Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, How Does Your Garden Grow. #2
Verity nodded too as her aunt bounced the patient feline upon her bosom. A faint silvering about the whiskers betrayed some age although its eyes were a clear amber – watchful and penetrating. “Aunt…” Verity frowned. “That’s not a new cat you’ve acquired, is it?”
“Which cat?”
Sephi rolled her eyes and raised a brow.
“Oh, well…him! No, no. This is Colonel Brandon. You’ve just never noticed him before as he doesn’t cry for attention or circle every female ankle that passes.
He just sits and…guards.” She batted her lashes, all innocence.
“Oh, and I bumped into Mrs Tait and accepted her invitation on all our behalf to a dinner.” Colonel Brandon’s purr was deep as thunder. “Must be off!”
“No, wait!” shouted Sephi.
“You did what?” yelled Verity.
The door closed.
Silence.
“Well. I’m not going.”
“Nor me.”
“All those people staring. And I know exactly what they’ll be thinking.”
Verity wasn’t sure about that but… “Agreed. We won’t go then.”
“As a matter of fact, Cousin, I think it might be a good idea for you to attend.” Sephi’s lips pursed. “You need to start socialising more and it is only next door. You can return home if…if you feel uncomfortable.”
“Ha!” Verity tapped her foot. “As you should then attend also.”
“You know I cannot. For I truly am a scarlet woman.”
“Oh, Sephi, with a little more time no one will remember.” She brushed back a fugitive curl from her cousin’s coiffure. “And it was not your fault. A young girl is never warned against the well-practised lures of a libertine. It was just an…error of judgement, on your part.”
“Not in Astley’s Amphitheatre! With the lauded libertine of the Season. Who instead of marrying me as he’d said, publicly disavowed me. Even the clowns laughed. Not everyone makes that much of an error of judgement.”
Well, no. “But your father was wrong to cut you off. To throw you out.”
“Was he? I was so bird-witted. And if it wasn’t for you, I’d be peddling my dubious wares as a courtesan.”
“No you wouldn’t.”
Sephi glanced askew.
“No. You’d be a famed modiste instead, like you’ve always wanted to be. Or shall be, if you accept my offer.”
Sephi mumbled under her breath so Verity hugged her shoulders once more.
Her cousin was a wonder with cloth and colour and would make a fine modiste.
Verity had offered to help but it was not money or skill that held Sephi back: that libidinous libertine had ruined more than just her reputation – but also her confidence and spirit.
Now a bleak mistrust obscured the true Sephi like an opaque varnish over a bright and beautiful portrait.
“I’ll try to extricate us both from the dinner then. I like Mrs Tait very much but she does get a glint in her eye when we chat on the front steps. I think she considers the two of us a project.”
“For marriage?” Sephi pulled a face and fiddled with some brushes. “Pah! I’ve seen the gentlemen she invites for dinners – all the latest bucks and nobs of Town – we won’t do for them. I don’t know how she gets so many acceptances as the Ton prigs must hoist their noses at her being from trade.”
“Two ways: one, Mrs Tait is vivacious, pretty and gentlemen can’t seem to say no. And two, her daughter Juliet’s dowry is six thousand.”
Sephi let out a whistle. “Well, I still think you should attend. And besides, it’s time you also stopped thinking about…him.”
“I don’t. I have. I don’t think about…him. Ever. It was years ago, after all. And my own decision.”
Sephi slanted her head to the canvas of the army captain standing majestic and motionless while battle raged around him. “You still paint him.”
Verity swallowed. “He’s a fine subject. Nothing more. Just one month of summer, that’s all it was. We were so young.”
Oft it felt as though that single month had happened to someone else, a girl of seventeen that no longer existed, a secret love that had been purely the imaginings of a fevered dream.
“Hmm.” Sephi inspected the painting. “He might see these one day, you know. Now he’s an earl, he’ll be socialising within the Ton and would recognise himself.”
Verity shook her head. “I’ve not seen him for an age so my interpretation of how he’d look is bound to be wrong.
And even if he did, surely it matters not?
He would never connect such works with some capricious fizgig who broke his heart all those years ago, especially a female one with no concept of war.
” She smiled brightly. “Besides which, the Ton know me to paint solely cats.”
“Hmm,” Sephi replied once more. “Where is he now?”
“I read…somewhere or other, at his newly inherited estate in Derbyshire. Even after all this time, I can still hear him describing how idyllic September was there. The most perfect season of the year. The calmness of it. The tranquillity, the closure of nature. He used to read to me from the list of late season flowering plants from the 1677 edition of Florae Altdorffinae Deliciae Hortenses sive Catalogus Plantarum Horti Medici.”
“Eh?”
“A plant catalogue.”
“Gosh,” murmured Sephi, “the thrill must have been too much to bear.”
Verity elbow-nudged her teasing cousin but…
When young, she’d thought herself and Miles would travel the world together. He would collect plants and she would draw them. They’d publish books and…
She twisted and closed her eyes, then opened them to the canvas of war and her world of mud and grey.
How life could turn on a sixpence.
Or one fateful night.
Sephi waved the retrieved newspaper beneath her nose. “Well, I propose we should all wear scarlet for our next promenade and truly scandalise London.”
And Verity grinned. For without such a turn on a sixpence, she would not have been able to help Sephi or Aunt, nor have the patronage of a powerful duke for her battlescapes or the London matrons commission tabby cat portraits.
“And I also propose,” Sephi continued, “that we take the phaeton and promenade in Kensington Gardens instead of St James’s Park the day after tomorrow, it being Sunday.”
“Yes. So we could. I shall wear that new walking dress you designed for me.”
“And I shall wear my red pelisse.”
They clasped hands and struck a pose.
“The Scandalous Scarlet Spinsters!” Verity smiled. “So beware Gentlemen of a Delicate Disposition! Heed me Daughters of Innocent Mien! For we in scarlet remain unbowed.”