The Venice Sketchbook(18)

“Aunt Lettie won’t mind,” Granny replied with a smile. “She’s not even there anymore, only a body she no longer needs. I expect she’s looking down on us and smiling. And she was so insistent that I made sure you had the box.”

Caroline hesitated. Then she got up, went to Aunt Lettie’s door and tiptoed into her bedroom again, glancing across at the bed as if she still expected the old woman to open her eyes and turn to see her. She opened a wardrobe that smelled of mothballs and a hint of perfume. Je Reviens. That had been Aunt Lettie’s favourite. There was a hatbox on the top shelf, but it contained several outdated hats. Then she found a simple old cardboard box in one corner and lifted it down carefully. A label was affixed to the top: For Caroline Grant after my death. Please make sure she gets it.

Caroline could almost swear she heard a small sigh of contentment coming from the bed as she left the room, carrying the box. She set it down on the table, across from her grandmother.

“I wonder what it could be that mattered so much to her,” she said. “Should I open it now, do you think?”

“Of course. You know we’re both dying of suspense.” Her grandmother laughed.

Caroline eased off the lid. Inside were two leather-bound books and a jewellery case. She opened the latter, her heart beating fast. She swallowed back the “Oh,” realizing how rude it would be to show disappointment. Inside the jewellery case was an old-fashioned ring with a row of small diamonds, a string of glass beads, and three keys. Two were old, almost antique-looking keys—a brass key topped by the figure of what looked like a winged lion, a large iron key so formidable that it looked as if it might unlock the door to a dungeon and then a small silver key, such as might open any kind of cabinet or box.

“What on earth?” Granny sounded as surprised as she was. “Keys? Where did she get keys?”

“You don’t recognize any of them?”

“Certainly not. I’ve no idea what she’d want with a lot of old keys. She wasn’t the type of person who collected things. I’ve always thought of her as a minimalist. And a realist. Unsentimental.”

“And the ring and beads?” Caroline asked. “Were they her favourites?”

“I’ve never seen her wear them. She had a brooch from our mother she liked to wear. But apart from that, she didn’t go in for much jewellery, did she?”

Caroline had already put the keys aside and was lifting out the two books. She opened the first and saw inscribed inside the cover Juliet Browning. Begun May 1928.

“Oh, it’s a sketchbook,” she said. “Sketches. So that’s what Aunt Lettie was talking about. She wanted me to have the sketches. I didn’t know that Aunt Lettie used to sketch.”

“She was very keen on it at one time,” Granny said. “She went to art school, you know. They thought she showed promise.”

Caroline looked up in surprise. “Art school? She never mentioned it.”

Granny shook her head. “No, she never talked about her life. Of course, she had to abandon her studies when our father lost his money and died. I remember how disappointed she was about that. She managed to get a job teaching art at a nearby girls’ school. Well, someone had to provide for our mother and me. I was six years younger, still in school.”

Caroline was turning pages in the book. “She was quite good, wasn’t she? Oh, and look—these sketches are of Venice, aren’t they? There’s a gondola, and St Mark’s. Venice—that’s what I think she was trying to say just before she died. Something about Venice. I never knew she had travelled.”

“Our aunt Hortensia took her to Italy as a present for her eighteenth birthday,” Granny said. “I was always a bit resentful about that, because by the time my eighteenth birthday came around we had no money. Aunt Hortensia had let my father manage her money, too, so she lost everything, of course.” She looked up and made eye contact with Caroline. “I never went to a posh boarding school like Lettie. It was a local convent for me. And no European jaunts. In fact the first time I went abroad was to India with your grandfather, right after we married.”

“What year was that?” Caroline asked.

“Nineteen thirty-seven. I was twenty-one and horribly naive. India was an awful shock, I can tell you. The heat and the dust and the flies and the beggars. I would have fled straight home to my mother if I could have.” She gave an embarrassed chuckle. “But I stuck it out. Jim was wonderfully patient. A good man. I’m sorry you never met him.”

Caroline nodded, returning her smile, then turned back to the book. “Oh, look. She’s sketched a handsome Venetian—I wonder if he was a gondolier? Oh, and she went on to Florence. See? That’s the Ponte Vecchio.” She closed the first book and took up the second one. “This one is also Venice,” she said. “And it’s dated 1938. So she did go back.”

“That’s right, I believe she did,” Granny said. “I remember my mother writing in one of her letters that Lettie had been asked to take a party of schoolgirls on a trip abroad in the summer holidays.”

Caroline was turning pages. These sketches in the second book were also of Venice, but done by a more skilled hand. The perspectives were just right. The faces of people in the market were so alive. There was a garden with trees and a fountain. More gondolas. An outdoor restaurant with lanterns . . .