The Girl with the Emerald Ring (Blackwood Security #12) - Elise Noble Page 0,1
the kitchen. The show had been a success in that we’d sold all but two paintings, but the artist was a pretentious bore and the event ran late. Midnight had been and gone by the time I shovelled the last guest out of the door and into a taxi.
Still, I couldn’t complain too much. At least I had a job.
Between my complete lack of experience and Piers bad-mouthing me to anyone who’d listen after I left him, finding work hadn’t been easy. Do you know how much use a degree in art history is in the real world? No other gallery would give me so much as an interview, but luckily for me, Hugo had read for his degree at Oxford University, my alma mater, and also once had a bust-up with Piers’s father. The whole Fortescue-Hamilton family was mud in Hugo’s eyes, which I suspected was the main reason he’d offered me the position.
A position that paid peanuts, but it was better than having to turn to my parents. They weren’t short of money, and they’d even offered to bail me out, but their “gifts” came with so many strings attached that it was like wading through macramé. Never again would I be beholden to another person, not a blood relative and certainly not a man.
Which was why I poured Mirabella a generous glass of rosé and headed back to the gallery to find her studying one of the most awful examples of modern art I’d ever seen. Imagine if Picasso drew a pineapple, then put it through a shredder and gave the pieces to a toddler to reassemble. Even Hugo agreed it had no redeeming features. He’d bought it as part of a job lot from a house clearance to get a David Hockney sketch he really wanted, and it was a toss-up over whether to burn the piece or hang it in the gallery on the off-chance some schmuck with appalling taste came in.
“Isn’t it something?” I said to Mirabella as I passed her a glass of wine. “It’s by Vincent Crystalla.”
“Who?”
“He won the Turner Prize for Laughter Unchained.” Which was a vaguely horrifying sculpture of a clown in orange prison overalls, handcuffs and leg shackles lying on the floor behind him. “Are you familiar with his work?”
“I don’t think I saw that one.”
“It’s a metaphorical representation of the constraints oppressive governments put on human enjoyment. Profound. What do you think of Fruit: Reconstructed?”
“It’s, uh, interesting.”
“Imagine having that on the wall at one of your parties—it’d be a real talking point.”
“You think? It’s not a bit…offbeat?”
“Well, you have to be a real art lover to appreciate it.”
“I’m not sure it’d work in the riding arena.”
“No, you’d want something more traditional for that spot. Andrea Edmunds is an up-and-coming artist who paints horses in a distinctive style—acrylic on bare canvas with minute attention to detail—and she also takes commissions. Would you like to see her portfolio?”
Two hours and four glasses of rosé later, I helped Mirabella into a taxi and went back inside to face Henrietta. Any other boss would no doubt have been thrilled by the sales I’d made—two countryside scenes, one custom painting from Andrea Edmunds, and the awful pineapple thing—but I knew Henrietta wouldn’t see it that way. We got a bonus for each painting sold, and her client had left without buying a thing.
“Bethany, a word?”
“Let me just clear these wine glasses away.”
Anything to put off the inevitable. What would she make me do this time? Rearrange the packaging supplies? Reply to comments on the gallery’s Facebook page? Dust the back office? In the five months I’d worked there, Henrietta had proven herself to be a master at dreaming up trivial tasks to keep me busy, thereby minimising the possibility that I might beat her in the sales stakes. And I couldn’t say a thing. Complaining would make me look like a troublemaker, and I needed to keep this job for a little longer. The only thing that would look worse on my CV than no experience at all was leaving a position after such a short period of time.
“No, no, leave that. Gemma can do it. Hugo’s asked you to run an errand.”
Translation: Hugo had asked Henrietta to run an errand, and she’d seen it as the perfect opportunity to get rid of me.
“What kind of errand?”
Oh, that sly smile… She tried to hide it, but just for a moment, it popped onto her face unbidden.