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  Alfred did not say anything, leaving the housekeeper to wonder, for perhaps the thousandth time, why it was that she had ever had anything to do with painters.

  ‘The trouble with you painter people,’ she murmured from under the stack of dresses she was still supporting, ‘is that nothing is good enough for you. And, if you ask me, it never will be. Always on about something or other, you painters, but when it gets down to it, what is the result, may I ask?’

  ‘The result is that I have chosen the blue jacket with the white dress. Yes, I have most definitely chosen the blue jacket,’ Alfred announced, interrupting the housekeeper, and he stood back, holding up the jacket first to Edith’s face, and then to the light. ‘The blue is shot through with a little mauve, so that should be most suitable for the subject.’

  ‘As I was saying, the trouble with you painters is that you must have everything perfect, and what is the end result – just a painting that hangs on the wall that most people stand in front of for little more than a few seconds. Just a wall cover finally, that is what a painting is, just a wall cover. Just a bit of paint arranged in a frame, and hanging over another bit of paint on a wall—’

  The rest of Mrs George’s theory was lost to posterity as Alfred once more piled up the dresses in her sturdy arms, turned her forcefully towards the door, opened it for her, and showed her back out to the courtyard.

  ‘You are quite right, Mrs George, no doubt of it, but happily for us there are people prepared to pay a great deal of money for those bits of framed paint to hang on their walls.’

  ‘Nothing better to do with their money, and no sense to go with it, neither—’

  She was still grumbling as she crossed back to the main house. For a second Alfred watched her go, and then he closed the door.

  ‘Mrs George is just like my late mother,’ he told Edith. ‘My mother was always saying just those things to my father, which is probably why he left her for the South Seas, and never came back. Now. Where are you going to change, Mrs Todd, may I ask?’

  Edith was aware that by constantly addressing her as ‘Mrs Todd’ Alfred was being, in some way that she could not put her finger on, vaguely flirtatious. It was the way he said ‘Mrs Todd’ as if he did not believe that she was really married to Napier.

  ‘I will change in the room off my husband’s studio, thank you, Mr Talisman.’ She snatched up the blue jacket and white dress, which was actually her own favourite, and passing Alfred, who was already starting to prepare his canvas, she left the room and went next door.

  ‘Come in!’

  Napier had probably expected to see Alfred standing in the doorway. Certainly he did not bother to look up but stood wrapped in perfect concentration staring at Becky, who was now wearing the hated Grecian robe and holding the harp that had once been Edith’s dreaded prop.

  Edith put her finger to her lips and started to tiptoe across the studio, but she need not have bothered, because Becky too was wrapped in concentration, unmoving, her hand, which now looked surprisingly graceful, holding the harp, her eyes gazing straight out at Napier.

  Edith changed into the dress, tiptoed back across the studio, then quietly closed the door, and it was only as she settled herself in front of Alfred that she realised that there had been something missing in the scene she had just witnessed in the next-door studio. Napier had not been heard to give one of his great sighs. Not once!

  In the time it had taken her to struggle out of the grey costume and into the blue jacket and white dress, he had not made a single sound. Edith was sure that if it had been she who had been sitting to him, he would have heaved a sigh that could be heard across at the house. Whereas Becky had stayed still as a statue, looking suddenly and magnificently suited to the wretched Grecian gown, and Edith could almost hear him humming delightedly as if he had at long, long last found his true inspiration.

  ‘Anything the matter, Mrs Todd?’ Alfred asked, after a moment, when she walked back into the smaller studio, dressed in his choice of clothes. He was gazing at her with sudden sympathy, looking so guileless, and to such a fetching degree, that Edith found herself thinking that the expression on his face must be precisely the one that the devil would use when at his most Machiavellian.

  ‘Nothing at all, no, Mr Talisman. Why should there be?’

  ‘There should not be. It was just that you looked suddenly unhappy.’

