Someone to Love (Westcott #1)(94)
Avery hated him on sight. His hand itched to grasp his quizzing glass, but he resisted.
“Anna.” Both his hands were outstretched toward her. Avery might have been part of the furniture. “Just look at you. You look . . . elegant.”
“Joel.” She was looking at him with a smile to match his own and both hands outstretched to his grasp. “I am so glad you could come. And that is a new coat. It is very smart.”
They joined hands and both bent their elbows as though they were about to embrace. Perhaps they did not, Avery thought, because he was not part of the furniture. Anna turned her still-beaming face toward him while still grasping the man’s hands.
“Avery,” she said, “this is my dear friend Joel Cunningham.”
“I rather thought it was,” Avery said on a sigh, and despite himself his fingers curled about the handle of his glass. “How do you do?”
“Avery, my husband,” Anna said, “the Duke of Netherby.”
Cunningham released her hands and turned to make his bow, and Avery was interested to note that the man looked at him with the same sort of critical appraisal and veiled hostility as he had just looked at Cunningham. Like two dogs coveting the same bone? What an alarmingly lowering thought.
“Delighted,” Cunningham said.
Anna was looking from one to the other of them, and Avery could see that she had sized up the situation quite accurately and was amused.
It was not an auspicious start to the evening, but Avery certainly did not like the image of himself as a jealous husband—it was enough to give him the shudders. And Cunningham swallowed whatever hostility he might have brought with him or conceived at his first sight of the man his friend had married. They settled into a three-way conversation that was really rather pleasant, and the food was certainly superior.
Cunningham was an intelligent, well-read man. He was making what Avery understood to be an increasingly lucrative income as a portrait painter, though he dreamed of making a name for himself as a landscape artist, and he had a vague dream too of becoming a writer. “Though people with some talent in the visual arts are not always similarly talented with words,” he said.
“Are those who sit for your portraits still mostly older people?” Anna asked him. “I know you always longed to paint younger persons.”
He thought about it. “Yes, I enjoy painting youth and beauty,” he said, “but older people tend to have more character to be captured on canvas. They present a more interesting challenge. It is only recently that I have realized that. Perhaps it is a sign that my own character is maturing.”
He had not made much if any progress in keeping an eye on the Misses Westcott, he reported to Anna. Cunningham had seen who he assumed to be the younger sister enter the Pump Room with her grandmother on a couple of occasions, but he had not set eyes at all upon the elder.
“I did meet Mrs. Kingsley with the younger Miss Westcott at one of Mrs. Dance’s literature evenings,” he said, “and she was complimentary about the miniatures I had taken with me. She made mention of two granddaughters she had living with her and was clearly thinking about the possibilities. I wrote to you about this, Anna, did I not? But I have not heard from her since, and I have not knocked upon her door, easel in hand. Sometimes these things take time and patience and a little maneuvering.”
Anna smiled in understanding. “Avery and I called there today,” she said. “They are in good hands with Mrs. Kingsley, Joel, and I never intended you to do more than locate them for me and assure me, if you could, that they were settled here.”
Cunningham also volunteered his time to teach art at the orphanage a few afternoons a week. Avery asked him how well he worked with the new teacher, and he grimaced.
“She is a nincompoop,” he said. “But a dangerous nincompoop, for she seems highly respectable, the sort of person who must know all about teaching and the needs of growing children. She knows worse than nothing. She resents the fact that I teach art and keeps alluding to the fact that she is an accomplished watercolorist and has won acclaim from all sorts of dusty people. She has taken to listening in on my lessons and occasionally openly contradicting me. In the Gospel according to Miss Nunce, good art has nothing whatsoever to do with talent or the imagination or—heaven forbid—an artist’s individual vision, and everything to do with correctly learned and meticulously applied craftsmanship. When one of my boys painted a sky full of light and color and life and glory, she refused to have it displayed in the schoolroom because the sky was not a uniform blue and there was no yellow ball in the top right-hand corner with yellow rays of equal length coming from it. I thanked her, in front of the children, with awful courtesy—you would have loved it, Anna—for making it possible for me to take the painting to display in my studio.”
Oh,” Anna said, her elbow on the table, her chin in her hand, “if I could just have been a fly on the wall.”
“She is trying to make it impossible for me to stay,” Joel said. “But I am too stubborn to go, and I care for the children too much to oblige her. I hope I am making it impossible for her to stay. You ought to see how I allow the children to stuff all the art supplies into the cupboard, Anna. You would have scolded me for a week. Miss Nunce merely looks grim and martyred and complains to Miss Ford.”
Anna laughed and Avery began to like the man.