Read Online Rebecca Wentworth's Distraction by Robert J. Begiebing - Free Book Online

time.”
    â€œThank you, Miss Norris. You must know how grateful and pleased I am. I stand by my offer to leave you payment in surety.”
    â€œThat won’t be necessary; I know you value it and will take every appropriate care.”
    He offered her a congratulatory glass of wine, and to his surprise she accepted. She was an energetic little woman who stepped about like some uncaged bird admiring his rooms and views. His painting room was of particular interest to her. And she was taken by a portrait in progress of a young woman.
    â€œWho is she, sir?” Miss Norris said.
    â€œIs she familiar?”
    â€œOddly so, yes, as if I know her without having seen her.”
    â€œThen you’ve read Mr. Richardson’s novel?”
    â€œWho has not? It’s all the talk.” She looked at the portrait curiously. “My goodness, it is she!”
    â€œPamela Andrews,” he said proudly. “A mere fancy on my part, of course, but perhaps available as a striking specimen. And something of a conversation piece as well.” People would visit his rooms expecting specimens, prints, and models, and lessons.
    â€œIndeed. She is very well done, and very amusing, sir.”
    He had painted Pamela in profile, her dark hair partly covered by a white cap with two little upright points above the forehead. Her bodice and gown he rendered in brown with white trim and white ruffles about the neck. He had gloved her arms and hands.
    Miss Norris was completely taken with his Pamela and spent some time before it. Sanborn took her interest as a good sign for the response of future patrons.
    He did not pursue the topic of finding the child, for he did not wish to unsettle her, but rather congratulated her on her forethought and temerity and allowed her to savor their mutual pleasure over what she had accomplished for them.
    I N THE MONTHS that followed, he made many a study of the painting’s confident magic. It was, he often admitted to himself, a little like having the living child staring back out at him from a looking glass. But he grew familiar with the prepossessing face and found that he began to welcome it; he no longer felt the strange apprehension and outrage he had experienced upon first viewing it. In fact, he was reminded of something Smibert had told him when Sanborn called upon the old master in his Queen Street rooms in Boston during Sanborn’s early months in the city. He had felt emboldened to call upon Smibert—by that time the dean of American portrait painters—because both of them had mutual acquaintances from Hogarth and Ellis’s academy in London.
    â€œI very much enjoyed teaching Anna Berkeley while on shipboard, sailing for Newport, in Rhode Island,” the older painter had said. “I now have the pleasure, in addition, to believe that she may not only be the first woman to paint portraits in America, but may well be one of the finest limners to have once practiced the trade on these shores.”
    â€œIs that so?” Sanborn replied, hoping the master would ask to see a sample or two of his own work. Smibert seemed charmed by the thought of a female pupil of talent who might make her mark in the New World. That rather surprised Sanborn at the time. But he himself was hoping for some advice and help with securing commissions, so he did not then give much thought to Madam Berkeley, or her renowned husband, or the college they had all hoped to establish in Bermuda.
    Yet now the master’s words rang again in his ears. Rebecca surely was another female of talent. But Rebecca’s gift, unlike what must have been the decorous aptitude of the bishop’s wife, was eccentric and rare—not the primitive talent of some untutored New World limner, say a Robert Feke. No, it was the gift of a powerful, disquieting, and deeply personal vision.
    Now in Portsmouth all these months later, however, he found that having Rebecca’s self-portrait in his