For the first time in months, Anthony’s days fell into a pleasing pattern. After breakfast, he would pore over the newspapers, working doggedly through the accounts of parliamentary debates. He wrote letters—shaping the words carefully—letters to Cruitshank, to Mabeldon, and tucked them himself into the bottom of the mailbag. He held a few meetings with his father’s political cronies, elder statesmen he’d been putting off for months. On three occasions, Yardley called while he was thus engaged. How shocked Yardley must have been, turned away at the door, the young idiot too occupied with important business to receive him. The reversal made Anthony smile.
In the late afternoon, he would stroll to the mews, pass through the coach house, linger in the stables, and make his way into the southeastern corner of the garden. If Anthony’s mother were still alive, the glasshouse would glow green, a profusion of leaves, brightly starred with new blooms, pressing the translucent walls. No trees, no plants, grew inside. But now, for first time in years, the glasshouse was filled with life, with color.
He would hallo softly from the doorway, and Lucy would acknowledge him with a word, a nod, or not at all. She worked in the center of the space, where his mother used to sit in winter. He’d lounge against the brick foundation, sitting on a shallow sill, the glazed glass rising behind him, and nurse a tumbler of whiskey. He watched Lucy at work. My God, he pitied her canvas! Trapped on its easel, nowhere to run as she approached, brush raised, face twisted in a ferocious scowl. Painting, she looked twice as alive as anyone he’d ever seen, pacing, spearing her hair with distracted fingers that left streaks of paint at her temples. Her eyes seemed lit from within, slits of gold. She circled the easel, darting and feinting, like a novice fencer sent into a frenzy by a motionless master. Or she was motionless, standing stock-still in the flooding light in the attitude of a saint communicating with angels. Little happened hour by hour to the canvas itself, but he could see by her face that a brushstroke had transported her into raptures or dashed her against the rocks of despair.
He was enthralled by the drama. Enthralled by her.
Sometimes they spoke as she washed brushes or stretched her back, folding forward at the waist, leaning back, in an awkward, wide-legged stance. Her frank, unselfconscious physicality delighted him, and he stretched too, striking even more ridiculous postures that made her laugh. Encouraged, one afternoon, he stood on his head, which turned her laugh into a growl.
“If you kick the easel, I will bury you.”
But he was far enough from the easel, to the side of it, the crown of his head aching where it ground into the iron grating. He took a deep breath, tensing his muscles, and lifted into a handstand. If he tipped too far over, his feet would hit the lower curve of the glass dome. But he didn’t tip, didn’t even wobble. Blood rushed to his head. Probably good—to drain the blood from that other part of him, the one making him show off for her like a green boy.
“You are a dolt,” she said as he lowered himself slowly, straight down, tucking into a crouch to prevent his legs from flailing. He grinned as he stood up, shaking the hair from his eyes. Dolt was high praise, considering her usual run of epithets.
Whenever he returned to the house from one of these too-brief idylls, he felt enlivened, as though a golden spark from her eyes had touched fire to something long dead in his chest.
One week passed and the next began. No matter how packed his schedule, he couldn’t avoid the confrontation forever. He knew it. He didn’t startle to hear Yardley’s voice, even though he’d told Collins to admit no one after his noon appointment.
“That wasn’t Samuel Lawford?”
Yardley stood in the doorway to the study, briefcase in hand, looking down the hall. Despite his irritation, Anthony felt amused by his expression. Yardley looked as gobsmacked arriving as Lawford had looked leaving.
Anthony dropped the report Lawford had handed him onto the desk.
“Nice fellow,” he said. “Principled.”
Lawford was motivated by ideals. Unlike the other politicians Anthony had invited into his study, Lawford hadn’t framed the laws he was drafting in terms of party strategy or personal gain. He hadn’t referred, ominously, to favors owed and grudges earned, to votes for sale. He hadn’t attempted to flatter Anthony by praising his father, or attempted to manipulate him by assuming his support for bills explained via references to the financial backing of wealthy constituents.
Refreshing. Lawford made politics seem palatable, even noble. A public service.
He should have held meetings with his father’s enemies sooner.
Yardley let the door bang behind him. His ginger brows had crept so high up his forehead they seemed in danger of annexation by his hairline.
“That man was a thorn in your father’s side. Did he come to threaten you? His muckraking friends in the press made a hell for this family. What did he want?”
His protective air rankled. Anthony gripped the edge of the desk. Yardley’s protectiveness—it was the counterpoint to his father’s disgust. He should have recognized that Yardley’s kindness shared the same root—deep skepticism about his mental powers.
