In class, I’d use a bold brush. I could take the still lifes, the models, the ordinary things before us, and turn them into a fairy tale. After all, wasn’t that how I lived my life? Bright skirts and scarves hiding a core of plain, ordinary loneliness. With slashes and strokes, with words on a page, I’d paint the world beneath the skin of a dream.

But, outside of class, with only Finlay, me, and my pencil, I could draw the world as it really was. Finlay, after hearing that his limb had shrunk further and that he’d need a new prosthesis. Sitting on the bed, head in his cupped hands, exhausted. His trousers rolled up over his knee. The leg all wood rubbed shiny, screws, hinges, leather straps. I didn’t leave anything out, not the weary hunch of his shoulders, the fingernails bitten down to nothing. In the dusty sunlight, he slumped, defeated.

Then furious, the prosthesis thrown across the room, scattered on the ground in pieces. His eyes flashed, angry at having to start over again, angry at having to relearn those wobbly steps, at having to go back to being a man stared at.

Then remorse, as he crouched on the floor, dust streaking the trouser knee of his good leg. He felt around, gathered up every last screw and splinter of wood. He sat, his stump splayed out, piecing that wooden leg back together. No matter how much it had betrayed him, he still needed it.

I drew all of that—the weariness, the frustration, the desperation—without any of the artifice or gilt I saw in class. I drew Finlay as he was, finding more beauty in that curve in his stump, in the stark strength on his face, than in a thousand queens.

“Clare, you are an artist,” he said, echoing me that first day. “You just have to convince the rest of the world.”

“You can’t throw my own words back at me like that,” I teased, but he wasn’t having any of it.

“With your pencil, you reveal me. And, in those drawings, you reveal yourself. This is what you were born to do, Clare.”

“My Something Important,” I whispered. Luc said that, the day we stood in the hallway of Mille Mots, tiptoed on the edge of our future. Two words that made me feel more than hopeful; they made me feel invincible.

I went with Finlay to Renfrewshire to be fitted for his new leg. Sitting in the recreation hall of the Princess Louise Hospital, I realized Finlay had it easier than most. Other soldiers, missing too much to be useful, waited, too. Some without a leg, some without two, some without an arm along with the rest. Not all had their prostheses yet. I watched those soldiers slouched in wheelchairs, propped with crutches against gaming tables, or leaning back against the walls, eyes closed, quiet resignation on their faces, and I memorized it all. On the train back to Glasgow, I let myself sketch.

I sketched a lanky soldier, still straight and proud in his uniform despite the folded trouser leg. I sketched a young man in an overlarge suit, his feet tapping out a One-Step, half the beats done with a stockinged foot, the other half with a wooden sole. I sketched a soldier, head bent, stub of an arm curled protectively around a small boy. Not all in the recreation hall were soldiers. I sketched a nurse, a refugee from Belgium, quietly knitting with three leather fingers.

Your Something Important. All of those soldiers, who’d given so much of themselves on the battlefield that they’d left a piece behind, they’d been out there doing good. Their work was more important than mine. Just a pencil, a few lines of charcoal…how could that compare?

One soldier at Princess Louise had lost a nose. It had been replaced by a clumsy rubber prosthesis, thickly painted. It filled the space, but not much more. What he’d lost, he could never fully recover. Me drawing them, it wasn’t enough. To keep those sketches in my book and pity. I needed to share them, to show the world that the dead are not the only ones to be mourned.

Finlay, he understood. “When you picked up that pencil, you gave me dignity on the page.” He stilled my sketching hands as the train rumbled into Queen Street Station. “Clare, other people should see this. You should send these out.”

So I did. With the last of my coal money for the week, I bought heavy sheets of paper and, wrapped in two scarves and an extra sweater against the cold, I copied over my sketches. I packed them carefully between sheets of cardboard and brought them to Fairbridge when I went to visit for Christmas.

Grandfather straightened his glasses on his nose and spread them all out on the empty dining table, scrutinizing until my nerves flickered like electric lights. When he finally slipped off the glasses, his eyes were wet.

“You have something your mother and grandmother never had.” He straightened up the pages. “The courage to capture the world as you really see it.” He packaged them up and sent them to Charles Rennie Mackintosh in London.

Clare, you’re in the right place now, Mr. Mackintosh wrote. Will you exhibit?

Are they good enough? I asked. My works were far from what the others at the school were producing. They weren’t the sorts of things one hung alongside the bold colors and allegories. All in pencil and soft lines, they faded.

They’re haunting, wrenching, honest, he replied. I’m reminded of Käthe Kollwitz. Those poor unfortunates in the pictures, they are the ones from whom society looks away. You look straight at them and their souls.

