Chapter Four
“Y ou did not tell me you had a suitor!” Jane admonished her over tea. Her expression, open mouth, wide eyes, raised brows, ducked chin all conveyed pleased teasing.
“This is why.” Nell was very uneasy with this particular expression because in the past, it was the expression many women used to insult her.
It took weeks for young Nell to understand that she had been insulted and that those girls were not her friends.
Aside from which, Nell preferred to be applauded for her accomplishments and wit, not from collecting admirers, over which she had no control.
Jane was a friend, which had proven over the course of six-and-a-quarter years.
She was likely the most conventional of her three friends.
She had light-colored hair that could be described as both burnished and dishwater , depending on the speaker of the description.
Her eyes were overly large and spaced widely in her face, giving her the permanent illusion of surprise.
This made reading her expressions more challenging for Nell, but she had become adept at it during the course of their acquaintance.
They had initially met at a luncheon—when Nell mistakenly believed she could make a difference by attending social functions—to promote the education of women.
Nell had attended with the belief that the group would advocate and pressure higher learning institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge to not only admit women, but also allow them to graduate.
However, when she arrived at the luncheon, it was to her dismay that it was a seminar to reinforce the value of domestic tasks women already learned out of necessity.
Jane had been there in the company of her grandmother, who had soon passed away from an affliction of the lungs.
Nell had found out about the woman’s passing from the newspaper, attended the funeral, and called upon Jane a few weeks later, as Nell believed such showings were the correct steps in social circles.
The house Jane lived in was small and sparse, and she seemed desperate for a friend. It was a feeling Nell knew well.
Given her experience, Nell would not abandon someone in need of a friend, even if the woman in question believed her education should stop after learning fifty distinct embroidery stitches.
Now, seated comfortably on the settee, Jane leaned forward, her wide eyes seeming to grow bigger with the change in perspective. “Tell me everything! Is he handsome? I wonder if my Rafe knows him!”
Her friend spoke in exclamation marks. It was an irritating affectation, which Nell had assumed she would grow out of at some point during their friendship.
Sadly, Jane had yet to forgo them. “It is possible that your Rafe does indeed know him. He is the Earl Beckett. I am a poor judge of male beauty, but he does not seem to turn heads one way or another.”
“Titled! You minx!”
Nell blinked at her friend’s use of the epithet. “I assure you, I employed no coquetry to obtain his notice. Would that I had not.”
“Don’t say that,” Jane said with a strange grimace. Or perhaps it was a smile. Nell wasn’t sure. “I’m sure he is a very…” Jane trailed off, clearly at a loss for words.
Nell waited patiently for Jane to find the word, but when she didn’t, the absence of it hung above them like a rain cloud.
Nell tried to think of a word Jane might have used, like handsome or kind, neither of which applied.
So then Nell thought about the word she might use to describe him, which was perhaps why Jane had trailed off.
She had wanted Nell to inform her what Beckett’s excellent attributes were.
“He has a keen eye for paintings,” Nell offered.
Jane tried to look as enthusiastic as she had during her first volleys, but did not succeed. Even Nell could see the strain. “Did you tell him these were yours?” Jane gestured to the painting behind the settee.
Nell had not lied when she told Beckett that the forest painting was Jane’s favorite.
But to say favorite when Jane found all of Nell’s painting appalling was, in truth, misleading.
Her friend believed that a lady’s painting should consist of happy subjects, and certainly only domestic tableaus.
The forest painting, with a sampler of endemic English species, was as close as Nell had in her oeuvre.
“I did tell him, but only because he asked me who painted the one in the hall.”
Jane winced, as if this were a faux pas of the grandest scale. “Oh no, my Nellie. But I suppose if he really likes you, he’ll still return.”
“Indeed,” Nell agreed. “He is returning next week for another stroll in the park.”
Jane brightened and clapped her hands together. “Happy news!”
There was a part of Nell that wanted to tell Jane about Mrs. Dove-Lyon, and about the devil’s bargain she had agreed to a decade ago. But to tell that story was to put herself in peril, and Nell refused to compromise her safety for anyone, even Jane.