  ‘I am not unhappy; I am just thoughtful. When another woman is sitting to your husband for the same painting for which you have sat, it makes you – thoughtful.’

  ‘Of course. Now if you wouldn’t mind my arranging you?’ He started to walk towards Edith, innocence personified.

  Edith had not planned for this, as why should she? She had not sat to anyone besides Napier before. Now she found that it was one thing for Napier to rearrange her, putting her hand this way or that on the harp, or plucking at a sleeve, but for Alfred Talisman to put his hands on her, doing up a button in the middle of her jacket, a button that she certainly had not realised had somehow loosened itself, smoothing the shoulder lines on the same jacket, tucking a tendril of hair back into place – for Alfred Talisman to do that to her was somehow very different.

  Quite against her will she found herself falling into an unexpected trancelike state, as if what was happening to her was not truly happening; as if she was being transported to another world, a world where she was no longer ‘Mrs Napier Todd’, but just – Edith. And then he started to paint her.

  Napier always worked in – indeed demanded – a concentrated silence, but Alfred, she discovered, was quite different. It seemed that, while working at a terrific pace, he loved to talk incessantly, even as, using the new, more modern technique favoured by the Newbourne School, he stabbed at the canvas in front of him, his normal reserve fled.

  He also demanded a contribution from his sitter, constantly posing questions to her, and, to Edith’s amazement, actually listening to the answers. As the days passed he entranced her with his travel stories – he seemed to have spent more time abroad than in England – and his gossip, which seemed to touch on everyone and everything in Europe; and of course, being a painter, he was mildly if engagingly risqué. The most surprising feature of his personality was that, unlike Napier, he was sensitive to how his model was feeling.

  ‘You must want to get down and walk around?’

  He held out his hands to her, smiling down at her, and Edith, not wanting to, but wanting very much to, placed her hands in his. As she did so she made the mistake of looking into his eyes, and immediately dropped her own, purposely avoiding the expression in his, not wanting to see what they were saying to her.

  ‘There.’ He let go of her hands. ‘Why not take a turn or two around the room? And shake your hands about a little, it will help the blood to keep chasing around your frame.’

  Edith had grown used to his looking at her as if he knew exactly what she would look like if she was sitting to him stark naked, but once he set her down she walked quickly away from him, putting up what she hoped was a good show of pretending not to see and feel what she knew Alfred was seeing and feeling.

  ‘You won’t always be able to run away from me, Mrs Todd, you must know that. I have seen into your soul; more than that, my canvas has become the mirror of it.’

  Edith turned. It was true he had seen into her, and she would find it difficult to run away from him. Worse, she now knew that she could not run away from the realisation that Alfred might love her in a way in which, it seemed, Napier was incapable. It seemed he loved her for herself.

  Chapter Ten

  Mrs Molesworth adjusted the cameo brooch at the neck of her maroon silk gown. She had been a widow for many years now, but still took great comfort from the lock of her husband’s hair which nestled inside the brooch. Celandine had left her to choose her own gown, and she had plumped for the maroon silk, which she had read in her favourite periodical was once again a fashionable colour, and one much favoured in Court circles, although
not of course with the Queen, who had not been seen out of black since the death of her beloved Albert.

  Mrs Molesworth felt she understood and sympathised with the intensity of the Queen’s feelings at the loss of her consort, although she herself would not have chosen to stay in perpetual mourning for her own husband, Mr Molesworth, since he had really been too much the black sheep of his otherwise eminent family. He had been a source of some considerable trouble to herself and their son, who happily had not taken after his father, except in his love of the sea, and was now in the Navy sailing the seven seas. His father was now in the churchyard, unable to gamble any more of their precious money away, which meant that Mrs Molesworth could continue to be prosperous and live a life free of fear. So all in all, it could be said that even a much-loved one’s demise could bring some benefits.

  ‘Crowd into my skirt,’ she instructed her two granddaughters. ‘And lean on Grandma the way she told you.’

