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

artifice of her coiffure, costume, and toilette were becoming. She was a woman whose striking presence and dignity he knew he must transfer, well placed, to his canvas. He was plying every effort and care, well within the orthodoxy of Squire Browne’s requests, to the task she had set him. He thought his work went very well, thus far, and he was full of confidence as he brought out the pearly tones of her watered silks, the white crispness of her laces, the softness of her velvets. It would be a three-quarter portrait, a dark curl falling over the right shoulder, and the whole set in painted spandrels—quite after the fashion they would emulate.
    â€œIs this correct, Mr. Sanborn?” she asked upon resuming her seat.
    He posed her further, if only slightly, to his advantage. He wanted to display fully her white under sleeves, just below the elbows. “Well done, madam. You are an excellent sitter.” Though he regretted that note of hireling praise, he hummed a pleasant ditty as he returned to his easel.
    â€œWith certain of my Portsmouth patrons of the highest quality, I assure you, it is quite a different matter. Some seem unused to the slightest restraint or inconvenience.” He smiled complimentarily before he began again, and she returned his smile. He wondered if there were a bit of the coquette in her still. Her décolletage was fashionably appropriate but daring as well, only the slightest hint of a fichu moderating the temptations of her ample bosom. He imagined how as a young unmarried woman she must have taken the widower Colonel Browne wholly into her powers. Yet such elements of her nature he would of course subdue in his portrait. Even if he had the capacity, he thought, he would never display, as Rebecca surely would, this inmost heart of Madam Browne’s character.
    â€œIs she gone to London, then?” he asked idly. “I believe I recall her saying something about the possibility of traveling to London as she sat for me.”
    â€œLondon?” She looked at him without her smile. “Oh, no, Mr. Sanborn. She is visiting relations of Mr. Browne’s, of the Wentworth line. She is seeing something of the woodland operations and her cousins, you see. The country air and vigor of climate shall do her good.”
    He thought of winter coming on and wondered how she could blithely say such a thing. But he himself had not been to the frontier, nor had he an inkling of the timber trade, nor how even the higher families or proprietors might live there. He had heard that the more prosperous proprietorships were quite convenient, having little of the rude frontier settlements of a century ago about them. Still, the whole arrangement sounded now, just as it had on Miss Norris’s lips, utterly ill considered.
    None of this could he speak to Madam Browne. He had to settle for worrying such thoughts in silence, even as he presented to his patron the most genial appearance.
    Yet the lady had confirmed everything Miss Norris had said. He began to wonder again how difficult it would be to travel inland and find the child whose self-portrait arrested and enchanted him more and more the longer he studied it.
    He tried one or two further conversational gambits to elicit information, but Madam Browne rather too apparently tired of the subject, so he was pressed to give it over for the remainder of her sittings. She wished to speak, rather, on the talk about town—the role of people of fashion in the great celebrations upon the return of Mr. Wentworth from London and his installation as first provincial governor, the Wentworth’s renting of the Macpheadris house, and so on. Sanborn’s mind, however, insisted on its wayward pursuit of the absent child.

1742
    The end of most immigrants was their own material and social betterment . . . to transplant to America the social pattern of the English country squire.
    â€”Byron Fairchild, Messrs. William Pepperrell: Merchants of