The Ballad of Daniel Durst

 

Port Hawkesbury, Canada

May 15th, 1846

 

“Expectin’ company, Mr Durst?”

Daniel’s head shot up from where he’d bent it over the ledger laid out on his desk.

The office boy, Thomas, had leant just far enough into the door-frame to make his enquiry. His shrill and strident voice had shattered the gentle atmosphere of small repetitive sounds—the scratch of pen-nibs against paper, the rustling of turning pages, the occasional footsteps or muffled coughs that served as a reminder of the otherwise-silent human presence—that hung over the shipping firm. Despite this sudden interruption, none of the other clerks seemed to have taken any notice of him yet, for which Daniel gave silent thanks. Despite being, technically, a city, often Port Hawkesbury reminded Daniel of Rochester—in that small-town way where everyone seemed to have their nose perpetually in everyone else’s business.

Daniel, meanwhile, kept his countenance free from any sign of the alarm which had begun ringing in his chest. His voice remained dull and disinterested as he replied, “Why do you ask?”

“Two gen’lemen just disembarked from Liverpool and keep askin’ folks where to find you,” said Thomas.

This answer did nothing to assuage Daniel’s increasing concern. He turned a page in his ledger and dipped his pen whilst his mind whirled.

It couldn’t be Tolhurst searching for him, though that had been his first fearful assumption. Mr Grigsby had written him some months back to inform him of that monster’s demise. Perhaps it might be Felix, the prodigal son returned at last. But Thomas had mentioned two gentlemen, and Daniel knew not who would accompany Felix in search of his vanished betrothed. Furthermore, Felix had no idea of Daniel’s true identity—unless he had encountered Lofthouse in his wayward travels and Lofthouse had divulged Daniel’s secret. Although Daniel realised as he recalled the existence of Lofthouse, it might just be that Lofthouse had accompanied Mr Grigsby across the Atlantic to see how Daniel got on. A spike of anger struck Daniel’s heart at the thought of Lofthouse breaking his promise to secrecy, but if Mr Grigsby had come to see him and asked after him by a description which resembled a copy clerk in a shipping firm rather than a runaway heiress, it would seem to indicate that Mr Grigsby had taken the shocking revelation rather better than Daniel had expected, and the thought of his guardian’s approval did warm Daniel’s heart despite himself.

“Did they give their names?” Daniel said without looking up from the columns of figures.

Thomas shrugged. “Not in my earshot.”

Useless, Daniel thought. Aloud, he said, “Did you notice anything particular in their appearance?”

Thomas snorted. “Certainly did!”

Daniel waited with no small amount of impatience for him to elaborate.

“One fellow’s taller than a lamp-post,” Thomas went on, his words carrying a tinge of admiration. “With a massive furred cloak and big leather boots and a cap with a feather in it, all in black.”

Daniel blinked. “A furrier, you mean.”

“No!” Thomas scoffed. “He’s wilder than that. Like Robin Hood or something.”

Daniel didn’t wish to waste any time debating the relative wildness of furriers and highwaymen. At any rate, the description matched no one he’d known in England. “And the other?”

Thomas twisted up his face. “Dull. Like a clerk.”

Said to a roomful of clerks. A smile twitched at the corner of Daniel’s mouth. Still, he did know one clerk in particular, and so he asked, “Chestnut hair? Freckles?”

Thomas blinked in astonishment. “Yeah.”

There was half the mystery solved, then. Lofthouse had arrived in Canada. For what purpose, Daniel knew not. Still, he realised as he considered the matter, he would have to catch Lofthouse up on his cover story before he spoke to many more townsfolk.

Daniel had not attained his present position through entirely honest means. He and Sukie had arrived in town hardly six months ago. With Daniel not yet in possession of his entire fortune, they had only the remainder of their profits from selling his hair and pawning what delicate articles he had no use for. They’d gone first to visit Sukie’s Aunt Molly, who worked as a cook in the household of a ship’s captain and who didn’t take kindly to the notion of her maiden niece sharing a cross-Atlantic cabin with a gentleman. (The announcement that Daniel had asked Sukie to marry him calmed her ire somewhat, but she didn’t smile upon Daniel until the wedding actually took place some weeks later.) There Sukie remained whilst Daniel trod all over town looking for work.

While Mrs Bailiwick’s Academy had given Daniel an education, it had not given him a gentlemen’s education, which left a few gaps in his instruction he must leap over if he wished to find employment. He had stopped in at every sort of office he encountered as he wandered the unfamiliar streets—for, if nothing else, he had splendid penmanship and a head for figures. The banks, post office, and solicitors weren’t taking on any new hires. The shipping firms proved more promising, and one in particular, Swift & Allen, had an office manager who let him take their clerking exam on the spot. The exam itself felt at least somewhat intuitive, and despite his nerves Daniel kept his hand from trembling. His audacity paid off, for no sooner had the manager, Mr Peakes, reviewed his exam than he offered Daniel the position starting the very next day.

However, though Daniel had passed the exam honestly enough and had worked still more honestly ever since, he had got his foot in the door by claiming to have clerked previously in the Staple Inn law office of Mr Ephraim Grigsby, Esq., under the senior clerk, Mr Lofthouse. Which meant Lofthouse’s sudden arrival in Port Hawkesbury made things rather awkward.

So Daniel, as casually as possible, plucked up a scrap of scratch-paper from the discard pile and dashed off a quick note to his wife.

 

Dear Mrs Durst,

I beg you will forgive the short notice, but Mr Lofthouse has arrived in town today with an unknown companion. I intend to invite them both to await me at our house for dinner.

Your ever-devoted,

Mr Durst.

 

This he folded, sealed, and handed off to Thomas to deliver, with a ha’penny for his troubles.

Daniel had taken rooms for himself and Sukie at a lodging-house when they first arrived in Port Hawkesbury. But this had been a temporary measure. After he attained his clerking position, they began their hunt through the newspaper advertisements for a proper house. Then, when they’d married at last, Daniel wrote again to Mr Grigsby to inform him of the happy occasion—or rather, a version of it, wherein “Miss Flora Fairfield” married a Mr Daniel Durst—and request the remainder of his inheritance be wired to Mrs Daniel Durst. Mr Grigsby, ever-dutiful, followed through within a few short weeks. With his rightful fortune in hand, Daniel acquired the charming little house Sukie had selected; a cottage, almost, some distance from the amenities of town, but all the more beloved for the privacy said distance afforded.

Daniel had developed a distinct desire for privacy whilst at Mrs Bailiwick’s Academy. As the wealthiest pupil there, he’d had the especial privilege of an upstairs bedroom all to himself from the age of fourteen. He found it a welcome relief from the ceaseless chatter of his fellow pupils and a shelter from the notice of the all-too-attentive music master. And all the moreso as his body chose that particular year to betray him. It became suddenly very important for him to dress and undress in private, for while he looked no different from his fellow pupils, he felt very different indeed and preferred no one besides himself gaze upon the parts of him which felt most at odds with his soul. Nor did he need anyone else commenting on his habit of throwing a sheet over the stand-mirror before he performed his morning ablutions.

When the lunch hour finally arrived, Daniel did not avail himself of the hand-pie baked and packed for him that morning by his devoted wife. Instead, he abandoned his luncheon to go out wandering the streets in search of Lofthouse and his queer companion. The description of Lofthouse didn’t get him very far when questioning passers-by. The description of his unknown cohort, however, as provided by Thomas, proved far more useful. It brought Daniel in short order to the stationer’s shop, where he beheld the oddity for himself.

The stranger was almost exactly as the boy had described—much to Daniel’s surprise. He’d assumed the lad had exaggerated. But indeed, he found himself confronted with the vision of a tall gentleman in dark garb of the medieval sort, with a feather in his peaked cap and leather boots folded down just above his knees and an enormous billowing furred coat all in black. He wore his hair unfashionably long in a queue at the back of his neck. Daniel could discern little of what the stranger might think from the severe cast of his long face as he examined reams of tinted paper and plucked up a particular bottle of red ink for closer inspection.

The gentleman speaking to the clerk behind the counter, however, proved far more familiar.

Daniel recognized Lofthouse at a glance. An inch or so shorter than Daniel himself, with chestnut hair and a face spattered with freckles. He’d dressed in an unassuming black frock-coat—the exact match for the grey one Daniel himself wore now, for Lofthouse had donated it under Daniel’s pretense of assisting indigent sailors. It wasn’t the only item of Lofthouse’s that Daniel had acquired under less-than-above-board circumstances. Denied Latin at school, Daniel had thrown himself into French and Italian and, in just the last year, had taken the opportunity of stealing a dusty Latin grammar from Lofthouse’s garret to teach himself. When Lofthouse had asked after “missing papers,” Daniel had initially thought the theft had been caught out. He still wondered if he ought to return the book by post or if he ought merely to send what money the book was worth along with a note of apology and hope it hadn’t any sentimental value. He’d taken it on impulse; its discovery amongst Lofthouse’s novels rather a surprise and the feelings the sight of it invoked no less surprising—covetous thoughts of the education Lofthouse and gentlemen like him had received, jealousy seething as the dust told how far Lofthouse had taken that education for granted, until the bitterest dregs of Daniel’s heart told him to take it, just take it, Lofthouse would never miss it, and he himself had far greater need of it, and he’d snatched it up and stuffed it into the voluminous pocket of his despised skirt.

Then, of course, Lofthouse had caught up to Daniel and Sukie in their escape, but rather than drag them back to Mr Grigsby and Tolhurst, he’d sworn to keep their secrets and wished them well on their journey. Which cast rather a guilty pall on Daniel’s own behaviour towards the man.

After a few moments of waiting, when it became clear the conversation between Lofthouse and the clerk would not abate, Daniel cleared his throat.

“Good morning, Mr Lofthouse,” he said.

The hem of the black frock-coat arose as Lofthouse whirled to face him. Mild irritation at the interruption vanished into astonished delight breaking over his freckled features. To Daniel’s surprise, he stepped forward with hand outstretched and a genuine smile. “Mr Durst! Splendid to see you again.”

Daniel shook his hand with a grip he’d practised often in the months since leaving Mrs Bailiwick’s Academy; firm grasp, two pumps, drop and withdraw. Lofthouse seemed impressed with it. But before he could say anything further, Daniel had to cut him off.

“I cannot thank you enough,” Daniel said with careful emphasis, “for the recommendation you gave me after I left Mr Grigsby’s employ.”

