A paper doll couldn’t have squeezed into the Schools through the throng. Students clustered in the roadway, talking excitedly. Lucy’s hand tightened on the strap of her bag, and she almost pivoted, ready to run for Piccadilly. Then she chided herself as a twit and a spoilsport.
This was Kate’s day. Nothing would sully it. If the wave of excitement crashing through her churned up darker feelings—envy, self-pity—she would simply wait until that sediment settled.
She stood, searching the crowd. Red-faced larvae wiggled into knots of older boys, eager for inside information. The pinafores made their own groupings, throwing hopeful glances over their shoulders. Redcliffe Davis and Thomas Ponsonby held languorous court by the entrance, puffing cigars, Davis’s sapphire earring twinkling through the smoke.
It was always like this, confusing and exhilarating, when the first rumors concerning the Hanging Committee’s decisions broke. She’d known it was coming, if not today, tomorrow. The Hanging Committee took only five days to go through the oils, another five for the watercolors.
Where was Kate? Lucy felt a clear bubble of hope rising in her chest. No need to wait any longer. If the news was good, she could share her friend’s happiness without a particle of reservation.
She saw larvae ripple and scatter, and then she saw Kate, shoving through them, grinning so hard it seemed her face would crack as she ran to Lucy, almost bowling her over. Her fierce hug held her upright.
“Tell me!” Lucy gasped then laughed at the impact. “You had a picture accepted?”
“Two.” Kate let her go to spin in a circle, arms upraised. “And so did Gwen, although we don’t know yet where they’ll be hung. But, Lucy”—she swept one of her arms out, a capacious gesture, taking in the whole chattering assembly—“everyone is talking about you.”
As if on cue, Lucy felt a tap on her shoulder. A curly-haired blond man of about forty had come up behind her and stood with a little pad of paper. His smile was toothy and ingratiating.
“You’re Lucy Coover, I take it?” he said, pencil already scratching.
“No interviews!” Kate crowed. “Unless . . . are you with the Art Journal?”
“The Herald.” The man did a double take, eyes darting from Kate’s gray fedora down to her fawn-colored trousers. Kate made a face, steering Lucy away.
“Don’t waste yourself on him. We’ll hold out for a real critic, like Alan De’Ath. Wouldn’t that be cracking? An essay by De’Ath!” She took off her hat, screamed into it, then replaced it on her head at a jauntier angle.
“Cracking,” Lucy agreed without comprehending. She glanced over Kate’s shoulder, then to the left, to the right.
People were staring. Not at Kate. At her.
When the articles about Lady Euphemia had appeared in the papers, Lucy had feared that she and Kate would be mentioned as well, but she’d since put those worries aside. The asylum staff had drugged them both too heavily for preliminary questioning, and Jephson had never gotten the chance to conduct his investigation. No one had learned their names.
But perhaps some new information had come to light? Or—her next thought made her face flame—was some bit of gossip going the rounds, linking her to Anthony’s broken engagement?
Miss Yardley had broken it, so the story went. After the latest scandal, she’d thought better of connecting herself to a family so thoroughly besmirched.
Maude’s version—which she’d recited to Susan and Constance loudly, the three of them in a huddle behind Lucy’s easel—was, predictably, more shocking, including a new marriage proposal, from an impoverished Welshman, which Miss Yardley had secretly accepted.
If it were true—a very big if—Lucy supposed Miss Yardley was either following a wild impulse of the heart, as Maude implied, or heeding the call for self-preservation. She knew that her family name would soon be blotted with an indelible stain of its own. Escaping to Wales with a husband, however humble, was perhaps her best option.
“Spill it,” Lucy said to Kate tersely. “What are they saying about me?”
“Saying?” Kate capered. “They’re saying you’re a genius, but I say you’re a damn liar. I should dissolve the Sisterhood on principle, but I can’t, not now, when we’ve done it, Lucy. We’ve done it!”
“This isn’t about me and Anthony?” Her blush, which had subsided, fired her cheeks anew at the phrase.
Me and Anthony. He hadn’t renewed his proposal since that night in the coach. Giving her time, she supposed. Or changing his mind.
In any event, he’d been occupied settling his legal affairs, traveling between London and Hampshire, and they’d only seen each other briefly.
The effectiveness of his statecraft, however, was very much in evidence. A medical inspector had come last week to Charlotte Road, a young, rail-thin doctor, Dr. Penn, who’d crawled over every inch of the properties before hopping onto a barrel in the back court to denounce, roundly, the city’s swindlers and the vestry’s pothouse factions to a crowd of tenants who made the air rattle with their cheers. At one point, he’d yelled out that sanitary improvement, until reformed, could be nothing but the car of juggernaut, a phrase Aunt Marian had repeated admiringly for days afterward.
