Page 106 of The Muse of Maiden Lane

He hadn’t dared. It was difficult enough getting her to agree to sit for him without adding disrobing to the mix.

“I’m thinking it must be tulle or some kind of diaphanous net,” he continued, enjoying her blushes. “Something with pearls sewn into it or colored glass, or another glittering type of stone that will catch the moonlight.”

“Teddy, really—”

“We’ll be married. Or soon to be so. There’s no scandal in it. Anyway, it will just be the two of us to begin with. I’ll lock the parlor door, and Jennings can take himself off for our sessions.”

“What do you mean to begin with?”

“Part of the painting will necessarily have to be done out of doors. It’s a twilight piece, with the sea at its back, and you in the foreground. One of the Pleiades come to earth.”

“This begins to sound more and more out of the realm of comfort.”

“Immortality is rarely comfortable, but we’ll manage, I’m certain.”

A glimmer of suppressed laughter danced behind her eyes. “I don’t know whether you’re teasing me again, or whether you’re serious.”

“Both, possibly,” he said. And then, in distracted thought: “Tom has a point. We needn’t wait to use the house while the repairs are being done. We needn’t even wait until we’re married. The drawing room only wants a good cleaning, and then I can set up my studio. I’ve already waited too long to start painting you. I can’t wait any longer. The more I delay, the more chance the vision will slip away from me. If I don’t commit it to canvas soon—” He stopped, belatedly realizing that he was talking at her rather than to her. He suppressed a grimace. “Unless you have an objection?”

“No,” she said slowly. “Not so long as you don’t expect me to undress right away. I shan’t want to do that before we’re married.”

His heart thumped heavily. The implication was clear. “I won’t ask you to,” he promised. “Yet.”

Twenty-Six

Within a week, the front reception room in the house at Maiden Lane was put in order. The floors were swept, the old furnishings hauled away, and the boards removed from the windows.

True to his word, Mr. Jones had found several sailors who were willing to work on the house. They were capable men from Mr. Jones’s own community. Lascars, most of them, either home on leave, or permanently set ashore because of age or infirmity. They spoke Bengali, with enough English mixed in to enable easy communication. For anything else, Teddy applied to Ahmad or Mr. Jones to translate, or to his new housekeeper, Mrs. Mukherjee.

Mr. Jones had brought Mrs. Mukherjee to Maiden Lane for an interview the morning after the Finchleys’ dinner. A stout sailor’s widow of late middle age, she had been struggling to make ends meet and was keen to take up regular employment. After consulting with Stella, Teddy had hired the woman to start immediately.

While Mrs. Mukherjee and the sailors righted the house, Teddy took himself off to Oxford Street to purchase what he’d need for Stella’s portrait from Winfield and Sons—one of the many artists’ colormen in the city.

Colormen provided all manner of services for painters, from stretching and priming canvases to selling easels, pigments, and paints. At Winfield and Sons, Teddy bespoke a canvas that was fifty inches in height and forty inches wide. He then went to the shop of another colorman in Regent Street where he bought a selection of new hog-hair and sable brushes, and extra tubes of oil paint in French ultramarine, viridian green, cadmium yellow, lead white, and cobalt blue.

Like Whistler, Teddy intended to work with a limited palette. However, unlike The Woman in White, Teddy’s portrait of Stella would be rich with color. Saturated with blues, greens, and yellows, used in various strengths, fading into each other in seamless harmony, rather than stark contrast.

On returning to Maiden Lane, Teddy spent the next several days—with the help of Jennings and Mrs. Mukherjee—laying out drop cloths, setting up his easel, and preparing his canvas. All was in readiness when the day at last arrived for Stella’s first formal sitting.

Teddy was just mixing colors on his palette when he heard Mrs. Mukherjee greet Stella in the hall. There was a brief exchange—Mrs. Mukherjee offering to take Stella’s bonnet and gloves, and Stella inquiring about how Mrs. Mukherjee was finding her work—before Stella was at last shown into Teddy’s studio.

The preliminary sketches he’d made of her in Devon lay all about the room, along with new sketches he’d made during the last week—heavily shaded images of her staring into the distance, her eyes grave and her figure quietly seductive.

It was the first thing Stella looked at when she entered.

“When did you draw these?” she asked, walking toward them.

She was wearing the same dress she’d worn on the first day he’d sketched her in Hampshire—a deep blue silk trimmed in delicate black cording. The very dress that had begun to stir feelings in him that weren’t entirely artistic. Her hair was neatly arranged in a plaited roll at her nape.

“Some of them in Devon,” Teddy said. “The rest over the last week.” He set down his palette. His coat had already been discarded and his sleeves rolled up. Streaks of green and blue oil paint stained his hands and fingers. “Did Mrs. Blunt come with you?”

Stella picked up one of the sketches to examine it. “She’s busy at the hotel, overseeing the packing.”

The Blunts were departing for Yorkshire tomorrow. In their absence, Stella would be removing to Ahmad and Evelyn’s house. Her mare was already there, lodged in the Maliks’ stable, along with Crab, the horse belonging to Stella’s groom.

“If she didn’t accompany you—” Teddy began.

“I took a cab,” Stella said.