Whatever shock Lofthouse felt at this blatant lie, he limited his expression of it to a single blink. Then he replied, “Of course. You did very well for us. The least I could do, really.”

Daniel let out a breath he hadn’t realised he’d held.

“May I introduce my associate?” Lofthouse continued. “Mr Butcher. Butcher,” he added with a glance over Daniel’s shoulder, “this is Mr Durst.”

Daniel turned to find the medieval highwayman had crept up beside him in total silence. He flinched, then scolded himself for it, and struck out his hand. Butcher matched his firm grip and gave him a small yet sincere-seeming smile besides.

“May we offer our congratulations as well,” Lofthouse went on. “Mr Grigsby gave me the glad tidings of your nuptials—after a fashion,” Lofthouse added, much to Daniel’s relief.

“Thank you,” said Daniel. “I regret I cannot tarry long; I must return to the office.”

Lofthouse gave him a look of far greater sympathy than Daniel thought the statement warranted.

“However,” Daniel continued, “my wife and I would be honoured if you would join us this evening at our house for dinner.”

Lofthouse and Butcher exchanged a glance. Daniel thought he saw the faint flickering shadow of fond indulgence at the corner of Butcher’s mouth.

“We’d be delighted,” Lofthouse replied, with what seemed a genuine smile.

 

~

 

Daniel’s own interest in women became apparent to him shortly after his arrival at Mrs Bailiwick’s Academy. It grew from a fixed fascination with the elder girls to some small flirtations with those his own age around the time when his own body began to betray him. His fellow pupils reciprocated his interest, and he proved rather popular amongst them, for he had, if he were to flatter himself, a certain handsome quality which no amount of frills or flounces could ever quite disguise.

But of all the girls there—many beautiful and talented, most very interested in him—none sparked his notice quite like the arrival of one particular maid in his sixteenth year.

She was of a like age to himself, as he soon discovered. Unlike him, however, her eyes shone a deep amber to match her ebony locks, and the rosebud lips which annoyed him in his own face attracted his admiration in hers. And, unlike his fellow pupils, he had to steal his moments of admiration, for she didn’t sit beside him in drawing or French, or carry his hand or waist in dancing. Whilst he might offer to hold the pincushion of a young lady engaged in embroidery, he knew not how to make himself known to a maid who must keep herself unheard and unseen, lest she lose her place.

Still, he observed her whenever she crept into a room to start tidying-up just as the young ladies left it. More than a few times he glimpsed her in the halls slipping in or out of the servants’ stair. His attic bedroom, attained in his fourteenth year, put him rather nearer to the servants’ quarters than the pupils’ dormitory. Yet her work forced her to keep such miserable hours that she had vanished altogether either before he awoke or well after he fell asleep.

But, on the occasion of one particular afternoon tea, he’d had his chance.

Most of the young ladies ignored the maids, having been brought up to believe staff beneath their notice and expecting only to communicate with those who ranked so high as housekeepers or cooks. Daniel, however, caught the new maid’s eye as she brought in the tea-tray. He leapt up to accept it from her—after all, according to Mrs Bailiwick, he would have to conduct his future husband’s tea service, so why not take charge in the academy as practise? Audacity and confidence shielded him from reproof of teacher and pupil alike.

And, as the maid relinquished the service into his hands, his fingertips brushed against hers.

She glanced up at him, startled.

He gave her his most becoming smile, a bundle of nerves behind it, his heart in his throat.

A heart which flew with joy when she shot him a small, sweet, sincere smile in return.

Then the full weight of the tray bore upon his arms, for she had let go of it altogether and vanished again as though she’d never been.

Daniel retained his composure as he set down the tray and dispensed tea to his classmates. He waited until after he saw them all served, then turned to his headmistress.

“Pray tell, Mrs Bailiwick,” Daniel asked her whilst the girls distracted themselves with tea-cakes. “What is the new maid’s name?”

Mrs Bailiwick blinked at him. “I believe she’s called Sukie. Why do you ask?”

Sukie. The name resounded sweet as birdsong in Daniel’s thoughts. So sweet that he quite forgot to answer Mrs Bailiwick’s enquiry. But Miss Sophronia Wilkinson happened to drop her teacup into its saucer with a splash at that very moment. Daniel gave silent thanks for her accidental distraction of the headmistress and amused himself for the remainder of the afternoon with thoughts of brushing out soft ebony tresses whilst staring into deep amber eyes.

The sweet birdsong kept echoing through his mind all night and on into the morning, when, just before Italian lessons, he glimpsed a black-and-white figure scurrying away down the upstairs hall.

He thanked Providence he wandered the hall alone at that moment and called out in a voice of forced calm, “Miss Sukie, is it not?”

Her steps halted. For a moment, she hesitated with her back still to him, and he feared he’d overstepped. Or, heaven forefend, received her name wrong from Mrs Bailiwick.

Then she turned, and the glance from her amber eyes stole all power of speech from him. She ducked her head and curtsied, saying as she arose again, “Yes, Miss Fairfield?”

The honourific gave him the same twinge of discomfort as it always did, though the voice that spoke it sounded far softer and more sweet than usual. He brushed it aside and approached her until hardly a yard remained between them. She watched him careful all the while.

“I’d like to welcome you to our academy,” he said.

She dropt her head again and murmured her thanks.

“My chambers are upstairs,” he continued. “Just beneath the attic. Not very far from your own, I believe.”

She glanced at him curiously.

“And,” he added, “if you aren’t too preoccupied with your own engagements, I wonder if you might join me in my chambers this evening after dinner. That is, if you’ve the inclination?”

Having made his offer and half-expecting a refusal, his heart only began to beat again when she, with a small and secretive smile, accepted.

Dinner seemed to last a century. He could hardly manage more than a few mouthfuls, until he reminded himself that much of it had likely come from Sukie’s handiwork, and a respect for this allowed him to consume a more respectable portion despite his fluttering stomach.

Then he bid his fellow pupils good-night and climbed the flights to his bedroom with his heart pounding at his ribcage as if it could break free.

He arrived and found no one within. Which was reasonable, he reminded himself. Sukie had a lot to do washing up after twenty-three young women, their instructors, their headmistress, and Daniel. He couldn’t expect her to arrive upstairs until at least another hour had passed. Two, most likely.

And so he lit a candle, opened a book, and settled in to wait.

He knew not what book. His eyes wouldn’t rest on the page long enough to absorb the words. With every half-imagined floorboard creak they flicked to the door, which Daniel had left open the barest crack. The mantle-clock over the empty fireplace ticked. The candle burned down.

Then, just when Daniel had abandoned all hope of ever seeing Sukie this night, a true footstep creaked in the hallway outside.

Daniel’s heart leapt into his throat. He whirled toward the door. It swung inward with another long, low creak.

And Sukie stepped over the threshold.

She paused just afterward, taking in the room with wide dark eyes, and let out a low whistle.

Daniel, who had balanced on the brink of considering his private chamber a gilded cage, now found his opinion beginning to reverse as he beheld how it seemed to astonish and delight Sukie. He stood from his desk and offered her the choice of seat; his chair or his bed.

Without any hesitation she sat on the corner of his bed as casual and comfortable as if it were her own.

Daniel, after some small dithering on his part between what was prudent and what he truly wanted, sat down beside her.

And immediately realised he knew not what to say.

The nerves which had knotted his stomach and fingers alike now tied his tongue and forced it still.

But just when he felt on the verge of panic, staring into Sukie’s beautiful dark eyes, she smiled and parted her perfect rosebud lips.

“Do you read novels?” she asked.

Daniel confessed to this vice, which seemed to please her. She spoke of her favourites (mostly penny dreadfuls) and enquired after his (mostly chivalric romances) and grinned the most charming grin he’d ever beheld when he offered to let her borrow his books. Then the conversation turned to the academy and how she liked it and what she thought of its inhabitants, and from there Daniel learnt a great deal more than what he thought he knew about his fellow pupils. Whilst his tongue remained fettered, hers flew free as any bird. And indeed, her voice sounded sweeter than birdsong to his ears. He could listen to her chatter about anything for days on end. She spoke with a spirited air that quite belied her meek and mild comportment in the household below.

They whispered for hours, until the candle became a guttering stub in its tin holder and Sukie began to interrupt herself with yawns.

“Forgive me,” she said, stretching her arms wide.

“Perhaps we ought to part ways,” Daniel said—against the wishes of his own heart, which would have bid her stay and sleep beside him. “At least, until tomorrow eve.”

Sukie quite agreed and stood to go, smiling through another yawn. “Goodnight, Miss Fairfield.”

“You don’t have to call me that,” Daniel blurted.

Sukie blinked at him. “What ought I to call you instead?”

Daniel hesitated. He did not then know quite what he wished to be called. It felt foolish beyond words to ask after his true heart’s desire. But after a moment, he settled on the answer. “Just Fairfield.”

After all, Felix’s friends at Eton called him simply, “Knoll.”

Sukie gave him a considering look. Only when a slight smile tugged at the corner of her beautiful mouth, just enough to dimple her left cheek, did Daniel dare draw breath again.

“Very well, Fairfield,” said Sukie.

 

~

Daniel finished out the remainder of the work-day with his head in a whirl. He gave thanks that the moving of figures from one column to another didn’t require him to be particularly mindful. Still, his nerves increased as the sun crept ever closer to the western horizon, and when the clock struck the closing hour at last, he felt a curious mixture of nervous relief. He had to force himself to walk rather than run home. The sight of his cottage, its front windows shining a merry glow of candle-flame out into the street, proved a balm for his heart. He passed through the garden gate, up the flagstone path, and lifted the familiar latch of the door to the unfamiliar sound of gentlemen’s voices within.

Sukie and he had never entertained guests before in their humble home. Daniel had a dim idea of how the thing ought to be done. He’d never attended a dinner party in his life, being too young to accompany his parents before they died, and life in Mrs Bailiwick’s Academy being as much or more sequestered than any cloistered abbey. Still, in the months leading up to his escape, he had acquired second-hand copies of etiquette guides—one for gentlemen and one for ladies—which offered some hints on how to conduct himself and how the thing itself ought to be conducted. However, some time had passed since last he read those particular pages, and he hadn’t the opportunity to review them in the hours between his invitation and the dinner itself, the books in question stuck at home whilst he remained stuck in office.

Still, as he opened the door into his own warm and familiar front hall, his surroundings suffused him with renewed confidence. He tossed his hat and overcoat lightly onto their hooks and proceeded with a surer step into his wife’s parlour.