Her friend finished her cup of tea and gave a brilliant smile.
Of all the manners of polite society, Jane’s smile was exceptional.
Nell believed that it was this trait that caused her beau, her Rafe , to continue courting her, as it certainly wasn’t her dowry.
Jane took piecework to help supplement the income of her parents.
But even still, with her thimble callous and hunched shoulders, Jane’s unshakeable belief in the inevitability of happiness was enviable and endearing. Of course a man would want a woman like her to observe across the dinner table as he digested his mutton.
“I must be off, and of course, when I see you next week, I want to hear all the details of the next walk!”
Nell rose to her feet as her friend did, and walked her out of the sitting room, her eyes falling on The White Cliffs of Dover , as it always did when she escorted someone out the door.
While the painting was not soothing itself, it was a balm all the same.
As if Nell could take all the frustrations and unease she felt and place them into the frame, so she needn’t feel them all the time.
The burden of such inner turmoil could be placed upon the boat, about to be dashed upon the towering walls of white chalk.
In addition to any turmoil that she abandoned to the ill-fated ship, she added the image of Beckett looking down upon her with amazement when she confessed to being the painter in question.
She had needled him too much; she could tell that from his irate departure.
But she did not want to become attached to the look of admiration, for it would disappear as quickly as it had come.
She could not count on the feelings of any person other than herself. She knew this. This incontrovertible fact drove her in all things. What she could control, she would. What she couldn’t, she would not think about.
But did not the painted ship dip lower in the water when she loaded it with the weight of Beckett’s appreciation? For it left an open hole in her heart to let it sit there.
Beckett did not sleep well for the whole of the week.
When Timothy pried about how his second encounter had gone, all he could say was “fine.” Timothy attempted to further his investigation by asking more and more oblique questions until Beckett threatened to throw his glass of Scottish whisky at the man’s head.
But what made Beckett lose sleep was Mrs. Reid’s alternating obliviousness and insight.
Her paintings were stunning. He would not describe either painting as full of pathos, but they were emotional in a way that seemed at odds with the woman in normal conversation.
The searching expression of the deer haunted him.
As if the animal were looking for its mother and could not find it.
Or the panic of the fox, mid-sprint, as if it could catch up to whatever had left it behind.
The technique was nearly flawless. But that was not what pushed Beckett to investigate further.
The loneliness was palpable, and that was an emotion he understood well.
He would fall asleep wanting to give Mrs. Reid the benefit of the doubt—he misunderstood her or misjudged her brusque manner.
But then he would awaken with her insult to his intelligence ringing in his ears and become indignant all over again.
They had completed two encounters. Three left, if he could live through them. There was no stipulation of what types of events counted. If they were all silent walks in the park, that suited him just fine.
Thus, he found himself standing on her doorstep once again, too early for the fashionable set to descend upon Hyde Park. He knocked, ready to enter at Jacobs’s command. But instead of the manservant, Mrs. Reid herself appeared, already attired in her pelisse, bonnet, and gloves.
He frowned, wishing he could spy the boat and the cliffs again, and also wondering if her gown was that rich green hue again, or if she was back in her half-mourning colors. Not that it mattered what color gown she wore. But the green had brought out a luster in her walnut-toned brown hair.
“Shall we?” Mrs. Reid said as both a greeting and to spur them away from her home.
Knowing that Mrs. Reid gave only information to obscure, he had to ask, “Is there something amiss in your abode that I cannot come inside?”
She stopped short, pulling on one of her gloves and staring at him intently. “Do you wish to go inside?”
That made him seem somehow desperate, or even as if he had some alternate plan that did not include a stroll around the park.
“No,” he said, though he would have liked another peek at both the cliffs and the idyll.
And then he realized that she had answered his question with a question, which was a time-honored tactic of evasion. She had managed to best him again.
“Well then,” she said, holding her arm out to indicate the direction of the park.