Jane Urquhart Read online

  Les Invalides is a large, imposing building, festooned with heraldic carving, originally built to house mutilated soldiers from a never-ending series of wars. Branwell, evidently well aware of this, soon found himself in the vast dark attic of what he would in upcoming days describe in his journal as the architecture of misery, architecture built to house war and wounds and illness, a museum of distress. Shining through the otherwise smoke-colored air were the silver discs of the oeil-de-boeuf windows that, upon approaching the building, he had admired from the outside. Gradually as his eyes adjusted to the lack of light he began to discern lumpy, abstract shapes on pedestals placed seemingly at random throughout the huge room. When he drew closer he could see that the shapes were tiny papier mâché towns and villages, stone walls in good repair, drawbridges pulled firmly up, now evenly coated with several centuries of dust. Branwell, without knowing it, had stumbled across the whole of fortified France in miniature, made, according to the few old labels he could decipher, so that Louis the XIV might survey his territory at a glance, a territory fearful of strangers and constantly prepared for strife. This, Branwell commented in his journal, was “the architecture of fear, housed in the unused brain of the architecture of misery.”

  Each tree in a village square, the shutters on a town hall, walls surmounted by crenulations, the sculptured facade of a church or cathedral, cobblestones on a ruelle were wonderfully and faithfully rendered, but this may not have made much of an impression on Branwell at the time. It might very well have been this view of all of fortified France that made him decide at that moment to leave Europe, for that is exactly what he did. Perhaps there was simply too much of it: too much art, too much architecture, and too much history that included too much war. He must have recalled – and with uncharacteristic fondness – his island boyhood and everything that had delighted him about it. His father’s tyrannical ways may suddenly have felt sane to him, sane and firm, and rooted in a world large enough to include the limits of the family’s island empire as well as all the ships and rafts that set sail from its quays. The ships, the rafts likely appeared in his mind, and then the verdant shores of the St. Lawrence River dotted with discrete, undefended villages. Home, he would have known, was now what he really wanted.

  A few days later, canvases unstretched, rolled, and packed, he sailed, taking with him two memories: the darkness of Les Invalides and an unshakeable desire to reproduce a particular turquoise painting in the Louvre, by a long-dead northern European artist.

  So after a visit to the attic of Les Invalides, Branwell left behind European civilization and returned to his home on the island where everything for a time probably appeared to him to be not pastoral and bucolic as he had preferred to recall it, but raw and unfinished and in what looked to be a state of complete destruction. Felled and ruined trees were being floated down the lake to his father’s docks. Raw and unfinished timber was being hastily assembled in order to construct the merchant ships that would litter the lake’s surface, ships that would eventually carry not only timber but also animals, barrels, china, furniture, food, bolts and nails, cast-iron cooking utensils, shotguns, salt, axes, hacksaws, looking glasses, bolts of cloth, cannons, cannonballs, and human beings. For a time, the sails that surmounted these vessels might have seemed too crisp to Branwell, too free of the patina of age, and the ships themselves too attached to greed and commerce. Still, all of this would have been preferable to the cities that crouched in the dusty attic of Les Invalides, cities in which, it appeared, each activity, every thought, and all spoken words could only have been a preparation for conflict.

  His distracted father had been – in the beginning – quite pleased to see him: he believed that his son had taken on an air of sophistication as a result of his European adventure and said as much to him during a welcoming dinner cooked by his sister. After a couple of weeks, however, Woodman Senior became uneasy about this sophistication that seemed to be manifesting itself in an attitude of bored listlessness and the inability to take to any form of useful employment.

  His sister, a year younger, much less beautiful, and in some ways even odder than Branwell, continued to paint the burning hulks and smashed schooners of which she was so fond but he, the educated one who had gone abroad to study art, painted nothing at all. What was his father to make of this? He offered himself as a subject for a portrait and Branwell complied in order to please him, but Joseph Woodman proved incapable of sitting still long enough for his son to make a creditable likeness (moreover, staring at his father made the painter nervous and his subject even more irritable than usual).

  “It isn’t what you want,” his sister had told him. “Paint something you want to paint, ships for example.”

  But, of course, that wasn’t what he wanted either.

  He finished the portrait. It was hung above the mantel in the parlor where it remained for several decades until his father, in ill-tempered old age, demanded of Annabelle that it be taken down.

  As the months passed, Branwell was constantly urged by his father to enter into the family business as a clerk in the office. “All he’s good for,” he told Annabelle, time and again, when she questioned this. Branwell resisted, claiming that had he a female model his artistic prowess would return. This revived earlier fears about his libertinism and made his father long to confine him to a room in which there was nothing but a desk and an inkpot and a ledger. He was twenty-two. It was high time he was making a living.

  Annabelle knocked on Branwell’s door one evening shortly after one of these conversations with her father. Her brother, who had been lying on the counterpane staring at the ceiling, rose from his bed and opened the door. He had let the fire go out and the siblings could see their breath as they spoke.

  “I will be here forever,” she told him, “but you can do something. You can get out.”

