Chapter One
Acceptance

Truly, Texas, March 1891

Ruby latched the chicken-yard gate behind her and waited for the hens’ cackling to settle. If anyone tried to sneak up on her, the birds would squawk an alarm. Certain she was alone, she pulled a scrap of paper from her pocket and read it again. Molly, her best friend, had sent the note by way of a passing cowhand five days ago. Since then Ruby had read the two words—It’s here—so many times the edges of the paper had feathered and Molly’s red wax seal had fallen off. It was the reply to clandestine correspondence Ruby had sent months before. It could change her life.

Ruby had been to town with her father just the week before, so her turn would not roll around again for three long weeks. Trusting one of her siblings, especially that sly Beryl, to pick it up without tattling to their folks, was unthinkable.

When Ruby asked to take her sister’s place in the wagon, the little snot had flat refused. Bartering continued for days with the deal consummated only this morning while doing breakfast dishes together.

Beryl whined a hard bargain. “I want the brooch Granny gave you for Christmas—”

Ruby couldn’t believe that she, a grown woman of eighteen, was reduced to negotiating with a nine-year-old. She rolled her eyes but gave a reluctant nod.

“—and a month’s worth of dinner dishes.”

“Fine.” Ruby blew out a breath hot with exasperation. From the triumphant expression on Beryl’s face, Ruby had been played for a sucker. Under her breath she muttered her father’s term for his daughters when they didn’t live up to his expectations, “Hellion child.”

Now, beside her father in the buckboard, half-listening to his mumblings about what he needed in town, Ruby envisioned the changes it could make in her life.

“Sixteen penny nails, two-by-fours, poultry wire. You got your mother’s shopping list, girl?”

“Yes, sir.” Ruby’s heavy gloves didn’t prevent her fingers from worrying the bottom button on her winter coat until it dangled by a thread. One more twirl snapped the fiber, spiraling the bit of bone to the floorboard. She grabbed for it, but it tumbled into the rutted road, buried forever beneath red West Texas dust. To keep from losing another, she sat on her hands. The closer they got to town, the more her heart felt like a kernel of popcorn ready to explode.

Groceries—Ranch Supplies—Dry Goods—Clothing. From its perch above Statler’s Mercantile, the hand-painted sign knocked a wind-blown greeting against the eaves. Pa pulled the buckboard adjacent to the storefront. Before he could set the brake, Ruby kicked off the buffalo robe protecting her from the cold blue norther that had blown in. Without waiting to be helped down, she jumped from the seat, her skirt flaring so high frigid air lassoed her knees. She ignored his “Are you ever going to behave like a proper young—” and dashed into the store.

Inside, her gaze darted into every corner of the store, making sure Molly was alone. “Where is it?”

“Don’t I even get a hello?” From her station behind the dark oak counter, the middle Statler girl grinned and waggled her feather duster in greeting.

“Hello, Molly,” Ruby sassed, wondering how her friend could be so calm on such a momentous occasion. “Happy now? Where is it?”

Molly put aside the duster and carefully wiped her hands before pulling several items from a cubbyhole.

Ruby jiggled on her feet at her friend’s deliberate pace.

Most items Molly returned to their place, but one—a fat ivory envelope—she waved high in the air, tormenting her friend.

With one hand Ruby pushed off the counter, stretching for the letter with the other. As her fingers closed on the paper, Molly jerked it away.

“You wretch.” Movement out the front window caught Ruby’s eye. She tugged Molly’s arm down. “Here comes my pa.”

The smile snapped off Molly’s face as quickly as a mousetrap closing. She thrust the envelope toward Ruby who stashed it in her coat pocket and extracted her mother’s shopping list.

The store door creaked open to admit her father. “Any mail, Ruby?”

“No, sir.” She tucked her hand back into her pocket, pressing the letter against her thigh.

Mr. Statler, his arms filled with boxes, stepped out of the stock room. “Howdy, Hermann. Anything I can help you with?”

“Put whatever the girl needs on my account, Jack. I’ll pick her up when I’m done at the lumber yard.”

Ruby ran a finger down her mother’s checklist but was too excited to focus. The spidery handwriting became a tangled, illegible web as ten pounds of flour moseyed into five pounds of cornmeal and blackstrap molasses poured onto one card of small white buttons.

Unable to calm herself enough to fill the order, while Ruby waited for her pa to leave, she studied her friend. Despite performing her usual duties of stocking shelves and cleaning the store, Molly’s white cuffs remained pristine and not a strand of hair escaped the flaxen braids crowning her head. With a sigh, Ruby removed her bonnet, tried in vain to pat her hair into place then brushed off her clothing. Windblown and gritty, Ruby looked like she’d rolled into town on a tumbleweed.

