Free Angel of Hever Castle, The by Kim Wright Page B

he does not leave his bed.” She flushed in shame.  “I should not know whether or not a man leaves his bed in the dark of night.  No decent girl knows these things, but I do.”
    “It matters not ,” Rayley said.  “Your family understands and forgives all.  We shall catch the train tomorrow morning and you shall be home by Christmas Eve.”
    “It looks like Dorinda Spencer,” Trevor continued, talking softly to himself as if he could not hear Rayley and Anne, as if he alone were immune to the emotion engulfing the room.
    “Good God, man, what does all of that matter?” Rayley snapped.  “Remember why we have come here, and it isn’t for any damned painting.”
    “I have gone too far to turn back,” Anne said.
    “One can always turn back,” Rayley sai d fiercely.  “We have journeyed here on the wishes of your mother, with no other intention than to bring you home.”
    “ It is an understandable error,” Trevor murmured, his eyes never leaving the naked Madonna’s face. 
    “But first tell me,” Rayley persisted.  “Do you own a white cloak?  Does he?”
    “A white cloak?” Anne echoed in confusion. “I have no such garment and LaRusse wears the same clothing every day.  Why do you ask?  And what did my mother tell you?  She does not understand me and she never has.”
    “ I can see why you both fell into the same confusion,” Trevor continued, still looking down at the painting.  “For there is an undeniable similarity in the faces, something very like in the mouth and the chin.  And yet the woman in this portrait is not Dorinda Spencer.”
    “M eaning what?” said Rayley, throwing up his hands in exasperation.
    “Mea ning that your casual comment was closer to the mark than Emma’s theory,” Trevor said.   Rayley had heard this tone in Trevor’s voice before and knew what it meant.  Pieces were dropping into place for his friend, and the larger picture was beginning to become clear.  “LaRusse’s madness is born from guilt as well as poison.  It is not Dorinda whose face he paints alone, by the dark of night.  It is her sister Rose, the woman who bore his illegitimate child and then disappeared.”

Chapter Eight
     
    It is the paint that does it, or so they say.  It makes you sick, brings on the visions of darkness and death. 
    And she knows that he is almost there.  That he has almost crossed that thin pale border which separates sanity from madness.  He does not sleep.  He does not eat.  He drinks and paces and rails against his latest girl – that pale and ineffectual Anne. 
    It is the white paint that will take him the rest of the way.  It is not an easy thing to obtain in London, where they are wise enough to fear it, so she was forced to journey to Calais and learn the technique in a French school.  It involved soaking lead plates in Mercury – dreadful stuff – and then flaking off bits to brew the white pigment.  It makes you drunk, forgetful, and foolish.  It brings on “the artist’s disease.”  They claim it is what drove Van Gogh insane, prompted him to cut off his ear and present it to a whore.
    And so shall it work its white magic on LaRusse.
    She mixes the paint at two parts white and one part blue, far more than what is prudent.  Far more than the ratio which is recommended at the art school where she learned.  It might even be enough to kill him if she tried, but she doesn’t want him dead.  At least not now.  Not quite yet.   She wants him to suffer.  To remember.
    Ni ght after night, she rises from her bed.  Puts on her white cloak and runs across the meadow to the gatehouse with a lantern in one hand and her paints in another.   And night after night she finds the portrait, his Angel of Hever Castle, waiting on the easel.  Anne’s arms and shoulders, Anne’s breasts and hands.  And yes, even Anne’s face, at least at first.  But she has always been quick with a brush and within minutes, the angel of Hever is