“Come,” he said, quietly. She turned her head, and he tilted his very slightly toward the corridor beyond.
And she followed.
The east room was at the back of the house, down a corridor that grew progressively quieter as they moved away from the main rooms. When Anthony opened the door and stood aside, Caroline stepped in and stopped.
It was a studio. Small, properly lit: a brace of candles and a tall standing lamp that produced a warm, even, working light rather than the decorative kind. An easel stood near the window, a canvas already stretched and set on it, white and waiting. Beside it, there was a low table with brushes in a jar and small glass pots of oil paint arranged by color. A wooden palette. A cotton rag was folded neatly beside it.
Across the room, against the opposite wall, was a velvet sofa in deep green, the kind of sofa that communicated that it had served as a resting place for subjects before; its proportions were practical rather than decorative, angled toward the light without apology.
A white, laundered sheet was draped over one arm of the sofa. She noticed it and then did not think anything further about it.
“Hartwell had this prepared,” she said.
“I asked him to,” Anthony said. He had come in behind her and closed the door.
The room was very quiet with the door closed; the sounds of the house retreated to something ambient and unobtrusive. He moved to the easel, examined the canvas with the brief assessment of a man checking that a thing had been done correctly, and appeared satisfied.
“Everything you need is here.”
“All that is left is the model,” she said, but he did not reward her with a response she’d like. Instead, he smiled dubiously and took a step forward.
“The pigments are the proper kind, not the decorative paste they sell in Bond Street,” he said to distract her.
“You know the difference,” she said, a little surprised.
“Hartwell told me the difference,” he said, with the precise honesty of a man who did not take credit for other men’s expertise, “at considerable length, when I told him what I needed.”
She looked at the canvas, and the paints, and felt the room settle around her into the particular quality of a place where serious work was done.
I could paint in a room like this.
She imagined it with the helpless, inconvenient accuracy with which she sometimes thought notions she had no businessthinking, ideas that showed her, in their brief flash, the shape of a life that was not the life that was being arranged for her.
“Sit at the easel,” he said. “I’ll bring in the model.”
She looked up. “Where?—”
But he had already turned away, and she moved to the stool in front of the easel, adjusted its height, settled, and looked at the green velvet sofa and tried to form an expectation.
Someone he knew, presumably. One of the men from this house. She thought about that and felt a brief, unexpected flush of something that was not quite reluctance.
She heard a sound behind her. It was not the sound of a door opening, but the sound of a coat being removed.
She turned on the stool.
Anthony was standing three feet away, setting his coat over a chair that she had not, until this moment, registered was positioned there. He was in his waistcoat and shirt. As she watched, he began on the waistcoat buttons.
“What,” she said, “are you doing?”
He continued on the buttons. “What does it look like?”
She spun back around, with rather more force than was necessary. Behind her, she heard the soft fall of a waistcoat. She stared at the canvas with extraordinary focus.
“You are not the model. You were going to bring someone in.”
“I am bringing myself in,” he said. His voice was entirely calm. She heard the sound of a shirt being untucked.
“Anthony.” She used his given name now, which she deployed only when the situation had escalated beyond the reach of titles, but her small smile betrayed her. “You cannot be serious.”