rumor. Isabelle suspected that the fire had killed something inside him, just as it had inside her.
She’d lost innocence, her sense of wonder. She didn’t know what he had lost, but she suspected its absence had put as deep an ache inside him as her own loss had put in her. For all his unsociability and sudden rages, he had understood, better than anyone Isabelle had met before or since, the intrinsic worth that lay at the heart of all things, the beauty that grew out of the simple knowledge that everything, no matter how small or large it might be, was the prefect example of what it was. It was the artist’s sacred task to illuminate that beauty, Rushkin had told her, to create a bridge between subject and viewer; to craft a truthful vision that left both the artist and the audience wiser, allowing them to wield the weapon of knowledge in their daily confrontations with an increasingly hostile world.
Isabelle sighed. Sometimes she missed her old mentor so much that it hurt. But then she’d remember the other side of him, the part that swallowed the good memories with hateful shadows: his elitism and his towering rages. His small cruelties and his hunger to control. His hunger ...
As inevitably happened when she thought of Rushkin, she couldn’t understand why it had taken her so long to extricate herself from his influence. It hadn’t simply been her greed to learn all she could from him. But what exactly had been the hold he’d had on her? How could one man be responsible for so much that was good in her life and so much of the misery and pain?
She sighed again, staring out the window. Morning twilight was growing lighter by the moment. As she watched, the long shadow cast by the barn withdrew toward its foundations. The dawn chorus sounded—more muted every day as, species by species, its choristers migrated south. But at least the day was dawning sunny, the storm was gone and the power was back on. It looked to be the morning of a perfect autumn day.
She didn’t feel nearly as tired as she thought she should after spending a sleepless night. Her eyes were a little itchy and her back was stiff from being hunched over the drawing table for so many hours, but that was about it. She rubbed at her eyes, then looked down at her hands and realized what she was smearing all over her face.
“Lovely,” she muttered.
Standing up, she stretched and went into the washroom to take a shower before going downstairs to wake Alan. She’d make him breakfast before rowing him back to the mainland. But first they’d have to talk some more. She hoped he’d be able to meet her demands—she wasn’t asking for much—but even if he didn’t, she knew she’d take on the project because it was long past time to fulfill that broken promise.
She would do it.
For Kathy and her dream of the lost children’s arts court.
And for herself, so that she could try to regain defunct courage and so be brave enough to accept the responsibility of a gift she’d once been given.
Alan woke groggily to the sound of tapping on the guest-room door. He struggled upright in a tangle of bedclothes, disoriented, body and mind still thick with sleep.
“Breakfast’s almost ready,” Isabelle called through the door.
“I ... I’ll be right out,” Alan managed to mumble in response.
He listened to her footsteps recede before he slowly swung his feet to the floor. His gaze traveled to the window, but all it found was sunshine streaming in through the panes, giving the room the air of an early Impressionist’s painting, all bright yellow light with deep mauve shadows pooling where the sunbeams didn’t reach. There was no wild girl with her red hair and oversized man’s shirt.
Rising from the bed, he crossed the room to look out on the lawn outside the window. The sun had already burned off the dew, so the faint path of footprints he remembered from his dawn visitor was gone as well.
If he’d even
The whole encounter lay like a dream in his memory now. It seemed far more reasonable to believe that he had simply imagined Cosette and her odd conversation. His sleeping mind had conjured a patchwork individual out of Kathy’s story and Isabelle’s painting to visit him in his sleep and voice the curious mix of desire and bafflement he felt whenever he thought of Isabelle.
He felt better after he’d had a shower—more alert, if a bit scruffy from being unable to shave. When he joined Isabelle in the kitchen, it was to find she’d prepared him a huge country breakfast: pancakes, eggs and bacon, muffins, coffee and freshly squeezed orange juice.
“You didn’t have to go to so much trouble,” he said.
“It wasn’t any trouble,” Isabelle assured him. “I enjoy cooking.”
“I just thought that after working all night, the last thing you’d feel like doing was putting together a spread like this.”
Isabelle turned from the stove, the surprise obvious in her features. “Now how did you know I’d been up all night?” she asked.
Alan heard the wild girl’s voice in his mind.
Except he’d decided that he had dreamed her—hadn’t he?
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I heard you walking around or something.” When she raised her eyebrows quizzically, he added, “You did tell me yesterday that you’re the only person living here on the island, didn’t you?”
Isabelle nodded, but Alan thought he could detect a guarded expression slip into her eyes.
“Why?” she asked, her voice mild. “Did you see somebody?”
A half-naked adolescent girl, that’s all, Alan thought. You know, the one from your painting. She came to me in the middle of the night, dispensing her own version of advice for the lovelorn.
“Not really,” he said. “I just had a very vivid dream—you know the kind that seems so real it’s more like a memory?”
Isabelle smiled, making Alan forget that her eyes had ever held a hint of circumspection.
“Sometimes it seems as if all this island holds are dreams and memories,” she said.
“Good ones, I hope.”
Isabelle hesitated for a moment, then shrugged. “All kinds.”
She seemed to have to work a little harder at it, but she gave him another smile before returning her attention to the stove where she was frying the last of the eggs. Sliding it from the spatula onto a plate, she joined him at the table.
“Dig in,” she said.
“Thanks. It looks great.”
She surprised him while they were eating by telling him that she’d illustrate Kathy’s book.
“I don’t see any problem with you holding on to the originals,” he told her after she’d explained the terms under which she would take on the project. “I can call you with the specs when we’re further along in production— unless you’d like to be involved with the design as well?”
Isabelle shook her head. “That’s not my field of expertise. I’d rather you just let me know what sizes the pieces have to be reduced down to, if you want headings for the stories, incidental art—that sort of thing.”
“No problem.”
“I’ll be moving to town for a while to do some research,” she told him, surprising him further. “I might even rent a studio if I can find something affordable. I’ll let you know where you can reach me as soon as it’s more settled.”
Alan was about to offer her the use of his own spare room, but stopped himself just in time. Let’s not get too pushy, he told himself. He might have fantasies about her, including visits from advice-dispensing gamines, and they certainly seemed to have resolved their differences, by avoiding them if nothing else, but that didn’t mean his own feelings were reciprocated. At this point he’d be far better off taking it slowly, one step at a time.
“If I’m not in, you can leave a message on my answering machine,” he said. “And maybe I could repay your hospitality by taking you out to dinner one night.”
“That would be nice.”
Be still, my heart, Alan thought. He felt like a schoolboy fumbling through his first awkward attempt at making a date.
“Now, about the payment schedule,” he said, trying to make his way back to firmer emotional ground. “As I told you yesterday, until we get a firm commitment from New York on the distribution deal, we can only—”
