Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [67]
My great-uncle was in his Library, peering at a letter, under the overmantel portrait of himself in his long tomato-red baronial robes with a bust of Homer. I tapped on the open door and asked if I should fetch my writing-desk and take down his answer. Lord Mansfield looked over his spectacles a little distractedly and said no, not today.
"Have you been into the Cold Bath yet this morning, sir? The doctor said—"
"I'm perfectly well, Dido, don't fuss."
I turned away, examined the carved letters on the bust by Nollekens. "Remind me. Uni Aequus Virtuti?"
He smiled at me indulgently and looked up at his plaster self. "Faithful to Virtue Alone," he translated.
"Why did you pick that as a motto?"
"It means, my dear, that as Lord Chief Justice of England I must never allow personal considerations or whims to sway my judgment: I must follow pure principle. And now what I must do"—the frown creeping over him again—"is finish reading this letter before I go in to the King's Bench."
I thought my great-uncle might change his mind and ask me to take dictation after all—his eyes, like the rest of him, being nearly seventy years old—so I stood quietly in one of the Library's recesses. Beside his coffee tray lay a knot of rosebuds; Mr. French the gardener always picked a nosegay on the summer days when the master had to drive into the stinking city. The Library was all blue and pink, sparkling with gold paint and red damask, and the air was still cool; the chill was delicious on my neck. I looked at the backs of the books, the orange and green and brown glow of their leathers; they would need another dusting soon. I contemplated the allegorical paintings above me. Justice reminded me of my great-uncle; Commerce, of my chickens, who were giving so many eggs this month that it was high time I sent some down to be sold in Hampstead. Navigation: that stood for my father, Rear Admiral John Lindsay of His Majesty's Navy. He had rescued my mother from captivity on a Spanish ship the year before I was born. I wrote him letters, telling him of my daily life at Kenwood with my cousin Elizabeth and our great-uncle and great-aunt, and sometimes when he was not too busy he dictated a reply.
The recess was lined with one of the great pier-glasses: seven and a half feet high, three and a half feet wide, the largest mirrors in England, or so Mr. Chippendale assured my great-uncle. They had been brought from France by road and sea and road again, and not one of them had broken. The glass was not tarnished yet. It gave me back to myself: my hair was dressed very high and frizzy today, and my pointed face was the colour of boiling coffee.
"Dido, are you still here?" Great-uncle Mansfield glanced up from his letter. "I forgot to say, you're wanted on the terrace. I've told Zoffany to put you in Lady Elizabeths portrait."
I grinned at him and seized my basket; went into the Ante-Room, shutting the door softly behind me; stepped out the Venetian windows and onto the grass.
"What a charming property this is, Miss Dido, this ravishing villa of Kenwood," murmured the painter with his foreign r's, as he arranged us. My cousin was to be seated on a rustic bench reading Evelina, catching my elbow as I rushed by—or pretended to, rather. "Lay down your book, Lady Elizabeth, if you would be so very kind. Reach out and caress your cousin in passing," he told her, "to convey the warmth of familial friendship, but regardez-moi, hein? Eyes forward."
Elizabeth was looking her usual loveliness in her new French pink saque, with her late mother's triple rope of pearls around her neck and rosebuds in her hair. I asked should I put on my patterned muslin, but Mr. Zoffany said on the contrary, he had a special costume for me in his trunk. It was a fanciful thing in loose white satin, with a gauze shawl and an ostrich-feathered turban to match. When I came downstairs, transformed, he clipped big gold earrings onto me; it was a most curious sensation. Catching sight of the basket of fresh-picked plums and grapes I had