Chapter 4
As the door to the Bingley townhouse closed behind them, Thom and Edwards looked at each other and began to laugh, in the absence of any joke but the sudden release of tension.
“Well, you have it!” Edwards said at last, when they had regained their control.
“Everything you wished, and more besides! I thought you were done for, for a second there. Bingley is a friendly fellow, but not lax with his responsibilities. If Mrs Bingley had not taken a liking to the painting, I fear he might have refused you. Now at least you have a proper chance. Shall we go and have a drink to celebrate?”
“Gladly,” Thom agreed, falling into step with his friend.
Without the need for speech, they turned toward the club.
“And to sell a painting, too! This is the first time I have sold one to a member of the ton. Merchants pay just as well, but they are less helpful in setting a fashion. And that is what I will need in order to make any tolerable amount of money at it.”
Edwards raised an imaginary glass. “To the ton, to the fulfilment of art, and to making a tolerable amount of money.”
They were seated at their usual table in their club and into a second glass before they returned to the topic of the visit.
“Well, that was a satisfactory amount of success for one day,” Edwards said with a satisfied smile.
“It was indeed, and I owe you my thanks,” Thom told him.
“Perhaps it is foolish of me, but I could not be entirely at my ease without at least attempting a painting of Miss Bingley. I think she will be the making of me — my Mona Lisa, if you will forgive me an arrogant comparison far beyond anything I could deserve.”
Edwards was looking at him rather oddly. “I hope I am deserving of your thanks. In truth, I am not quite certain of it.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
Edwards was silent for a long moment. “I do not mean to offend you,” he said at last.
“I am sure you will not, but I would be grateful if you were to explain yourself in any case. At the moment, you puzzle me unbearably.” Thom huffed out a heavy breath.
“Indeed, Edwards, I do not think you need be particularly concerned. Surely I have never been one to seek out a cause for offense where none was intended.”
“No, indeed you have not,” his friend agreed.
“Very well, then. I thought only to warn you against falling in love with Miss Bingley. It would be a natural enough thought. It is already more than apparent that you like her looks, and her dowry would be enough to support you comfortably. But you must not think of it. She has never made any bones about her ambitions. All the ton knew she was intent on Darcy, until he married his present wife. She might consider marrying a man without much money, if his connections were very good in the fashionable world, or perhaps a merely respectable man, if his estate were sufficiently impressive, but you have neither. Miss Bingley will never consider you. Anyone who is anyone in London could tell you that. I am sorry to speak so, but I think it better that you should know at once. You are too good a friend for me to view the prospect of your heartbreak with complacence.”
Blunt as they were, Edwards’s words were not intended to hurt him. Yet they did hurt, and more than Thom would have guessed. It was absurd of him, he knew. He had no such intentions towards the lady, and it was only reasonable that she would not consider him, and that Edwards would warn him of it.
Thom did not choose to speak of his unreasonable hurt. “I think you warned me of this before, Edwards, but you needn’t. My father would certainly be pleased, if I married Miss Bingley,” he said instead, with heavy irony, “and you know I could not bear to please my father.”
As he had hoped, Edwards laughed at this. “How is the old demon, at that?”
“I have not seen him in some time, at his request,” Thom told him drily, “but I hear he is considering a fourth wife.”
Edwards shook his head. “Poor woman.”
“Yes, indeed. But let us talk of better things.”
When their meeting at last broke up, Thom said his farewells to his friend and left in a strange mood. He ought to have been elated at the success of their meeting with the Bingleys, and he supposed he was. It was the mention of his father, likely, that had led to such lowness.
Thom had heard of the love and support that family was expected to offer but, after the death of his mother when he was seven years of age, had never experienced it for himself.
He could not much blame his older half-brothers for their disinclination to consider himself truly one of them.
The Baron of Ramsbury had his heir, his spare, and another spare, and when his wife had then died, he thought to marry again for the purpose of amusing himself.
With his heirs and his place in the world so firmly established, it was not necessary to marry for wealth or status, and so he had selected Mary Simmons, a woman of no family connections, no money, and quite astonishing personal beauty.
She had agreed to the match, for however undesirable the baron might have been as a husband in other respects, her prospects were few, and could not have been expected to extend to the nobility even in her family’s wildest dreams. Thom did not know whether the marriage had ever been happy.
