Portrait of a Scotsman by Evie Dunmore

Chapter 24

Her first attempt at photography in the village school the next day was discouraging, a disaster, a chagrin. Mr. Wright explained the camera’s different movements to her, but he used a lot of terms she had never heard before, and she barely got to touch the camera, for he kept doing everything himself. The children of Heather Row, among them little Anne, sat patiently when she first tried to immortalize them on a gelatin plate, but the image on the focusing screen was very dim and upside down, and by the time she had found her bearings, the children were bored and moving. When Mr. Wright suggested she practice on an inanimate object for a few weeks and learn the theory behind dry-plate emulsions, she fled. The children liked her much better without a dark cloth over her head and ran alongside her on her way back to the inn. Anne insisted on putting her small hand in hers, and Hattie felt strangely guilty for not having brought any boiled candy. “I shall be back tomorrow, and bring some toffees,” she told the girl when the Drover’s was in full view. “Will you sit for me again?” Anne regarded her with serious blue eyes, giving no indication whether she had understood, but then she nodded. She gave Hattie’s brown wool skirt a covert little stroke and dashed after her friends back toward the village, her braids bouncing on her small shoulders.

Hattie lingered on the path, breathing in the sweet scent of heather and coal, and wondering whether the idea forming at the back of her mind since leaving the St. Andrews camera shop was genius or deluded tosh.

Lucian was in their room, in the armchair, using the evening light to read the book he’d been reading on the train the day before. At her entry, he raised his eyes from the page immediately and his gaze swept over her. She raised a hand to her hair—the dark cloth had left a strange smell on her skin and disheveled her coiffure.

“What are you reading?” she asked, strolling closer while pretending nonchalance.

Lucian had shed both his jacket and his waistcoat and looked rakish, sprawled in the chair with his braces on display.

He closed the book and put it aside on the windowsill. “Something on peat.”

Sounded boring. “And how was your inspection of the shafts?” The map of the mine’s bowels—tunnels, pits, drainage channels, and ventilation shafts—was spread on the table, a vital piece in Drummuir’s safety plan as well as a tool for gauging the remaining yield.

Lucian’s gaze narrowed. “Is there something you want?”

She clasped her hands before her. “I had an idea.”

His mouth quirked, but not in a mean way, and so she continued. “I would like to take artistic portraits of the people of Drummuir, in addition to functional ones.”

“What for?”

She pulled a chair away from the table and sat down with a sigh of relief. “I have a documentary in mind. An artistic exhibition—to raise awareness in London. All proceeds of tickets and pieces sold would fully be passed on to Drummuir.”

“Awareness,” he drawled. “An artsy documentary … Love, in case it’s slipped your attention, this is the time of the Decadents. People want to read and look at beauty, sensuality, pretty things. Life’s too grim for art to be grim, even for those higher up on the ladder.”

“It’s the right thing to do,” she said firmly. “I feel it in my belly.”

“Ah,” he said. “How was your first lesson?”

She hung her head and rubbed her temples. “Horrid.”

“So naturally it made you want to do more of it, and to critical acclaim no less.”

The lesson hadn’t made her want to do it. Feeling Anne’s small hand in hers had. Seeing Rosie Fraser in her Sunday finery, easily confused with any other respectable matron in the city.

“I know nothing,” she said.

Lucian’s expression was a careful blank.

She gave him a sullen look. “Mr. Wright tried his best, but he has a way of making it all sound dreadfully complicated—he lectured about focal point calculation for thirty minutes, and I nearly cried with frustration because I don’t want to invent new cameras, nor build them myself. I just want to use them.”

Lucian shrugged. “He’s an engineer.”

“But I am an artist. And I require a teacher who understands my artistic ambitions, and then offers the technical solutions.”

“If you find him impossible, we’ll find you someone from London.”

That was her next problem. “I don’t have enough time in any case,” she said. “Delusional of me to think I could manage it in three days’ time.”

“You can’t,” he agreed. “I already sent word to London that we’re staying awhile longer.”

She sat up straighter. “When?”

