Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind by Anne Charnock Page A

way you told the story?”
    “Well enough. He insisted on one change, when he saw the early preparatory drawings, but that usually happens.”
    “What didn’t he like?”
    “The lance. Originally I had the lance impaling the knight, through his chest.”
    “He wanted the lance to miss him?”
    “That’s right. It didn’t affect the composition, so I agreed.”
    “I’m still confused. I only ever think of the story when I look at a painting.”
    “If you want to be an artist, Antonia, you must think like one. For me? It’s all about bringing together the many individual elements. That’s why I left my bed early in the morning for so many years, and why I worked long hours, with so many years spent away from home. Do you think I care about Niccolò da Tolentino and his army? I’ll paint anything for the right coin. I care that the Florentines defeated the Sienese, of course, but the story doesn’t excite me. It’s the painting of it that excites me and keeps me awake at night.”

    Antonia slips into the kitchen in the late afternoon and sits in a chair under the window. A sheet of paper rests on a board in her lap. She holds a stick of red chalk in one hand, and she grips the board tightly with her other hand. She glares at Clara, who is preparing the family’s dinner at the large table in the centre of the kitchen.
    “Clara, Father has set me a difficult task for tomorrow. I have to make a likeness of Mother. So I’d like to . . .”
    “Yes?”
    “Practise. I need to practise. So . . . may I draw you again?”
    “I’ve got a meal to prepare.”
    “I’ll try to draw you while you’re working.”
    “When I’m skinning this rabbit?” she says, gesturing with her knife.
    “Yes. You’ll be stood in one place while you do that. Can I sit closer?”
    Clara gestures with her head, and Antonia pulls her chair across the kitchen. With her foot, she drags a stool out from under Clara’s table. It’s Antonia’s own stool, kept in the same place since her childhood, when she spent so many hours in the kitchen during her mother’s bouts of illness. And now, she uses the stool as a footrest so that her drawing board sits higher in her lap.
    There’s no need for Clara to pull her face like that, just because she’s using a knife, Antonia thinks. She struggles to capture Clara’s grimace. After several attempts and repeated smudging out, she says, “Can you keep your face relaxed while you’re cutting?”
    “It is relaxed.”
    Antonia feels she ought to be able to draw anything in this room from memory, even Clara, but she’s learned that her memory is fickle. When she lies in her bed at night, she can conjure the kitchen smells so easily, but she can never fix the detail she needs for a drawing.
    “It’s so difficult, Clara.”
    “It must be my ugly face. Here, let me look.” She comes around the table, wiping her hand down her work smock, and stands behind her young mistress. “I look like a man.”
    “I’m sorry.” And they laugh. Clara touches the backs of her fingers against Antonia’s forearm and rubs gently. She raises her hand to her mouth. She kisses and makes the sign of the cross. Clara’s superstitious impulse has been normalized by repetition. All the servants in the Uccello household know how close the family came to losing Antonia to the plague. They believe she passed over, that she reached Saint Peter’s gates, that her return to them was due to the sincerity of their prayers. She came back and brought good fortune, not only for the family but for all the family’s servants.
    Antonia doesn’t mind Clara’s superstitions. At least Clara no longer asks which saints she met at the gates of paradise. The truth is that Antonia didn’t see anyone or anything, and she wonders if she wasn’t as sick as everyone thought. She’d love to tell Clara that she’s seen paradise exactly as it’s painted in the church of Santa Maria Novella. She loves the fresco, by Nardo di