"Mary Stewart - Wildfire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Mary)

Chapter 1



IN THE FIRST PLACE, I suppose, it was my parents' fault for giving me a silly name like Gianetta. It is a
pretty enough name in itself, but it conjures up pictures of delectable and slightly overblown ladies in Titan's
less respectable canvases, and, though I admit 1 have the sort of coloring that might have interested that
Venetian master, I happen to be the rather inhibited product of an English country rectory. And if there is
anything further removed than that from the bagnio Venuses of Titian's middle period, I don't know what it
is.

To do my parents justice, I must confess straightaway that the bagnio touch was there in the
familyтАФnicely in the past, of course, but known nevertheless to be there. And my mother is just sufficiently
vague, artistic, and sentimental to see nothing against calling a red-haired daughter after the Vixen Venus,
the lovely redheaded Gianetta Fox, who was once the rage of London, and a Beauty in the days when
beauties had a capital B, and were moreover apt to regard beauty and capital as one and the same thing.
She was a nobody, the lovely Gianetta; her mother, I believe, was half Italian, and if she knew who her
father was, she never admitted to him. She simply appeared, Venus rising from the scum of Victorian
Whitechapel, and hit London for six in the spring of 1858. She was just seventeen. By the time she was
twenty she had been painted by every painter who mattered (Landseer was the only abstainer), in every
conceivable allegorical pose, and had also, it was said, been the mistress of every one of them in turnтАФI
should be inclined here, too, to give Landseer the benefit of the doubt. And in 1861 she reaped the due
reward of her peculiar virtues and married a baronet. He managed to keep her long enough to beget two
children of her before she left himтАФfor a very "modern" painter of the French school who specialized in
nudes. She left her son and daughter behind in Sir Charles's scandalized care; the former was to be my
maternal grandfather.

So my nice, vague, artistic mother, who spends her time in our Cotswold rectory making dear little pots
and bowls and baking them in a kiln at the bottom of the garden, called me after my disreputable (and
famous) great-grandmother, without a thought about the possible consequences to me when I hit London in
my turn, in 1945.

I was nineteen, had left school a short eight months before, and now, fresh from a West End training
course for mannequins, was ingenuously setting out on a glamorous career with a fashion house, modeling
clothes. I had a share in a bed-sitting room, a small banking account (gift from Father), two hand-thrown
pots and an ash tray (gift from Mother), and an engagement diary (gift from my brother Lucius). I was on
top of the world.

I was still on top of the world when the Morelli Gallery acquired the Zollner canvas called "My Lady
Green-sleeves," and Marco MorelliтАФthe Marco MorelliтАФdecided to make a splash with it. You remember
the fuss, perhaps? Morelli's idea was, I think, to stage a sort of comeback of art after the austerities and
deprivations of the war. He could hardly have chosen a more appropriate picture to do it with. "My Lady
Greensleeves" has all the rioting bravura of Zollner's 1860 period: the gorgeous lady who languishes,
life-size, in the center of the canvas is the focus of a complicated shimmer of jewels and feathers and
embroidered silkтАФI doubt if any material has ever been more miraculously painted than the coruscating
damask of the big green sleeves. As an antidote to austerity it was certainly telling. And even Zollner's
peacock riot of color could not defeat his model's triumphant vitality, or drain the fire from that flaming hair.
It was Gianetta Fox's last full-dress appearance in canvas, and she had all the air of making the most of it.