Then the sun came up.
In September, to judge by the wealth of late-summer produce in her drawings of outdoor markets, she’d gone south: N?mes and Avignon, Nice and Florence, Rome and Ravenna and Venice. She’d either spent longer in that last, or been particularly fascinated by the canals, for there were dozens of small studies that experimented with the reflections of towers, flags, and passing gondolas.
It was startling to turn the page to a drawing of a man who could only be English, walking with his dog across a winter field that could only be Selwick.
The following pages were of him as well, and when one showed his face, I knew who it was: Ronnie’s father, the artist’s brother, Thomas Beaconsfield. He’d died before Ronnie and I met, but I recognised him from a photograph Ronnie kept on her desk. That face had also been a recurring theme throughout the sketch-journals, going back to Vivian’s childhood. In all those images, her affection shone clear.
But it occurred to me that I had seen few of her older brother, Edward, the current Marquess. I pulled down one of the earlier volumes, labelled 1902, and indeed, there were only two that might have been he. I supposed that, being sixteen when Vivian was born, Edward had been off to University when his sister was tiny—plus, as Ronnie had told me, the heir preferred city lights to country pastures. Vivian had probably spent only brief holidays with Edward before he returned to Selwick after their brother’s death. By which time the madness was creeping up around her.
Hers had been a typically protected childhood. Most of the figures in her earliest sketches were women of the household, with the occasional shift to groups of men working in the fields or stables. Children appeared sometimes, particularly one dark-haired girl who, to judge by the dates on the sketch-books, was a year or two older than Vivian. A friend? Or a companion, assigned the task of making sure the small, blonde daughter of the family did not get into trouble as she wandered the hills with her pencils?
I put the 1902 book back on its shelf (for a child of eleven, her drawings seemed remarkably sophisticated) and pulled down the last book on the shelf.
This one had no label, although as with earlier volumes, the occasional more detailed drawing would have a date in its corner. Here was Ronnie, startlingly like she’d been when I first laid eyes on her. Several pages of wintry branches followed, with attempts to capture the look of ice. Then came a finished sketch from what would prove to be her brother’s last home leave: Thomas Beaconsfield, wearing a Captain’s uniform, stood behind his seated wife, hands on her shoulders. 12 February 1915. He had died the following summer.
I wondered if Ronnie knew the image existed.
The next pages continued wintry landscapes: snowdrops peeping out of leaves; bits of flaming log in a fireplace; a cat burrowed into pillows. The page after that was missing: torn out along the seam. I tried to think if I had seen any other missing pages, and thought not—although I hadn’t studied every volume. Had some extreme of self-criticism led Vivian to remove this one? The pages that followed did suggest she’d been pushing herself to try something new: details dropped away, leaving quick, thin lines that at first glance were mere marks on a page, but soon emerged as studies of objects captured in a fast twist of the hand. As if someone had shown her a book on Japanese ink drawing—only these were faint, almost pointillist tracks of graphite that suggested an unfurling leaf, a blossom, a clutch of newborn chicks.
Then another page went missing, this one methodically picked away down to the fold.
After that second gap, an entire season had passed before Vivian took up her pencil again, to sketch a distant and solitary figure scything in a field. Then three acorns on the ground, so detailed that had they been in colour, the hand might have been tempted to pick them up. Two women in a large kitchen, backs turned as they worked on some project—the shape of the tins lying to one side suggested a Christmas pudding. And finally, another polished rendering, this one of Ronnie and her mother, before the fire. Ronnie appeared to be reading something aloud; Lady Dorothy was bent over some needle-work. The fire was lively, the scene speaking eloquently of love and warmth and survival.
This one was dated: 9 December 1915. It was also signed: Vivian Marie Beaconsfield.
I frowned. Her framed watercolours were signed, but I could not recall seeing a name on any of the other drawings. Did she intend this as a finished piece, to go on the wall? If so, why was it still here? I turned the page, finding a curled leaf, snow atop a twig, and a shiny conker—none of them signed. After the conker came one final torn-out page, and after that: nothing. The remainder of the book held only blank pages.
Ronnie had told me that Vivian stopped drawing when her beloved brother was killed, but clearly she had not. True, she’d picked up her pencils less often, but with no less commitment to the process. Looking at those final pages, I could see no sign of what had to be building up in her mind. That single dead leaf, that lonely twig, might in themselves seem ominous, but not when compared with the preceding years of similar drawings.
Sometime around Christmas 1915, Vivian Beaconsfield had laid down her pencils, closed her last journal, and ceased drawing. A few weeks later, she flung her possessions out of the windows and stripped her rooms to the walls. And a few months after that, she had attacked her surviving brother and gone into care, beginning the cycle that finally delivered her to the gates of Bedlam.
The afternoon was drawing in, and I felt I’d exhausted the possibilities of the sitting room. I returned the undated sketch-book to the shelf, straightened the spines again, and went into the adjoining bedroom. It, too, was a bright space, with ivory curtains hooked back from the window. The bed was made up, the water carafe on the table filled—did the maid still come every day to tend to Vivian’s empty quarters?
However, unlike the lightly furnished sitting room, this space was an Aladdin’s cave of treasures. The bed-cover was lace-work over a creamy linen coverlet. The small wooden tables on either side looked German, each with an electric lamp with blown-glass bases and damask silk shades. A closely woven oval carpet next to the bed looked to be Turkish or Greek, as were the two pillows atop the coverlet.