Page 140 of The Ladies Least Likely

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“ D id you know?” Harriette asked Ren a few days later as he leaned on the false marble pillar in her painting nook, staring into the distance.

He wore his blue silk suit, his wig was impeccably shaped and powdered, his specially made boots gleamed with polish, and he did not need to affect his distant, absorbed expression.

He looked as if he’d been struck across the head and his ears still rang from it.

He shifted and raised his eyes to hers. Harriette felt a pinch of hurt for him and for herself at his lost expression. She had to leave him sooner than she’d expected, and she couldn’t find a way to tell him when he was already grappling with the shocking news his sister had delivered.

“Did I know that Amalie is ill?” His voice rasped as if he had overused it of late, perhaps with howling against the vagaries of fate.

Harriette nodded, her throat tight. She concentrated on capturing the play of light on his buttons rather than stare into his face.

His vulnerability raised a fierce protectiveness in her.

She always tended to react when someone she cared about was injured, but with Ren that instinct was multiplied.

She wanted to howl with him, gnash her teeth, rend her clothes as the ancients did to symbolize their mourning.

She wanted to twine her arms about his chest and hold him against her until all his sadness had transferred to her.

She did not have that right, and never would.

She couldn’t have him, and she kept reminding herself that it was better this way.

Better to leave him alone. Best not give in to the nearly rending temptation to draw close, touch him, cradle him in her arms. Burrow against his firm, warm chest and stay there like a baby bird sheltered from the wind.

She was being absurd and possibly goose-brained. Time to stop such nonsense before these paths of thought spiraled any further.

“I knew she was sickly.” Ren pondered her question. “There were hints now and again in her letters, but no one ever said the situation was d-dire. No one ever—” He paused, struggling. “I wonder if my m-mother knew?”

“Surely she would have Lady Amalie under a doctor’s care if that were the case.”

“My mother dislikes d-doctors. My father insisted the doctors must have damaged me during delivery, causing my foot. But when my sister was born…” He paused. “My mother blamed herself that we are—formed as we are. And my father came to share that belief.”

“That’s Aristotle for you,” Harriette said.

She didn’t like how the highlight looked on the buttons—too heavy, more like a glob of butter than light.

She dipped her brush and painted over the offending area.

“Aristotle wrote that the male seed exerts a shaping force on the female menstrual blood, the matter from which we all are made. If the process goes as intended, one births a perfect male. If formation is not complete, one ends up with a female. And there are any number of factors that could influence a mother and impact her gestation, it was thought. What foods she ate. What sights she saw. If she had an imbalance of the humors, if she experienced a severe shock or surprise—there were superstitions added over the years by medieval writers, but the general theme is, any imperfections in the child are the fault of the woman.”

Ren stared at her. “You are a repository for the strangest knowledge.”

Harriette shrugged. “We read long bits of Aristotle in our Greek courses at Miss Gregoire’s. Some of the girls took to speaking Greek as their own secret language.”

“Miss Gregoire’s Academy for Girls offers a profoundly different model of schooling than Eton or Cambridge,” Ren remarked. “How I wish Amalie might be sent to such a place.”

"There is no reason she should not be accepted,” Harriette said. “And her—differences, if you want to call them that, would not be the slightest hindrance. All of Miss Gregoire’s girls have their oddities, you might say.”

“My mother would never allow it,” Ren said gloomily. “She would manufacture some long speech about how Amalie is too delicate and people are too cruel, and a safe home is her best protection, and the conclusion is that Amalie is denied every pleasure a girl her age ought to have.”

“Who is Lady Amalie’s guardian?” Harriette asked, though it was none of her business to inquire. “It cannot be Lady Renwick, not legally.”

Ren blinked. “I sup-suppose I am her g-guardian,” he stammered with surprise.

“Then you are within your rights to summon a doctor to see her. And you might ask him to inquire about her exposure to lead.”

Ren pounced. “Do you know what ails her? If you do, Rhette, you must—you must tell me.”

