The Elsingham Portrait - By Elizabeth Chater Page 0,2

. . .

To escape the buffeting wind, Kathryn turned almost blindly into a side street. The district was unfamiliar to her—but the more unfamiliar, the better. Here in this rather dingy neighborhood she would not be likely to meet anyone she knew—anyone who would wonder why Kathryn Hendrix was crying on the street in broad daylight. She walked rapidly, head bent against the icy cold. In a few moments she noticed the first drops of rain. Before she could more than register the fact, the downpour was on her. The wind whipped sharp needles of sleet into her face, down her neck, against her legs. Kathryn raised her head to look around her. Was there a bookstore, a coffee shop—anywhere to take shelter?

The street was lined with old houses, neatly kept up but far from stylish. A few small stores, intruding on the houses, revealed that this was a neighborhood in transition. The rain came down harder.

“My new hat will be ruined,” Kathryn thought. But what did it matter? Who was to see it, who to care? Still, she would be more than foolish to risk a bad cold. She had her job to think of—the job she would have to keep for the rest of her life. She looked around for some temporary refuge from the storm. A flash of brilliant color caught her eye. A small store had a painting on display in its single window. Stretched above both door and window, a sign proclaimed that this was the Moderan Gallery.

The picture which had caught her attention represented a sun-drenched Italian fishing village, with little pastel houses spilling crazily down the steep hillside to a smiling blue bay. And flowers everywhere—on roofs, hanging from outside stairways and windows, flourishing along the edge of the sand near the cliff. Without another thought, Kathryn turned into the gallery.

The interior was at first disappointing. Rows of cheap plywood screens held canvases of different sizes: seascapes, landscapes, portraits. The wooden floor was scarred and rather dirty. The light was poor. Kathryn was wondering whether she wanted to wait in this depressing place until the rain stopped, when a lighted portrait on the back wall caught her eye. She moved toward it, as much from reluctance to go back into the storm as from any desire to examine the picture.

It was a full-length portrait of a woman in elaborate eighteenth century costume. The first impression was of warmth and brilliant light. The dress was golden satin, the skirt extravagantly wide with ruffles of heavy gold lace on the overdress, and more lace and jeweled flowers embroidered on the bodice and underskirt. The bodice was cut revealingly low, exposing rounded flesh whose tones of apricot and cream had been stroked onto the canvas with obvious admiration by the artist. The woman’s hair, built to a ridiculous height in the fashion of the late seventeen hundreds, was a blaze of titian red, so crimped and puffed and bejeweled that it seemed an artificial headdress rather than a woman’s hair.

And then Kathryn raised her eyes to the face.

The woman had the most arrogantly beautiful countenance she had ever seen. Sensuality pouted in the full lips, pride flared in the exquisite curl of the nostrils, and the eyes—Kathryn felt a shiver of emotion ripple along her flesh as she met the challenge of those strange, light green eyes framed in long black lashes. The eyes caught hers, held them . . .

Deliberately Kathryn forced herself to look away, telling herself she wished to know who had painted this very life-like portrait—refusing to admit that the bold, pale green stare had frightened her. Near the foot of the portrait, where the painted pattern of a rich Turkish carpet served as a background, the artist had scrawled his signature: Adrian Bart. Kathryn had never heard of him, yet she thought that if he had painted many pictures as disturbingly alive as this one, the world should surely have been aware of his name. All the time she was bending to decipher the signature, Kathryn felt the pull of those arrogant eyes above her. Adrian Bart had employed a technique which Kathryn had heard of, painting the eyes of his subject so they seemed to follow the viewer wherever he went. Reluctantly Kathryn looked up and met the green eyes a second time.

Now she was sure of it. That hard, mocking stare was evil. It was putting some kind of spell on her—drawing her . . . Kathryn moved back