After Clare by Marjorie Eccles Page A

was time lessons were supplemented with a few accomplishments and social skills designed to help them grow into young ladies.
    The solution was a young art student named Christian Gautier, half French, who was engaged during his vacation from his London art college to tutor them in drawing and painting, and to improve their French. A good-natured, gangling young fellow with a shock of untidy hair, he was something of a clown and made them laugh, though his efforts to teach them did not make too many obvious inroads into their ignorance. Yet he had an ability to capture with a few pencil strokes everything Emily laboured to do and never remotely succeeded in achieving. Clare, on the other hand, lost interest in the garden, her pony grew fat with too little exercise, and her hands became grubby with oil paint and charcoal, rather than earth. Her sketches and watercolours earned her praise and much attention from their young tutor, which seemed to overwhelm her and sent her into furious blushes. The French of both girls remained of the schoolgirl variety, Christian being more interested in improving his own English.
    He was with them for only two or three months, after which he returned to obscurity as far as they were concerned, but he had sowed the seeds of ambition in Clare. She had always sucked up knowledge of any kind as if she were drinking it through a straw, and from then on, she persisted in the notion that she wanted nothing more than to devote her life to becoming an artist.
    Ambition and everything else, though, receded into the background when their world collapsed without warning. One day Mama was there, chatting and smiling, telling them stories and letting Emily adorn herself with her jewellery and totter around in her shoes, pretending to be grown up, with Clare looking on with disapproval – she was fifteen by then, beyond such childish activities, if ever she had been interested in them – and the next, Mama was gone.
    Emily hadn’t known there was to be a baby. She was young for her years, though very much aware that there were things connected with being married that she mustn’t ask about. Clare said she had known about the baby. How? Emily desperately wanted to know, but she wouldn’t say.
    In the desolate time that followed Leila’s death, Anthony was unreachable, and the girls were left to their old nurse, Nanny Kate, now upgraded to the post of housekeeper. Kate Bunting was a woman who covered a soft heart and an all-embracing love for children with a matter-of-fact exterior and a refusal to accept any silly nonsense about Hecate trees.
    Perhaps it was her firmness which in the end finally brought about Clare’s silence on that subject. Even she had been shaken by Miss Jennett’s abrupt departure after that curse – it
was
a curse, Emily knew, not just a spell as Clare had called it at the time, maybe because a spell didn’t sound so evil – and perhaps she still felt guilty and was afraid the dark magic really was potent, and dangerous, and that was why Mama had died. At any rate, she dropped any mention of the Hecate tree and its arcane attractions as completely as she had given up messing about in the garden, and from then on any spare time she had was concentrated wholly on her painting and drawing, with the fierce absorption and intensity she had previously given to magic lore and dark secrets.
    Inevitably, when the time was approaching for her eldest niece to come out, to be presented at court, Aunt Lottie arrived, eager with plans and intentions. Clare listened and then politely said no thank you, she would rather attend one of the art schools in London, preferably the Slade, scandalizing Mrs Arbuthnot who, childless herself, had been looking forward to supervising both girls’ coming out, that most important rite of passage, and had constantly badgered Anthony about it ever since her sister’s death.
    â€˜Art school?