CHAPTER ELEVEN
VARIATION
Harriet was at work. That was the attitude with which she awoke and how she had remained all day, resolved, now the yuletide festivities had passed, to bring the exhibition to fruition. She stood before one of her easels, eyeing painting number four, the daubs of yellow newly applied, the Prussian blue triangles dry enough for a line or two of an orange hue. Startled by a sudden crash, she turned, brush in hand, to see on the lawn a dead branch of the messmate that grew beside the fence. The weather had turned nasty and a vicious northerly was forcing kiln-hot air across the state. The last rays of the sun backlit the tall and straight mountain ash in the neighbour’s garden, their tops keeling in the wind. Glimmers of fiery light stroked the studio’s south-facing
