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 have turned out not to be as compliant as he would wish. The point of marrying a much younger woman was that she should be malleable, not have an intellect that made him feel exposed.
Politics and philosophical debate should be kept for the club and had no place in the drawing room. In his view, women should exchange gossip, run the household, and look pretty.
Helena, seeing the time, ran down the wide staircase to the hall. She picked up her own and Isabella’s riding crops from the rack by the front door, which stood open to the morning. Benson had brought the horses round and they stood in the spring sunshine, shaking their heads, restless to be away.
Isabella rounded the corner of the house, her face flushed with running. Her eyes lit up when she saw Helena and the horses.
‘Mama, I thought you were never coming, it is the most wonderful day to ride.’
‘Indeed,’ Helena said, smiling at her daughter when she should have scolded her dishevelled appearance.
‘Isabella, you will need your jacket, it is not yet warm enough to ride without one. Go quickly and pin back your hair securely or it will catch in the trees and unseat you.’
Once mounted, Helena and Isabella turned their horses away from the house and down the long drive. Isabella glanced back at the huge ungainly house. The many windows of her home always seemed like eyes watching. So many of the rooms lay empty and unused.
‘I thought we would ride to the old stables, Isabella, to see how Mr Welland is getting on with your chest of drawers.’
‘Could we ride down to the cove, Mama, and then up the cliff path to the village? The horses love the sea.’
‘I think it better we return that way. It is near noon and we must not disturb the men’s luncheon.’
They rode in companionable silence, skirting around the top acre field on the edge of the wood towards the village, which lay in the valley below them. The mist still lay over the houses and only the spire of the church protruded above it.
A small three-masted schooner with all her sails unfurled to catch the wind was heading out to sea as graceful as a butterfly on the surface of the water. Isabella, watching her, asked, ‘Papa says he might buy a small trading ship, Mama.’
‘I believe he is seriously thinking about it, Isabella. Trade is so good these days, and he and Sir Richard Magor are talking of sharing the cost.’
The horses shook their heads and snorted, and Helena and Isabella set off down the hill, only loosening the reins and giving them their heads when they reached the flat. Isabella rode ahead and her laughter came to Helena like small birds’ cries on the wind. She smiled, wanting to laugh out loud, too, for the sunshine warm on her face, for the changing colour and beauty of the fields, for the sea below them and for the intense pleasure and wonder she had in her daughter who was so much a part of her and Daniel, and yet so uniquely herself. Helena lifted her face to the sky. She had much, much to be grateful for.
Isabella sniffed in the scent of wood shavings and glue as they entered the boatyard, which was housed in the old stables belonging to the Vyvyans. There were three men working on the hull of a boat, sanding and planing planks of wood. It was evidently hot work in the sheltered yard for one of them had removed his shirt. He had his back to them and seemed engrossed in what he was doing. His fair hair flopped forward, striking against the darkness of his skin. His back was long and smooth and brown, and the muscles in his arms moved and swelled as he planed a piece of wood, back and forth, back and forth.
Isabella could not move. She was transfixed by the sight of the half-naked boy. Her heart hammered in her chest. Her mouth felt dry and her body strange and hot as if she had a fever. She could not turn her eyes away.
Ben Welland lifted Helena down from her horse and came round to help Isabella dismount. He followed her eyes and issued a sharp command to his son.
‘Thomas – get thy shirt on, we have company.’
The boy looked up startled and noticed the women for the first time. He stared straight at Isabella with vivid blue eyes, so deep they were almost purple. With an easy and laconic grace he unhooked his shirt from a piece of wood and pulled it over his head, then with a curt nod turned back to his work.
Ben Welland led Helena and Isabella to the edge of the yard and opened one of the stable doors into a workshop. Isabella hardly listened to the conversation between her mother and the carpenter. She was feeling very odd indeed.
Isabella’s chest of drawers lay in a corner covered with a sheet.
‘I hope this pleases thee, Ma’am.’
Ben pulled the sheet away and Helena and Isabella gasped. A small, exquisitely carved piece of furniture was revealed. Helena had ordered a chest of drawers for Isabella’s room and this far exceeded her expectations.
The wood was plain and light with capacious drawers, polished smooth as an apple; but it was the work on the front of the drawers and all around the edges of the top of the piece that was so skilfully done. Instead of brass handles there were round knobs carved in the shapes of leaves and flowers.
With a cry Isabella moved forward to touch and look closer. There were slender trees and birds nestling among the flowers. Squirrels and tiny dormice, all carved to fit the piece and make it seem as one piece of wood.
‘Mr Welland,’ Helena exclaimed, ‘this is an exquisite piece. I have never seen a piece of furniture like it. I know your work and expected it to be beautiful, but this … Isabella?’
‘It is perfect, Mr Welland. It is … wonderful. I thank you so much for it. Mama has had my room newly decorated, and this … I love it! I truly love it.’
Mr Welland was well pleased, but he was a dour Yorkshireman and not given to excess. ‘Well, Miss, don’t take on. It is my son, Tom, thee has to thank. I carved the piece, but it was Tom who wanted to try the decoration. He said the wood lent itself to shape and there is no doubt he was right.’
‘It looks as if he will one day be as good a carpenter as his father,’ Helena said diplomatically.
