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on the table, he pushed back his chair and stood. Swiftly, I stood as well, and he rang for Molly to clear.
    “Yes,” he said. “I think you may see it. Since, as you say, you will be leaving soon, it is right that you should look on your mother’s face before you go.”
    Scarcely daring to breathe for fear he would change his mind, so unexpected was his agreeable, accommodating mood, I followed him out of the dining room to the stairs. He paused to get an oil lamp, and then we began our ascent.
    I followed him all the way to the top of the house, to a low narrow door I had never opened. The key Father used was rusty, the lock stiff, and when the door finally opened with a jerk we were greeted with a rising cloud of dust. When it settled, the lamp cast a warm glow on a jumble of disorder: broken chairs, crumbling sheaves of paper, boxes, trunks, crates. Everything was furred heavily with dust so that it blended into a dun-colored mass, and as we moved into the attic, squeaks and scrabbling sounds preceded us. Spiders had made free of the place; generations of webs draped the rafters, and Father, in front of me, had to brush them aside to move forward. The condition of the attic dispelled any notion I might have had that Father made sentimental pilgrimages to visit his dead wife’s portrait, and I wondered why he had not stored it in a place where it would be safe from vermin and decay.
    At least he—or a servant—had covered it, so that it was not naked to the dust that had grown moss-like over every other surface. The tall rectangle standing at the far end of the room was swathed completely in a cloth that may once have been white but was now the same grimy color as everything surrounding it. Father set the lamp on a nearby trunk so that it cast its light on the shrouded shape. Then, with thinned lips showing his distaste, he grasped a corner of the drape and pulled. Instantly he fell back as another choking cloud of dust arose, and I held my handkerchief to my nose as I stared at the painting, waiting for it to emerge from the haze.
    I could feel my heart quickening. After so long, finally to know what she looked like, to see whether I even—oh, please—resembled her. To see in her face what her character was, whether she had been flirtatious, or gentle, or strong, to know what kind of person she had been who had ended her own life when she was no older than I. Through the settling dust came colors first, then shapes: a bright pink gown, a blue bonnet, hands folded over a fan. My heart was beating fast and joyful as my eyes sought her face.
    They met blankness. Beneath the meticulously rendered plumes and frills of the bonnet there was no face, but a hole of vacant white canvas. Nausea touched me and I fell back a step, shaken by the terrible void where I had expected to find the features of a human face.
    “The artist never even saw your mother.”
    I had forgotten Father’s presence. Unable to speak, I looked at him where he stood next to me and saw unmistakable satisfaction in his eyes. “Tragic, isn’t it? The only surviving portrait of your dear mother, and it lacks its subject.” When I still said nothing, he went on, and he was actually smiling. “She was a very sickly little thing, your mother. If she wasn’t taking the waters at a spa she was convalescing in Italy. The artist had to paint everything else first, and she was dead before he so much as met her.”
    “But… the hands?” I asked faintly, finding my voice.
    He waved dismissively. “A model, no doubt.”
    A shiver went through me. Not even these held anything of my mother. All they spoke of was an anonymous shop girl or actress who had worn my mother’s dress for the time it took to be set on canvas. I would never even have the slight knowledge they would have afforded: would she have had long fingers, clever with a needle or at the pianoforte? Or the plump, dimpled hands of a belle? Would she have had a smudge of Prussian blue paint on