Chapter 8

After admiring her new acquisition for several minutes, Priscilla had gone to her bedroom and quickly stripped out of her clothes, putting on lounge pants and a ribbed tank top, without a bra underneath.

After changing, she had spared a few moments to stare at the lone painting on the wall above her bed.

It was another Bouguereau…Calinerie, also known as Tender Ways. It depicted two peasant girls—one a teenager, the other a child of about eight or nine. The teenager was sitting on the stone stoop of a house, and a ripe orange was resting next to her. She was looking directly at the viewer with a smile.

The child—presumably her younger sister—was reaching up, wrapping her arms around the other girl's shoulders, and giving her a kiss on the cheek. The story suggested was that the older sister had agreed to give her sibling the fresh orange she had…or at least share it. Either that or the little girl was trying to coax her sister into sharing the treat by giving her a kiss.

It was one of Priscilla's favorite paintings by Bouguereau, but she had only ever seen it in catalogues raisonnés or Bouguereau monographs. For years, the painting had been part of a private collection in Japan. Then, nine months ago, Priscilla had gotten a call from her personal art shopper, Jennifer.

Jennifer was an art expert, appraiser, and buyer. Priscilla kept her on retainer to look for artwork of any kind she knew Priscilla would be interested in.

During that phone call, Jennifer had informed her that Calinerie was coming up for auction in Tokyo.

"At any cost!" Priscilla had told her, dispatching her to that city via her private plane, although the other woman could have easily done the bidding via phone.

And now Calinerie was hers, and after changing her clothes, she had stared at it for a while, a small smile on her lips.

"I've got a friend for you," she had told the artwork. "Don't move…"

Now, she was back downstairs, barefoot in her kitchen, in search of sustenance. No sooner had she entered the kitchen, however, when her phone chirped with a text message from Diane, her personal chef.

Maddy told me not to come over to prepare dinner. Just so you know, I was going to prepare a salmon filet and pasta for you tonight. The filet is in the fridge if you'd like to cook it yourself. There are still some of the garlic scallops from last night left over. 350° for 3-4 minutes. Or medium-heat on the range in a nonstick pan, with some oil, 2 minutes on each side. See you tomorrow!

"Yeah, that's too much work," Priscilla said aloud to no one. She wasn't even sure how to turn her oven on. It was a beast of an appliance and looked to be a Frankenstein-esque hybrid of Old World functionality and Star Trek-style technology. After all, it wasn't as if she had been the one to outfit the kitchen after purchasing the house. She had left that job to Madeline and Diane.

Instead, she opened the refrigerator, saw the ingredients—if that was what they could be called—for making a tuna sandwich, and set about pulling those items out, placing them on the stone-topped island in the middle of the kitchen.

She then bit her bottom lip and looked around.

She liked her bread toasted…but she couldn't find a toaster. She knew she must have one because whenever she asked Madeline or Diane for a tuna sandwich, it came on toasted bread.

"Where do you suppose my toaster is?" she asked the room. Not spying it straight away, she uttered, "Ugh!"

Picking up her phone, she sent Diane a text.

Question: Where is my toaster? For toasting bread. For a sandwich.

Diane replied almost instantly.

You don't have a toaster. You have a toaster oven. It looks like this…

A moment later, another text containing a picture was received.

Priscilla sighed and rolled her eyes.

Smart ass!

She knew what a toaster oven looked like…although if she was being honest, she had never actually noticed what particular kind she had, let alone used it.

Turn it on. Put the bread in, press the button that says Toast, set the dial to 400°

Again Priscilla rolled her eyes.

"A toaster would be easier," she muttered. "Bread goes in the slots, you push the thingy down…et voila! Toast!"

She located the device and followed Diane's instructions.

In a few minutes, she had her sandwich made. She contemplated enhancing the simple meal with potato chips but decided that because she hadn't gotten a workout playing tennis today, she needed to behave and not add more calories. Besides, because it was still early-ish, she knew she would need something else to eat later tonight before bed.

With the sandwich on a plate she had miraculously found in one hand, and a bottle of water in the other, she made her way through the house, back to her den.

The Young Shepherdess was still on the desk, where she had been left. After taking a couple of bites of the sandwich, Priscilla retrieved a key from her handbag and unlocked a closet door. There was one item in the closet, and she set about removing it: a large, flat, rectangular box that was actually considerably heavy…she had to slide it out rather than lift and carry it.

