Chapter 9
Nine
Lucy had no idea why the tea Miss Sedgewick had promised took so long to appear, but she was very glad when it did, especially as it was followed into the room by Miss Sedgewick herself.
Finally she might get some respite from Jack.
His presence was like being squeezed in a giant’s hot hand, one of those blundering, stupid ones who didn’t realise its own strength.
“It’s all settled!” Miss Sedgewick said gaily. “You’ll have the cosiest room imaginable, Lucy.”
Then Jack stood to take his leave, and it was as if cool air had come sweeping in through an open door.
Lucy, unobserved as Jack addressed himself to Miss Sedgewick, took a few good deep breaths while he told of his plans to visit his sister and arrange for Lucy’s luggage to be brought around.
“Because, knowing you, Min, you flew out of there with nothing more than what you’re standing up in and your own cloak of righteous indignation. ”
“Unfair!” Miss Sedgewick cried in Lucy’s defence. “I inform you, Lord Orton, that she had at least two bandboxes.”
“Oh, two, was it?” he returned, eyes twinkling at Miss Sedgewick. Lucy reached for the samovar and determinedly filled her cup. “And I suspect at least one of them was full of nothing but sketchbooks and pencils.”
Miss Sedgewick laughed. After all, Jack was entirely correct.
So Lucy did nothing but spoon too much sugar into her cup, wishing the spoon wouldn’t clang so against the thin china, and pretending not to notice the familiar leave Jack took of the beautiful, spirited Miss Sedgewick; or the way she put out her hand and he held it, gaze warm on her fair face.
Lucy diligently prepared a cup for her host while Miss Sedgewick showed Jack to the door.
If Jack’s choice of Mr Simmons for a friend had surprised Lucy, she was equally surprised by his romantic choice.
It had always seemed obvious to her that Jack’s future wife would be some incomparable beauty, fashionable and lovely, but all sweet, giggling acquiescence and ready admiration, sharing Jack’s own frivolous turn of mind.
Miss Sedgewick was nothing of the sort. Beautiful, yes, but not in that soft but stately way Lucy had already seen to be the admired mode during her few days in London.
And though Miss Sedgewick had lively manners, a great deal of wit, and seemed to share Jack’s bold sociability, she was older than him, of very strong character, and clearly no girl to be charmingly ordered around.
Intellectually she seemed as far above him as, well, as Lucy had often felt herself to be.
Grudgingly, she supposed his choice of lover did him as much credit as his choice of friend.
“There!” said Miss Sedgewick, sitting down with a contented sigh once Jack had gone. “Now we can be at peace.”
Lucy could have laughed. Peace was a word very far from her own feelings at that moment.
How many years had she spent wandering her aunt’s house like an aimless ghost, doing nothing but capturing fragments of half-formed reality with pencil or brush while reality itself passed her by?
She’d longed so often for something, anything, to happen.
And now too much was happening all at once.
But it had always been like that with the Ortons.
Any time she crept from the dismal silence of her father’s house and across the fields to the great stone building proud in its parkland, she would inevitably find Bedlam within.
Nell and Nora shrieking and arguing, and Jack often enough the cause or caught up in some madcap prank of his.
Or else there’d be a game in full swing, everyone scampering to hide somewhere in the endless rooms, holding their breath, giggling, waiting to be found.
Or hitting balls on the lawn, or Nell directing servants to set up a Bedouin encampment of tented sheets and pillows for some fantastical picnic in the garden, cake crumbs on the grass, wasps fighting over lemonade.
And Jack would be bored by such sedentary pursuits, demanding Lucy go fishing, or that she get up on the fat little pony he’d outgrown years before and jog about after him on his new hunter, half falling but more scared of admitting it than of hitting the ground itself…
Consciously, she relaxed her grip on her teacup.
It was only Jack being Jack. He’d always been overwhelming.
And Miss Sedgewick’s personality was hardly any less forceful.
Was it any wonder she felt rattled? She tried to push all the noise in her mind into a small, tight box and sipped her tea, listening to Miss Sedgewick’s plans for her comfort.
The house the Sedgewicks had rented in town wasn’t large, and when her host later took her on a tour of the whole, Lucy’s guilt at importuning them only grew, especially when Miss Sedgewick insisted she take over the morning room as her studio.
They stood in the doorway, Lucy assessing the two large windows through which light was currently painting rectangles on a pale, oriental rug. As in the rest of the house, the floorboards were dark and well polished.
“It’s dim in the afternoons, but it gets the best light in the whole house in the mornings.
And I don’t need it. I can happily use the parlour for my correspondence, and Mark is hardly ever in the house.
Indeed, I’ve suggested to him that he ought to move to lodgings at Horse Guards.
The closer he is to his duties, the more heed he might learn to take of them.
I na?vely cling to the hope that some military discipline will rub off on him because so far the only aspects of military life he’s taken to heart are a passion for splendid uniform and a casual disregard for his own life. ”
“He…is very valorous,” Lucy suggested, trying to find a shard of sisterly devotion in this speech.
“Oh, on the hunting field, entirely without a care for his neck! On the battlefield, he is as yet untested. His regiment stays in England—its duty is to the king, even with this endless war. He chose wisely, you see.”
Lucy’s awkward silence made Miss Sedgewick laugh.
“I forget you’re not used to me yet. Let me reassure you I love my brother very much.
But the wonderful thing about familial love—and if I can philosophise for a moment, let me say that I feel all healthy love should be the same—the wonderful thing is that such a love is not blind.