The joyful chime of Sukie’s laughter greeted him as he stepped over the threshold. She sat in her chair, the armless twin of Daniel’s own, by the fire. Butcher and Lofthouse occupied the sofa opposite, side by side and rather closer to each other than the spacious furniture required. Both bore smiles to match Sukie’s, though Lofthouse’s changed to a mildly startled aspect as he turned to behold Daniel in the doorway.

“Mr Durst,” Sukie said, raising her hand so he might clasp it. “Mr Butcher was just telling me of the goats kept on his estate and what scrapes they find themselves in. Dinner is ready,” she added. “All covered and waiting.”

“Not long, I hope?” said Daniel.

She smiled and assured him they hadn’t waited for more than a few minutes before his arrival.

“Then,” said Daniel, turning to his guests and speaking with far more confidence than he felt, “if you would join us for dinner, gentlemen?”

The cottage had no formal dining room. Still, its kitchen table had room enough for four chairs around it, and neither Lofthouse nor Butcher looked askance at its offerings. Daniel had learnt how to carve a roast from books—his guide to gentlemen’s etiquette, as well as Sukie’s cook-book—and distant childhood memories of his own father presiding over the dinner table. He had not yet found the opportunity to test his skill in company. He kept his hands steady whilst he carved, and if Lofthouse or Butcher noted anything amiss, they gave no hint of it in look or speech but merely accepted their plates with smiles and thanks as Daniel passed them down.

Sukie likewise smiled at him, which was more than Daniel felt he deserved after ambushing her dinner plans with two more mouths to feed and barely a few hours’ notice. He knew better than most gentlemen how much work that entailed. Not just through what housekeeping arts Mrs Bailiwick had taught him in anticipation of his marriage to Felix, but also through Sukie herself instructing him in all she knew of cookery, which proved a fair bit. She could not, she had informed him, make him even half so good a cook as her Aunt Molly. But she could teach him enough to make him useful.

The dinner itself went on well, Daniel thought. Butcher maintained his stoic silence yet did not seem displeased with the fare or the company. Lofthouse proved a little more talkative, if a touch nervous and consequently awkward. He complimented Sukie’s cookery as well as her decoration of the house. Her bashful smile made Daniel’s heart bloom with affection all over again. He couldn’t resist reaching for her hand under the table. She gave him an affectionate clasp in reply.

At the meal’s conclusion, Daniel drew the gentlemen into the parlour again so Sukie might clear the table in private. She rejoined them shortly. No sooner had she reappeared than Lofthouse reached into the leather satchel he’d left by the sofa and withdrew two jars.

“A housewarming gift,” he explained, handing one off to Daniel and the other to Sukie. “Honey and sloe preserves from Mr Butcher’s estate.”

One mystery solved, then, Daniel concluded. Mr Butcher was a gentleman farmer. Though, given his garb, still a rather eccentric one. The golden honey and dark purple sloe looked delicious regardless. He gave his sincere thanks.

“And,” Lofthouse added with some hesitance, “there is another matter as well.”

Daniel’s hackles arose. He forced himself to reply with an even tone. “What matter might that be?”

“Have you heard tell,” Lofthouse asked gently, “of Tolhurst’s passing?”

“I have,” Daniel admitted—much to Lofthouse’s evident relief. “Mr Grigsby wrote to inform me. Can’t say as I’m sorry for it.”

A wan smile flickered across Lofthouse’s lips as he replied, to Daniel’s surprise, “Nor I.”

Butcher’s face proved more difficult to read, but the grim line of his mouth seemed to imply he felt likewise.

“There is, I think, a small inheritance due to you,” Lofthouse added, dipping his hand into his waistcoat pocket.

A frost of icy dread crept over Daniel’s heart. If Tolhurst had left him anything, he would as soon have had him take it to his grave.

These feelings were not dispelled when Lofthouse withdrew a delicate golden chain. He knew, even before the charm dangling from it turned to face him, what it was.

There, with the chain drawn between Lofthouse’s fingers and the back of it braced against his knuckles, lay the beloathed miniature.

And a hundred horrid memories came flooding back with it.

Tolhurst had commissioned the wretched thing. For Felix, of course. A gift for his nephew’s birthday, celebrating his impending nuptials with a beautiful bride. He’d already fulfilled his part in the portrait by paying the artist. Yet he insisted on attending every session of the painting process as a chaperon when a maid or even another pupil would have sufficed. And though he didn’t need to study Daniel’s features for the painting, still he stared with even more intensity than the artist himself. It was remarkable, really, Daniel had thought as he gazed off out the window over the artist’s shoulder and studiously ignored Tolhurst lurking in the corner of his eye, how a man could stare so and yet never once see the truth staring back at him.

The same went for the artist. The end result appeared hardly worth the excruciating process. It showed an even worse reflection of Daniel’s true self than any mirror. His strong jaw and hard gaze had transformed into a simpering, slope-shouldered, wide-eyed creature he couldn’t recognise as human, much less as himself.

Of course Tolhurst had loved it. Pride rang through his voice as he showed it off to Daniel. The caress of his fingertips around its minuscule gilded frame made Daniel’s skin crawl. Daniel had wished he’d had a knife to hand in that moment, as if he could carve away from his own flesh the traces of Tolhurst’s touch on the miniature.

In the end, it hadn’t required a knife. He could change himself from caterpillar to moth by shedding his old raiments for garb that fit who he truly was. His old name vanished the moment his real name first fell from his own lips. When he looked in the mirror now he couldn’t perceive a trace of the form the world had forced him to assume for so long.

And yet here it was again. The empty shell of someone who never was, a pallid husk lurching forth from the grave to reach its icy fingers toward his soul.

He didn’t expect Lofthouse to understand. After all, how many living men could claim to be haunted by their own ghost?

“I had thought,” Lofthouse explained, oblivious to Daniel’s turmoil, “that if anyone had a right to it, it was yourself.”

“Keep it,” Daniel said, his words clipped.

Lofthouse balked. Evidently Daniel’s sharp tone took him by surprise. He turned first to Butcher, then to Sukie, and back to Daniel. He cleared his throat. “If you’re certain…”

Daniel forced a smile. “Might make things awkward with the wife to keep a miniature of another woman around.”

A snort of laughter escaped Lofthouse. He attempted to cover it up with a cough. “Yes—well—quite right.”

And to Daniel’s infinite relief, he slipped the miniature back into his pocket.

“How long will you remain in town?” Daniel asked, as much to change the subject as to know the answer.

Lofthouse shared another glance with Butcher. “Mr Butcher’s ventures may detain us for some time.”

Nothing in Butcher’s aspect gave any hint as to what those ventures might be, and the man himself said not a syllable.

“Perhaps,” Lofthouse continued, “long enough me to perform some small service in honour of your nuptials.”

Daniel’s eyebrows took flight.

“A wedding portrait,” Lofthouse hastily added. “Or a pair of portraits, if you prefer, to hang side-by-side.”

This cleared up a great deal of the mystery but still left Daniel in the dark on a few points. “You are acquainted with an artist?”

Lofthouse blinked. “No, I—well,” he blurted with yet another glance at Butcher. Then he dipped a hand into his jacket. “Here—perhaps I had better show you.”

And so saying, he withdrew a palm-sized book in a leather shroud from his inner jacket pocket, opened it, and held it up for Daniel’s inspection.

A remarkable pen-and-ink sketch of sloe blossoms met Daniel’s gaze. Before he could take the book from Lofthouse’s hands, however, the page turned, this time to a drawing of goats leaping across a stream. More glimpses into the natural world followed—songbirds, squirrels, flowers, rabbits—along with a few architectural sketches of tumbled-down castles and sundry other ruins.

“You’ve done these yourself?” Daniel asked.

“Yes,” Lofthouse admitted, turning another page.

Daniel was on the verge of pointing out how, while this was all admittedly impressive work for one he’d known only as a solicitor’s clerk, a wedding portrait required one to draw human figures rather than plants, animals, or architecture. But the pages Lofthouse turned to now showed human figures—lounging beneath berry-bushes, dancing through meadows, crouching in tree-forks, or simply leaning against a convenient pile of stones to stare back into the viewer’s eyes.

Or rather, not-quite-human figures. For as Daniel peered closer he saw Lofthouse had replaced some figures’ feet with hooves, added horns or antlers to particular brows, affixed damselfly or moth’s-wings to certain shoulders, and subtly (or not-so-subtly) pointed the ears of every single character depicted. They were rendered in a startlingly realistic style considering they must have come whole cloth from Lofthouse’s imagination.

Only one sketch appeared altogether normal. A particular portrait of a man with a long twice-broken beak of a nose and hawkish brows above his dark eyes, with rivers of ink-black hair shot through with streaks of silver. A drawing of Butcher, and a particularly flattering one at that, which cast his severe features into something more tender than otherwise.

Daniel had but a glimpse of this before Lofthouse snapped the book shut and tucked it away into his jacket again. A glance at his face showed a faint rosy hue beneath his copious freckles. Butcher, meanwhile, still looked as stoic as stone.

Lofthouse cleared his throat. “While it might not have been my profession these past few years, I’ve put in some practise at it. And,” he added, “if you would consent, I would like to put what little talent I possess into your service.”

Daniel hadn’t considered the prospect of a wedding portrait. Indeed, some days he could hardly believe he was lucky enough to be married at all, much less living openly as himself with the most wonderful woman in all the world. He glanced to Sukie to see what she thought of it. She appeared more intrigued than otherwise. He returned to Lofthouse.

“I think,” Lofthouse ventured, “you deserve a better likeness than what others have previously painted.”

A bark of laughter escaped Daniel. He recovered himself enough to reply that he quite agreed.

A short conversation sufficed to arrange the particulars. Lofthouse would return with his art kit on Saturday, after Daniel arrived home from his half-day at the office, and come back again on Sunday afternoon, and so on for as many weeks as it took to complete the portrait. Lofthouse seemed confident it wouldn’t take terribly long. Butcher seemed not to mind that this adventure would deprive him of his clerk’s services for hours on end. Daniel shook hands on the bargain with both of them and they took their leave, with Sukie bidding them come for dinner again when their calendars permitted.

“I think,” she said when the door had shut upon their guests and both Lofthouse and Butcher had vanished down the lane into the evening, “that went off rather well, don’t you?”

Daniel agreed and told her so with a kiss.

 

~

The nightly conversations betwixt Sukie and Daniel in the attic of Mrs Bailiwick’s Academy continued for some weeks.