  Her granddaughters did as they were told, with every show of reluctance, because sitting still and cuddling up to Grandma was essentially, as far as they were concerned, not just one punishment, but two.

  Celandine, who had no real experience of children, beyond Agnes’s two arrogant sons, leaned forward and rearranged the children’s dresses while they rested their blonde heads on the maroon silk.

  She knew she had to work quickly, because that was the nature of the commission. She also knew that bribing the children was out of the question, for not only was their grandmother present, but any suggestion of plying them with cake would be vetoed if only because of Grandma’s best dress.

  ‘I don’t like the frocks that my daughter-in-law has insisted on them wearing,’ Mrs Molesworth announced, seeming not to care if the children informed their mother of their grandmother’s opinion of her taste. ‘I would have preferred them both in pink, myself, I would. I allus prefer a girl in pink; you knows where you are with pink.’

  ‘I think you will like the look of the sprigged cotton once I have put it on the canvas,’ Celandine told her, determined to be diplomatic.

  Once conveyed to canvas, after only a few weeks’ labour, the two children came out looking angelic, and finally, it seemed, rather too angelic for Sherry’s taste.

  ‘Mmm, dearest, I see your point,’ he announced before dinner one night when he was allowed to view Celandine’s painting at last. ‘But to my mind you have not conveyed their personalities. They look too alike.’ He stared at the painting as if he were a dealer. ‘In fact, I find that there is rather too much detail in the painting overall. Really far, far too much detail. The toy pony placed to the side of this child’s shoe, the doll being held by the other child, and then Mrs Molesworth’s lace cap, and her cameo brooch, not to mention the background that you have chosen – it is all much too much detail. Why could you not hang a curtain behind the good lady? A velvet curtain is traditional in portraiture, and the curtain that I used in the Captain Black portrait serves admirably, I think. Much better than all those objects on the chimneypiece. That’s her diary, is it? And the cooking utensils, not to mention the cake on the stand on that table to the side of her. It is all too much detail, dearest, really too much detail.’

  Celandine breathed in and out very slowly. She knew that Sherry was having a hard time of it trying to sell his paintings, which were too local for London, and too London for the locals, and she also knew that he had been painting in difficult conditions, having chosen to go to the harbour rather than stay in his studio on the coldest day of the winter, but even so she felt that she would have appreciated it if he had kept his opinions to himself.

  ‘To begin at the beginning, which is always a good place to start,’ she said, after taking a sip of wine to steady her emotions, ‘the children look alike, Sherry dearest, because they are in real life actually twins. There is no curtain as a backdrop, as in your portrait of Captain Black, because Mrs Molesworth wanted me to paint in the details of her everyday life, the household effects to which she has to pay such attention. The diary where she notes down the people who are coming to stay, the cake—’

  ‘You should never pay attention to sitters’ whims, dearest, really you shouldn’t. Mark my words, if you do, believe me you will be there all day, really you will. They always want flattery and their demands can be truly astounding. No, you must never pay attention to the sitter. Paint the truth of what you see, not what they want.’

  ‘But you paid attention to Captain Black. You made sure that I put in the blessed skull and crossbones and the admiral’s hat, and brought out the gold on his epaulettes, even though he was only the captain of a trading vessel!’

  Celandine could hear Mrs Molesworth calling them to dinner, so she turned away and went to the door, still carrying her glass of wine, rather than take the argument any further.

  ‘That was only your first attempt, dearest. I judged it better to leave you to your own devices, but if you are to make portraiture your chosen path—’

  They were going down to dinner, so Celandine fell silent rather than protest that she would never, ever have chosen portraiture as her artistic path, but that she did choose it, had chosen it, because she did not want either Sherry or herself to starve.

  Nor did she say how much she longed to paint what she wanted, to express her own artistic vision, because she knew, for the present anyway, that there was not even a remote possibility of its happening.

