retired, but is taking pupils: He goes to Croscombe House to teach the Croscombe girls, and Miss Emily is doing remarkably well under his tuition. The Tremaynes think so highly of him that they send a carriage over, twice a week, for him to attend at Hunsford Lodge, where he instructs Mr. Ralph, who has considerable talent in that direction, and all the Miss Tremaynes.”
“Croscombe House, you say, and Hunsford Lodge?”
“And several other pupils besides. He is so much in demand, that I fear he may be unable to take on any more at present.”
No master was going to refuse to teach Lady Catherine’s granddaughter. The amiable Herr Winter was summoned, subjected to an impolite interrogation as to his background and abilities, and informed that he was to have the honour of teaching Miss Darcy.
Fortunately, Herr Winter was possessed of a sense of humour, and he had taken a liking to this Cassandra, with her wide grey eyes and ill-contained energy. At first, he had expected no more of her than of his other female pupils, who needed to sketch and draw and do water-colours as an accomplishment and as an agreeable way to pass the empty hours of leisure, and he had been astonished to find in Cassandra a talent far beyond that of the usual run of young ladies.
Very soon discovering that there were few of his male pupils, in Germany or in London, who had ever shown more promise, he forgot about her sex and simply enjoyed unfolding to her the mysteries of his craft. “Art, I cannot teach,” he would always say. “That comes from the soul and cannot be taught.”
Water-colours and pastels weren’t enough for her, and by the time she was fourteen, she was already an accomplished painter in oils, a skill she took care to keep hidden from her mother. He would have liked her to tackle some bigger themes, but Cassandra was firm about where her tastes and skills lay: She could paint from nature well enough, for her early training with her father had made her observant, and the liveliness of her flowers and trees and landscapes made them delightful, but her real love, and gift, was for portraiture.
Herr Winter showed some of her work to young Henry Lisser, who was duly impressed. “Were she not a young lady, and born into an English gentleman’s household, she could make a living from her brush,” he said.
“Look at the upstairs parlour at Rosings, if you are able,” Herr Winter said. “She painted the panels in there; they thought I did it, but she wanted to learn fresco techniques, and so I showed her, and let her do the work. It was irksome for me to take the credit and the fee, but the pleasure and pride she took in the work were their own reward for her, and the main reward for me. It is much admired, I could not have produced anything so charming myself, and I was besieged with requests from other houses to do a similar thing. I had to say that my fingers were giving me considerable pain, since otherwise it might be noticed that those exquisite pastoral scenes did not come from my brush.”
Henry Lisser shrugged. “It is a waste of a talent,” he said, almost to himself. “However, she will marry a country squire and settle down to be a wife or mother, as is her destiny.”
Herr Winter put Cassandra’s work back in its portfolio. There was a tiny frown on his amiable countenance. “Part of me hopes that this will be the case. But, with this particular young lady, I do wonder about her future. I think it may not be as you describe. Her life at Rosings is not altogether a happy one; I only hope that she does not break out some day, tired of the smallness of her life, and perhaps take some disastrous step that she will come to regret.”
Once Mr. Lisser began work at Rosings, he saw for himself what Herr Winter meant. However, he kept his thoughts to himself, and, in truth, he was not much interested in a set of persons whom, he imagined, he would never see again, once the painting was finished. He had a good deal of reserve, and liked to keep a professional distance between himself and his clients.
Mr. Partington tried to draw him out—what was his background, what were his antecedents?—but he gave little away. He had studied in Leipzig and Vienna and Paris, before coming to London, he said, and no more could be got out of him.
Mr. Lisser had been surprised to find that the family arranged in front of the view of Rosings that he was to paint was to consist of only five members of the family. Mr. Partington chose the grouping, with him standing protectively behind his wife, who was seated with her baby son in her arms. Their youngest daughter sat cross-legged at her feet, in a foaming muslin dress with a pink sash, and her older sister, similarly attired, sat on a nearby swing.
It was a charming composition, very much in the modern taste, showing a paterfamilias enjoying the pleasures of family life, and the dutiful and fecund wife serene and contented, under his care.
“You have another daughter,” Henry Lisser said abruptly. “Is she not to be in the painting?”
She was not, Mr. Partington said snappishly, since she was a Darcy, a mere stepdaughter, not a Partington. However, Mr. Partington would be very much obliged if Mr. Lisser would include one or two of his prized Shorthorn cattle in the picture.
Cassandra was exasperated. Belle had been introduced, thanks to Mrs. Croscombe, to several agreeable and handsome young men; why did her volatile fancy have to alight on Mr. Lisser? And while she might tell her stepfather that such an artist would be a welcome addition to the dinner table at many a lofty home, it didn’t mean that he would in any way be considered a suitable lover for a Miss Isabel Darcy, with a fortune of some thirty thousand pounds or more.
Belle was a flirt, a determined and accomplished flirt, and now her attention was fixed on Mr. Lisser, there was nothing Cassandra could do to prevent her cousin from playing off her tricks. And it seemed that Henry Lisser was not displeased by the pleasure Belle took in his company. When he was at work, his attention was focussed entirely upon his subject. He was grave and uncommunicative, saying little to his subjects, and those few words merely a request to move this way or that, or to place a hand or reposition an arm. He gave instructions to his assistant, as necessary, and sometimes spoke to Cassandra, as to a pupil, but in a low, indifferent voice.
To her admiration, he banished Belle from his presence while he painted, in a kind enough way, but with sufficient authority that she accepted his rejection with no more than a toss of her head. The children, of course, could not hold their poses for very long, so he had filled in their small shapes and then dismissed them, bidding them to run along and play with their cousin Miss Belle. They skipped off, and he was left to do some more work on the patient Partingtons.
Cassandra was fascinated to see how he worked, it was so very different from her own style of painting. He took numerous sketches, charcoal or graphite, and had always a sketchbook in his hand, drawing the house from numerous angles: “You must see the whole in your mind, even while you only paint one view.”
Cassandra was full of admiration and questions. He asked to see her notebooks, making few direct comments, but suggesting a shading here, another grouping of a composition there, and gave her some valuable advice as to portraiture, although, as he said, his own genius did not lie in that direction. Oh, yes, he could paint figures in a landscape, but head and shoulders or full-length portraits were not for him.
“You should travel, Miss Darcy, it would be of great benefit to you to go to Italy, to study the works of the masters and also to see for yourself the landscapes of that country.”
“Italy! Why, Mr. Lisser, Bath would be an adventure for me, and as for London, I long to go there, but”—with a sigh—“it is not at present possible.”
Mr. Lisser remembered what Herr Winter had said about his talented pupil, and said no more about her painting or travel. Instead he wanted to talk about Belle.
“She is your cousin, I believe?”
“The relationship is not such a close one. We share great-grandparents through her father and my mother, and there is also a connection through my father, who was the younger son of a younger son. Belle’s father is the eldest son of an eldest