He forced himself to smile.
“He wanted to know why I invited him. He said he’d sooner expected an invitation from the devil.”
Yardley’s face was going red. “You invited him?”
Anthony nodded. “I’ve read the records from the last parliamentary session. His ideas interest me.”
He’d labored over those blue books night after night, puzzling them out, collapsing on his bed, pain stabbing behind his right eye. But the effort had paid off. The names, the committees, the bills, were now locked in his head. He’d handled himself well with Lawford.
Reading his father’s notes alongside the records, he’d begun to track the forces—internal and external—that had shaped his father’s political persona. He hadn’t realized what a pivotal role Yardley had managed to play, without ever setting foot in Westminster.
As an active member of the Board of Works, Yardley attended long, windy meetings—several a week—where he rubbed elbows with men prominent in the affairs of every vestry in the city: aldermen, merchants, factory owners. He promised private investment in parish infrastructure, promises on which the Duke of Weston could deliver, and in return, they got their people to stuff the ballot boxes and delivered amenable MPs.
His father hadn’t resorted to bribery as far as Anthony could tell. No out-and-out corruption. But he knew how to play the game, and the game depended—heavily—on legalized graft and sinecures.
Yardley’s close connection with his father had given him access to the upper echelons of society. What would he do if Anthony found him less indispensable?
He felt vaguely ill, looking at Yardley’s familiar face, craggy and open. At the moment, his blue eyes were bulging slightly with the force of his amazement.
“Which of Lawford’s ideas caught your interest?”
Anthony cleared his throat. “He supported the Irish Land Act. The Irish farmers deserve a fair rent.”
As a topic, rent no longer bored him. That one image had caught his attention, changed his outlook.
My babes have grown so thin, I could keep them in my pincushion.
Nothing dull or abstract about it. Not at home or abroad.
Yardley sighed. “It starts with a fair rent. Next thing you know, it’s the expropriation of the landlords and agricultural collapse. You’ve a lot to learn, my boy. Men like Lawford exist in the realm of ideas. Try to implement one of those ideas and see what havoc ensues.” He sat heavily in a chair, setting his briefcase on his knees. “You should get to know your own party. Have you met with Southgate? He was one of your father’s staunchest allies.”
Ask Collins. They both knew the butler acted as a spy. Anthony’s jaw ticked. Were they going to continue to pretend that Yardley hadn’t enlisted Lucy’s help to extend his legal childhood? He picked up Lawford’s report.
“It seems to me that Lawford exists in the realm of action. He thought the invasion of Afghanistan cruel and unjust, and he opened the debate in the Commons on the policies that led to the war. He agitated for the independence of the Transvaal. Our government’s inhumanity keeps him up at night.”
Yardley’s nostrils flared. “Talk to Southgate about Lawford, and don’t take any of his prattle to heart. The man’s a jester. He’s up at night because that’s when he pens his witticisms.”
Anthony glanced at the report in his hand, flicked the edge with his finger.
“I’m most interested in the case he makes here. Against intervention in Egypt. In fact, I might throw my support behind him.”
Lawford had tugged at his long gray beard for a solid minute after Anthony had made that pronouncement. He had suspected intrigue. Yardley suspected buffoonery. He narrowed his eyes. Then he threw back his head and laughed.
“You’re the jester.” He wagged his finger at Anthony. “I should spot your clowning by now. This is what I get for urging you out of the stable.” He wiped his eyes. “Point taken. Do what you will, then. I can’t stop you.”
“That’s right. You can’t.”
Yardley heard the edge in his voice. He sobered, straightened.
“You’re in a strange mood,” he observed. “Still upset about Hampshire? Cruitshank wrote to tell me he’d had a letter from you. I told him I’d give you the annual reports.”
He opened the briefcase.
“Here they are, as promised. Three years of them. Inputs, output. It’s all there. The numbers are clear enough. The tenants have no cause to bellyache.”
He leaned forward, tossing the reports onto the desk.
“Read them and we’ll talk if you have questions.”
Anthony rose, tugged the bellpull. He put his palms on the desk, bracing himself.
“Better we talk now.”
“Very well.” Yardley tilted his head, studying him. As Anthony hesitated, he nodded slightly, the encouraging nod he’d given on innumerable occasions during Anthony’s boyhood, when he’d failed to express himself well, stumbled on his words, flew into a passion.
Calm down. Spit it out.
Yardley had listened to him patiently. Anthony set his jaw. He wasn’t that attention-starved boy anymore. He wouldn’t be humored.
“In ten days, I will turn thirty,” he said.