I was unused to praise. Who wants haunting, wrenching, and honest in the middle of a war?

Those who know it.

But I didn’t. I didn’t know any of it beyond what I saw in the corridors of the hospital. Those soldiers brought a memory of the trenches home with them, to carry around always.

Clare, I know a gallery, in Paris. The owner is an old friend. May I send one to him?

I thought and, with a hesitant pen, wrote, Yes.

The first one we sent, it sold right away. “A soldier, recently returned from the Front,” said Monsieur Santi, the gallery owner. The next two sold just as quickly. “You have an admirer,” he said, and asked me to send more.

Checks came to me in Glasgow, checks I held in disbelieving fists, then tucked away in the bottom of my washstand drawer. Share them with the world, Finlay had said. I hadn’t expected compensation for that.

I wrote to my grandfather at Fairbridge. I’ve done it. Like Grandmother, I’m an artist now.

When a letter came for me, it wasn’t from Perthshire. This envelope came from Paris. The stationery bore the insignia of the American Red Cross.

Studio for Portrait Masks

70 bis Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs

Paris

January 1918

Dear Miss Ross,

My name is Anna Coleman Ladd and, under the auspices of the American Red Cross, I am attempting to set up a studio in Paris modeled after Lieutenant Francis Derwent Wood’s Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department at the Third London General Hospital, Wandsworth. I am not sure if you’ve read about Lt. Wood’s work with mutilated English soldiers, though you may have heard of his department, popularly called the “Tin Noses Shop.” Like yourself, Lt. Wood is an artist, and he has lectured at the Glasgow School of Art, so you may be familiar with him. He has pioneered a new and quite astonishing technique of casting thin metal masks that are light, comfortable, and quite lifelike. Not medicine, but rather art.

These masks can cover the whole face, depending on the degree of injury, or can cover only part of the face. Glass eyes can be added with durable lashes made of thin strips of painted metal. For masks that cover one’s mouth, an opening can be left for a cigarette. These masks are seamless. It is quite an impressive feat, to make masks delicate and thinner than a lady’s visiting card, yet conveying so much humanity in those few ounces of metal.

I have learned his technique and, with the Red Cross, am setting up a studio here in Paris to help French soldiers in similar circumstances (called here mutilés). I’ve made some adjustments to the process—enamel paint offers more lifelike tones of color—but follow Lt. Wood’s general method in sketching, casting, sculpting, hammering, and finally electroplating the copper mask.

I have been looking for artists who pay great attention to life detail and who have the compassion to work amongst disfigured soldiers. I have seen your pencil drawings in La Galerie Porte d’Or and, Miss Ross, I believe you have both qualities.

I will be in London next Tuesday. Would you do me the honor of meeting with me? I would like to speak to you more about the opportunity to assist me in my work. Helping these soldiers is such a small thing for us to do, but for them, it is anything but small.

Sincerely, etc.

These days it was hard to feel like art mattered. When men were giving themselves, giving their youth, giving their life, when women were waiting and praying, I was painting. I was sculpting and drawing and creating, as though there wasn’t a war, as though my creation could counter all of that destruction. None of what I was doing signified outside of the art school. Anna Coleman Ladd was doing something that did.

I remembered the soldier I used to see waiting in the hospital, self-conscious with his ill-fitting rubber nose. If he’d had the chance to instead wear a work of art, would it change things for him? Would his world seem a fraction less dim?

“You’re meant to do this, Clare,” Finlay said. “You’re more than an artist. You’re a warrior.”

“You’re the one who’s been to battle,” I pointed out.

“And you’re the one who’s saved me.” He kissed me on the forehead. “Now, go. Go bring another man back to himself.”

The soldier stood in the threshold of the Studio for Portrait Masks. The room was bright, but he kept to the shadows.

Mrs. Ladd tried to keep the soldiers at ease and the studio cheerful. The phonograph in the corner, the sun-streaked windows and skylights, the little vases of peonies tucked here and there, warmed the room. Posters and flags were tacked between the windows—a large American flag, for her, and smaller British and French flags, for the rest of us working in the studio. It was a bright spot in an otherwise somber city. Three months after the war ended, Paris was still recovering.

Usually, the soldiers sat in little groups, laughing, smoking, playing checkers and drinking wine. Some were waiting for appointments. Others had nowhere else to go. Since being demobilized, too many lived on the streets. They begged for food, drink, a place to warm up. Here, at least for part of the day, they had all three. But, more than that, here they found people who understood. They found other soldiers just as broken.