The box had markings on it showing that it had been shipped from Piombino, Italy…from the workshop of a master woodworker who had done work for Priscilla in the past. It had arrived six months ago, and Priscilla had made sure that it had arrived with several other similar packages, so that this one wouldn't stand out in the minds of the household staff who had taken delivery of it. To them—she was certain—it had just been another box being delivered to their boss, a woman who had a lot of boxes delivered.

She dragged the box along the teak floor to the center of the room, which was a nice, clear open space, and then gently laid it flat on the contemporary-style area rug there.

Another two bites of her sandwich, and she went to work opening the box. It wasn't easy. Priscilla wasn't an expert on cardboard, but even she knew that this was good stuff: thick and corrugated, able to withstand the rigors of overseas shipping. What's more, the panels of the package were held together with thick staples, requiring her to use quite a bit of strength to pry them open. The idea came to her that one of the advantages of being a lesbian was that there was less worry about breaking a nail when doing things like this. Although, in the next thought, she considered that the nail polish applied during her last manicure two days ago was going to take a beating.

Once the box had been opened, she had found a pair of scissors in a desk drawer and had to contend with de-mummifying what was inside the package, which had been carefully and expertly wrapped with foam padding, yards of shrink wrap, and more yards of packing tape.

But once she was done…

On her knees, she sat back on her heels and smiled.

"Oh, bravo, Enzo!" she exclaimed happily.

She was looking at a gorgeous picture frame, with ornate scrollwork moulding, gilded in gold leaf. She had placed the order for this frame—while in Enzo's workshop—nine months ago, and it had taken him three months to construct it. She smiled happily when she noticed that he had worked her family crest into the design of the moulding, as requested.

Remaining on her knees and admiring the frame, she continued eating her sandwich, washing it down with the water.

When she was done, she rose and placed the plate on the edge of her desk.

"Okay…time to get to work…" she said.

A long time ago, back when she was studying at Cambridge, in England, she had spent a summer in Piombino, at an art restoration workshop, with two of her girlfriends. It was there she had learned all about cleaning paintings, effecting repairs on them, examining canvases and preparing analytical reports about their condition…

It had been basic-level, of course, but still very informative and hands-on.

It was there that she had met Enzo, because one of the skills the workshop had taught its students was how to refit paintings into frames—and Enzo had been the instructor. It was a skill Priscilla had kept up with during the intervening years, because even back then she had known that this day would come. Therefore, she had made a hobby of it.

She often bought relatively worthless paintings at estate sales, or even thrift shops, and—using tools she had owned ever since the Piombino workshop—took them out of their current frames and refitted them into others. Some of the artworks she ended up keeping—not because they were valuable, but simply because she liked them. The others she donated to various organizations so they could sell them.

She considered herself quite adept at reframing now…and was about to put her expertise to work in the most magnificent manner.

***

It took over an hour. Perhaps Enzo could have done it in twenty minutes, but Priscilla had been exceedingly careful. After all, she had gone to a lot of trouble to obtain this painting…and one does not steal artwork from a museum every day. Besides, she loved this artwork. It held a place in her heart not quite on par with people she loved…but very close. As such, she had wanted to go slowly with her work, and treat the canvas with awe and respect. The beautiful young shepherdess depicted in the painting was actually quite old, after all.

1885 was a long time ago.

While she had been working, Priscilla had let her mind wander—not for the first time—to the model Bouguereau had used for the painting. Also not for the first time, she wished she knew more about her…

Not a whole lot was known about Bouguereau's models, even though he often reused several of them in his works. Unfortunately, most of their names had been lost to history, with few exceptions—Jeanne, Marguerite, and Yvonne, who were all sisters—and there existed only a handful of photographs showing models in his studio.

Priscilla had learned that the model for The Young Shepherdess was actually Italian, not French—one of many immigrant girls whom Bouguereau hired to model for him when his family spent summers in La Rochelle. Even with her resources and connections, however, Priscilla had never been able to discover the model's name.

She hoped the model had lived a long life and had been happy throughout it. She hoped she had been comfortable to whatever degree her means had allowed. She hoped that if she had gotten married, that it had been a happy union, one of love and respect.

Priscilla also hoped that the model had seen the finished painting and been proud of it, of being captured by the master painter in such a beautiful yet mysterious manner. She hoped that, even in 1885, the model had somehow known that she would be famous, that countless people would gaze upon her and admire her and consider her—not just the painting as a whole, but her—as a work of art.

