Chapter Seven

Seven

Stella Hobhouse stood on the threshold, a brilliantly patterned blue-and-ivory cashmere shawl tangled about her arms, and a rather incongruous black crepe-and-lace matron’s cap covering the entirety of her hair. Her pale, silver-blue eyes were wide with surprise. She clearly hadn’t anticipated encountering him here.

But though she could have easily done so, she didn’t run away. She remained, hovering on the threshold, her aura sparking with the same electricity as Teddy’s own.

It took her but an instant to master herself. Her lush mouth compressed; her countenance rapidly composing itself into a ladylike mask. “Happy Christmas, Mr. Hayes,” she said. “But it isn’t morning any longer. It’s past one.”

He looked at the carriage clock as though noticing it for the first time. “Is it? Forgive me. I lose track of the time when I’m working.”

She flicked a glance to his canvas, temporarily diverted. “You’re painting?”

“The beginnings of a landscape, as you see. Not one of my best efforts.”

A doubtful frown puckered her brow. “It looks quite good to me.”

“From a distance, perhaps, but not when you view the brushstrokes at close quarters.” He rolled his chair back a turn, giving her a better view. “See for yourself.”

She hesitated. “I don’t wish to disturb you.”

“It’s no disturbance,” he said. “I was just breaking for tea.”

There was a pause. A weighty one. Teddy’s fingers curled tight on the wheels of his chair. He ruthlessly tamped down the urge to say something more.

“Very well,” Miss Hobhouse replied at length. “If you’re certain.”

Hope surged in Teddy’s breast, despite his best efforts to contain it. Restraining a smile, he motioned to the canvas, inviting her to look her fill. The gesture was deceptively nonchalant. It seemed to do the trick.

Miss Hobhouse slowly advanced into the room, as careful as a fox entering the secluded glen of a known hunter. Wariness shadowed her gaze, at war with a palpable curiosity. Curiosity about his work.

Or perhaps it was about him.

Teddy set a guard on his tongue. He wasn’t going to be candid with her. Not this time. He wouldn’t risk frightening her away.

She came to stand in front of his unfinished painting, studying the canvas for a long moment. The finely woven wool of her dark blue day dress caught the light, making the modest fabric gleam as sensuously as velvet.

Teddy watched her with rapt attention. She was a young lady comfortable with silences. Still and grave in her perusal, as he suspected she was in most areas of her life. It took an effort not to pepper her with questions. He had so many of them.

“How talented you are,” she declared at last.

He swallowed an unreasonable swell of pride. She wasn’t the first to compliment his work. Yet, her opinion held unusual weight. If he impressed her favorably enough, she might agree to let him paint her.

“I’m pleased you think so,” he said.

“And yet so young,” she added, still gazing at the canvas.

“I’m four-and-twenty. Older than you, I’d wager.”

“Only by two years.”

So, she was two-and-twenty. He’d guessed her age to be somewhere thereabouts. But that wasn’t what made him look at her with increased intensity. It was that their conversation had so rapidly escalated to the personal. He didn’t know whether to be encouraged by it or insulted.

Perhaps his unapologetic candor had inspired her own? Or perhaps…

Perhaps she was one of the countless females who regarded a gentleman in a wheeled chair as a variety of nonentity.

Teddy had met such women before. Ones who addressed him not as a man, but with the same degree of informality as they’d use with a boy in the nursery. After all, what harm could a crippled man do to a lady’s virtue?

He hadn’t thought Miss Hobhouse was such a lady. Not based on her behavior on the night of the ball. Then, she’d responded as any respectable young miss might when opportuned by an impertinent gentleman. She’d taken umbrage at his forwardness. She’d reprimanded him for using her given name. She had, ultimately, fled.

Teddy was nevertheless on his guard. “It’s not the years that matter in art. It’s the experience of life.”

She cast him an interested glance. “I suppose you’ve had a great deal of that experience, studying in Paris as you have.”

Another irrational surge of hope caught him by the heart. She knew something about his life. Which meant she’d asked someone. Which meant she was intrigued by him.

