The Swan Thieves

I imagined Beatrice's garden. It would have been small and rectangular--the book I found of paintings of Paris in the late nineteenth century didn't include any by Clerval, but there was an intimate scene by Berthe Morisot showing her husband and daughter on a shady bench. The text explained that Morisot and her family lived in Passy, a grand new suburb. I pictured Beatrice's garden at the end of autumn, the leaves already brown and yellow, some plastered onto the slate walk by a heavy rain, the ivy on the back wall the color of burgundy-- vigne vierge, one caption noted beside a painting of a similar wall: the original Virginia creeper. There would be a few roses--now stark brown stems, scarlet rose hips-- around a sundial. I considered all this, mentally discarding the sundial. Instead I concentrated on the soggy flower beds, the corpses of chrysanthemums or some other heavy flower darkened by rain, and in the center a small formal arrangement of bushes and a bench.

The woman sitting at her desk looking out at all this would be twenty-six years old, a mature age for the era, married for five years but childless--that lack, a secret anguish, judging from her love for her nieces. I saw her at the desk painted by her mother, the full, pale-gray skirts of her dress--didn't ladies wear different dresses for morning and afternoon? -- billowing against the chair, lace at her neck and wrists, a silver ribbon around the knot of her heavy hair. She herself would be anything but gray, her face strong-featured and clear even in the dull light, her hair dark but also bright, her lips red, her eyes bent wistfully to the page that was already her favorite company, this wet morning.