Wonders of the Invisible World (7 page)

“I hate your Mr. Wilding,” Miss Bunce said between her teeth.

“Try to forgive him; he’s not entirely right in the head. I won’t make you work any longer tonight.” He gestured toward a long plank table painted cherry red, on which the housekeeper was piling platters and bowls of cold meats and fruits, pies and puddings and punch. “Have a sausage. Mr. Coombe is going to read to us soon.” He cast an upraised brow at Sophie. “Perhaps you and Miss Bunce should corner a comfortable place to sit before all the chairs get taken. Nelly,” he called to his housekeeper, a wiry young woman with a cheerful face and a good deal of energy, “I just remembered all those cushions—Where were they last seen?”

“You shoved them all in a cupboard, Mr. Slade.”

“Well, we’ll just shove them out again, and line them up along the walls. I’ll ask my sister to play the piano while everyone’s filling a plate. That’ll quiet them down. Where is she?” he asked, standing on the crate to peer over the crowd. “Emma? Coombe, have you—”

“When last seen,” the poet said drily, “she was speaking to Bram Wilding.”

Adrian closed his mouth over a toneless “Mmm.” He stepped off the crate, added briskly, without elaborating, “Well.”

“I can help you with the cushions,” Ned offered, “if you’ll tell me where they’re hiding.”

“That cupboard by the door, I think. Thank you.” He paused, his eyes flicking over the crowd again. “Ah. There’s Emma in a corner, showing Wilding her drawings.”

He vanished into the crush, and Ned went to set the cushions free.

The new lodgings were on Carmion Street, in an apartment building on a corner; it had an oblique view of the river if you stood at the right window. The building was a staid brick block with large windows tidily painted white and unadorned with fripperies. The fripperies had all followed Adrian in, it seemed. They lay scattered everywhere: brilliant carpets and shawls he’d picked up on the streets, ancient tiles, pieces of costume to use as props for his paintings, plates and cups, bulky chairs, a horsehair sofa, massive chests and sideboards, even the odd piece of armor and broken statuary. It looked, Ned thought, like the sorting room in a museum basement. Paintings leaned against the walls. Ned recognized a few of them from exhibits, or visits to other friends’ studios. The chaos, he noted as he opened the cupboard, extended into the next room as well, and was even strewn all over the massive, canopied bed.

He found a stack of round, oversized cushions covered with faded crewelwork. Wedged into a square cupboard, they resisted Ned’s efforts until one popped out near the middle of the stack, exuding a puff of antique dust. What exactly they had been intended for, Ned could not imagine. He began strewing them hither and yon, which became easier as the party gathered around the table, leaving him some bare floor. People, plates and cups in hand, wandered back and sat upon them as soon as he dropped them. Adrian appeared beside him suddenly while he wrestled with another.

“Here we are,” he said cheerfully, taking the cushion out of Ned’s arms after he staggered back from the tug-of-war with the cupboard.

“It’s like dancing with a drunken costermonger,” Ned muttered. “What were these in their previous lives?” He hauled out another cushion and turned to find himself face to face with the nymph.

He blinked at her, startled, wondering how Adrian had turned into his sister. Then Adrian rejoined them, dusting his hands.

“You must meet my sister,” he declared. “Emma, this is Edward Bonham, who painted that wonderfully chilly painting with the owl in it.”

“Oh yes.” She spoke, Ned thought dazedly, as she walked: carefully and delicately, as though she had just turned from a graceful poplar into a woman and was uncertain about the effects she might have on people. “I loved that painting, Mr. Bonham.” There was an unnymphlike smile in her eyes, perhaps left by the wake of his costermonger comment.

“You should show him your drawings,” Adrian suggested, hauling the last cushion out, and giving it a hearty shove with one boot to an empty spot along the wall.

“I’ve just been showing them to Mr. Wilding,” she told them. “He said that technically I show promise, but that thus far passion seems to have eluded me. He offered to give me a lesson or two.” Adrian’s mouth opened abruptly; she continued with unruffled composure, “I told him that I understood what he meant, but that true passion in painting could only be expressed by true mastery of technique; without it passion looked sentimental, trite, and in the end ridiculous.”

