Day 8
The next morning, rain blurred the hard edges from the world, transforming objects into simplified shapes, like Christo’s fabric-wrapped bridges, nudes, and trees.
Jane had been painting since daybreak. Yellow, red, orange, blue.
The colors made her hungry, but she was too infatuated with paint on canvas to dress for breakfast. When Matilda came, Jane shooed her away.
She had forgotten the thrill she used to feel when buying a new paintbrush, squeezing all those colors onto her palette, smelling the clean, natural odor of the oils, the reckless unknown of first spoiling a white canvas.
These past years, she had become comfortable with her mouse and computer screen, creating corporate art, lazy and dull.
Kind of like her last relationships. And now, smearing green and blue together, interrupting it with orange, she realized she wanted to love someone the way she felt when painting—fearless, messy, vivid.
In honor of Jane Eyre, she did a self-portrait.
When she caught just the right shading of a cheek, her heart bumped her ribs as though she were in love.
She was after that self-assurance in the eyes of those old portraits, a knowing gleam that insisted she was worth looking at.
It was tricky to achieve. She wanted to ask someone else’s opinion about her painting, but not the traitor Matilda.
Aunt Saffronia? No, she was too eager to please.
Martin? Oh, stop it. Mr. Nobley? Yes, but why him?
When hunger at last chased her from her easel, she threw on a day dress and crept downstairs, finding a maid, who served her tea and bread in the gray-washed morning room.
The house echoed as though long deserted.
She thought of returning to her easel but felt unsettled by the expression she’d left in her painting—she feared it was forced assurance, an actor’s eyes.
She decided to give both pairs of eyes a break.
Voices in the hall chased her down a corridor. She didn’t feel fit for company. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders; her feet were bare under her dark gray day dress. She wasn’t even wearing a corset. And her mood felt more gothic horror than cheery comedy of manners.
She slinked into the library, staring at the streaks of water against the window, the book A Sentimental Journey half open before her. What do gardeners do in the rain? she wondered.
Mr. Nobley had entered the room before he noticed her. She startled upright in her chair, feeling as if she should hide her unkempt self, but he didn’t seem to notice and instead groaned dramatically.
“And here you are. Miss Erstwhile. You are infuriating and irritating, and yet I find myself looking for you. I would be grateful if you would send me away and make me swear to never return.”
His easy manner was like a tune that bade her body relax. “You shouldn’t have told me that’s what you want, Mr. Nobley, because now you’re not going to get it.”
“Then I must stay?”
“Unless you want to risk me accusing you of ungentleman-like behavior, yes, I think you should stay. My brain had been hatching a plan to hide for the rest of the day, but I think too much time alone in this mood and I’m in real danger of doing a convincing impersonation of the madwoman in the attic. ”
He raised an eyebrow. “And how would that be different from—”
“Sit down, Mr. Nobley,” she said.
He sat in a chair on the opposite side of a small table.
The chair creaked as he settled himself.
She didn’t look at him, watching instead the rain on the window and the silvery shadows the wet light made of the room.
She spent several moments in silence before she realized that it might be awkward, that conversation at such a time was obligatory.
Now she could feel his gaze on her face and longed to crack the silence like the spine of a book, but she had nothing to say anymore.
She’d lost all her thoughts in paint and rain.
“You are reading Sterne,” he said at last. “May I?”
He gestured to the book, and she handed it to him.
Jane was remembering a scene from the film of Mansfield Park where a man read so sweetly to a lady he adored that the sound created a passionate tension, the words themselves becoming his courtship.
Jane glanced at Mr. Nobley’s somber face, and away again as his eyes flicked from the page to her.
He began to read from the top. His voice was soft, melodious, strong, that of a man who could speak in a crowd and have people listen, but also a man who could persuade a child to sleep with a bedtime story. So she waited to be swayed by the words, but the words were . . .
“Wait, what’s going on?” Jane asked.
“I have no earthly idea.”
“I swear I’m literate, but not one sentence you just read made sense. It sounded like a bunch of random names and maybe something about wine?”
Mr. Nobley was trying very hard not to smile.
He kept reading, but his lips were tight, and his voice scraped a couple of times over the incoherently boring sentences.
Jane laughed at him, and then he did smile.
