Page 44

The gallery’s lower story was less congested. She peeked into the coffee room, which glittered with mirrors and glazed ceramic tiles. She continued on past the trio of lavish dining rooms, from which drifted the murmur of voices and the tinkle of cutlery, and savory aromas that made her stomach growl. If she kept going, she’d reach an archway that led into a courtyard garden. She could see the greenery, shiny with damp. The rain had begun.

She could turn left, find the shop De’Ath had mentioned. Buy herself a pen with his money.

Her stomach wasn’t growling. It was groaning, and the groans bore no relation to hunger. She felt as though her insides had twisted up. She went back down the hall and into one of the dining rooms, stopping just inside the doorway and leaning against the wall. She could feel the plasterwork pattern against the small of her back, willow branches or olive boughs. Strains of conversation reached her ears. Cultured prattle about theatrical performances seen or anticipated. A lofty debate between juveniles about the duality of the Greek spirit in art. Even the prosaic complaints about the weather seemed rarefied by the speakers’ accents and exquisite boredom.

This was the world into which Jack had craved admittance. No beggarly attics for these young artists and writers. No meals of dry bread.

Nina pressed her back harder into the wall, as though to stamp her flesh with the decorative motif. At the Royal Academy, Jack’s pennilessness had at first appealed to his fellow apprentices. They’d found it piquant, to include a roughneck among their boon companions, to pay his portion of the rent on their great big house, to make offerings of their cast-off finery and send dinner trays up to his room when his pride kept him from the table. She had changed all that, taken the fun out of the arrangement, made it impossible.

Hovering on the perimeter of the gorgeously embellished dining room, she felt as though she’d entered an alternate reality. There sat phantom Jack among the bohemians, as lighthearted as any of them. This was the life he would have lived, if she had never been.

A waiter moved into her line of vision, striding purposefully in her direction. She lowered her head and slipped back into the hall.

This time, she entered the coffee room and walked straight to the bar, where she stood for a moment, staring at her distorted, dispiriting reflection in the silver urn of the Napier machine. Bulbous cheeks, snub nose, eyes sliding together, cyclopean. She stuck out her tongue.

And that was when she heard her name.

Chapter Ten

“Miss Finch!”

Nina turned slowly. Miss Holroyd, in a dove gray suit with a lilac in the buttonhole, the Duchess of Weston in crimson silk, and another woman, a beauty in blue, with a dreamy expression, sat together at a little table scattered with cups, sketchbooks, and half-eaten slices of cake. As Nina fixed a smile on her face, the ringleted Miss Knotwood appeared from behind a pillar. In her pink tunic, with those imposing collarbones, she looked like a goddess come to earth.

“Miss Finch,” said Miss Holroyd again, waving her over. “Where’s De’Ath? Has he gone up to see the pictures? In case you’re wondering, the old crank already opined. Gave a whole lecture, in fact. On how we Sisters must cultivate dainty ways and paint for children! He had the audacity to—” The next word became a hiss. “Speak of the devil.”

She narrowed her eyes, and Nina twisted in time to glimpse a white-haired bespectacled man in the entrance to the coffee room, his black cane tucked beneath his arm, a coterie of lanky half-grown boys dogging his heels, jostling one another for position. That would be Lloyd Syme. De’Ath’s nemesis. Her and Jack’s unwitting accomplice. She threaded her fingers tightly together, neck prickling. However much Syme reviled the Sisters, and women generally, she and Jack needed him, and that trumped all.

But the longer she looked at him—at his thin, pale, supercilious face—the more her twisted insides shriveled.

Finally, he sneered, flicked at an invisible speck on the lapel of his full-skirted frock coat, and swung around so quickly the boys around him collided as they scattered. He vanished down the hall.

“Too many chattering women.” Miss Holroyd gave her assessment calmly, gaze wandering the tables, at which young ladies predominated. “He’ll have gone to the billiards room for respite. What say ye, fellow musketeers of the brush and the chisel?” She pulled a silver cigarette case from inside her jacket. “Shall I breach the gentlemen’s redoubt?”

“If you want to aggravate yourself for no reason,” sniffed the duchess. “By all means.”

Miss Holroyd shrugged. “I’m already aggravated.” But she tucked the cigarette case away and picked up her coffee, black.

Black coffee. Nina shifted her weight from foot to foot, glanced over her shoulder at the bar.

“Miss Finch,” said the duchess. “You will join us?”

Nina gave her head a regretful shake. “You’re very kind, your grace. But I can’t stay. Mr. De’Ath wants his coffee.”

“He sent you for coffee?” Miss Holroyd’s nostrils pinched. “You’re his amanuensis, not his body servant.”

“Amanuensis.” Miss Knotwood paused with a cup halfway to her lips. “I wondered about your connection. I took you for one of his political friends.”

Nina tried not to look sour. Obviously, she didn’t belong among his artistic friends, the vivid and alluring Sisters, dashing musketeers of the brush and chisel. But she wasn’t political, either.

“Has he many of those?” she asked. “Political friends?”

“Oh yes.” Miss Holroyd leered. “He’s especially fond of suffragists.”

“Kate.” The duchess cut her eyes at Miss Holroyd.

“What?” Miss Holroyd’s leer tamed instantly into a decorous smile. “I intend to supply Miss Finch with context, about artists, critics, suffragists . . .” She waved her hand. “Everything. To make her job more interesting.” She kicked back in her chair, smile widening as she scrutinized Nina.

“De’Ath’s favorite suffragists,” she said, “are the ones who practice free love.”