“Yesterday, in St. Andrews.”

When her silence drew out, he added, “I telegraphed Matthews, instructing him to come up to Drummuir and bring a few documents I need for my own affairs of business.”

“I see.”

“He’s also bringing a book with prints by Julia Margaret Cameron.”

“Her name sounds familiar,” she said, still coming to terms with the news.

“She was a photographer, one of the greats,” Lucian said, “one of the first and few to blend art and photography. She knew some of the Pre-Raphaelites.”

Was it a trap? A kindness? She fixed him with a distrustful stare. “Why?”

He gave a shrug. “I thought her work might interest you.”

Whatever his motivation, he had shown great foresight in anticipating her desires. I don’t want to, she thought, I don’t want to like him so. She had barely slept last night, as if his nearness beneath the blanket set all her cells alight with heated yearning. She felt a little molten inside right now; it must be her old, unbetterable self, feeling pleased that someone was pleasing her.

A man would have killed the Beast.

She wrestled with the words before forcing them out: “I would appreciate it had you consulted me before prolonging our stay,” she said. “Particularly in a place such as … this.” She nodded at the tired little room.

Lucian tilted his head. “You prefer to leave?”

“No! I still—I’d still appreciate being asked.”

One black supercilious brow went up. “Noted.”

See there. She had made her point in cold blood, and nothing terrible had happened.

Perhaps she should kiss him. Under normal circumstances, one would kiss a husband who had put thought and effort into a surprise.

Lucian’s smile was crooked. “You’re wondering if you should kiss me as a thank-you.”

She started. “What?”

“It’s what a good wife would do,” he said, and spread his knees. “She’d come and sit in my lap and kiss me.” Wicked laughter was dancing in his eyes now, and heat spread in her middle. So he possessed some humor. The darkly sarcastic kind.

His mocking smile faded when she rose and went to him. By the time she was perched on his hard thigh, his features were tense.

“Like this?” she said, her heart beating wildly. He had spent the day outside and smelled deliciously earthy. The shirt buttons at his throat were undone, low enough to reveal the dark dusting of hair on his muscular chest.

“That’s good,” he murmured. His arms were locking around her waist. She had walked into that snare with eyes wide open, in search of something, her boundaries, her powers. She kept her eyes on the V of his bare chest. A very fine chest. She put a fingertip against it. Lucian’s throat moved, the rest of him was still as a rock. She stroked, lightly, over warm skin and soft-crisp hair, then slowly trailed down toward the top button. There she lingered. Lucian broke first; he clasped her chin and kissed her full on the mouth. Need barreled through her at the intimate contact. A soft flash of his tongue against hers, and she had to pull away, needing air. The surface of her skin was hot from head to toe.

She looked out the window, where the sun was sinking in a liquid glow. “It’s so …” She shook her head. “Confusing,” she whispered.

His dark gaze traced her profile, assessing. “Perhaps because your mind is telling you one thing when your body is telling you another,” he said in a low voice. “Might be less confusing if you stopped thinking of it as a reward for me, but as taking pleasure for yourself.”

Well, that only went against every tenet of a woman’s education.

Her confusion changed direction when she recognized the spine of the book he had placed on the windowsill.

She turned to Lucian in time to see a flash of oh drat pass behind his eyes. “This,” she said, “is Wuthering Heights.”

“Aye.”

“Something on peat, you said!”

He shifted beneath her. “There’s lots of mentioning of the moors in it.”

“Where did you find this?” The book looked new, the spine just broken.

Lucian took it from her and held it against his chest. “In the bookshop in St. Andrews.”

Silence, except for the tapping of his fingers against the book’s jacket. Nervous—he was nervous for having been caught reading a novel, the silly man.

“And are you … enjoying it?” she ventured. “The read?”

He gave a shrug. “I suppose.”

“So you do.”

“I do, yes. And turns out you’re wrong. About everything.”

“What? I am not,” she said. “What do you mean, everything?”

“To start with, the villain of this book isn’t Heathcliff, but Nelly—”

“Nelly!”

