“When we arrive in Port Hawkesbury,” he said, beginning by looking away from her, then forcing himself to meet her all-too-beautiful gaze, “will you marry me?”
Sukie stared at him. “What?”
“In Canada,” Daniel explained, forcing his voice to remain steady. “I should like to live as husband and wife. With you.”
After all, they already behaved in all regards as husband and wife in the attic of the academy. For three years they had opened their hearts to each other every night. And for the past year or so,beneath the cover of darkness and bedclothes, Sukie had been to Daniel what Mrs Bailiwick claimed Daniel ought to have been to Felix.
(And what an informative afternoon that had been, when Mrs Bailiwick called Daniel into her private parlour and told him exactly what would be expected of him as Felix’s bride. If he hadn’t already known he’d no wish to wed Felix or any other man, that interview would have fixed his preference in his mind. As matters stood, it enlightened a great deal of his own feelings towards Sukie, and when next they met in his boudoir, he found her eager to experiment in how best he might fulfill the role which felt most natural to him.)
At present, Sukie continued to stare at him.
Silence was as good as a refusal. Daniel endeavoured to buck up beneath the blow. “Forgive me, I—”
“Yes,” Sukie blurted.
Daniel choked on his own apologetic speech. “What?”
“Yes,” she repeated, and kissed him, parting just long enough to say again, “Yes,” as she cradled his face in her hands, and then another whispered, “Yes,” as she bore him down onto the bed.
Some moments afterward, Daniel lay with her curled against his side and her head nestled in the hollow of his collarbone, staring up into the shadowed eaves with his heart still soaring. She would marry him. She would make him her devoted husband. She would willingly, gladly, ecstatically become his wife. And yet something nagged at him.
“I cannot give you children,” he confessed into the darkness.
Sukie shrugged, a gesture he felt rather than saw. “There are more than enough waifs in the world to fill our cradles, should we want them.”
~
The watercolour sketch went off largely without incident. Daniel and Sukie sat together as they had for the initial composition. He recalled well the sight of watercolour pans from his own drawing lessons. His old set was still kicking around somewhere in his steamer trunk; he wondered if he ought to bring it out to try his hand at it again.
Lofthouse appeared to paint with more vigour and enjoyment than the art master at the academy. And when the sunshine streaming through the southern window turned from afternoon gold to evening crimson and he turned his sketch-board around to show his subjects what he’d wrought, Daniel found the result far more pleasing than any technical still-life ever produced under the academy’s roof. The black-and-white sketches had caught their likeness. The warmth of colour seemed to bring them to life. Sukie clapped her hands in delight and redoubled Daniel’s own.
With a shy but no less pleased smile, Lofthouse packed up his kit and bid them adieu, promising to return with the finished painting, “Soon.”
A fortnight passed with neither hide nor hair of Lofthouse or Butcher seen in town. This Daniel knew not just from what he himself had witnessed—or rather, failed to witness—but from the gossip Sukie gathered from her Aunt Molly. If anyone in Port Hawkesbury had glimpsed a Gothic highwayman or his modest companion, none mentioned it. Nor, Aunt Molly added, had the staff of the lodging-houses found any of their guests matching the distinct description. This despite Lofthouse stating his intention to paint the final version of the wedding portrait out-of-doors.
Indeed, it seemed no one had seen Lofthouse or Butcher in town since Daniel and Sukie had invited them to dinner.
Daniel wondered at this, but likewise wondered at himself for never once bothering to ask Lofthouse himself where he stayed in town.
“Perhaps they made camp in the woods,” Sukie suggested when Daniel wondered aloud one evening.
“Perhaps,” Daniel conceded. “Lofthouse didn’t look like a fellow roughing it in the wilderness, though.”
Sukie shrugged.
While their guests didn’t appear in town, there nevertheless appeared a visitor in their garden. Several mornings just after dawn when Daniel left the cottage to walk to the office, he noticed one of those queer little black-masked grey birds flitting alongside him. A shrike, Lofthouse had called it. And Daniel had a dim recollection of seeing one before back in the garden of Mrs Bailiwick’s Academy—just a hair over a year ago now. Curious to find such birds on both sides of the Atlantic. Daniel supposed birds could fly wheresoever they pleased. Yet it wasn’t just this curiosity that nagged at him.
One particular evening, he returned to find yet another shrike perched on the gate trellis awaiting him.
Or perhaps the very same shrike.
The notion was absurd. Yet as Daniel paused with one hand on the gate to stare at the diminutive creature, and it cocked its head at him in return, he couldn’t shake the suspicion that he’d seen not just this sort of bird but this exact individual specimen before.
“I know you, don’t I,” he said—even as he knew talking to a wild bird was behaviour fit for Bedlam.
The shrike blinked at him and cocked its head again at the opposite angle.
The idea of a bird listening and responding to his words ought to have unsettled him. Instead he felt queerly comforted. And besides, he told himself, more likely the creature wasjust confused from being squawked at by a giant featherless, flightless thing.
