Leonora Read Online Free PDF Page B

the cat’s tail. In addition, her education was to be complemented by training in the sports of horse-riding and fencing. Leonora, who in addition to English already speaks French, now acquires Italian and amazes herself by this mission of self-discovery.
    â€˜What are you doing, Miss Carrington?’ the headmistress enquires on seeing her crouched over her exercise book.
    â€˜I am composing a manual of disobedience.’
    â€˜Your mother informed me you were interested in drawing.’
    â€˜Now it’s writing.’
    At break time Miss Penrose, who never leaves the building without first putting on a hat and gloves, studies her pupils through the window and observes Leonora instructing them: ‘We are now going to play horses.’
    Most agree, and most of all Elizabeth Apple. They begin a kind of wild dance, stampeding in all directions, until the tea table is upended and its china tea set smashed. They continue on at a canter, out into the garden, manes flowing as tremulously as waterfalls, as they ride on one another’s backs, whinnying.
    â€˜Girls, what is going on? Have you completely lost your heads?’
    Miss Penrose cannot believe her eyes. From the family home at Hazelwood, Carrington assures her that he will reimburse her twice the cost of the tea table and its shattered porcelain tea set.
    â€˜My daughter will never do such a thing again. From now on, she is forbidden to play at horses.’
    She is both Miss Penrose’s youngest and most original disciple. The headmistress studies how she responds. Leonora’s eyes open wide as she appears to be listening to a voice within her. The deepest depths of her eyes emit signals of light. She enters museum galleries with reverence, attempting to muffle even the sound of her shoes on the floor, keeping her hand over her mouth. Is she suffering palpitations? Since the museum guard allows nobody to cross the wire, she keeps her distance to admire the paintings, fearful of activating the alarm. She returns over and again to the same pictures, and Miss Penrose asks her:
    â€˜Why are you so particularly impressed by the Sienese School of Francesco di Giorgio and Giovanni di Paolo?’
    â€˜Because of their use of colour, especially their shades of vermilion, chestnut, gold – oh how I love that gold! I would like to use those colours in my own painting. How was it possible for Cimabue to be so ahead of his time?’
    Her friend Elizabeth Apple shares her enthusiasm. The two take notes and repeatedly escape Miss Penrose, especially during lessons in etiquette or in learning how to date antiques. Neither of them are particularly interested in learning whether a piece of furniture belonged to the period of the Directory or to Louis XV.
    â€˜Let’s go to Siena, Elizabeth!’
    â€˜They could expel us for that!’
    â€˜How can you be so easily scared?’
    Leonora decided they should take a bus there without first informing Miss Penrose. They go via Arezzo to visit the work of Piero della Francesca.
    Elizabeth is a coward and attempts to restrain her. ‘Let’s not go down this alley, it’s very dark’; ‘I think there’s a man following us’; ‘We’d better go back now.’ The last thing Leonora wants to do is to go back now, and she enters an antique-shop-cum-cavern-of-delights covered in dust and cobwebs, the fibres of which form bridges between the hand of a metal charioteer and a porcelain plate before continuing on to envelop a Florentine dagger. ‘We recovered these books from a Venetian palace,’ comments a different kind of shipwreck survivor, an old man, indicating a yellowing stack. Who knows what varieties of fungus are growing in this disturbing Aladdin’s cave?
    Leonora feels in her element, curious and confident in equal measure. In here, even the dust is magical. Suddenly, in the midst of all the objects, there shines a pair of yellow cat’s