That Summer: A Novel

by Lauren Willig

  If he didn’t find himself at the receiving end of a rightfully indignant husband’s bullet first.

  “So he’s not the unacknowledged son of Lord Vaughn, then?” Imogen picked up a tea cake but didn’t bite into it. Butter-rich crumbs flaked beneath her fingers, sifting along the folds of her skirt.

  “Oddly enough, no,” said Gavin. “That’s not even his right name. He added it in the hopes of drawing more custom.”

  It had worked, too. Gavin didn’t quite understand it, but it had. It bothered Gavin, deep in his bones. A man should stand on his own merits, on the merits of his work, not on trickery and lies.

  “I had thought as much,” said Imogen quietly. She set the cake aside, her face averted, her teeth worrying at her lower lip. “Even Jane was half taken in by his story.”

  “And Miss Grantham’s father?” Gavin couldn’t bring himself to say your husband.

  Imogen shook her head, her face abstracted. “He has no idea of it. He is … not often at home.” She looked directly at Gavin, her eyes dark and clear. All that’s best of dark and bright … The words flitted nonsensically thought Gavin’s mind. “The last thing I want is to see Evie fall prey to a fortune hunter.” Imogen looked away, her fingers threaded tightly together in her lap. “She is so very young.”

  There was a wealth of love and fear packed into that simple phrase. Gavin didn’t see that Miss Grantham deserved it—she struck him as a flighty, shallow thing, ripe for the Augustuses of the world—but Imogen loved her, and that was all.

  What would it be like to have Imogen speak of him as she did of Miss Grantham, with that sort of depth of emotion, all the stronger for being so carefully concealed?

  “If I tell you this,” he said slowly, “it goes no further.”

  Imogen’s back straightened. “I have no truck with gossip. At least, not about people who haven’t been dead for several hundred years.”

  There was a forlorn gallantry about her words that tore at the last of Gavin’s resolve.

  In brief, terse sentences, Gavin said, “Augustus’s real name is Alfred Potts. His father was a dustman. His mother is—or was—a governess before she married, which is how Augustus, Alfie, got his education. He claims she was some connection to the Vaughns, a poor cousin or the like.”

  Sometimes Gavin thought that the reason Augustus was so convincing in his adopted role was that he had half-persuaded himself of his own story, that he wasn’t the dustman’s son at all but a changeling, the child of his mother and the Earl of Vaughn, with secret marriage lines hidden away like a lost prince in a story.

  “I see,” said Imogen thoughtfully.

  Gavin looked at her, in her expensive brushed silk, in the quiet of her garden, and said quickly, “Not that there’s any shame in that. It’s the lying that’s the shame, not his parents, whoever they might be.” A bitter laugh rose in his throat, harsh and ugly. “I’ve certainly no right to throw stones. My own people make Alfie’s look right grand.”

  A dustman would have looked down his nose at them, and rightly. There hadn’t been dustmen in their part of Manchester. The refuse had collected in the streets, pounded into the dirt, seeping through the stones of the basements where men lived like rats.

  Imogen took her time in speaking. “At the dinner that night,” she said carefully, “you said you grew up in Manchester?”

  Gavin could feel his hands tense on his brush. He couldn’t make himself meet her eyes. “Yes.”

  “And yet you made your way to the Academy.” Something in her voice made Gavin look up. There was no condemnation in her face, but softness and a kind of wonder. She sat in shade, but her face seemed to glow like a hundred candles. “You made your way to the Academy by nothing but your own talent and determination.”

  Talent and determination and coins filched from the pockets of his betters. He’d never meant to, never wanted to, but hunger drove one to strange things. He’d lived on the streets those early days in London, swiping apples from carts, pouncing on dropped coins.

  Her admiration shamed him.

  “I’ve lived in ways you can’t begin to imagine,” Gavin said hoarsely.

  “Everything you have you won for yourself.” Her voice vibrated with quiet passion. Her hands balled into fists in her lap, she leaned forward, setting her pearl earbobs swinging. “Do you realize how rare that is? I would be proud, proud, to have done what you have done.”

