“Friends of mine,” Anthony said. “Hartwell owns it. He opens it on the third Friday of the month for…people in his particular orbit.” A brief pause. “Artists, mostly. Writers…a few actors.” He glanced at her. “No one who moves in the same social circles as your brother.”
“You are certain?” Caroline asked.
“I am certain,” he replied.
The carriage stopped. A footman materialized from the direction of the house with the efficiency of a household that had managed this kind of arrival many times and had no particular opinion about it.
Anthony descended first and turned to offer his hand, and Caroline stepped down into the cold and looked up at the house and felt, as she had felt at the gaming hell and the circus and the boxing match before that, the particular, irresistible pull of a room she had never been in yet.
A man appeared at the top of the steps before they had reached them: lean, somewhere in his forties, in a well-cut coat over what appeared to be a paint-stained waistcoat that had not been changed before the company arrived. He had the sharp, amused face of a person who watched things for a living and had collected a considerable amount of evidence.
“Wynford.” He descended the steps to meet them with the easy, unsurprised quality of someone who had been expecting this and found its arrival satisfactory.
He and Anthony clasped hands with the warmth of men who had shared a few years of the same rooms and retained an affection for the association.
“You are late.”
“I am never late,” Anthony said. “Other occasions are early.”
Hartwell laughed; a short, genuine sound, and looked at Caroline with the attentive, measuring quality that she associated with people who spent their time looking at things and had not yet decided what category she belonged in.
“And this is your…?”
“A friend,” Anthony said. His tone was easy; there was no weight in it, nothing that would survive being examined. “She has an interest in the studio.”
“Ah.” Hartwell’s gaze moved over her with a rapid, professional assessment. “The east room is set. I had Prentiss prepare it this afternoon.” He glanced at Anthony. “You owe me for the oil paints. The good ones.”
“Put it on the account,” Anthony said.
“You have no account. You always pay in cash and pretend not to know me in company.”
“That is how I maintain my reputation,” Anthony said pleasantly, and Hartwell laughed again and stood aside to let them pass.
The entrance hall was warm, lit by several branches of candles, and smelled of beeswax and paint and something floral that she could not immediately name. Voices carried from the rooms ahead, and beneath the voices, music: a pianoforte, played well but without formality, producing the kind of sound that lived in the background of a room rather than demanding its foreground.
Anthony guided her to the right, through a half-open door, and she saw—and heard, rather more than she had been prepared for—the first room.
It was a large, low-ceilinged sitting room, and it was full. Perhaps twenty people, in varying states of elegant disarray: a woman in a silk dress reading from a sheaf of papers to an audience of three, two men debating something at considerable volume near the fireplace, and a small group arranged near a table that held champagne glasses and a bowl of strawberries that gleamed an improbable red in the candlelight.
Several people were simply listening to the woman with the papers, who was reading with the unselfconscious directness of someone performing for an audience she trusted.
Caroline caught the words a moment after she had ceased to consciously hear them. Then process them properly. She felt her face do something she hoped the near darkness obscured.
“Is she…?” she began, very quietly.
“Reading erotic poetry?” Anthony confirmed, with the neutral composure of a man identifying a weather pattern. “Yes.”
“From a printed volume?”
Anthony hummed. “I believe that is her own composition.”
“Oh, that you should lay your head between my twin breasts, and with them, bring me to ecstasy,” the woman with the papers delivered the final line with the same unhurried precision she had given every other.
Her small audience responded with the particular, focused appreciation of people who considered the whole business a serious artistic undertaking rather than a diversion.
Caroline stood very still and felt the warmth of the room and the unsteady, amazed quality of a person who had just discovered that a thing she had read about in books was not, in fact, entirely a literary invention.
She could have remained there for quite some time. She was aware of this. She was also aware of Anthony beside her, watching her rather than the room, with the steady attention she had learned to recognize and still had not learned to be entirely unaffected by.