The room on top of the museum was warm when Gabby arrived. John Bradbury had been over and switched on a heater and left her a kettle, a jar of coffee, tea and a packet of biscuits. The sun streamed in at the large window over the graveyard and glistened on the sea in the distance; sea that met the sky so seamlessly it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.
Lady Isabella still lay on her back, cushioned by foam. Before Gabby began to treat the flaking paint with consolidant she walked round the figurehead, carefully looking for anything she had missed. Then she photographed Isabella from all angles for her record of work in progress.
She had to stand on a stool to take the photos, and as the camera clicked it seemed to Gabby a flicker of expression passed over Isabella’s face. Gabby knew it was a trick of the light, the lift of her arm causing a shadow, the sunlight full of dust motes making her blink; but all the same her heart leapt and she experienced a strange and sudden physical reaction as she looked down on that impassive and beautiful face.
Shakily, she moved away and got her magnifying glasses, a plastic pocket and tweezers. This won’t hurt, this will make you see again. I need to discover the colour of your eyes. With the tweezers she lifted a speck of paint from beneath one eyelid and dropped it into the pocket. The blind eyes stared upwards, unblinking.
Gabby then laid Japanese tissue gently over the damaged eyes and held it in place with a weak solution of gelatine. The wood under her fingers seemed to grow warmer. Gabby closed her own eyes for a moment. The sun streamed into the room and outside the birds sang among the gravestones. Gabby, with her fingertips pressed to Isabella’s bandaged eyelids, felt the silence swell and grow inside the room, as if time had stopped or was holding its breath. As if this single touch of her fingers on the damaged face could, like a surgeon, reactivate a life unfulfilled.
The sensation was so real, so profound, that tears came to Gabby’s eyes. She felt overwhelmed by an intense and incomplete emotion she could not place, and the sudden powerful need to know who Isabella had been.
Isabella noticed that the snowdrops were out under the trees and the daffodil buds were unfurling to show cracks of yellow and green. Below the lawn, where she stood beneath the branches of the macrocarpa, lay the creek on a full tide. The branches of the great fir were reflected in the water, rippling and moving, changing shape dizzily as she watched.
Everything in the garden was about to burst forth in a riot of colour. Isabella could feel the excitement tingling in the tips of her fingers. The birds felt this, too, she was sure of it. They swooped and flew low, beginning to gather twigs and moss for their nests. Spring was poised, waiting, it seemed to Isabella, for the sun to breathe warmth upon the tight buds; and like magic the garden would be transformed and radiant.
Isabella looked upwards. The sky was Prussian blue with small floating scraps of cloud. Far away down on the creek curlews called out, small lonely echoes like a madrigal. She closed her eyes, her face upturned to a sun not yet warm, and she experienced a moment of pure exhilaration in being alive, in being there in the garden; in being Isabella.
So acute was this sensation of herself, it felt like pain. It caught in her throat, made her shiver with some primitive instinct that she should not acknowledge this happiness, but recognize the transitory power of joy. Yet, this knowledge of herself was set so perfectly in this fleeting moment of her own life that she did not yet have the wisdom to pay homage to fate. She gathered the folds of her long skirt, lifted the heavy material above her ankles and set off in a run across the grass. Her footsteps made small indentations on the wet lawn and her laughter carried in little pockets of sound across the still garden.
Isabella was fourteen years old, and her body, like the garden, was beginning to stir. She felt acutely alive, but in waiting. Confused and excited as if she was poised on the edge, the very beginning of her adult life. As she ran across the garden she laughed without knowing why. Perhaps it was a last goodbye to childhood or just the sensation of being part of the earth, part of this cycle of nature; hidden, but stirring with new life and about to burst forth upon a waiting world.
Her dark hair flew out behind her, blue-black in the sunlight, blue-black against the whiteness of her pin-tucked blouse. Her black riding habit held high above her ankles, revealed slim black-clad legs and small riding boots.
Her mother, Helena, dressed also in a riding habit, watched her from the window of her bedroom and smiled. Isabella was still free. Free to be anything she chose, God willing. She watched the girl run and duck under the lower branches of the fir, circle the small fountain and head for the path to the lake.
Helena suddenly saw from a distance what she had been avoiding facing. Isabella was no longer an angular child, but fast becoming a rounded young woman. A child may charge around the garden like a highly strung horse, but it would be considered unseemly in a woman.
Helena had tried and failed to get Daniel to educate his daughter as he would have educated his son, if he had had one. Helena was sure that his disappointment in not having an heir was not the reason. Each time she asked, he smiled indulgently.
‘What is the point, my love? My daughter is going to be a beauty like her mother. She will marry and have children and have no need of an education.’
‘But, Daniel, education is a means of broadening Isabella’s mind and will help her converse on a range of subjects. I know you think my music and my education is wasted, but it is not. I may not often play for anyone else, but I play for myself …’
And while she was saying these words to her husband, the waste of her own talent would often consume Helena, for she knew her words were as dandelion fluff blowing across the fields. Daniel had closed his mind to her arguments.
Helena knew that in questioning Isabella’s narrow education she was also questioning her own life. This yearning she had for something … something more than this comfortable, undemanding existence.
She moved away from the window and walked into her sitting room. She stood for a moment looking at her beautiful piano, then she lifted the lid and sat down letting her fingers rest lightly on the keys. Music was an extension of herself, part of the nature of who she was. The only way she had to express herself.
Her father had considered ambition in a woman unseemly and had been afraid her music would prevent her finding a husband. Despite assurances from Helena’s professor of music in Rome that she had a rare talent, he had resolutely insisted that to even consider playing at concert level was out of the question. Helena’s fingers played a sombre little tune. She could have travelled to Vienna, Paris, London … She closed the lid gently. She had been separated from her music professor and sent to study English in London, with the Vyvyans. If her marriage to Daniel Vyvyan had not been exactly arranged, it had been hoped for. Both her father’s family and the Vyvyans had known each other for generations.
Daniel had generously bought her the piano as a wedding present. He played himself, jolly little popular tunes, and he had thought it would be nice for them to play together when they had guests. However, Helena’s playing, even if she tried to match her playing to his, so outshone his own ability, so impressed and astonished their friends, that Daniel felt inadequate.
Daniel Vyvyan did feel threatened by Helena’s intelligence, by her musical talent and her undoubted beauty. He wished her sometimes more … ordinary in all aspects of her character. He was twenty years older than his wife and he was intensely jealous of the young men who gathered around her like bees attending their queen. It was not just young men either, he was much envied by his friends.
On occasions, riding over his land, he would kick his horse to a gallop, furious that Helena should