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teach Lady Catherine’s granddaughter. The amiable Herr Winter was summoned, subjected to an impolite interrogation as to his background and abilities, and informed that he was to have the honour of teaching Miss Darcy.
    Fortunately, Herr Winter was possessed of a sense of humour, and he had taken a liking to this Cassandra, with her wide grey eyes and ill-contained energy. At first, he had expected no more of her than of his other female pupils, who needed to sketch and draw and do water-colours as an accomplishment and as an agreeable way to pass the empty hours of leisure, and he had been astonished to find in Cassandra a talent far beyond that of the usual run of young ladies.
    Very soon discovering that there were few of his male pupils, in Germany or in London, who had ever shown more promise, he forgot about her sex and simply enjoyed unfolding to her the mysteries of his craft. “Art, I cannot teach,” he would always say. “That comes from the soul and cannot be taught.”
    Water-colours and pastels weren’t enough for her, and by the time she was fourteen, she was already an accomplished painter in oils, a skill she took care to keep hidden from her mother. He would have liked her to tackle some bigger themes, but Cassandra was firm about where her tastes and skills lay: She could paint from nature well enough, for her early training with her father had made her observant,and the liveliness of her flowers and trees and landscapes made them delightful, but her real love, and gift, was for portraiture.
    Herr Winter showed some of her work to young Henry Lisser, who was duly impressed. “Were she not a young lady, and born into an English gentleman’s household, she could make a living from her brush,” he said.
    “Look at the upstairs parlour at Rosings, if you are able,” Herr Winter said. “She painted the panels in there; they thought I did it, but she wanted to learn fresco techniques, and so I showed her, and let her do the work. It was irksome for me to take the credit and the fee, but the pleasure and pride she took in the work were their own reward for her, and the main reward for me. It is much admired, I could not have produced anything so charming myself, and I was besieged with requests from other houses to do a similar thing. I had to say that my fingers were giving me considerable pain, since otherwise it might be noticed that those exquisite pastoral scenes did not come from my brush.”
    Henry Lisser shrugged. “It is a waste of a talent,” he said, almost to himself. “However, she will marry a country squire and settle down to be a wife or mother, as is her destiny.”
    Herr Winter put Cassandra’s work back in its portfolio. There was a tiny frown on his amiable countenance. “Part of me hopes that this will be the case. But, with this particular young lady, I do wonder about her future. I think it may not be as you describe. Her life at Rosings is not altogether a happy one; I only hope that she does not break out some day, tired of the smallness of her life, and perhaps take some disastrous step that she will come to regret.”
    Once Mr. Lisser began work at Rosings, he saw for himself what Herr Winter meant. However, he kept his thoughts to himself, and, in truth, he was not much interested in a set of persons whom, he imagined, he would never see again, once the painting was finished. He had a good deal of reserve, and liked to keep a professional distance between himself and his clients.
    Mr. Partington tried to draw him out—what was his background, what were his antecedents?—but he gave little away. He had studied in Leipzig and Vienna and Paris, before coming to London, he said, and no more could be got out of him.
    Mr. Lisser had been surprised to find that the family arranged in front of the view of Rosings that he was to paint was to consist of only five members of the family. Mr. Partington chose the grouping, with him standing protectively behind his wife, who was