A Stranger in Mayfair - Charles Finch [3]
That evening they were in their sitting room at the Crillon. She was at a small carved desk, writing her correspondence, and he was sitting in an armchair, reading. A cool summer breeze blew in through the window.
As if she were reading his mind, she looked up and said, “To think—in three days we’ll be home!”
“I can’t wait,” he said quietly and ardently.
“I’ve had a letter from Toto. She’s simply enormous, she says, and she and Thomas seem to be quite content together—what does she say? Here it is: Thomas and I sit together in the evenings. I knit and he reads, except when we both stop and talk about baby names and what room to give the child and, oh, everything. That sounds like Toto, doesn’t it? She writes just the way she speaks.”
Bess Telford’s facts had been mingled with rumors—Thomas McConnell was a doctor and occasionally did drink too much. A talented surgeon from a family of minor nobility in Scotland, he had come to London to practice in Harley Street and shortly thereafter, almost to his surprise, married one of the most admired young women in the city. Lady Victoria Phillips was born with beauty and immense fortune, and in personality she was entirely winning—effervescent, affectionate, gossiping, and slightly silly—but she was also young. While their marriage had been happy for three years, after that it had become first an acrimonious and then a terrible one, full of fights and cold silences. For a period of two years the couple barely spoke, and Toto spent much of her time at her parents’ house in the country. It was during this time that Thomas had begun to drink. Shamed by his wife’s family into selling his practice for a song to a Phillips cousin (it wasn’t considered fitting that the husband of Toto Phillips should be a professional man) his subsequent aimlessness had been cruel to his spirit. It was only within the last year or two that Toto and Thomas’s relationship had healed, and her pregnancy—which was why, eight months in, she could describe herself as enormous—was just the final bond they needed to restore them to happiness.
The trouble between them had been terrible to Lenox and Lady Jane. Thomas was Charles’s medical assistant when a case demanded it, and besides that a close friend, and as for Jane, Toto was a cousin of hers, and more like a niece than any of Jane’s actual nieces. The couple’s renewed closeness was a massive relief. Toto’s series of letters had been more and more happy with each one, as the birth of her baby came closer and closer.
“Where will she go for the birth?” asked Lenox.
“I believe they intend to stay in London.”
“I would have thought they might go to her father’s house.”
“In a way I’m glad they won’t. It’s always been too easy for Toto to flee to her family. Perhaps it’s a sign that she’s growing up.”
Lenox stood. “Shall we go to dinner soon?” he asked.
“I’d rather just stay in, if you don’t mind?”
He smiled. “Of course.”
The next morning was August 25, the day in France of the Feast of St. Louis. By more than a century’s tradition it was also the day the famous Salon opened at the Louvre palace, and the greatest artists of France and indeed the world displayed their year’s work. Lenox and Lady Jane went early, heard Napoleon III speak, and spent a long day looking around. People surrounded a painting by Manet and another by Whistler, and while Lenox admired these profoundly he soon found himself steering away from the crowds and toward the back rooms. Here he found in one dim corner a series of three extremely blurred, thick-painted canvases of sunrise, even less distinct than Manet’s. They seemed to be little