Chapter 30

They made it to the platform seconds before the train to Truro steamed into motion. Even the first-class carriage was full, and they found seats together only by the grace of two jovial young men eager to retire to the smoking lounge for the sake of the ladies.

"You should have taken your private railcar." Kit arched a teasing brow at Lucy as he settled across from her.

"Anthony wanted me to take it." She set her bag on her lap, a better-quality bag than the battered one she'd lugged about as an art student, but still, a workbag. "Too much fuss."

"He gave this venture his husbandly approval?" Kit felt the jab of Nelly's elbow. Sometimes his teasing went too far. He'd wounded Lucy in the past, implying that her marriage to the Duke of Weston was a form of subordination.

Chastened, he cleared his throat. "How is Weston? And how are the girls?"

"Wonderful." Lucy opened her bag and pulled out her sketchbook. "I can show you."

"Dear God, no! Desist!" Kit covered his eyes with his hands. "I've seen enough depictions of Weston's bits to last a lifetime."

"I haven't," murmured Nelly. "He's quite a specimen."

Kit lowered his hands and saw that Lucy was scowling at them both. The first painting she'd ever exhibited was a nude of Weston, as scandalous as it was successful. He'd played muse to her ever since. In Kit's opinion, teasing about Weston's willingness to drop his trousers was permissible until the end of time. The duke's devotion to Lucy's art—his devotion to her, full stop—was his finest characteristic.

Nelly might disagree.

The sketches Lucy showed him were of her daughters, twins, just beginning to toddle when he'd seen them last.

"They're with Anthony at Stratton Grange." She named his—their—country seat, smiling a little wistfully at her drawings. "I'll join them next week."

Kit gave the sketches their due, nodding as he returned the sketchbook. "Beautiful."

The drawings and the children. Lucy had managed to combine her roles, so they seemed compatible, integral even, each to the other—artist, wife, mother. Aristocrat, less so. Pomp and circumstance still put her back up—she dressed herself in the mornings and gritted her teeth through society functions—but she'd also used her station to advance the causes she supported, with Weston's help.

Kit leaned back in his seat, contemplative.

"Would you have imagined," he asked, "when we were nineteen years old, just starting in the Antique School, that we would one day take a train together to the sea—you a duchess, and I a gentleman?"

"I'd have imagined winged pigs before this." She laughed, shaking her head, and then, slipping into the East End cant that once peppered her speech: "Life's a rum go, ain't it?"

"That it is," he murmured. Lucy's accent had changed over the years. She had changed, but he still recognized the half-feral girl, impassioned and ambitious, loyal and kind. He hoped that—in some sense—he remained recognizable too.

He tipped his head. "What would they think of us? Our nineteen-year-old selves?"

"They'd think we're a dream come true." She gave a happy sigh and flicked at the window curtain. The landscape whirring by was lushly green, only a few broken branches and puddles scattered in the fields to show the storm's path.

"So." She turned back to him, expression suspiciously innocent. "Who is Muriel?"

He told them, as much as he could tell them, in a busy train carriage, as a man of honor and discretion. When their curiosity was appeased, they told him their idea.

"The Siblinghood?" he repeated.

"It's not sonorous," Lucy admitted. "But it captures the spirit."

He gave them all a doubtful look. "The Sisterhood is women artists dedicated to supporting women artists. You don't want to change or obscure that."

"We want you, though," said Gwen. "Stop moving."

"Are you sketching me?" He stilled, swerving his eyes to peer down at her sketchbook. "I don't look half-bad."

"The Siblings," said Nelly. "I think it's brilliant."

"It was your idea," guessed Kit, and Nelly sniffed. He laughed and scrubbed a hand over his face.

"Sorry," he muttered, as Gwen made a beleaguered noise and lifted her pencil. "And thank you all, truly."

The three of them waited, watching him, love and hope and excitement written plainly on their faces, even Gwen's. They were his friends, his Sisters, and their desire to bring him back into the fold was profoundly moving, and perhaps…not exactly in line with his own sense of things.

He opted for absolute honesty. "I confess I'm unsure about Sibling."

Nelly's sniff became an offended huff.

"I'm not opposed to it," he said. "But I might rather something else. Maybe you stay Sisters, and I'm a cousin. Maybe we won't figure it out today."

Lucy nodded. "We have all week."

"Or this week," he added, wryly. A frown puckered her brow. She opened her mouth to protest, then checked herself.

"It's well begun, at least," she said, relenting but determined.

"Another thing." His heart skidded to a stop. The buoy of happiness turned to lead in his chest and plummeted to his stomach. He pushed himself to speak through a clenched jaw. "I can't seem to paint at all these days." He put on a mocking expression, a cover for his wavering composure. "My ability to participate in any circle of artists is currently hypothetical."

"What do you mean—you can't paint?" Lucy's eyes narrowed.

