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After a leisurely breakfast of kippers (Lucas discourses amusingly on the need for unsalted butter to dot their golden hides, and the preference for a sprig of flat-leaved parsely as decoration over a sprig of dill)...
Solange rolls her eyes and digs into the breakfast.
...Lucas takes a sketchpad, a box of water colours and a small camping stool to a secluded part of the deck. His practical sailing gear has been put aside for the moment, and he wears a cream linen suit with a curved collar, a white shirt with an old Harrovian tie and a panama hat. The jacket he carefully removes and hangs on a convenient hook on a mast, before he takes out a small pipe, filling it with some aromatic tobacco, and lighting it while he waits for Solange.
And our style reference today is Visconti's Death in Venice.
Solange wanders his way after awhile. Her practical sailing gear is still on, and along with the cableknit sweater she wears a dubious expression with a curious slant at Lucas's impromptu setup. The dubious expression she carefully removes as she passes the mast near him, so that when he sees her she's smiling brightly instead. "I do like the smell of tobacco smoke," she comments idly. "Reminds me of Father."
Lucas smiles. "I assure you, any resemblance you see between us will be fleeting," he says.
The smile grows. "No doubt."
"Now - given the time at our disposal, my plan is to make a trump sketch - but a fairly durable one. One that should last five years or so. It will take a few days, so choose a position to pose in that will be comfortable - and that can be recreated in a cabin if inclement weather dictates we need to finish below decks."
He waits for her to choose a suitable position.
"Oh, I think between you and me we can manage not to have inclement weather," Solange replies as she glances around herself. Her gaze settles on the railing. She shrugs marginally and moves over to lean up against it. Not exactly the most comfortable of positions, but she'd rather be standing than sitting for hours on end--she can see more this way.
Her back against the rail and slouching slightly, Solange crosses her arms and gazes directly at Lucas. "Will this do?"
"Wonderfully," says Lucas. He selects a graphite pencil from the other side of his watercolour box and makes a few rapid lines on his sketchpad.
"Now," he says, "tell me something about yourself. Some little, trivial thing that is peculiarly Solange."
Her mind perhaps still on breakfast, Solange replies, "I have a terrible sweet tooth. I really liked Gouter's pain au choclats. They were...quite delectable." It's apparent from her sudden dreamy smile that she's remembering the little pastries filled with chocolate. "Is that too trivial?"
"Au contraire," says Lucas, his dark gaze intent on the sketchpad. "It gives me the clue to the long sinuous line of your throat." He makes just such a mark and then looks up at her and smiles.
"I have sent Gouter to Xanadu - he should be in transit even now. One imagines that he will already have taken over the galley of whatever vessel is fortunate enough to bear him, and that he will currently be doing wonderful things with limes."
That elicits a chuckle from Solange.
"Now - tell me someting else ... something you remember from your childhood, perhaps."
His attention returns to the sketchpad.
"My childhood?" Solange spreads her hands briefly and tucks them back across her chest. "I was fostered out to Lord Worth and his wife, as you probably know. Spent a lot of my childhood at their house in Garnath getting into trouble with my foster-brother Matthew."
She breaks into a smile. "I remember one afternoon Matthew broke a vase, one of Mama's favorites. He'd been running in the house even though we'd both been expressly forbidden to do so. He convinced me to confess to the crime for the sum of a penny, which he had in his pocket."
Solange shrugs. "I was young, maybe four or five, and thought it a fair trade at the time."
Lucas is silent for a moment - from the movements of his pencil, he appears to be adding some shading.
Presently he asks, "Why do you think you singled out that incident? Does the punishment you received stand out vividly? Or is it the memory of a time when someone tricked you, and you resolved not to allow it to happen again?"
She laughs. "It didn't quite work out the way Matthew intended. I confessed to the crime, then turned to the doorway where Matthew was listening in and in all innocence demanded immediate payment from him. Mama punished Matthew for bribing me and I got pie for dessert that night. Pie was good, but what I really wanted was the penny.
"I'm not sure what made me think of it...think of Matthew...I miss him." She shrugs again and looks away. "Do you...or did you...have any siblings, Lucas? On your father's side?"