And throughout those weeks, Daniel agonised over when, if ever, he ought to kiss her.

Touch had come easily. Far easier than he’d expected. It began on a night like any other since their evening visits first ensued, when, in the midst of one of the yawns that signalled an end to their conversation for the day and thus gave Daniel an otherwise unaccountable pang, Sukie had reached up not just to pluck her black-and-white cap from her head but also to unpin her hair. The severe bun tumbled down over her shoulders in carefree waves. The sight made Daniel’s heart skip a beat.

“Oh!” said Sukie when she recovered from her yawn and caught his wide-eyed stare. “Forgive me, I didn’t mean… that is, I didn’t think…”

Daniel felt she had nothing to apologise for in letting her hair down. But rather than say so, or anything else sensible for that matter, he instead kept up a reverent silence as his hand reached out of its own accord to take a particular curling lock between his fingertips.

Sukie stared at him.

“Pardon!” he blurted, yanking his arm back to himself as if burned.

Yet while her astonishment remained, she didn’t appear in the least bit upset or angry with him as she replied, “I don’t mind.”

Daniel could hardly believe his good fortune. Slowly, hesitantly, his fingers faintly trembling, he reached out again and idly brushed his fingertips through her hair.

She closed her eyes with a soft sigh that washed over Daniel’s heart.

While he misliked washing or brushing out his own hair—the length of it annoyed him, and the time it took to tend it annoyed him further still, until it required almost more willpower than he possessed to resist hacking it all off—he found when it came to the walnut locks on Sukie’s tender head, he delighted in taking the utmost care. He could spend many happy hours combing it out for her, weaving his fingers through it to work out the knots without causing her the least pain, until it shone with a glossy glow. And she, against all odds, seemed to enjoy letting him do so.

After such an intimacy as this, it seemed silly to go on denying each other the small comfort of touch, and so Daniel felt emboldened when next they sat together, cross-legged with their knees almost meeting, to lay his hand on the floor-boards between them, palm-up, at her mercy.

And she, to his infinite delight, deigned to grace his palm with her own.

They held hands throughout that night’s conversation. And the following night. And the night after that.

Another subsequent night, whilst they held hands and whispered of nothing and everything, Sukie reached up to her own shoulder and winced.

Daniel was on the alert in an instant. “Are you all right?”

She shrugged. “Just an ache. Gone by morning. Or I hope so, at least.”

Small wonder she ached, given all the hauling and scrubbing she did in a given day throughout the whole academy. Still, Daniel wondered a great deal at his own boldness as he raised his hand to her shoulder and asked, “May I?”

She blinked at him in something like confusion but nodded all the same.

Daniel rearranged himself to sit beside and behind her. Then, with his breath held and his heart hammering at his ribcage as though it would burst free, he laid his hands upon her shoulders and began to knead.

Her head fell forward with a groan of relief.

Slowly and steadily he worked the knots from her muscles with his soft hands—shamefully soft, when contrasted against her honest and hard-earned callouses. It became another part of their night-time ritual. And there were nights when, stretched out across his bed and under the ministrations of his fingers, she would fall asleep altogether. Then he dared not disturb her but dressed himself for bed as quiet as possible and laid down beside her, careful not to let his form touch hers, though the bare inch between them hardly seemed to suffice in either direction, neither near nor far enough for his liking.

Yet no matter how oft they touched, it always felt—to Daniel, at least—like the moment their fingertips had first brushed against each other at afternoon tea. Terrifying. Exhilarating. And, somehow, as natural as a rosebud unfurling into full bloom.

He didn’t dare to imagine how a kiss might feel. Still, the thought of it burned in his mind throughout the day, flaring forth at odd moments of idleness to consume him in day-dreams far beyond anything that had ever preoccupied him before.

And then, one evening, Sukie arrived with a barely-repressed smirk on her face and something held behind her back.

No sooner had Daniel shut the door after her than she held out to him a package wrapped brown paper and twine. He accepted it with some bewilderment. Unwrapping it revealed a battered but no less beautiful copy of Scott’s The Monastery.

“I thought you might like it,” she said, beaming. “I know you haven’t the opportunity to procure them yourself, and if I may be so bold, I noticed Mr Knoll’s gifts don’t come very often, and when they do they don’t seem to suit you. If you asked him for a novel he might well return with a string of pearls—and not the penny dreadful, neither. So I supposed it was up to me to supply the lack.”

He laughed and thanked her, though words felt hardly sufficient to express all he felt at this marvelous escape from the dull day-to-day of the academy.

Sukie bit her lip (which made Daniel’s heart perform acrobatics) and asked if she might have something in return for her gift.

“Oh—of course, yes,” said Daniel. He supposed the price of an entire novel, even second-hand, must prove trying on a maid’s salary. “How much—?”

“A kiss,” Sukie blurted.

Daniel blinked. Surely he’d misheard her.

A primrose tint came into Sukie’s beautiful face. “That is—I rather thought—if you don’t mind—but if you do mind, it’s all right by me, I only—”

Daniel leapt forth and kissed her.

Soft lips met his own. Their touch thrilled his whole being, exceeding all expectation. She gasped against his mouth and threw her arms around his shoulders. The warmth of her embrace suffused his very bones. He found himself entwined with her in turn, his hands settling onto the soft curves beneath her uniform. A thud resounded through the attic as the book fell to the floorboards all-but-forgotten.

Kissing likewise became another vital part of their evening routine.

Despite this, or in some way because of it, Daniel still held the most crucial fibre of himself apart from her. Quite aside from and yet alongside with her arrival he began to understand certain truths of his own soul. The further his body transformed in a wildly different direction, the more sure he felt in what he was and what he ought to be.

Yet how could he possibly tell anyone that the heart of a man beat beneath his breast? And expect to be believed?

Even if Sukie were to believe him, it might still dash all they held to pieces. Perhaps she only loved him as a lady, and her affection would wither when she knew him for a gentleman. He could bear the scorn of all the world—the scorn of God himself—but if she spurned him, he knew not where to turn.

He contemplated this one particular evening whilst he waited for her arrival. So deeply did he think on it that he didn’t hear her footstep in the hallway beyond his door. The creak of its opening made him flinch. Sukie noticed.

“You look grave as saints, Fairfield!” she observed with wide eyes. “Whatever’s the matter?”

Daniel swallowed hard. He couldn’t bear to lie to her any longer. “There’s something I must tell you.”

Sukie shut the door in silence and joined him in sitting on the bed. He wanted to take her hand, as always, but tonight he lacked the courage, having used it all up in forcing speech from his clenched throat. He couldn’t even look her in the eye as he began. But begin he must. And so he cast his gaze to the rafters, took a deep shuddering breath, and spoke.

“I am a gentleman,” he said.

Four words he had oft spoken in his own mind but never yet breathed aloud. He knew not how Sukie took them; he couldn’t bear the sight of her face just now. So instead he continued. How his body resembled that of his fellow pupils, but his soul was quite another thing altogether. How trapped he felt both in his own flesh and in the role thrust upon him by Mrs Bailiwick and Mr Grigsby and his long-dead parents who’d promised him as an inheritance to another boy scarce older than himself before either of them could even talk. How his blood had boiled over with envy when Felix’s voice broke and his bones stretched beyond the bonds Daniel himself might never escape. How to hear folk call him “Miss” Fairfield sounded like coals raked over his soul and how “Mrs Knoll” sounded even worse. His voice grew raw and hoarse with the telling, until at last, his heart torn from his chest and its secrets spattered all across the room, he fell silent. The silence grew. His eyes felt drawn toward Sukie, as ever, and at last he ceased to resist their natural gravity.

She stared at him with her beautiful dark eyes flown wide.

“I am a gentleman,” he repeated, the words no less strident for the rasping quality of his voice.

She continued to stare at him. Then that impish smile he’d loved so well tugged at her lips.

His heart sank. After all this, she thought him jesting.

“Is that all?” she said.

Daniel balked. “All?”

She cast her laughing eyes upon him; he realised she smiled not with mockery, but with relief. “I thought you meant to tell me you were going away or something else horrible!”

The potent mixture of astonishment and relief in the wake of having braced himself for dread unrealised left him quite unable to speak or do anything but gaze at her.

“What ought I to call you?” she asked. “Aside from Fairfield, I mean. That’s only your surname. You’ve a given name as well, haven’t you?”

Given from himself, to himself, indeed. He steeled his nerve and replied, “Daniel.”

“Daniel,” she echoed, with bright eyes and lips parted in wonder.

It was the first time he’d heard anyone besides himself call him by his real name, and the sound of it made his heart soar. It flew higher still as she leaned in to kiss him. She left her palm against his cheek as she withdrew to fondly gaze at him from those dark and beautiful eyes.

“My darling Daniel,” she said and smiled in a reflection of his own joy.

~

Neither hide nor hair of Lofthouse or Butcher appeared in town throughout the rest of the week. Daniel supposed their business, whatever it was, kept them tucked away.

Saturday morning passed in a flurry of figures. The noontime bell jolted Daniel from a suspended reverie, half-anxiety and half-eagerness, not unlike what he’d felt before he’d hosted dinner. His prior experience as an artist’s model had not produced fond memories.

However, he reminded himself (not for the first time) as he walked home, this particular portrait did not spring from Tolhurst’s commission. Nor would it come from Tolhurst’s own hand. Tolhurst was dead. And perhaps this particular adventure would replace malcontented remembrances with something brighter and better to look back on.

He arrived home to find Sukie in the parlour. She sat mending in her wedding gown. It had originally been Daniel’s—the cornflower-blue poplin. Daniel had never liked the look of it on himself. Sukie had surprised him by picking it out for her own when they’d gone through his ill-fitting wardrobe selecting which items to keep and which to sell off to fund their journey. But the moment he saw it on her, he realised its beauty. She’d looked resplendent in it on their wedding day. She looked resplendent even now. He could do no less than approach her domestic throne and bend to kiss her.

She smiled up at him when he pulled away. He sat down in his arm-chair beside her and accepted her gift of his own shirt, needle, thread, and a button to re-attach to it. They mended together in companionable silence until the ringing door-bell roused them.

Daniel opened the front door to find Lofthouse standing with both hands clenched around the strap of the leather satchel slung across his shoulder.

“Not too early, I hope?” Lofthouse asked with a nervous smile.

Daniel assured him he’d arrived just in time and ushered him into the parlour.

Sukie set her mending aside and arose to accept their guest’s handclasp.

