Matilda saw the girl’s jaw clench and then release. “No.”
“Oh, Bea, you won’t leave for days. Weeks. I cannot wait to take you there—I have a friend who can sneak us in after hours—the light isn’t as good, of course, but once I went at dawn, andthatwas the best time—”
“I can’t,” Bea said, but this time she sounded miserable, rather than angry. “I can’t go.”
“Why on Earth can you not? You will learn so much—it’s more than worth a few ugly whispers. You’ll be so enraptured you won’t hear them anyway.”
“Ican’t.”
Matilda’s heart wrenched in her chest. “They’re only words, Bea. They only have power over you if you let them.”
Bea’s lips twisted down, her mouth a mirror of Christian’s. She shrugged and looked at the ground. “Then I suppose I am letting them.”
Matilda took a careful breath and then let it out. “All right,” she said. “There’s no sense in worrying about March now. We have a whole winter to paint together. You have a great deal to teach me about pigments.”
And I have five months to change your mind.
She supposed that if anyone was well-positioned to teach Bea to ignore the opinions of the self-righteous half of thebeau monde,it was one of the Halifax Hellions.
And for the first time in a long time, the absurd nickname didn’t send a shiver of irritation through her. In fact, she thought, she felt almost proud.
Chapter 14
Two weeks later, Matilda and Bea sat on the bed in Bea’s chamber and watched the cat carefully shred what appeared to have been a delicately embroidered cushion set inside a miniature chaise longue.
Bea had named her Angelica Kauffman, after one of the two female founders of the Royal Academy, and between the cat and their art, Matilda had made some cautious inroads with the girl. They’d taken to spending half the day on the beach, in a sheltered cove that Bea favored, painting and talking of technique and salons over the chattering of Matilda’s teeth.
One evening, as they dined on root vegetables in cheese sauce and tiny flaky mushroom tarts, Mrs. Perkins had slipped in with a filet of sole for the enthusiastically yowling Angelica Kauffman. She had informed them all dryly that the cat would need a place to build her nest in the coming weeks.
Christian’s voice had sounded alarmingly strangled. “Her nest? I don’t understand.”
Mrs. Perkins had given him a look of vague concern, as though wondering if he’d come over a bit silly. “Her nest,” she’d repeated. “For the kittens.”
Christian’s face had taken on the single most terrifying glower Matilda had ever seen, and she—
Well, there were limits to the bravery even of a Halifax Hellion. She’d stuffed another bite of mushroom tart in her mouth and run away.
Ever since, Angelica Kauffman and Mrs. Perkins had embarked upon something of a battle of wills. Each time the cat rejected yet another nest that Mrs. Perkins presented, the housekeeper redoubled her efforts. She seemed to take it as a personal challenge.
“She’s going to give birth in your brother’s chamber,” Matilda said gloomily. “I am certain of it. And then he will put me out, and I shall freeze to death on the mail coach back to London.”
The pretense that Christian had selected the cat as a gift for Bea had of necessity been abandoned.
“It seems likely,” agreed Bea, in tones that—to Matilda’s ear—sounded inappropriately chipper when discussing someone else’s imminent demise. “How many kittens do you think there will be?”
“Three or four,” Matilda said, then groaned and flopped backward onto Bea’s counterpane. “Probably eleven. Send a few back to London with my corpse so my brother and sister know I died in the service of animal rescue.”
Bea gave Matilda’s knee a fleeting pat. Though she had begun to come out of her shell, she was still cautious, wary of touch. Afraid, Matilda thought, of asking for too much. “He probably won’t actually put you out.”
Matilda turned her head to gaze at the wall. As in Matilda’s room, heavy draperies crowded with even heavier furnishings. The light through the small window was barely enough to illuminate the pattern of turnips and artichokes on the wallpaper. “If there are eleven kittens, I would consider freezing to death a mercy.”
“He likes you,” Bea said.
Matilda’s heart gave a stuttering leap in her chest.Do not ask. Don’t you dare ask, Matilda Halifax—
“What makes you say so?” she asked, and then groaned inwardly at her lack of restraint.
She felt Bea shift her weight in the bed beside her and imagined that Bea had shrugged. Matilda could not divert her face from its position at the wall to check, however, as she was fairly certain her cheeks were a shade of pink not usually found in nature.