Priscilla had often thought that if she could find out who the model had been, and where she had lived and died, that she would lay flowers on her grave as a sign of gratitude.

"Finished!" Priscilla said now, and then blew out a breath. Sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the framed painting, she reached for her glass of wine before remembering that she hadn't poured herself one. All she still had was what was left in the water bottle she had gotten from the kitchen earlier.

Deciding that wouldn't do, she removed the latex gloves she had worn while working, and then got up, wincing a bit how tight the muscles in her lower back and knees had gotten. Just another reminder that no matter how much she worked out, no matter how much she paid her two personal trainers, and no matter how many games of tennis or racquetball she played, she was forty-two-years-old.

She went to the small bar in the den, opened the wine fridge, extracted a 2001 Riesling, and poured herself a glass. She took a healthy swig to celebrate finishing the reframing, and then put the glass down.

After blowing out a breath, she said, "Time for Part Two…"

She left the den and went back downstairs. At the rear of the mansion, in a section she hardly ever needed to visit, was a utility room where Madeline and Ricardo—the handyman—kept an assortment of items needed for their jobs.

Snooping around one night for things that might help her with her nefarious plans, Priscilla had taken note of the small furniture dolly which she had seen Ricardo use to move heavy items around the house. It was hanging from hooks attached to a pegboard. She lifted it off the hooks and carried it back to her den, resting it on the floor beside the frame, which was still lying face-down on the rug.

Bending, she grabbed the heavy-gauge wire which Enzo had provided for hanging the painting and lifted the frame up from the floor before taking hold of it along the sides and hoisting it onto the dolly, standing it upright on the device.

Keeping hold of it, she wheeled it out of the den and to the left…towards the elevator.

The mansion had three stories, not including the basement. The elevator was a nice perk, but normally—so as not to feel too guilty about her physical upkeep—Priscilla used the stairs to get to the upper stories because every calorie burnt counted.

She rode the elevator up one flight, where all the bedrooms except one were. Soon, she had The Young Shepherdess wheeled into her bedroom—a massive room with enormous picture windows offering a view of the Pacific. She carefully guided the framed painting to her bed and because it wouldn't stand up on its own, gently lowered it onto the duvet-covered mattress.

She let out a breath. This was proving to be a lot of work.

"Almost there," she told herself.

A floor-to-ceiling bookshelf occupied half of the north wall of the bedroom. She went to it and removed a 19th-century hardcover edition of Pride and Prejudice that was on the very bottom shelf, forcing her to squat at the knees to reach it. With the book removed, she put her hand in the cavity that had been created, felt around, and pushed a small button.

Replacing the book, she then stood back up. The left side of the bookshelf had been decorated with hand carved wooden crowns, three of them, to be exact, arranged in a pyramid. She took hold of the crown that was at the apex of the pyramid and twisted it to the right.

She heard a click and smiled.

She was now able to pull the entire bookshelf away from the wall. Despite it being constructed of solid wood, and heavily laden with tomes—mainly hardcovers—the enormous thing swung open as smoothly and with the same ease as the front door of any house.

Revealed behind the shelf was a large, arched recessed niche in the wall. A gallery light came on automatically, illuminating the space in a soft, warm glow.

Back to the bed…

Grunting, she lifted the painting off of the mattress and carried it to the hidden niche.

"Okay, you can do this…" she encouraged herself.

With the tip of her tongue sticking out from between her lips as she concentrated, she managed—with only a couple of misses—to hang the heavy frame from the two professional-grade mounting hooks that she knew were affixed to studs in the wall.

She was done!

Standing back and assessing her work, she approached The Young Shepherdess again in order to make a slight adjustment to straighten the frame. Satisfied that it was level, she hurried to her bed and sat on it with her back against the headboard and her knees pulled up to her chest, her arms wrapped around them.

For several minutes, she just stared at the beautiful artwork…and the lovely young woman depicted on the canvas stared back at her in return.

Finally, she uttered a soft chuckle.

Soon, the chuckle turned into full-blown laughter, the kind of laughter that she was finding hard to stop—it was taking on a life of its own.

But she understood it…

It was laughter born out of relief that it was all over.

It was laughter born out of her audacity.

The laughter came from the latent excitement still in her system.

It came from the pleasure of having seen a well-designed plan, years in the making, executed perfectly.

She surrendered herself to it, recognizing the need for its cathartic properties.

"Well," she gasped out when she was finally able to speak, "this has been a most interesting day…"