The crowd released its collective breath, and, like that, Cannon Street returned to its usual bustling self. The crowd dispersed and carried on with a hundred individual days.
Jake gave the horse one last pat as he glanced toward the place where he’d last seen Lady Olivia. The beggar remained in his place, but she was gone. Jake raced forward, craning his neck to get a better view. Nothing. The frustrating woman had slipped away from him yet again. Unexpectedly closer to his goal, it galled him to find it snatched out of his grasp.
Yet he also experienced a vague feeling of uncertainty regarding this underhand means of locating the art thief. It had to do with the depths he sensed within her. At the Dowager’s Salon, he’d assumed her the type of Englishwoman who would bore him within two sentences of conversation. But the last few days had shown him that Lady Olivia Montfort wasn’t the person her exterior suggested.
She wasn’t a type. She was, in fact, very much her own person.
And very like the ever-changing sea. One had to gain experience with the sea in order to read it correctly. Otherwise, its currents would carry a ship far off course before a sailor realized his error.
He did, at least, have some experience with the sea.
Would it be enough?
~ ~ ~
Olivia rolled her tongue against the roof of her mouth and attempted to rid it of its copper taste, the taste of bitterness.
Why had that acrid note sounded in her voice when she’d spoken of Lord St. Alban’s future,properwife?
Even in her head, it sounded bitter. He’d caught it, too. She could tell by the tight narrowing of his eyes on her.
Why should she be bitter anyway? It was her choice not to be a proper wife. She’d once been a proper wife, and once was enough.
She increased her pace, her heels a purposeful click-clack against the sidewalk. It wouldn’t do to dwell on such musings. They could be sorted out later by the Olivia who dwelled in the West End. The Olivia who had just struck a bargain—and shaken hands on it!—with Lord St. Alban.
A gentleman doesn’t gift a lady with property, unless she agreed to be his—
She’d stopped him right there, she’d had to. He’d been offering to make her his—
She exhaled a forceful breath, hoping to rid her mind of the dratted man at the same time. She was striding toward the East End, a striking world that increased in vibrancy and vividness with each step. These environs never failed to offer respite, however temporary, from her small West End life.
Over the years, she’d come to expect any number of situations from a morning spent roaming the East End on her eventual way to Jiro’s studio: filth, poverty, rancidity, the odd moment of fright, the odd moment of kindness, but, most of all, she’d come to expect the unexpected.
Her purpose was to dash off quick sketches of street subjects. Jiro had insisted that this exercise was essential to her development as an artist. She needed to understand all walks of life in order to paint life in its full depth and complexity. How was it possible that a decade had passed between now and then?
It had begun with a simple scribble on Lucy’s watercolor set. She’d found herself invigorated in a way she hadn’t since Percy’s supposed death. Painting, creating something from nothing, connected to something deep inside her: it was hers alone. She’d never experienced a pursuit so reliant on her own skill and drive.
Within the week, she placed a discreet ad in the paper and found an art master, the recently immigrated Jiro of Nagasaki, and began painting: Lucy, the Duke, the household staff, the aged family dog Poochie, bowls of fruit . . . anyone or anything that would sit still for half an hour.
With Jiro’s encouragement she explored other parts of London, too. It was during this period that she began to evolve into the woman she was today. At least, that was how she viewed it in retrospect.
Instead of having Jiro come to her in St. James’s Square, she began going to him in Limehouse for her lessons. She’d hired a nanny to spend mornings with Lucy and began painting like a madwoman, paying her street subjects, like the washerwoman she’d just finished sketching, to sit for five, ten, fifteen minutes . . . whatever time they could spare.
For the first time in her life, she experienced the real world, and it fascinated her. It was a solitary venture, but she never felt lonely. She saw the dirty, impoverished, fetid side of London hinted at on the streets of St. James. But she also saw the various ways people lived with dignity in reduced circumstances. The poor were no longer an abstract concept for her.
This experience not only deepened and expanded her palette as an artist; it deepened and expanded her as a person. She evolved into a woman, a whole woman, not just some confection of a girl, the girl she once was.
Face tilted toward the cloudless sky, the first in weeks, she nearly tripped over a pair of legs, one of which was missing its foot at the end. “’Ave ole Boney to thank for that,” the legs’ owner piped up.
Olivia averted her gaze. She’d been staring. “Beg pardon, sir.” She dropped a few coins into the beggar’s cup. “Which campaign, sir?”
“The Peninsula, milady.”
The air arrested in her lungs. For a decade she’d believed Percy’s body buried in a soldier’s grave on the Peninsula. She drew enough breath to ask, “Which division?”
“Second, milady.” A cough rattled through the old soldier’s chest. “Signed on in 1809 and didna stop ’til ’14. Nearly had me whole leg blowed off. Lucky ole Boney just got me one foot.”
She cleared her throat, which had gone tight. “Do you mind if I draw your likeness?”
