Page 49 of The Lady Makes Her Mark

Chapter 16

By late morning, Constantia had given up any pretense of teaching her students anything about art that day. The lesson on the importance of leaving empty space in a composition would have to wait until the sisters were capable of focusing on something other than foiling their brother’s marriage plans. At midday she shooed them out of the studio and listened to them plotting as they filed down the stairs.

As silence fell, she began to roam around the room collecting their sketches from the day before. When she reached the last table, she stretched out a hand for the drawing and froze. On the back of the sheet of paper containing the picture of the chair, Harriet had drawn something else. Something entirely new and yet devastatingly familiar.

Constantia had just slid onto the bench to study it more closely when she heard a peremptory rap on the schoolroom door. Swiftly setting the other sisters’ work on top of Harriet’s, she turned toward the sound. But before she could speak or move to open the door, it swung inward to reveal a perfect stranger: an elderly woman, slight of stature, wearing a high-necked, wine-colored gown and a frown.

Constantia scrambled to her feet. This could only be the infamous Aunt Josephine.

“I am Lady Posenby,” the woman said in a chilly voice. “And you must be the drawing master.”

She exhibited no desire for an introduction, so Constantia merely inclined her head and curtsied.

“I question the wisdom of encouraging my nieces’ inclinations in this area.” She pointed with a folded lorgnette toward the stack of drawings on the table beside Constantia. “But they are clever enough girls, so I trust they are making progress?”

“We have only just begun,” Constantia explained as the woman strode closer and began to inspect the pictures. “However, I am satisfied with what they have produced so far.”

“What a lot of waffle. I see nothing remarkable here,” she declared.

Was it Constantia’s imagination, or did she sound pleased by the discovery?

Lady Posenby raised her lorgnette halfway to her eyes to peer at the comment Constantia had written on Georgiana’s picture. “You mustn’t allow them to run roughshod over your rules,” she said, then added, not quite under her breath, “though certainly flowers seem a more fitting subject for young ladies than rickety old chairs.” Then she reached Harriet’s work. The lorgnette rose higher. “What’s this?”

“It, um, it appears to be a cartoon, ma’am.”

“Was this part of your instruction?” she demanded, whirling on Constantia. “To ridicule Ryland in the style of that awful magazine?”

For her part, Constantia hadn’t decided whether the cartoon was making more fun of Alistair or Aunt Josephine. But neither of them had fared well under Harriet’s pencil.

“Certainly not, ma’am. I believe Lady Harriet must have been doodling during the lesson.”

“Well, you ought not to permit it,” she said, crumpling the paper into a tight ball. “Just as Ryland ought not to permit his sisters to read that trash. The Magazine for Mischief, or whatever it calls itself.”

Constantia wanted to say a great many things in reply. But she settled for boldly correcting her ladyship: “It’s the Magazine for Misses, ma’am.”

“Read it, have you?” She turned the lorgnette on Constantia and looked her up and down. “I can’t say as I’m surprised. You artistic types aren’t much for the rules of polite society.”

Constantia bristled instinctively at the tone, though the words themselves were unexceptionable. The rules of polite society were, after all, the ones by which her mother had been as good as sentenced to death. Should anyone be surprised to find she had little patience for them?

“If you were looking for your nieces, they work here in the mornings. When the light is best.” She drew her spine straighter as she spoke, until she stood head and shoulders taller than Lady Posenby.

“It was you I wished to see.” And she looked displeased at having to crane her neck to do so.

Constantia made no effort to hide either her suspicion or her surprise. “Why?”

“You are familiar with those cartoons of my nephew, I take it?” Constantia managed to nod. “Well, now he requires a wife. His fortunes may be strained at the moment, but he’s still the Earl of Ryland. It ought to be no great feat to find a wealthy merchant’s daughter who will thrill at the prospect of being addressed as ‘my lady.’ But”—she gave the ball of paper a threatening shake before tossing it onto the floor—“the nonsense spewing from that magazine has made the task considerably more difficult than it ought to have been. That artist has made him ridiculous in the eyes of every young lady in Britain—and Ireland, too, for all I know.”

As she spoke, Lady Posenby directed her gaze out the window, as if scouring the landscape for potential magazine readers lurking in the bleak moorland. Constantia could only be grateful she was not scouring her face, for she feared the emotions at war there would reveal too much.

Did the Magazine for Misses truly have such reach?

Did her sketches truly have such power?

At the risk of betraying herself, Constantia said, “What does all that have to do with me?”

She’d wanted to prick Lord Ryland with her drawings, it was true. Though she had certainly never dreamed that by doing so, she could damage his marital prospects. But if what Lady Posenby said was genuine, it seemed she had, however inadvertently.

And she found she could not be sorry for it. Not now that she knew him better, knew the scent of his cologne and the taste of his kiss. The announcement that he intended to take a wife had produced an unexpected sting of jealousy in her breast. Some wicked part of her did not regret making his path more difficult.