Page 35 of The Muse of Maiden Lane

But want was too weak a word.

He had to paint her.

“This is, I take it, the reason you haven’t been at table these past several days?” he said. “Or at the dance?”

“It is,” she admitted. “There wasn’t time to have a fashionable morning cap made in the village. And I couldn’t borrow one from any of the other guests without raising suspicion. Lady Arundell’s cap was the best I could manage. I’m fully aware it does me no favors.”

“You still might have come to dinner or—”

“On no account. I may be reduced to roaming the remote corridors of Sutton Park with my hair covered in a borrowed matron’s cap, but I’d as soon not expose myself to the other guests at a meal, or a ball, or over a hand of cards. They’d find it as strange as you did. I’d be thought an absolute eccentric.”

“There are worse things in life.”

“Any number of things, I’m sure. That doesn’t make this any less problematic. An unmarried young lady can’t afford to be thought peculiar. She can’t afford to be obtrusive at all.”

“You’d rather be ordinary?”

“What I’d rather be,” she said, “is inconspicuous.”

He gave her a sharp glance.

How often had he felt the same? That the very fact of being different had put him under a painful variety of scrutiny? He didn’t aspire to ordinariness. Far from it. But conspicuousness was a loathsome alternative. If Teddy was to be recognized at all, he’d rather it be for his skill with a brush and pencils than for the fact that he was a young man, in the very prime of life, stuck in a wheeled chair. His injury wasn’t the whole of him. It wasn’t even the most interesting part. It irked him to no end that, to some people, it was the only thing worthy of noticing.

Is that how Stella felt about her hair? Is that why she desired to be ordinary?

“Were you so inconspicuous before?” he asked. “Unless…You weren’t born with this hair color, were you?”

“No, indeed. When I was a girl, my hair was a plain, nondescript mouse brown. The color didn’t begin to change until I was fifteen. By sixteen, I was completely gray.”

“And you’ve no idea why it happened?”

“The village doctor offered suggestions. So did my brother. But they neither of them understood the why of it any better than I did. All I know is that it’s come to define me. It’s the first thing people notice. Often the only thing.”

“Do you care so much what people think of you?” Teddy asked. It was the very question he’d frequently posed to himself.

“I wish I didn’t,” she said. “But I must.”

“Because you’re in search of a husband.” He was unable to disguise his disdain.

Stella responded to his tone with a faint smile of amusement. “You refer to my efforts with contempt. And yet, you must eventually marry.”

“Must I?”

“Every gentleman does eventually.”

“I won’t,” Teddy said bluntly. “I have no wish for a wife.”

She flashed him a surprised look. “What? Never?”

“I’m not the marrying sort.”

She returned to staring at the clock. He could tell what she was thinking. She assumed it had something to do with his chair.

And perhaps it did. To be sure, it was a large part of the reason he’d vowed to remain a bachelor. But it wasn’t the entirety of it.

“I’m too fastidious and particular,” he said, answering the question she’d been too polite to ask. “A wife would only get in the way of my painting. Either that or she’d bore me. And I despise being bored, almost as much as I despise having my work interrupted.”

“A wife’s purpose isn’t to entertain a husband. She’s meant to be a helpmeet.”