Would she be the first to see such things in this world?”

  He laughed quietly. “Not the first, surely.” But what he had seen unsettled him, too. He understood the parents’ trepidation, even if he did not condone their response.

  “How else to explain what you have held in your own hands, sir?”

  “Indeed, Miss Norris.”

  “Did not our Savior Himself teach that we should come to see as a child?”

  He said nothing. He turned to continue his search through the stack of canvas and board. He imagined them all going up in flames, their destiny now. Many were of a lighter heart—lambs, children playing, flowers yearning toward the sun, beasts of the field and wood dancing in attitudes of homage and ritual. But the darker ones haunted him already, and he knew they would haunt him for some time: a charcoal sketch of lowering skies beneath which a colossal winged figure flew among children playing in a ring. The giant’s great saber flashed, like a well-oiled scythe above a field of ripened grain. A crowd of adults looked on in helpless horror.

  Another drawing: monstrous dragonlike forms rising out of the earth and belching malignant flame and smoke over sun-struck forest and sea.

  “Such visions in a child of . . . what? Twelve years?” he said, as if musing to himself in a quiet voice. “In a child of such beauty and apparent innocence.”

  “Yet she paints what she sees,” Miss Norris repeated. “Surely these are not studies from some master.”

  “That would seem plain enough, Miss Norris. But why destroy even these jubilant ones?”

  “These darker visions are the more recent, but Madam Browne said only that the colonel’s orders were to destroy all these.”

  “All,” he said.

  “Quite, Mr. Sanborn.”

  “And these expensive books and prints?”

  “To be locked in Squire William’s library, a chamber over the back parlor. A harmful influence, it is now believed. Inexplicably so, yet harmful nevertheless.”

  He had heard that Squire Browne’s library was one of the most impressive in the province: arising from a legacy of books passed down through his father, Aaron Browne, from his grandfather, Richard, one of the first-generation “merchant-princes” of the Piscataqua. And to his grandfather’s collection of authors from classical times through the previous century, Colonel Browne had acquired, in addition to sermons and other works of Anglican respectability, a fine inventory of contemporary English authors: Swift, Pope, Shaftesbury, Addison, and Steele, among others. It was a matter of some pride with the colonel to say that if Colonel Pepperrell’s library was the only one on the Piscataqua to rival his own, his, Browne’s, nonetheless, exceeded that of his august competitor on the north bank of the great river.

  Sanborn learned that as a young man William Browne had been sent to Harvard where, Miss Norris assured him, he had graduated high in his class in recognition of his social position among the colonies. He was not an ignorant tradesman who had somehow managed to rise in the world, though his father had also sent him to Boston to be trained in a counting house before he became a partner in the family’s business.

  Sanborn silently and quickly passed through a number of other illustrations. He came upon the canvas of her self-portrait.

  He held up the painting and looked at it for some time, turning it this way and that. The face and hands were everything, as if the very opposite of his own rendering. He held the painful thought only a moment, as if she were instructing him by example.

  Yet even in her self-portrait was another vision, if clearly the girl’s own face. Here, too, some fanciful power was being expressed, rather than a conventional or literal rendering. Here again the face and limbs, the whole body, were merely the material vessel of some other energy, an energy that seemed to arise out of her deeper, more vital character. Once again the artist had focused—he could think of no other way to express it—on a reality behind the physical reality. Not Amos, this time. Not God. Not demons or dragons, but just the girl herself, beautifully, strangely, vibrantly animated with inanimate pigment on inanimate canvas.

  Such mystic musings were not natural to him, or easy for him by education or training. But the girl’s pictures forced the viewer’s mind to dwell on these, as he now put it to himself, “other matters.” He knew, of course, that artists in other epochs had painted work that might be considered in “the mystic line”; he knew of, even if he hadn’t read, the mystics of the Word as well. All these were not unheard of, but rather simply beyond his ken.

  “It is Rebecca herself, is it not, Mr. Sanborn?” Miss Norris asked, disturbing his ruminations.

  She startled him back into awareness of her and of the great silent house around them. He looked about the room, as if for a last time. “It is she, Miss Norris, but something more as well, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Something more? Some grace beyond the reach of art?” She offered a complacent smile. “Well, yes, Mr. Sanborn, I think you are correct on that point. And perhaps that’s where the trouble lies.”

