Montreal, Quebec 1998
Mark went down to the basement to take one last look at Isabella before he wrapped her up in bubble wrap and placed her in the crate. He had become so used to her being down there that it would seem strange not to have her dominating the room. Despite the ravages of her age and the sea, her presence filled the space. Her eyes in the damaged face watched him with a look that was mysterious and resolute, as if she had seen everything and nothing could surprise her any more.
Her expression seemed to change in the varying light. A face that was made up of such a multiplicity of emotions that Mark thought the carver must have known his model well. This was not a face merely glimpsed or remembered. This face he had created was mobile and frighteningly alive. Her carver had seen and captured the essence of the woman, and even now, a decade later, Mark believed he could glimpse an innocent sensuousness. A consciousness of self that was part of being a beautiful woman and seeing herself reflected in a man’s eyes.
The paint had flaked on the left cheek giving her an air of having been abandoned. There was a deep cut in the wood above her right ear, probably made by a propeller. When Mark first saw her in the garden of a house he never meant to revisit, he had been startled, for it seemed to him that he must have been guided there solely in order to rescue her.
Who better than a historian to discover her origins? His exasperated family admitted that no one else would be foolish enough to ship her from Newfoundland to a basement in Montreal in order to find out who she was and where she had come from.
‘You’re so fanciful, Dad. I guess you believe she was waiting for you to come along, huh?’
Of course, he wouldn’t admit to it. Neither could he quite understand how his family were not equally enchanted by her.
‘In the right place, I might be,’ Veronique said. ‘But not in my basement, watching me. Her eyes follow me about. I forget she is in here and at night when I switch the light on she gives me a terrible fright.’
‘This is one of the loveliest figureheads I’ve ever seen. It’s worth preserving,’ Mark said. ‘Pity she belonged to a British schooner, not one of ours … Various bodies in England are funding most of the cost, but it’s the same over there as it is for us here, they have to fight for every penny they get.’
Mark turned and Inez was standing behind him, hip jutted out to support Daisy who was sleepily sucking her thumb. Inez put her on the ground and they carefully started to wrap the figurehead in layers and layers of bubble wrap, until she resembled a mummy and her face and features were distorted by plastic.
Sitting on the floor, Daisy looked up and pointed. ‘Poor lady gone?’
Mark picked the child up. ‘Yes. She is going to fly on an aeroplane over the sea and someone a long way away is going to make her better.’
‘I like lady,’ she said. ‘What name?’
‘Isabella.’ The child’s hair smelt of butter. ‘The lady used to stand on the front of a ship and swim through the waves and look very beautiful. Her name is Isabella, and we have wrapped her up in a thick coat of bubbles so she won’t get hurt on the aeroplane.’
‘Poor lady,’ Daisy said again as they went up the stairs, and Mark wondered how he could appease his wife for flying off with his wooden angel.
He was not ready to give her up yet; and he needed to know who he was going to give her up to.