‘Aye, and more so. He grows bored sometimes with the plainness of wood. He sees shapes where others do not. I let him have his way with the drawers on the understanding if thee did not approve or thought it too fancy, he must make more plain ones for thee.’
Helena smiled. ‘How could we not approve? For a gentleman’s room it might be too ornate, for a young girl it is imaginative and skilfully done. Is this his first work of this kind?’
‘Aye, it is, Ma’am.’
‘May we thank him?’
Mr Welland hesitated and Helena, noticing, said, ‘You must be proud of him?’
Ben Welland looked at her with eyes that were possibly as vivid as Tom’s once, and were now the colour of a faded sky.
‘Aye, Ma’am. I am proud, but I hope to keep the lad with me. Keep him here in the yard. But he is restless for more intricate and complicated carving, for which I know he has the skill. Trading ships are being commissioned faster than we can build them and we could not live by furniture alone, fancy or no. Tom has always been skilled with a piece of wood, even as a bairn.’
Helena smiled again, understanding. ‘But, interesting as boatbuilding is, Tom will need more imaginative work one day and you are afraid of losing him. Our praise of his work might hasten that day.’
‘Yes, Ma’am, I believe so. But it is his due and I cannot deny him.’
He turned and they followed him out into the sunlight again. Ben called out to his son and the boy turned and stood awkwardly in front of them. Helena congratulated him on his work and assured him that he would be rewarded above the original price mentioned. She also told him that when people saw Isabella’s piece he was sure to gain more commissions.
Isabella, staring from beneath the shadow of her hat, believed Tom Welland to be the most beautiful person she had ever seen. At the mention of her name, Tom’s eyes turned to her, and she said, her face reddening, ‘Thank you … it is lovely.’
She turned away abruptly and walked to her horse. Tom watched her and when he saw she was going to mount without help he moved forward. He cupped his hands so that she could put her small foot into them and carefully lifted her to the saddle. Ben Welland was busy helping Helena onto her horse.
Isabella gathered the reins in her small, gloved hands. When she looked down the boy was still watching her, his face grave, but she had a distinct suspicion that he might be amused by her. She said suddenly, ‘Please do not make another chest of drawers the same as mine for anyone else. I wish mine to be the only one or it will be spoilt, the magic will be gone.’
Her brown eyes met his blue and he held them. The amusement was gone, they held a sudden regard that struck her like lightning. Her bodice felt suddenly too tight, her breasts against the cloth ached. She turned her horse abruptly away before he could answer, brought her whip lightly down on the mare’s flank so that the horse leapt out of the boatyard with Helena behind her.
Helena had witnessed Isabella’s confusion and she sighed. The boy was uncommonly handsome as, probably, the father had been before him. Helena’s thoughts of the morning returned. She was right, Isabella was no longer a child but a young woman with a passionate body difficult to control.
How to tell her, Helena wondered, without putting her off marriage forever, that the men women were often attracted to were not the ones, in general, suitable to marry.
Isabella was now a long way ahead. They had entered the stony cliff path that led down to the cove. Helena did not call out or try to catch up, she wanted to let Isabella compose herself. She would have to talk to her, but not yet, not the second her daughter discovered desire. She must let her have privacy and time to accept her changing body.
Helena remembered her own first thunderbolt of unfulfilled yearning for a friend of her brothers … Claudio … that was his name.
Isabella had reached the bottom of the cliff path and turned her horse to wait for Helena to catch up. Helena was not concentrating. She was back in Rome, remembering the beauty of a young body. Why, she had almost forgotten what desire felt like …
Her mare stumbled on the loose stones and Helena realized she was holding the horse’s head too tight and loosened the reins.
Isabella was having trouble holding her horse. It was plunging and dancing, impatient for a gallop by the sea. Helena called out to her, ‘Let her go, she will unseat you. I will be right behind you.’
Isabella swung her horse round and started to canter towards the edge of the sea. Helena’s horse whinnied in frustration, wanting to be off the stony path onto the sand. Helena spoke to it soothingly.
‘Wait, wait, we are nearly at the bottom … steady now, wait till we are off these stones.’
At last they reached the bottom of the cliff and the beach lay tantalizingly ahead. Isabella was already melting into the distance. Helena’s horse leapt forward, snorting with excitement. The stones skidded under its feet, and as it lurched Helena was thrown forward and lost her stirrup. She gathered the reins in and tried to hold the horse, but the mare reared up on her hind legs and plunged ahead again. Helena flew over the horse’s head and landed on the sand, but the back of her head connected sharply with the black rocks lying at the foot of the cliff. She died instantly.
Isabella was still galloping to the far side of the cove. She had regained her composure and felt exhilarated by her ride along the edge of the waves. Laughing, she turned her horse round to watch her mother coming towards her.
The riderless horse, stirrup flying and thumping into her side, was pounding her way, and Isabella could just make out a small figure lying crumpled and motionless near the black rocks. She gave an anguished cry that was lost in the sound of the surf and the seagulls screaming above her.
The light was going. The room was suddenly cold. Gabby shivered. She had done enough for one day. She finished filling Isabella’s robe, where the wood had rotted at the back of the figurehead where it would have abutted the ship.
She tidied her things and prepared her bottles and jars for the morning. Pink clouds had gathered, coloured by the setting sun. The face of Isabella was caught in golden light from the window and in the rays of the dying sun the face looked as smooth and sad as death.