Free The Seance by John Harwood Page B

the task in hand.
    Around midnight, when the moon was at its highest, I had done all that I could. Still the light burned in the window; I gathered up my things and withdrew into the shadow of the trees. I had brought a lantern with me, but that would mean announcing my presence to whatever might be abroad in Monks Wood, and after a hundred yards of stumbling in near-darkness, I went a little way off the path, wrapped myself in my greatcoat and huddled at the foot of another massive oak. There I lay listening to the creepings and rustlings in the thickets around me, the occasional hoot of an owl, drifting in and out of uneasy dreams until I woke in grey twilight.
    For the next five days I scarcely left my studio. I neglected my father shamefully, but the picture would not be denied; whenever I lay down to seek a few hours’ sleep it floated before my inward eye, beckoning, insisting. I worked with an assurance I had never possessed – or rather been possessed by – constantly running up against the limits of my technique and yet guided by a vision so compelling it seemed almost to make virtues of my limitations, until the morning when I set down my palette for the last time and stepped back to admire what looked like the work of someone far more gifted than myself. It was a scene at once melancholy, sinister and beautiful, and in that long moment of contemplation I felt like the God of creation; I looked upon my work and knew that it was good.

    My father, though he admired the picture, was more concerned about the prospect of my being arrested for trespass, and exacted a promise that I would not venture uninvited upon the Wraxford estate again. I agreed readily enough, believing that I would be able to apply my new-found talent to any subject I chose. But my next study of the keep at Orford looked markedly inferior to its predecessor, as did my efforts at several other favourite scenes. Something had been lost, an absence as palpable as a drawn tooth and yet impossible to define; some mysterious collaboration of hand and vision, a facility I had not even been conscious of possessing. Where once I had simply painted, all was now laboured, forced, unnatural; and the harder I struggled against this mysterious inhibition, the worse the result. I thought of returning to the Hall, but aside from my promise I was restrained by a superstitious fear that if I tried to repeat my success,
Wraxford Hall by Moonlight
would somehow ... not dissolve before my eyes, exactly, but reveal itself as flashy and mediocre. Perhaps I really was deluding myself; the thought had occurred to me often enough, and I had not submitted the picture to expert judgment; I felt I could not show it, for fear of alarming my father. Yet my heart insisted that I had done something remarkable, though at a price I would rather not have paid.
    Then in October of the following year, all was changed by my father’s sudden death from a stroke. Now I was free to devote myself entirely to painting; except that my talent had deserted me, and besides, selling the practice seemed like a betrayal of my father’s memory, even his trust. Our clients expected me to carry on; Josiah, our elderly clerk, expected it; and so I went on ‘just for the time being’, as I kept telling myself, unsure whether it was conscience or cowardice that kept me in harness. My sole act of defiance was to hang
Wraxford Hall by Moonlight
upon my office wall (I told anyone who asked that it had been done from an old mezzotint) where it was displayed on the afternoon when I first met Magnus Wraxford.

    I had received a note from him to say that he would very much like to meet me; he did not indicate why. I knew from my father’s notes to the Wraxford papers that Magnus was the son of Cornelius’s younger brother Silas, who had died in 1857. Cornelius had made a new will in 1858, leaving his entire estate to ‘my nephew Magnus Wraxford of Munster Square, Regent’s Park, London’. Out of