I am sitting here now with nearly forty dollars in my pocket and a list of folk who have commissioned me to do paintings specially for them. It’s a small bloody fortune, and more than I could ever have expected to make doing almost anything else. And there is nothing else that I love doing quite as much as this.
For the first time in my whole life I know what it is that I want to do with it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Sime’s immersion in the diary was suddenly broken by a security lamp coming on below his window and he resurfaced to the reality of the attic room in his sister’s house in Bury. He felt disorientated, and a little disappointed. He had no idea where events in the diary were leading, nor could he see what possible relevance they might have.
He stood up and leaned over the desk towards the window to peer down into the garden. In the light that flooded the side porch and the grass beyond it, he saw his sister wrapped in a coat and carrying a flashlight. She crossed the lawn towards the trees at the far side.
As the security light behind her went out, only the beam of her flashlight cut through the dark of the garden until another security lamp above the doors of the double garage beyond the trees poured light down on to the path and the turning area in front of it. She opened a door and disappeared from view. A few moments later a yellow light appeared in the attic window above the garage doors, and the security lamp extinguished itself to plunge the garden back into darkness.
Sime sat down again and returned his focus to the diary.
He scanned quickly through its pages, trying to get a sense of the story they told without becoming bogged down by their detail. His ancestor, it seemed, had gone on to great success, exhibiting his work in Quebec City and Montreal. His paintings, in the end, had commanded substantial sums of money. Enough for him to make his living by his art, which must have been rare in those days. But his art was popular. Immigrant Scots appeared to have had an unquenchable appetite for a piece of their homeland, and his ancestor had barely been able to keep up with demand.
It wasn’t until an entry made nearly fifteen years later, when his great-great-great-grandfather must have been about forty years old, that Sime found himself halted in his tracks by the opening line.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Saturday, 26th June 1869
I sit writing this tonight with a real sense that there is some force that guides our lives in ways that we will never understand. I could, I suppose, attribute it to God. But then I would have to credit Him with the bad as well as the good, and to be truthful I am no longer sure what I believe. Life has treated me well and badly in almost equal measure, but it is the bad that always tests our faith. In a strange way we tend to take the good for granted. But I shall never do that again. Not after today.
I have been in Quebec City all this week at an exhibition of my work in the old walled town, almost in the shadow of the Château Haldimand. There are sixty works in the exhibition, and today was the final day, with only two paintings remaining to be sold. It was late afternoon and I was preparing to leave shortly when a young lady entered the gallery.
She was an extraordinarily pretty young woman, which is what immediately drew my eye, although to be honest she was not of the class that one would expect to be visiting an art gallery. I calculated that she was probably in her late teens or early twenties, and while very presentable she was plainly dressed, as you might expect of a maid or a serving girl. But there was something about her that fascinated me, and I could hardly stop myself from watching her as she wandered casually around the gallery moving from one painting to the next. She took some time over each picture, and seemed quite engrossed.
There were others in the gallery at the time, and I became distracted by a potential buyer asking me questions about one of my unsold works.
When he had gone, without buying I might add, the sound of a lady clearing her throat made me turn, and there she was standing at my elbow. There was such an intensity in her eyes that my stomach flipped over. Close up she was even more beautiful than from a distance. She smiled. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, sir. They tell me that you are the artist.’
I felt quite unusually bashful. ‘Yes.’
‘Scottish landscapes, I think.’
‘That’s right.’
‘They are very beautiful.’
‘Thank you.’ My tongue seemed to be sticking to the roof of my mouth.
‘But they’re not just anywhere in Scotland, are they?’
I smiled. ‘Well, no. They are all landscapes of the Outer Hebrides.’
‘And why did you choose that particular place?’
I laughed. ‘It’s where I grew up.’ I hesitated. ‘Are you interested in buying?’