Adrian grinned. “Good for you. What did he say?”

“That most women painters should confine themselves to watercolors, since they have not the breadth of soul to express the fullness and complexity of oils, though he had seen one or two come close enough to counterfeit it.”

Adrian rolled his eyes. “What did you say to that?”

“That I would do my best to prove him wrong,” she answered simply. “And then the monkey had an accident on his hair and he went off to wash.”

Ned loosed an inelegant guffaw. A corner of Emma’s long mouth crooked up. “What are your thoughts on the breadth of a woman’s soul, Mr. Bonham?”

“I think,” he said fervently, “I could travel a lifetime in one and never see the half of it.”

She regarded him silently for a heartbeat, out of eyes the color of a fine summer day, and in that moment he caught his first astonished glimpse of the undiscovered country that was theirs.

Adrian cleared his throat. His sister looked suddenly dazed, herself, as though she had forgotten where she was.

“Come and eat,” Adrian said, smiling. “Then you can show Bonham your drawings.”

Emma played the piano after supper while the party, clustered into little groups on cushions and crates, argued intensely about the nature of Art, or languished, satiated, over their coffee and listened to Emma. She scarcely heard what her fingers were doing. She was still lost in that little moment when she had looked into Mr. Bonham’s hazelnut eyes and seen her future. They say it happens that way sometimes, she thought, amazed. I just never thought it would happen now. I never thought that it would actually happen, only that it was always something to be expected, to hope for, never that it would suddenly happen and I would be wondering: What happens next?

Then Mr. Bonham drifted over and smiled at her. She smiled back. That was what happened next. He lingered to listen; she played, simply content with his nearness. There was nothing extraordinary about his looks; there were half-a-dozen young men in the room, including her brother and the irritating Mr. Wilding, she would have chosen over Ned to pose for the hero of her painting. True eye-stoppers, they were. But hers had stopped at a boyish face with a determined jawline and a sweet, diffident expression, behind which a busy, talented brain conceived pictures like the simple mystery of that winter night, and crafted them with a great deal of ability. She had come to the city to learn to paint; perhaps she could learn something from him.

Perhaps that was next.

She was trying to conceive a painting around him, idly wondering which role might suit him best, when Adrian came up to her. She softened her playing, lifted her brows at him questioningly.

“Emma, this is Marianne Cameron. She wants to ask you to pose for her, but she is too shy.”

The young woman in question snorted at the idea, making Adrian laugh. She was short and stocky, with frizzy, sandy hair and truly lovely violet eyes. Her pale lavender dress, sensibly and elegantly plain, suited those eyes.

“You,” she said to Emma, “are the most beautiful thing in this room, with the possible exception of Bram Wilding, who can’t be bothered to pose for anyone. Several of us rent a room on Tidewater Street; we’d love you to come and pose for us. Adrian says you paint, too. If you like, we can make a space for you to work. It’s a bit quieter than this place; we don’t have monkeys and poets swinging from the rafters there.”

“Speaking of which,” Adrian murmured, “I wonder where that monkey has gotten to?”

“Us?” Emma asked.

“We women,” Marianne said briskly. “We have made our own band of painters, and we refuse to be convinced of our inferiority. We learn from one another. Would you like to come and see?”

“Oh, yes,” Emma said instantly. “I would very much.” She remembered Adrian then; her eyes slid to him. “That is—I came to help Adrian get settled—”

“Go ahead,” Adrian urged. “We both must work; we can deal with this clutter in the evenings.”

“Good!” Marianne said with satisfaction. “I’ll come for you tomorrow at noon then. We work all day, but the afternoon light is best.”

“Miss Cameron paints quite well,” Adrian said, propping himself against the piano as Marianne moved away. “She has even had one or two paintings exhibited:
Love Lies Bleeding
and
Undine
—that one has marvelous watery lights in it.”