“Indeed. Have I ever forgotten your birthday?”
Anthony shut his eyes briefly. No, Yardley had never forgotten his birthday.
On his eleventh birthday, just two months after his mother died, Yardley had taken him to see the suits of armor in the Tower of London. A few bright hours of excitement in those unremittingly dark days.
His father had requested his presence after dinner and his nurse had brought him into this very room. His father had sat behind the desk at which he now stood, staring at him coldly for what felt like a thousand years before he delivered a curt ultimatum.
Your nurse tells me you’ve been crying about your mother. You’re a grown boy now. If I hear of your crying again, I’ll have you dropped in an ice-water bath where you can sit until you learn to contain yourself.
He opened his eyes. “After this birthday, we might not have occasion to talk.”
“Anthony, are you quite well?”
Yardley’s face creased, looking suddenly worn with care. Anthony fixed his eyes on the lapel of Yardley’s jacket, took a deep breath.
“Whether I am or not, it is my concern. In the future, you will handle your affairs, and I will handle mine.”
“Your affairs are my affairs. For now, that’s the legal reality.” Yardley made a resigned motion with his hand. “After your birthday, well. You’ll be thirty, fully emancipated as they say. But the bonds of affection remain. I will always endeavor to help you in any way I can. You know that.”
The footman knocked, entered, placed the tray on a table, vanished. Yardley regarded the tall glasses of milk. Anthony came around the desk, leaned back against it.
“I’d offer you something stronger,” he said. “But I fear you’d report me to Hamilton and Johnstone.”
Yardley lifted a glass of milk with a slight grimace. “Your father took the matter a bit far.” He sniffed at the milk, then sipped. “I don’t deny it.”
“Then why are you so hell-bent on enforcing his rules?”
Yardley returned his glass to the tray.
“Hell-bent,” he said, musingly. “I worried this would happen, that you’d make me out to be a demon in this. You resent the restrictions your father placed on you. I understand that. But you should understand the sense of necessity that drove him to it.”
He ignored this. Yardley had made the case before. But this time his quarrel wasn’t with his father, but with Yardley himself.
“You knew I was going to the Albion. You hoped to catch me drinking.”
Yardley tilted his head. “Miss Coover told you.”
“She didn’t have to tell me. I saw you.”
“Ah, well.” Yardley sighed. “A test. You passed with flying colors. I was pleased.”
“Were you?” He searched Yardley’s face.
“Of course.” Yardley smiled. “I’m less pleased by your continued acquaintanceship with Miss Coover. I sincerely admire her, but the attachment can’t be a happy one.”
Anthony didn’t like it, this sudden silkiness of tone. He looked at Yardley sharply.
“What attachment? She comes to the garden from time to time. As my painting teacher.” He cleared his throat as Yardley’s smile widened, crinkling his eyes. “She doesn’t need your admiration. She needs justice so her house isn’t knocked down.”
“You were too long with Lawford.” Yardley shrugged. “Justice. That’s a bit too grandiose to serve. The gears of power are gritty little things in the vestries. Don’t worry, though, I kept my word to Miss Coover. I raised the issue of the evictions at last night’s board meeting. A special committee was formed to investigate the Charlotte Road properties. Your intervention is not required.”
Hot, boyish embarrassment. It flooded him. He’d kept his word, too, but to no purpose. He’d been turned away from Mabeldon’s twice and had yet to receive a reply to his letters. Yardley saw his discomfort. He always did. Slowly, the older man reached again for the glass of milk and held it up as though trying to peer through it. The solid white cylinder blocked the center of his face. He lowered the glass.
“Anthony.” He paused, thoughtfully. “I’ve looked the other way whenever possible, but you’ve been cheating so broadly, you gave me no choice. I felt compelled to arrange a little situation so I could honestly appraise your self-management.”
“Honestly?” Anthony snorted. “Not the best choice of words. There was nothing honest about it.”
A brief beat of silence; then Yardley continued.
“You’ve disrespected my intelligence,” he said. “You’ve shown no consideration for the delicate position in which I find myself as friend to both you and your father, not to mention as trustee of the estate. I’ve angered you by refusing to hunt high and low for your sister, but to do so would be to break my word to your father. You could handle the situation with maturity and patience. Take the codicil for what it is: a temporary check on your behavior. Instead, you continue to blow everything out of proportion. You’ve been surly, delinquent, hell-bent, to borrow the term, on proving that the very safeguards you despise are in fact essential and justified.”
His speech had gathered momentum, and heat. He paused, meeting Anthony’s eyes. He seemed reluctant to continue.