A few of the older Cantrell children, along with a few borough lads always up for mischief, had ripped down the notices, and no bill poster had appeared to stick them up again.
The buildings were saved.
“You and Anthony,” repeated Kate musingly. “It will be, in part, about Weston, yes, and that will be very interesting indeed.” She managed to keep still as she answered, still grinning. “But the Hanging Committee didn’t notice. They were too walloped! Imagine them—bored to tears, lulled half to sleep under their lap rugs by the seven hundredth piteous picture of a Yorkshire seaport. And then, behold! Endymion!”
Lucy heard her own heartbeat in her ears.
Kate clapped her hands. “I heard from Davis, who heard from a porter that there was applause when the foreman brought it out. The president said it’s as good as the best myth painting by Burne-Jones.”
Later, she would remember this moment—she would always remember it—how the world reorganized itself around her, the roadway changing, the Schools, the galleries, everything glowing with possibility.
“You swore to me that he destroyed it!” Kate hugged her again. “What am I going to do with you? You’re a monster, but I love you, and your picture is going to hang on the line!”
She shouted at the sky. Anyone who hadn’t been looking was looking now.
“Do you know why else I can’t dissolve the Sisterhood?”
Kate swept off her hat and fanned herself with it, waiting for Lucy’s reply. But Lucy could only blink at her.
“Because we’re a proper Circle now. As soon as I heard we were all exhibiting, I marched right up to Gwen and laid it all out, gave her no quarter. You need us, and we need you, I told her, and she agreed! We must write a better manifesto. That’s the first order of business. Something to goad the critics. Gwen will help enormously, don’t you think? Where is she?”
She scanned the dense crowd.
“I told her I was going to look for you and that she should come find us. Oh well. She probably ran off to hide in the library. I suppose that’s fine. I’ll be the radical. You’ll be the romantic. And she’ll be the obscure. We’ll make it work for us. Still, I wish I could figure her out.”
Lucy shrugged, as if in agreement, although she’d already figured out two things. One, that Gwen had lost at least some portion of her hearing, and two, that Gwen wasn’t yet ready to share that fact.
“Give her time,” she said, suddenly pensive; then she scowled at Kate. “And what’s this about the romantic and the obscure? Each Sister determines her own character, thank you very much.”
The romantic. Indeed. But, actually, maybe . . . it fit. Heavens above, all of her passions had arrived.
She knocked Kate’s hat out of her hands, unable to restrain herself. She felt as giddy as a child, laughing as Kate tried to catch the hat and batted it instead, so it bounced off of a passing larva.
She couldn’t focus on Gwen, on the Sisterhood, on anything but the electrified field immediately surrounding her body, that strange glow of realized potential, of the future arriving.
She was going to show in the Summer Exhibition, show her very best, her most daring and obsessive picture, painted at the very limit of her technique.
Anthony hadn’t destroyed it. He’d preserved it, framed it, submitted it on her behalf. He’d trusted her talent. He’d tried, since she’d known him, to do the right thing, and failed, and tried again. He’d kept his promises.
He’d asked her to marry him, and she hadn’t said yes.
“Now where are you going?” called Kate, rising, slapping her hat against her trousers to knock the dust off.
But Lucy had hiked her skirts to speed her pace and she was already turning onto Piccadilly.
Anthony was standing in the back garden, pausing to drop his watch back into his pocket, when an unexpected sight met his eyes: Lucy, running full tilt down the camellia walk.
She threw down her bag, then bent over sharply, one hand on her hip, the other arm under her ribs. It took a moment for her to unfold. Her hair was a windblown halo. And yet, the wind didn’t gust. The day was exceedingly still.
How far had she run at that speed to produce such disorder?
Anthony took a step closer. “Is there a fire?”
Her face was flushed with color, cheeks rosy beneath the constellations of freckles. Sweaty curls stuck to her temples. Her lilac dress was hopelessly rumpled. She looked ravishing.
“You could have come to the front door,” he said. “I have a new butler, and the footmen, as you know, like to race.”
“I’m used to coming this way,” she panted. “My feet carried me. What—what are you doing here?”
She straightened up, the slightest shadow of apprehension dimming her expression.
“I was in the stables mixing ale into an elderly thoroughbred’s water trough.” He grinned. “He needs the fortification.” The only alcohol in the back garden these days went to Snap. “I have a meeting soon, though, with Mr. Purinton, my solicitor.” Finally, he’d hired a lawyer of his own. A young man with level brows, right-minded and methodical, who, best of all, had never met his father or Robert Yardley. “He lodged the caveat against the validity of both my father’s codicils in the court. He wants to discuss news—good news, I believe—about the proceedings.”
She looked a question. He felt as though he’d never seen her eyes before. Lit by the sun, they were the color of some fantastical liquor, a mixture of malted lilies, bulrushes, and gorse.
