‘Ah, I see you are chastising me for wanting to attain the impossible. You remind me that while human subjects might stay in place for a few moments so I can catch them in an expression that brings them alive to the viewer, nature never will oblige. I would need a moving picture to do so.’
‘Or a style that suggests movement, like Mr Turner’s.’
‘You like art?’
‘I do, though I could no more paint a landscape than compose a symphony. You need Evelina for that. She’s very good– did you know that?’
‘I did.’ Though he realised he had neglected to ask his sister to play her works to him for over a year now. What a great brother he was. ‘What about you?’
‘My interest is botanical drawing, which is very precise, movement discouraged.’ She then proceeded to talk intelligently about the flowers growing in crevices of the stone walls or on the verge of the river. Her talk moved to seashells, which she also enjoyed painting, and the shell grotto that she and her sisters were making in their garden. Jacob would’ve enjoyed her conversation even more if Arthur hadn’t kept on shooting him triumphant looks like a hunting dog expecting praise for having retrieved the downed partridge. Damn his brother for being right: Lady Alice was a very eligible match and a friend to his sisters. She didn’t have a shady past as a forger of the very things he most prized in his collection, something that still stood between him and Dora. A life with Lady Alice would be more than bearable if he wasn’t already spoken for.
He looked back to Dora. She wasn’t watching him. Was that a deliberatenot watchingthat meant she was acutely aware of what was playing out between Lady Alice and him, or did she not care? He would almost have preferred to see a flash of jealousy to reassure him that his own attachment to her was returned with similar force.
He was a fool. There was no other explanation for these idiotic thoughts.
‘I would enjoy seeing your illustrations sometime,’ he said politely once Lady Alice finished telling him about her latest collection of specimens from the coast near her home.
‘And I would enjoy showing them to you,’ she said with unmistakeable warmth.
Blast, she’d taken his comment as flirting, and he hadn’t meant to send her that signal of his interest. He couldn’t take it back now.
‘Excellent. Then I must do so when we’ve finished our task here.’
‘Task?’
‘Miss Fitz-Pennington and I are investigating a theft.’ It was best not to mention murder to a young lady. Society didn’t approve of that sort of thing.
‘Indeed? Together?’ She glanced back at Dora who chose that moment to meet their gaze. Dora smiled questioningly. Jacob shook his head a fraction, suggesting she keep away. ‘I thought you were a doctor?’
‘I was– indeed, I still am, but I have turned to diagnosing, how should I put it, puzzles that need solving. Miss Fitz-Pennington has joined me in this endeavour.’
‘I did wonder about her when we were introduced. Who is she? Who are her people?’
‘Miss Fitz-Pennington is the daughter of a Liverpool gentleman but, unfortunately, she is illegitimate. She trained for the stage and that has given her a formidable memory as well as many skills that make her the ideal partner in our investigations.’
‘How intriguing. She sounds a most interesting young lady. How is she allowed to do such a thing? Does her family not prevent her?’
‘It’s a little more complicated than that.’
‘I must speak to her.’ With that, Lady Alice turned her horse to the side and waited for Dora to approach. ‘You ride on, Dr Sandys. We ladies need to talk.’
ChapterSeventeen
Road to Hardknott Pass
‘The mother and father died in the snowstorm, leaving the children without anyone to look after them,’ said Luke Knotte, his squirrel-bright eyes glittering over his nut of a story. ‘It happened right here in this valley. It may look a beautiful spot, but it is treacherous. Death is never far away.’
His habitual scowl in place, Moss harrumphed. ‘You shouldn’t scare Miss Fitz-Pennington. Cumberland doesn’t have the monopoly on danger. There’s many a cutthroat down a London alley and the mortality rate is certainly higher in town.’
Particularly for magistrates who strayed to Billingsgate, thought Dora.
‘But here Nature is our enemy– as well as our friend,’ insisted Knotte. ‘Don’t you find that dichotomy fascinating?’
‘I’d say that’s a rather obvious conclusion, if not a platitude. Snowstorms are dangerous– what a discovery.’ The man from the Alien Office corrected the amble of his horse towards a tempting outcrop of grass.
Knotte looked upset to be called out as trite. ‘Surely it is novel that in our age we are able to find a terrible beauty in the story whereas before us writers would only have seen the pathos?’
Dora sighed. The men were from different literary traditions and would never agree. They had been arguing over the poetry to be found in suffering for some miles now and she was sick of it. Suffering wasn’t poetic– it was grinding and ugly. You got out of it as soon as you could. ‘What happened to the children?’
