Page 108 of The Duke Undone

“I’ve moved my studio back to the garret. Anthony—” She hesitated.

“It’s true, then?” Kate interrupted, gripping her arm. She looked poleaxed. “You? And Weston?”

Lucy could see her thoughts churning, could read the expressions as they flitted across her face. A tryst was shocking, but Lucy had gone about it boldly, unapologetically. In a way, it was marvelous, very well done indeed. Kate groped toward acceptance when another thought hit.

“Lucy.” Kate’s eyes were huge and her grip tightened. “Do you love him?”

Lucy hesitated. The Pre-Raphaelite brothers were always falling in love with their models, women whose faces and bodies haunted them, showing up in canvas after canvas. True muses. The Pre-Raphaelite sisters hadn’t much considered the possibility.

To admit her love for Anthony was to hazard her friendship with Kate. She didn’t know how Kate would react. It was one thing to tryst, to seize knowledge. It was another thing to lose her heart, to cede herself. Would Kate see it as weakness?

Kate wanted the truth.

“Yes,” said Lucy simply.

After a long moment, Kate nodded.

“If there’s more to him than meets the eye, that’s well and good. And what meets the eye is superb.” She clapped her hands. “I approve!”

The relief Lucy experienced was as keen as it was pointless. There was nothing for Kate to approve.

“Thank you,” she said. “But he’s marrying someone else. Quite soon, I believe.”

“What?” Kate gasped. “The bastard. How does he dare?”

Lucy broke Kate’s first rule of engagement by bursting into tears.

• • •

The days and nights that followed offered new, dizzying lessons in perspective. Time seemed both stretched and compressed. Lucy ignored the pointed looks and whispers of her classmates, aided by Kate, who took pleasure in breaking up their hushed conferences. As the porters began to walk the hallway, carrying the first submitted pictures up to the large room in which the Hanging Committee would soon meet to pass judgment, a powerful excitement took hold in the Schools. Conversation returned to its seasonal rhythm. What would characterize this year’s Summer Exhibition? Which genres and artists would the critics hail? What controversies would attend the placement of the pictures?

Now or never. Lucy threw herself into her painting, passing sleepless nights at her easel, burning through pounds of candles and lamp oil, forcing herself to put the cost out of her mind. Concentrate. She used a knife to pile on color, her nose an inch from her canvas, which Anthony had returned to her promptly, as promised. Electrified and exhausted, she let her composition occupy her every thought. She could almost forget he existed. When Maude approached her in the canteen at the end of the week, thrusting the engagement announcement into her hand, she didn’t show a flicker of emotion.

The moment she put the final touch on her picture—late in the night, the lamp turned up, candles burning—her body drooped. She drooped, but Violet did not. The picture was high-toned, arresting, dreamy without the softened edges of dream.

A scant few days remained to submit, but submit she would. She had finished in time.

She allowed herself to lie abed the next morning and made her way down the stairs much later than was her wont, even on a Saturday.

Surely her mind was still sluggish from its surfeit of sleep. Dream clogged her ears. She wasn’t really hearing his voice.

She burst into the shop. Aunt Marian was not at her worktable, gone to the privy perhaps. Anthony stood just inside the front door, a pained smile on his lips, and Miss Yardley, Miss Yardley, was coming toward her in a princess gown of geranium silk, gloved hands extended.

“Bonjour, chérie, comment allez-vous?” Miss Yardley gripped her fingers, kissing the air with rosebud lips. “Do you approve of my dress? Or was it dyed with deadly nightshade?”

She laughed gaily, squeezing harder, until Lucy felt the hard ridge of a ring straining the soft leather of her glove. She extricated her hands, trying to repress the violence of her response.

“It appears safe enough,” she said. Her voice sounded colorless to her own ears. She couldn’t look at Anthony. How did he dare to come here, with her? He was depraved.

“That’s all I need to hear. I trust you with my life!” Miss Yardley smiled a dazzling smile, gaze flitting over the display case to the darker corners of the room, where petticoats piled on the worktables, glowing damningly in the gloom.

“It’s a bit unassuming, isn’t it?” she said, creases of concern bracketing her rosy mouth, but then she shrugged, laughing. “But that’s the charm, I suppose. Lucy—I may call you Lucy?—after what you did for me, I feel I must repay the favor. Come to our wedding!”

She misunderstood Lucy’s look of horror.

“I plan to be a modern duchess. You won’t feel out of place. I’ve invited my old governess, too, and Nancy, who sells me the perfume I so like at the department store. Anthony, tell her you want her to come.”

Lucy stared at the floorboards. A nail was coming up. She wanted to hammer it, hard.