“Yes,” she said cautiously. “I’m Chloe Wynchester.”
The lads burst out laughing.
“How could you tell without a face?” demanded the one on the left.
“It’s the same dress,” answered his friend, “wrapped around a blank canvas.”
“Nothing there at all,” agreed the first, and they stumbled off in chortles of laughter.
“W-wait,” called Chloe, spinning toward their retreating forms. “Why did you want to know?”
They paused to face her, eyes shining with mirth.
“Oh, haven’t you seen?” said one.
His friend elbowed him in the side. “Give her yours.”
“I want mine, now that we’ve seen her.” The lad pushed his friend forward. “Give her yours.”
After some jostling, one of them finally stepped forward, a rectangle of paper fluttering in his outstretched hand.
Chloe took it from him with trembling fingers.
“It’s a penny caricature,” his friend explained helpfully. “They’re all over town. I think it’s a Cruikshank.”
The first lad doffed him on the cap. “It’s a Rowlandson, you bufflehead.”
“Looks like a Cruikshank to me.” His friend pulled out his own copy and ran a dirty finger round the edges. “Where’s the signature?”
Chloe didn’t give a fig about the signature.
The caricature was ofher.
The illustration was of yesterday. The scene outside Gunter’s. The famous pineapple sign was blowing in the wind above a trio of fashionable ladies pointing and laughing at a man and a woman on the opposite side of the sketch. The ladies were patronesses of Almack’s. Their features had been exaggerated, which only served to make them more recognizable.
The gentleman was Lawrence. He was down on one knee, in the mud, offering up armfuls of flavored ices with a theatrical expression of infatuation.
The woman was Chloe. Wearing the same wonderful, beautiful sapphire walking dress she had on now.
In the caricature, her face was not making a comical expression. Chloe’s face did not haveanyexpression, because the artist had neglected to sketch her visage. She was just a generic woman shape, with nothing inside.
The caption read:
A fall from grace! The Duke of F— falls
for the most forgettable face of all.
Chloe crumpled the cartoon in her fist. She kept crumpling until it was a hard little ball, just like the heart shriveling in her chest.
Thiswas what it meant to be seen with Lawrence publicly. Ridicule for her and ridicule for him. She would be seen not as a person with thoughts and feelings but as an object of scorn, no more memorable than a puff of air, remarkable only in her ability to attract no one’s eye but Lawrence’s.
Her vision swimming, Chloe faced ahead and forced her boots to keep walking. It was a caricature, not the end of the world. Who cared what two silly boys found amusing?
But every storefront seemed to have the day’s caricatures pasted to their windows. Her beloved duke, portrayed as a clownish buffoon. Herself, a vague outline with nothing of worth inside.
She walked faster, head down to ignore the empty shell of herself reflecting back at her again and again. Her crossed arms were cold, her legs leaden, but she kept moving, moving, moving, her stinging eyes on the pavement before her.
Just as she reached the safety of the bookshop, she glimpsed Lawrence up ahead, striding toward her.
