Page 131 of The Ladies Least Likely
CHAPTER EIGHT
“ O h, he’s a great gorger,” Mary Darly said. She laid out the three sketches Harriette had given her on the counter of her print shop. “You’ve done him up nicely.”
“That’s him to the life, without any improving.” Harriette set down her leather-bound portfolio of sketches. “He’s rather a prime article.”
“That he is.” Mrs. Darly smiled. “People won’t know what to think when I turn from my satirical prints to handsome young bucks.”
Harriette regarded the enlarged prints hanging on the shop wall high above the neat columns of bookshelves holding Mrs. Darly’s wares.
The wooden floor was swept clean, and a table near the back allowed customers to open and peruse the larger folio volumes.
While the Darlys were known for their caricatures, many of them poking fun at the excesses of the fashionable, Mrs. Darly had helped make Harriette’s sketches of the Graf von Hardenburg a rage.
She hoped she might do the same for Renwick.
Did she want other women looking at him and admiring him? The small voice nagged at the back of Harriette’s mind. Did she want to share him with the world?
Of course she did, she told herself. She wanted the rest of the world to recognize his many fine qualities. And if it helped draw female interest, then he would have his pick of brides, and she would have done her best by him as a friend.
Friends don’t kiss friends with open mouths and try to put hands down their breeches , the nagging voice said.
“This will be a break from my series on wigs,” Mrs. Darly announced. “Do you want to see one?”
“Oh, yes.” One artist to another, Harriette never turned down a chance to study Mrs. Darly’s work.
She was a talented engraver as well as a print seller.
She’d written the book on how to draw caricatures, and their prints of the exaggerated styles of a fashion craze that had lately afflicted young men had gained the Darlys’ business the nickname of The Macaroni Shop.
Harriette liked visiting The Acorn in Ryders Court, as it was the shop Mrs. Darly managed herself, and she often showed Harriette her works in progress.
Harriette pressed the skirts of her polonaise gown to her legs to keep from sweeping pamphlets and broadsides off their stands as she followed Mrs. Darly through the narrow door leading to her printing parlor.
She looked around with envy at the assorted presses, the large copper sheets used for engravings, the stacks of papers waiting to be printed and cut.
The smells of rosin, ink, and the acids used to burn lines into the copper plates excited her nose.
Mrs. Darly was a woman allowed to pursue her trade, and no one thought the less of her for it; in fact her talent was celebrated.
Harriette wanted that kind of liberty and regard for herself.
The paper propped on the easel showed a print of a woman wearing a gown much like Harriette’s, but the bustle was enormously exaggerated, and the wig atop her head, crowned with ribbons, was taller than the woman herself, floating above her head like an enormous balloon.
Harriette giggled. The figure’s self-satisfied expression made the caricature complete.
“This is marvelous. It will be as big a sensation as your Macaronis,” she said.
“Not as big a sensation as your interesting young man,” Mrs. Darly replied.
“I’ll do a simple etching with some engraving, I think?
To make an aquatint or a mezzotint will be more expensive and time-consuming, and might make him look more serious than we’d like. Or I could add coloring, if you wish.”
“An etching will be splendid to begin with. We can talk about making a finer set of portraits if this set becomes popular.”
With a bit of discussion, they settled on a price at which Mrs. Darly would purchase the prints, and the percentage of the profits that Harriette would receive if they sold.
Sharing in the profits wasn’t something many printers offered; in fact, in this business, it was more often an author had to pay a publisher to print their book.
But Harriette liked working with Mrs. Darly, woman to woman, with no nonsense, subterfuge, or haggling, as she’d found too often to be the case when she approached male print sellers.
None of the condescension for a female artist, either.
“Are you taking students yet?” Mrs. Darley asked as they walked back to the front of the shop, where a group of customers had entered. “I am to the point where I’m turning people away for drawing lessons. I could send them to you if you wished.”
Harriette experienced a thrill all through her body at those words—a thrill almost as exciting as when Ren had slipped his arms about her at her worktable. “I’m not certain I’m ready to set out my sign as a drawing teacher. I’m still taking lessons myself.”
“A good thing if one is always learning,” Mrs. Darly said cheerfully.
