Southampton Row - Anne Perry [39]
There were another dozen people there also, but not Cornwallis. Her heart sank. Why had she supposed he would come, as if he were at her beck and call, with nothing to do but go to art galleries on a whim? She had no doubt whatever that he had been attracted to her, but attraction was not love, not the profound and abiding emotion she felt!
The women were coming in from the previous room. She could not escape. A further half hour’s desperate conversation ensued. What did it matter? The whole idea had been ridiculous. She wished more than anything on earth that she had never written to him. If only the post had swallowed her letter, lost it forever!
Then she saw him. He had come! His stance, the set of his shoulders, she would recognize anywhere. In a moment he would turn and see her, then she would have to go forward. Between now and that instant she must control the thumping of her heart, hope to heaven her face did not betray her, and think what to say that opened the way for him to speak, and yet was not too forward, too eager. That would make her look gauche, and it would repel him.
He turned, as if he felt her stare. She saw the pleasure light his face, and then his effort to cover it. For his ease, she forgot herself and went forward.
“Good afternoon, Captain Cornwallis. I am delighted you were able to spare the time to see this for yourself.” She gestured delicately towards one of the largest paintings, that of six heads, all facing out of the canvas, looking over the left shoulder of the viewer. It was titled Hogarth’s Servants. “I think they were mistaken,” she said firmly. “Those are real people, and excellently drawn. Look at the anxiety of the one in the middle, poor man, and the calm of the woman on the left.”
“The one at the top looks scarcely more than a child,” he agreed, but the moment after he had glanced at the picture, his eyes were searching her face. “I’m glad we chanced to meet,” he said, then hesitated, as if he had been too elaborately casual. “It . . . it has been a long time . . . at least it seems so. How are you?”
She could not possibly answer with the truth, and yet she longed to say “So lonely I escape into daydreams. I have discovered that my husband not only bores me, but I actually dislike him.” Instead she said what she always did. “Very well, thank you. And you?” She looked away from the picture and at him.
There was a very slight color in his cheeks. “Oh, very well,” he answered, then he too turned away. He took a step or two to the right and stopped in front of the next picture. It was another portrait, but this time a single person. “It must have been fashion,” he said thoughtfully. “One critic mimicking what the others had said. How could anyone with an open mind consider this poor? The face lives. It is highly individual. What more does one wish of a portrait?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Perhaps they wanted it to tell them something they already believed? Sometimes people wish to hear only what supports the position they would like to maintain.” She thought of the Bishop as she said it, and the endless evenings when she had listened to men decrying ideas without looking at them. Maybe the ideas were bad, but then again, maybe not. Without consideration they would never know. “It is so much easier to blame,” she said aloud.
He looked at her quickly, his eyes full of questions, but he did not ask her. Of course he didn’t! That would be intrusive and improper.
She must not let the conversation die. She had come here to see him, to learn if his feelings were still the same. There was nothing to do . . . almost certainly! But she still needed to know if he longed for her as much as she did for him.
“There is so much in faces, don’t you think?” she remarked as they approached another portrait. “Things that can never be said and yet are there if you search for them.”
“Yes, indeed.” He looked down at the floor for a moment, then up again