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“I’ll show you the next one.” She tried to make the promise sound new, as though she hadn’t made it before, after she’d bought the sewing machine.

My dear girl! Aunt Marian had looked between Lucy and the gleaming Singer with tears in her eyes. Then she’d blinked, scowled to conceal the hurt.

You sold a picture and this is the first I know of it?

At that moment, Lucy would have promised her anything.

It wasn’t that she found her aunt’s interest burdensome. As a girl, Lucy had solicited her opinions, presenting sketches with shy excitement. Aunt Marian’s bright, dark eyes had a piercing quality, and her praises gratified. They always rang with truth. Aunt Marian saw, even in Lucy’s scribbles, energy and emotion, the potential of a grand design. Her faith was unshakable.

Lucy had been afraid to show her Endymion. After a lifetime spent associating with theatrical personalities, Aunt Marian wasn’t easily scandalized. But a male nude, bathed in moonlight, the personification of longing . . . Lucy didn’t dare. An experiment in classicism was how she’d described the picture. Aunt Marian could sense her discomfort and allowed her to leave it at that.

The most recent picture, of the Dowling boys . . . it was simply a failure. Whatever flaws Aunt Marian imagined, the reality was worse.

“Truly, you’d have been disappointed,” she said.

“Very well, then.” Aunt Marian gave a stern nod. “What are you waiting for? Off you go. Paint something better.”

Lucy looked helplessly at Mrs. Fairfax’s gowns hanging along the back wall, all of them in need of letting out, of new buttons, of even dowdier collars.

“I’m paying the older Cosgrave girl to come sew with me. Now, don’t say a word! I’m paying her from your money, so it’s you who bought yourself the time. With one picture, you earned more than I made on Cymbeline and Gertrude put together, so drop that sleeve.”

The one picture had taken Lucy nearly five months and she’d never have gotten such a sum if she hadn’t pretended she was a man, famous on the continent and a Visitor to boot.

But that was an objection she couldn’t make.

Lucy tucked away her threaded needle. For a moment, her aunt sewed in silence; then she sighed.

“I’ll see it someday.”

Lucy’s stomach dropped.

“You won’t,” she said, too bitterly. She’d had nightmares of the canvas burning as she tried to pull it from a great fireplace, big as the gates of hell, and Weston leaning on the mantel, laughing. Mercifully, when he started to kiss her, the force of her anger woke her up and she lay awake, heart pounding. Saved from that particular perdition.

Aunt Marian peered at Lucy speculatively over the thread unspooling from the bobbin.

“It’s just a feeling I have,” she said. “I can’t explain it.”

Lucy managed a wan smile as the knock came at the door.

Not the wind this time.

The knock repeated.

“That’ll be Megan now,” said Aunt Marian, but the woman who burst into the shop wasn’t the pale, timid Cosgrave girl. The woman was short, broad, and ruddy, well into her middle years.

“Mrs. Cantrell.” Aunt Marian finished her seam and stood painfully. “It’s a wet morning to come out.”

“Miss Stirling.” Mrs. Cantrell’s round face was damp, with rain and with tears.

“Don’t tell me it’s your husband.” Aunt Marian rushed to the younger woman, forgetting her stiff knees, and helped her into a chair.

Overcome, Mrs. Cantrell shook her head.

“Not one of the children?” At her aunt’s look, Lucy hurried to put the kettle on the hob.

“No, no, they’re fine, all in good health, thank God.”

The Cantrells were a boot-making family, had been for generations. Most boot makers worked in factories now, but the Cantrells still ran the shop two doors down as a family business. They were numerous. Even the youngest Cantrell children could cut and sew and paste. Their tiny store was a manufactory in miniature.