“What is that?” Fanny hovered in the doorway, looking uneasy. She’d been stripped, dried, and dressed in a fresh shift and stockings and, with her flushed cheeks and wavy, drying dark hair, looked like a small, disheveled angel recently rescued from badgers.
“It’s just a novel,” Bree said, and smiled. “I’ll tell you the story later, if you want. Here, come and look.”
Fanny came to the table, her head turned half away, not really wanting to see the ruined drawing. Then she saw the paper screen that Bree had fetched from the pantry—a rectangular wooden frame, with a very fine screen made of muslin from which threads had been pulled to create a grid, this tacked to the sides of the frame—and curiosity overcame her reluctance.
“It’s a clean tear—that’s lucky.” Brianna touched the torn edge of one half with a gentle finger. “See how it’s frayed along the edge? Paper is made of fibers, and if you were to soak a sheet of paper in water for a long time, do you know what you’d get?”
“A handful of soggy fibers?” Roger guessed.
“Pretty much. So—” She’d brought in a box of her paper-making supplies and now took from this a large cloth bag, bulging with …
“Is that cotton?” Fanny asked, fascinated by the fuzzy white blobs that poked out of the small heap of fabric scraps and something that looked—to Roger’s jaundiced eye—like handfuls of scraggy blond hair pulled out of someone’s head.
“Some of it. And flax that’s been hatcheled. And some paper scraps and bits of decayed rag. So we start with a handful of fibers, finely ground.” She laid her paper-making screen on the table, took up a small corked bottle, and carefully spread a line of what looked like carpet sweepings across the middle of the screen. “That’s going to be my patch. Now we lay the pieces down on top of that …”
One by one, Roger handed her the halves of the drawing and she carefully fitted the torn edges as closely together as she could manage.
“It’s a good thing it was drawn with a graphite pencil,” she observed. “Ink or charcoal or watercolor, and we’d be out of luck. As it is …” She’d brought down something that looked like a photographer’s finishing tray as well: a shallow box with raised sides, the seams sealed with pitch. Holding her breath, she lifted the paper screen and slowly lowered it into the tray.
“Water, please, nurse,” she murmured, reaching out a hand toward the big mulberry-colored pitcher that sat on the sideboard, always full of clean water. Roger edged off the bench—leaving a small puddle on the floor, he saw—and fetched it.
She sprinkled water carefully over the drawing until it was quite saturated—“So it will stick to the screen and not float,” she explained—and then poured more water into the tray, letting it rise until it just covered the sheet of paper.
“All right.” She set down the heavy pitcher with a small sigh of relief. “Now we let it soak for … oh, twenty-four hours should be plenty. That will dissolve the fiber of the drawing paper, which will then bond with the fiber of the patch—while not disturbing the lines of the drawing.” Roger saw her cross her fingers briefly behind her back. She smiled at Fanny.
“So then we press it, dry it, and we’ll essentially have a new sheet of paper—but with your drawing just like it is.”
Fanny had been watching the pouring with the hypnotized gaze of a frozen rabbit watching a fox, but with Brianna’s words, she looked up and let her breath out in a huge “Ohhhhh!”
“Oh, thank you! Thank you so much!” She pressed her palms against her cheeks, gazing at the drawing as though it had suddenly come to life.
And Roger had the sudden feeling that it had. To this point, he’d seen it purely as something Fanny valued, without really noticing the drawing itself. Now he saw it.
Whoever had drawn it had been a talented artist—but the girl on the page had been something special in herself. Beautiful, yes, but with a sense of … what? Vitality, attraction—but she also gave off an air of challenge, he thought. And while the beautiful mouth and sidelong glance offered a seductive half smile, they communicated also determination—and a sense of simmering rage that raised the hairs on Roger’s nape.
He remembered that this girl had killed a man with her own hands, and with premeditation.
To save her little sister from a fate she knew too well.
He wondered briefly whether the man who had drawn her that night at the brothel had then taken her, knowing what he was buying, and perhaps relishing it. He instantly suppressed the visions conjured up by the thought, though there was no suppressing the thought itself.