Chapter 8
“You are hovering.”
Louisa looked up from the exhibition catalogue she had been pretending to read.
Oliver stood beside her in the Great Room of Somerset House, hands clasped behind his back, surveying the crowd with the calm interest of someone who had arrived at the Royal Academy for the paintings rather than the people. He had not looked at a single painting.
“I am not hovering. I am studying the catalogue.”
“You have been studying the same page for six minutes. Unless you have developed a profound fascination with the landscape watercolors of Mr. Elias Grout, I suspect you are stalling.”
She closed the catalogue with a sigh. “Mr. Grout’s watercolors are perfectly respectable.”
“I could not disagree more.” Oliver turned to face her.
The afternoon light from the high windows fell across his shoulders, caught the gold in his hair.
“But we are not here to discuss Mr. Grout. We are here because you agreed to let me help you. Step one requires you to stop pressing yourself against the wall as though you’re hoping that it might open up and swallow you. ”
Louisa straightened. She had, in fact, been cowering against the wall.
The Great Room was packed. Half of London had turned out for the Summer Exhibition, filling the vast, high-ceilinged gallery with the rustle of silk, the murmur of opinions delivered at fashionable volume, the occasional bark of laughter from a gentleman who believed his wit carried better at full force.
“I did not agree to be paraded through the Royal Academy,” she muttered, avoiding his piercing gaze.
“I am not parading you. I am taking you to the one place in London where having an opinion is not only permitted but actively encouraged.” He glanced at the crowd gathered before a large canvas on the north wall. “What do you know about painting?”
“Very little.”
“Somehow, I do not believe you.”
She gasped, and a blush rose to her cheeks. “I… cannot fathom why you would say that.”
Oliver sighed, as though she were a rather tedious child.
“Your problem, Louisa, is not that you have nothing to say. Your problem is that you seem to have decided that what you have to say does not matter. So you rehearse. You edit. You smooth every thought into the blandest possible version of itself before you let it leave your mouth, because you believe the real version will not be welcome.”
She stared at him. Her pulse beat against the high collar of her dress.
“That is a presumptuous assessment from a man I have known for a fortnight.”
“Presumptuous does not mean inaccurate.”
The crowd shifted. A group of five or six guests had gathered before a large oil painting near the center of the north wall.
Louisa recognized it from the catalogue: a classical scene, Dido building Carthage, painted in the grand style with columns rising against a gilded sky.
The colors were magnificent, but the composition troubled her.
The figures in the foreground felt stiff, posed, arranged for effect rather than truth.
The painter had placed Dido at the center with her arm extended toward the horizon, her expression serene, triumphant, as though founding a city were no more taxing than ordering tea.
Louisa had opinions about this painting. She had formed them the moment she walked in. She had kept them inside the catalogue where they belonged.
“Come with me,” Oliver said.
“Where?”
“Over there.” He nodded toward the group. “I have a theory I should like to test.”
Before she could protest, he had her by the elbow and was steering her through the crowd with the practiced ease of someone accustomed to moving through spaces that rearranged themselves for his benefit.
They reached the edge of the group just as a stout gentleman in a bottle-green coat was holding forth.
“Magnificent brushwork. The columns alone display a mastery of perspective that I have not seen since Lawrence. And the coloring, the warmth of the sky against the marble. One feels as though one could step into the scene.”
Murmurs of agreement from the surrounding guests. A woman with an ostrich plume nodded vigorously.
Oliver crossed his arms.
“I agree entirely,” he said, his voice carrying the pleasant authority that dukes deployed when they wished a room to pay attention.
The group turned. Recognition flickered across several faces.
The Duke of Ashford had an opinion. The Duke of Ashford was speaking.
“The technique is faultless. And Dido herself is beautifully rendered. Though I must confess, I find her rather serene for a woman who has just fled her brother after he murdered her husband. One might expect a touch more urgency.”
He delivered this with the mild curiosity of someone discussing the weather. Then he turned to Louisa.
“What do you think, Miss Fairchild?”
Every muscle in her body seized. Six faces looked at her. The stout gentleman in green raised his eyebrows. The woman with the plume tilted her head, waiting.