“Will this do?” she asked, a little shyly, as she plucked at the skirt of her gown.

Lofthouse blinked. “Very well, I think. Splendid colour.”

Sukie’s beaming smile washed over Daniel’s heart and banished any nerves he might have fostered there.

“Now, then,” Lofthouse continued, glancing over the room. “May I rearrange a few articles? And—how would you prefer to pose?”

Daniel hadn’t the foggiest. “What would you suggest?”

“The traditional composition has the lady seated whilst the gentleman stands behind,” Lofthouse explained. “Though, if I may be honest, the best posture is one which you may find comfortable keeping for hours at a time. Perhaps,” he added, his eyes alighting on their matched chairs, “seated side-by-side?”

Daniel glanced to Sukie. She nodded. He returned his gaze to Lofthouse and gave his assent.

With Daniel’s assistance, Lofthouse moved the two chairs into the centre of the room, where they caught the best light from the south-facing window. Sukie grabbed a third chair from the kitchen so Lofthouse needn’t stand whilst he worked. Sukie sat in her chair, and Daniel took his rightful place in his own beside her. On impulse, he reached out to her, and she laid her hand in his palm.

“Will this do, Mr Lofthouse?” Sukie asked.

Lofthouse glanced over their pose. “Quite well, I should think.”

And in the time it took him to say so, he had sketch-book and pencil in hand and had already begun to draw. Not, Daniel noted, in his little leather-shrouded book, but a rather larger one that he propped up on a board on his lap, which all but hid him from view. For some moments the only sound in the cottage was the tick of the clock on the mantle and the scratching of pencil across paper.

Prior to the start of the portrait, Daniel had mostly concerned himself with how he might feel about being stared at for artistic purposes once again.

It did not occur to him to wonder how it might feel to have another man stare at his wife.

Yet, as he sat with her hand-and-hand and confronted the sight of the artist before them, he found his mind returning down old avenues, and the gnawing concern grew within him. If, heaven forefend, he saw Lofthouse looked at Sukie as Tolhurst had once looked at him—well, he did not think he could be held responsible for what he would do to the man.

But the stirrings of outrage proved short-lived as Daniel stared hard into the clerk’s face. Lofthouse’s gaze didn’t strike him as judgmental, as Daniel had assumed it might. Nor did it appear indifferent, as the prior portraitist’s had. Nor, to Daniel’s great relief, did it in any way resemble the covetous burning looks Tolhurst had once cast upon him.

Rather, Daniel found Lofthouse’s glances up from his sketch-book had an enquiring air. Studious and practical, the looks of a man endeavouring to puzzle out the scene before him, revolving the matter in his mind. When his eyes fell upon Sukie, they held nothing approaching ardour; aesthetic appreciation, at most.

“Ought we to keep silent, Mr Lofthouse?” Sukie enquired suddenly.

“What?” said Lofthouse, jerking his head up sharp. “Oh—no, it’s quite all right to speak. I’m not working on your faces just yet. Only blocking in the pose and composition. See,” he added, evidently in response to Daniel and Sukie’s twin confusion, and turned his sketchbook around to show what he’d done thus far.

It appeared as almost entirely vague shapes. In them Daniel recognized their own parlour, after a fashion, as if seen through fogged glass. So too did he see himself and his wife in the pair of figures, with the half-erased remains of the boxes and circles that had built them still visible beneath the stronger strokes bringing them into a more human shape. Their brightness, illuminated by the southern window, contrasted against the dark hearth behind them, which formed a sort of frame to anchor the whole image. All told, rather familiar to Daniel, who’d been taught to draw a little himself, albeit in a young ladies’ academy.

The important thing was that Sukie looked delighted by it.

“Pray tell, Mr Lofthouse,” she asked, “is this your usual method?”

“After a fashion,” Lofthouse admitted, turning the sketch back toward himself and resuming his drawing. “I’ve not done a wedding portrait before, strictly speaking, but most of my drawings begin this way, yes. Pencil sketch to compose it, then watercolour sketches to sort out the colours and lighting, and then on to the oils. I might do the oils elsewhere,” he added with an apologetic glance. “The fumes are unsavoury indoors, and I prefer to paint with them out in a garden or some other sort of place with a breeze.”

Daniel found no quarrel with this method.

“And is this the sort of work you do for Mr Butcher?” she pressed.

Lofthouse dropt his pencil.

Daniel suppressed a laugh, though he had to let slip a smile. He’d had the same questions himself.

Lofthouse bent over to retrieve his lost instrument in a manner that reminded Daniel more than a little of Mr Grigsby. He cleared his throat and resumed sketching. “When Mr Butcher wants such a thing done, yes, he asks me to do it. More often I manage his estate.”

“The sloe berries and the honeybees and such?” Sukie offered, her coy half-smile adding a dimple to her cheek as she exchanged a glance with Daniel.

Lofthouse confirmed this was so, adding that he assisted in the management of goats and hens as well. “And the keeping of game.”

Daniel understood him to mean he oversaw the game-keeper and the other labourers who attended such matters. “You are his steward, then.”

Lofthouse looked quite relieved to have someone else speak the title. “Exactly so, yes.”

Whilst Lofthouse might be the sort of man to struggle in speech, and Daniel himself felt rather too nervous for much talk, Sukie remained both clever and curious and thus both inclined and able to keep up a light and merry string of conversation between the three of them. Thus she coaxed Lofthouse to divulge small details of his life after leaving Mr Grigsby’s employ—how he far preferred the countryside to the smog of London and how Butcher encouraged his pursuit of fine arts. She kept it up all through the afternoon, until the sunlight faded into sunset and Lofthouse packed up his kit and bid them good-night. He couldn’t stay, despite their invitation, as he was previously engaged to meet his employer for dinner, though he would see them again on the morrow.

What the deuce could bring an English gentleman farmer and his steward to Canada on undisclosed business, however, Daniel couldn’t begin to fathom.

 

~

Felix had vanished the previous spring.

Daniel felt half-glad of it despite himself. No longer need he dread the scene that would ensue in breaking off the engagement. Not that he thought Felix bore him any particular affection, but several of his fellow pupils would doubtless prove inconsolable, for they’d invested far more of their own emotion in the romance of Daniel’s engagement than either he or his fiancé could possibly feel toward each other.

However, as Daniel had told Lofthouse when the clerk had arrived to make queer enquiries, a betrothal did a great deal to discourage other would-be suitors.

Daniel had considered breaking off the engagement before. When Felix’s majority began to draw near and the wretched wedding seemed imminent, Daniel had visited Mr Grigsby to make certain enquiries. The results of these enquiries seemed promising—until Daniel had returned to Mrs Bailiwick’s Academy and found Tolhurst far too attentive. He could imagine how much bolder Tolhurst might become if his nephew didn’t stand between them. And so Daniel decided to remain engaged to Felix as long as possible to ward off Tolhurst’s advances. Ideally, long enough to set up his own modest household in the countryside with Sukie. After all, a young heiress couldn’t live without a lady’s maid.

But then Felix had vanished.

And Tolhurst grew too bold by far.

It began in May. A certain spring entered Tolhurst’s step for reasons then unknown. Daniel noted a satisfied smile, like that of the cat who stole the cream, perpetually playing about Tolhurst’s thin lips in idle moments.

Daniel noted also how, whilst teaching the piano-forte, Tolhurst, who had never stood as far away as Daniel would’ve preferred, now hovered directly behind him, near enough for Daniel to feel the rank heat of him through the back of his gown, almost near enough for them to touch. Their hands did touch, Tolhurst laying his over Daniel’s to direct his fingers on the keys when before mere verbal instruction and visual demonstration had sufficed. Daniel felt compelled to scrub his hands thoroughly after each lesson.

This would all have been bad enough, but Tolhurst wasn’t sated with tormenting Daniel in music alone. He began attending dinner at the academy every night—much to Mrs Bailiwick’s delight, who took it as a compliment to her housekeeping. She didn’t notice, or chose not to notice, how Tolhurst ate but half his portion and spent the bulk of the meal stealing glances at Daniel with that smug little smile on his wretched mouth. Daniel returned not a one, but this did nothing to deter Tolhurst’s attentions.

Other lessons, too, became haunted by a certain hulking presence in the door-frame. Italian, French, and embroidery, none of any possible interest to Tolhurst, nevertheless drew him like a moth to a flame, and his towering shadow lurked over all, with his blazing blue eyes ever-fixed on Daniel. Daniel pretended very hard not to notice. This did nothing to dissuade Tolhurst.

Drawing lesson typically provided Daniel a welcome relief from the stuffy confines of an academy no better than a convent. Yet he began to feel watched even out in the garden. Glancing all ‘round for the source of this creeping sensation over his skin, he happened to track the flight of a swallow out of the hedge and wheeling up towards the eaves in the academy roof.

And there in the attic window stood the looming shadow of Tolhurst.

Daniel stared back in mute horror. Then he forced his gaze down to his sketchbook and did not raise it again for the remainder of the afternoon. Bad enough to be watched. Worse still to know how near to his own bedroom Tolhurst must venture in order to reach that vantage point.

All this continued throughout the month of May. At first Daniel didn’t understand what had changed to embolden Tolhurst.

Then came the interview.

On the first of June, Tolhurst asked Mrs Bailiwick if he might have a word in private with Daniel. Mrs Bailiwick, who adored Tolhurst for reasons Daniel couldn’t begin to fathom, of course agreed. Tolhurst asked Daniel to join him in the music room. Daniel, who bore no desire to go behind closed doors with his beloathed music master and without a chaperon, demurred, and suggested they meet out-of-doors in the garden. If worse came to worst, he supposed, a shout in the midst of Rochester’s quiet streets would summon rapid aid. Or he could try climbing over the hedge himself, his hampering skirts be damned.

No sooner had Tolhurst led him out to the garden than Daniel knew he’d made the right decision in insisting the interview be held out-of-doors. Tolhurst had the impudence to offer Daniel his arm. Daniel pretended he didn’t notice the gesture.

Then Tolhurst offered Daniel a seat on the stone bench. Daniel, having no wish to endure Tolhurst looming over him, declined.

And so Tolhurst stood beside him—again, near enough for Daniel to feel the rank heat coming off his bulk in waves—and began to whisper terrible things.

He had surmised for some time, so he said, how Daniel seemed somewhat less-than-eager at the prospect of marrying Felix. (Daniel felt rather surprised Tolhurst had gleaned even that much of his true feelings, as he remained so blind to every other one of Daniel’s truths.) If so, Tolhurst believed he had found a solution to that particular predicament. Would Daniel like to hear it?