“But you’re not surprised.” Anthony goaded him grimly. “I’ve never been up to standard.”
Yardley thinned his lips.
“I would chalk your recent excesses to grief and youthful defiance, but . . .”
He shook his head.
“There is a larger, more troubling pattern.”
In the silence that followed Anthony’s voice cracked like a whip.
“You told me not to explain!”
Yardley had silenced him when he’d tried to speak of Maiwand, not only at their first meeting in Hampshire, but later, too, on the rare occasions he’d broached the subject. He’d implied that Anthony had no need to defend himself, that an understanding existed between them.
Anthony tensed his jaws, the muscles around his eyes. His face hardened into a mask, the mask he’d learned to present to his father, never Yardley himself.
Yardley felt the novelty of his stark expression. His eyelids drooped. He looked like a sad spaniel.
“Why make you relive such unpleasantness? You were acquitted, after all,” he murmured. “It was over and done with.”
“My father accepted the story they told him. I expected as much. But you? You didn’t doubt it?”
Leaning on the desk, he loomed over Yardley, whose large body seemed contorted, stuffed into the chair.
“Anthony.” Yardley cast his eyes up. He looked past Anthony, searching the ceiling, blinking rapidly. He gripped the arms of the chair. His gaze grew suspiciously bright. “Your father sent me to identify George’s body.”
Anthony jerked. But his face was adamant. He stared down at Yardley, impassive.
“I was the one who saw him.” Yardley’s voice sank into a whisper. “He’d spent two days in the water.” His chest heaved once, mightily, but he continued. “That day, I stopped doubting, and I started fearing. I feared for you, Anthony. That story—it had the ring of truth. Or maybe it was the knell of fate. You are very much her child.”
Her child. Son of the Hellenic harlot. The mad slut. All sorts of things had been said of her. His father had once referred to her within his hearing as a bitch in heat. On that occasion, his vision had blurred, a red wave crashing over him. He’d leapt on his father. He was still young enough to be shaken off, dragged away, locked in a room.
“I am her child,” he grated. “And I don’t plan on destroying myself. But I will live on my terms. You may not like them, I warn you.”
After a long moment, Yardley nodded.
“Very well, then.” He rose and picked up his briefcase. “I will be the first to wish you a happy birthday.”
He leveled Anthony with his gaze.
“Obey. Stay out of the papers. On March twenty-sixth we’ll have something to celebrate.” A smile tugged his lips. “I’ll bring the champagne for the toast.” He took Anthony’s shoulder in a firm grip and shook it hard. “We’ll get through this,” he said gruffly. “Call if you want to discuss those reports.”
Anthony stared at the door after Yardley let himself out. Then he threw himself onto a chair, pressing his palms together. His head throbbed. A glass of whiskey would help. But he was growing accustomed to waiting until the later afternoon, when a visit to the glasshouse had more to offer than a pain-dulling tipple.
He couldn’t bring himself to inspect the annual reports from Hampshire, to chase more swarming hieroglyphics around the page. He pressed his palms together harder, then pulled them apart and looked at the sharply etched lines.
He stood and headed to the coach house to seek out a raw board, a saw, and a plane.
A heavy footfall alerted Lucy to Anthony’s presence. Usually he was quieter. She would feel the hairs stir on the back of her neck, and she would know that he’d arrived. Every day she waited for that moment, when the air charged around her. Every day she half hoped the moment wouldn’t come.
It wasn’t that she minded sharing the light with him. It was that she liked it too much.
She fixed her eyes on the canvas. Her third attempt, and Violet still drooped. She wanted the dolls to participate more in the scene, to repay—albeit ever so slightly—the girls’ attention. They didn’t need to seem alive, of course. But they needed to seem . . . quickened.
More highlights. She went to her paint box, open on top of a marble bench between two enormous planters, both upside down. Anthony had turned them over so she could use them as makeshift tables.
The furnishings are sparse, he’d said when he’d first brought her inside, watching her with a strange expression, eagerness mixed with apology.
It’s a crystal palace in miniature, she’d said, rapt, and it was. The glasshouse itself was small but ornate, a beautiful curvilinear structure of sheet glass and iron. He’d set up an easel beneath the apex of the dome, put a camp chair in front of it, turned over a tall urn on which he’d placed an Argand lamp in case clouds dimmed the sun. He’d carried in a bucket of water and laid out glasses and a pitcher on the marble bench, so she could wash her brushes.
You said it has been abandoned for years? she’d murmured. The glass is remarkably clean.
