The Portrait

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

The footmen carried the chair as far as the earl’s rooms. When they had set her down, she rose and made her way to the heavy doors. She knocked. Warren, her father’s ancient valet, opened the door almost immediately. Stooped and grim, he moved aside without a word.

For a moment, she stood silently in the doorway. Her father lay in the great curtained bed, the room still as death. Thick curtains covered the windows, and the smell of sickness was heavy and fetid in the air. In spite of herself, she felt a thin edge of nervousness in her stomach. Her father had always awed her. Even as she hated him, she could not deny that he was the image of a Crusader lord, afraid of no one. She could not remember ever entering his bedchamber as a child. The very notion would have terrified her.

“Leave me with my father, if you please,” she said over her shoulder. She heard the faint rustling of Clara’s gown and the soft click of the door. Then the silence became so heavy that her ears hurt and her gorge rose. She was being suffocated, crushed in velvet layers of sickness and silence.

Slowly, she moved forward. Without either Clara or a crutch to hold on to, she still hobbled slightly on her twisted leg. The rhythm was familiar to her ears. It was the sound of being alone.

A chair had been placed beside the bed. She grasped its finely carved back gratefully and paused, a little out of breath. I must do this, she thought. She raised her eyes, and stared at the wasted frame of the terror of her youth. She looked until her eyes watered and tears gathered. She blinked.

“I am here, Papa.” She whispered the words. They fell dully into the silence, the velvet counterpane muffling the edges of her voice. She tore her gaze away and looked around the room. There was nothing comfortable about it – it was made for the sleep of earls.

A harsh sound escaped the earl’s throat. She looked quickly back at him and bent a little, trying to see his face. The eyes were closed.

“I see that, as usual, my presence does not interest you,” she said, feeling a little bolder now. She waited. No response. Carefully, she eased herself into the chair. “I came all the way to see you, Papa. Will you not speak to me?” Catherine watched the light, rapid rise and fall of the bedclothes heaped over his chest. A tic quivered the corner of his mouth. She suddenly wondered whether he could hear her – perhaps, although he could not rouse himself from this state of sickness, he might be able to hear and understand. A luxury, this! To be able to speak to him without fear of recrimination, without fear of a roar of temper, without fear of an argument.

She hesitated, still watching the frail form. She had rehearsed so many times the words she would say to him if she were able. If society could be relied upon not to condemn a girl for hating her father, if there was any hope at all of him listening to her – even for a moment – without losing his temper, if it might ever occur to him that it was too cruel to blame a child for the loss of an earldom, if … and if and if. But somehow the words did not come flying off her tongue with the ease she had anticipated.

“I disappointed you, Papa,” she said. “But it was not my fault.” She considered this notion. No, it was not her fault. She would have been born a boy if she could. She was an excellent rider, and guns did not frighten her. She was skilled at cards. She enjoyed her books. In fact – and here she almost laughed – she displayed a woeful lack of proficiency in most of the womanly arts. She would have been a much more successful boy.

She painfully lumbered across the room to the windows, pushed aside one of the heavy velvet curtains and peered through the dusty glass. The view of the park surrounding Albrook Hall must have pleased him, she thought. She remembered staring at the same view from the dirty window of her nursery, hour after hour, day after day, rain and shine. The view was engraved, etched in her brain. She was startled by the realisation that it must be etched in her father’s brain as well.

How very strange. Was it possible to have images permanently seared in one’s being? And, if so, why was this one so powerful? She was yet a child when she left Albrook. This place was not her home.

“Perhaps we have more in common than I had supposed,” she said to the window. She nodded at the view. “Look at the wood, the rowing boats on the lake – I could tell you the colour of every boat and where the missing oars might be. I could tell you which horses have been exercised, when and by whom. I could tell you that the dairymaid’s child belongs not to her husband, but to the stableboy’s friend who now sleeps with the bay mare because his wife will not take him back. But these are things that you know, I assume. Are there any besides us? It is unlikely.” She touched the glass with her fingers. “I know I am not a boy. But my blood runs thick here, too.”

She turned, the light from the window streaking harshly across her father’s motionless form. “There is no one else. Just you and I. Clavertons, both of us. I am crippled in body but you are crippled in spirit.” She let the drapery fall, and once again the room became a dusky, silent cave. “We might have been a comfort to one another.” She said this accusingly. Then mused, “Now your body too has failed you. But I – I am free. Freer than you could possibly have imagined. An irony, is it not?” Slowly, she approached the dying man again, dragging her bad leg. She placed her hands on the bed and leant in for a good look at this person who had had no use for his own flesh and blood, who had told her governess – loudly and within earshot – that he wanted to hear nothing of the cripple.

“Maybe you enjoyed your noose,” she said. “Maybe you enjoyed being a prisoner of your own name. I do not. I am grateful that you freed me.”

Her mother had not been the earl’s first Countess. She had married him after his first wife, and all their children, had died. It was his last effort to save the family. Catherine was their only child, and the earl had flown into a rage when, on the day she was born, he received the news that his only living child was a girl and a cripple. When his second wife died, the earl sent Catherine away and became a recluse. But he and she were the only two Clavertons left on the face of the earth.

Catherine stared down at the wizened shrunken features of the man who had once frightened her so desperately. Despite her bold words, she knew deep inside that she was lying. She was a Claverton, and she would run from this fact for the rest of her life. This place was part of her, and she of it, try as she might to rid herself of its clutches.

Despair clutched her heart.

“God help me,” she whispered. “God help me! My only fear is that I am your daughter and I will share your fate. I do not want to die alone.”