Daniel said nothing.

Tolhurst spoke on anyway. He proclaimed, at first, a stalwart filial affection. Then, seeing Daniel unmoved, he grew more passionate in his speech. He stepped nearer as he declared his delight in all the feminine features Daniel despised in his betrayer body. He brought his lips almost near enough to touch Daniel’s ear as he told of his descent into madness and obsession—not his words, but unmistakably his meaning—over a figment of his imagination that he deluded himself into believing existed in the young man before him. Worse than his words were the pauses between them, when his ragged breath echoed in Daniel’s ear like that of some rutting beast given the power of language to abuse.

And then, to Daniel’s outrage, Tolhurst had the absolute gall to seize Daniel’s hand in his own and bend to kiss it.

It took all Daniel’s strength of will to refrain from bringing up a sharp knee to smash Tolhurst’s nose.

But as Tolhurst ducked out of his line of sight, Daniel espied a familiar figure coming around the garden hedge. Lofthouse, of all people, emerged from the greenery. Moreover, he appeared appropriately horrified at the sight before him.

Never before had Daniel felt so happy to see his guardian’s clerk. Happier still to hear him interrupt Tolhurst’s impertinent display and, furthermore, demand (however politely) to speak to Daniel alone. A hideous weight lifted from Daniel’s chest as Tolhurst banished himself back into the academy.

The resulting interview with Lofthouse proved far more pleasant, though still troubling. It wasn’t just Daniel who hadn’t heard from Felix since the beginning of May. And this, combined with Tolhurst’s sudden increase in overbearance, led Daniel to conclusions that made his stomach twist. He revolved the matter in his mind well after Lofthouse took his leave. And by the time Sukie had joined him in the attic that evening, he’d come to a decision.

“I’m running away,” said Daniel.

A thousand thoughts flew across Sukie’s beautiful face in an instant. Then she smoothed her furrowed brow and set her trembling chin to reply, in a voice not of a lover but of a girl in service, “I see.”

Her evident assumption that he would leave her behind broke Daniel’s heart. Yet still he feared her answer as he asked, “Will you come with me?”

The dull look in her eyes vanished with a gleam. “Yes.”

Daniel’s tongue stumbled in his mouth. He’d already prepared his case, laid out in his mind how he would explain his plan to her and what place she might have in it, how he would attempt to retain his dignity even as he begged her to leave behind all she knew for a future with him. And she’d needed to hear none of it.

So instead, he kissed her.

 

~

Lofthouse returned to Daniel and Sukie’s cottage at noon on Sunday, just as promised. He explained, in his own nervous and apologetic way, that he didn’t require them to pose together again, for he intended to make close-up pencil sketches of their individual faces, to better capture their likeness in the final painting. As such, he need detain only one of them at a time.

Daniel volunteered to sit first. He pulled his chair into the best light from the southern window, just as they’d done yesterday. Unlike yesterday, Lofthouse drew the kitchen chair up very near to him—within a yard or so. Daniel braced himself for whatever awkwardness must assuredly ensue. It helped a great deal when Lofthouse brought out his sketchbook and set its board up between them as a barrier. Though, given he drew Daniel’s face, their eyes must by necessity still meet now and again.

Sukie, meanwhile, took up her mending on the sofa. Likewise she took up the threads of conversation from where they’d left off the previous day. She enquired what Lofthouse thought of Port Hawkesbury and indulged him with her own opinion of its charms and virtues.

Lofthouse confessed he likewise found Port Hawkesbury refreshing and added, “I’ve seen a great many remarkable birds.”

Daniel blinked. Lofthouse coloured.

“What sort of birds?” Sukie asked. Daniel could hear the smile in her voice.

Lofthouse dropt his gaze to his sketchbook again as he replied, “There was a pileated woodpecker just this morning. And a black-and-yellow warbler. And a blue jay—have you seen? You must have—delightfully vibrant, positively cerulean in parts.”

“We’ve seen blue jays,” Sukie confirmed, still audibly smiling. “And woodpeckers, though I don’t know if they’re pileated.”

“The ones with red caps and black-and-white bodies,” Lofthouse explained. The hunch in his shoulders relaxed just a hair. “I only know the name because my mother had a book that illustrated the North American birds. It’s been something of a treat to come and see them for myself after all these years. You must have seen the robins as well?” he added, bringing his head up at last.

“Yes!” Sukie chimed in. “About twice as big as those in England, I’d wager. Did you see any puffins?”

“Puffins?” Lofthouse flicked his gaze away from studying Daniel’s face to meet her eye with a bewildered glance.

“Fat funny little fellows,” Sukie explained. “In black-and-white suits with bright blunt beaks. We saw them on both sides of our boat crossing.”

Lofthouse blinked. “Oh. No, I haven’t had the chance, I’m afraid. But I should very much like to.”

Daniel wondered to himself how Lofthouse could’ve avoided seeing them on his own Atlantic crossing. The fat funny little fellows, as Sukie called them, had flocked all over the rocky coasts of Britain and Canada both. For that matter, Lofthouse hadn’t mentioned any other seabirds in his list. Perhaps they weren’t colourful enough to attract his notice—puffins aside.

Lofthouse cleared this throat. “Mr Butcher has espied several waterfowl in his own excursions. Loons, harlequin ducks, green-winged teal, red-breasted merganser…”

All freshwater birds, Daniel noted.

“What sort of excursions bring Mr Butcher to so many ducks?” Sukie asked.

Lofthouse glanced up as if the question had startled him, though Daniel couldn’t see how. After a moment’s hesitation, Lofthouse replied, “He hunts.”

There was half the mystery solved, then. Butcher could hardly do worse than the Canadian wilderness for catching wild and hitherto unseen game. A single pair of elk antlers would suffice to make conversation for decades if brought back to England and hung up in his study.

“There,” said Lofthouse, jerking Daniel out of his private musings. “What do you think?”

He turned his board around as he spoke, and Daniel found himself confronted with his own face.

Daniel realised a half-second afterward how hard he had braced himself for an unpleasant result. His mind remained stuck on the miniature and the dozen-odd portrait sketches his classmates had done of him for drawing practise at Mrs Bailiwick’s Academy. Only within the last year had any looking-glass deigned to show his true self in his reflection. He hardly expected the art of drawing had caught it up.

Yet as he gazed upon what Lofthouse had wrought, he discovered something more like his true reflection than otherwise. A gentleman stared back at him. A young gentleman, yes, but one with smooth sharp cheeks, strong jaw, and a confident gaze which leant a brightness to the slight smile at the corners of the mouth. Something rather like what he saw in the looking-glass as he shaved each morning. A touch grander, perhaps.

“Good,” Daniel said when the silence stretched a half-second too long and he realised his opinion was still wanted. “Very good.”

A fleeting bashful smile crossed Lofthouse’s freckled face. “Splendid. Now, if Mrs Durst would be so kind…?”

Daniel graciously arose so his wife might sit. As she took his place, so he took hers. She had left her mending basket behind beside her chair. Without thinking, he reached down to bring it up into his own lap.

Then he paused.

He had, in bending sideways, happened to catch a glimpse of Lofthouse again. Lofthouse, busy with arranging sketchbook and subject both, didn’t appear to have noticed him in turn, but no matter. This glimpse nonetheless served to remind him how he and his wife did not now sit alone in their parlour. And while Daniel and Sukie shared household duties between them, including mending, he remained acutely aware that most gentlemen did not.

Perhaps Sukie sensed something of his discomfort, for she happened to turn toward the window at that very moment and in so doing met his gaze. She held it for a moment before returning to face the stranger in their midst.

“Who does your mending, Mr Lofthouse?” Sukie asked. “A laundress?”

The enquiry appeared to unnerve Lofthouse far more than Daniel thought warranted.

“I do my own mending,” Lofthouse admitted after an uncomfortable silence.

“Do you, indeed?” said Sukie, mild as a lamb. “Your future bride will appreciate that, I’m sure.”

Another uncomfortable silence descended, unbroken even by the scratching of pencil against paper. At length, Lofthouse replied, “I suppose she will.”

He spoke, Daniel noted, in a very similar sort of tone to what Daniel had himself used whenever his fellow pupils would chatter about their future husbands and enquire after Daniel’s own fiancé in particular.

Something tapped at the window. Daniel glanced over to find a songbird on the windowsill. It bore grey and white feathers with black wing-tips and tail, and a black mask over its eyes.

“Oh, Mr Lofthouse!” Sukie cried, her voice nevertheless soft lest she startle it. “What sort of bird is that?”

Lofthouse stared at the window for a long moment. Finally he said, “It is, I believe, a shrike.”

The bird tapped at the window-glass again. Then, with a queer little leap, it flew up into the air and veered off out of sight altogether.

Lofthouse resumed drawing. Sukie returned the conversation to the subject of birds. Daniel picked up the mending, feeling rather foolish for avoiding it in the first place. After all, Lofthouse knew full well Daniel’s education and background. It could hardly astonish him to see Daniel sewing. Particularly when, by his own confession, Lofthouse—a gentleman whom society had always perceived as a gentleman—did his own mending.

And whilst Daniel mended, his mind wandered.

He didn’t precisely know what made a gentleman handsome in the eyes of a lady. But from what he’d observed, he didn’t think Lofthouse’s face half-bad. Certainly not repulsive. There seemed nothing in it that a lady might object to, unless she had a particular loathing for freckles. His behaviour and comportment likewise appeared perfectly unobjectionable. A bit awkward, perhaps, but that needn’t hobble a gentleman of good character and good credit, as Lofthouse was, by Daniel’s own assessment. His treatment of Sukie and Daniel had proved kind, at least. Kinder than Daniel would expect of most gentlemen, should they ever learn his secret. Which would suggest, on Lofthouse’s part, a sort of sympathy towards not just ladies but likewise those whom society mistook for ladies. All told, Daniel thought Lofthouse might have a bride whenever he wished.

If he were inclined toward a bride at all.

 

~

In the weeks following Sukie agreeing to run away with him, Daniel began practising dressing as his true self in the privacy of their attic sanctuary. He’d acquired his first few pieces earlier by writing to Mr Grigsby under pretense of assisting the Society of Friends of Needful Seamen. What he could not procure from his guardian’s cast-offs, Sukie acquired for him at Rag Fair, including a splendid pair of boots which shone far beyond their years after she’d got done polishing them.