By the time of his earliest memories, it was so no longer, if it ever had been.
Then his mother had died, leaving him the odd one out among a father and three older half-brothers who would rather not consider him one of them at all.
It seemed that to them, a half sibling was no relation at all.
And while Thom might wish to consider the matter otherwise, he could not begrudge them their choice.
His father had never thought much of him, and had only ever wished not to be obligated on his behalf.
The idea of supporting him in so idiosyncratic a profession was obviously impossible.
Having his mother’s looks, he ought to do as his mother had done, and purchase his daily comforts through marriage to a wealthier partner willing to overlook his lack of prospects.
His father had made that quite clear, but Thom had no intention of complying. In his mother’s life and his own, he had seen all too clearly what such comforts might cost. If a poor man in comparison to his father and his brothers, he was at least free.
That poverty was more than apparent in Thom’s garret apartment, but if he noticed how very cold and cheerless it was on a freezing day at the end of the year, he gave no sign of it. With the showing scant weeks away, there was no time to think of anything else.
The painting he had sold to Mrs Bingley might solve more than one problem for him.
Perhaps most importantly, it would pay his rent, which would otherwise have been a serious concern.
If that sale was all he hoped, it might be the beginning of his ultimate success.
With luck, Mrs Darcy might like the painting nearly as well as her sister had indicated.
That would lead to showing it to other ladies, and talking of the artist. The Darcys were popular, and their opinions were of significant weight.
If Elizabeth Darcy were to become a kind of patron to him, it might be enough to ensure his success, however well or badly the exhibit went.
Mrs Bingley had helped him in yet another way.
In her suggestion that the painting captured her sister’s spirit, she had given him an idea.
The painting he had sold was intended for a small nook in the viewing room, one which might almost be overlooked.
In one sense, he need not put anything there, and yet Thom did not really consider this.
The space offered intimacy, closeness, a natural pause in the flow of the crowd.
Placing a work, and not only that, but the right work, there was an opportunity not to be missed.
Having moved his paintings for the exhibit into a line across the long end of the room, Thom dragged a chair to face them and sat down in it.
Though, he thought wryly to himself, it was perhaps a wasted effort. Having spent many hours of his life on each, he could see each other paintings with equal clarity, regardless of whether his eyes were open or closed. He sat and gazed at them all the same, unseeing.
The painting to go there ought to be a kind of hidden key to the exhibit. Now it was not quite right — not with the painting he intended to add. There must be something else, something that captured the uniqueness of Caroline.
With a sudden shock, Thom realised he was thinking of her by her first name. That was a dangerous precedent, for it would not do to dress her so informally aloud. He ought to have been horrified at himself even for thinking it.
He could not pretend that he was. There had been a kind of intimacy between them even at a first meeting, a clarity of vision and purpose.
It could not change into anything society would see as real, of course.
All the world stood between them. Her very natural ambitions made any other connection impossible, just as his worthlessness did. His own choices had made sure of that.
Where his father had urged an advantageous marriage on him as the solution to the classic problem of a younger son, his elder brothers had more practical solutions.
Harry had joined the navy, and John the church.
He ought to do something similar, for dabbling in paints was no career for a gentleman.
He had not argued with them. How could he, when they were right? Only he could not seem to give up painting, either. The brush in his hand was as much a part of him as the hand itself.
And if that meant that he would spend his days cold and penniless, if that meant that no reasonable gentlewoman would marry him, so be it. As he could not do otherwise, he would accept his fate.
A sudden thought came to him. Thom snatched up his sketchbook and charcoal and began scribbling furiously.
He would paint the essence of the scene anew, but from a fresh perspective — from reimagining his wood nymph as Caroline Bingley.
She would not be shyly hiding behind a tree, to be sure.
No, she would stand proudly in the scene.
He would have to use tricks of perspective and leading the eye to achieve the same effect of having the viewer notice her only after looking closely at the picture.
Nor would she be in a peaceful grove. No, Caroline Bingley would be somewhere full of people, very much in the scene and a part of it, yet separate at the same time.
She would look most natural in a ballroom.
He would paint her there, well back in the throng.
Alone of all the attendees, she would look directly out of the canvas at you — that would be the joke and the trick of it, the thing that showed her remarkable complexity.
And she would be beautiful, the most beautiful of all…
Heedless of the time, Thom sketched deep into the night.