Chapter Three
"Your perspective is slightly odd."
"I am aware that my perspective is slightly odd, Lillian. That is why the tree appears to be falling over."
"It is not falling over. It is merely... leaning. With great enthusiasm."
Lady Rosanne set down her paintbrush and fixed Lillian with a look of exasperated affection.
Two weeks had passed since their first tea together, and in that time, Lillian had become a regular visitor to Wynthorpe Hall.
Frequent enough that the staff no longer announced her arrival, simply nodding their welcome as she made her way to whichever room Rosanne had claimed for the day's activities.
Today, that room was the morning parlor, where the light came in soft and golden through the east-facing windows and the air smelled faintly of linseed oil and turpentine.
Lillian had offered to teach Rosanne watercolors, and Rosanne had accepted with the sort of desperate enthusiasm that suggested previous artistic instruction had not gone well.
She had been right to be desperate. Rosanne painted with more passion than precision, attacking the paper with bold strokes that owed more to determination than technique. The results were distinctive.
"You are being diplomatic," Rosanne accused. "The tree is terrible. The entire painting is terrible. I have somehow managed to create a landscape that looks as though it is suffering from a digestive complaint."
Lillian examined the painting in question; a view of the gardens from the morning parlor window, rendered in watercolors that had achieved a curious muddy quality despite starting out as perfectly respectable pigments.
"It is not terrible," she said carefully. "It simply requires refinement."
"That is exactly what my last painting master said. Right before he resigned his position and fled to Cornwall."
"I am sure Cornwall was merely a coincidence."
"He specifically cited 'artistic differences' as his reason for departure.
My artistic difference was that I had none.
" Rosanne sighed, setting down her brush with an air of defeat.
"Perhaps I am simply not meant to paint.
Some people are not, you know. Some people are meant to appreciate art rather than create it. "
"That is one perspective." Lillian reached over and gently adjusted the angle of Rosanne's brush. "Another perspective is that you are trying too hard."
"Is that possible? To try too hard?"
"At painting, yes. You are attacking the paper as though it has personally wronged you.
Watercolor requires a lighter touch." Lillian dipped her own brush in the paint and demonstrated, letting the pigment flow across the page in soft, transparent layers.
"See? You are not forcing the colour onto the paper. You are inviting it."
Rosanne watched with the intensity of someone witnessing either a miracle or a confidence trick; she had not yet decided which.
"That seems like a miracle."
"It is simply patience. The water does most of the work. You merely guide it."
"I am not very good at patience."
"Then perhaps this will be good practice."
Rosanne considered this, then picked up her brush again with renewed, if tentative, determination.
Lillian watched her make a few careful strokes, her tongue poking out slightly in concentration, and felt a warm swell of affection.
Over the past fortnight, she had grown genuinely fond of Lady Rosanne Wynthorpe.
The girl was anxious and self-deprecating and far too quick to assume her own inadequacy, but beneath all that, there was a sweetness that reminded Lillian of a flower struggling to bloom in insufficient sunlight.
She deserved better than this beautiful, empty house. She deserved laughter and friendship and the knowledge that she was valued for herself, not merely for her connection to her brother.
Her brother.
Lillian had not seen the duke since that first afternoon in the blue sitting room. He had been conspicuously absent during her subsequent visits; always in his study, always occupied with estate business, always somewhere that was definitively not wherever Lillian happened to be.
She told herself she did not mind. She told herself it was a relief, actually, not to navigate his prickly silences and cutting observations. She told herself she did not think about him at all.
She was, as previously established, not very good at believing herself.
"Oh, look!" Rosanne's voice broke through her reverie. "That almost looks like a tree! A proper, non-digestive-complaint tree!"
Lillian examined the new addition to Rosanne's painting. It did, indeed, look somewhat more tree-like than its predecessor, though it still retained a certain... character.
"Much improved," she said warmly. "You see? Patience."
Rosanne beamed, and Lillian smiled back, and for a moment they simply sat together in the golden morning light, two young women united by watercolors and a growing friendship.
