Page 149 of The Ladies Least Likely
“It would be just you, and me, and my hat,” Harriette said. He regarded this extravagance, its deep crown set with silk rosettes and a bright red spray of berries.
“That is an extremely fetching hat,” he said, his voice deepening.
“What about Amalie?”
“What about her?”
“We’ll look in on her ladyship and make sure she’s going on aright.” Jock swung up beside them on his crutches, touching the brim of his hat to acknowledge Ren. “We’ll keep an eye on the place, as we promised you and the girls.”
“The girls?” Harriette said in confusion.
“I, uh, may have m-made a call in Ch-Charles Street last night,” Ren said.
Harriette noticed the innkeeper and the postilion drawing near. Servants as well as strangers made Ren nervous, but he had likely brought his footmen to accommodate her. Warmth bloomed over the surprise ricocheting through her innards.
“Is that why the girls were so sanguine about my leaving today? Because they knew you would offer to take me?”
“Your aunt approved,” he said, and a slight flush of embarrassment touched his cheeks. Harriette could imagine what her aunt might have said about his offering Harriette escort. It would include advice to overlook her inconvenient betrothal to another, she didn’t doubt.
But she was betrothed to another. And she recalled with aching clarity how Ren had set her from him yesterday, breaking their passionate embrace.
I can’t. That was clear enough. She would be in close company with him for days, not allowed to touch him, not permitted to act on her loving impulses, which she now knew came from deeper places than physical attraction or the trust of past friendship.
She felt an undeniable bond with him, an attachment more complete than she had ever known in her life, but she could not claim him for her own in the elemental way that God and nature had designed.
This was penance for the sins of all her past lives, as well as this one. It didn’t matter. The truth was she would follow Ren anywhere, do whatever he asked. Perhaps it made her weak, but it was her truth.
“How soon do you wish to leave?”
Traveling with the Earl of Renwick was an infinitely different experience than traveling back and forth from her girls’ school as Miss Harriette Smythe.
Lesser conveyances waited at the posting inns while hands poured out to help the wealthy travelers in the post chaise, eager for the coins that might be in the offing.
Innkeepers showed them to their best rooms just ahead of maids bustling in with fresh linens and hot water.
To avoid any looks of askance or insinuation, Ren loudly introduced her as Lady Harriette, daughter of the Duchess of Lowenburg, whom he was escorting to be united with her mother.
The fierce concentration and small scowl with which he produced all the l- and r-sounds of her name never failed to make Harriette’s heart turn over, and she didn’t mind when the bowing and scraping turned in her direction if it took unwelcome attention off Ren.
Because of him their meals were hot and tasty, they were served the best wines at dinner, and a private dining parlor was always available, even for a simple dish of tea during a change of horses, even when the public rooms were filled with curious villagers craning their necks to get a glimpse of London’s latest sensation.
One innkeeper’s wife sidled up to Harriette at dinner on the second night, ostensibly to offer her a cup of Madeira. “So that be ’imself, then?” she whispered while watching Ren, who chatted with a local squire who’d been occupying the public room when they arrived.
More correctly, the squire was holding forth with red-cheeked enthusiasm, and Ren smiled and nodded, his lips firmly closed.
Harriette watched fondly. He’d mastered the art of making his silence appear sophisticated and intelligent, rather than a reluctance to speak, and as he leaned on his cane with the nonchalance of a fashionable gentleman, no one would ever guess that his leg pained him from long hours of sitting.
She’d offered to help him with his exercises within the confines of the coach, but he’d declined, no doubt wisely, as it was in part an excuse to place her hands on him.
“That is the Earl of Renwick, yes,” Harriette said in answer to the inquiry of her hostess.
The matron pulled a roll of papers from her apron. “Have all the prints o’ ‘im, I do,” she said with satisfaction. “A farthing each. D’ye mean to make more of ‘em, mum? Find plenty o’ buyers ‘ere, ye would.”
Harriette still startled at being addressed as “madame” or “your ladyship,” but startled further to note that the prints the matron showed her had not come from Mrs. Darly’s shop.
