Chapter 8
Thom arrived at the Bingley’s townhouse fully a quarter hour before the last sitting was intended to begin.
As he walked up the steps and rang the bell, he told himself that it need not be the last time he would do so.
Certainly, this would be the last sitting.
The painting was almost complete, and even had he wished to work on it for another session, he could not have done so.
If it was not completed today, the paint would not have sufficient time to dry before his showing.
Yet it need not be his last visit to the house. Surely he could consider each of the Bingleys a friend now. Mrs Bingley was his first patron among the ton, and Charles Bingley as good a fellow as ever lived.
And Caroline Bingley…if they could not be anything more to each other, surely they could at least remain friends. Perhaps they might never again have this unrestrained closeness. She would marry one day, surely, and must then devote her time and her confidences to her husband.
If that thought sent a pang through his heart, he told himself it was selfish to feel so. He wished her happy, and certainly she could not be so with him. It was therefore better that she should find happiness with someone else.
He only hoped it might be with someone who saw her real worth. Caroline Bingley would be dreadfully unhappy if she married a man who did not understand her, or did not care to.
When he was shown into the music room, Caroline was not yet there. “Miss Bingley will be down shortly, sir,” the servant informed him.
“Thank you. Perhaps you might pass on the message that there is no call for her to rush. I will need to arrange my supplies in any case.”
He bowed. “Very good, sir.”
In fact, it seemed mere moments before Caroline was sweeping into the room. “I am sorry to keep you waiting, Mr Northville,” she said archly.
“Not at all,” he replied. “I believe I am the early one.”
“You are not so eager to be done with me, I hope,” she said teasingly. “Beginning our last sitting early, so you may be rid of me all the sooner?”
“Far from it,” he replied. He hesitated a moment, deciding whether to give the compliment she so clearly wished. He would not have begrudged giving it to her. Only he was rather afraid he could not say anything without saying too much.
But in the end, he could deny Caroline Bingley nothing she truly wished. “If my earliness can be ascribed to anything other than mere accident, I suppose it must be to my eagerness to see you again. These sittings have meant a great deal to me. I shall be sorry when we no longer meet in this way.”
For a moment only, she was taken aback. Her eyes widened, and she seemed at a loss for words in the face of such sincerity.
“So shall I,” she said at last, her voice low. Thom waited for a long moment, expecting the confession to be followed by some quip or witticism, but it was not. With true bravery, she let the words stand.
But of course they must not say too much. That path led to disaster. “Shall we begin?” Caroline asked after a little pause. “I am quite ready whenever you wish.”
“Yes, I should like that,” Thom agreed. “The light is ideal now.”
After so many sittings, they were both tolerably well-versed in the process. Caroline settled into her pose, capturing each nuance perfectly, from the gesture of the hand to the tilt of her head.
“Very good,” Thom murmured. “Now, the expression. Think your complicated thoughts, Miss Bingley.”
Her smile broadened for a moment at his mild witticism, then returned to the posed expression. With as much clarity as the difference between a lit candle and an unlit, he could see the moment when she abandoned herself to the thoughts that gave her such an interesting expression.
He had not quite captured it, not yet, but it must be today or never.
There was something in the eyes, some twitch of the mouth, that expressed the full enchantment of her.
If he could have her in no other way, he could have her like this, expressed in oils and brushstrokes.
Caroline Bingley in all her majesty must have a place on his canvas, if he could not give her a place by his side — or, at least, not a place that any sensible woman would want.
They spoke little. Thom would ordinarily have exerted himself to entertain a model sitting for him, but it was obvious Caroline did not need it. She was as rapt in concentration as he, unmoving, almost unblinking. He could hardly see her breathe.
She was marvellously controlled, marvellously disciplined. When Caroline Bingley set out to do a thing, it would be done, if it was at all within her power.
And he was utterly, irrevocably in love with her.
When Thom at last put his brush down, the light had changed significantly with the sun’s movement through the sky. But it no longer mattered. The painting was complete.
Caroline knew it too, though he could not have said how. “You are done, then?” she said inquiringly. “Shall we have some tea? I have grown quite thirsty, and I am sure you must be as well.”
“Thank you, I should like that,” Thom told her. Perhaps it was cowardly of him, but he would treasure every moment he could have with her, knowing them to be all too few.
Though he had rather expected Caroline to lead him to the drawing room, she surprised him by ringing the bell and calling for tea to be brought. She sat at the small table on the far side of the room and gestured for him to do likewise.
She must have read his surprise on his face. “Much as I like having tea with my sister-in-law, Mr Northville, I have enjoyed our private conversations. And with no more sittings, we will not have the opportunity for many more.”
“No,” he agreed. “We shall not. And I feel much the same myself. Their absence shall be a great loss to me.”
“You must continue to visit here,” she said quietly. “You will be very welcome. To Mrs Bingley, as well as to myself.”
“You are very kind, but I would not wish to intrude,” he said. “I do not typically attend visiting hours, for I cannot pretend to be part of London’s elite.”
“Your birth entitles you to be considered a gentleman, surely,” she protested.
“My birth, perhaps. But I think I have lost any right to that, given my profession.”
