She smiled and assured him they hadn’t waited for more than a few minutes before his arrival.
“Then,” said Daniel, turning to his guests and speaking with far more confidence than he felt, “if you would join us for dinner, gentlemen?”
The cottage had no formal dining room. Still, its kitchen table had room enough for four chairs around it, and neither Lofthouse nor Butcher looked askance at its offerings. Daniel had learnt how to carve a roast from books—his guide to gentlemen’s etiquette, as well as Sukie’s cook-book—and distant childhood memories of his own father presiding over the dinner table. He had not yet found the opportunity to test his skill in company. He kept his hands steady whilst he carved, and if Lofthouse or Butcher noted anything amiss, they gave no hint ofit in look or speech but merely accepted their plates with smiles and thanks as Daniel passed them down.
Sukie likewise smiled at him, which was more than Daniel felt he deserved after ambushing her dinner plans with two more mouths to feed and barely a few hours’ notice. He knew better than most gentlemen how much work that entailed. Not just through what housekeeping arts Mrs Bailiwick had taught him in anticipation of his marriage to Felix, but also through Sukie herself instructing him in all she knew of cookery, which proved a fair bit. She could not, she had informed him, make him even half so good a cook as her Aunt Molly. But she could teach him enough to make him useful.
The dinner itself went on well, Daniel thought. Butcher maintained his stoic silence yet did not seem displeased with the fare or the company. Lofthouse proved a little more talkative, if a touch nervous and consequently awkward. He complimented Sukie’s cookery as well as her decoration of the house. Her bashful smile made Daniel’s heart bloom with affection all over again. He couldn’t resist reaching for her hand under the table. She gave him an affectionate clasp in reply.
At the meal’s conclusion, Daniel drew the gentlemen into the parlour again so Sukie might clear the table in private. She rejoined them shortly. No sooner had she reappeared than Lofthouse reached into the leather satchel he’d left by the sofa and withdrew two jars.
“A housewarming gift,” he explained, handing one off to Daniel and the other to Sukie. “Honey and sloe preserves from Mr Butcher’s estate.”
One mystery solved, then, Daniel concluded. Mr Butcher was a gentleman farmer. Though, given his garb, still a rather eccentric one. The golden honey and dark purple sloe looked delicious regardless. He gave his sincere thanks.
“And,” Lofthouse added with some hesitance, “there is another matter as well.”
Daniel’s hackles arose. He forced himself to reply with an even tone. “What matter might that be?”
“Have you heard tell,” Lofthouse asked gently, “of Tolhurst’s passing?”
“I have,” Daniel admitted—much to Lofthouse’s evident relief. “Mr Grigsby wrote to inform me. Can’t say as I’m sorry for it.”
A wan smile flickered across Lofthouse’s lips as he replied, to Daniel’s surprise, “Nor I.”
Butcher’s face proved more difficult to read, but the grim line of his mouth seemed to imply he felt likewise.
“There is, I think, a small inheritance due to you,” Lofthouse added, dipping his hand into his waistcoat pocket.
A frost of icy dread crept over Daniel’s heart. If Tolhurst had left him anything, he would as soon have had him take it to his grave.
These feelings were not dispelled when Lofthouse withdrew a delicate golden chain. He knew, even before the charm dangling from it turned to face him, what it was.
There, with the chain drawn between Lofthouse’s fingers and the back of it braced against his knuckles, lay the beloathed miniature.
And a hundred horrid memories came flooding back with it.
Tolhurst had commissioned the wretched thing. For Felix, of course. A gift for his nephew’s birthday, celebrating his impending nuptials with a beautiful bride. He’d already fulfilled his part in the portrait by paying the artist. Yet he insisted on attending every session of the painting process as achaperonwhen a maid or even another pupil would have sufficed. And though he didn’t need to study Daniel’s features for the painting, still he stared with even more intensity than the artist himself.It was remarkable, really, Daniel had thought as he gazed off out the window over the artist’s shoulder and studiously ignored Tolhurst lurking in the corner of his eye, how a man could stare so and yet never once see the truth staring back at him.
The same went for the artist. The end result appeared hardly worth the excruciating process. It showed an even worse reflection of Daniel’s true self than any mirror. His strong jaw and hard gaze had transformed into a simpering, slope-shouldered, wide-eyed creature he couldn’t recognise as human, much less as himself.
Of course Tolhurst had loved it. Pride rang through his voice as he showed it off to Daniel. The caress of his fingertips around its minuscule gilded frame made Daniel’s skin crawl. Daniel had wished he’d had a knife to hand in that moment, as if he could carve away from his own flesh the traces of Tolhurst’s touch on the miniature.
In the end, it hadn’t required a knife. He could change himself from caterpillar to moth by shedding his old raiments for garb that fit who he truly was. His old name vanished the moment his real name first fell from his own lips. When he looked in the mirror now he couldn’t perceive a trace of the form the world had forced him to assume for so long.
And yet here it was again. The empty shell of someone who never was, a pallid husk lurching forth from the grave to reach its icy fingers toward his soul.
He didn’t expect Lofthouse to understand. After all, how many living men could claim to be haunted by their own ghost?
“I had thought,” Lofthouse explained, oblivious to Daniel’s turmoil, “that if anyone had a right to it, it was yourself.”
“Keep it,” Daniel said, his words clipped.
Lofthouse balked. Evidently Daniel’s sharp tone took him by surprise. He turned first to Butcher, then to Sukie, and back to Daniel. He cleared his throat. “If you’re certain…”
Daniel forced a smile. “Might make things awkward with the wife to keep a miniature of another woman around.”
A snort of laughter escaped Lofthouse. He attempted to cover it up with a cough. “Yes—well—quite right.”
