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“It is.” Cora frowned as she watched Manuela slide on one of her dressing gowns before going in search of something in her reticule.
“I could get some paper for you,” she offered.
“No need,” Manuela declined happily as she triumphantly pulled something out of the bag. “I’ve got one of my small sketchbooks.” She winked at Cora as she stretched the tight tube of papers, then pulled out two small pencils.
“I have a desk in the other room.” Manuela waved her off again. Cora grinned to herself at this new, very self-possessed side of Manuela.
She looked around the room for a second until she settled on a pale pink settee by the window. “There.”
Cora allowed herself to be positioned to this side and that, and after a few interruptions which involved a few kisses, the artist was happy with her pose.
“Can I see?” Cora asked, picking up the curled sheaf of sketching paper. Manuela looked up from whatever she was doing to her pencils and nodded.
“That’s from the last week at the fairgrounds,” she told Cora. The duchess leafed through the images. The paper was so small they were practically miniatures, but the detail and skill of the drawings was astounding. It was mostly faces. There had to be at least a dozen portraits.
“This is only a week’s worth?” she asked in surprise and Manuela laughed self-consciously.
“I’m always drawing, the moment my hands are idle, I reach for my sketchbook,” she admitted as she came to stand behind Cora. “You just never notice because whenever I’m with you my hands are distracted.”
“It’s true,” she exclaimed when Cora threw her a dubious glance.
“These are brilliant.” She was examining the portrait of a young girl. Her hair was pulled back into a braid, a small smile pulling up her lips. The features were so detailed, the happiness on the girl’s face so vivid Cora expected the impish child to wink at her.
“That’s Clarita, Luz Alana’s little sister, when we took her to Cairo Street,” Manuela explained, her eyes softening as she looked at the drawing. “She has a bit of a fascination with the mummies.” It was only her face, neck and a bit of her shoulders. She was wearing a black dress, and a small brooch was fastened to her neck, which on closer inspection...
“Is that a spider on her neck?”
Manuela kept her attention on what she was sketching, but her mouth tipped up. Her expression one of indulgent affection. “It’s a black widow!” she corrected. “I found it for her at a shop in Le Marais.”
“That’s an odd accessory for a little girl,” Cora mused.
“Luz Alana and Clarita lost both their parents, their father in the last couple of years,” Manuela said, raising a shoulder, her face somber as she talked about her friends. “She’s been fascinated with death and scary creatures. I know I shouldn’t encourage her, but I remember what it was like to be a child among adults and not fully able to grasp all the things happening around me. Feeling misunderstood.” She set her pencil down and turned to Cora, her face very serious. This expression of concern and love was so distant from the self-indulgent, spoiled girl she’d believed Manuela to be. “I had my art to focus on, and it helped during the harder times. Clarita likes insects and mummies. What’s the harm in that?” She fiddled with the pencil, her focus on the far wall. Cora knew what it was like to feel misunderstood too. Like your pain was invisible, because every adult in your life was too suffocated in their own grief. Her own father could barely stand to look at her most of her childhood.
Cora had lashed out. She had leaned into all the things about herself her father hated and had flaunted them in his face. Her tomboy inclinations, her fixation with business, her disinterest in marriage or any of the things society girls were supposed to want. The more her father insisted on her conforming, the more she rebelled. The more she tested his love, until she went too far and he cast her out. Her Tia Osiris had tried to love her, but even she was bewildered by Cora’s rage. Only after they’d set sail for Europe had she let her aunt in, and thankfully with her it had not been too late.
“It’s very kind of you to do that for her. Sometimes it’s enough for just one person in your life to embrace your strangeness.”
“Indulging Clarita helps me in a way,” Manuela admitted, before turning attention back to the sketch. Cora wanted to ask what she’d meant, but that was not conducive to observing the rules they’d set for this arrangement.
Grappling for something to distract her, she leafed through more of Manuela’s drawings. The next one was done with even more detail than the previous ones, but the style was very different. This one was of an older man. His eyes were screwed together as though he was trying to observe something at a distance. His mouth was pursed. Like he’d swallowed something sour. With his mustache and aged face, he should’ve looked grandfatherly, but the image made Cora feel as if she was witnessing something perverse. She flipped the page and found another similar drawing, but this time the face was that of a beautiful woman, or at least she would’ve been beautiful if her eyes weren’t wide and bulging out of her face, her mouth half open as if she was gawking at something. The image was just as unsettling as the previous one.
“Where is this from?” she asked, glancing up at Manuela, who seemed to almost recoil at the page Cora was holding up. As if even she’d forgotten just how disturbing her own sketches were.
“It’s from the ethnological expositions at the fairgrounds,” Manuela said succinctly.
An icy feeling settled in Cora’s stomach as realization dawned. “I’d heard they were planning to do that,” she said, with distaste. She had not gone to that part of the grounds but had heard from some associates who were part of the planning committees that the French planned to exhibit people indigenous to some of their colonies.
Display them in habitats for crowds to come and see. “It’s barbaric,” Cora said, looking at yet another monstrous, gaping face. “Do they make them just stand there to be being stared at?”
“They do,” Manuela said grimly. Her gaze was as hard as her sketches, which Cora noted were not of the people on display but of the leering crowds coming to ogle them. Now that she knew what it was that the figures in the drawing were doing, the images held a distinctly sinister air.
“I only went once,” Manuela admitted, a shiver running through her at whatever she was thinking of. “I couldn’t do any drawings of those in the exhibitions. It felt wrong. But the more I looked at the people coming to see them, as though they were in a human zoo, the more upset I became, and suddenly I was drawing them. I didn’t want to forget the ugliness of that moment.”
“Bearing witness is important. Your drawings are a stark window into what we’ve grown to accept in our society, how cruel we can be.” Cora pulled Manuela by her hand until she was settled between Cora’s legs. “That is what a good artist does—reflects the spirit of the moment, for better or worse.”
Manuela sighed, her expression rueful. “Last night, Claudine told me you sponsor quite a few of artists.”
Cora shrugged and pressed a kiss to the top of Manuela’s head, uncomfortable with this line of conversation. Claudine, Cassandra and Tia Osiris had the tendency to paint her in a saintly light whenever they could.