Indeed, the panes sparkled. He’d shrugged, but the dimples flickered briefly in his cheeks, all the confirmation she needed. He’d clambered around like a monkey, washing the grime off the glass.
He’d done all of it for her.
This past week had been a dream. When she left the School of Painting, she no longer dashed to the omnibus and jostled the slow miles back to Shoreditch, where petticoats, bodices, and undersleeves waited to accuse her. Aunt Marian had hired Megan Cosgrave through the end of March, had insisted on it. Off you go. Paint something better. These days, Lucy walked swiftly from the Royal Academy to Weston Hall, slipped around to the mews, ducked through a door in the stone wall, and entered the garden.
In the glasshouse, they were hers, the last hours of daylight.
Well, hers and Anthony’s.
There it was, her tube of zinc white. She snatched it up. Another footfall brought her head around, a tart remark forming on her lips. She didn’t want any bumbling around, not when her supplies were scattered all about.
“Oh!”
It wasn’t Anthony behind her. This man was his opposite, tow-haired and short-nosed, with a blocky build, his livery rumpled. He grinned with unabashed interest.
“You’re harder to catch than a greased pig.”
She raised her eyebrows. It took her a moment to realize he referred to her sprint through Weston Hall on that wet, desperate Saturday afternoon.
“Thank you,” she said at last. She couldn’t doubt he meant it as a compliment.
“The boys were sweating cobs by the end of it.” He wove around the sketches she’d fanned out on the floor.
“I’d bet you in a smock race, that I would,” he said, nodding.
She wrinkled her nose. If this was lewdness, it was a country variety entirely opaque to her. Up close, she noted how young he was, not more than twenty. He scratched at his bare chin, squinting at her easel. He had dirt under his fingernails.
“Are you the gardener?”
“Valet.” He tossed her a wink. “To me are entrusted the socks and drawers.”
“Let’s leave my drawers out of it.” Anthony stepped into the glasshouse, jacket slung over his shoulder.
“I see you’ve met Humphreys,” he said to Lucy with a smile.
“Hadn’t gotten to introductions.” Humphreys placed a hand on his heart. “We went right round the Wrekin. I dunna even know the name of the girl I’m sweet on.”
“A sorry plight.” Anthony folded his arms, and Humphreys slipped the hand on his chest into his jacket and produced a letter.
“Came at the last delivery,” he said, handing it over. He looked between Anthony and Lucy expectantly, then sighed.
“Off I go,” he said and rambled out.
Lucy stared. “That’s your valet?”
“Was he bothering you?”
“It was hard to tell,” she said, and Anthony laughed, an easy laugh, hanging his jacket on a bit of iron projecting from a muntin. When the glasshouse functioned as such, those brackets held the ventilators.
“He puts the Shropshire on thick for the ladies, but he’s a good lad.”
“Humphreys.” She turned the tube of paint over in her hand, placed it carefully back in the box. “The infantryman on the retreat, who you roused and then . . .”
“Saved my life.” He smiled. “After the court-martial, he didn’t want to rush straight home to the farm for another round of tongue-lashings. I offered him a position. It turns out I need him more than he needs me.”
He held up the letter. “When he can, he intercepts the post so Collins can’t steam it open or throw it in the fire. Acts as a lookout.”
A lookout. So Anthony could drink without risking discovery, no doubt. She raised an eyebrow.
“More of an accomplice than a valet.”
He shrugged. “He answers to anything. We understand each other.”
The sky shone dove gray, the cloudy light pouring through the glass, softening the green of his eyes. Not the green of faceted jewels. Today, his eyes were green like the leaves on the fig trees that once filled the overturned planters.
Fig trees, nectarine trees, lemon trees. She’d been spellbound by his description of the glasshouse from the days when his mother tended it. Green leaves unfurling, green vines climbing, globes of orange and purple fruits hanging overhead. The air sweet and heavy as sleep. A waking dream. His face had taken on a dreamy quality as he spoke. However cynical and self-destructive he may have become, he still possessed a capacity for wonder.
Now he broke her gaze. Whistling, he walked to the tank where he stored his liquor, rolled back the oilcloth cover, took out a bottle, and splashed whiskey into a tumbler. She knew she should bite her tongue.
“Have you considered complying with your father’s will?” she asked. “You’d save yourself a world of trouble.”
He inspected the whiskey in the glass, sipped, seemed to find it to his satisfaction. “I’ll take that under advisement.” Without looking at her, he leaned against the low brick wall, his customary spot, and ripped open the letter. She turned back to her canvas.
