how you do your job, or what knowledge makes a difference, but there are people who don’t like that presence, especially in a woman.”
Maisie waited, for she felt he had more to say.
“I know this sounds as if I’m a cranky art teacher—and you know, perhaps I am. Perhaps that’s why I came back to art, after the war—it’s a license to be a bit strange, after all; I sometimes think people expect it, so the fact that I am different doesn’t matter. And I’ve felt different, ever since the war.” He rubbed his damaged hand. “But the thing is, in all my experience as an artist, I have found that there are people who want to destroy beauty. Is that because it’s beyond them? Is it because beauty represents something they cannot have, or is not inside them? I have seen children destroy flowers growing alongside the canal. Of course, you can say, ‘That’s just children for you.’ But I don’t believe it at all—I believe there is some pain, something untoward in certain people—certain communities, even—perhaps it’s anger, a sense of dispossession or disenfranchisement, and they have to destroy that which brings joy, and love.”
Maisie nodded. “I think you’re right—but do you think that someone might have taken the life of Miss Pramal for this reason?”
He scratched his head with the curled fingers of his lame hand. “I hate to say it, but I think so. Yes, I think so, from what I have observed of the destructive nature of man. Perhaps there is nothing more unattainable than the beautiful outsider, so perhaps someone, somewhere, wanted to end a sense of their own ugliness by taking the life of the beautiful thing that gave weight to those feelings.” He shrugged. “It’s just all so very sad.” He looked up at Maisie. “I don’t know how you do your job, truly.”
She looked at Ashley, into his eyes. “Sometimes I don’t know either. But at the end of the day, I do my job so that people like Usha Pramal have a voice. I cannot bring back their beauty to this world—and even the most ragged soul was once beautiful, Mr. Ashley. But I can stand up and find out the truth. Sometimes I’m successful and sometimes not. But I do my best.”
He nodded again. “I take my hat off to you, Miss Dobbs. Every time I see art desecrated, I want to strangle the person who did it.”
Maisie smiled. “Oh, I sometimes feel like that, too. But I also know that inside the perpetrator of a crime, inside the destroyer, there is often a work of art that has also been ravaged.”
She bid good-bye to the art teacher, who stood at the threshold of his office, his hands in his pockets, his head bowed. And she knew she had just met another person whose heart had been touched by Usha Pramal.
But who had taken her life? With each interview, with each new nugget of information, and as her knowledge of the woman and her life took shape, she felt that Truth was playing games with her, as if she were being led through a forest by a sprite who sped in and out of trees saying, “Over here.” And behind each tree, under each leaf, there was just a little more to go on, but nothing that pointed to a killer.
As she walked to her motor car, the mist having lifted and the sun breaking through white clouds puffed with gray, she wondered again if Ashley had ever seen Simon at the convalescent home in Richmond—Simon, the young army doctor wounded alongside Maisie when the casualty clearing station in which they struggled to save lives torn apart by war came under enemy attack. He had been her first and most special love, yet he had lingered for years in a netherworld of existence, brain injured and shell-shocked, before finally succumbing to his wounds. She had struggled to put memories of their love and the terror of that war behind her, and now she wondered if this man before her, himself battling wounds long after the war had officially ended, had ever walked past Simon’s wheelchair placed in the conservatory. Had he perhaps sat alongside him, close to the window where leaves of so many green and luscious plants were reflected in his blank, unseeing eyes, their shimmering almost creating the myth that there was movement somewhere in his mind? And she wondered if, in going away, in leaving this