“Look! You can still stroke her. Take joy in that!” Dorian encouraged me as Celine stretched her long neck out to me over the stable door. I stroked her muzzle and smelt the warm sweetness of her scent, but it only made me cry harder.

“I want to ride,” I sobbed. “And I’m never going to. Don’t you see? It’s like showing me a feast and telling me I can’t eat.”

Dorian refused to be defeated by my misery. “You can still paint her. I’ve brought your things, you can work from your chair.”

He dried my eyes with his handkerchief, held my chin in his hand and raised my face, tilting it so that I was forced to look at him. “Paint me a picture, little sister. Come on. Do it for me, Rose.”

There were tears in his eyes, and I realised in all my life I had never seen Dorian cry before. I didn’t want him to pity me.

“All right,” I sighed. “Set up the easel.”

Dorian hurried about before I could change my mind. He swung open the stable door and wheeled me in to sit beside Celine and then set up the easel and adjusted its height while I organised the palette of paints and brushes on my lap. Celine struck a perfect pose with her ears pricked and I settled down and began to work.

And I tried, I really did. But the work did not sing to me. I slapped the paint on and the technique was there at my fingertips as it had always been, but when I drew back and looked, the canvas was mundane and soulless. When I had finished, all I had to show for my three hours in the stables was a portrait of the horse in front of me that had proportion and veracity but absolutely no energy or depth. The beating heart of something deeper that had always been the power of my work, it simply wasn’t there.

Dorian couldn’t see what was so wrong with it – or at least he pretended he couldn’t see it. “It is good for a first attempt after all this time,” he insisted as he wheeled me home. “What you need to do is go back to the Paris School, finish the year studying under Demarchelier, and then you can return to your studio and begin to paint again like you used to do. Your gift will return to you. You’ll see.”

My brother was being kind, but he knew as well as I that this is not how a ‘gift’ works. Before, when I painted, my portraits expressed the power of nature. Is it because my own nature is so weakened now that my work is limp and bleak? And as for returning to the Paris School. What was the point of that? This was what I tried to explain to Papa tonight at dinner.