Daniel, meanwhile, set about turning one of his whalebone corsets into something actually useful. It took a great deal of stitching, un-stitching, and re-stitching, and he very nearly lost an eye as one of the bones snapped back at him when he tried to cut it to size, but in the end he had something that would make his chest as flat as that of other gentlemen. Not that he’d had terrible much up there to begin with. Still, it was rather more than he’d have preferred. The tight binding around his ribs felt like freedom compared to corseting his waist.

With the whole kit assembled at last, one evening, he dressed himself as he ought to have been for the past nineteen years.

He began just after dinner, before Sukie finished with her duties and came up from the kitchen. He didn’t like having a witness to his body. He found he misliked it less when Sukie saw him, but on this particular occasion, he wanted to know himself alone.

Each individual article had staggered him as they’d arrived piecemeal over the past fortnight. Now, with smalls, shirt, stockings, trousers, waistcoat, frock coat, and necktie all laid out on his bed before him, a queer sort of euphoria blocked up his chest and head and threatened to overwhelm him. And yet there also came a grim sort of satisfaction, of self-righteous vindication, at finally attaining the costume for the role he was born to play.

Every piece as he donned it sent a thrill shivering over his skin. And when he finally found the courage to tear away the sheet covering the long looking-glass stand in the corner of his room, what he beheld in its reflection made all his suffering worthwhile.

For the first time in all his life, he saw his true self.

There stood a youth with a strong jaw and ice-blue eyes brimming with confidence. There stood everything Tolhurst and Felix and Mrs Bailiwick and all the rest of the world refused to see within him. There stood the gentleman imprisoned in his heart, set free at last.

He’d kept his hair pinned up. Now, he found if he held his head at the correct angle to the glass, he could almost imagine what he would look like when he finally had it cut like other gentlemen. The top hat, when he left off staring at himself long enough to snatch it up, hid his hair from view altogether, rendering the transformation complete. The top hat had proved one of Sukie’s most difficult finds and had cost a pretty penny in the end, but to see it now, Daniel knew it’d proved its worth.

Vindication flew through his veins with a tingling burn. He could stare at himself all evening. He could stare at himself ‘til dawn. He could stare at himself for the next fortnight and never feel satisfied. He might never leave off, and Mrs Bailiwick would find him a withered corpse still smiling at the mirror, a modern-day Narcissus.

The door creaked opened. Daniel’s heart shot into his throat. He whirled.

Sukie stood on the threshold. And to see his joy reflected in her face warmed his heart thrice-over.

“Goodness!” she said softly as she shut the door behind her. “Aren’t you a beau?”

For that, he could do no less than kiss her.

Yet as they parted, he couldn’t keep from asking, “Do I look like a gentleman?”

“You always do,” she replied—which was sweet, if not exactly helpful. Then she added, “But yes, in this garb even a dullard would know you for the gentleman you are.”

Shaving proved a particular predicament. Daniel knew the tools required—razor, brush, soap, and strop—but didn’t know how to employ them without slitting his own throat. Still, Daniel felt determined to make the attempt, and so when next Sukie went into London to gather surreptitious supplies for their escape, he added razor, brush, soap, and strop to her list. She returned that evening with a bundle of the promised goods and a beaming smile besides.

“I went to a barber’s,” she said by way of explanation as Daniel, bewildered, watched her set it all out on his wash-stand. “And I told him my cousin had an accident in the mill what left him unable to do for himself and asked him if he’d be so kind as to show me how a man ought to be shaved, or at least let me sit and watch while he went about his work so I might learn through observation, promising as I’d be very quiet and not at all a bother. It took some doing but I finally convinced him to let me stay, and I saw him shave a half-dozen fellows at least. And by the end of it he liked me well enough to give me a special demonstration on a particular sailor who’d just come off a merchant vessel and was in sore need of a trim. So this is how you begin,” she said, plying the brush in the soap dish to whip up a great deal of foam.

She handed the loaded brush off to him. Under her instruction, he brushed a white beard of lather onto his face. Then she showed him how to hold the razor by laying its blade against his throat. His heart beat rather faster at that, but not in fear. His fingers entwined with hers along the ivory handle. With slow swipes and careful strokes, they scraped away the lather together. By the end, she withdrew entirely, and he alone revealed his fresh new face to himself in the looking-glass.

Though he bore no beard before he’d begun, still he fancied he saw a difference in his reflection. The blade had scraped something away after all. No longer did the soft downy face of a child look back at him, but rather the smooth sleek cheeks and jaw of a gentleman.

He didn’t get out of it entirely without nicks. These he passed off as mere blemishes, daring without words for anyone, fellow pupil or otherwise, to comment upon them. None did, though Tolhurst looked somewhat baffled, as if he had detected some difference in Daniel’s countenance but couldn’t quite define it. It would be rather ironical, Daniel thought, for this of all things to finally prove his truth to Tolhurst. But Tolhurst said nothing aloud, and his obsession with Daniel faded not a whit.

“Where are we going?” Sukie asked the following evening.

Daniel blinked. “Anywhere, I suppose.”

Sukie screwed her mouth up to one side of her face. “I don’t think we’ll get very far wandering off at random.”

Daniel conceded they would probably not succeed in that venture. “Far enough that Tolhurst won’t bother following.”

Privately, he didn’t know if such a place existed, but the horror felt too enormous to voice.

Sukie bit her lip. “My aunt’s settled in Canada.”

Daniel shot her a startled glance.

“There’d be a whole ocean between us and him,” she continued. “And we’d already have a relation there. Unless you think it’s too far?”

“Not at all,” Daniel replied. “I’m only surprised you’re willing to go so far away from all you know.”

She gave him a look that said as well as words she thought him rather dull for that. “The one I know best is coming with me. So really I’m not going very far at all.”

Daniel knew no better reward for her cleverness than a kiss.

“We ought to travel as cousins,” Daniel said when they parted. “I don’t think we could pass for siblings. But cousins may likewise keep company together regardless of their sex without attracting any undue notice.”

Sukie agreed.

Daniel wondered if he imagined the hesitance in her voice—a hesitance he himself had felt when he’d concocted the plan. And one he felt again when his heart bid him make another bold addition to an already wild scheme.

“When we arrive in Port Hawkesbury,” he said, beginning by looking away from her, then forcing himself to meet her all-too-beautiful gaze, “will you marry me?”

Sukie stared at him. “What?”

“In Canada,” Daniel explained, forcing his voice to remain steady. “I should like to live as husband and wife. With you.”

After all, they already behaved in all regards as husband and wife in the attic of the academy. For three years they had opened their hearts to each other every night. And for the past year or so, beneath the cover of darkness and bedclothes, Sukie had been to Daniel what Mrs Bailiwick claimed Daniel ought to have been to Felix.

(And what an informative afternoon that had been, when Mrs Bailiwick called Daniel into her private parlour and told him exactly what would be expected of him as Felix’s bride. If he hadn’t already known he’d no wish to wed Felix or any other man, that interview would have fixed his preference in his mind. As matters stood, it enlightened a great deal of his own feelings towards Sukie, and when next they met in his boudoir, he found her eager to experiment in how best he might fulfill the role which felt most natural to him.)

At present, Sukie continued to stare at him.

Silence was as good as a refusal. Daniel endeavoured to buck up beneath the blow. “Forgive me, I—”

“Yes,” Sukie blurted.

Daniel choked on his own apologetic speech. “What?”

“Yes,” she repeated, and kissed him, parting just long enough to say again, “Yes,” as she cradled his face in her hands, and then another whispered, “Yes,” as she bore him down onto the bed.

Some moments afterward, Daniel lay with her curled against his side and her head nestled in the hollow of his collarbone, staring up into the shadowed eaves with his heart still soaring. She would marry him. She would make him her devoted husband. She would willingly, gladly, ecstatically become his wife. And yet something nagged at him.

“I cannot give you children,” he confessed into the darkness.

Sukie shrugged, a gesture he felt rather than saw. “There are more than enough waifs in the world to fill our cradles, should we want them.”

 

~

The watercolour sketch went off largely without incident. Daniel and Sukie sat together as they had for the initial composition. He recalled well the sight of watercolour pans from his own drawing lessons. His old set was still kicking around somewhere in his steamer trunk; he wondered if he ought to bring it out to try his hand at it again.

Lofthouse appeared to paint with more vigour and enjoyment than the art master at the academy. And when the sunshine streaming through the southern window turned from afternoon gold to evening crimson and he turned his sketch-board around to show his subjects what he’d wrought, Daniel found the result far more pleasing than any technical still-life ever produced under the academy’s roof. The black-and-white sketches had caught their likeness. The warmth of colour seemed to bring them to life. Sukie clapped her hands in delight and redoubled Daniel’s own.

With a shy but no less pleased smile, Lofthouse packed up his kit and bid them adieu, promising to return with the finished painting, “Soon.”

A fortnight passed with neither hide nor hair of Lofthouse or Butcher seen in town. This Daniel knew not just from what he himself had witnessed—or rather, failed to witness—but from the gossip Sukie gathered from her Aunt Molly. If anyone in Port Hawkesbury had glimpsed a Gothic highwayman or his modest companion, none mentioned it. Nor, Aunt Molly added, had the staff of the lodging-houses found any of their guests matching the distinct description. This despite Lofthouse stating his intention to paint the final version of the wedding portrait out-of-doors.

Indeed, it seemed no one had seen Lofthouse or Butcher in town since Daniel and Sukie had invited them to dinner.

Daniel wondered at this, but likewise wondered at himself for never once bothering to ask Lofthouse himself where he stayed in town.

“Perhaps they made camp in the woods,” Sukie suggested when Daniel wondered aloud one evening.

“Perhaps,” Daniel conceded. “Lofthouse didn’t look like a fellow roughing it in the wilderness, though.”

Sukie shrugged.

While their guests didn’t appear in town, there nevertheless appeared a visitor in their garden. Several mornings just after dawn when Daniel left the cottage to walk to the office, he noticed one of those queer little black-masked grey birds flitting alongside him. A shrike, Lofthouse had called it. And Daniel had a dim recollection of seeing one before back in the garden of Mrs Bailiwick’s Academy—just a hair over a year ago now. Curious to find such birds on both sides of the Atlantic. Daniel supposed birds could fly wheresoever they pleased. Yet it wasn’t just this curiosity that nagged at him.

One particular evening, he returned to find yet another shrike perched on the gate trellis awaiting him.

Or perhaps the very same shrike.