It gave her a little thwack of pleasure, as though someone had flicked a finger against her heart.
“Perhaps this wasn’t the most ideal passage,” he said.
“But you read it well,” she said. “I mean, your voice sounded . . . nice.”
“Nice?” He raised his brows. “Well, that is something.”
They sat in silence a few moments, chuckling intermittently.
Mr. Nobley began to read again suddenly, “ ‘Mynheer might possibly overset both in his new vineyard,’ ” having to stop to laugh again.
Aunt Saffronia walked by and peered into the dim room as she passed, her presence reminding Jane that this tryst might be forbidden by the Rules. Mr. Nobley returned to himself.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I have trespassed on you long enough.”
He stood, bowed, and was gone before Jane could ask him to stay. Before she realized that she wanted him to.
When she returned to her room to dress for dinner, she picked a purple brocade and smiled at the mirror. Her reflection looked more like a character in a movie than any Jane Hayes she’d ever known.
She hurried downstairs to find her dazzlingly adorned dinner companions standing outside the door on the front stairs.
The rain had stopped, and the whole world looked freshened up, water drops dangling like jewels from the half-bare trees, sparkling in the low light.
The ladies met each other’s eyes, as if all feeling a similar sensation.
They were as beautiful as a post-rain autumn and felt shy about it, the weight of embodying all that splendor almost too much to bear.
The butler came out to inform them that dinner would be a little later than usual, “due to an unfortunate stuffed-duck incident.” And so they decided to walk into the evening light.
The sun was dallying flirtatiously with the horizon, and they watched the clouds take up the yellow and orange, colors bright and hot like a bonfire.
There was some fumbling of pairs until Andrews and Charming at last walked arm in arm.
A Nobley and Heartwright coupling turned into Erstwhile and Heartwright, which became Erstwhile and Nobley, and there the musical partners game ended.
Jane glanced over her shoulder and wondered what thrills of pain and hope might be pricking Amelia as she walked with her erroneously jilted love. Such fun.
When Jane turned back, she found Mr. Nobley had been staring at her. He did not flinch away his attention, holding her with his eyes.
“You look well, Miss Erstwhile,” he said.
“So do you,” she said, and meant it. The gentleman’s dark blue dinner jacket and breeches were appealing at a DNA level. She lifted her hand as if to straighten his cravat and then quickly pulled it away. He was not hers to fuss over.
“If it keeps raining all the time,” Miss Charming was saying, “I’ll go crazy. Can’t we do something more than play cards and walk around?”
She squinted at Colonel Andrews to detect if he approved of her suggestion.
“Just so,” he said, and Miss Charming beamed.
“I’ve brought the very thing from London, a script from some little play or other called Home by the Sea.
There are six parts, three pairs of lovers, just right for us, and it will give us something to pass the time before the ball, so let’s rehearse and put it on for Lady Templeton. ”
“Oh, yes,” said Miss Charming, clasping her hands at her chest, “jolly good, rather.”
“I’ll bet our Miss Erstwhile would be keen on it as well, right? Miss Heartwright would never disappoint me, I know, and East is a seafaring man—always ready for an adventure. What do you say, Nobley?”
“I think it inappropriate to stage a theatrical in the house of a respectable lady.”
Miss Charming whined.
“Oh, come now, Nobley,” said Colonel Andrews.
“I won’t be entreated,” he said.
Jane blew air through her lips like a horse. She’d liked the idea.
“Way to spoil it, Mr. Nobley,” said Miss Charming. “Too bad Sir John isn’t here to play the third fellow. Will he be back soon, do you think, what-what?”
“I think not,” Mr. Nobley said coolly. He briefly exchanged looks with Jane as if making sure she was all right.
“That’s the pits. Hey, Jane, what about that guy, I mean, bloke, I saw you talking to once in the garden? Do you think he’d play the part?”
Jane felt her toes go cold. “I don’t know who you mean, Miss Charming.”
“Sure you do, that tall bloke in the garden, one of the servants, maybe. I thought he looked pretty good standing next to you. He’d be better for your partner than Mr. Nobley.”
“M-maybe it was one of the gardeners?” Now it was Jane’s turn to peek at Mr. Nobley’s face. He was staring dead ahead, the shadows under his eyes making him look sleep deprived.