The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [63]
“She’s exquisite, isn’t she?” he said, pausing beside me. “This window came from a private collection in New York City, quite undocumented. We think it’s from rather late in the Westrum opus. He must have done it during his retirement; certainly after he moved to Rochester. At least that’s the speculation among art historians.”
I nodded, slipping my phone back into my purse. I didn’t want to tell Stuart, not yet anyway, about my own discovery.
“She’s incredibly striking. Not beautiful exactly, but very unusual. You don’t know who the model was?”
“Unfortunately, no. We don’t know much about that period of Westrum’s life. He’d fallen out of favor and retreated here for the last twenty-some years of his life, after his wife died. No one was paying much attention to his work, sadly enough. We assume this woman was someone from the family who commissioned the window, but that’s only a guess. It may also have been Westrum’s daughter, Annabeth. The colors are particularly powerful in this piece, do you agree?”
“Yes. And I see the pattern in the leading.”
“That’s right. Here’s the other thing I just love in this window—look at the gradations of color in the flowers. It’s the spectrum of the rainbow, red to violet. Which is a wonderful visual pun, because the flowers are irises, and of course in Greek mythology Iris was the goddess of the rainbow.”
“That is wonderful to know,” I said quietly, trying to hide the thrill of excitement, electric and alive, that ran through me as he pointed out the flowers. If Iris is to leave your household . . . “Did you find anything interesting in the files?” I asked, nodding at his folders.
“Well, yes and no. Come back to the desk and I’ll show you.”
I followed him through the narrow hallway to the console, where he opened the folders and spread out the papers. There was a copy of the letter of receipt and thanks from the church for the chapel windows, clipped to a series of other letters.
“These are the commission requests,” Stuart said. “I only had a chance to glance at them quickly. You’re welcome to look further, of course. But the windows seem to have been ordered by a V. W. Branch in 1936. The address is in New York City, so Westrum probably knew him there. There’s not much more information—just a detailing of the dimensions, some sketches of the images requested, that sort of thing.”
I looked through the letters, all typed, all signed in black pen by V. W. Branch.
“Not him,” I said. “Her. V. W. Branch is probably Vivian Whitney Branch, an early feminist.” I was trying to speak very calmly, but I felt the sort of excitement you feel when the pieces of a puzzle are about to come together and make sense. “She had a sister, Nelia Elliot, who lived in The Lake of Dreams. That’s probably the connection to the chapel windows. Nelia Elliot was active in the suffrage movement, too.”
I went through all the papers carefully, one by one, hoping for a more tangible link to Rose, but I didn’t find anything.
“Well, that’s disappointing. I’d hoped the person who commissioned these might be an ancestor of mine,” I explained, for Stuart was looking very perplexed. “But nothing here has her name, or her handwriting. I found a few letters of hers at my mother’s house—I didn’t bring them, unfortunately. But I’d recognize the handwriting.”
“Well, it’s quite unlikely that your ancestor would have known Frank Westrum,” Stuart observed, a little affronted, taking a page from me and studying the script. “Not unless she lived in New York City before 1920. Or here thereafter.”
“I don’t know where she lived,” I said. “But I do have a feeling she knew him.”
“Ah, feelings,” he said indulgently. “Wonderful, ephemeral things, feelings.”
Annoyed, I pulled the phone from my purse and scrolled again to the image of the Jacob window. “Look at this—look at the woman behind the sack of grain.”
Stuart studied the screen, two spots of color surfacing on his cheeks.
“I see what