The Crimson Portrait by Jody Shields

Author:Jody Shields
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9780786294800
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Published: 2006-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

WEATHER HAD FADED the bridge’s painted brightness, and the lake reduced the color of its wavering, angular reflection another degree to a faded, brownish rose. Traces of the bridge’s original color, hidden in its carved details, were secret proof of its scarlet past.

Julian and Catherine leaned against the railing, watching the green water sluggishly moving its flecked veil of chrome yellow pollen. He checked the sky and suddenly took her arm.

“Let’s leave.” He hurried her across, their footsteps hollow on the dry wood planks. “A bare bridge over water is too exposed.”

His words flew against Catherine’s ears, softly insistent, and she shook her head, not wishing to be distracted from the sensation of his hand on her arm.

When they stood on the bank, he released her. “I fear aeroplanes, ever since I watched them fly over the trenches. They were unnatural as lightning. Black crosses against the clouds.”

“A black cross?” She shivered.

“I felt like Gulliver. Unable to lift my hand or look away.”

“I’ve seen a zeppelin. So enormous it didn’t seem to move at all but just hovered in the sky.” She remembered the blunt gray shape, the miracle of its weightless elevation, her anger as it filled the space above her.

“We’re too insignificant to matter.”

“That’s not true. You only act as if nothing matters. Nothing bothers you in the studio. You stand so still. How can you bear to have Anna stare at you? She seems so critical.”

“Little suffering compared to . . .” His words trailed away. “I have experience with drawing myself. Military officials once quaked at the pencil lines my hand made on their maps. I had some importance. They relied on my eyes and my judgment.”

She noticed he pushed up his sleeves, a sign that he was uneasy.

“But never mind. I have prepared a surprise for you. Please close your eyes,” Julian instructed.

She held his hand and walked blindly forward, sensing she was being led under trees, as the ground was knobbed with the hard coil of roots.

“Now you may sit down and open your eyes.”

Tiny circles of bright color starred the grass around their seated figures, and after a moment she recognized the ragged petals of red, violet, and white. Dianthus.

With a shy smile, he effortlessly plucked one of these flowers from the grass. “See? Nothing grows here. I created this for you.”

Now she understood that he had picked the flowers and placed each one on the hillside. A false garden. Catherine felt as if she wept, but her eyes were dry. “How beautiful.”

“It is the first bouquet I have ever given a woman.”

She desired to enter him like an infection, a worm, a bullet nestled at the point of impact, find the hidden place where he was wounded, mend him, and never leave.

A faint muffled noise reached them, then a second and third rolling wave of sound repeated the rhythm.

She cried out, and he put his arm around her. “It’s a freak of the air. A bombardment. They’re fighting across the channel.”

“Don’t speak of the war,” she pleaded.

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