Oliver’s eyes held hers. In them she read the challenge, plain, unadorned, the same directness he had shown her in the carriage after the Bancroft ball. Say what you think. The real version. Not the polished one.
“I think,” Louisa began. Her voice came out thin. She swallowed. “I think His Grace is right about the serenity, but the difficulty runs deeper than Dido’s expression.”
Silence. Oliver’s eyebrow rose. The faintest encouragement.
“The composition places her at the center as though she were posing for a portrait rather than commanding a city to rise from nothing. Dido was a queen who tricked a king out of his own land using nothing but an ox hide and a knife. She was clever, resourceful, fierce. This painting makes her decorative.” Louisa heard her own voice gaining ground, felt the words pulling free from the place she usually kept them locked.
“The columns are beautiful, certainly. The perspective is accomplished. But the painter has given us architecture and forgotten the woman. She should be the most alive thing on this canvas, and instead she is furniture.”
The stout gentleman blinked. The woman with the plume lowered her fan.
“Well said, Miss Fairchild.” The voice came from a tall, silver-haired lady at the back of the group.
Lady Fitzwilliam, Louisa realized with a jolt.
Patroness of the Academy. Collector. A woman whose opinion could make or break a painter’s career.
“The girl has a better eye than half the critics writing for the papers.”
“I do not claim any expertise,” Louisa managed.
“No, you clearly do not. Which is precisely why your opinion is worth hearing. The experts have been telling each other how marvelous this painting is for a week. Not one of them noticed that Dido looks like she is waiting for a fitting at the modiste.” Lady Fitzwilliam smiled.
“You must call on me, my dear. I hold a salon on Thursdays.”
The group resumed their discussion, but the atmosphere had changed.
The stout gentleman was reconsidering the painting with furrowed brows.
Two younger ladies whispered to each other, their gazes darting between the canvas and Louisa.
Oliver stood beside her with his arms still crossed, saying nothing.
When the crowd shifted and they stepped back, Louisa’s hands were trembling. She pressed them flat against her skirts.
“You did that on purpose,” she accused him at once.
“I did.”
“You provoked me into arguing with you in front of six strangers.”
“I provoked you into saying what you already believed. The arguing was incidental.” He tilted his head. The afternoon light carved shadows beneath his cheekbones. “Tell me you did not enjoy it.”
She opened her mouth to deny it. The denial stalled somewhere behind her teeth because it was false, because the rush still prickled along her skin, because for thirty seconds she had stood in front of a crowd, said exactly what she meant.
“That is what I thought,” Oliver said.
They walked. The exhibition stretched through a series of connected rooms, each hung floor to ceiling with paintings. Louisa felt lighter than she had in months, as though the weight she carried through every social gathering had been lifted by an inch, shifted, made manageable.
Oliver walked beside her without speaking.
She was aware of him at her shoulder, the height of him, the steady pace of his stride, the way other visitors glanced at him with curiosity that he did not acknowledge.
He stopped before a small landscape, barely larger than a book, hung at knee height where nobody would notice it.
“That one,” he said.
Louisa crouched slightly. A country lane in early morning. Mist rising from a field. A dog standing at a gate, looking back over its shoulder as though waiting for someone who had fallen behind.
“It is lovely.”
“It is the best painting in the room. And nobody will look at it because it is hung six inches from the floor beneath a canvas the size of a dining table.” He looked at her. “Some things are positioned badly. That does not diminish their worth.”
His voice was far too warm, too kind, to be speaking about just a painting. She straightened, her cheeks warm.
“You are very free with your metaphors today, Your Grace.”
“Oliver.”
“Your Grace.”
He smiled. She did not return it, but she felt it, the tug at the corner of her mouth, the warmth that spread through her chest like ink through water.
“You realize,” he said, “that you did not need me today. I gave you a push. The rest was entirely yours.”
“That is generous.”
“It is accurate. I did not put those thoughts about Dido in your head. I did not teach you about Turner or perspective or the proper rendering of a queen. All of that was already there, Louisa. It has always been there. You merely needed someone to tell you the room was ready to hear it.”
Warmth rose to her cheeks.
“You… are not your reputation,” she got out, and his brows shot toward his hairline.
“My reputation?”