Page 30 of The Duke Undone

“You haven’t heard?” Mrs. Cantrell pressed a hand to her cheek and stared around the room, avoiding Aunt Marian’s gaze. She seemed to notice Lucy for the first time, hovering on the threshold between the little back kitchen and the shop proper. “You look well, lass,” she said, and her voice broke.

She was Irish by birth and had been a beauty in her time. The story was she won Mr. Cantrell’s heart with a glance. He’d felt her green eyes pierce him like a dart as they haggled over the price of oranges. His parents tried to dissuade him—an Irish basket girl!—but he would not be moved. Her eyes were an extraordinary color. Lucy had only seen one pair that made their emerald seem dim by comparison. She didn’t want to think of them.

Mrs. Cantrell’s eyes were brimming.

“Perhaps you’ll find a man at your painting school who’ll give you a good home, a decent, hardworking man, like my Alvin, but not so unlucky. That’s what I hope for you.”

She meant well, of course. Mrs. Cantrell was bighearted, quick to anger, and quick to laugh. Sometimes, Lucy could hear her from down the street, yelling at her children or singing as she soled baby shoes. Family was everything to her.

Nonetheless, Aunt Marian snipped back.

“Stuff and nonsense. A man!”

Aunt Marian made no bones about her own hopes for Lucy, or about her belief that, when it came to realizing those hopes, a man would prove less a boon than a bane. She fixed Lucy with a fierce look before turning it on Mrs. Cantrell. Sometimes she transformed into a veritable gorgon. Her hair made a magnificent prop.

“Lucy needs a man as much as a toad needs a side pocket. She’ll make a triumph with her oils, mark my words,” declared Aunt Marian. “We’ll all be part of a big crowd looking up at her pictures on the wall. I’m saving my legs for it.”

She meant it. As painful as it was for her to move, if Lucy exhibited anywhere in England, she would run after trains, clamber in and out of cabs and omnibuses, trudge miles.

“One day, she will become a member of the Academy!”

“Is that right? Then I’m glad,” murmured Mrs. Cantrell. Like all the neighbors, she humored Aunt Marian, the resident firebrand.

Aunt Marian did tend to get carried away. The Royal Academy had never elected a female Academician. Neither were its members known for their radical ideas. Change came slowly, if at all.

Lucy was more likely to stand for Parliament.

“I just want her to be taken care of.” Mrs. Cantrell’s eyes were welling again, and she dried them with a handkerchief. “I don’t know what we’re to do.”

“What is it? What’s happened?”

Aunt Marian had gone unnaturally still, bracing herself.

“They’ve put up notices.” Mrs. Cantrell balled the handkerchief in her fist. “They’re all around, notices and placards. They’re demolishing the house, the whole block. It’s been condemned.”

“Condemned?” Aunt Marian sank back into her chair. “Condemned? Our block?”

Some streets in Shoreditch were little more than open sewers. But this wasn’t one of them. The Elizabethan houses that fronted onto the narrow lane had been divided into tinier and tinier sections to fit more and more families, but at street level the shops, if not prosperous, were clean and respectable.

“This house?” Aunt Marian continued. “It’s solid as bedrock! It’s old, but it will stand forever.”

She looked dazedly about as though expecting the ceiling beams themselves to speak their confirmation.

Now Mrs. Cantrell’s eyes blazed green fire. “I told the bill poster,” she said, “him that was putting up the notices. I told him you couldn’t find a stouter, squarer house, and families living more respectably, in any corner of England. Wasn’t nothing to do with him, he said, and so I offered to let him see for himself how strong the walls were by knocking his head on them. He didn’t like that, not a bit of it.”

“It’s nothing to do with the bill poster, that’s right.” Aunt Marian’s voice was hoarse. “It’s the vestrymen looking to make a penny. And the city . . .”

Her voice broke. On other occasions, people shushed Aunt Marian when she began to rail against local government with the passion of a pamphleteer. But today Mrs. Cantrell nodded. Aunt Marian cleared her throat and continued.

“We all know that the Board of Works is rotten as old meat.”

The kettle was screaming for half a minute before Lucy shook herself and turned on her heel. She filled the teapot and put cups on the tray with trembling fingers.

She could hear her aunt talking again in that same strained voice.

“I remember Mr. Pomeroy complaining when it came time for the board to send out its inspectors to check the theaters. He had to give free tickets and I don’t know what else, or they’d declare a fire hazard and close him down.”

“You don’t have to be telling me,” said Mrs. Cantrell. “The Board of Perks, they call it. Alvin went to talk with James Purcell.”