The Master

He turned to Henry, who looked at him but did not speak.

‘He wrote a story, not a plan,’ Mi

‘Yes, but if you think about the war, or speak to those involved, or even read about it, I’m sure there are more interesting stories, ones that are more true to life.’

‘But this wasn’t about the war,’ Mi

‘Are there not plenty of girls who can write such stories?’ Gray asked.

Holmes put his hands behind his head and began to laugh.

‘We ca

The talk between the three visitors and the Temple sisters returned again and again to the war. Since the girls’ brother and their cousin Gus Barker had been killed, the two soldiers had to be careful not to gloat too much about their survival, or their bravery. Nonetheless, it was difficult to avoid discussing specific exploits and the extraordinary phenomenon of injured soldiers such as Henry’s brother Wilky and Holmes himself and Gus Barker who insisted, once recovered, on returning to the fray. Holmes and Wilky had lived to receive more injuries and survived them too. Gus Barker, however, had been killed by a sniper two years earlier, when he was barely twenty, at the Rappaha

Henry had seen him on return trips to America during his childhood at his grandmother’s house in Albany, where he had also met the Temples, and later at Newport. As the others started again to talk about him, Henry’s mind wandered back to five years earlier when the Civil War seemed an impossible nightmare and the James family had returned to Newport from Europe so that William could study art.

One day in the fall of 1860 Henry had come into the studio to find his cousin Gus Barker standing naked on a pedestal while the advanced students sketched him. Gus was strong and wiry, red-haired and white-ski

It struck him all these years later that he had been thinking something which he could not tell Gray or Holmes or even Mi

Gradually, then, over the days, Mi

One day when she handed Gray lines of Browning to read, he held back and asked her to read them aloud.

‘No, I want you to read them to yourself,’ she said.

‘I can’t read poetry,’ he said.

Henry and Holmes and her two sisters did not speak; this, Henry knew, was a decisive moment in Mi

‘Of course you can read poetry,’ she said, ‘but you must first forget the “read” part and the “poetry” part and concentrate on the “I” part and find new credentials for it, and soon you will be a changed man and your youth will return. But if you really want me to, then I will read the verse aloud.’

‘Mi

‘Mr Gray is going to be a great lawyer,’ Holmes said. ‘He is learning to defend himself, I feel, so that he will in time learn to defend others more worthy of defence, perhaps.’

‘I long for you to read it aloud,’ Gray said.

‘And I long for the day when you will read it too, quietly and with emotion,’ Mi

HENRY BEGAN to imagine an heiress, recently orphaned, who had three suitors, a young woman whose patient intelligence had never been fully appreciated by those around her. He did not want to make her as beautiful as Mi

The story began for him in a small single moment in which Richard watches Captain Severn sinking into a silence very nearly as helpless as his own as they observe the progress of a lively dialogue between Miss Whittaker and Major Lutrell. So too at North Conway had this become for Henry and for Holmes a daily routine, as Mi

He did not realize then and did not, in fact, grasp for many years how these few weeks in North Conway – the endlessly conversing group of them gathered under the rustling pines – would be enough for him, would be, in effect, all he needed to know in his life. In all his years as a writer he was to draw on the scenes he lived and witnessed at that time: the two ambitious, patrician New Englanders, already alert to the eminence which awaited them, and the American girls, led by Mi