“You found it, then. The alternate will.” She hesitated. “The one in which your father made an heir of a hunting dog.”
“Humphreys found it,” he said. “Stuffed in the ottoman. Not a valid document, of course. Signed without witnesses. But dated, and clearly demonstrating that my father suffered delusions at the time he amended his legal will.”
It hadn’t been a pleasant read, that single sheet of paper, the angular script going jagged in numerous places, words crossed out, sentences begun and abandoned. Their father referred to Effie only once, as my daughter who died shortly after my son and heir, and to Anthony twice, once as the young idiot and once as that young idiot and coward.
He drew strength from Lucy’s brilliant eyes, and he continued.
“The larger paragraph is devoted to incoherent accusations.” He shook his head.
You children are my ruination. His father’s words no longer struck him as a prophecy, but as the pitiable invective of a bitter man who had lashed out instead of looking inward. Neither his father nor his mother determined his destiny. He didn’t bear the blame for their shattered lives. But his life, his commitments, his choices, his love—he fashioned these himself, bit by bit, every day.
The morning sun shone brighter, warm rays caressing his neck. Lucy was looking at him with peculiar understanding, as though she could read his thoughts.
He wanted to fashion his life with her. Live with her, fully.
“He’d come to fear Yardley.” He said it softly. “Mr. Purinton is confident that we’ll win at trial, pleading undue influence and suspicious circumstances. Neither codicil will stand. My father’s solicitors will turn on Yardley to protect their own reputations.”
His inheritance would be finalized. Due to George’s decease, he was his father’s principal beneficiary, all of the real estate devised to him, and the money as well, excepting Effie’s annuity, and a few small bequests to assorted pecuniary legatees and charities.
No trust. No conditions.
She kept watching him. He liked it, the feeling that she could see all of him, even the dark spots.
“There will be a scramble,” he said. “Everyone trying to exonerate himself and point the finger elsewhere. But for Yardley . . .” He shook his head. “There’s no way out. Undue influence is the least of it.”
He’d gone to Hampshire—a long journey for two nights, but he’d needed to interrogate the estate manager in person. Just as he’d suspected, the figures in Cruitshank’s ledgers didn’t match the figures Yardley had presented him. The rents in the village had gone up; Yardley was skimming the difference off the top.
“I’m charging him with embezzlement.” He smiled briefly. The freedom he’d won was public and ugly, and not without losses, but worth it all the same. He waved his hand, a gesture that took in the glasshouse, the back garden. His purgatory. “It’s over.”
Even in the brightening day, her face darkened.
“Over?” She tried to smile, an unfathomable hurt lurking in her eyes. Suddenly, he fathomed it. Lord, he was still a fool.
“I’m beginning again,” he said. “I want you with me. Not just there.” He glanced at the glasshouse. “Everywhere.”
He caught her hands and she grasped them, her fingers slippery with sweat. Suddenly, her smile was real. Huge. Heart-stopping.
“You didn’t destroy it,” she said. “You submitted it, my picture.”
Ah. Could it be? The Hanging Committee had made their decision, and it had been favorable. His breath caught.
“I couldn’t.” He laughed, the sound startling him. Surely, he hadn’t made a sound like that since he was a boy, a sound of unadulterated joy. “I’d already shattered a stained-glass window. I couldn’t put a blade or a flame to that canvas. Some talents are so great even boors and philistines can see them for what they are.”
“Anthony.” Her eyes searched his. “People will recognize your face.”
“My face?” he said wryly. He would never weary of her blushes. The way the blood rose to the surface of her skin, staining her cheeks, her throat, her breasts—that delicate movement captured his attention fully. Held it. “After the Summer Exhibition, all of London will recognize a good deal more than that.”
“You’ll be in the papers.” She looked uneasy.
“Good,” he said. “I hope I’m in every paper. Because you are getting the attention you deserve as an artist.”
“There will be talk . . .” She twined her fingers more tightly around his. “About . . .” She hesitated. “Us.”
“Us?” He repeated it, delighted. “I suppose so. Scandalous talk.”
She was staring at him, waiting for something. The pressure she exerted on his fingers was becoming painful. He raised his eyebrows.
“Count on me.” She cleared her throat. “That’s what you said. You said count on me. I wasn’t sure if I could. It felt dangerous. I didn’t want to lose myself . . .”
“Get sucked down into the bottomless pit? Understandable.” He exhaled. “You have a precious self. I will lift her up. As high as the moon.” He smiled. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said count on me.”
Her lips parted, a line forming between her brows.
“Count on us,” he said, pulling her closer. “Count on what we can do together.”
