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Chapter Eleven
As soon as Sirena opened the doors to her studio, Helen inhaled the sharp odors of oil paint and turpentine. Unexpected nostalgia overtook her; she had spent most her life near the docks, where such scents abounded. Pine tar and turpentine were used in shipbuilding as a wood preservative and for waterproofing rigging.
She smiled, the familiarity of the mixture of odors bringing strange comfort. Sirena was busy lighting more candles around the darkened room, but even in the dimness, Nicholas watched Helen, and she realized too late how observant he was.
“What is it?”
With three simple words and those golden eyes, his attention centered on her. For just a moment, she believed in his sincere curiosity, and it fueled a warm glow within her.
“Paint and turpentine—the same as at the docks,” she replied with a smile.
Realizing suddenly she had just slipped up and let her guard down, revealing her peculiar and practical upbringing, her smile disappeared and her cheeks flushed.
I can’t remember what my mother smelled like—whether she favored a perfume or a tincture. But the shipyards, the docks—those settings are of great familiarity.
She broke eye contact with Nicholas and watched Sirena make her circuit around the studio, briskly lighting candle after candle, revealing a large, airy room with tall, bare windows.
She wanted to be indifferent to Nicholas’s quiet attention, but she found she couldn’t ignore him, and her gaze returned to his.
“You were smiling for a moment. Do you enjoy the smells of paint and turpentine?”
Helen shrugged, hands smoothing down her pale satin skirts. If her revelations so far hadn’t completely bored Nicholas, these would. “Perhaps, but my notions aren’t romantic or artistic. My family name is Miller, and millers we’ve been, even before my father’s people came to America. Turpentine.” She closed her eyes. “You can smell it’s from pine resin, can’t you?”
Opening her eyes, she found that Sirena stood next to her son, and they were both dutifully inhaling—and paying full attention to her.
“The first relatives who came to Massachusetts made their living by burning pitch pine trees to make tar. It turned into a proper mill for lumber, owned by my family for a century. As Pen discovered during our trip to Madame Robillard’s, I know more about lumber and shipbuilding than about gowns.”
“Ah.” Sirena stared at Helen for some time before nodding, as if she’d concluded something. “I see. Your husband—what was his occupation?”
“He worked for his family’s shipbuilding firm, as the agent who acquired lumber.”
The older woman blinked. “Is that how you met?”
“Gray & Co.’s shipyard was very close to our lumberyard, and they were a customer of my father’s. We all grew up together, running amongst piles of lumber and the skeletons of ships.”
That was at once accurate and misleading. Helen had followed Robbie and Elijah around, running and skipping, while Robbie’s sisters were at their mother’s skirts learning to be ladies.
A wistful half-smile curved one side of her mouth as she remembered the innocent times when she, Elijah, and Robbie were simply children growing up together, then within a blink, she remembered to shutter her expression.
It was too late.
“Who knew more of lumber and shipbuilding?” Nicholas asked quietly. “You or your husband?”
“He grew up in it as I did. He knew a great deal.”
“Whoknewit more? Cared for all the details?”
Her breasts rose and fell more rapidly under her bodice. His questions, so direct as to be rude, caused memories to wash over her.
Robbie hadn’t ever cared a fig about his father’s business or the miraculous crafting of lumber into a ship that could sail the world. He enjoyed watching clouds roll across the sky and penning poetry about his love for a ginger-haired sailor.
Helen had followed the boys around the yards, thirstily absorbing details about how sternposts were assembled, the proper salting of a ship to season the timbers, which hardwood—locust—was ideal for producing treenails.
Nicholas was undeterred by her silence. “Were you a valuable assistant to him? Or did you simply work in his stead?”
How does he know? And why does he care?
Turning to him with astonishment, Sirena shook her head. “Nikolaos!”