  The Japanese style of painting which had so impressed her when she was in Paris, the art of Degas and many others that she longed not to imitate but to become part of, had once been her vision of the future, but no longer. For the moment she must be practical. Portraiture was the boat she was frantically rowing to keep Sherry and herself afloat; her own painting was the far horizon, a beautiful dream that she might, one day, realise.

  Edith could not prevent herself from looking forward to sitting to Alfred every morning with all the happy enthusiasm that she had never felt when she was sitting to Napier. Alfred did not seem to look on her as an object. He looked on her as a woman to be painted as she was; as herself. And what was more, unlike Napier, Alfred not only allowed her to see the painting as it progressed, he positively encouraged her to do so.

  It was always a most satisfying moment at the end of the day. The moment when they stood together to look at the painting.

  ‘So. How do you like what I think of you, Mrs Todd? Do you think I have read your character correctly, or do you think I have merely painted just another woman?’

  He had never asked that question before. He had only ever asked the kinds of questions that were, perhaps, uppermost in his mind in the early stages. Questions such as ‘Do you think there is too much mauve in the jacket?’ or ‘Do you think the Titian in your hair is coming out as it should?’

  Edith glanced up at him, and then at the painting again, before answering.

  ‘I like it very much, but – it is very strange, when I look at it,’ she said. ‘Most strange.’

  ‘And what is most strange, Mrs Todd?’

  He still seemed to love to use formality to discomfit her, while always employing the slightly raised eyebrow to underline the fact that he was not laughing at her, but with her.

  ‘I see it is me, but I also see that you have made me look very innocent.’

  ‘You are the most innocent person I know. You certainly should be.’

  He did not add that he knew she was innocent, because he had overheard the conversation between Napier and her on the night of the party.

  ‘I am not innocent, Mr Talisman,’ Edith retorted, laughing. ‘No young girl brought up in an inn can be totally innocent, I do assure you.’

  ‘You are as innocent as the day is long, and I must tell you that I like your innocence more for the fact that you are so convinced that you are nothing of the kind. Now, back to work, Mrs Todd.’

  He put his hands around her tiny waist and lifted her as effortlessly as a father lifting a child on to the chair, automatically rear
ranging her skirt as he did so.

  ‘Ah, you ladies, you must all thank heaven for the health bustle,’ he remarked lightly. ‘The dear little health bustle, snapping back and forth into place, an invention too long in arriving, and what a relief it must be to you all, relieving you as it does of the heat of the dreadful old horsehair.’

  Edith was becoming so used to Alfred’s easy attitudes since sitting to him that she hardly registered the fact that he had such intimate knowledge of female underclothing. His love for women, and his appreciation of their clothing, not to mention their attributes, was so much part of his character that she now accepted that he knew all about such intimate matters as health bustles, not to mention the relieving effect they had on the female body after the over-use of the old-fashioned kind.

  ‘Snip snap,’ he murmured, as he now always did when he finished adjusting her clothing to his satisfaction.

  Edith stared up at him, feeling happily dreamy, knowing that the hours ahead would be all too entrancingly restful.

  ‘You have a very bad effect on me,’ she murmured, as she repositioned her arm how she knew he liked it.

  ‘Why is that, Mrs Todd?’

  ‘I think,’ Edith announced, after a small pause, ‘I think it is because you are such easy company.’

  She did not need to add that Napier did not have the easy bohemian manner that Alfred possessed. Napier did not, at least when Edith sat to him, seem to appreciate a woman’s need to be treated as a person.

  Nor, in the way that seemed to come so naturally to Alfred, did Napier appreciate the need to understand that women were not put on this earth to represent some high-flown ideal of womanhood, but longed, as did men, to be allowed to be able to be themselves, neither all male, nor all female, but human; not to be for ever straining towards some sort of extreme virtuous state that would turn them into either saints or goddesses, far beyond the reach of men.