“Someone should stick a boot up her meddling old arse.”

“I can’t believe you are singling out poor Nelly—why, Hindley would be a far more obvious villain than her.”

He scoffed. “Hindley, sniveling bastard, needs a good beating, but he’s not who kept interfering between Cathy and Heathcliff with such great effect.”

“Nelly did what she thought was right to protect her mistress.”

“Nah.” He shook his head. “She’s a servant reveling in her ill-gained powers like a hog in the mud. And Cathy didn’t want protection; she wanted Heathcliff. Here—she says …” He settled her deeper into his arms, opened the book, and riffled through the pages until his fingertip found the line he was searching for. “She says, ‘My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary.’” He looked up at her with heated eyes. “Necessary. Those are her words.”

She’d never last through a Sunday evening of him reading to her, she realized. As he had drawled those words with his Scottish burr, her heart had fluttered like a butterfly under an unexpected sunbeam.

“And another thing you have wrong,” he said, his gaze boring into hers. “I’m no Heathcliff.”

Her pulse still high, she slid a poignant glance over him. “You’re not?” With his glower and curling black hair, he looked like the Yorkshire winds were still howling around him.

“First,” he said, “I’d have never killed that dog; it hadn’t done a thing.”

“Poor Fanny.”

“Yes, Fanny. Second, Heathcliff was indecisive. Which I’m not.”

“You’re not,” she acknowledged.

“A disloyal creature like Cathy wouldn’t be worth the efforts of a revenge,” he continued. “I’d ne’er return to that place to flaunt my new wealth and position only to torment her. But if I were fool enough to pine so after such a woman—nay, any woman—if I thought the very beating of my heart was compelled by her existence, and knew just a sliver of this sentiment returned, I would take her. No running away in a sulk after hearing things I don’t like, no idly standing by while a whey-faced gent weds and beds her. I’d have crossed the moors with her thrown over my shoulder if need be.”

“No doubt you would,” she breathed, aware of his arm tightening around her waist. “And naturally you would think nothing of forcing her to live in squalor with you.”

“Ah, but there was no squalor—he was clever, and fortune smiled upon him, didn’t it?” He was smiling, too, exposing his chipped tooth and looking like a gleeful wolf.

An agitation crawled beneath her skin. She shook off his arm and stood. “She was compelled to choose Linton by economic realities and propriety—most women would have done the same; it was her one sensible choice.”

Lucian shook his head. “She had too little faith in the man she needed, so he hated himself even more and she chose a puny groom for her bed instead.”

“Puny? You hate the poor man.”

He made a face. “He near faints when Heathcliff glares at him. Faints when he glares. Which woman who says, ‘I am Heathcliff’ could be well pleased with that?”

Her lips parted before she had an answer. Before she realized she had, in fact, nothing to parry this. Her mind was wiped clean. Instinctively, she understood why such a woman couldn’t have been pleased. Her gaze fled to the vast expanse of heather outside the window, then to the low line of hills on the horizon. A woman like Cathy would have pined for passion until the end, beneath whichever glossy veneer of social respectability she had painted over her loss, because the truth was there—down deep where the rocks might be, but it was there. And so hidden in the dark and gradually compacting beneath layers of self-deception and pretenses, truth could turn to rot and eat away at the very roots of one’s existence. That’s why some women went mad and haunted the moors. Some hearts strove for the mellow pleasures of kind and steady things, and some beat for the heat of passion even when they knew they’d burn. I’d choose the blaze, she thought. The clear recognition of her own essence cut at something inside her, sharp like teeth. I could have never loved Clotworthy Skeffington. And he could have never loved all of her. Imagine, the fine-faced lord’s reaction to her wayward thoughts, her desire for more, her gloriously helpless cries when Lucian had slid his fingers into her. She blew out a breath and touched her cheeks. Her hands were icy. Odd, how the truth pounced into plain view after being there all along. She wasn’t lovely. That’s why she had such a strong reaction to the word; there was nothing wrong with lovely, but it was not her. Beneath lace and silk, she was a wild and dangerous creature.

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?