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Chapter Eight

“Those bastards!” Kate stalked back and forth, pounding her fist against her thigh. Lucy watched her cautiously. Kate’s temper was the stuff of legend.

“They can’t get away with it. They can’t shovel people out of their homes at a whim.”

A chill breeze made Lucy glance at the sky, gray as a steel engraving. Rain threatened. How quickly the weather changed in early spring. When long break had begun, the day was bright and fair, gauzy with sun and cloud. She and Kate had walked to Green Park to breathe the fresh air. They’d laughed and gasped as sporadic gusts of wind made them skip forward. Something giddy had taken hold of her, the energy of the day—it loosened her tongue. Before she knew what was happening, the whole story had come tumbling out, starting from the moment she’d stumbled over Weston in the alley. By the time they’d turned back onto Piccadilly, Kate’s eyes were flashing. As soon as they’d reached the narrow roadway that fronted the Schools, she’d exploded.

“And you!” Kate paused, glaring, then spun around, addressing her next outburst to the sky as she marched away. “How could you keep this from me? Any of it! All of it!”

Lucy had been dreading this phase of the attack.

“I’m telling you now,” she offered.

Two boys burst out of the building. Infants, really, from the Antique School. They barely grunted as they barreled toward the street.

“Larvae,” muttered Kate, gazing after them. “Long break is over!” she called.

Lucy snorted, and for a second, Kate’s frown seemed to slip. Then her brow furrowed.

“You didn’t show me the picture! Me. Aren’t I your best critic? Aren’t we each other’s best critic?”

Best critic. That designation meant more to Kate than best friend. It denoted seriousness and a degree of honesty most friendships couldn’t weather. They were best critics. Lucy valued Kate’s judgments as much as Kate valued hers, maybe more. But the painting of that picture—she’d known nothing like it. The process had felt like a protracted fever, so vertiginous, so delirious, that she’d lost her moorings. She looked at Kate miserably.

“Come here.” Kate grabbed her arm and dragged her past the students’ entrance. Redheaded Thomas Ponsonby and tall, lanky Redcliffe Davis were trotting back from their own long-break excursion. If those two—notorious idlers—were headed to the studios, the hour was late indeed. Lucy watched them disappear through the door, Davis throwing a curious look over his shoulder.

The sound of thunder, distant but ominous, rolled overhead. Clearly, this conversation should be postponed. Before she could suggest the obvious, Kate spoke in a low, furious tone.

“What does the Sisterhood mean to you?”

Lucy felt a stab of pain in her fingers and realized she’d clenched her hands into fists. The ache in her knuckles had come and gone all winter. Too many hours with the needle and the brush. She shook out her hands, sighing.

“Study everything. Paint thrilling pictures. Elevate women artists.” She could recite the main principles in her sleep.

“Together!” Kate stamped her foot. “We didn’t start a secret society so we could keep secrets from each other! I would have helped you.”

Suddenly, Kate threw her arms around Lucy’s neck, embracing her fiercely.

“I hate that you sold your picture and Forbes, the chinless simpleton, saw it instead of me, and I hate even more that that oaf Weston destroyed it. You know he smashed the three-light window in the nave of All Saints Church? I’d have wrung the money out of my father and bought you the sewing machine.”

Kate’s father was a businessman with a reputation for luck and imprudence. He’d made a fortune on ostrich feathers and continued to invest unwisely, with excellent results. Kate claimed she could talk him into anything. Given that she’d cropped her hair and wore a man’s kit to the Academy, Lucy believed her. Today she was wearing a mulberry-colored suit and could pass—if she didn’t open her mouth—for a pretty dandy. She dressed in silk gowns and attached combs of false curls when she went out in society, but that, she claimed, was because she picked her battles.

Lucy sighed. “Thank you. But it isn’t that simple.”

Kate took her by the shoulders and spun her around.

“That is simple. That was your picture’s proper destination.”

Kate was motioning toward the large, forbidding black door set in the brick wall just beyond the students’ entrance. It was the door through which porters carried the pictures and sculptures submitted for the Summer Exhibition. Lucy had stared at it hundreds of times, imagining exactly that: her pictures passing through the portal, borne up to the committee. Never her Endymion, of course. A male nude, painted by an unmarried woman! She wouldn’t have dared, even before the man she’d painted had manifested, complicating everything, giving the lie to her lofty claims about classical ideals.

The subject of that picture is me.

To her mortification, tears flooded her eyes. Kate scorned tears in conversation. No crying allowed, except on the occasions when the mind was impressed by the sublimity of art or nature.

Lucy dashed the tears away as quickly as she could, shrugging. “Whatever the merits of the painting, I couldn’t have submitted it.”

She managed a wry smile.

“The Duke of Weston, it turns out, is easily recognized.”