A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [64]
“That’s just it,” said Annabelle, glancing over her shoulder at her brother. “You’ll be forced to travel. You will become itinerant.” She paused and then repeated the word itinerant, as if she had just discovered it, and maybe she had. “This is how you will get out,” she added as Branwell released his grip on her arm. “Think about that.”
What Branwell did not know about the papier mâché towns that had so affected him was that itinerancy was central to their creation. Itinerate draftsmen had been dispatched to the farthest reaches of France to draw the details of each house, public building, garden shed, crumbling wall, broken window, piggery, chicken coop, struggling fruit tree. Some were sent farther afield to the coveted borderlands of Belgium and Prussia, where they innocently measured and recorded the length of streets and alleys, town gates and fortifications, then plotted the dimensions of adjacent outcroppings and caves. They returned to Paris with their leather satchels and portfolios overflowing with accurate drawings of the pristine palaces of the rich, collapsing hovels of the poor, markets, barns, bridges, and towers, and the varying textures of the surrounding fields and fortified or unfortified farms; everything that was needed for craftsmen to reproduce the world in miniature in order to facilitate the battles of a king.
Later that night Annabelle slowly descended the back stairs into the now darkened kitchen and abandoned her brother’s shirt on a chair beside the door. Moonlight entered the place through two large windows and settled on the objects in the room as if by design—several pitchers, one large bowl, and three pale onions shone. Annabelle always noticed images such as these, but even though, on nights like this, she would sometimes stop and gaze at one dramatically lit object or another, it was only the ships that she chose to capture in her paintings. Apart from these vessels her art was almost entirely innocent of the actual. Still, even as she limped across a kitchen that had moonlight on the walls and firelight on the floor, the masts of her father’s ships were visible through the windows, and on the ceiling swam a river of silver light.
You might think that with all this reference to moonlight and water and wreckage that Annabelle had a romantic soul, but you would be very wrong. In fact, she read no novels and brooked no nonsense, and was an astute and unsentimental judge of character, particularly the character of her bog-draining, forest-plundering father. She suspected that were Branwell to linger too long here on the island he too would become the object of drainage and plunder of one kind or another and she wanted, as much as possible, to save him from that.
And so, the next day, after a morning spent with the apple-peeling machine and a bushel of apples, a morning during which she noted that the peels falling from the fruit resembled gold and crimson ribbons tumbling to the floor and knowing that she had no desire to paint them, she washed her hands, placed a bonnet on her head, and a shawl on her shoulders, and moved as quickly as she was able across the yard to her father’s offices.
What a masculine world Annabelle would have had to tramp through in order to reach her father! There was wood everywhere. Logs were being unloaded from the hulls of the two ungainly timber ships that had recently arrived from the northern lakes, and scattered here and there were the stacks of planked lumber that would eventually make their way to the opposite side of the island to be used to build schooners and clippers. The first timber raft of the season was being assembled in the small harbour and this was a noisy French business all round: men were cursing and shouting at each other in a language