  He didn’t know how to make her understand just how low he had been, just how loathsome. “To have scrounged and scrabbled and—and scavenged?”

  “No,” Imogen said. Her eyes caught and held his. “To have a talent such as you have and the will to use it.”

  There was magic in her eyes. He couldn’t look away. In them, as in a scryer’s bowl, he saw himself not as he had been but as he might be, as she believed him to be. It was heady and exhilarating and utterly terrifying.

  “Whatever you were, it is nothing to what you are now.” Her lips moved, uttering words that Gavin only half-heard. He was caught by the shape, the color, the texture, of them, the way she tipped back her head as she spoke, the vibration of the delicate blue-veined skin of her neck. “That is the difference between you and Augustus Fotheringay-Vaughn. He seeks to take the easy road, by trickery and lies, trading on a past that never was—whereas you, you are all that is honest and honorable.”

  Gavin was seized by a sudden mad desire to press his lips against the hollow of her throat, just there, where her words still reverberated. He wanted to sink his fingers into the shining dark mass of her hair and shake it free of its pins until it tumbled like silk around his hands, to draw her close and stop her mouth with his, kissing and kissing her until the world swirled in dizzy circles around them and the chirping of the birds blurred to nothing beside the frantic beating of their hearts.

  The force of it staggered him, leaving him stunned and gasping, so barely in control of himself that his hand trembled on his brush and his body burned with unimaginable desires.

  Honest? Honorable? He shamed both her and himself.

  “Forgive me,” he said, stepping back so abruptly that he almost overset the easel.

  The urge for flight overwhelmed all else, trampling on common courtesy and common sense. He couldn’t stay. If he stayed …

  That wasn’t to be thought of. She was his patron’s wife. His friend.

  Gavin clutched at words, words that eluded him, syllables disintegrating on his tongue, chasing away from his disordered senses. “I— An appointment—I had misremembered— I must go back to town. At once.”

  Imogen stood up abruptly, her skirts belling around her legs. “Mr. Thorne? Are you quite all right?”

  The concern in her eyes nearly undid him. Oh, God, to be able to come by that honestly, to be able to put his head in her lap and feel her fingers in his hair, her lips against his brow.

  “Quite,” he managed, clumsily piling his supplies back into his satchel. He had never felt more wrong, hot and cold as though in the grip of a fever, wracked with guilt and longing. “Forgive me.” And then, again, helplessly, “Forgive me.”

  And then he strode away across the garden at a pace that felt suspiciously like flight.

  TWELVE

  London, 2009

  Disappeared? He had to be pulling her leg.

  “You’re making that up,” said Julia. She picked up her scotch from its perch on top of a Sotheby’s catalog. “Aren’t you?”

  Nick shook his head. “A bit of exaggeration for effect, perhaps, but in substance it’s all quite factually true. Thorne dropped off the map. Quite literally. There’s no word of Gavin Thorne after the summer of 1850. According to Anna, it was strange enough that a bunch of his mates in the PRB found fit to mention it in their letters.” He considered for a moment. “Not that it bothered them for long.”

  Maybe it was that loaded word, “disappeared.” It conjured up images of dark fates and foul play.

  Julia sat down slowly on the old chintz sofa.
The hollowed-out upholstery sagged beneath her. “What happened to him?” she asked.

  Nick looked down at her, his eyes crinkling around the corners. “You look like a little girl waiting for a bedtime story.” When she scowled at him, he said, “It’s thought he might have immigrated to New South Wales. That is on his Wikipedia page,” he added blandly.

  There was an exposed spring digging into Julia’s hip. She shifted to one side. “Thought? They don’t know?”

  Nick perched on the edge of his desk. The office was small enough that his knees practically brushed hers. “It wasn’t like now. You didn’t have Facebook tracking your every movement. People fell off the grid, disappeared. Rather refreshing, that, when you think about it. Move someplace new, assume a new identity … and, voilà! New life.”