“It’s strange,” Emma sighed. “I always feel such a great country gawk, and here I am to be painted.”

“You’re as far from a gawk as anyone can get without turning into something completely mythical.”

She smiled affectionately at her brother. “You didn’t say such things when we were younger.”

“I don’t recall that I was ever less than perfectly well behaved.”

“You called me a she-giant once and warned that I would never stop growing; I’d be tall as a barn by the time I was twenty, and there would be nobody big enough to marry me.”

“I’m sure I never said any such thing, and anyway you were probably taller than me, then, which as your older brother I found completely unacceptable. Now I’m taller, so I can be magnanimous.” He straightened, glancing at the party; the noise level had ratcheted upward considerably when Emma stopped playing. “We’d better have Coombe read now that Nelly has finished clattering plates. I do wonder where that monkey is; I hope it isn’t burning up the beds.”

“I’ll go and look,” Emma said, and slipped through the crowd as Adrian began describing the unutterable delight yet to come: an epic of epic proportions by the brilliant Linley Coombe on the subject of—what was the subject again? Emma heard them all laugh at something the poet said as she opened the kitchen door.

The kitchen, along with the small dark rooms attached to it, was the domain of Nelly and the cook, Mrs. Dyce. Nelly, who had a thoroughly practical and unflappable nature, was Adrian’s treasure; she could conjure beds out of books and floorboards for any number of unexpected guests, he said, and she did the work of five servants without turning a hair. Now the housekeeper was being scullery-maid, helping Mrs. Dyce with the mountain of dirty dishes. Earlier that day, Emma had helped her unpack the crates, dust furniture for the party, find silverware and candlesticks and lamps among the boxes, and summon food and wine for an unknown number of guests, all before she vanished into the kitchen to help Mrs. Dyce cook the elaborate supper.

Mrs. Dyce, a gaunt, mournful woman who could turn out a fragrant shepherd’s pie with one hand while she was wiping away a tear for her dead husband with the other, only sighed and shook her head at the notion of monkeys in the kitchen.

Nelly wiped her hands on her apron, said calmly, “I’ll have a look, Miss.”

She took a lamp into the inner sanctums of bedchamber and pantry, while Emma checked the high shelves and cupboards.

“I don’t see it, Miss Emma,” Nelly said, reappearing. “Maybe Mr. Wilding shut it up in a cupboard after it set Miss Bunce on fire.”

“I doubt that Mr. Wilding would think of doing anything so sensible.”

“You may be right, Miss. But one can hope.”

“One can, indeed, hope. I’ll ask him.”

But, reluctant to put herself again under that powerful, discomfiting gaze, she looked first into Adrian’s bedroom, expecting she might find the little monkey curled up and napping among the sheets. Her lamplight, sliding over the room, revealed only its familiar chaos. Finally she glanced into the room, hardly bigger than the pantry, where she slept.

No monkey.

She turned back into the hallway, perplexed, and jumped. Bram Wilding stood in her lamplight with the golden monkey on his shoulder reaching for the lamp.

She moved it hastily. “Mr. Wilding. You startled me.”

“You were looking for me.”

“I was looking for your monkey.”

“Ah. Well, I’ve come in search of you. Please forgive my earlier rudeness, Miss Slade; the last thing I would want is to discourage you or anyone from painting. The truth is that I am so distracted by you that any amount of idiocy can come out of my mouth without me hearing a word of it. From the moment I saw you, I knew I must paint you. I see you as the great, doomed Celtic Queen Boudicca, in silk and fur and armor, with her long fair hair flying free as she faces her conquerors, knowing that she will lose the final battle but ready to fight until she can no more for her lost realm. Will you pose for me?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Wilding,” she said with relief. “I’ve already promised Marianne Cameron that I would pose for her—”

“Put her off.”

“Tomorrow.”

He was silent. The monkey chattered at her, wanting her flame, its great eyes filled with it. Bram’s dark eyes seemed impenetrable; light could not reach past them.

“I’ll talk to her,” he said finally.