Page 85 of The Duke Undone

“Obey. Stay out of the papers. On March twenty-sixth we’ll have something to celebrate.” A smile tugged his lips. “I’ll bring the champagne for the toast.” He took Anthony’s shoulder in a firm grip and shook it hard. “We’ll get through this,” he said gruffly. “Call if you want to discuss those reports.”

Anthony stared at the door after Yardley let himself out. Then he threw himself onto a chair, pressing his palms together. His head throbbed. A glass of whiskey would help. But he was growing accustomed to waiting until the later afternoon, when a visit to the glasshouse had more to offer than a pain-dulling tipple.

He couldn’t bring himself to inspect the annual reports from Hampshire, to chase more swarming hieroglyphics around the page. He pressed his palms together harder, then pulled them apart and looked at the sharply etched lines.

He stood and headed to the coach house to seek out a raw board, a saw, and a plane.

• • •

A heavy footfall alerted Lucy to Anthony’s presence. Usually he was quieter. She would feel the hairs stir on the back of her neck, and she would know that he’d arrived. Every day she waited for that moment, when the air charged around her. Every day she half hoped the moment wouldn’t come.

It wasn’t that she minded sharing the light with him. It was that she liked it too much.

She fixed her eyes on the canvas. Her third attempt, and Violet still drooped. She wanted the dolls to participate more in the scene, to repay—albeit ever so slightly—the girls’ attention. They didn’t need to seem alive, of course. But they needed to seem . . . quickened.

More highlights. She went to her paint box, open on top of a marble bench between two enormous planters, both upside down. Anthony had turned them over so she could use them as makeshift tables.

The furnishings are sparse, he’d said when he’d first brought her inside, watching her with a strange expression, eagerness mixed with apology.

It’s a crystal palace in miniature, she’d said, rapt, and it was. The glasshouse itself was small but ornate, a beautiful curvilinear structure of sheet glass and iron. He’d set up an easel beneath the apex of the dome, put a camp chair in front of it, turned over a tall urn on which he’d placed an Argand lamp in case clouds dimmed the sun. He’d carried in a bucket of water and laid out glasses and a pitcher on the marble bench, so she could wash her brushes.

You said it has been abandoned for years? she’d murmured. The glass is remarkably clean.

Indeed, the panes sparkled. He’d shrugged, but the dimples flickered briefly in his cheeks, all the confirmation she needed. He’d clambered around like a monkey, washing the grime off the glass.

He’d done all of it for her.

This past week had been a dream. When she left the School of Painting, she no longer dashed to the omnibus and jostled the slow miles back to Shoreditch, where petticoats, bodices, and undersleeves waited to accuse her. Aunt Marian had hired Megan Cosgrave through the end of March, had insisted on it. Off you go. Paint something better. These days, Lucy walked swiftly from the Royal Academy to Weston Hall, slipped around to the mews, ducked through a door in the stone wall, and entered the garden.

In the glasshouse, they were hers, the last hours of daylight.

Well, hers and Anthony’s.

There it was, her tube of zinc white. She snatched it up. Another footfall brought her head around, a tart remark forming on her lips. She didn’t want any bumbling around, not when her supplies were scattered all about.

“Oh!”

It wasn’t Anthony behind her. This man was his opposite, tow-haired and short-nosed, with a blocky build, his livery rumpled. He grinned with unabashed interest.

“You’re harder to catch than a greased pig.”

She raised her eyebrows. It took her a moment to realize he referred to her sprint through Weston Hall on that wet, desperate Saturday afternoon.

“Thank you,” she said at last. She couldn’t doubt he meant it as a compliment.

“The boys were sweating cobs by the end of it.” He wove around the sketches she’d fanned out on the floor.

“I’d bet you in a smock race, that I would,” he said, nodding.

She wrinkled her nose. If this was lewdness, it was a country variety entirely opaque to her. Up close, she noted how young he was, not more than twenty. He scratched at his bare chin, squinting at her easel. He had dirt under his fingernails.

“Are you the gardener?”

“Valet.” He tossed her a wink. “To me are entrusted the socks and drawers.”

“Let’s leave my drawers out of it.” Anthony stepped into the glasshouse, jacket slung over his shoulder.

“I see you’ve met Humphreys,” he said to Lucy with a smile.