Then the door opened, and the Duke of Wyntham walked in.
***
Daniel had not meant to enter the morning parlor.
He had been on his way to the library, there was a particular volume on drainage systems that he needed to consult, and the morning parlor was not on the route to the library.
It was, in fact, quite definitively not on the route to the library.
One would have to make a deliberate detour to pass by the morning parlor while walking from the study to the library.
And yet.
Here he was.
Standing in the doorway, watching his sister and Miss Lillian Whitcombe bent over their paintings like conspirators sharing a secret.
Miss Whitcombe looked up first. Her hair was slightly disordered, a strand had escaped its pins and curled against her cheek, and there was a smudge of blue paint on her left hand. She looked comfortable and at ease, as though she belonged here, in this room, in this house, in his life.
The thought was so startling that Daniel nearly turned around and left immediately.
"Daniel!" Rosanne's voice was bright with surprise, and, he noted with some unease, with something that looked rather like satisfaction. "I did not expect you. Do come in. Lillian is teaching me to paint."
"So I see." He did not move from the doorway. He told himself this was because he did not wish to intrude. It was not because Miss Whitcombe was looking at him with those steady, disconcerting blue eyes, which made him not entirely certain what his face was doing in response.
"We are painting the garden," Rosanne continued, apparently oblivious to his discomfort. "Or rather, Lillian is painting the garden, and I am painting something that may eventually resemble a garden if one squints and has very generous standards."
"You are too hard on yourself."
"I am appropriately hard on myself. My tree looks like it has some kind of illness."
"It does not..." Lillian began, then stopped, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. "Very well. Perhaps a mild cold."
Rosanne laughed, and the sound of it, bright and unguarded and real, did something complicated to Daniel's chest. His sister so rarely laughed like that.
In London, her laughter was always careful, modulated, designed to cause no offense and attract no attention.
Here, with Miss Whitcombe, she laughed as though she had forgotten to be afraid.
He should be grateful for that and he was grateful for that.
And yet some part of him, some small, shameful part that he did not like to examine, felt something else entirely. Something that felt uncomfortably like jealousy.
"Perhaps you should join us," Rosanne said, in the tone of someone making a suggestion they fully expected to be refused. "Lillian is an excellent teacher. She might even be able to improve your perspective."
"My perspective is adequate."
"I was not referring to your painting."
The words hung in the air for a moment, pointed and precise. Daniel looked at his sister and saw something in her expression that he had not seen before. A kind of gentle challenge. A quiet assertion that she was no longer simply going to accept whatever mood he brought into a room.
It was, he thought, probably Miss Whitcombe's influence. Two weeks in her company, and Rosanne was already beginning to stiffen her resolve.
He was not certain how he felt about that either.
"I have work to do," he said. "The drainage report..."
"It can wait an hour," Rosanne finished. "Sit down, Daniel. Try not to glower at the paintbrushes."
"I do not glower."
"You are glowering right now."
"This is simply my face."
"Then your face should apologise to the paintbrushes."
Miss Whitcombe made a small sound, quickly suppressed, that might have been a laugh. Daniel's gaze snapped to her, and she met it with an expression of perfect innocence.
"I was merely clearing my throat," she said.
"Of course you were."
"Painting can be quite dusty."
"I am certain it can."
They looked at each other across the length of the room, and Daniel felt that same strange tension he had noticed at the fair; a kind of a strange awareness, as though the air between them were charged with something he could not name.
"Do sit down," Rosanne said again, and her voice had softened, losing its teasing edge. "Please, Daniel. It would make me happy."
It would make me happy.
It was such a small request. Such a simple thing.
And yet Daniel could not remember the last time his sister had asked him for anything.
He could not remember the last time she had felt safe enough to express a want, a preference, a desire that was not immediately qualified with apologies and disclaimers.
He crossed the room and sat down in the empty chair beside the easel.
"There." Rosanne's smile was radiant. "That was not so difficult, was it?"
"That remains to be seen."