“Not too early, I hope?” Lofthouse asked with a nervous smile.
Daniel assured him he’d arrived just in time and ushered him into the parlour.
Sukie set her mending aside and arose to accept their guest’s handclasp.
“Will this do?” she asked, a little shyly, as she plucked at the skirt of her gown.
Lofthouse blinked. “Very well, I think. Splendid colour.”
Sukie’s beaming smile washed over Daniel’s heart and banished any nerves he might have fostered there.
“Now, then,” Lofthouse continued, glancing over the room. “May I rearrange a few articles? And—how would you prefer to pose?”
Daniel hadn’t the foggiest. “What would you suggest?”
“The traditional composition has the lady seated whilst the gentleman stands behind,” Lofthouse explained. “Though, if I may be honest, the best posture is one which you may find comfortable keeping for hours at a time. Perhaps,” he added, his eyes alighting on their matched chairs, “seated side-by-side?”
Daniel glanced to Sukie. She nodded. He returned his gaze to Lofthouse and gave his assent.
With Daniel’s assistance, Lofthouse moved the two chairs into the centre of the room, where they caught the best light from the south-facing window. Sukie grabbed a third chair from the kitchen so Lofthouse needn’t stand whilst he worked. Sukie sat in her chair, and Daniel took his rightful place in his own beside her. On impulse, he reached out to her, and she laid her hand in his palm.
“Will this do, Mr Lofthouse?” Sukie asked.
Lofthouse glanced over their pose. “Quite well, I should think.”
And in the time it took him to say so, he had sketch-book and pencil in hand and had already begun to draw. Not, Daniel noted, in his little leather-shrouded book, but a rather larger one that he propped up on a board on his lap, which all but hid him from view. For some moments the only sound in the cottage was the tick of the clock on the mantle and the scratching of pencil across paper.
Prior to the start of the portrait, Daniel had mostly concerned himself with how he might feel about being stared at for artistic purposes once again.
It did not occur to him to wonder how it might feel to have another man stare at his wife.
Yet, as he sat with her hand-and-hand and confronted the sight of the artist before them, he found his mind returning down old avenues, and the gnawing concern grew within him. If, heaven forefend, he saw Lofthouse looked at Sukie as Tolhurst had once looked at him—well, he did not think he could be held responsible for what he would do to the man.
But the stirrings of outrage proved short-lived as Daniel stared hard into the clerk’s face. Lofthouse’s gaze didn’t strike him as judgmental, as Daniel had assumed it might. Nor did it appear indifferent, as the prior portraitist’s had. Nor, to Daniel’s great relief, did it in any way resemble the covetous burning looks Tolhurst had once cast upon him.
Rather, Daniel found Lofthouse’s glances up from his sketch-book had an enquiring air. Studious and practical, the looks of a man endeavouring to puzzle out the scene before him, revolving the matter in his mind. When his eyes fell upon Sukie, they held nothing approaching ardour; aesthetic appreciation, at most.
“Ought we to keep silent, Mr Lofthouse?” Sukie enquired suddenly.
“What?” said Lofthouse, jerking his head up sharp. “Oh—no, it’s quite all right to speak. I’m not working on your faces just yet. Only blocking in the pose and composition. See,” he added, evidently in response to Daniel and Sukie’s twin confusion, and turned his sketchbook around to show what he’d done thus far.
It appeared as almost entirely vague shapes. In them Daniel recognized their own parlour, after a fashion, as if seen through fogged glass. So too did he see himself and his wife in the pair of figures, with the half-erased remains of the boxes and circlesthat had built them still visible beneath the stronger strokes bringing them into a more human shape. Their brightness, illuminated by the southern window, contrasted against the dark hearth behind them, which formed a sort of frame to anchor the whole image. All told, rather familiar to Daniel, who’d been taught to draw a little himself, albeit in a young ladies’ academy.
The important thing was that Sukie looked delighted by it.
“Pray tell, Mr Lofthouse,” she asked, “is this your usual method?”
“After a fashion,” Lofthouse admitted, turning the sketch back toward himself and resuming his drawing. “I’ve not done a wedding portrait before, strictly speaking, but most of my drawings begin this way, yes. Pencil sketch to compose it, then watercolour sketches to sort out the colours and lighting, and then on to the oils. I might do the oils elsewhere,” he added with an apologetic glance. “The fumes are unsavoury indoors, and I prefer to paint with them out in a garden or some other sort of place with a breeze.”
Daniel found no quarrel with this method.
“And is this the sort of work you do for Mr Butcher?” she pressed.
Lofthouse dropt his pencil.
Daniel suppressed a laugh, though he had to let slip a smile. He’d had the same questions himself.
Lofthouse bent over to retrieve his lost instrument in a manner that reminded Daniel more than a little of Mr Grigsby. He cleared his throat and resumed sketching. “When Mr Butcher wants such a thing done, yes, he asks me to do it. More often I manage his estate.”