"He may have had little side-slips he preferred not to speak of to my mother," says Lucas. "If so, I never knew. He died before I was of an age to be told such things, I suppose. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say we had other things to speak of for some years before his death. However, this drawing is about you. Tell me more of Matthew."
It's a half-minute or so before she responds. "He was older by about six months, and as the older sibling--and also as the boy, since I was only a girl--thought it his duty and right to be better than me at everything. It really annoyed him when he wasn't. I could run faster. I've always been a good runner. But he was better than me at climbing trees."
She pauses again, remembering. "Matthew was dark. Dark hair, dark eyes...sometimes dark personality. I was the light one, always smiling, always laughing. I had a good childhood." Solange smiles then, partly embarrassed, partly feeling guilty, as if a happy childhood was a forbidden fruit for most of her cousins that she--through nothing she did or was--alone was allowed to eat.
"It helps," agrees Lucas, smoothing a line over what is presumably, by the angle, her cheek-to-be. "Did you have pets? I have a pure white cockatiel, I remember, a very handsome fellow."
"We had a pony when Matthew and I were young. His name was Mister Hobbs. The indignities we put that pony through...I dressed him up in flowers and hats and capes and made him come to tea...Matthew would pick up a long pole and try to make Mister Hobbs his jousting charger...You should've seen Matthew. He was so serious holding that long pole, but he was too tall for the pony and we had to let the stirrups way out. Then Mister Hobbs was too fat to really run, so he did this sort of wobbling trot..." Solange chuckles. "Poor Mister Hobbs. He earned his feed by the end of the day, no doubt.
"By the time I was nine or ten, I started pleading to learn to ride a real horse. Father arranged for both Matthew and me to take riding lessons. I was glad Matt got to come along. He would've made my life miserable had I gotten to do something fun like that and he hadn't, but I was glad for other reasons. I wanted Matt to be happy."
"Would you say that's a thread that runs through your life?" asks Lucas, his tone almost idle ... and yet ... nothing about this process seems really idle. "Do you always want people to be happy, cos?"
Solange's eyes narrow. "It's not really in my power to make everyone around me happy, is it?" Less of a question, and more of a statement. Her expression turns guarded. "Trying to do so is a sure path to disappointment. At least that's been my experience in the matter."
"Tell me about a disappointment," says Lucas - and his voice is softer than the hypnotic swish of his pencil on the paper ... the soft susurrus of graphite on paper seems louder than his voice, louder than the sough of the waves, louder than the remote plangent cry of sea-birds far overheard ....
Solange gazes at him, listening to the pencil mark the paper, finding herself involuntarily caught up in the process. For a moment, she and Lucas are the only two people in the universe, separated--or was it joined?--by the stroke of pencil on paper.
Then she blinks, snapping herself out of the reverie, and once again hears the seabirds cry and smells the fishy tang of the water and sees the sailors moving about the deck and feels the hard rail against her back.
She blinks again. "Disappointment?" she repeats, her voice sounding strange in her own ears. "I...um..."
Kyril looking at her as she takes a drink of the red wine, Father striking his leg in frustration as he sits in his wheelchair, Aunt Felicity gazing at her disapprovingly over the top of her teacup, Mama dressed in black and turning away, Matthew touching her face...
Solange startles. The cry of the seabirds is clear again. She passes a hand over her face, then tucks it back under her arm. "Ask me a different question, Lucas," she says quietly.
He raises his head and looks at her. His eyes are so very dark ... strange that Flora's son should have eyes that are so very dark. For a moment they seem unfocussed - as though he is looking not at her, but through her, seeing inside her, seeing deep down to her core. Then he shakes his head slightly, and he is just Lucas, indolent, spoilt, bitchy Lucas.
"We can do this," he says, "or we can spar on the deck and stretch our muscles. Or we can hang a line off the back of the ship and fish. Or we can ignore the fact that you have supplied your own after-dinner comforts and retire to my cabin for a rousing session of how's your father. But if we do this - we do it properly."
The wind tugs the sails. The fair breeze blew. The white foam flew. The furrow followed free. So.