“I do not know anything,” Harriette cautioned, wondering if it were wise to speak to him like this. She had no time to be coy or to make the kind of investigation that was necessary. “Only—how long has she been painting her face?”

“I don’t know. Always, I suppose. Mother used the paint from the time she was very young, whenever there was a chance others would see her.

That wasn’t often, of course, because of—because of her withered arm.

She preferred to keep Amalie hidden altogether.

” Ren paused, his brow furrowing. “What—what does face paint have to do with anything?”

Harriette glanced at the table where she mixed her paints.

“I cannot be sure, but her symptoms strike me as a type of lead colic. My painting master at Miss Gregoire’s told me about it.

It is a type of sickness painters can get and it is thought to be due to the lead used to make white paint.

It was said that the painter Caravaggio went mad and died because of lead colic—back then they used lead salts in all sorts of colors.

Most white paints are made with a lead preparation.

” When Ren shook his head in confusion, she added, “I understand that lead is also used to whiten face paint.”

He abandoned his pose and strode across the room, uncaring that in his lack of concentration his limp was noticeable.

He drew to Harriette’s work table and regarded her jars of pigment as if answers were laid out there.

“You think this is why she is sick? This lead colic?” He opened a jar of white pigment and sniffed as if he could detect poisons.

“I cannot be sure. I am not a doctor. But it seems lead can make people very ill. My teacher taught me to use gesso for my whites, which is made with chalk and gypsum. I read some years ago about the Devon colic, a sickness of the gut that is endemic to Devonshire. A doctor proposed it was because the cider they like to drink there had lead mixed into it. And Mr. Wedgewood has sworn he will change his pottery formulas because of potter’s colic, which his workers were contracting because of lead in the ceramic glazes. ”

“She—she will die of this?” Ren’s voice was strangled. “Because of this paint she uses on her face?”

“God forbid,” Harriette said quickly. “But I think she must stop using the white paint immediately.”

“She won’t.” Ren’s voice was hoarse, torn from him. “She is as ashamed of her birthmark as she is of her arm. My mother can see nothing else when she looks at her, and with Amalie in the house—she is exposed to her censure every day.”

“I wish I had time to prepare something better, but you might give her this.”

Harriette stepped to his side and reached for a small, tightly stoppered glass jar on her worktable. A bright ribbon circled the creamy whiteness within.

“It is a face paint of my own preparation, made of chalk and gypsum. It should be easy to apply, now that I have found the right binding. I have been experimenting these past days and my first preparations were too runny when I applied them. The girls were in gales of laughter, saying I looked like a bleeding ghost.”

Ren’s face was unbearable to see, his composure gone, the naked emotion laid bare. Wordlessly he gripped her shoulders, his fingers digging into her skin as he clung to a desperate hope. His throat and jaw worked as he struggled to form the words choking him.

“I can promise nothing,” Harriette whispered. “I wish I could, Ren. But—will you see that she gets this? And uses it?”

His affirmation was a finger beneath her chin, tipping her face up so he could probe every line of it with his all-too-perceptive eyes.

She let her eyelashes flutter down. She felt uncertain, suddenly, about letting him see into her soul.

If anyone could detect what lay within her, it would be he.

At the moment she was full of nothing but deceit and despair.

She heard his slight hitch of breath, felt air fan over her cheek, smelled the trace of lemon from the scone he’d nicked from her aunt’s breakfast table.

Her heart surged to her throat, beating with wild anticipation.

And when his mouth pressed against hers, she moaned with the sheer relief of being able to kiss him again, when she could seem to think of nothing else during the times he was not kissing her.

He was heat and strength and delirious passion and a calm, deep knowledge that steadied her.

He was Ren. He was the home she’d always wanted and had not found until now.

“I see what happens when I am lax in my chaperoning duties.”

Princess wandered into the studio wearing morning dress and no powder in her hair, which shone a deep, true black. “I find you two canoodling.”

Ren drew back as if she were a snake that had struck him, spewing venom.

“What an absurd word,” Harriette snapped when she had come up for air.