I didn’t tell Nicole about finding the diary. Or Françoise either. I felt so guilty, but I needed time to think about what to do with it. In my hands that diary felt almost like a portal to another time. I was consumed by Rose’s story and the power of the secrets held in that journal. I felt like she would have wanted me to see it, but would she have wanted her innermost thoughts shared with the rest of the world? Weirdly, that felt like a betrayal of her confidence. And so I was torn over my loyalty to my guardian, Nicole, and my bond to my benefactor, Rose, a girl who had been dead now for a hundred and fifty years. All I knew was that once I handed the diary over to Nicole, there would be no going back. The book would become an artefact to be pored over by intellectuals and historians. But in my hands it was alive somehow, and so was Rose.

It made me feel better, too, knowing that Rose had felt like an outsider at the Paris art school just like me. If she could rise above it to become great, then so would I.

Augustin did not even look at me when I entered the classroom that morning. The other students all talked amongst themselves. Sure, maybe they thought it wasn’t worth trying to talk to me, but even so they could have at least acknowledged my presence with a bonjour or something, right? Anyway, without a word from anyone I took up the same place at the easel where I had been sketching the day before and began to work.

I kept my head down and focused on my picture. The drawing was really taking shape now. I was filling in the details on the black-and-white cobs, working up the textures of their manes, the ripples of their muscles and the reflections on their coats of the dappled light through the overhanging tree boughs. Now, as they became more defined on my sketch pad, I found my own focus becoming more intense. With each line and smudge I was bringing them alive, pressing hard against the paper with the charcoal to get the dark bits I needed, then going back over to rework the charcoal, smudging it and rubbing out areas to create shade and light. I was working from fiction, and yet it felt I’d recreated a scene that was so real, if you gave it a very quick glance it almost looked like a photograph.