The notion was absurd. Yet as Daniel paused with one hand on the gate to stare at the diminutive creature, and it cocked its head at him in return, he couldn’t shake the suspicion that he’d seen not just this sort of bird but this exact individual specimen before.

“I know you, don’t I,” he said—even as he knew talking to a wild bird was behaviour fit for Bedlam.

The shrike blinked at him and cocked its head again at the opposite angle.

The idea of a bird listening and responding to his words ought to have unsettled him. Instead he felt queerly comforted. And besides, he told himself, more likely the creature was just confused from being squawked at by a giant featherless, flightless thing.

“I drew you once,” Daniel continued. The more he spoke to it, the more soothed he felt. He knew not why. “Whatever are you doing here?”

The bird blinked at him again. It made a little sideways hop across the trellis. There it preened itself before locking eyes with him once more.

Daniel supposed shrikes were not quite enough like parrots to speak for themselves. He tipped his hat, smiling at his own folly as he did so. “Well—good evening to you, sir.”

And to his astonishment, the bird bowed as if in reply.

Daniel hardly had time to do more than widen his eyes before it flicked out its wings and took flight, veering off to vanish in the evening’s shadows. He stood staring after it for some time before he went into the house. Sukie met him in the front hall.

“Do you recall seeing shrikes in England?” he asked her after he’d kissed her.

She blinked at him in a manner not unlike the bird. “Not particularly. I saw plenty of finches, swallows, and sparrows.”

Daniel supposed these were all good birds in their own way. “Have you seen any by the house here?”

“Oh, yes,” said Sukie. “Since Mr Lofthouse pointed them out it seems I see them every day. There must be a flock roosting nearby.”

“You see more than one at a time, then?”

Sukie furrowed her brow in thought. “No… Now that you mention it, there’s only ever just the one.”

Daniel knew not how he ought to feel about that.

“Do you mislike it?” Sukie asked, studying his face.

“I don’t think so,” Daniel replied.

That was good enough for Sukie, who smiled and entwined her arm with his to bring him into the kitchen for dinner.

The shrike sightings did not abate throughout the fortnight.

“Is Mr Butcher married?” Daniel wondered aloud to his wife on a Saturday afternoon.

She blinked at him. “You’d stand a better chance of knowing than I.”

They stood together in the kitchen. Daniel peeled and chopped vegetable matter whilst Sukie beat a dough into submission. He couldn’t blame her confusion at his bringing the matter up now. It’d been more than a fortnight since anyone had seen the gentleman. And yet, whenever Daniel wasn’t thinking of Sukie or the novels they read together or figures in a ledger or shrikes, he found his mind wandering again and again down the familiar path of what the deuce Butcher and Lofthouse got up to.

From what little Daniel had observed of him, Lofthouse seemed very much inclined toward the company of his fellow bachelors. He had begun in the employment of Mr Grigsby—who’d never married, despite being a nice enough fellow, and of a rather advanced age—and had moved on to Butcher, an eccentric. Though perhaps Butcher had married after all. It would account for him bringing his steward along on his travels instead of leaving him behind to manage the estate. Perhaps Butcher had left matters in his wife’s hands instead. Daniel still thought that a rather backwards way of doing business. He said all this aloud to Sukie, who listened with increasingly raised brows.

“Why does it trouble you so?” Sukie asked.

“He knows all my own history,” said Daniel. “Yet I know nothing of his.”

“Not all, surely.”

“Well, no. But more than most gentlemen.” Daniel furrowed his brow down at the pile of potato peelings he’d produced whilst making his argument. “And I think he may likewise live an unconventional existence.”

He continued to explain his reasoning. If there existed such a thing as a lady who preferred the companionship of another lady over any gentleman—as Daniel felt assured there must, from the whirlwind romances he’d witnessed between his fellow pupils at the academy—then he supposed there must exist after all a sort of gentleman who preferred the companionship of another gentleman over any lady.

Sukie didn’t look nearly so shocked at this train of thought as Daniel might have otherwise supposed.

“And I think,” Daniel concluded, “that Lofthouse may be one such gentleman, and Butcher another.”

“Of course,” said Sukie.

Daniel glanced up sharp from his half-chopped onion. “Of course?”

“They do remind me a great deal of my uncles,” Sukie said, mild as anything.

Daniel blinked at her. “What?”

“Uncle Jack and Uncle Jem—though Jem isn’t a blood relation,” she added. “They’ve a fishing boat out of Yarmouth. Thick as thieves for as long as I’ve known ‘em, which is all my life.”

Daniel, his mind in a whirl, blurted, “Why didn’t you say anything?”

Sukie raised her brows. “About my uncles?”

“No—about Lofthouse and Butcher.”

“Well, y’know,” Sukie replied with a shrug. “Glass houses and all that.”

“Yes—but you might have said something to me,” Daniel pointed out.

Sukie blinked at him. “Thought you knew. You’re usually rather clever.”

Daniel didn’t agree with her assessment of his intelligence at that particular moment but laughed and kissed her, nonetheless.

Just then, the ringing gate-bell interrupted them.

Sukie shared a glance with him that sufficed to send him on his way. First to the sink to rinse the vegetable residue from his hands, then to the front hall to shrug on his frock coat and answer the door.

Lofthouse stood on the threshold. Butcher stood beside him in all his Gothic glory. Between them they carried a board some four feet broad and almost as tall, draped in buckram.

“Do forgive our arriving unannounced,” said Lofthouse. “May we come in?”

Daniel stepped aside to let them pass and ushered them into the parlour. At his urging they propped their burden up on the sofa. Sukie joined them from the kitchen.

“Oh, Mr Lofthouse!” she said, clapping her hands. “Is this…?”

“It is,” Lofthouse replied. His eyes danced in a way Daniel had never seen before. He laid a hand on the corner of the buckram. “Shall I? Or would you prefer to reveal it yourself?”

Daniel shook his head and made an encouraging gesture towards the artwork that even now he could scarce believe existed. “By all means.”

Lofthouse and Butcher exchanged a glance. Together, in a singular swift and fluid movement, they whisked the buckram off the board.

And there before Daniel’s eyes lay bare his own wedding day.

His eye fell first upon Sukie. In life she appeared ever-beautiful to his eye, even (or especially) with streaks of flour through her mahogany hair and smudges across her brow. He’d always despised his blue poplin on himself, but to see it on her, and how she beamed with happiness to wear it, rendered the whole more beautiful still. How well he recalled on their wedding day the way the gown’s colour brought out the blush in her smiling cheeks and the rosy tint of her perfect lips. And now, rendered through Lofthouse’s brush-strokes, her form seemed to glow with radiant joy, the brightness of hue exceeded only by the evident bliss captured in her resplendent face.

When he could tear his gaze away from the perfect portrait of his wife—which took some doing—he forced himself, with no small amount of trepidation, to look upon his own image.

What he saw there left him thunderstruck.

Never before had he recognised even a fraction of himself in any artistic representation. Only within the past year had he coaxed the looking-glass into reflecting his soul.

And now, in Lofthouse’s painting, he saw his soul again.

A gentleman sat before him. A young gentleman, and yet, confidence beyond evident years shone in the blue eyes and the set of the strong jaw (Daniel’s favourite feature of his face and one of the few he didn’t despise). The grey frock coat fit the figure as if moulded for him alone, and not acquired under questionable means from another’s wardrobe. With his shoulders drawn back, his spine straight, his head held high, and his thighs set apart with all the command of a king, he looked every inch who he was. Even the carefree wave of the golden curls appeared more like a crown beneath Lofthouse’s brush. His strong hand clasped Sukie’s, and the slight smile that played about his lips bespoke a joy beyond all possible expression.

“Butcher made the frame,” Lofthouse added just as Daniel’s eyes fell upon it. An oaken frame, carved in the shape of its own leaves and acorns, surrounded all.

Sukie praised it at once and thanked him effusively for his contribution. Daniel thought he beheld a faint rosy tint in the otherwise stoic features as Butcher bowed and murmured that they were quite welcome.

Daniel returned to the painting. Lofthouse hadn’t attended that blessed day—few had, with Aunt Molly as their only guest and the vicar as their only witness. And yet he had captured all the joy of it.

Their relationship hadn’t met with quite so much approval as they might have wished for. Aunt Molly, no doubt wary of unfulfilled promises from gentlemen to parlour maids, had strong opinions about their decision to share a cabin on their Atlantic crossing. The assurance from Daniel that they were engaged met with poorly-disguised disbelief on her part. Likewise she had fretted over whether or not they were rather too young to marry at all. (No one, Daniel noted, had considered it at all odd for him to wed at nineteen when they’d supposed him a young lady rather than a young gentleman.) However, when the day itself finally arrived—not a minute too soon, by Daniel’s reckoning—Aunt Molly had shed a steady stream of joyful tears from the moment they entered the church and on after Daniel carried Sukie over the threshold of their cottage out of her sight.

The kiss Daniel gave his Sukie at the altar was perhaps not so modest as Aunt Molly might have wished. It expressed all the exhilaration he felt to bind himself to his beloved for all eternity, to protect and cherish her to the end of his days and beyond. Words he’d dreaded throughout his engagement to Felix, and after his escape had hardly dared to ever hope he might hear, echoed again in his ears with newfound bliss. “I now pronounce you man and wife.”

The painting blurred. Daniel blinked hard and tilted his face up to the ceiling beams. A gentle hand entwined with his own.

“Where shall we hang it?” Sukie asked.

Were it not for Lofthouse and Butcher standing before them, Daniel could’ve kissed her. Trust her wisdom to know when to give him a task that would draw him out of the labyrinth of his mind. Over the mantle, they decided, and then Daniel had to fetch hammer, wire, and nail, and, with Butcher and Lofthouse, raise the painting against the wall whilst Sukie directed them how to straighten it out. Then came the hammer-blows and the tying-up and when at last they all stood back to admire it again, Daniel could do so with clear eyes.

Sukie broke off admiring it long enough to ask Lofthouse and Butcher, “You’ll stay for dinner, won’t you?”

Lofthouse hesitated. “We wouldn’t want to impose…”

“It’s no imposition whatsoever,” Daniel declared.

Lofthouse glanced up at Butcher. Butcher gave him a small encouraging smile in return.

“Very well,” Lofthouse replied with a shy smile of his own. “Will you let us help prepare it, at least?”

Daniel blinked. Butcher appeared in no way surprised.

And Sukie simply beamed, twined her arm through Daniel’s, and bid them all follow her into the kitchen.

 

~