Three days passed before the reply came. Three days in which Elena performed the rituals of her household with a precision that bordered on the mechanical, her mind perpetually elsewhere, turning over the possibilities of what she had set in motion. She oversaw the laundering of the linens, the polishing of the brass, the preparation of meals that Marcus barely acknowledged. She received callers, Cornelia Aldritch among them, and made the appropriate sounds of interest at their gossip. She walked in the garden, her hands buried in the pockets of her coat, her breath pluming in the cold air. And all the while, she waited.
The letter arrived on a Friday morning, brought by a boy from the village who handed it to Mrs. Alden and disappeared before anyone could question him. It was a small envelope of cheap, cream-colored paper, addressed in the same flowing script that Elena had come to know as intimately as her own handwriting. She took it to her room, locked the door, and opened it with fingers that, despite all her discipline, trembled slightly.
Dear Mrs. Voss,
Your letter was a most unexpected pleasure. I am not often sought out by ladies of Ashwick, who generally prefer that their portraits flatter rather than reveal. I should be delighted to meet with you. My studio is in the upper rooms of the old guildhall. Perhaps you might come on Monday afternoon, at three o'clock? I will have tea, and we can discuss what you have in mind.
With warm regards, Camille Delacourt
Elena read the letter twice. The handwriting was the same as the letter she had found with the photograph, the same purple-black ink, the same confident, flowing strokes. But the tone was different. There was nothing of the desperate mistress here, nothing of the woman who had pleaded with a stranger to release her lover. There was only a young artist, pleased to have attracted the attention of a potential patron, eager to make a favorable impression.
It was, Elena thought, a kind of talent. The ability to be two people at once, to hold two realities in the mind and move between them without a flicker of dissonance. It was a talent she herself was beginning to cultivate.
Monday arrived with a sky the color of pewter, heavy and low and threatening snow. Elena dressed with the same care she had applied to her visit to the Black Swan, choosing a gown of dark blue merino wool, a jacket with silver buttons, a hat with a small, tasteful feather. She looked, she decided, like a woman of means who was also a woman of taste, someone who might genuinely appreciate art, someone who might become a patron. She did not look like a wife who had come to study her rival.
The guildhall stood at the edge of the village, a half-timbered building that had once been the seat of the merchant guild, back in the days when Ashwick had been a center of the wool trade. The lower floor was now used for storage, and the upper floor had been divided into a series of rooms that the town council rented out to anyone who could pay. Camille Delacourt's studio occupied the largest of these rooms, at the top of a narrow, creaking staircase that smelled of dust and turpentine.
Elena climbed the stairs slowly, her hand on the banister, her heart beating with a steady, controlled rhythm. She had rehearsed this encounter a hundred times in her mind. She had prepared her lines, her expressions, her gestures. She was ready.
She knocked, and the door was opened by Camille Delacourt herself.
Up close, the young woman was even more striking than she had been at a distance. Her dark hair was pinned up in the same loose, untidy knot, and she wore a smock spattered with paint in a dozen different colors. Her hands were stained with charcoal, and there was a smear of blue pigment on her cheek. Her eyes were large and dark and seemed to take in everything at once, and when she smiled, her whole face transformed, becoming something open and warm and almost childishly eager.
"Mrs. Voss," she said, and her voice was lower than Elena had expected, with a slight, husky quality that was not unattractive. "Please, come in. I am so glad you wrote to me. It is not often that anyone in Ashwick takes an interest in my work."
She stepped aside, and Elena entered the studio. It was a large, airy room, lit by a bank of north-facing windows that filled the space with a soft, diffuse light. The walls were lined with canvases, some finished, some only begun, and the floor was covered with drop cloths spattered with paint. An easel stood in the center of the room, holding a half-finished portrait of a woman in a white dress, her face still only a suggestion of features. In one corner, a small iron stove radiated a welcome warmth, and beside it, a tea table had been set with a chipped china pot and two mismatched cups.
Elena took all of this in with a single, comprehensive glance. The studio was chaotic, bohemian, utterly unlike anything in Ashwick Hall. It was the room of a woman who lived by her own rules, who answered to no one, who had created a world for herself and inhabited it without apology. And it was here, in this room, that Marcus came on his Tuesday afternoons. It was here that he shed his judicial dignity and his marital obligations and became someone else entirely.
"I hope you do not mind the disorder," Camille was saying, clearing a chair of a stack of sketchbooks. "I am afraid I am not much of a housekeeper. Please, sit. The tea is still hot."
Elena sat, arranging her skirts with the automatic grace of long practice. "Not at all," she said. "I find it fascinating. It is so rare to see a space devoted entirely to the making of art. One feels that something important is happening here."
