Zoomorphia
It was the surprise of her young life. She could not think of a way to tell Mama. Struck dumb, she nodded at Timéo Ruggier, nodded again, found the strength to turn on a heel to leave the studio.
‘I shall not go in there again,’ she said, going down the stairs with Capucine, the maid who was also nanny and cook. And gardener, since Gepp died.
‘Come on, Miss Yvonne.’
‘I shall not! You can’t make me!’
‘Why not? What happened?’ Concern was plain on Capucine’s face, and her ample bosom heaved slightly. She was always short of breath, but this made the maid doubly breathy. ‘Why will you not return to the sitting? Did he do something?’
The girl nodded, solemn and silent.
‘I’m thinking the worst.’ The maid reached behind her waist and loosened apron strings slightly, to give her lungs more room.
‘It is the worst!’ Little Yvonne stamped her feet and lifted a defiant chin, not an attitude usually liked by her elders. ‘What the artist has done is … is …’
The outburst was ignored on this occasion by the nanny, who offered her hand, intending it to be taken, so she could lead her charge to luncheon.
Yvonne slapped the upturned hand with as much force as she could muster.
‘Oh!’ It was Capucine’s turn to be shocked. Standing numb and immovable, her outstretched hand tingling, she watched the girl stamp off down the corridor, where the portraits of many earls and countesses looked down upon whoever passed that way.
Yvonne reached the tall garden doorway, with its coloured glass fanlight and long latch and bolt. It was a complicated Cremorne lock, which spanned the height of the door. She deftly lifted the catch and levered it, so the hooks at bottom and top were loosed of their traps. Leaving one side of the double doors open behind her, she ran down the steps, in sunlight so bright she was momentarily blinded.
Missing a shallow step, she stumbled and righted herself quickly, bending a supple ankle without noticing. At the wide gateway to the walled garden, where Gepp would harvest celery, lettuce, tomatoes, radishes and cabbage, cabbage, cabbage for the table, Yvonne stopped. She remembered Gepp was dead. He was gone, forever, leaving her without a shoulder, without a comforting embrace. She was all by herself, surrounded by the things he left behind. The things Capucine now struggled with to provide vegetables for the table.
‘I am alone!’
Alone, she brushed the front of her velvet skirt, to remove from her whole mind and body what had happened in the studio, and proceeded through the garden. Past the rows of carrots, she went, past the pale jagged leaves of the artichokes, which would soon produce their prickly heads. She swung—confident even in anger—around the corner where no one but servants went, past the enormous compost heap that exuded a kind of moist heat. There was the smell of mould, the fug of mushrooms, the high scent of bruised garlic drying in bunches. She marched past some tools propped against the greenhouse glass, and stopped in front of the henhouse.
For a very long time, Yvonne gazed at the birds. There were eight or nine brown hens, and a small grey bird she had no doubt would grow into a fine turkey. There was a smaller coop where a rooster strutted on his own. Shaking his wattles and looking at her curiously, he turned twice, picking and placing formidable feet carefully, and tilting his head. If he could speak, he would caution her, bid her to be clever.
Be a wise young lady.
But he could not. Yvonne looked back at the hens, wondering why this bird, one that seemed rather similar to the chickens, was kept apart.
‘Does he have a name?’ she asked aloud, forgetting again that Gepp was not hovering to answer all her questions. ‘Why is he apart from the hens?’ When no response came, she raised her chin at the rooster. ‘I dub thee Sir Vance of the Marsh!’
The rooster strutted away, giving the girl his back and stopping behind the enormous terracotta feeder in the middle of the run.
She returned to commotion at the house. The garden door was still open, and sharp voices inside drifted to where she stood, calmer now that she had communed with the kitchen garden fowl. Even though Geff was not there, the sight of his tools and the remnants of his work had brought her to earth.
‘Yes, your ladyship,’ the nanny was saying, ‘She can open the Cremorne lock. She can manage most locks and latches.’
She could sense that the artist stood there too, even though she could not hear his voice.
‘She is eleven, Monsieur Ruggier. Eleven!’ Her mother’s shrill voice reached her. ‘If her father were not abroad … if … if …’
If Geff were still alive, Yvonne thought she would lead him up those stairs. Yes, take the gardener’s gnarled hand, in whose weathered cracks and callouses her garden was ingrained, and bring him into the house. But he was up in the sky. Yes, her garden travelled to forever, where the old gardener could hoe and till and weed and sow forget-me-nots in the clouds. Her garden was also in his soul, which perhaps hovered above the tomatoes that were just now turning red. She would lead him to the studio and show him, if he were here. Show him.
Her father? What use was her father? He was rarely there, because diplomatic travels took him where her mother was loathe to go. Lady Katherine knew she was marrying a diplomat, knew very well, but refused to leave her home county. So Yvonne grew up with Gepp as father figure, understanding the complicated fractals in a sunflower seed head more than the relations between India and her country.
She understood that Monsieur Ruggier, who was painting her portrait, so it could grace the day sitting room wall into the future, had been fired. He was dismissed. Sent from the house with his hastily-gathered painting things, handed a token portion of what he was contracted to be paid. He was driven to the village in the small gig, from where it was his business, and his business alone, how he would get himself to wherever he had come from.
‘Mama?’
‘Capucine has told me everything, my darling. I am very, very upset.’