After an interminable conversation about the upcoming town hall meeting and the quarter-inch of rain the town had gotten the week before—things that weren’t nearly as important as Ruby’s letter—Ruby’s pa drove off and Mr. Statler returned to the back room.

Molly whirled around the counter to join Ruby. “Open it.”

After a final survey ensured they were truly alone, Ruby pulled the envelope from her pocket, slid a finger beneath its seal, and removed the letter. Her hands trembled too much for her to decipher the words, she thrust the page at her friend. “I can’t bear the suspense. Read it to me, please.”

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-EXCERPT 2-

Author Note:
Ruby Schmidt has just left her West Texas home and betrothed to go to attend the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts. This is her first day in her new world.

Eager to explore the Academy, Ruby skipped there the next morning. She reined in her eagerness, not wanting to appear a foolish schoolgirl. Red and black brickwork patterns graced the magnificent façade of the Academy. Terra cotta statuary, floral designs, and stone tracery surrounded a large Gothic window. Above, a bas-relief frieze depicted famous artists. She’d never seen such elaborate ornamentation on a building.

She entered through a two-story arch, gaping in awe at the decorative tiled floors, a spectacular staircase with banisters of bronze and mahogany, walls studded with golden rosettes, and a blue ceiling spangled with silver stars. How easy to learn art here where beauty dwelled.

In the student store, she received the list of supplies for her first class, Drawing from the Cast. She purchased Venetian charcoal, paper, and fixative, and for a modest additional cost, she chose a portfolio instead of a drawing board. Carefully she counted $3.72 from her reticule before placing the majority of the items in her new locker, rented for a dollar a year, keeping only pencils, an eraser, and a sketchbook for immediate use.

She climbed the grand stairs to the second floor galleries. The largest painting Ruby had ever seen dominated the landing. Beneath it, a gold plaque read Dead Man restored to Life by touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha, Washington Allston (1779-1843).

An entire wall of her room at the boarding house could not hold the image. Scarlet accents swirled through a pyramid of figures. At its peak, Allston had placed a Roman centurion’s gleaming gold armor, and at its base, the dead man’s white shroud.

As Ruby moved through the galleries, she understood why the Academy’s art collections were considered the most valuable in America. Briefly she worshipped before each picture, moving close enough to study the translucent layers of colors and shifting her head to catch the play of light across individual brush strokes. Her fingers itched to hold a paintbrush, and she rubbed her fingers together to soothe their prickling.

On the Cherry Street side of the Academy, Ruby wandered into galleries containing paintings and casts of sculptures. Rooms lit by skylights contained furnishings for drapery painting and life drawing classes. She inhaled deeply. Pungent odors of turpentine and linseed oil mixed with paint permeated the building. Black fingerprints from charcoal dusted the doorjambs.

A stout, middle-aged woman watched over the door to the Antiquities Room. She beckoned to Ruby. “Come on in, dearie. It’s Thursday, Ladies’ Day. No men allowed.”

Glad she happened to come when the galleries were open to women artists, Ruby entered, her heart thumping with anticipation. Inside a dozen women, uniformed in dark smocks, stood before easels and sketched. All her life, she had seemed singular in her desire to study art. She was no longer alone. The urge to whisper hello to her fellow painters rose within her, but the silence in the room was so profound she found herself unable to speak.

The Nike of Samothrace caught her eye, a sculpture she’d only seen in art books at the library of the Texas Normal College. Carved by an ancient Greek sculptor, the figure of the goddess Nike commemorated a victory at sea. Wings unfurled behind her, she descended from the heavens to land on the prow of a warship, struggling to maintain her balance against the combined forces of ship, air, and water. The wind whipped her garments behind her like sheets snapping in a Texas breeze. The goddess’s missing head and arms did not diminish her grandeur—nor did knowing she was a reproduction of the statue in the Louvre.

Compelled to touch the graceful wings and the undulating rhythm of the robes, Ruby skimmed one hand sensuously over the plaster, finding it hard, cool, smooth, yet delicately textured at the feathers. The Nike celebrated Ruby’s own triumph in being in Philadelphia.

Next Ruby stood before a copy of Michelangelo’s David. From loving Bismarck, she knew what lay beneath the fig leaf and longed to pry away the ludicrous covering and sketch the Biblical hero in all his glory.

