Flower Diary by Molly Peacock

Author:Molly Peacock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2021-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

3.

Like a raconteur at a dinner party, in her first installment of “From Gibraltar to the Pyrenees,” Mary reveals that she’s an excellent scene-setter and wickedly willing to poke a little fun at people. Warm, gossipy, in her version of a Chaucerian pilgrimage, she introduces us to the characters she meets on the ship. First “was the distinguished painter . . . with his family and band of students.” That’s William Merritt Chase, the instigator of Shinnecock, after which they modeled their summer art school at Onteora. Chase boarded along with a cluster of his apprentices. “There was the bishop, in leggings, breeches, and black silk apron,” chatty Mary adds, along with the “young German” and a “Briton with his theatrical-looking wife.” Companionable, opinionated, grabbing a name that Frances Hodgson Burnett’s popular novel coined, she zeroes in on “the fair-haired little girl” whom adults have dressed “in complete masculine attire” and “whom we had dubbed Little Lord Fauntleroy.”

Within sight of Gibraltar, the pilgrims became transfixed by the “faint and blue” enormous rock on the horizon, “growing momentarily more definite.” For Mary, Gibraltar was “realizing some, at least, dreams of our castles in Spain.”4

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