Bone House_ A Novel - Betsy Tobin [43]
Samuell is on his knees tending the fire when I enter, his face reddened from the heat and his hands covered in ash.
“What news of Chepton?” I ask him straightaway.
“I saw no ghosts, if that is your meaning,” he says, standing up and brushing soot from his legs. “Nor corpses either,” he adds with a smile. I think of his face the other night when he burst into the room: the whiteness of his pallor and the look of fear within his eyes.
“You saw nothing?”
He shakes his head no.
“Did you ask about?”
“Aye, and they thought I was well mad,” he says, lifting a heavy iron cauldron onto a hook over the fire. Just then Mary enters carrying a pail of water.
“Samuell, they need you in the yard,” she says. Samuell nods and slips out the back.
“You were right,” she says to me. “ ’Twas but a tale.”
“And you’ve heard nothing since?” I ask. She shakes her head no.
“Perhaps it was no more than a practical joke,” I say.
“A poor excuse for poking fun, if you ask me, at the expense of the dead,” she says, pouring water from the pail into the cauldron over the fire.
“Who knows where rumors come from?” I reply. The great-bellied woman claimed that there were fairies in the forest: that they came to us in the dead of night and whispered half-truths in our ears. Perhaps she was right.
I rise and cross to the door, peering out to see if the painter has arrived. Mary gives me a piercing look. “He is later than usual,” she says knowingly. I tell her of the miniature, and of my master’s commission. She looks at me askance.
“Why, ’tis morbid beyond belief. And you agreed?” she says, raising her eyebrows in a skeptical arch.
“I had no choice,” I say, not entirely truthfully. “It was my master’s wish.”
“And if he asked you to lie upon his bed, I suppose you’d grant him that as well?”
“I could not see the harm. He is lonely, and misses her terribly.”
“Like half the village,” she says, with a nod to the other room. “ ’Tis his own fault. He need not be alone. There are many who’d have him, with his wealth and good looks.” She turns and throws me an irreverent grin. “Let’s have a look at it then,” she adds. I remove the frame from beneath my skirts and open it. For once Mary is serious, her eyes poring over the tiny painting.
“This is a fine thing indeed,” she says with awe, cradling the tiny frame in her callused palm.
“Do you see the likeness?” I ask.
“If this is all he has to work from, then he will have a job to do,” she says doubtfully.
“It isn’t all,” I say, reaching for the portrait and closing the frame.
“I forgot,” she says with a teasing smile. “He will have you as well, and all your fine words.”
She returns to the other room, and I sit upon the stool to wait. Once again I open the frame to study the face within. The woman is indeed beautiful: more so, perhaps, than Dora, but without the same allure. The mouth is very like, especially in the fullness of the lips, and the eyes are of a similar type, but they are not a match. I will be hard-pressed to explain the differences.
The door opens suddenly and he is there, standing behind Mary, who ushers him in and then returns to the other room with a wink. The painter removes his hat and smiles apologetically. “Forgive me,” he says. “I was delayed.”
His politeness takes me by surprise and I am at a loss for words. He steps forward, indicating the portrait in my hands.
“Who is this?” he asks. I rise and hand it to him.
“I found it in her cottage,” I explain. “I think it is her mother, for there is some resemblance.”
He studies it intently for a moment, turns the frame over and peers at the signature, then shakes his head in disbelief. “This painter: I was apprenticed to him for some years before he died. He is from my country and was among the first to do this sort of work,” he says. “You did not tell me your friend was Flemish.”
“I didn’t know,” I say. Dora spoke only rarely of her past, and in the