Page 7 of To Sketch a Scandal (Lucky Lovers of London #4)

Barrows went back behind his own desk and rummaged in the bottom drawer.

He returned with a large paper sack and a folded jacket with quite a lot of patterned patches on it.

Tentatively, Matty dragged the sack to him and began taking items out.

A case of black lead pencils. Tins of paint.

Three blobs of clay. Bundles of paper. Two craft books.

And a green ball of yarn that had been stabbed through with a pair of wooden knitting needles.

“What’s all this for?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” said Barrows, dropping his bombastic act at last. “You’re not going to be the model this time, Matthew. You’re going to engage with the class as an aspiring artist.”

Matty gaped at the implements before him. “Sir…”

“Frost ate it up,” Barrows whispered, grinning ear to ear.

“If you can prove your ability to crack a case this way, instead of the other, you can ease his mind about promoting you.” When Matty didn’t respond, he crossed his arms, mustache twitching.

“A little thanks would be appreciated, you know. I had to come up with this on the spot, and think I found a pretty good work-around, if I may say so myself.”

Matty’s mouth had gone very dry. “Theoretically you did, yes.”

“What do you mean, theoretically?”

Matty picked up the limp end of the green yarn, grimacing. “I don’t know that I’m good at this sort of thing.”

“Well, that’s why you need to attend a class, isn’t it, my boy?”

“I suppose…”

“Look, lad, you’re just going to have to read these books, experiment with these mediums before the first class, and figure out how to make it work, because the alternatives are grim.

You can’t be a model—I’ve made too big a show of how your very soul will splinter and shrivel if you try.

And to quit the case at this point would reflect so poorly on you that the rumors wouldn’t even come into play when they decided to sack you.

Methods aside, you’ve got to crack it if you want the promotion, end of story.

” Barrows shrugged and slapped him on the back.

“On the bright side, though, I’m giving you official dispensation to leave off the razor for a bit, just like you wanted.

We still can’t have you looking like police, so a mustache is out, but…

” He unfolded and held out the odd, patchy jacket.

“I think some well-applied stubble will bring the look together nicely, don’t you? ”

Matty blinked it all in as Barrows waggled the ugly garment like it was something quite enticing indeed.

Admittedly, Matty’s dread was lessened slightly—of all the possible outcomes, this was among the better of them.

But there was a problem with it that stood out to him like a goatee on a street officer.

“But, Barrows,” he said, and God, he hated to say it, to admit what was coming, but what choice did he have?

“You’re leaving. What happens if the new angle slows me down, and the case isn’t solved by then?

I was expecting to get a junior partway through this, not to start taking direction from some other chief, especially if I’m trying something different, do you see what I’m saying? ”

“Oh.” Barrows folded the coat over his arm, very casual. Too casual. “That’s been thought of and handled—”

“Handled how?”

“Just a bit of creative staffing—”

“Barrows, come off it,” Matty snapped. “Who else is coming on the case?”

Barrows put on as pleasant an expression as he could clearly manage. “Detective Ashton will be working with me from headquarters. He’ll be split between this and the work he’s already got, so you won’t even be interacting much.”

“Ashton?” Matty repeated, horrified. “You mean the person Frost was gossiping with last night? That Ashton?”

“I spoke to him,” Barrows said, smoothing wrinkles in the coat same as he did the conversation. “He bears you no ill will—he’s a more practical-headed fellow than Frost, doesn’t care how the work gets done so long as it gets done.”

Matty stared at the clothes and art supplies in front of him. They were a far cry from the silk suits and soft hand creams he’d been planning on as a model, preparing for seduction-as-usual. He was very comfortable with that act by now. This other stuff was troubling.

“In that case,” he said. “Are we sure I can’t take the usual tack with this after all?”

“Quite,” said Barrows. “But what difference does it make, really? All that will be behind you in a few short weeks anyway. You’re so very old now, as you said. Might as well get the head start on the next phase of your career.”

Matty squished the ball of yarn with one of his fingers, feeling like a similar sort of unpleasant, scratchy prodding was happening to his stomach.

“What if I can’t?” he asked.

Barrows paused, confused. “What do you mean?”

“What if…” Matty swallowed hard. “What if I’m not cut out for all this, Barrows?

What if my pony’s only got one trick to work with?

This seems like a high-pressure way to find out one way or another, and…

and I’ve never worked with anyone but you.

What if it’s you keeping all this together?

What if I’m just, you know…” He prodded the ball again. “The face of the operation?”

Before he’d even finished the thought, Barrows was reaching across the desk, patting Matty’s shoulder and shaking his head. “Nonsense, Matthew,” he said. “Haven’t I always had complete faith in you?”

“Yes,” Matty admitted. He did not add the rest of the thought. That maybe that was Barrows’s mistake to begin with.

* * *

Aspiring. Multimedia. Arts and crafts. Noble poverty.

These were the sorts of words that went into his personality profile.

Having been too distraught to shave this morning, he was, at least, ahead of things in that regard.

He’d be the son of a successful banker and a long-retired dancer, as exhausted and disgusted with a practical life of finance as the real Matty supposedly was with being bait.

He was to be purposefully disheveled, but undeniably posh somewhere underneath it, simply playing at destitution.

The story went that he’d thrown himself into all manner of mediums, the more esoteric and socially confusing the better, but was finally running out of money.

Portraiture—though terribly basic—might keep him from having to turn to his family for help, after having made a scene at supper one evening, in which he declared he’d rather starve as an artist than feast as a banker.

