“There,” said Lofthouse, jerking Daniel out of his private musings. “What do you think?”
He turned his board around as he spoke, and Daniel found himself confronted with his own face.
Daniel realised a half-second afterward how hard he had braced himself for an unpleasant result. His mind remained stuck on the miniature and the dozen-odd portrait sketches his classmates had done of him for drawing practise at Mrs Bailiwick’s Academy. Only within the last year had any looking-glass deigned to show his true self in his reflection. He hardly expected the art of drawing had caught it up.
Yet as he gazed upon what Lofthouse had wrought, he discovered something more like his true reflection thanotherwise. A gentleman stared back at him. A young gentleman, yes, but one with smooth sharp cheeks, strong jaw, and a confident gaze which leant a brightness to the slight smile at the corners of the mouth. Something rather like what he saw in the looking-glass as he shaved each morning. A touch grander, perhaps.
“Good,” Daniel said when the silence stretched a half-second too long and he realised his opinion was still wanted. “Very good.”
A fleeting bashful smile crossed Lofthouse’s freckled face. “Splendid. Now, if Mrs Durst would be so kind…?”
Daniel graciously arose so his wife might sit. As she took his place, so he took hers. She had left her mending basket behind beside her chair. Without thinking, he reached down to bring it up into his own lap.
Then he paused.
He had, in bending sideways, happened to catch a glimpse of Lofthouse again. Lofthouse, busy with arranging sketchbook and subject both, didn’t appear to have noticed him in turn, but no matter. This glimpse nonetheless served to remind him how he and his wife did not now sit alone in their parlour. And while Daniel and Sukie shared household duties between them, including mending, he remained acutely aware that most gentlemen did not.
Perhaps Sukie sensed something of his discomfort, for she happened to turn toward the window at that very moment and in so doing met his gaze. She held it for a moment before returning to face the stranger in their midst.
“Who does your mending, Mr Lofthouse?” Sukie asked. “A laundress?”
The enquiry appeared to unnerve Lofthouse far more than Daniel thought warranted.
“I do my own mending,” Lofthouse admitted after an uncomfortable silence.
“Do you, indeed?” said Sukie, mild as a lamb. “Your future bride will appreciate that, I’m sure.”
Another uncomfortable silence descended, unbroken even by the scratching of pencil against paper. At length, Lofthouse replied, “I suppose she will.”
He spoke, Daniel noted, in a very similar sort of tone to what Daniel had himself used whenever his fellow pupils would chatter about their future husbands and enquire after Daniel’s ownfiancéin particular.
Something tapped at the window. Daniel glanced over to find a songbird on the windowsill. It bore grey and white feathers with black wing-tips and tail, and a black mask over its eyes.
“Oh, Mr Lofthouse!” Sukie cried, her voice nevertheless soft lest she startle it. “What sort of bird is that?”
Lofthouse stared at the window for a long moment. Finally he said, “It is, I believe, a shrike.”
The bird tapped at the window-glass again. Then, with a queer little leap, it flew up into the air and veered off out of sight altogether.
Lofthouse resumed drawing. Sukie returned the conversation to the subject of birds. Daniel picked up the mending, feeling rather foolish for avoiding it in the first place. After all, Lofthouse knew full well Daniel’s education and background. It could hardly astonish him to see Daniel sewing. Particularly when, by his own confession, Lofthouse—a gentleman whom society had always perceived as a gentleman—did his own mending.
And whilst Daniel mended, his mind wandered.
He didn’t precisely know what made a gentleman handsome in the eyes of a lady. But from what he’d observed, he didn’t think Lofthouse’s face half-bad. Certainly not repulsive. Thereseemed nothing in it that a lady might object to, unless she had a particular loathing for freckles. His behaviour and comportment likewise appeared perfectly unobjectionable. A bit awkward, perhaps, but that needn’t hobble a gentleman of good character and good credit, as Lofthouse was, by Daniel’s own assessment. His treatment of Sukie and Daniel had proved kind, at least. Kinder than Daniel would expect of most gentlemen, should they ever learn his secret. Which would suggest, on Lofthouse’s part, a sort of sympathy towards not just ladies but likewise those whom society mistook for ladies. All told, Daniel thought Lofthouse might have a bride whenever he wished.
If he were inclined toward a bride at all.
~
In the weeks following Sukie agreeing to run away with him, Daniel began practising dressing as his true self in the privacy of their attic sanctuary. He’d acquired his first few pieces earlier by writing to Mr Grigsby under pretense of assisting the Society of Friends of Needful Seamen. What he could not procure from his guardian’s cast-offs, Sukie acquired for him at Rag Fair, including a splendid pair of boots which shone far beyond their years after she’d got done polishing them.
Daniel, meanwhile, set about turning one of his whalebone corsets into something actually useful. It took a great deal of stitching, un-stitching, and re-stitching, and he very nearly lost an eye as one of the bones snapped back at him when he tried to cut it to size, but in the end he had something that would make his chest as flat as that of other gentlemen. Not that he’d had terrible much up there to begin with. Still, it was rather more than he’d have preferred. The tight binding around his ribs felt like freedom compared to corseting his waist.
With the whole kit assembled at last, one evening, he dressed himself as he ought to have been for the past nineteen years.
He began just after dinner, before Sukie finished with her duties and came up from the kitchen. He didn’t like having a witness to his body. He found he misliked it less when Sukie saw him, but on this particular occasion, he wanted to know himself alone.
Each individual article had staggered him as they’d arrived piecemeal over the past fortnight. Now, with smalls, shirt, stockings, trousers, waistcoat, frock coat, and necktie all laid out on his bed before him, a queer sort of euphoria blocked up his chest and head and threatened to overwhelm him. And yet there also came a grim sort of satisfaction, of self-righteous vindication, at finally attaining the costume for the role he was born to play.