He forced his fingers to loosen from the wheels of his chair. A man mustn’t appear too eager, he reminded himself. Eager for approval. Eager for admiration. Especially not where pretty girls were concerned.

Pretty? Ha! Who was he fooling? She was as shimmering as a moonbeam. As bright as a star, even with that atrocious auburn dye marring her silver hair.

Not that the color was visible at the moment. Indeed, he couldn’t see a single strand of Miss Hobhouse’s hair. It was entirely masked by her cap.

He cleared his throat. “Paris. Ah yes. That provided a wealth of experience.”

“You studied with a famous painter, did you not?” she inquired.

She had been asking about him, it seemed.

“I studied at the atelier of Charles Gleyre,” he answered. “Are you familiar with his work?”

“I’m afraid I’m not. Should I be?”

“You definitely should. So should everyone. He’s a brilliant artist in his own right, though he’s largely retired from public life. He devotes himself to teaching now. He’s instructed some of the most promising painters of the new age. Men like Mr. Monet, Mr. Renoir, and Mr. Whistler.”

She abruptly looked away from him, turning her attention back to the canvas.

“Whistler,” he reminded her. “The American artist who painted the piece in the Berners Street Gallery.”

“Oh?” A faint flush of color seeped into her cheeks. She continued studying his landscape. “Is he a friend of yours?”

“Regrettably, no. He’d already left Gleyre’s studio by the time I arrived. But I find much to inspire me in the way he works within the confines of a limited palette. Whites and grays and so forth. My own style differs greatly. Still, one can appreciate his genius.”

Teddy had written as much in a letter of admiration he’d sent to Whistler last summer, not long after The Woman in White —then titled simply, The White Girl —had been rejected by the Royal Academy. The American artist had sent a cordial reply, acknowledging their shared connection with Gleyre, and expressing an interest in seeing Teddy’s own work the next time they were both in London.

“Yes,” Miss Hobhouse said. “I suppose he is quite talented in an unusual way.”

Teddy nearly bolted straight up in his chair with excitement. “You don’t mean to imply that you actually went there? That you saw Whistler’s painting?”

Her gaze slid back to his. “I did,” she confessed.

“And?”

“I’ve never encountered anything like it.”

He rolled closer to her. Miss Hobhouse’s reputed skill at sketching notwithstanding, she didn’t strike him as being a learned critic of the arts. Chances were she had only a basic knowledge of the subject, of the sort conveyed to young ladies by their governesses in the schoolroom. Teddy nevertheless craved her opinion.

“You thought it ugly?”

“I thought it strange,” she said.

“It is,” he agreed. “But who’s to say that strange is bad?”

A smile tugged at her mouth. Her eyes again found his. “You have an odd way of viewing things.”

“Not odd,” he said. “Not antiquated, either. Art is changing. It’s no longer a matter of depicting something exactly as it is—some still life of fruit on a carefully draped table. There are other elements to consider. Light. Movement.”

Her brows swept upward in disbelief. “Movement? In a painting?”

“Yes, exactly. It’s the impression of a moment. The shimmer of the changing light on the water. The whisper of the breeze through the branches. The sensuality in the turn of a lady’s countenance.”

Miss Hobhouse visibly stiffened. “I don’t think that’s quite—”

“The elements. Nature. Human desire.”

“Mr. Hayes, really—”

“Which is not to say that any of it’s salacious. It’s alive, that’s what matters. And it’s no longer…” He motioned with his hand, struggling for a way to describe it. “Earthbound,” he managed at last.

Her brow creased. Some of the starch went out of her spine, her offense at his earlier choice of words momentarily forgotten. “It’s no longer earthbound? Do you mean—”

“I mean that there are no limits. No boundaries. There are only feelings—the artist’s own and those he evokes in the viewer. All the rest is…” He gestured vaguely again before trailing off with a grimace.

So much for guarding his tongue.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I get rather exercised on the subject.”

“You needn’t apologize for being passionate about something.”

“For being ineloquent, then.”

“You’re not ineloquent.” She motioned to a nearby chair. “May I?”

“Please,” he said.

She sank down on the tufted seat, her full skirts pooling about her feet in a spill of sensible blue wool.

