Free Bonnie Dundee by Rosemary Sutcliff

well enough at the same time. I seemed always to be grinding the blue called ultramarine which he needed for that gown, for it was a deep blue and he painted thickly; and he would have only small amounts ground and oil-mixed at a time, lest any should be wasted, that colour, which the old church masters used for the Virgin’s mantle, being the most costly of all pigments, ground from pure lapis lazuli.
    I watched the painting grow from the rough sketches, and its first outline in the warm black-brown ingres, while form and colour took shape. And if not the Lady Jean I knew, then at least this new lady in the fine stiff gown and the ‘Confidantes’ ringlets bound with silver ribbons over her ears, began to grow out of the canvas. It was all like returning to a familiar but long-forgotten world to me; and I began to itch in my fingers and in some place deep inside myself to an odd bit of board and a brush and a dap of ingres of my own, such as my father had whiles and whiles allowed me.
    Then one evening Mynheer, going off for his supper, left me to grind some more ultramarine before I went off to mine, for he would be needing it to put the finishing touches to my lady’s slashed and ruffled sleeves in the morning.
    When the door shut behind him, I set to work, first with the pestle and mortar, and then when the rough grinding was done, adding the oil drop by drop and working the pigment up on the marble grinding slab until it came smooth as curd and deeply blue as fresh-opened cornflowers. Finally I scraped off with the palette knife and put it into its wee pot, making sure that not one speck was wasted. I had been in a hurry at first, wanting my own supper. But when it was finished – och, I don’t know; it was the first time I had ever been left alone in the Little Dining-room, and there was the canvas standing up on its easel, with its veil of fine linen flung over it to keep off the dust while the paint was damp, and plenty of daylight left, for the room faced westward and we were almost into June. And the wish was on me to take a good look while I was on my own with no one by to call me to this task or that. I lifted back the cloth, and there it was, the bonniest thing, even though the Lady Jean looking back at me was not just the Lady Jean I knew. And I thought it was a sad thing that it was just her on her lone, and not a proper wedding portrait with Claverhouse in it, too. But then I wondered how would the man look, dressed up and stiff as she was, with fine new point-lace at his throat and wrists, and maybe his own hair cut off close, and a fine fashionable peruke the like of Mynheer’s? And I thought of him as I’d come to know him, riding into the stable-yard with his uniform often enough wet and mired with the moorland ways, and sometimes thatquick quiet smile of his, and sometimes his eyes red-rimmed and weary in his head…
    There were a couple of bits of board on the deep windowsill, all ready sized; the kind that Mynheer used for making sketches, and the window was very near. I had only to reach out my hand…
    I’ll never know what possessed me. I reached out, not really knowing what I did. And I found a small brush and the crock of ingres; and I was settled on the windowsill with the board on my knee.
    I began to paint.
    And having begun, I went on. I was scarcely aware of finishing with the ingres and calmly helping myself to the colours I wanted and setting out my palette as I had set it out so often for my father and now for Mynheer. I worked at top speed, seeking to catch all that was left of the daylight, utterly absorbed in what I did.
    I have become a skilled and, as I think, a bonnie painter in the years since then, though alas, never the great one, the master that every painter dreams of becoming when he sets out. I have had joy of my painting, aye, as well as the hard work and the times when I would have liked fine to throw the whole thing at some fat sitter’s head. But I do not think that