CHAPTER EIGHT
TUESDAY 17TH JANUARY 2017 – FERNLEY COTTAGE
It was eight-thirty. The wind had abated and the snow was falling snow-globe slow. In the studio, Judith felt the sadness that came with the completion of a good work. Earlier in the day she had foregone her commission for Bethany’s friend—the riverbank scene with its complexity of red gums—in favour of her latest Wimmera landscape, a sparse depiction of an abandoned farm, and now the work required scarcely another brushstroke.
The painting was to hang in the Aussie bistro in Fore Street and she was pleased she had transcended her aversion to its burger and pie theme and gone in one day with a bunch of photos on her phone. The owner, a bubbly woman in her thirties, had been delighted and offered to exhibit and sell all of her Wim