  “Perhaps,” he agreed. “But I would have said something beyond grace, too, some amazement in the soul.” He looked at her and she stared back as if untouched by his extravagance. “Of course it is a commonplace as well
, is it not, that those having the most delicate sensation and taste, whose faculties are the brightest, the most keen and penetrating, nay, even the most spiritual, are most given to nervous disorders.” He held up Rebecca’s own portrait to better light.

  “May I keep this one alone, Miss Norris?” She did not answer. “For a brief time at least,” he went on. “I’ll make you a personal deposit for security, to assure you nothing will befall the portrait until I have finished my considerations of it and return it to you for disposal.”

  “I can’t take such a chance,” she finally said, “circumventing my employer’s wishes.”

  He decided not to argue or insist. He could see that would lead nowhere at the moment, except to make her more adamant on principle. He knew that she had already given in to his pleadings more than she thought appropriate.

  “Would it not be possible to discover the whereabouts of the child, in some town on the frontier, as you said?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said with a grave face, “as it is not my place to make inquiries, and as doing so would only raise suspicions and even firmer secrecy.”

  “But if you should come into such information, would you share it with me, Miss Norris? I would be most grateful.”

  She looked at him directly. He was sure, again, that she knew more than she spoke. But he detected a sympathetic attitude, despite her reticence and the formality of their relations. “To what purpose, Mr. Sanborn?”

  “I believe this child, whom I came to understand in some small capacity through our sittings, must suffer in her removal, whatever its nature. I have seen enough to know that. Moreover, I believe you share my sentiments concerning your former charge, Miss Norris. May we not inquire into her welfare on our own, out of compassion?”

  “Her parents feel compassion. And love.”

  “Yet they are unsettled by her, they have removed her, and they have denied her exercise of her powers and her deepest delight.”

  “They believe some discipline is called for, and that is their prerogative, as I have said. Perhaps she need spend more time in this world, rather than some other.”

  “You are right, of course, in regard to the parents.” He believed she was merely mouthing her master’s argument, not her feelings. “Yet the heart speaks otherwise, to one outside the family. And as you have said yourself, she draws and paints only what she sees in this world. It is not some other, if you report her words correctly. Her sight will remain unchanged under any discipline. It is her seeing, and there is nothing to be done about it, is there?”

  “I cannot say, sir.” She made a motion to suggest it was time to leave.

  “Think on it, Miss Norris. I beg you.” He handed her his new card, in case her mind took a more agreeable turn.

  Chapter 8

  REBECCA HAD MADE HER MARK on Daniel Sanborn, portrait painter. Perhaps because of his anger at her effrontery, he renewed his efforts to learn the mysteries of painting faces and hands. He had seen what an Old World master could do; now he had seen what a gifted child could do as well.

  He found that he continually studied Rebecca’s painting of herself, as if by study he might unlock its secret. And how he came to be in possession of it was one of the most unexpected, yet straightforward, incidents of his early months in Portsmouth. He had been sitting in his painting room after a day of good work, enjoying his pipe and a glass of Madeira, looking out his window into the ruddy haze settling over the city of a September evening. There was a knock on his door; he rose at his leisure. Two more knocks before he reached the door suggested to him some urgency about the person who sought his attention.

  He was pleased to find Miss Norris wrapped in a hooded cape. Her eyes were fixed on the card he had attached to his door:

  DANIEL SANBORN —DRAWING MASTER PORTRAITS IN OILS

  She held in her hands a large object, well covered. Upon entering his rooms and exchanging greetings, she immediately uncovered it to reveal Rebecca’s self-portrait.

  “They have burned the others,” she said. “I saved this one out. Surreptitiously, of course. I thought one product of her childhood should be salvaged. And seeing your particular interest in this one, your admiration, as well as my own, I chose it.”

  “How’d you manage it, Miss Norris?” he said with a great encouraging smile, lit by tobacco and wine.

  “I placed it, well disguised, with some other last things as I was removing to my new residence and position.” She looked grave, as if the memory of the risk she had run was a sobering reflection. “You may borrow it if you like, for a time.”

  “Thank you, Miss Norris. You must know how grateful and pleased I am. I stand by my offer to leave you payment in surety.”

  “That won’t be necessary; I know you value it and will take every appropriate care.”

  He offered her a congratulatory glass of wine, and to his surprise she accepted. She was an energetic little woman who stepped about like some uncaged bird admiring his rooms and views. His painting room was of particular interest to her. And she was taken by a portrait in progress of a young woman.