“I’m insufferable,” Matty muttered as he took down the notes, a swirl of dusty breeze from the open window ruffling the page. “I want to box my own ears already.”

“Your desperation and defiance of order will make it more reasonable for you to ask awkward questions and insinuate yourself with the teachers.”

“Oh, I know.” Matty sighed. “I’m not saying it isn’t brilliant. I’m saying it makes me nauseous. There’s a difference.”

Once the character was set, he had to get used to it before the class started.

He began with the part that was easy for him: the visual.

He donned the patchy jacket and a rotation of silly-looking printed neckcloths, carefully neglecting his grooming.

That all went pretty well. Each morning, he looked in his mirror to find a more convincing twat than the one he’d been yesterday.

And he had to admit, there was something satisfy ing about taking things the opposite direction than he usually did.

He found he actually liked how he looked with his blond hair a little disheveled and his face a little rough.

He looked his own age, at least, which was novel.

He wished, however, that he could say the same about the rest of it.

Matty had never had occasion for art. His youth—cut fortunately short by Barrows’s intervention—had been a rather lonely plod through surviving day to day.

His schooling was ill-afforded and spottily attended; his leisure comprised of causing trouble with other semi-feral boys; his home life…

well, he did not like to think about that.

The most artistic thing he could remember engaging in was making faces with his finger on foggy windows or dusty floorboards.

There were always plenty of dusty floorboards at home.

Fortunately, the nature of his insufferable character meant he didn’t actually have to be good at anything.

But unfortunately, when Matty finally got up the guts to sit down at the desk he kept in his lonely little boardinghouse room, a pot of tea on one side and his character sketch on the other, facing the assortment of materials Barrows had provided him, he found that even calling himself “not good” would be overly optimistic.

First, he read the books so he’d understand the theory, then started in on the blobs of clay.

They were harder than he expected, and his attempts at humanoid shapes yielded results so horrifying, he’d have marked them down as dangerous occult items had he discovered them in a suspect’s home.

The following nights found him mixing paints on a little palette, ruining dozens of perfectly nice pieces of paper with hideous smears that clanged and clashed and didn’t look anything like the skylines and human faces he’d been attempting.

After ripping those up when they looked no happier dry than they had wet, he desperately found instructions for what to do with the yarn.

He sat in his chair by the fire (tea traded in for gin at this point in the enterprise) in a desperate hope that craft might prove better suited than art .

With wooden needles in hand and the green yarn flopping in a basket at his feet like it was having a seizure, he strung together what was supposed to be a scarf, but looked more like algae clinging to something dreadful that had been dragged from the Thames’s most unfortunate depths.

As the first class drew nearer, and he still did not have so much as an appealing stick figure for all his efforts, it was Matty who had begun to feel quite wary indeed.

This level of dreadful threatened the integrity of his story.

His character was supposed to look ridiculous , yes, but not out of his mind .

And that’s what a man of his talents would have to be if he thought he could ever earn a living in this profession.

He finished the scarf on a moonless night. When he held it up by the light of his fire, he found that finishing had not improved its beauty in the slightest.

In a hot wave of frustration, he threw it to the ground, disappointed to see it fall short of the mantel—it would be a lot prettier if it were on fire.

This stuff was all sort of funny when he was in the office with Barrows, but it was embarrassing on the days that Ashton came in, and worst of all when he was facing it alone in his room for all these hours, cooped up, working at doomed endeavors, worrying about what would become of him when he got sacked.

Because he would get sacked. He knew it fully as he stared at the languishing form of the discarded knitting on the hearth rug.

He wasn’t going to be able to pull this off.

And it wasn’t just the promotion on the line when he failed.

Once Barrows was gone, and Matty had proven he could do nothing that didn’t rely on his dimpled smile, Frost’s suspicions would return.

He’d be out on his arse, out here, in this lonely room so quiet he could hear every carriage creak from the street below.

Scotland Yard was his life. It was a difficult life, and not exactly one he’d chosen, but it was his.

And he’d blown it by proving unable to hide an appetite that had never even done him any good to begin with.

“Fuck it,” he whispered to nobody at all, grabbing that patchy jacket and throwing it over his shoulders.

He scooped up the scarf and wound it around his neck out of a pure sense of chaos.

If his appetites were set to ruin him anyway, if it was as true as it seemed that everything was about to crumble for good, what point was there to sitting around with another case of pencils, loneliness and dread eating his insides away bit by bit? He did not have to sit here.

Did not have to be alone, either. Even patchy and stubbled and twenty-five to boot, he was still pretty enough that he did not have to be alone ever, if he did not want to be.

It was the one thing he’d been before Scotland Yard saved him, and it was the one thing he’d continue to be for a while yet when it inevitably sent him back out.

To the coffeehouse, then. He put his shoes on and locked his door, going quietly down the staircase and out into the night.

For a while, he walked quickly with his head down and his hands in his pockets, but as he neared the place, he slowed.

Who had seen him coming in here anyway? A prickle of nerves dampened his determination.

It was one thing to accept that he’d be sacked under suspicion.

It was another to allow himself to be caught red-handed in a crime, not to mention the trouble it could bring to his not-quite-friends at the coffeehouse if he were.

He stopped in the middle of the street. The thought of going back to his room, of facing its emptiness and the pressure of learning something new and doomed, made him feel physically ill. He could not go back there. He might do something stupid, he thought, if he tried.

But where else in this city could a man with such a mismatched occupation and inclination go ?