Cursed

19. Daurien's Painting

"Don't be," I tried to say it in a soothing manner. Something I had not done in a long time. If ever, "I know what it is like to lose someone that you love. At least you know your mother loved you back." She tried to stop her sobs and wiped her tears away again with her sleeve, along with her nose. She was looking at me curiously and for once I felt like she was really seeing me. The real me. Or at least some small part of the real me.

She lifted her teacup and tested the heat of the tea with her little finger like she always did. She put the same finger to her lips and sucked off the sweet, warm moisture that was dripping off it. Then she started to giggle. First tiny, weak giggles that then grew so that she had to set down her teacup before having a chance to sip from it. After a few seconds of me staring at her questioningly, she reached a full blown laugh.

"What?" I demanded. Only a moment ago she was sobbing and I was telling her that my father had never loved me. Well, not specifically so but that was the idea. I could not fathom what could have possibly been so funny about any of it.

"You would have to be blind not to like the library!" she was almost crying again but not out of sadness. I coughed, trying to suppress a foreign feeling in my stomach and base of my throat. It seemed like days ago when I had said that one would have to be blind not to like the surprise I was out to show her. The pun was unintentional, but true. A blind man would not enjoy a library all that much, now would he?

She continued to laugh for a good while longer and every time her bellows grew in magnitude I had to fight that feeling with another cough. Eventually, she did stop and sipped her tea slowly. I could sense her longing to be left alone to browse her new, though they were truthfully quite old, books. So, I stood from my seat and left her to herself. Besides, as much as I longed to stay by her side, there was a burst of inspiration inside of me that was dying to come out.

I called for Coat Hanger to bring me my cloak and once he had, I told him I wanted my painting materials to be brought to where I had sat with Belle for breakfast.

I wrapped myself in my cloak once again and headed out the same way I had come in when I led Belle blindly through the mansion corridors. I sat in the same chair I had earlier and shooed the table away. I stared at where Belle had been sitting and I could see her. Every contour of her face, every glint of cherry in her auburn hair, the very depth of those hazelnut eyes, I could see it all before me.

Coat Hanger was at my side with a fresh canvass and easel. Candleholder was trailing behind him yet again with the paints and such.

"No," I told Coat Hanger as he set down the easel before me, "I want the one I began and never finished just before Belle came to stay with us." Had Coat Hanger been human, he would have worn a disgruntled look on his face as he lifted the blank canvass off the easel and waddled off to retrieve the one I wanted.

When he returned with the painting, I was shocked by how absolutely wrong it was. I didn't remember it being so bad. I started mixing paints and slathering them all over the already dry paint from before. I began by vaguely creating the shades of her face but didn't add any definitive lines. I angled her head slightly down and really focused on the shape of her jaw and where it connected to her neck and ear. I made a rough outline of where her hair was tucked behind her ear and wrapped around her face. I made a note to myself that I wanted a strand to fall over the front of her face. That same strand that she had tucked behind her ear with a blush after she had thrown her arms around me earlier. I was especially fond of that strand.

Next I proceeded to details. I new that it wouldn't be Belle if I didn't get the eyes just right but that if I did, I wouldn't really be required to paint the rest of her. So I began with them. I mixed six different shades of brown: chocolate, chestnut, hazelnut, ochre, amber and auburn, and began on the iris. I painted chocolate and chestnut for the darker areas and whisked in the amber and ochre for the highlights. Anything in between was in auburn and hazelnut.

It seemed that I had to work so much harder on the actual shape of her eyes than the color. I had already manged to achieve the depth they contained and now I had to create the expression they wore. The emotion she hid within them.

When I got to her lips I began with the shades that were above and below them, before filling them in with the soft pinks I had mixed. Her plump bottom lip cast a slightly more prominent shadow on her chin than most lips I had painted and I had to work on it for awhile to capture it the way I wanted to. I did not paint her smiling. As beautiful as her smile was, I wanted to capture her true thoughts in the way that she looked, even if she never actually showed them the way I was taking the liberty to in my painting.

When I was finished, her shoulders and the edge of her hair faded into a wreath of pink and white roses that created a border around the inside of the painting. It seemed pertinent to surround her with the roses that she had been surrounded by when she sat out here with me earlier that day.

In the end, if a stranger had looked at Belle and then at the painting he mightn't have thought it to be her. It did resemble her quite well actually, but everything about it was how I saw her and not necessarily how she allowed others to see her. It was exactly the way I envisioned it to look. It was perfect.