“But I expect you know enough to teach others the basic principles. I have your direction in Charles Street, and if I find a likely young candidate, I’ll send them your way, shall I?
” Her eyes twinkled. “Another addition to the Catherine Club.”
“I don’t know why we’re calling ourselves that,” Harriette said, somewhat abashed, and giddy to think of herself as a drawing master.
Inspiring and teaching young women the way her drawing instructor at Miss Gregoire’s had opened a new way of seeing the world to Harriette.
For a moment she allowed herself to imagine a studio of her own, perhaps a tall-windowed shop like this one, where patrons came for sittings and eager young students came to learn at her feet.
A sign over the door that said Harriette Smythe, Painter.
Or whatever her real name was. Maybe it was time to have that conversation with her mother.
She’d shied away from pressing her mother about the story of her life, in part because she didn’t want to hear she was the love child of an illicit union that had cost her mother her genteel station and her home.
And in part because Harriette had been content at Miss Gregoire’s and now as part of her aunt’s household, where she was allowed to pursue her interests.
She didn’t know any other home than England.
She didn’t wish for any home beyond these shores.
“Something I can help you find?” Mrs. Darly greeted her customers pleasantly. Their gaily bedecked hats, dainty shawls, and broad skirts marked them as ladies of means and leisure. They were women for whom the first blush of youth had passed, but not their alliance to fashion.
“It is her,” one of the women remarked in a hushed tone. She wore a lace cap piled high on her head and large silk rosettes pinned to her bodice and sleeves.
Harriette looked up, thinking the women had come to meet Mrs. Darly, a talented woman who had made a success of herself. But her smile of amusement slid off her face as she realized they were staring at her.
“From Lady Renwick’s last night,” the second said. Tiny feathers sprouted from the top of her wig, and a black ribbon around her throat fluttered as she spoke. “Renwick’s—” She whispered a word behind her glove, and her companion’s eyes rounded.
“And we saw her in the very act of furnishing her sketches to the print seller!” The first woman raised gloved fingers to painted red lips. “Oh, what Lady Renwick will say when we tell her!”
Harriette raised her eyebrows at Mrs. Darly. “Do they realize I can hear them?” she asked in a stage whisper. It was beyond hope that the women were discussing her in tones of admiration. They were licking their lips at the prospect of scandal.
Mrs. Darly was a businesswoman who didn’t miss an opportunity.
She stepped forward with a smile. “If you’re looking for works by Miss Smythe,” she said, waving a hand in Harriette’s direction, “I am happy to say I will have a new series of prints available for sale in the next day or so. They’re sure to suit a lady’s artistic sensibilities. Would you like to order a set today?”
Harriette gathered up her portfolio and fled the shop as the women edged toward Mrs. Darly, still watching Harriette with wide eyes as though she were a creature on exhibit at the Exchange or the Tower Zoo.
Mortification pursued her. Renwick’s what? What was the gossip running about her now? How bad was it?
Harriette plunged down the narrow alley that led to Cranbourne Street and then turned toward Leicester Square, where she had left the cabriolet and her attendants.
The summer afternoon was hazy and not overly warm and the men lounged at their leisure, Jock perched atop Hyperion, the coach horse, while Beater leaned against the side of the vehicle.
The two men exchanged comments with each other as they regarding the passersby strolling the square and its public gardens.
“Too many patches,” pronounced Jock as the men’s eyes followed the shapely figure of a woman in a gaudy gown who minced by holding a dainty parasol over her bone-white face. “Sign o’ the French disease.”
“Cyprian,” Beater grunted.
Ah, the liberty of men to evaluate every passing female. Though women did it too, as she had just seen in Mrs. Darly’s bookshop. “If you are done observing the wildlife, may we go?” Harriette asked acidly.
Beater bolted to attention, crumpling the paper wrapping of a meat pie he’d purchased off some passing vendor. “There’s Princess yet,” he rumbled, and Harriette sighed.
“Still visiting the Holophusikon, I gather?”
It was veil for an assignation of some sort or another, she knew.
Princess had no interest in natural history, far less the collection of curiosities that Sir Ashton Lever had put on display after purchasing Leicester House, the great edifice that lined the north side of the square.
But Princess was a consummate actor, and if a lover wanted to pay the five shillings to gain her entrance to the collection, she wouldn’t decline.