Fair enough. She wasn’t here to give him counsel or draw him into conversation. She was here to paint. She picked up her brush. Put it down at the sound of ripping paper. He was shredding the letter into pieces. He caught her glance and smiled.
“Destroying the evidence,” he said.
Perhaps she looked uncomprehending.
“A letter from my aunt Helen.” He tucked the scraps into his pocket. “I am forbidden contact with my mother’s family.”
He swallowed the glass of whiskey. Here was a new wrinkle. She gnawed her lip, regarding him. Prohibiting drink was one thing. Prohibiting relatives quite another. Her mental portrait of Weston the elder continued to darken. He’d disowned one child and cut off the other from people who loved him.
“Why?” she asked.
His smile was beautiful even when bitter. “My father did not share his reasons with his unreasoning son. He despised me. We ignored each other, unless my conduct made that impossible.”
He put a hand on the back of his neck, rubbing at a tensed muscle.
“In the end, his health was failing. I do wish I’d tried to talk with him. About Effie, at least. Maybe . . .” He shook off the thought. “It would have made no difference. He believed that Mediterranean blood heats too easily. My mother inclined to brain fever, which brought on the more serious diseases for which she was locked away.”
Nymphomania, he’d said. She thought of the paintings she’d seen in the Winter Exhibition of nymphs bathing in rivers, of nymphs caressing Cupid, of nymphs dancing with satyrs. They were fluid, graceful figures. In those paintings, the coloring was sensual. They were scenes of pleasure.
Was pleasure the disease? She wondered about his mother, this woman who wanted lush green even in winter, who died when imprisoned between bare gray walls.
“My father was always looking for signs she’d passed her weakness on to her children.”
He raised the glass to his lips before remembering he’d emptied it.
“There were plenty.” He laughed, laughter as bitter as his smile. “I’m sure he thought mixing with her relations would exacerbate the condition.”
“You see them anyway,” she said softly. “Or correspond with them.”
He shrugged. “When I can. Compliance would save me a world of trouble. But I cannot—I will not—accept his authority, even temporarily.”
He pushed off the wall, claimed the whiskey bottle, and refilled his glass.
She opened her mouth.
Don’t, she told herself.
“You reject his authority,” she said. “You choose blind disobedience instead of blind obedience.”
Too late to stop now.
“Which means he still controls you.”
He froze, half-turned away. When he finally looked at her, he saw something in her face that made him relax his stance.
“You’re right, of course. I could handle it all much better,” he said wryly. “When I last paid a visit to my aunt, my cousin Sofia used a crystal ball to peer into my soul. What she saw dismayed her.”
He laughed, relaxing further, easing into the recollection. “Sofia possesses a distinctive flair for the dramatic. She has Greek blood on both sides, which goes a ways toward explaining it.”
“Greeks are dramatic?”
“Greeks invented drama.” He gave a wry tug with his mouth and she couldn’t help but grin in response.
“Sofia’s father, he’s from Greece?”
“No. My aunt Helen married Peter Metaxas.”
He registered her blank expression.
“You don’t keep up with shipping dynasties? Peter Metaxas is the London-born son of Costa Metaxas. Costa started the firm Rodis & Metaxas with my maternal grandfather. They run it together, Peter and Helen. Don’t quiz my aunt on rates of freight for competing steamer lines. She has a formidable head for business. She and my mother were opposites.”
He fell silent and she found that she wanted him to go on. When he slipped into this mood—earnest, unguarded—and they talked together, fell into rhythm with each other, she felt an exquisite rightness. Felt as though they showed each other the selves most portraits, even portrait photographs, couldn’t capture. Something beneath the skin.
These moments they shared were soap-bubble moments. Perfect, impossibly colored, brief. She wanted to stay inside with him longer. Before he drank a third glass and a fourth. Before they retreated into their separate, unbridgeable lives.
“What did she say to you about your soul?” she asked. “Sofia, I mean.”
He set down his whiskey glass.
“You dare to ask?” He paused for effect. “She told me I was cold, sick, and silly—a strong indictment from the other world.”
Her laughter rang out.
“But that’s Jane Eyre!”
His brows had drawn together but his lips twitched in response to her amusement.
“Your Grecian oracle,” she said. “She’s a good English girl who reads her Brontë. Cold, sick, and silly—it’s what Mr. Rochester says to Jane when he’s dressed as a fortune-teller.”
Now he laughed outright.
“Too bad, really. She also said I’d meet a mysterious woman and fall desperately in love. Do I have to disregard all of it?”
He seemed peculiarly intent, waiting for her answer.
“I can’t say,” she said, smile fading. “I’m not an oracle.”
