Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold

Author:Gaynor Arnold
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Fiction, Historical, General
ISBN: 9780771007866
Publisher: Emblem Editions
Published: 2008-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

“WOULD YOU OBTAIN a box for Mrs. Gibson?” Mrs. Brooks says to Mercer.

“A box?”

“Yes. To put things in. A large one.”

He departs in a stately way, as if merely to acknowledge the existence of “a box” is to demean himself.

“Where’s the portrait of us?” I ask Mrs. Brooks. “The one by Mr. Evans.”

She demurs. “Which one is that? This house is so full of pictures. The master had a new one of himself every year.”

“There’s only one of us both together, Mrs. Brooks. Surely you know it. It used to hang in the dining room.” I open the door to the dining room. It’s not there. Over the mantel, there is a landscape by Landseer instead, and next to it an oil portrait of Alfred and another of Louisa and Kitty when they were young. I glance at the great mahogany table, set with silver candlesticks—the scene of so many of my failures as a hostess, my failures of wit and grace and beauty, my failures of organization, my failure to keep awake—Dodo Dumpling doing her best to embarrass her husband. I don’t want anything to remind me of that time. I don’t want the silver or the glass. I don’t want the candelabra. I don’t want the landscape with its dull-looking cattle on a purple mountain against a muddy sky. I don’t even want the portrait of Alfred. He looks strange, worn, old; he is not as I remember him. “Maybe the study?” I suggest.

Mrs. Brooks hesitates. “We mustn’t go in there. Miss Millar says—”

“Well, she’s Not At Home, is she? Where’s the harm?”

I open the door. A faint smell of tobacco greets me and I can see him again in his green buttoned armchair, reading the newspaper, legs crossed, cigar in hand. He never smoked while he worked, he didn’t like the way the smoke got into his brain, but he liked to have a cigar with his brandy after supper. His black velvet smoking jacket, with its satin collar and cuffs, is still hanging on its hook.

The room is immaculate. The blind is half-raised. The desk is dusted, his pens and quills neatly aligned along the top. His inkwell full. The blotter new. A sheaf of clean paper stacked on the left-hand side, a pile of finished pages on the other. All as if he is about to come in and write. I feel a lump in my throat so painful that my whole face aches. I go to the desk; I caress the polished rosewood of the chair and the worn leather surface of the desk, stained with patterns of ink. My fingers brush the edges of the manuscript. It seems to be a chapter from The Death of Ambrose Boniface and is much crossed out and written over. I turn to the last page. It is creased and covered in blots; but it’s in his characteristic hand:

‘Your Honour won’t mind me saying as it’s more than a little uncommon for a fine genleman such as yourself to express an interest in the melancholy details of a calling such as mine.

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