  “Yes, but why leave if you’re just in the middle of building a career? The Pre-Raphs would have been just taking off in 1850. Why go off to—to—”

  “New South Wales,” Nick provided. “Sheep farming. It wasn’t a smooth, upward trajectory. They all had some tough times in those early years. Thomas Woolner ran off to Australia to join the gold rush. Another one of the original seven gave up and joined the priesthood. Rossetti almost abandoned painting to write poetry full-time. It’s entirely plausible that our man Thorne threw his brush in and decided to try something more immediately lucrative. Although…”

  “Although?”

  Nick absently pushed an art book out of the way and settled himself more firmly on the desk. “One of the few facts I did find was that Thorne sold his Mariana for one hundred and fifty guineas. Not pounds, guineas.” Julia wasn’t sure what the difference was, but from Nick’s tone she gathered that meant something bigger and better. “That was big money in those days. Not retire to Tahiti type money, but enough to keep a fledgling artist going for quite some time.”

  “Maybe he took the money and cashed it out for a sheep farm in New South Wales?” Even to herself, Julia didn’t sound convinced.

  “Or diamond mines in South Africa? There were a thousand ways for men to lose money back then and all sorts of corners in the earth in which to lose themselves.”

  Julia looked down at her scotch. “This is going to sound silly, but it seems like a shame. To have talent like that and then just throw it away.”

  Out of nowhere, she thought of the grad applications she had never sent in, the ones for the PhD programs in art history. Her advisor had been so disappointed when she had told him she was taking the McKinsey job instead; he’d told her if she changed her mind he’d be there to make calls for her.

  But that was silly. It wasn’t at all the same thing as Gavin Thorne throwing in the brush to raise sheep. His was a true, creative gift. Her talent, such as it was, had been analytic rather than creative. Did the world really lose out by having one fewer art historian?

  The world might not have lost out, but she was beginning to wonder if she had.

  Shaking her thoughts back to the present, Julia gestured towards the pictures on which Nick was half-sitting. “Even from those, you can just see this Thorne getting better and better. Can you imagine what he might have produced if he had stuck it out?”

  “Or he might have burned out,” said Nick. The words were cynical, but his tone was sympathetic. “Burned out or sold out. He might have hit a big success and just gone on painting more and more mawkish variants of the same. The Pre-Raphaelites started out as a revolutionary movement, but most of them ended up as establishment and found they enjoyed it.”

  “True.” The scotch burned the back of Julia’s throat. She remembered those pictures of bearded patriarchs she had seen on the Internet, prosperous Victorian bourgeois with gold watch chains straining across their chests, so different from the sketch she had seen of Rossetti in his youth, hollow cheeked and passionate, long curls tumbling around his shoulders. “Still. Better to age than not. Are there any pictures of Thorne?”

  If Nick noticed the abrupt change of topic, he didn’t comment on it. “There might be. They all seemed to spend half their time sketching themselves and each other. I can ask Emma. She might know.” He set down his glass next to him, precariously balanced on a pile of invoices. “There doesn’t seem to be much on Thorne at all. Biographically, I mean. According to my sources, it’s because his career was so short. With only four paintings, he didn’t generate enough of an oeuvre for anyone to expend serious time studying him.”

  Only four paintings. “Five now,” said Julia. The mind boggled. “Assuming we can verify it.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.” Nick’s eyes met hers, a brilliant blue-green behind his glasses. “You do realize what this means. If it is genuine, that painting marks a whole different direction for Thorne. Everything anyone thought they knew about this man is going to have to be reevaluated. It’s not exactly headline of The Times stuff, but a number of learned academics are going to have their knickers in a twist.”

  “If it is genuine,” said Julia. Deep in her heart of hearts, she had no doubt it was. The only question was proving it. In a weak attempt at humor she said, “I think I need more scotch.”

  She was joking, but Nick topped up her glass anyway. “It will help if you can find anything to trace the provenance,” he said, sliding the bottle back into its slot in the globe. “Any contemporary reference—or any reason it might have turned up in your house.”

  Julia tapped her fingernails against the side of her glass. “There might be a connection.… There’s a portrait in the drawing room of the house that looks just like the woman who’s posing as Iseult in the painting. I’m pretty sure they’re the same person.”