Suddenly, the memories flooded her. The feel of him as he slid down the bed. The thud of his knees on the floorboards. How she’d beat against his mouth.
Her breathing constricted, and she had to turn away, seizing on a jar of brushes.
“I love Jane Eyre,” she said, inspecting a brush. “But my favorite from the Brontë sisters is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Do you know it? It’s marvelous. A woman escapes her corrupted, adulterous husband and supports herself as a painter. She paints all day in a decaying mansion on the moor.”
Ah. She was babbling. She put aside the jar, smoothing her dress. She looked at him. Dimples.
Dammit.
“Marvelous,” he agreed.
“I have borrowed it five times from the lending library.”
“I don’t read novels,” he said. “Can’t, actually.” He picked up his whiskey again, and she tried not to care as he took a long sip. He slouched against the wall, studying his shirt cuff.
“I’m not illiterate.” He looked irritated at himself for having started down this road. “But I’ve never been able to figure them out. Letters, that is.”
He laughed, mocking himself. He’d likely been mocking himself his whole life. Before anyone else could. She regarded him thoughtfully.
“How do you read?” she asked. “Without understanding letters?”
“I think of the words as pictures,” he said, slowly. “I remember them that way, as shapes. I can’t pick them apart. My Latin teacher said I had porridge for brains and that was an insult to porridge.”
“The man should be boiled in porridge,” she said. “Your brain is excellent! You must have a mental compendium of thousands and thousands of words.”
“Something like that,” he said gruffly. He shrugged, tossed back the rest of the whiskey, set the glass on the sill. But he was grinning.
“Boiled in porridge?” He pushed off the wall and came toward her, slowly, deliberately, the smile playing across his lips. His gaze was hot.
She spun to face her canvas, redirecting his attention. “You’ve got a good visual sense, clearly, if you’re sorting through all those word pictures. What do you think, then?”
She gestured to her canvas. She hadn’t yet solicited his comments, and he hadn’t offered any. He’d barely looked at the picture when he came and went. Respecting her privacy, she supposed.
She felt him close behind her.
“They’re confident little creatures,” he said. “Oddly contained. It’s interesting . . . you’ve taken out the garden altogether. They’re almost hanging in air.”
In her first versions, she’d made the figures smaller, painted in the background, the little domestic details. The bricks in the walls, the clothesline with its handkerchiefs. In this picture, she’d enlarged the figures and painted them against a dark, abstracted background, layering color until she produced the right shadowy burgundy, evocative of secrets.
“I want attention to focus on the girls, the world they’re creating,” she said. She risked a glance over her shoulder. Her stomach flipped. He knew nothing about art, but he was a keen and interested observer. Talking to him about her canvas felt natural. Until she looked at him. Then her mind emptied out.
“Don’t move,” she said. “I want to sketch you. May I? The light . . .”
The dimming sky, layered with cloud, cast a pearly light. The dome of the glasshouse looked like a pearl. His black hair and brows, his strong-boned face, stood out powerfully.
“Just your head,” she said breathlessly, scampering for her sketchbook and charcoals. She positioned herself a few feet away.
“Stay as you were,” she said. “Don’t smile.”
“I’ve been told I have a nice smile.” He tried to speak without moving his lips.
“I hadn’t noticed.” Her hand moved rapidly. The scratching of charcoal on paper was the only sound.
“I wouldn’t have broken that church window if the light were like this,” he said meditatively. He didn’t tilt his head, but he rolled his eyes up, trying to peer toward the dome.
“No?” She murmured it, shifting slightly, going over her lines, filling in the waves of hair.
“No,” he said. “The fog was thick that night, and the window was red, a screaming red. That’s how I felt when I saw it. It screamed at me. Red like artillery firing, metal so hot it smokes. I had to stop it.”
The bottom edges of his hair almost touched his collar. She sketched the lines of his shoulders.
“Is this what you told the magistrate?”
“The magistrate didn’t waste a minute on me. No, this is the first time I’ve spoken of it.”
“Blaming the color red,” she murmured. “The idea . . .”
The neck was a cylinder rising, at a slight forward incline, from the shoulder girdle. Important not to flatten it. She shaded the notch at the base, contoured the faint bump of the Adam’s apple, followed the muscles as they wrapped around the sides.
“Did it stop, the screaming?” she asked, shading with the broad face of the charcoal. “When you broke the window?”
“It did, but then the police officer started shouting.” The self-mockery was there again, in his voice. “If it was peace I was after, I should have chosen a different course of action.”
He rolled his shoulders, tossed the hair from his eyes. His whole posture shifted.