  When he said nothing, she asked, “What did you see in Paris that you still see in your mind?”

  The awful miniature cities almost took shape in his memory, but he shook them off. “Frescoes?” he said uncertainly. He didn’t like to mention naked models to his unmarried sister.

  “Frescoes,” she said, bending down to nurse a leg rendered almost useless by a childhood bout of tuberculosis, “that’s good. I’ve never seen a fresco. Wall paintings. What else? There must have been something else.”

  He thought of the painting that had so impressed him in the Louvre. From the Flemish school of the sixteenth century, it was the only picture he could recall in accurate detail despite days spent walking on squeaky parquet past large-bottomed goddesses, blood-soaked battles, bored or anemic princelings, spoiled dogs, dead rabbits, and rotting fruit, saints suffering under the hands of torturers, Madonnas, Pietàs, baptisms, and the inevitable crucifixions. He had stopped in front of this painting because at first glance it had seemed to be about nothing at all except pure landscape and glorious shades of color: turquoise and grey and emerald green with a touch, here and there, of rose. All of this was surprising, almost shocking, in the midst of the jaundiced yellows and bog browns that darkening varnish had leant to the other masterpieces in the room. There was light in this painting and it wasn’t candlelight, or firelight, or torchlight. It was daylight. It was fresh air.

  “There was a painting,” he ventured, “done long ago, I think, by a Dutchman.”

  “Yes?” said Annabelle encouragingly. She had a cast in one eye and it seemed at this moment as if she were eyeing her brother with amusement. In fact, she was looking at the collar of one of his shirts and thinking that it needed washing. But she was far from uninterested in what he had to say. “What was the subject of the painting?”

  Branwell suspected that she was secretly hoping for ships. “Not ships,” he said, “no, wait, perhaps one, but far off, far off in the distance.” He paused, remembering. “There were great distances in the painting, Annabelle, rivers winding off and around, mountains and towns and many caves.” He had shuddered a little when he mentioned the towns,
but mentioning the caves had helped him steady his nerves. “There were fields too, and orchards, all miles and miles away. At first I thought that there was nothing but air in the painting but, in fact everything was in it, the whole world.” Branwell was warming to his subject.

  Annabelle now had the shirt tucked firmly under her arm.

  “There was a saint. Very small,” Branwell continued. “You might not have noticed him at all. And the lion was even smaller but visible, doing this and that in the wilderness, sometimes chasing a wolf, I think.”

  Annabelle had always been intrigued by dangerous wild animals, frightened and fascinated at the same time. She exchanged a glance with her brother when he mentioned the wolf. It almost looked as if he were about to say something but decided against it and instead, as she turned to leave the room, he announced, “I want to use these colors, I want to paint these distances, but not on a panel like the Dutchman, on walls.” He rose from the bed where he had been lying, took a couple of steps, and caught Annabelle by the arm. “I want to make frescoes, but how on earth am I to do that? Father would never put up with me splashing color all over this house. He would call it unseemly.”

  “That’s just it,” said Annabelle, glancing over her shoulder at her brother. “You’ll be forced to travel. You will become itinerant.” She paused and then repeated the word itinerant, as if she had just discovered it, and maybe she had. “This is how you will get out,” she added as Branwell released his grip on her arm. “Think about that.”

  What Branwell did not know about the papier mâché towns that had so affected him was that itinerancy was central to their creation. Itinerate draftsmen had been dispatched to the farthest reaches of France to draw the details of each house, public building, garden shed, crumbling wall, broken window, piggery, chicken coop, struggling fruit tree. Some were sent farther afield to the coveted borderlands of Belgium and Prussia, where they innocently measured and recorded the length of streets and alleys, town gates and fortifications, then plotted the dimensions of adjacent outcroppings and caves. They returned to Paris with their leather satchels and portfolios overflowing with accurate drawings of the pristine palaces of the rich, collapsing hovels of the poor, markets, barns, bridges, and towers, and the varying textures of the surrounding fields and fortified or unfortified farms; everything that was needed for craftsmen to reproduce the world in miniature in order to facilitate the battles of a king.

  Later that night Annabelle slowly descended the back stairs into the now darkened kitchen and abandoned her brother’s shirt on a chair beside the door. Moonlight entered the place through two large windows and settled on the objects in the room as if by design – several pitchers, one large bowl, and three pale onions shone. Annabelle always noticed images such as these, but even though, on nights like this, she would sometimes stop and gaze at one dramatically lit object or another, it was only the ships that she chose to capture in her paintings. Apart from these vessels her art was almost entirely innocent of the actual. Still, even as she limped across a kitchen that had moonlight on the walls and firelight on the floor, the masts of her father’s ships were visible through the windows, and on the ceiling swam a river of silver light.

  You might think that with all this reference to moonlight and water and wreckage that Annabelle had a romantic soul, but you would be very wrong. In fact, she read no novels and brooked no nonsense, and was an astute and unsentimental judge of character, particularly the character of her bog-draining, forest-plundering father. She suspected that were Branwell to linger too long here on the island he too would become the object of drainage and plunder of one kind or another and she wanted, as much as possible, to save him from that.

