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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover Design: Selena Kitt
Ravens Roost © September 2010 habu
eXcessica publishing
A Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved
Ravens Roost
by habu
Chapter One: Lucky at Ravens Roost
It surprised me later that I’d seen the white Bentley convertible with the tan leather top before I focused on him. When I did see him standing there, smiling at me, trying to get a good look at the canvas on my easel, all I could think was “Nice coat.” I don’t know when I’d last seen a man wearing a full-length mink coat —or even a woman—but he wore it well—naturally, as if by right, which I guess it was, since he was probably one of the richest men in Virginia.
I’d come up to Ravens Roost to be alone. The Sunday Washington Post’s Travel Section had said that the leaves on the Skyline Drive would be starting their peak period on Wednesday, so I knew if I was going to get any painting done without tourists at my elbows I needed to get up here by today, Tuesday. Thankfully, the weather had cooperated. The sun was shining and the temperature wasn’t too cold or humid to mess with my paints.
I figured if I drove up to the top of the Blue Ridge at Afton, from Waynesboro, and headed south on the Blue Ridge Parkway rather than north on the Skyline Drive, I’d avoid nearly all of the early leaf spotters coming down from Washington on the drive. And until the man in the mink coat rolled up in his Bentley at the Ravens Roost overlook, looking west through the Torrey Ridge and down into the Shenandoah Valley, I’d been right.
It was one of my favorite spots, especially because it presented me with a conundrum. I could get the landscape, which changed dramatically by season, just right whenever I came up here. But I couldn’t capture the birds. They were ever in motion, and that’s the way I liked them—the ravens and hawks soaring on the updrafts and nesting in the nooks and crannies of the sheer, lichen-covered gray cliff faces under the overlook and and across the asphalt of the parkway beyond it. It was the soaring motion of the birds that I wanted to capture. But thus far it had eluded me. And I still found myself telling anyone at the art fairs asking me about the canvases painted up here that I appreciated their kind comments about capturing the Blue Ridge mountain scapes just right, but that I still hadn’t managed to capture the soaring birds here at Ravens Roost.
“Yes,” I heard him speak softly from behind me in a well-modulated, educated voice—something foreign in Virginia anywhere but here at the western edge of the Piedmont, where the old families of Central Virginia still did the European tour and brought home British spouses.
I turned and raised my eyebrow. My paint brush, loaded with just the right mix of red and orange and yellow, hovered over the canvas.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you. But I stopped at the overlook because the way the sun hit the trees on the slope over there made them shimmer with fiery earth tones. And I see here that you have captured them perfectly on canvas.”
“Thank you,” I said and turned back to the canvas, trying to remember just where I had wanted to apply the paint. I wanted to be irritated by his snapping of my concentration, but I found that my mind was torn between capturing the perfect play of the light before it flitted away and wanting to concentrate on him. I would have thought that a man in a fur coat and a Bentley would be entirely out of his element up here at the top of the Blue Ridge, but he seemed in complete comfort and control, as if he was the proprietor and perhaps it was I who was the interloper. This despite the outlook having been a special spot for me for the two years since I had descended from New York, where the business of surviving had been stifling and sucking the very life out of my creativity. I had thought I was a cityscape artist. But I had been wrong. I found myself entirely at home in the quiet elegance of the Shenandoah Valley.
With a sigh, as a cloud floated across the sun, changing the light on the slope of the Torrey Ridge to something as interesting as what I was painting—but something far different from what I was painting—I lowered the paintbrush and covered the paint-loaded tip with an oil rag.
“I am mortified,” he said in a voice that sounded genuinely contrite. “I have ruined your painting. I see that the light has changed.”