“Oh, Hattie,” Annabelle cooed, when she never cooed. “I’m so delighted for you.”
“Mr. Blackstone must be over the moon,” Lucie said.
“He absolutely is,” Hattie said. “Very over the moon.”
A pause ensued. Hattie kept her oddly fixed grin on her face. Annabelle and Lucie exchanged a discreet, quizzical glance.
“Hattie,” Catriona said cautiously. “Is everything all right?”
Her friend raised her brows. “Of course.” It sounded as convincing as a false penny, and Hattie herself noticed. Her insincere smile vanished. “If you must know,” she said, “I’m a little worried. About Mr. Blackstone.”
They all drew back, surprised.
Hattie made a calming motion with her hand. “It’s just that he is rather . . . protective.”
Lucie’s eyes had turned flinty with suspicion. “Is he confining you?”
“No, no—but, what if he will? What if he insists that I leave London once I show more? What if he keeps me from painting? Or from my photography? Or from my causes.”
“Why would he do that, as long as you are feeling well?” Annabelle asked.
“Because the fumes of the paints and turpentine and gelatin plate solutions are probably a little detrimental to my health? The equipment is heavy, too, and I walk long stretches.”
Catriona pushed at the armchair to move it closer to the group and sat on its edge.
“Simple,” Lucie said to Hattie, “employ someone to carry the equipment and to develop the photographs for you.”
“I might do that,” Hattie said. “I think it’s the fumes he will worry most about; he has a concern for people’s lungs.”
Come to think of it, Hattie hadn’t really talked much about her photography or progress on her paintings in weeks, even though she could have easily pursued all of it at Oxford, away from Mr. Blackstone’s potentially disapproving eye.
“Are you worried that Mr. Blackstone will be overly worried,” Catriona asked on a hunch, “or is it you who’s worried?”
Hattie blinked at her. “What do you mean?”
“If Mr. Blackstone encouraged you to keep painting and photographing, would you?”
Hattie gave her a sullen look, her back very stiff. The next moment, she seemed to fall in on herself like a collapsing soufflé.
“I don’t know,” she said, and hung her head. “I don’t know. One ought to do what is best for the babe.”
“Of course,” Annabelle said, and reached for Hattie’s hand.
Hattie turned her fretful face to her. “What if I don’t know what ‘best’ is?”
“Well—”
“And there is this . . .” She reached into her knitting basket and pulled out a roll of printed pages. They looked as though they had been ripped from a journal haphazardly and had been read and rolled up again many times.
“I came across this article a while ago,” she said.
Lucie craned her neck. “What is it?”
“May I read it to you?”
“Go on,” Lucie said, her voice already primed for battle.
Hattie smoothed her hand over the first page. “If the grand essential to a good mother is self-denying, self-effacing love,” she read out loud, “this is a bad era for its development. Selfishness and self-seeking is the spirit of the time, and its chilling poison has infected womanhood, and touched even the sacred principle of maternity. In some women it assumes the form of duty. They feel their own mental culture to be of supreme importance, they wish to attend lectures and take lessons, and give themselves to some special study. Or the enslaved condition of their own sex troubles them; they bear in their minds the oppressed shopgirls . . . In these and many ways, they put the natural mission of womanhood aside.”
She looked up, a hunted expression on her face. “That’s us, isn’t it? Giving ourselves to special study? Attending lectures? It’s me.”
“Which crusty creature penned this drivel?” Lucie demanded.
Hattie was flipping through the pages. “Let any tenderhearted woman go into the parks and watch one of these unhappy children in the care of its nurse,” she continued in a shaky voice. “The hot sun beats down on its small, upturned face, and the ignorant creature in charge goes on with her flirtation, or her gossip, or her novel . . . During those awful hours in which its teeth force their way through hot and swollen gums, the forsaken little sufferer is at the mercy of some sleepy, self-indulgent woman who has no love for it . . . Oh.” She looked up with her eyes swimming in misery. “I was fully planning on employing a nanny.”