Teddy appreciated her sitting down. Many people didn’t in his presence, preferring to loom over him in his chair. He despised having to crane his neck to look up at them. He’d much rather look a person in the eyes.

Had Miss Hobhouse intuited that? He suspected she had.

“Mr. Whistler’s painting did make me feel something,” she said, flicking a brief, rueful glance upward to her black-crepe-covered hair. “Obviously.”

Teddy had noted the similarity of her hair color to that of the woman in Whistler’s piece on the night of the opening ball, but he hadn’t comprehended the reason behind that similarity. Not until this moment.

The realization struck him like a thunderbolt. “Is that why you colored your hair? Because of Whistler’s painting?”

The guilty flash of embarrassment in Miss Hobhouse’s eyes was as good as an admission.

“I don’t know why he called it The Woman in White ,” she said, rather than answering him. “It didn’t resemble any of the female characters in Mr. Collins’s novel.”

Wilkie Collins’s wildly popular and sensational novel, The Woman in White , had been released but a few years prior, to enormous success. It was a common misconception that Whistler’s painting was meant as an illustration from the story. Both the public and art critics had made the error, to Whistler’s detriment.

“Whistler didn’t name his painting The Woman in White ,” Teddy said. “You can blame that on the gallery owner. Apparently, he thought to capitalize on the success of Mr. Collins’s novel.”

“That was presumptuous of him.”

“Unwise as well. All it’s done is bring unwarranted criticism on the piece. He’d have done better to keep its original name— The White Girl —as Whistler intended.”

Her brows notched in a thoughtful frown. “Still…I suppose the title is accurate. The painting is of a woman in white. The most arresting thing about her was her hair.”

“And the light,” Teddy said. “And the color.”

“The absence of color, more like. There was so much white in it.”

It was a valid observation on its surface. Whistler’s painting depicted a fair-skinned lady in a white cambric dress. His mistress, in fact: the auburn-haired beauty Joanna Hiffernan. She stood on a white rug against a pale, curtained background, gazing out at the viewer with an enigmatic stare.

“I don’t understand what it was all supposed to mean,” Miss Hobhouse said.

“Why should it mean anything?”

“Why? Because art is meant to mean something.” She gave him a doubtful look. “Isn’t it?”

“Mean something how?” he asked. “Morally? Philosophically?”

“Yes, I suppose. To uplift or…or to educate.”

“I reject that notion,” he said emphatically.

A glimmer of amusement sparked in her eyes. “Naturally, you do.”

“I’m not the only one. There’s an entire class of artists who believe that art should stand alone. Whistler is among them. He says it’s enough that a painting appeals to the artistic senses. It needn’t be burdened with allusions to morality or politics or religion.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I do. The French call it l’art pour l’art .”

“Art for art’s sake,” she translated. And then she laughed. It was a soft, husky sound. “My old governess would take issue with that idea. She used to say that all of my drawings should glorify God.”

“Was it she who taught you to sketch?” he asked.

“I taught myself. Miss Callis only ever criticized my work. She didn’t like that I gave my horses wings, or that I shaded them in outlandish hues. I keenly remember her rapping my fingers whenever I chose an inappropriate color from my paintbox.”

“An inappropriate color?” He scoffed. “She sounds appalling, as well as ignorant.”

Miss Hobhouse’s smile dimmed. “I would certainly never have chosen her for myself. It was my older brother who employed her.”

Teddy regarded her steadily. “Your brother the clergyman.”

“Yes.”

“What of your parents? Had they no say in your education?”

“My parents died long ago—my mother when I was born, and my father when I was but a child. He perished in a carriage accident traveling home from London. He was a barrister.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.” An eloquent wince flashed across Teddy’s brow. “Not about his profession, I mean, but about—”

“I know what you meant.” She smiled slightly. “Thank you. I’d like to say I remember them, but I suppose I was too young.”

“Your brother has had charge of you ever since?”

“And of my education.” She fidgeted with a crease in her heavy wool skirts. “I had a terrible time being rid of Miss Callis. Indeed, it seems I’ve spent the whole of my life deposing one tyrant after another. First my nurse, then my governess, and now…”

“Now?” he prompted quietly.