I’m fully aware of my brother’s faults. He is shallow, selfish, lazy, and greedy.
I abuse him to you freely, Lucy, for your own good.
I can call you Lucy, can I not, if we are to be very great friends? ”
“Y-yes…”
“It’s my job as your hostess to warn you against him. You’ll often be in his company now, and he’ll often be in his fine red coat. He’s a handsome man and knows how to please when he chooses. If, by sheltering your person under my roof, I’ve put your heart in danger, I’ll never forgive myself.”
Lucy managed a smile, though she’d grown hotter and hotter during this speech, and only half of it was embarrassment. First Jack, now this! If she was to be suspected of harbouring feelings for every young man of her acquaintance, life in society would be tiresome indeed.
“I’m at no risk, Miss Sedgewick—”
“Caroline, please.”
The name reminded her of how it had sounded from Jack’s lips, but she quashed that thought, it being irrelevant.
“I… I have no presumptions, no wishes… Indeed, I’m the last creature in the world to be in danger.
” If Miss Sedgewick was direct, then she may as well be direct too.
“I did not come to London for any…any matrimonial prospects. And I have neither beauty nor fortune to tempt anyone. You needn’t fear for me. ”
Miss Sedgewick smiled at her for a moment before saying, quietly, the smile still evident in her voice, “I have my suspicions about at least one of those facts. Possibly two.”
But before Lucy, bewildered, could protest further, Miss Sedgewick waved her onwards and up the stairs to the next floor.
“Your luggage is here already. Jack clearly acted with all alacrity. Take a moment to refresh yourself. In an hour we’ll take a stroll to Bond Street and put some of your pin money to good use. ”
Shopping with Miss Sedgewick was a very different experience to shopping with Jack’s sisters.
Lucy didn’t feel like a burden, for one thing, and though her own taste was hardly expert, she discovered she greatly preferred Miss Sedgewick’s eye for subtle quality over Nell and Nora’s enthusiasm for the ostentatious.
Miss Sedgewick also had the unnerving habit of listening to Lucy, something she wasn’t at all used to.
And when, after several moments of coaxing, she was persuaded to offer her own wish as to their next destination, she haltingly suggested Robertson’s in Long Acre.
This was an art shop near Covent Garden which Lucy had seen advertised in a periodical Lord Ashburton had left open on the breakfast table.
She hadn’t dared suggest it to her previous host, knowing both its purpose and its location would have produced nothing but disgust. But Miss Sedgewick agreed readily, saying a few raised eyebrows were exactly the finishing touch for the ensemble she’d just persuaded Lucy to order.
Reminded by this smilingly delivered pronouncement of the dubious propriety of visiting such an establishment, Lucy began to express her doubts.
“Nonsense,” said Miss Sedgewick, dragging her onwards by their linked arms. “You’re to be an artist of great fame and renown. Raised eyebrows are as essential to your career as canvas, glazes, and brushes.”
“Actually, he is a colourman—”
“Then let us buy pigments!”
They were at the step up to the shop when the door opened and a man came out.
He was strongly built, dark haired, about forty years of age, and plainly but smartly dressed.
He smiled upon seeing Miss Sedgewick and swept the hat from his head with a warm bow.
“Miss Sedgewick! What an unexpected delight.”
He stepped down into the street to join them as Miss Sedgewick smiled.
“You see, I’m corrupted, brought into your artist’s world at last. Here, Miss Fanshaw, may I produce one of the artistic friends I promised you?
This is Mr Thornton. Mr Thornton, this is my friend, and currently my guest, Miss Fanshaw. ”
Mr Thornton gave her a bow no less warm than his first to Miss Sedgewick. A good-natured smile seemed very at home on his bluntly handsome face, and Lucy could hardly believe he was the famed portraitist who had painted everyone from humble farm labourers to the regent.
“Honoured to make your acquaintance, Miss Fanshaw. Is it you I have to thank for drawing Miss Sedgewick hither? Our mutual friend won’t mind me saying that she herself barely knows one end of a brush from the other.”
“Mind!” objected Miss Sedgewick with her ever-laughing eyes. “When watercolours are one of a lady’s most cherished accomplishments? Abominable abuse. I have a strong urge to punish you by making you look through my childhood sketchbooks.”
“If I wished to see cats that looked like cows, flowers that looked like turnips, and beloved family members who—”
“Also looked like turnips?”
Mr Thornton laughed. He turned a twinkling eye to the astonished Lucy and confided, “You cannot beat Miss Sedgewick, she is always first to the fence.”
“And you cannot compliment your way to freedom now, Mr Thornton,” said Miss Sedgewick. “It is too late for that. The sentence has been decreed. Come to dinner tomorrow night—there’ll be a half dozen people you know—and I will show you my sketchbook. And Miss Fanshaw will show you hers.”
“The balm that follows the sting,” Mr Thornton said with a gracious smile at Lucy. Turning to Miss Sedgewick, he once more lifted his hat. “You know that every invitation of yours is a sentence I would gladly fight to receive. Tomorrow, ladies. Adieu!”
For a brief moment they watched him walk down the street. Miss Sedgewick said nothing, but the speaking smile she gave Lucy showed her satisfaction. Here, she seemed to say, is the life I know you secretly desire. Artists, and friendship, and easy, casual manners with those whom you can esteem.
The little bell tinkled as they entered the shop, and Lucy finally found the shade of umber she’d been searching for.