Chapter 21 #2
Nora immediately began to protest, which gave Lucy an opportunity to relax the false smile she was wearing.
They were Jack’s sisters, and she would attempt politeness for his sake and her own dignity, but this brazen greed…
! And after the way they’d treated her! Her hands were white-knuckled on her lap, her pulse hot and rapid in her ears.
“What a pity Jack had to leave town just when you were getting so happily reacquainted,” Nell now said, not even waiting for the maid who’d brought the tea tray to leave.
“Oh, yes, we heard the whole! We may have been trapped at home, but our friends took pity on us, and we’ve had letters every day keeping us up to date with all the on-dit from around town.
Jack took you to Somerset House. And has dined here several times.
But you always were inseparable—it’s just like old times. Didn’t I say as much last night, Nora?”
Nora looked up halfway through a large bite of one of the cakes the maid had brought. Mouth full, she nodded enthusiastically, a few crumbs dropping. “Just like old times!” she confirmed after a hasty swallow. “Made for each other!”
And Lucy had planned to spend the morning in her studio, preparing for a visit from Mr Thornton later that day!
She could have been in her sanctuary, doing sane and soothing things with paint and canvas.
She could have been doing something that mattered, something that was real.
But when she looked to Miss Sedgewick for help, or at least sympathy, her friend was merely smiling in an enigmatic way, her attention on Nell in the manner of one artist studying another’s work—one professional judging another.
Finding no help in that quarter, Lucy flashed Nell a faint simulacrum of a smile and busied herself by picking up a piece of cake she had no appetite to eat.
If only she could tell them about George! That would put a stop to all this. Except that was no good, was it, because it was all a lie. Who did it benefit? Only Jack knew, only Jack believed it. And what good had it done other than drive him from town?
What a mess of lies and misunderstandings she was tangled in!
Ever since arriving in London nothing had been neat or straight or sensible.
Even Nell’s original invitation had been a type of falsehood, and Lucy’s acceptance of it had also been a lie, because she’d come to London only for the art.
Then Nora’s wicked rumour… And then the one about her supposed fortune…
And now she’d been driven into a false engagement!
And still people made things up! Nell was inventing dreams and schemes of her own design, based on nothing at all but the heady fumes of greed.
And knowing her lack of tact, she’d probably spread enough hints to make all London think Lucy was as good as promised to Jack before he even returned to town.
It had to stop. She would tell Jack the truth the moment she next saw him.
She put down her untouched cake, nauseous, rubbing damp cake crumbs from her palms. Hah! And she’d once prided herself on the natural honesty she’d always believed herself to possess!
Everything had become so complicated… Perhaps, she reflected grimly, her so-called honesty had only been possible living alone with her aunt where the days held no surprises and no one asked her to be or do or say anything at all.
It was easy to be honest when all one had to say was “Yes, Aunt” or “No, Aunt.”
But really…hadn’t that been a lie too? Hiding herself in silence and in her aunt’s disinterest the way a thief might hide in shadows?
Her aunt knew she painted—painting, according to her aunt, was a genteel occupation for a young lady.
But having no interest in art, or in Lucy, she’d never asked Lucy exactly what she painted. Had never once asked to see it.
So there’d been no witness to the way Lucy’s childish sketches of fruit and flowers gradually became interspersed with attempts to capture the craggy features of the butler, or the sharp sourness of her aunt’s expression as she sat staring through a window, criticising the gardener.
Or the inherent power in the form of the thick-set groom as he pitchforked hay from the loft, frayed shirt sleeves rolled to his elbow.
No one had ever seen the sketchbooks hidden in the box under her bed, or the ones in the base of her wardrobe, where ochre or charcoal or pencil attempted to capture the complexities of a foot, a bared arm, a shoulder—copied either from museum prints, or, often enough, from remembered glimpses of that same groom washing himself in the trough.
She’d sketched memories of farm workers bare-shouldered in the summer sun, sweat glistening on sinewed backs and rippling muscle…
And no one, no one, would ever see the softer lines of thighs and stomach and breasts sketched guiltily by candlelight in the secrecy of her room, a chair pushed under the door handle, for she had no lock.
Was any of that honest? Hiding what she drew? Hadn’t she told Jack that she wanted to stand up and be seen?
Even her art wasn’t honest, she thought bitterly. How could it be when she was trying to capture the raw reality of life through furtive glimpses, never able to look directly at her subject or study it frankly in all the detailed intensity she needed?
Was anything, anything, about her honest when she was always hiding?
Scared.
Quiet.
Keeping everything inside.
Maybe that was why Jack affected her so deeply.
He knew. Not what she did in the candlelight of her room, not what she sketched or the images she dreamed of, but he knew her better than anyone did.
She hadn’t always only said “Yes, Aunt,” and “No, Aunt.” In her childhood with Jack, she’d chattered freely.
Only one word for his every six, it was true.
And often enough he wasn’t listening. But ideas had come into her head, and she’d said them out loud with hardly ever a pause for thought, because it was only Jack, and Jack was so easy, so open and accepting, and the worst he might ever do was laugh.
“Doesn’t the sun make those daffodils almost dazzling, Jack? Look at those geese; what a pattern they make against the sky. Doesn’t that cloud look like a man smoking a pipe?”
And…
“Doesn’t the new curate remind you of a bee? A big bumblebee. The way he hums at the start of every sentence and darts around all the parishioners after every service, like they’re clusters of flowers he has to visit?”
And…
“No, I do not think we should pour honey on the pews, Jack. Not at all!”
And…
“Stay sitting there on that fence, Jack. I want to draw you with that tree all behind you like a halo. Your nose looks just like that angel’s in the church’s nave.”
And then…
“Why are you laughing at me? Don’t move. Jack! I said stay there! No, I don’t want to climb the tree. And no, it is not because I am scared!”
To which he’d only laughed more and scampered up it like a sailor boy up a ship’s rigging. She’d sketched some flowers instead, dog roses twined through the hedge.
But if she spent the rest of Nell and Nora’s visit abstracted and pensive, the sisters didn’t notice it.
Never did. Never would. Lucy studied them instead and found traces of Jack’s features in theirs but none of his charm or his open good nature.
He wasn’t petty or mean. He was still her friend even though she was poor and no one.
Her fortune, or lack of, meant nothing to him.
He was caring, in his clumsy, maddening way.
And he was…he was warm and alive and fun and he…
he had a soul that glowed like a candle.
And the other night, in the twirl of the waltz, something else had glowed there for a moment…a deeper, darker heat.
Her stomach turned over, and she told herself it was nerves. What on earth would he say when he found out the truth about George?
He will laugh, she prayed. Of course he will laugh.
She was glad when Mr Thornton came and art pushed the rest of the world from her head. He admired her work sincerely, intelligently, and the hour’s visit felt like a heavenly breeze after the sticky guilt of the morning and the Orton sisters’ inanity.
But he was almost leaving, her heart thumping, thumping, when at long last the invitation came. She would go to Mr Thornton’s studio that Friday, and she would draw from life.