  “Who is she, sir?” Miss Norris said.

  “Is she familiar?”

  “Oddly so, yes, as if I know her without having seen her.”

  “Then you’ve read Mr. Richardson’s novel?”

  “Who has not? It’s all the talk.” She looked at the portrait curiously. “My goodness, it is she!”

  “Pamela Andrews,” he said proudly. “A mere fancy on my part, of course, but perhaps available as a striking specimen. And something of a conversation piece as well.” People would visit his rooms expecting specimens, prints, and models, and lessons.

  “Indeed. She is very well done, and very amusing, sir.”

  He had painted Pamela in profile, her dark hair partly covered by a white cap with two little upright points above the forehead. Her bodice and gown he rendered in brown with white trim and white ruffles about the neck. He had gloved her arms and hands.

  Miss Norris was completely taken with his Pamela and spent some time before it. Sanborn took her interest as a good sign for the response of future patrons.

  He did not pursue the topic of finding the child, for he did not wish to unsettle her, but rather congratulated her on her forethought and temerity and allowed her to savor their mutual pleasure over what she had accomplished for them.

  IN THE MONTHS that followed, he made many a study of the painting’s confident magic. It was, he often admitted to himself, a little like having the living child staring back out at him from a looking glass. But he grew familiar with the prepossessing face and found that he began to welcome it; he no longer felt the strange apprehension and outrage he had experienced upon first viewing it. In fact, he was reminded of something Smibert had told him when Sanborn called upon the old master in his Queen Street rooms in Boston during Sanborn’s early months in the city. He had felt emboldened to call upon Smibert—by that time the dean of American portrait painters—because both of them had mutual acquaintances from Hogarth and Ellis’s academy in London.

  “I very much enjoyed teaching Anna Berkeley while on shipboard, sailing for Newport, in Rhode Island,” the older painter had said. “I now have the pleasure, in addition, to believe that she may not only be the first woman to paint portraits in America, but may well be one of the finest limners to have once practiced the trade on these shores.”

  “Is that so?” Sanborn replied, hoping the master would ask to see a sample or two of his own work. Smibert seemed charmed by the thought of a female pupil of talent who might make her mark in the New World. That rather surprised Sanborn at the time. But he himself was hoping for some advice and help with securing commissions, so he did not then give much thought to Madam Berkeley, or her renowned husband, or the college they had all hoped to establish in Bermuda.

  Yet now the master’s words rang again in his ears. Rebecca surely was another female of talent. But Rebecca’s gift, unlike what must have been the decorous ap
titude of the bishop’s wife, was eccentric and rare—not the primitive talent of some untutored New World limner, say a Robert Feke. No, it was the gift of a powerful, disquieting, and deeply personal vision.

  Now in Portsmouth all these months later, however, he found that having Rebecca’s self-portrait in his rooms kept his curiosity about the girl’s fate foremost in his thoughts. One might say that his curiosity and his compassion grew, were nurtured, by her pictorial presence. Miss Norris was obviously acquainted with many family members and relations, so he began to plan a means of convincing Miss Norris to discover Rebecca’s circumstances and whereabouts.

  He was not sure just what he would do with such intelligence, but he wanted to know so that he might contemplate her fate more exactly. Just as her troubling perceptions and techniques had come to frequent his mind, so now did her actual presence, or the memory of it, haunt his reveries in moments of leisure. Somewhere in the back of his mind he vaguely fancied that he might strike out to find Rebecca at an undetermined point in the future, perhaps months, or even years, from now. He could understand well enough his fascination with her extraordinary abilities, but he found himself less comfortable with his memories and impressions of the child herself. She had become in his mind like some bewitching creature met in an unforgettable dream.

  Chapter 9

  A MESSENGER BOY CALLED upon Sanborn in his rooms one day in late autumn with an invitation to wait upon Madam Browne. His services were required once again, this time to execute a portrait of the grande dame herself.

  When she came into the familiar parlor, she immediately congratulated him on his ever-growing reputation. “My husband is away, traveling with the surveyor general on matters of timber and the law,” she explained. “But he suggested I give you this offer, and that if you find it satisfactory, we may begin at your first convenience.” She handed him a folded sheet of paper. On it Squire Browne had written a price, ten guineas, and made suggestions as to positioning and attributes.