She wandered around the cast room, her lips clamped together to control her desire to exclaim over every statue, bust, or bas-relief. She hesitated before taking out her sketchbook, afraid the other artists would intuit she was a mere amateur. Beginning her academic career by sketching the Nike or David would surely be too audacious, so she chose a plaster cast of a woman’s hand. As she drew and redrew the long chalky fingers from different angles, the natural light from the skylights faded unobtrusively from warm gold to mercury silver. Suddenly, the brilliance of midday blazed again from overhead. Startled, she looked up.

The guardian of the galleries noted her dazed expression. “It’s just our new electrical lights, dearie.”

Once the Academy closed, Ruby returned to the boarding house, spinning in giddy circles, oblivious to peoples’ stares. She was intoxicated, as drunk as old Joe Greer, the town ne’er-do-well, when he stumbled from the Dark Horse saloon back home. Art everywhere! More than she had seen in her entire life. The Academy exceeded her dreams. Too delirious with joy to pay attention to where she was going, Ruby wandered into the path of an omnibus. The driver clanged its bell in frantic warning. She jumped to the sidewalk, narrowly escaping being struck by the electrical conveyance.

Back at Mrs. Wheelwright’s, she wrote her family and Bismarck describing her adventures. Enthusiastic words flew from her pen:

My dearest Biz,

My New Life began today! I walked into the Academy and immediately knew I had answered my Calling. Before that moment, I had not truly lived. Art will give my life meaning and purpose from here on…

-EXCERPT 3-

February 1892

Ruby sat on a stool before her easel with Willow to her left. On Ruby’s right, Ira Wheatley paced as he worked. Like her, he was a redhead, though more carrot than blond, and so large in frame she’d found him intimidating when they first met. She wondered how his enormous hands could manipulate a brush, much less create the delicate lines of engravings. His work captured bizarre unposed moments, making her wonder what happened immediately before or after the scene. The week before he had shown her etchings of everyday life in the tenements of Philadelphia. One depicted a woman in a nightgown holding a kerosene lamp and looking down at a man in a bed.

“Is she a wife? Perhaps caring for an ill husband?” Warmth raced up Ruby’s face as she posed another possibility. “Or a soiled dove who’s forgotten which man remains in her bed?”

“A soiled dove?” Wheatley smirked.

Embarrassed, Ruby averted her eyes. “You know, a lady of…of…ill repute.”

He shook his head at her euphemism, smiled enigmatically, and refused to clarify his artwork. “It is what it is, Red.”

“You fiend!” She’d swatted him with her paintbrush.

Now, she sensed Wheatley’s frequent, prolonged gaze. Irritated, she turned to confront him. “Quit staring.”

Hearing whispering, Anshutz walked toward her as if to shush her. Instead, he stopped at Wheatley’s easel. “Is there a reason you’re not working on today’s assignment?”

Ruby, along with the rest of the class turned, stared, and held their collective breaths waiting to see what happened.

“I finished the bust.” Wheatley lifted the sketch he was working on and revealed he had indeed completed his drawing.

One of Anshutz’s famous harrumphs of disapproval erupted as he looked at Wheatley’s drawing from the cast. He made several swipes with his charcoal before he flipped back to the top drawing and appraised it. “Hmm. Well done. However, the Committee on Instruction feels your fellow class members are not appropriate subjects, particularly if sketched without their consent.”

Wheatley scribbled his name across the bottom of his drawing before tossing it at Ruby. “Here, Red.” He slammed his portfolio shut and stormed out of the classroom.

Ruby looked at the drawing. Her irritation faded. Surely she was not as lovely as Wheatley envisioned her. He had rendered her face and body in charcoal but had used red ochre for her hair. In his sketch her shoulders were bare. Her cheeks burnt as she wondered if, in his mind, he had removed the rest of her clothing.

Mr. Anshutz moved toward Ruby. “You may wish to keep that. I suspect Mr. Wheatley’s drawings may fetch a pretty penny one day.” Then he made numerous bold corrections on Ruby’s work. “Do it again. You must not think the lines, Miss Schmidt, you must feel them.”

She had thought her drawing good. Her smugness evaporated with his criticism. Anshutz was worse than her father. Nothing she painted would ever please her professor. She stood abruptly. Her stool clattered to the floor. Holding back tears, she dashed from the room.

In her retreat, she ran by Willow. Her friend grabbed Ruby’s hand, tugging her back.

Ruby broke free.

When Willow tried to follow her, Anshutz said, “Remain here, Miss Wycke. She must develop a thicker skin, or she’ll never survive as an artist.”

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