“Off with the shoes and stockings,” said Amberleigh. “You will find the mud in my pond as soothing to tired feet as any treatment imagined. It’s the chalk, you know. Makes a wonderful poultice.”
“I’m not sure…” began Beatrice, but Celeste had already hitched her skirts into a froth around her thighs and was rolling the thick, dark stockings from her pale legs.
“By claiming a small space for ourselves, we can perhaps return to the innocence of our childhood,” said Amberleigh. “And through the lens of innocence we can begin to glimpse something true. You must recognize the creative possibilities, Miss Nash?”
“I suppose so,” said Beatrice, but the doubt in her voice forced her to be truthful. “My father taught me to imagine the arts as the highest form of human endeavor, a distillation beyond mere education and erudition. Not some primal product of muddy toes or…” She stopped before she might say something to offend.
Amberleigh let out a peal of laughter. “Or of drinking in the afternoon,” she said as the serving girl approached with a wooden bucket from which peeked several bottles and a large lump of ice. “I assure you, dear Miss Nash, that champagne is quite the muse if approached with the proper air of worship.”
“Do pour me some tea before I catch my death of cold,” said Minnie, who had left her pond kingdom and now appeared dressed in a loose wrapper and swathed toga-style in a thick blanket. She was smoking a cigarette in a short ivory holder. “I sometimes think it would be quicker for Johnny to paint me than to wait for the photograph.”
“Have some champagne?” asked Amberleigh.
“No, no,” said Minnie. “It makes me sleepy and— I say, Miss Celeste would make a fine subject for Johnny just now, wouldn’t she?”
Celeste was tiptoeing on the edge of the pond, squishing the moss and mud between her toes, all her skirts clutched in a ball around her knees. She bent to peer at a large water bug, suspended on the surface by its wide feet, and her reflection in the water arced towards her.
“No photographs, please,” said Beatrice sharply. “I am bound to look out for Celeste’s respectability.” As she finished, Minnie’s cheeks began to turn red.
“I’m sorry,” said Beatrice. “I just meant she is very young and her father is very old-fashioned.”
“So is Minnie’s father, the Vicar,” said Alice Finch, setting down her camera and wooden tripod carefully behind Amberleigh’s chaise. “And yet, as I told him, art must be made. And should it be made on the back of some poor girl willing to trade her reputation for bread, or should we be our own models and be willing to appear in the art we will hang above our mantels?”
“But you do not appear,” said Beatrice.
“Believe me, we have tried,” said Miss Finch, as Minnie smiled. “It turns out I do not have a face the camera can love. My Diana the Huntress—well, I could have been the frontispiece for a builder’s catalog. So in all our constructions of beauty, I stay behind the lens and Minnie shines in front.”
“We are very careful as to which art might be published,” said Minnie. “I am a vicar’s daughter, not some shade of the demimonde.”
“I’m sorry I implied disapproval,” said Beatrice. “I am more used to writers than to artists. Please forgive me.”
“Drink some champagne and we’ll forgive you,” said Amberleigh.
“Just tea for Celeste and me, thank you,” said Beatrice.
“You writers are just as quick as artists to exploit your characters in ways you would never behave yourselves,” said Miss Finch. “Then you judge them harshly and cast them into the pit to the delight of your oh-so-respectable readers.”
“I think I am in about as dire a strait as any I have inflicted upon my characters,” said Amberleigh.
“It will blow over in time,” said Minnie. “And meanwhile your friends are glad to have you to ourselves in the country.”
“It appears we do not have as many friends as I thought, dear Minnie,” said Amberleigh, producing a note from her pocket and looking it over. “Agatha Kent writes to excuse herself from our afternoon tea. She is so busy with relieving the Belgians, she says, that she must deny herself the pleasure and also suffer the shame of being unable to reciprocate in the foreseeable future.”
“I had thought better of her,” said Minnie. Beatrice said nothing, but as she looked at Celeste, drinking tea in her bare feet, a small flicker of concern licked at the edges of her happiness. She would have come to tea at all cost, but now she wished she had made some excuse not to bring Celeste.
“It was Tillingham and Mrs. Kent who arranged for us to rent this house,” said Amberleigh. “I had hoped that meant I would find a welcome in their small town, but it appears the gates are barred.”
“It seems we are all refugees of one sort or another,” sighed Alice Finch, slumping into a chair and stretching out her legs in their thick boots. “Let’s drink to that.”
Beatrice opened her mouth to demur but upon further reflection decided to remain quiet. As the hot tea hit the back of her throat she wondered—if she was to be considered a refugee, then where was the home to which she might hope to be repatriated in due time? She coughed and hoped this would explain the sudden tears in her eyes.
“In honor of the creative friendships that matter,” said Amberleigh, scanning some pages from Beatrice’s small portfolio, “I will beg Miss Nash’s permission to read from her work.” Beatrice could not pretend to protest, and for the first time she enjoyed the thrill of hearing her own words spoken aloud for others to hear. To be advised on her story, to be asked to give her creative opinion on some of Alice’s photographs, and to have both Alice and Amberleigh listen carefully to her stumbling thoughts made her as dizzy as the champagne the older women drank. Amberleigh said she must come and write in the garden whenever she pleased, and so the afternoon drifted on, in a haze of sunlight dazzling on the water and warm conversation under the trees. It was only when Celeste, who had been busy making chains of daisies for the hissing cat, expressed a firm desire to walk home barefoot that Beatrice noticed the late hour. Horrified, she demanded that Celeste don her shoes like a respectable girl, and with the briefest of goodbyes, she hurried her home to cold plates of supper and more than a few pointed remarks from a highly suspicious Mrs. Turber.
Mr. Fothergill sent round a note asking Beatrice to visit his clerk at her convenience, and so she found herself once again in the thickly carpeted front parlor of his office, looking at the windows and wondering whether they were ever opened. There seemed more dust than oxygen in the room, and she longed to be released into the sunshine. After a few minutes, Mr. Poot emerged from the warren of back rooms, an eager smile of welcome on his face as if they were friends. A boy brought in a tray of tea, and Beatrice, who had always chafed at being chaperoned as a younger woman, rather wished she had brought someone with her now, so lingeringly did he shake her gloved hand, so close did he pull his chair to hers.
“It’s just a matter of some odd letters,” he said, when she had declined to have a cup of tea, refused a dish of sugared almonds, and been brief in reply to his comments upon the pleasantness of the weather.
“Excuse me?” she said, in as icy a tone as she could muster.
“I understand your trustees are waiting for you to return some rather valuable letters to the estate?” he asked.
“I assure you they are entitled to no such letters,” said Beatrice. “I have made it quite clear to my father’s publisher, and to my aunt’s family, that any letters in my possession are my own copies of correspondence and not part of my father’s archive.”
“Well, can’t you just make another copy?” asked Mr. Poot. “It seems a silly squabble.” It seemed impossible to explain to Mr. Poot the insult of her manuscript being given to Mr. Tillingham and her hard work being at once both dismissed and appropriated by others. She could only sigh.