“Drat it,” he said. “Have I spoiled it?”
But she’d finished.
“Move at will.” She shut her sketchbook. A good drawing. She returned the sketchbook to the bench, brushing the charcoal from her fingers.
“It’s easy to talk to you.” He was grinning; she could hear it in his voice. She looked up with an eagerness she couldn’t disguise. That grin. Those eyes. But she saw his back instead. He’d wandered away. She watched as he poured out another glass of whiskey, her heart deflating. He gave her a sideways look, flashing a smile no less beautiful than the one she’d imagined.
“Light’s going,” he observed.
It was indeed, going fast. Soon, she’d be on her way home, to sew, to sleep, to wake and begin again.
“I have the mad idea,” he said, “to invite you to join me for dinner.”
Amazed, she folded her arms. Protests rose to her lips. She’d smudge the tablecloth with charcoal. She’d set all the servants’ tongues wagging, and someone might even challenge her to a smock race. She’d no idea what spoon one used to eat mock turtle soup.
All she said was: “Do it. Invite me.”
He spun in a circle, his glee contagious.
“Do you like salmon?” he asked. “Mutton? Duck?”
He reached for her, and she went breathlessly into his arms. His mouth tasted hot, of salt and peat.
“Turbot?” he murmured. Now his lips teased the sensitive spot behind her ear, found the hollow beneath her jaw.
“Turbot.” She repeated it doubtfully.
“Don’t decide. I’ll have Humphreys bring everything,” he said, releasing her and sweeping his jacket from the hook in almost the same movement. “You can see what strikes your fancy.”
She jammed her fist into her stomach, tried to keep her face expressionless, but he could see the change come over her. He shrugged into his jacket, eyebrows raised, half-inquiring, half-concerned.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.” She smoothed her skirt, which was burgundy and showed no smudges. “Nothing, I . . .”
She would not sulk like a child denied a pretty bauble. It wasn’t that she wanted to dine in Weston Hall, that cold, rather hideous house. Not at all. It was just . . .
To her horror, she found herself blinking back tears. Anthony was looking at her with something very like horror in his own eyes.
“You thought I meant dine at table,” he said. “Lucy, you know that would be beyond madness. After my birthday, after I inherit, of course . . .”
“Things will be different.” She interrupted him with a bright, false smile. He looked agonized and paced a few steps, back and forth.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said. Then he swore, lifted the whiskey bottle, and caught her gaze.
“That will be different, at least,” she said. “You will be able to drink at your table.”
Awareness prickled over her.
“Ah,” she said softly. “Is that why you wanted to dine with me here?” She was looking at the bottle.
How could she make this mistake? Her mother’s mistake. How could she choose him when he chose that?
“No.” He shook his head. The glasshouse dimmed, a cloud running across the lowering sun.
“I wanted to dine here because . . . it’s the only place we can be.” He loosed a breath. “Jesus. Maybe that didn’t come out right either.”
“Regardless, it’s an important reminder.” She began to move briskly, tidying away her supplies, setting her brushes to soak. The days left to paint her submission were dwindling. She couldn’t afford to waste them. Whereas he was simply marking time until his birthday.
“Reminder? What reminder?”
She would not make her mother’s mistake. She would not allow an affable, handsome, woefully damaged man to become the center of her life. Not when that man was a black hole into which she could pour her love, her talent, until she had nothing left. Not when she already knew what it was like, the particular hell of feeling lonely in company.
“There’s nowhere we can be.” She kept her voice level. “You can be here with your whiskey; I can be here with my painting. Let’s not confuse the issue. Elsewhere, well, there’s no confusion at all. You are a duke, and I am . . .” She curled her lip, baring her upper teeth.
She’d achieved nothing. Could claim nothing. Artist. Seamstress. Niece.
“Lucy.” He spoke into the sudden, brittle silence. “Dine with me. Here, this evening. I’m not drunk, for Christ’s sake. Don’t punish me.”
“Poor Anthony. Punished by all. How do you endure so much hardship? We should send the little children of Shoreditch to learn fortitude at your knee.”
His face shuttered. She’d hurt him. Good, she’d intended to. Better they distance themselves from each other now. When he was thirty and could drink wine at dinner in glittering company, then sip cognac with fellow lords in a smoke-filled sitting room, he was hardly likely to remember the woman who’d provided a bit of distraction in his hideaway.
“I believe my aunt is making a stew,” she said. “But thank you for the invitation.”
He let her walk past, the bottle still in his hand. It wasn’t dramatic, no. It was just a soap bubble bursting. Her heart gone flat.