So he told them, too, about burning his easel, about his subsequent headaches and shaking hands. He told them haltingly, tension locking his neck and shoulders, then sat in silence, eyes on the window.

"It's because of what I said." Lucy'd gone rigid too, her steepled hands pressed to her bloodless lips.

"Don't worry. You're not so powerful." He sighed, and suddenly it was easy to speak, to let the most maudlin formulation slip out.

"I abandoned the Sisterhood," he said. "And then I abandoned art." His laughter seemed to shred his throat. "Too late, I discovered that art had abandoned me."

"Kit." Lucy lowered her hands. "You are not so powerful. You can't banish art from your life by burning an easel. Art is extremely tenacious. How else could it persist in the face of so much misunderstanding and rejection?"

"Ha," he muttered, but as he looked at her face, its familiar, no-nonsense expression, he felt the lead in his gut begin to lighten.

Her gaze faltered and then firmed, as she came to some decision.

"I couldn't paint," she confessed. "After Anthony built me my studio. It was so grand, I felt like an utter fraud. I couldn't paint for a month."

"I don't remember that." He crossed his arms.

"I didn't tell you." She went pink. "Any of you. I was ashamed. I let you think I was preoccupied with married life."

Thathe did remember. "You and Weston spent all of that April holed up and cooing at each other like doves."

"You thought I was with him, and he thought I was at the studio. Really, I was going for soggy, horrible walks all over London, hating myself for squandering what ninety-nine percent of the people I passed could never ever have."

"Lucy," said Gwen in a soft voice. "Why?"

Lucy looked at her, then at Kit. "You know what it was like for me, before. I painted in a little, dark room, on old canvas, with cheap brushes and not enough of anything. Not enough light. Not enough space. Not enough time. Not enough pigment. Suddenly, I had everything, and it should have made painting so much easier—the possibilities were limitless. But I'd always made art in response to limits, and I didn't know myself as a painter without them. I was so overwhelmed I couldn't begin. My head didn't pound, and my hands didn't shake, but my feet propelled me miles and miles, sent me anywhere but the studio."

"You invited me to share the studio with you." Kit frowned as he reinterpreted events. "I thought it was because you felt guilty for avoiding me. But it was because you needed me to help you stay put."

"And to help me feel like myself again." Lucy chewed her lip. "I wish I'd tried to explain, but it felt so vile—whining about luxury." She paused. "I know our situations aren't the same. But I also know you and art haven't done with each other yet. You'll meet on new terms."

"Perhaps." He moved his shoulders, loosening his neck, the motion agnostic. Lucy's smile was suffused with faith. It thawed him to the marrow.

"All right," he allowed. "I hope so."

"Enough talk." Gwen tore a sheet of paper from her sketchbook and folded back the top quarter too quickly for anyone to glimpse what she'd drawn there. "Let's play."

She passed the folded paper to Lucy.

Lucy's eyes twinkled.

"Kit," she said. "Meet Mr. Malkin, the bird-cow in spats." She bent her head and began to sketch.

"We've already met." Kit snorted. "I invented this game."

"Don't look." Lucy hid her sketch with her left hand, right hand flying. "Voilà!"

She folded the paper again, concealing all but the thinnest bottom sliver of pencil marks. She passed it to Kit.

"Mr. Malkin, the bird-cow in spats," he muttered, extracting a pencil from his knapsack. The first time they'd ever played, they'd produced a drawing of exactly that: Lucy's cat, Mr. Malkin, with the torso of a bird, the legs of a cow, and the feet of a dapper young man.

Hence, the name.

"Hurry up," said Lucy.

He examined the edge of Lucy's sketch. Had she been drawing scales?

"No thinking," she said, so he filled his segment quickly, more scribble than sketch, the coils of a serpent. He folded the paper down and passed it to Nelly, just as Lucy handed him another.

"I started this one," she said, so he elongated the neck, draped the shoulders in a flowing toga, contributing the midsection of a Roman senator.

They kept passing papers, and his pencil kept moving, scrawling chicken feet and shading tiger stripes. It was drawing—but drawing with four hands instead of just one. Connecting lines that a friend had begun, and another would continue.

He felt fine. Better than fine.

Maybe his hand shook a little, but maybe that was because he was laughing as he clothed a walrus in a tartan waistcoat and put a horse on a bicycle.

"You start one," said Gwen.

He didn't hesitate. He drew a woman's head, her hair windblown into snaky locks. She had strong features and fine dark eyes, and he would have gazed into them if Nelly hadn't clucked with her tongue.

He folded the paper and passed it on.

When the collective sketches were unfolded, on the platform in Truro, they all laughed at the impossible creatures, neither fish nor fowl, though many included appendages of both.

Kit claimed the drawing of Muriel for himself. She had butterfly wings and octopus arms. The mouth he'd sketched smiled up at him, as though she marveled, and approved.