  “Not to sound too skeptical”—Nick readjusted his glass—“but what would an artist’s model be doing hanging in the drawing room?”

  Julia took another swig of her scotch. “My theory is that she was an artist’s model first and then married into respectability later. That would explain why she made it into the drawing room.”

  A wry expression crossed Nick’s face. “That sort of thing has been known to happen a time or two. But why stow the painting away in a wardrobe?”

  Julia curled her legs up beneath her. “Maybe her husband wanted to suppress evidence of her former career? That would explain why we found it hidden away.”

  She could see Nick trying to find fault with her theory. “It’s an idea,” he said cautiously.

  With repeated application of scotch her idea was looking better and better to her. “Admit it,” she said. “It’s a great idea.”

  Nick swallowed a grin. “I’ll give you ‘plausible.’ Do you have any idea who the woman in the portrait is?”

  Julia shook her head. “An ancestress, presumably. My father thinks I should talk to my cousin Caroline—Natalie’s mother.”

  Nick grimaced. “Better you than me.” Remembering himself, he frowned at his scotch. “You didn’t hear me say that. It was the scotch talking.”

  Julia bit her lip on a grin. “What else does the scotch have to say?”

  Nick regarded the amber liquid in his glass. “Not much more or I won’t be able to drive home. Can I offer you a lift?”

  It took Julia a moment to realize it was a dismissal. She glanced quickly at her watch. Oh, hell. How it had been over two hours? No wonder Nick was trying to get rid of her. It was a Monday night. The poor guy was probably dying to get home. Not to mention starving.

  Hastily she set down her empty glass and began to struggle her way out of the sagging old sofa. “That’s really sweet of you, but I’ll be fine on the train.”

  No one had warned her that the couch was a Venus flytrap. Sagging down in the middle, it resisted her puny efforts to free herself.

  “Need a hand?” Grasping her hand, Nick hauled her effortlessly to her feet. Julia landed on her feet with a little bounce. Instead of letting go, he said, “Are you sure about that lift? It sounds like it’s pouring out. And it’s really no bother.”

  For the first time, Julia realized that ther
e was rain drumming against the tiny window behind the desk. It was hard to see much through it, narrow and barred, but what she could see looked far too gray for seven o’clock on a summer night.

  Julia looked down at her impractical linen dress, her open-toed sandals.

  “If you’re sure it’s really no trouble…”

  “I wouldn’t have offered if it were.” Nick dropped her hand and began shuffling papers into place, loading a silver laptop and assorted folders into a worn brown leather computer bag. “I’m parked just down the block. You don’t have an umbrella, have you?”

  An umbrella? In England? That would have been way too sensible. “I’m afraid not.”

  Nick hauled his bag up on his shoulder. “Neither do I.” There was an Indiana Jones–esque glint in his eye. “We’re just going to have to run for it.”

  As it turned out, running didn’t do much good. The rain was coming down in sheets. Julia was soaked before Nick had pulled down the grille of the shop, her dress plastered to her body and her hair hanging in long, lank strands around her face.

  “Just a little mizzle,” said Nick cheerfully, beeping the car doors open.

  Julia stuck her tongue out at him and slid into the passenger seat. “Sorry for dripping all over your upholstery,” she said as he climbed in on the other side.

  “Stop apologizing.” Reaching out, he switched on the CD player. Not Handel this time, but vintage Depeche Mode. It seemed to suit the rain running in rivers down the window. Rubbing his glasses against the hem of his shirt, he glanced at Julia, his lips twitching in part amusement, part sympathy. “Do you need the heater?”

  Great. She must really look like a drowned rat. Unfairly, the rain had only darkened his fair hair to the color of the scotch they had been drinking and flattened his shirt against a chest that bore out either some sort of sport or a good gym membership. Did hauling antiques around count as weight lifting?

  “I’m fine,” said Julia hastily. She lifted her hands, twisting her hair to try to get some of the wet out. It had the unfortunate effect of relocating the trickle of cold water right down her back. It had also, she realized, following Nick’s appreciative gaze, placed various aspects of her anatomy in a rather suggestive position. Julia hastily dropped her hands. “All that booze is keeping me warm.”