She smiled, wiggled her hand free, and stepped back, combing at her hair. The effort changed nothing. She still looked wild. Lovely. Rare. His heart hurt, it felt so full. She linked her fingers, and again, he had the impression that she was waiting.
He rocked on his heels, uncertain. A bird twittered in the cherry tree. Her smile was becoming a grimace.
“Idiot,” she muttered, and he blinked.
“Ask me,” she hissed. “I ran all this way to answer. I got six stitches in my side so I could be here as quickly as I possibly could to say yes, you imbecile. Yes.”
“Oh, well then.” He could take a hint. If it was put to him very, very clearly. He stepped forward and swept her up into his arms.
She felt his lips in her hair, his arms tight around her. She rocked with him as he walked.
She felt a blast of heated air. He’d carried her into the glasshouse.
“Lucy Coover,” he said, setting her on the marble bench so she stood above him.
She heard the new note in his voice, and her own throat closed.
“Will you marry me?” he asked.
She’d run all this way to answer, and now she couldn’t speak. She tried—it was futile—to push the lump down. The pause lengthened. He scratched his neck, heaved a sigh.
“You don’t make this easy,” he told her. She worked her throat again. God above. She pressed her hands to her neck to signal that she was too filled up—with emotion, with love—to force out a single word. But he’d linked his hands behind his back and was searching the shining glass dome for inspiration.
“I won’t rush you,” he said. “If you’ve decided you need more time to answer, I’ll ask again, next week. Next month. Next year. When we marry, if I don’t presume too much . . .”
At that she managed a giddy sound, not very ladylike, akin to a grunt. He glanced at her, a corner of his mouth lifting.
“When we marry, we’ll go first thing to Hampshire. During my recent visit, I assessed every room in Stratton Grange. The morning room will be your studio. There’s a whole wall of east-facing windows, and the light streams in across the meadow. Hampshire is abundant with cows, but I will protect you. As you know, I fear no cow on earth.”
Laughter loosened her throat.
“Aye, you’re a bold one,” she said. His grin was widening.
“The country air will do Mr. Malkin good. Revivify his fighting spirit. Your aunt needs no such revivifying. But I think she’ll like Stratton Grange.”
“Aunt Marian!” Lucy clapped her hands. “She doesn’t know yet! God save me, I’ve got to tell her at once.”
“About your picture showing in the Summer Exhibition? Or about our wedding?” He caught her waist, swung her in a circle. She slid down his chest, heels hitting the floor. His voice was teasing in her ear.
“You didn’t answer,” he said. “Or you did, before, but it was all out of order. One more time? Lucy Coover . . .”
She stepped back and looked into his face.
“Will you marry me?” he asked, eyes glowing.
“Yes,” she said instantly. And then she said it again, yes, but their mouths merged and yes mingled with the rushing of her quickened blood. He broke the kiss.
“I have something for you,” he said, almost skipping to the marble bench. “I made it before I had the money to buy you all I want to buy you. Easels, canvases, canvas supports, pigments, oils, varnishes, a paint box, a traveling chest . . .”
She shook her head, mind reeling. Did he still think money was her motivation? But he was grinning with boyish excitement as he turned.
“Here,” he said and handed her something plain, dark. A wooden oval, smooth and oiled, the curves graceful, a little circle cut out for her thumb.
“A palette?” She took it, fit it to her hand and arm. She ran her fingers over the sanded edge. Her stomach was fluttering.
“I needed something to do with my hands,” he said. “Those were . . . difficult . . . days.”
She nodded slowly, heat pricking behind her eyes. Difficult days he’d struggled with drink, that devil that he was learning to keep at bay.
Their story—his and hers—it would not be her parents’ story. They’d write their own story. It wouldn’t be a perfect fairy tale, pure happiness and light. It would be hard, complicated, real.
Now the tears were running down her cheeks. She had to do something with all this feeling. She turned on her heel and ran from the glasshouse. She heard him shout her name, confused, but she was back in a flash, bag braced against her hip. She lowered it to the ground, set the palette beside it, that most humble and heartfelt of gifts. She could already picture it smeared with every color of the rainbow.
“Take off your clothes,” she said. “A reclining nude is well and good, but I have a new idea. I want you upright.”
Her corpse, not a corpse at all. A living, breathing man, standing mere feet away, looking at her, eyes wide-open, green and filled with life. His life and her life too.
He lowered his head, fingers busy with buttons. Her breath caught as he opened his shirt, and he heard it, looked up, and grinned as he kicked out of his trousers. His watch had fallen from his pocket, and they both saw it wink in the light. They glanced at each other in agreement.
Everything else could wait.
She pulled her sketchbook from her bag, turned the pencil around and around in her fingers. Where to start? She loved all of him. Every line, every curve. She smiled, thinking of the time that stretched before them. She’d start here today, there tomorrow.
She pressed her pencil lead to the page.