She looked at him with surprising firmness. “I shall not argue with you. I shall only tell you that you will always be welcome here, and not only by me.”
“Thank you,” he replied, unwilling to protest further, and fell silent. It was too near what he wanted. Too near an invitation to believing himself still a gentleman, and a gentleman who might be worthy of speaking to such a lady.
But he knew better. It was not entirely impossible. Some women in the ton would doubtless be happy to purchase a handsome baron’s son with their dowries; even one as unfashionable as himself. If a woman was without personal ambitions of her own, it need not really matter.
Caroline Bingley was not an unambitious woman.
He could not resent it. What was there for a woman to do but to marry as well as she could, and what fool would blame her for choosing not to marry far below herself?
Of course she was ambitious; it was very nearly the first thing he had learned about her.
And so it was his part not to selfishly drag her down, or trap her in a marriage that would preclude everything she really wanted.
He would not embarrass them both with words of love that, if Caroline felt the same, could do nothing more than burden her with refusing him or chain her into a life of regret.
“I believe it is exactly a week until the showing, is it not?” Caroline remarked.
“Yes. It is good that I was able to complete your portrait today, or the oils would not have had time to dry.”
“I am surprised it will take so long.”
“In fact,” he told her, “the painting may take six months to be truly dry. A week is only enough for the surface layer to be dry to the touch.”
She nodded, looking surprised, but said nothing. He raised the teacup to his lips.
“Are you very nervous?” Caroline asked him after a little hesitation. “I know how much it will mean for your career.”
“Dreadfully,” he admitted. “It is not only ambition. Perhaps you will think me arrogant. But I like all my own work so well that it is difficult to think that others might view it without seeing what I do. It is that that weighs on me, more than the prospect of future failure or success.”
“No, I do not think that is arrogance,” she replied. Her voice was unusually quiet, almost too low to hear. “That is the most difficult of all, to be sure. To offer up what you have made, and to have it rejected.”
He looked at her in surprise. “You seem almost to speak from experience, Miss Bingley.”
“I could not claim to. When have I done anything, really? I suppose you only made me remember things from when I was a girl. It is of no matter.”
“I do not think I believe that,” Thom murmured. “But whether it is of much matter or not, I would be honoured if you would share it with me.”
She waved a hand as though to say it was really nothing. Thom looked at her in silence, smiling gently in what was half a dare and half an earnest request to unburden herself.
“Oh, very well,” Caroline said, relenting.
“When I was first learning the pianoforte, I tried to make up little songs of my own. I am sure they were very bad. It would be too much to expect that anyone should listen to them with patience. But when I played them for my mother and she told me to stop wasting my time, I was rather hurt, all the same. And I did stop wasting my time with such foolishness after that. What was I thinking, to imagine I could compose music — and me only a little girl!”
“What a shame,” Thom murmured, wishing that he might say more.
Wishing that the nature of their relationship might allow him to offer better comfort.
For all Caroline attempted to play it off as though it were nothing, offering him a brave smile that wavered only a little, it was obvious she had been deeply hurt.
“I am very sorry,” he went on. “Both because I am sure it hurt dreadfully, and because I should have liked to hear your compositions. I am sure I would have found them of great interest.”
He surprised a laugh from her. “You are too generous. They were nothing, I assure you.”
“But they were yours,” Thom said. “I would have found them interesting for that reason alone. As it is, I have never even heard you play, and I should dearly like to.”
“Well, then,” she said brightly, as though she wished to put an end to their too-emotional conversation, “I shall play for you now, if you truly wish it.”
“I do,” he replied steadily. Though courtesy would hardly have permitted another answer, Thom was in truth eager to hear her play. A woman’s performance on the pianoforte was always revealing, be it of her thoughts, her feelings — her dedication or lack thereof, if nothing else.
If he knew Caroline Bingley, she did not lack dedication.
The piece she chose was quick and complicated, the notes spiralling to dizzying heights. Thom almost lost himself watching her play. As the song went on, Mr and Mrs Bingley came to the door to listen, sitting quietly on the sofa at the far side of the room.
When the piece at last came to an end, Caroline seemed surprised to receive applause, and from three sets of hands, at that. She turned to face them and gave a little bow, half mocking.
“You are all too good, to be sure.”
“Not at all,” Mrs Bingley said, before Thom could offer the praise that he too felt to be richly her due.
“I think your skill has only grown of late, Caroline. You were always one of the most accomplished women of my acquaintance, but I think your playing has changed. There is something new in it, something that I like better than ever.”
Caroline smiled crookedly. “Of everyone I know, Jane, you might be the only one who could guess what it is.”
“I am sure I could not,” Mrs Bingley said hastily. “Unless — you changed instructors recently, did you not? Perhaps it is having a new London instructor.”
“No, not at all,” Caroline replied. “It is merely some good advice I received — that I ought to play not for any recognition I might receive, but for the music itself.”
The conversation went on into other channels, but Thom could not seem to hear it. He was utterly caught in the moment of hearing those words from her lips, those words which so entirely captured the work of his life.
It could not last forever. He would have to make his polite excuses and go, for there was much to be done.
He only would have liked to stay there forever, in the moment where he was entirely consumed by love of Caroline Bingley.