Jakob’s Colors by Lindsay Hawdon Read Free Book Online

grooves—four carts. A circle carved in the wood of a welcoming door. A rag tied to a branch of a telegraph pole, a bone wedged into a crack of tree bark, a broom left on the ground. Signs of safety, where gypsy folk might pass.
    All three of her children had been born in a wagon, had been lulled to sleep from the earliest age by the rock of Borromini’s hooves. At night they fell asleep to the wind whistling through the wooden slats. At day they woke to scents of horsehide and wild garlic. Lor had made beads and strung them around her children’s necks, told them if theybecame invisible, that way, she’d always find them. She learned how to twist and break a chicken’s neck, was both sickened and full of self-congratulation. She wore skirts that flared, wore beaded bracelets on her wrist, braided flowers into her hair. She was like a photograph that had been taken twice, one negative casting its shadow over the other, blurred, each picture not quite correlating to the other. Who was she now?
    She grappled for understanding. There were words missing. She could not remember the name of any English tree. There were vast holes in her story like moth bites in a tapestry, and the moments of clarity that she had, the threads of memory that drew her onward to the next, moved like a snail’s silk trail, unraveling too slowly.

Long Before
ENGLAND , 1929
    H er house lay in a Somerset valley that on fresh summer mornings was covered with a blanket of mist. It was a high Georgian building, three stories, with a whitewashed facade and a mass of wisteria that each spring bloomed purple flowers over the large ground-floor windows, blocking out the morning sunlight and casting a ghostly lilac hue throughout the ground floor. Only the back of the house showed the paint peeling, the exposed stone bruised with age, rivulets of rust running down from roof to ground. Not for the lack of money, but rather for the indulgent foreboding that this lack might one day arrive.
    Inside, the house was decorated grandly, too grandly some would say, for the size of the interior, which was not as vast as the imposing furniture implied. There was so much of it; a mahogany breakfront bookcase dwarfed the living room doorway. It held no books, instead a collection of Wedgwood miniatures, a gift passed down through the generations, admired and vaguely fondled. A dining room table, a George IV oaken slab, fumed but too long. The chairs sat cramped against the wall around it. Surreptitiously, the thinner guests were seated upon them. A Liberty washstand, one of a kind designed byArchibald Knox, sat redundant in the marble-floored hallway, scarred with cigarette burns, a scattering of silver, daily polished picture frames of family long perished smiling up from the marble surface. Persian rugs covered the oak floorboards. Indian shawls draped across worn leather ottoman chairs. Elaborate tapestries hung from the walls above reams of glossy magazines that lay unfingered, unread. Everywhere there was too much clutter, crowded trinkets that no one was allowed to move, bought with a compulsion, the easy delight of spending, that could take hold weekly, daily even.
    By the time Lor was eleven years old, she was used to finding her mother, Vivienne, standing amongst these possessions, poised in the center of a room as if she were one of them. She would be silent, her neck bare, her head slightly bent, staring at a place where the floor met the baseboard as her long fingers toyed with the silk of her dress. Still young enough for her dreams to cling to her, unchallenged, unrealized. Her ambitions lay in art, vast canvases that she streaked with brilliant color but struggled to fill, alternating between bouts of intense activity that were driven and frenzied and this dreamy languor that held her locked in thoughtfulness in the center of a room. Watching from doorways, Lor felt in those moments that her mother was lost to them, that if her name were