She gave him a rueful look. “My brother is contemplating marriage.”

“Ah. His betrothed is of a tyrannical strain, I gather.”

“She isn’t his betrothed. It’s one of the reasons I’m here.”

His brows lifted in inquiry.

She hesitated before explaining, “The young lady is in town for Christmas. My brother had planned to invite her to stay with us. His plan was contingent on my being there. That’s why I accepted Lady Anne’s invitation—to frustrate my brother’s aims. That, and…I’d hoped coming here might provide an opportunity to solve my own wretched problem.”

“What problem is that?”

“The usual one. I’ve failed in my efforts during the London season. Twice failed, for this year was my second attempt at the business. If not for that sad fact, I mayn’t have been so desperate as to color my hair.”

“I see. You hope to marry.” He’d already known that. It was why she’d been in town three months ago. Why every eligible young lady had been in town. Her words nevertheless provoked a pit in Teddy’s stomach. Once she was respectably wed, he’d have no more chance of painting her. Not the way he wanted to. “If that’s your ambition, I don’t wonder that you’d rather I didn’t paint you.”

“I wonder that you’d wish to,” she returned. “Do you mean to depict me like Mr. Whistler’s Woman in White ? As some stark, ethereal spirit the critics will write scathing reviews about?”

It was his turn to frown. “I don’t know. I won’t until I start with the preliminary sketches. Even then, my feelings can change. I’ve discarded entire canvases in the past when the piece wasn’t going as I intended.”

“Portraits of ladies?”

“Sometimes.”

“Have you painted many of them?”

“A few.”

She looked at him with that same cautious curiosity. “Why did you discard them? Was it because you couldn’t accurately capture their beauty?”

“Not that,” he said. “It was the light. It’s always the light. Sometimes it eludes me.”

“It might elude you with me, too.”

“It won’t.”

“You’re very confident.”

“I’ve never been more so,” he said. “You’re made of light, Miss Hobhouse. It shines all around you. I’ve never yet met a lady who possesses one fraction of your brilliancy.”

She held his gaze. “You’re exceedingly persuasive when you wish to be.”

“Not persuasive enough, I discern.”

“As to that…” She furrowed her brow. But whatever she intended to say next was interrupted by the sharp sound of a stomach growling.

This time it wasn’t Teddy’s.

His mouth hitched in a swift grin. “Good Lord. Was that you ?”

Her face flushed crimson. “I beg your pardon.” She stood abruptly. “I’m afraid I haven’t had my tea, either.”

He pounced on the opportunity with instinctive speed. “Haven’t you?” He rolled a half turn closer to her, all thoughts of remaining aloof and disinterested forgotten. “Then join me. I could use the company.”

She backed up a step. “I don’t think I—”

“It needn’t spoil your tea in the drawing room.”

She gave him a dubious look.

“The grand Christmas tea that Lord March is giving this afternoon,” he reminded her.

She flushed. “Oh yes. That.” Her fingers twined in the folds of her shawl. “I’m afraid I won’t be attending. I’ve been…That is…I’m…”

“Then take tea with me,” he said, ruthlessly pressing his advantage. “You’d be doing me a favor. My sister and brother-in-law are off with the others, and my manservant has gone down to the kitchens to enjoy his own Christmas repast. I’m on my own here. It’s a bit awkward, truth be told.”

Her attention dropped to the wheels of his chair. Her eyes lit in dawning comprehension. “Oh! I’m sorry. I-I didn’t realize.” Her shoulder set with a sudden resolve. An expression of determination came over her. “Yes. Of course, I’ll join you. A cup of tea can surely do no harm.”

Teddy’s stomach sank. Too late, he recognized the conclusion she’d leapt to. She thought his reference to awkwardness had been about his chair, not about the mere fact that he was alone in a strange house, wanting for company. He opened his mouth to set her straight only to stop short.

To the devil with his pride! What did it matter why she remained, so long as she remained?

“Excellent,” he said. “If you would be so kind as to ring the bell?”