She nodded, and started to move towards the small dining room, where she was—since a year—allowed to take daytime meals with her mother. She was fast outgrowing the nursery, but not fast enough to be released from the oversight of Capucine, with her wheezy breath and tight aprons. That would take many months longer. A governess would be taken on, and who knew what discoveries might be made, and knowledge discovered?
‘We shall not discuss …’
Yvonne turned to face her mother. ‘He said I was wiser than my years, Mama!’
‘Did he? Well, you shall never hear that man speak again. Never. Yvonne, look at me. The dismay … the disbelief, of having trust betrayed. A grown man, daring to touch a little girl.’
‘Touch?’ Yvonne’s eyes were wide and void of anything that spoke of guile or deviousness. This child was candid and authentic, but her mother was determined to put things right.
‘It startled and disgusted me, what Capucine reported.’ She placed a hand to her bosom, on top of the beautiful cameo brooch among the lace. Her face was a mask of anger.
‘What, Mama?’
‘I am also very upset and angry at you, Yvonne.’
The girl straightened her back, formed her feet into a vee of resistance, defiance, rebellion, her heels tapping together in their patent leather shoes. She looked her mother in the eye. ‘Why?’
‘You slapped Capucine, who cares for you, does everything for you. You slapped her! I shall not allow such violence in this house. Now go to the nursery, and stay there until luncheon is brought to you on a tray.’
Yvonne puffed, pursed her lips and panted. ‘Oh!’ She snorted. ‘Ho! I’m upset because Capucine has left tools resting against the glass of the greenhouse. Gepp would never have done that.’ She was angry at Capucine for a number of things. She was angry at breakfast, having been given eggs that were cold. She was angry when she found the book she was reading had been slapped shut. There were a thousand things Capucine did to make her angry.
‘Go, young lady, and think of what you have done.’
What did Capucine tell her mother about what happened in the studio? What was that about a touch? Yvonne did not know, but to be rebuked for a little hand slap deserved a reaction. A sharp reaction. Halfway up the stairs, when she sensed her mother had moved away, out of earshot, out of sight, she turned and made her way back through the still-open door to the garden.
‘Sir Vance of the Marsh!’ she called, as she approached the rooster’s run.
The notion that entered her head at that moment was contemptible, vengeful, so it made her smile. If she was to be punished, it had better be for something really grave. Her sense of justice demanded it.
‘Puss, puss, puss.’ She puckered her mouth and called. ‘Here, puss, pussss.’
She was enormous; a Bengal cat whose name, Apostrophe, suggested something small and curled. But this was a straight, striped domestic tiger of a cat, which slinked round corners, trapped small prey easily, paced out the measured kill with cunning and stealth. Her pounce was always lethal, needle sharp.
Apostrophe came, her shadow long and wide on the ground. She stopped, looked her little mistress up and down.
‘How would you like a little visit with Sir Vance?’ She moved to unfasten the catch of the wired door to the run. If she let the cat in, she would make short work of the fowl. It would be a massacre of no small degree.
‘We are two wild creatures, Apostrophe.’ Yvonne stooped to stroke the cat’s head. Gingerly, warily, she touched the silky fur between her ears. ‘Oh, Puss-puss. How I wish I were … oh!’ She stared at the creature’s face.
The sudden realization of what had happened in the studio assailed her at that moment. That’s what it was. That’s what had happened. It was not aberration. It was something far removed from that.
She scooped the cat up and looked directly into her eyes, narrowly avoiding a paw with extended claws scratching her face. ‘Ooh, you are feisty. You are dangerous.’ She looked and looked at the cat’s face. The whiskers, the dark markings, the whitish stripes, the golden down just visible underneath. Apostrophe calmed and breathed.
Yvonne breathed. ‘I see.’ She looked up at the leaves of the old apple tree, and Apostrophe swiped that paw again, struggled to be free, and dropped silently to the ground. ‘Ah!’
How could she be angry, after what happened? She was wrong. She touched a finger to the blood on her cheek. She had made a mistake.
Capucine was always wrong.
Mama was rarely right.
But she, she had to make sure of something. She would abandon her plan for revenge. Well, at least until she understood what had really happened in the studio. At a sedate pace, she re-entered the house, pulled and twisted the ratchet for the lock hooks on the long latch bolt to find their home silently, silently, until it was locked, and tip-toed up the shallow marble stairs.
Passing the door to the nursery, passing the upstairs sitting room, passing her bedroom and entering the corridor where Capucine’s room was, she did not pause for a second. At the back steps, she sighed to herself. ‘I hope what I saw is what I think it is.’
Up the stone uncarpeted steps she paced, feeling the cold air into which she rose. It was very chilly in the rooms Timéo Ruggier was given to use during his painting sojourn. The studio door was closed. Yvonne grasped and turned the stubborn knob slowly, let herself in, and closed it again. Standing with her back against the door, she saw someone had covered the painting with a drop cloth.
She pulled it off and smiled. ‘Yes!’
What had made her angry earlier, what she had thought before to be dark disfiguring scars, marks an artist might make to signify his distaste with the commission, or his dislike of the sitter, now made sense. It was not that, it was not.
Yvonne took two paces back and gazed at her portrait. Monsieur Ruggier had painted the visage with whitish stripes, shadowy markings, with golden hues peeping underneath. The face glowed. Her face. The artist had painted her as a cat.
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© Rosanne Dingli 2024