Thank God for Edward, who kept her well supplied with books. Lucy was currently reading a new one, The Chemical History of a Candle, which contained six of the Christmas lectures for young people that Michael Faraday had given at the Royal Institution. It offered an interesting enough description of candle flames and combustion, carbon particles and the luminescent zone, and it was a gift from Edward, so Lucy was determined to appreciate each word; but, truth be told, it was a little basic. She’d had it on her lap since they left Paddington, but couldn’t bring herself to open it now, letting her thoughts rest instead upon the summer ahead.
Four whole weeks at Birchwood Manor with Edward as chaperone! Ever since Mother had said that, yes, she could go, Lucy had been counting down the days, crossing them off on the calendar in her bedroom. She had it on good authority that other mothers might have minded their thirteen-year-old daughter spending the summer in company with a group of artists and their models, but Bettina Radcliffe was utterly unlike any of the other mothers that Lucy knew. She was a ‘bohemian’, according to their grandparents, and since Father died had become expert at attaching herself to the travel plans of others. She was spending July on a tour of the Amalfi Coast, ending in Naples where her friends, the Potters, had set up house. Far from worrying that Lucy might be morally corrupted, Mother had been exceedingly grateful to Edward when he suggested that his youngest sister should join him and his friends at Birchwood Manor for the summer, as it meant she would be spared having to endure the grudging largesse of the grandparents. ‘Which is one less thing to worry about,’ she’d said airily, before returning excitedly to her packing.
There was another reason that Edward wanted Lucy there over the summer. She was the first person he had told when he bought the house. It was January 1861, and he had been away on one of his ‘faraways’ for three weeks, four days and two hours. Lucy had been reading On the Origin of Species again, lying across the bed in her room with its dormer window overhanging the street in their house in Hampstead. Suddenly she heard her brother’s familiar rhythm on the pavement below. Lucy knew everybody’s footfall: the drag of the heavy man who brought the milk, the tick-tick-cough of the frail, phlegmy chimney sweep, Clare’s trivial scuttle and Mother’s spindle-sharp heels. But her favourite sound was the purpose and promise of Edward’s booted tread.
Lucy hadn’t needed to look through the window for confirmation. She tossed aside her book, flew down all four flights of stairs and across the hall, leaping into Edward’s arms just as he crossed the threshold into the house. At twelve, Lucy had been too old, really, for such behaviour, but she was small for her age and Edward was easily able to catch her. Lucy adored Edward and had done so since she was a tiny baby in her crib. She hated it when he went away, leaving her with none but Clare and Mother for company. He was only ever gone for a month or so at a time, but without him the days dragged, and the list of things that she’d been keeping in her head to tell him grew as long as her leg.
As soon as she reached his arms, she started her report, each word tripping over the one before it in her rush to account for everything that had happened since he’d left. Usually, Edward listened avidly to her stories before presenting her with the latest treasure he had procured on her behalf; always a book, and always an indulgence of her love for science, history and mathematics. This time, however, he had held his finger to her lips to silence her and said that her report must wait, for it was his turn to speak: he had done something incredible, he said, and he needed to share it with her at once.
Lucy had been intrigued but equally gratified. Clare and Mother were in the house, yet it was she, Lucy, who had been chosen. Edward’s attention was like a light being shone and Lucy basked in its warmth. She went downstairs with him to the kitchen, the one place they could always be sure the others wouldn’t bother them, and it was there, as they sat together at Cook’s waxed and worn table, that Edward told her about the house he had bought. Twin gables, a country garden, the river and the copse of trees. The description was familiar, even before he said, ‘It’s the one, Lucy, the very one from the Night of the Following.’
Lucy had drawn breath then, stars of memory prickling her skin. She had known exactly which house he meant. The Night of the Following was legend between the two of them. Lucy had only been five years old when it happened, but the night was seared onto her memory. She would never forget how strange he was when he finally returned the next morning, his hair all tangled and his eyes wild. It had taken a full day before he would speak about it, but he had told her in the end, the two of them sitting inside the ancient wardrobe in the attic at Beechworth. Lucy was the only person Edward had ever confided in about the Night of the Following; he had trusted her with his greatest secret and it had become an emblem of the bond between them.
‘Are you going to live there?’ she said, her mind skipping immediately to the possibility that she might lose him to the countryside.
He laughed and brushed his hand through his dark hair. ‘I’ve no plans yet beyond possession. They will say it was a madness, Lucy, a madness, and they’ll be right. But I know you understand; I had to have it. The house has been calling to me since the night I first saw it; now, at last, I’ve answered.’
Across the aisle, as Lily Millington laughed at something that Edward had said, Lucy regarded her brother’s current model. She was beautiful, but Lucy suspected that she might not have realised quite how beautiful without Edward’s guidance. That was his gift; everybody said so. He was able to see things that others did not, and then, through his art, alter his spectator’s perceptions so that they could not help but see as well. In the last of his Academy Notes Mr Ruskin had called this the ‘Radcliffe sensory swindle’.
As Lucy watched, Edward brushed a gleaming strand of Lily’s red hair from her face. He tucked it behind her ear and the model smiled. It was the sort of smile that hinted at previous conversations, and Lucy felt something unexpected and shivery rise up inside her.
The first time that Lucy saw Lily Millington she had been little more than a haze of fiery red in the glass house at the bottom of the garden. It had been May 1861 and Lucy, a bit short-sighted, had thought at first that she was looking at the leaves of a potted Japanese maple tree through the glass. Edward had a fondness for exotic plants and was forever visiting Mr Romano on the corner of Willow Road, making sketches of the Italian man’s daughters in exchange for samples of the newest plants brought back from the Americas or even the Antipodes. It was one of their many shared passions, for Lucy, too, delighted in these living, breathing visitors from faraway places, wondrous glimpses into parts of the globe quite unlike their own.
It was only when Mother told Lucy to take two cups of tea down the path on a tray that she realised that Edward had a model in the studio. Her curiosity had been aroused immediately, for she knew who this must be. One could not live within the same house as Edward and fail to partake in the great peaks and troughs of his passions.
Some months before, he had fallen into a slump from which it seemed he would not resurrect himself. He had been painting Adele, but had reached a point where he had exhausted the inspiration to be drawn from her small, neat features. ‘It isn’t that her face isn’t pleasing,’ he had explained to Lucy, pacing back and forth in the studio as she sat upon the rosewood chair by the furnace. ‘It’s only that the space between her pretty ears is vacant.’