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she’d
stolen it. Another painting had taken its place.
    It was a portrait of a girl in the sunlight. She was
laughing at something with her eyes turned upward and one arm thrown above her
head as though to pluck something unseen out of the air. Sunlight—the golden
kind you only see at the end of a perfect summer’s afternoon—flowed through her
chestnut hair and over the graceful curves of her dress and lit the bright-red
flowers behind her. But although all these details were present and remarkably
vivid at first glance, the more Hecuba looked at the painting the more they
seemed to exist as accidents, ideas created by the merest slash of red or
casual sweep of gold. Close up, the individual brushstrokes were plainly
distinct, thick bars and bold sweeps of color that her fingers itched to touch.
    It was only when she heard Rushmore’s voice coming from
behind her that she realized she’d dream-walked her way across the entire room
and was staring at the painting from one foot away. “That’s my sister Serena,”
Rushmore said.
    His sister. Hecuba was first pleased, then angry with
herself for being pleased. But she put that aside to stare at the portrait
again. “This is like nothing I’ve ever seen,” she said. “You’ve painted her so
vividly she could almost step out of the frame, yet I can see exactly how
you’ve built her out of brushstrokes. It’s…it’s like when you’re just waking up
from a dream and you can only half remember what you’ve been looking at.”
    He smiled slightly, his own eyes intent on the painting. “My
brother objects to seeing it in his study.”
    “Yes,” said Hecuba, “but your brother is an ass.”
    Rushmore laughed in surprise. “So you heard that part, did
you?”
    Hecuba’s eye was caught by a small irregularity—a part where
the painting had been rent then carefully but imperfectly repaired. Phrases
from the conversation she’d heard came darting back to the surface of her
memory. “This was based on C. F. Jones’ technique?”
    “Yes,” he acknowledged. “I was thinking about the way his
paintings seem to dissolve at the edges, like they’re only half-real, and
wanted to see if I could get the whole subject to look that way. I didn’t get
it quite right, but I think that’s partly because the color…” He broke off.
Hecuba turned to see him staring at her in rather a more pointed way, those
brown eyes of his almost accusing. “Because the color I ought to have used,” he
said, “was Hecuba green.”
    “Ah,” she murmured. “I’d wondered when you were going to
work that part out.”
    “So that’s why you’re after my paintings!” he cried. “C. F.
Jones was your father.”
    “No,” corrected Hecuba, “C. F. Jones was my mother .”
    He couldn’t have looked more surprised if she’d sprouted an
extra head to tell him that fact. “Your mother?” he said. “Are you sure?”
    She snorted. “I’m fairly certain, yes.”
    He stared at her for a moment more then grabbed her by the
elbow and hauled her back across the room to the painting that hung to the
right of the mantelpiece. Hecuba allowed this liberty because she knew what he
was looking for—and because the journey took her back to the warmth of the
fire.
    In the better light, his eyes flicked back and forth from
her face to the face in the second painting, A Portrait of Hecuba as Henry
VIII , in the famous style of Holbein. Hecuba remembered wearing the itchy
gold brocade and wrinkled green velvet tunic, the weight of the false crown on
her forehead, how much her arms had hurt from holding them at the proper
arrogant angle, how her feet had ached to move, how her nose had itched several
times and her mother had scolded her for scratching it and spoiling the pose.
    She’d stood for two entire days, full of more irritation
than an eight-year-old girl should be able to contain. And all that wounded
dignity, impatience and fury had been captured in color by her mother’s
skillful