They resembled her original sketches only in form; the figure was blurred, the lines not properly inked, and the expression on Ren’s face overall struck her as less pensive and more leering.
Pirated copies, no doubt by a local printer who had hastily made his own plates and was underselling Mrs. Darly.
Harriette would never see a share of the profits from these sales, though she was recognized even here as their author.
Printing was a cutthroat business, far worse than painters competing for commissions.
She pulled her sketchbook from her pocket. “This is yours alone, mind you,” she said. “You may show it to whomever you like, but don’t let that shoddy printer get hold of it. Mrs. Darly in London is the only person authorized to reproduce my work.”
The matron nodded and watched, wide-eyed, as Harriette brought Ren to life on the page.
She sketched him as he was, in his plain leather traveling coat and leather breeches, riding boots, a neckcloth tossed about his throat.
She put his cane in one hand and his tricorne hat in the other, and when he turned to watch her from across the room, she captured the expression on his face with a few practiced lines.
In a moment the man himself stared out from her paper at them: warm, amused, perceptive, and, if one looked closely enough, with a hint of caution about the eyes, expressed in a few tiny shadows.
“Oi, that’s enough to dream on,” the matron said. “‘Is lordship won’t mind, then?”
Harriette caught Ren’s eye as she neatly parted his sketch from her book and mimed giving it to the woman. He scowled, observing his own likeness on the page, then shrugged.
“Will ye sign it then, mum?” the matron asked shyly.
“Tell me what you like about these prints,” Harriette couldn’t help asking as she scribbled her initials at the corner of the sketch.
Her hostess stared at Renwick with a soft, fond look. Beneath the lines of age and strain, the ragged edges that time and hardship had worn, Harriette glimpsed the sweet dreams of a long-lost girl to whom the world had not yet been unkind.
“I can’t rightly say,” the older woman said.
“A man like that’d never glance at the likes o’ me, that’s certain.
But I look at a picture like this and it makes me feel that I be understanding ‘im, if ye know what I mean. And with that look on ‘is face, it almost seems—that he’d understand me , if he but knew me. That ‘ee’d like what he saw right back.”
Harriette could only nod, captivated by the woman’s insight.
She’d thought of her sketches as simply capturing an image of beauty, or perhaps indulging a silly feminine inclination toward fantasy.
But if such a fantasy helped a woman understand herself better, to see and appreciate her best aspects through the imagined gaze of another, or if it helped her envision the kind of relationship that would bring the best part of her nature to fulfillment—that didn’t seem so silly.
Harriette tried to recall if she’d had such notions when she was a girl.
She couldn’t recall harboring crushes or infatuations, though she’d done her share of giggling with her school friends when the more fashionable young men of Bath promenaded past them in a square or park.
Ren had been her confidant, her primary and most enduring relationship, as close in thought as the letters she composed telling him what she was learning, what she thought of her mother and her school, what she was discovering day by day in her art lessons, and what it meant that she could capture living beauty and share it with others.
After she’d moved to London and her first patron, the squire, had taken ruthless advantage of her youth and stupidity, Harriette had become pragmatic and hard-headed about her work.
She captured likenesses of the proud and wealthy who wanted to leave a trace on the world they’d ruled long after they left it.
She’d forgotten what had first drawn her to painting: the ability to distill the essence of a living thing and reveal it in a way that others could see.
And to give herself a new way of looking. The innkeeper’s wife had gone dreamy not so much over Ren himself, but the way Harriette had captured the man she loved on paper—dashing, handsome, full of secrets and mischief and passion, the type of companion many a woman would yearn for.
“What mun I pay ye, mum?” the matron asked, placing the sketch with care in her apron pocket so as not to crease or crumple it.
“’Tis a gift,” Harriette said, and ceased hearing her hostess’s profuse thanks when Ren headed her way with a smile on his face.
“Is that how you are paying our tab for the fare?” He took his seat across from her at the small table supplied with what rather looked like a full meal than a light supper.
“Indulging your fans,” Harriette said lightly.