  And so, the next day, after a morning spent with the apple-peeling machine and a bushel of apples, a morning during which she noted that the peels falling from the fruit resembled gold and crimson ribbons tumbling to the floor and knowing that she had no desire to paint them, she washed her hands, placed a bonnet on her head, and a shawl on her shoulders, and moved as quickly as she was able across the yard to her father’s offices.

  What a masculine world Annabelle would have had to tramp through in order to reach her father! There was wood everywhere. Logs were being unloaded from the hulls of the two ungainly timber ships that had recently arrived from the northern lakes, and scattered here and there were the stacks of planked lumber that would eventually make their way to the opposite side of the island to be used to build schooners and clippers. The first timber raft of the season was being assembled in the small harbor and this was a noisy French business all round: men were cursing and shouting at each other in a language Annabelle pretended to ignore though she knew the vocabulary well. The enormous dram, or unit of the raft, sixty feet wide and almost two hundred and fifty feet long, had just been completed and the rivermen were now poling sticks of oak timber (along with some pine to ensure buoyancy) into the first crib, which had been fastened by withes and toggles to its neighbor. Annabelle’s favorite part of the raft, the temporary frame bunkhouse where the men slept and ate, would not be constructed until later when all of the cribs were filled and the floor of the raft was secure. Then, as a final touch, a mast with a sail attached to it and a recently felled small pine would be erected in the very center of the dram. No one had ever properly explained the presence of the pine to Annabelle, but she secretly believed that it must be an offering of sorts to the wounded spirit of the plundered forests.

  The Frenchmen – for that matter, the Englishmen – who worked for her father paid no attention to Annabelle, having intuited early on that one glance in her direction might result in an abrupt termination of their employment. She wasn’t much to look at anyway, with her flat chest, her lameness, her long face, and her severe dark clothing. Annabelle believed that the French thought of nothing but sex, a distasteful subject that never entered her own mind unless she was in earshot of those men, that language.

  Her father’s whiskers had always looked to Annabelle like a feathered headdress (worn upside down, as if it were a bib) and this headdress had always been white. Moreover, he had always resembled certain powerful Old Testament leaders: the temperamental Isaacs and Noahs and Abrahams – even Jehovah himself – an angry potentate whose tantrums were kept only temporarily beneath the surface of his character as the result of an enormous act of self-control. As far as she knew, her father smiled only on the occasion of a launching of a ship and even then he appeared to be showing his crooked and oddly pointed teeth rather than displaying any real signs of good humor. He was much admired for his firmness and for the latent ferocity that everyone sensed in him. And, as owner of Timber Island and everything on it, he was considered to be honest and fair by all the men whose lives he controlled. Women were of no consequence to him – beyond their ability to cook food and procreate – and so he mostly ignored all wives and female children, his own wife included when she was alive. But Annabelle was another matter. She was not afraid of him. And he knew it.

  “What is it?” he asked, not looking up from his papers, recognizing his daughter’s footsteps as she entered his office. The top of his head shone in the low light. The grate was without fuel. “I haven’t much time,” he went on, without giving his daughter a chance to speak, “that vile Gilderson over on the mainland has now built a steamship of all things! The ugliest species of watercraft ever to diversify a marine landscape, I’ll wager! He has had the infernal nerve to invite me to the launching Saturday next, even asked if I’d like to send a small flotilla of sloops to attend the monstrosity’s progress out of the harbor. I certainly will not provide anything of the sort and am writing him at this moment to say just that. The fool!”

  Despite the fact, or perhaps because of the fact, that he was ten years his junior, Oran Gilderson was Joseph Woodman’s chief competitor in the local shipbuilding trade. They were locked together by envy and a not inconsiderable amount of loathing and, as a result, invariably issued handwritten invitations to each other
on the occasion of the launching of a ship, savoring the opportunity for potential humiliations of one kind or another.

  Annabelle untied her bonnet, removed it from her head, and placed it on the oak desk directly in front of her. She shifted her weight onto her good leg. There was only one chair in the office and her father was occupying it. “Branwell isn’t happy,” she blurted. “Your son. He wants to paint walls, to do something that is all his own.”

  Her father looked up now in irritated astonishment. “Whatever can you mean?” he asked. He had no time for frivolous interior decoration. A succession of mainland drawing rooms of various hues might have passed through his mind, drawing rooms in which he would have been ill at ease, bored, and overheated.

  “He wants to make frescoes, to paint landscapes in hallways.”

  “Landscapes? Hallways?” Joseph Woodman removed his reading spectacles and peered at his daughter. “For heaven’s sake, why?”

  “To give the people here more scenery.” Annabelle drew herself up into her nearest approximation of good posture. “Some trees, perhaps…”

  “I’ll show them trees,” said her father testily.

  “Live trees,” continued Annabelle. “Mountains… waterfalls.”