When she turned to Lucian, his eyes widened. “You’re smiling.” He said it in the same tone as a man would say, I have just seen a pig fly by.
“Because I believe we are discussing literature, Mr. Blackstone,” she said.
A look of surprise stole over his face. “I believe we are.”
“Romantic novels, no less.”
“This isn’t Florence, though,” he said, and glanced around their bleak abode.
“No,” she said. “It’s a haunted inn in a desolate wasteland.”
He barked a laugh, a rusty sound, but his eyes gleamed bright and he suddenly appeared close to his true age of nine-and-twenty. Her heart gave a palpable thump. This was how he could have been. He could have been fun.
The twinkle in Lucian’s eyes faded. “You all right?”
Coming from him, the hint of worry in his tone felt more intimate than an openmouthed kiss. She glanced at the chamber door. “I must go and inquire after our laundry.”
He studied her for a moment, then he released her with faint reluctance. “You do that, then.”
As she made her way down the creaking stairs, watched by dead-eyed waterfowl, she wondered whether the truth gained layers over time and was never just one thing. Perhaps Linton had been kind and appropriate, but was still utterly wrong for Cathy. As for Hattie’s own husband … he was wealthy and ruthless now, but which of the lines on his face had been carved by the hardships of his youth? Had the seeds of his callousness been planted when he had been six years old, forced to sit alone in the dark? He would have grown taller had he been better fed as a boy. He would be softer had he lived in the light. He could have discussed novels with refined speech had there been learned minds to teach him rather than the cruelty of the colliery. She pictured him laughing, in his fine cotton shirt and a spark in his eyes, and she was struck by his good fortune and the magnitude of his achievements. What sheer force of will had to be driving him every hour of the day to defy all the odds stacked against him? It made her feel nervous and hot. I crave him, she thought. She shouldn’t, but it was no use—the passionate part of her desired him exactly for who he was. But while she wanted the heat, would she have the strength to suffer the burn?
Chapter 25
Mr. Matthews’s arrival at noon the following day brought memories of London, of a previous, now strangely nebulous life. As usual, Matthews was meticulously dressed in a well-fitted maroon travel jacket, speckless gray trousers, and paisley waistcoat. The man himself looked frazzled; he must have packed and left Belgravia the moment he had received Lucian’s telegraph two days earlier.
“I cannot thank you enough for your troubles,” Hattie told him when he presented her with the box containing the portrait book of Mrs. Julia Cameron.
“My pleasure, Mrs. Blackstone.” His bleary gaze slid discreetly over her appearance from head to toe. “I hope you are in the best of health.”
She had dressed without giving any thought to her accessories this morning, she realized—perhaps it was obvious. She smiled vaguely. “You are in Mr. Stewart’s old room—I shall show you the way.”
“Meet me in the dining area in half an hour, and bring the documents,” Lucian said from behind them, and his coolly commanding voice came as a small shock. It was his voice from the days when she had first known him, and she realized that she had become used to a much softer tone since. Matthews simply acquiesced. He was murmuring at the overabundance of stuffed animals and the precariously creaking stairs when Hattie guided him to his lodgings.
“One grows used to the menagerie,” she reassured him, “but I so look forward to all the news from London—the papers here are two days behind the time.”
Matthews absentmindedly replied that it would be his pleasure. When she took the book off him and left him to settle in his new lodgings, he raked her with another glance, and his scrutiny left an uncomfortably prickling sensation on the back of her neck.
Back in her room, however, the photography book soon consumed her attention entirely. Julia Margaret Cameron had mainly photographed women and children, and what portraits they were! Her lens was soft without sacrificing sharp, meaningful details, and it had made the simple ethereal and the static emotional. There was no denying that looking into the expressive eyes of these strangers gazing from the pages was moving. This, this was life! Incomparable to her own amateurish attempts at putting meaning onto canvas. When Hattie turned the last page, she sat in quiet turmoil. Lucian had been right all along: it was possible to make art with a piece of technology. Her mind galloped ahead; after the miners, she would photograph the suffragists. How often were they subject to ridicule and spite, were they reviled as ugly, mannish, angry creatures? Daily. She’d dare any critic to look at Annabelle’s Pre-Raphaelite beauty, or Catriona’s quiet depths, or Lucie’s elfin face, and not feel silly for perpetuating such prejudice … She excused herself from lunch and began analyzing the images to understand the elements that in sum created something so wonderful.