Camille laughed, a quick, surprised sound. "You are very kind. Most of the ladies who come here spend the entire visit looking as though they expect the floor to collapse beneath them. They think art is something that happens in museums, behind velvet ropes. They do not understand that it is made in rooms like this, with paint and sweat and a great deal of trial and error."
"I am not most ladies," Elena said, and the words were true in ways that Camille could not possibly understand.
They sat across from each other, the tea steaming between them, and Camille began to talk. She spoke of her training, such as it was: a few years at a women's academy in Lyria, where the instruction had been mostly watercolors and flower arranging, and then a long, self-directed apprenticeship in the museums and galleries of the capital. She spoke of her return to Valdoria, to the house on the moor where her mother lay in her invalid's bed, dreaming of the vineyards of her youth. She spoke of the struggle to find patrons, to be taken seriously, to be something other than a curiosity.
Elena listened, and as she listened, she studied. She studied the way Camille's hands moved when she talked, expressive and quick. She studied the way her eyes lit up when she spoke of a particular painting, a particular effect of light. She studied the way her voice softened when she mentioned her mother, the only person, it seemed, for whom she felt any real tenderness.
And she began, slowly and carefully, to build the person she would be in Camille's presence. She would be the older woman of taste and sensitivity, the woman who understood art because she had lived a life that had taught her to value beauty. She would be the woman who had been disappointed by the world, who had found in painting a solace and a refuge. She would be the woman who was not quite a friend, not yet, but who might become one, in time, if the circumstances were right.
"Tell me about the portrait you wish to commission," Camille said at last, pouring fresh tea. "Your letter mentioned a desire for something truthful. What did you have in mind?"
Elena set down her cup. She had prepared for this question. "I want a portrait that does not lie," she said. "I have sat for portraits before, and they have all been the same. A woman in a fine dress, with a fine smile, looking out at the world as though nothing has ever troubled her. They are portraits of a person who does not exist." She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was softer. "I want a portrait of the person I am, not the person I am expected to be."
Camille was silent for a moment. She was looking at Elena with a new expression, something that was not quite curiosity and not quite recognition, but somewhere in between. "That is a difficult thing to ask," she said. "Most people do not want the truth. They want a beautiful lie."
"I know," Elena said. "That is why I came to you."
The words hung in the air between them. And then Camille smiled, a different smile this time, slower and more thoughtful. "Very well," she said. "I will paint you. But I must warn you: if you ask for truth, I will give it to you. I do not know how to do otherwise."
"Good," Elena said. "Neither do I."
They discussed the practicalities then, the schedule of sittings, the fee, the size of the canvas. But beneath the practicalities, something else was happening, something that Elena had not entirely anticipated. She had come to this studio to study her rival, to learn her weaknesses, to gather intelligence for the campaign she was planning. But as she sat across from Camille Delacourt, as she listened to her speak of art and truth and the difficulty of being a woman alone in the world, she felt a flicker of something that was not envy, not hatred, not the cold, patient malice that had driven her here.
It was recognition.
Camille Delacourt was a woman who had refused to be what the world demanded. She had refused to marry, refused to be respectable, refused to be silent. She had chosen a life of precarious freedom over a life of comfortable imprisonment. And Elena, who had made the opposite choice, who had married and been respectable and been silent, who had done everything the world demanded and had been rewarded with a cold husband and a colder bed and the knowledge that she was, in the end, a piece of furniture in her own home—Elena looked at Camille Delacourt and saw the woman she might have been, if she had been braver, if she had been stronger, if she had not been so afraid.
The jealousy rose again, but it was different now. It was no longer the simple, elemental hatred of a wronged wife for her rival. It was something more complex, more painful. It was the hatred of a woman who had surrendered for a woman who had refused to surrender. It was the hatred of the prisoner for the free.
She did not let any of this show on her face. She smiled, and she thanked Camille for the tea, and she agreed to return on Thursday for the first sitting. And then she left the guildhall and walked home through the cold, gray afternoon, her mind churning with a confusion of emotions that she could not yet name.
That night, as she sat at her writing desk with the candle burning low, she took out the photograph of Camille and Marcus. She looked at their laughing faces, at the easy intimacy of their pose, and she tried to summon the pure, clarifying hatred that had sustained her for the past weeks. It came, but it was muted now, complicated by the memory of the woman she had met, the woman who had spoken of truth and refused to lie.
She put the photograph away and closed the drawer. She would continue. She had set a course, and she would follow it to its end. But she understood now that the road would be harder than she had imagined. She had thought she was facing an enemy. She had not expected to face a mirror.
Outside, the first snow of winter began to fall, soft and silent, covering the gardens of Ashwick Hall in a blanket of white.
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