Moonlight Over Paris(13)
Most surprising of all, she’d managed to speak with him as Helena Parr, a confident and articulate adult. The shy and awkward debutante of ten years past? Gone. The rejected fiancée, so cringing and apologetic, of five years ago? Absent.
Just the thought of it made her smile. And it made her wonder: here, in France, might she finally be free of the past?
Chapter 6
Helena rose at dawn the next day, and spent a happy and solitary morning in her studio, fortifying herself with cups of tea from her aunt’s silver samovar. She fueled it with lumps of the ersatz coal the French called boulots, which threw off about as much heat as a firefly’s dying breath, but the samovar didn’t seem to mind. It did look rather ridiculous amid such rustic surroundings, but it boiled water quickly without heating the already-warm studio and meant she didn’t have to invade Jeanne’s kitchen whenever she wanted a cup of tea.
Having decided to work up one or two of her sketches from the day before in pastels, she looked them over and chose one that was little more than a few penciled lines. A swath of lavender had colonized a ruined drystone wall, rooting wherever pockets of soil had collected, and she’d been entranced at the way the plants spilled in a leggy jumble over the scattered blocks, as if there were no place on earth they’d rather be growing.
She began with blocks of color, which she pressed onto the paper with broken pieces of hard chalk pastels: a pale gray, almost white, for the mass of the wall, a bluish gray for the undulating mass of the foliage, and airy smudges of cornflower blue and violet for the blossoms. Dipping a flat brush in water, she used its damp bristles to sharpen the pigments here and there, adding intensity to the blossoms and depth to the ruined wall. She worked quickly, never lingering in any one spot for fear of overworking the pigments.
At this stage, the painting needed some time to dry, so she made herself a cup of tea, washed and dried the brush she’d used, and walked down to the edge of the top garden terrace. The sky was a dazzling blue already, without a shred of morning cloud. It would be another fine day, and very hot. Perfect weather for an afternoon on the beach.
She stood at the edge of the terrace and sipped at her tea, and tried to recall what life had been like before she had discovered she could draw.
She could still remember, if vaguely, how she had loved to make sketches of her toys and pets when she was very little, and how her parents had been pleased when presented with examples of her artwork by her nanny and governesses. No one had ever encouraged her to do anything more, however, and after a while she had become frustrated by her inability to capture what her eyes saw.
And then, the year she’d turned twelve, Miss Renfrew had been engaged as governess to her and Amalia. The woman hadn’t been especially friendly or kind, and most of her lessons had been extremely boring, but she had known a little about art. Miss Renfrew had taught Helena the basic rules of composition and perspective, had shown her how to use pastels and watercolors, and had encouraged her to always carry a sketchbook and pencils, just in case inspiration struck when she was far from home. When Miss Renfrew had been replaced by another, less artistically inclined governess the following year, Helena had been disconsolate, but she hadn’t given up. She had, instead, saved for months to buy an illustrated guide to figure drawing, and once she had memorized its precepts she had bought and devoured similar volumes devoted to watercolors and pastels.
And there she might have stayed, a self-taught but woefully inexperienced artist, if not for the war.
In the early years of the conflict, she hadn’t done much in the way of volunteer work, apart from the same sort of Red Cross meetings and bandage-rolling parties that every other girl her age seemed to do. She had been bored and restless, and before long had started to pester her mother for permission to do more.
It had taken months and months, but eventually she had worn Mama down. By the middle of 1917 she had begun to volunteer at a small auxiliary hospital in Grosvenor Square. At first her work had been confined to letter-writing for men too weak to do so themselves, but one day she had found herself at loose ends, and without anything else to do had pulled out her ever-present sketchbook and pencil and had sketched one of the wounded men. He had been turned away from her, his face in profile, and it had been surprisingly easy to capture his likeness. One of the nurses had noticed, and complimented her, and soon every patient on the ward was asking for a portrait to send home.
Art had sustained her that year and the next, all those long, bleak months at the rag end of the war after Edward had gone missing and her happy, na?ve dreams for the future had melted away like so much sand before the tide. In the years that followed, art had become her salvation. No matter how horrid people had been to her, no matter how lonely she had become, she’d always been able to escape to her room, to her easel by the window where the light was best, and forget everything.
Helena returned to her easel, again working with fragments of hard pastels, breaking them as needed to find a sharp edge for the details she sought. A mossy green traced the length of individual stalks of lavender, a shard of dark indigo further shadowed the crevices between the wall’s ancient stones, and tiny pools of warm white, softened with her fingertip, caught the fractal path of sunbeams through a parasol of olive leaves.
She took a step back and surveyed her work. It was a simple scene, nothing that would ever turn the world on end, but it nonetheless filled her with a deep sense of satisfaction. Out of nothing more than a sheet of paper and a handful of broken pastels, she had created something beautiful.