Lucas looks down at his sketchpad again.
"Tell me about a disappointment, Solange," he says quietly.
Solange glares at him, lips pursed together, chin lowered and color high. "Fine. You want a disappointment?" she snaps. "Prime example, the disappointment in his eyes when I told him I didn't want to see him anymore. What I didn't tell him was that it was because I was afraid I wouldn't still love him when he was eighty-three as I did when he was twenty-three. I was selfish and self-centered and weak and I regret terribly I ended it for those lame reasons. Can you put all that in the trump? Will you remember that every time you use it?"
"Possibly," says Lucas, his eyes intent on the pad, as he makes what appears a hard definite line with a long sweep of the graphite pencil. "Possibly not. What matters is that you remember it."
He looks up at her. "I've said - this is about you, not about me. Do you think if you hand this trump to someone else - Vere, say - he will see all this in your face? He'll just see a trump of his sister - a way of reaching you.
"But unless I know what makes you you, I can't make the trump at all."
He holds her gaze for a long moment, before he returns his attention to the pad.
She regards him back, uncertainty and mistrust co-habitating equally in the now tense lines of her shoulders. Did he really need to probe this deeply to create a trump? Or was it a ruse, was he playing her? Was she just being naive about this whole thing?
"Tell me about a moment of perfect happiness."
Solange closes her eyes in annoyance at the abrupt yank on her emotions as Lucas travels from one extreme to the other. Control. She must regain it before her reactions got completely out-of-hand. Lucas is creating a trump that could prove immensely valuable in the upcoming days. This is ultimately a Good Thing, and she is the one in control of what she tells him and what she doesn't. And she doesn't have to tell him everything.
She takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, not looking at him, but looking past him to the open sea.
"The morning following my succesful completion of walking that glowing monstrosity in Amber's basement. After waking up I went to see Father. His smile was so big... I remember him standing in his study when I came in. Standing. He told me how proud he was of me and gave me my trump deck as a present. He hugged me, and his arms were so...huge...I was swallowed up in them. I felt safe, like nothing bad would ever happen again. Ever."
She frowns, breaks her stance to scratch her nose, then folds her arms across her chest again. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have snapped at you."
"You're being remarkably restrained," says Lucas, making a few more swift lines. "How did you lose your virginity?"
Solange coughs suddenly, her hand coming to rest against her chest. "Bite me," she tells him when she can speak again. "You don't need to know that."
Lucas looks up at her - and then grins.
"It can be very revealing," he says. "All right - we'll leave that for now. Just one last question for this morning ...
"You've told me your greatest disappointment. Now ... what's your greatest regret?"
A memory of Matthew flits into her mind, but she squelches it and smiles at Lucas. "No, we're done for the morning," she states, pushing herself away from the railing. "May I see what you have so far?"
"Certainly," says Lucas.
He holds the sketchpad out so that she can see it.
Arms still crosssed, she steps forward to study it.
At first it seems to be several connected lines, some shading ... an abstract, random patterning on the page. Not yet a portrait - not even really a sketch ...
And then ... something. Perhaps he changes the angle a fraction, perhaps the light catches it in a different way, perhaps she shifts her head.
But suddenly she is there, there, captured on the paper - the lines of her face, her hand resting on an invisible rail, the strands of hair blowing across her face, staring out at the viewer ... and the expression in her eyes is the intensity she sees in the morning mirror before she puts on the face she will wear to the world.
A blink.
It is just lines on the paper again.
Lucas flips the cover over, closing the pad.
Fascinating. Solange straightens up and regards Lucas with a mixture of uncertainty and awe. She understands better the whole "don't take my picture, you'll steal part of my soul" fear she's encountered with some people. Her arms remain crossed.
"Early days," he says. "I suppose sex is out of the question. Shall we spar instead?"
That gets a wicked, dangerous smile from Solange. "Certainly," she growls, meeting his eyes. "I'd be more than happy to kick your butt." She brushes past him to go retrieve her sparring equipment from her cabin.
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LVIII: A Momentous Confession | Index | LX: The Soul of a Trump
