In response to your question—no, I haven’t yet written to Mr. Howard, and now I rather regret having told you about meeting him. He is a perfectly nice man but he is not, no matter what you may be thinking, a potential beau. While I’m not opposed to furthering my acquaintance with the man, I have no intention of embarking on any sort of romantic entanglement, so please do put that idea out of your head!
I’ve enclosed a little portrait of Hamish that I thought the boys might like to see when they’re next home from school—isn’t he a dear old thing?
With much love,
Your devoted sister,
Helena
She did have every intention of writing to Mr. Howard. Once or twice, she had very nearly asked her aunt for a petit bleu postcard, for she had seen Agnes using them when arranging visits or appointments. But something had stilled her tongue. What if the man she remembered from that day on the beach was a concoction of her memory? What if he had only been making conversation, and was himself uninterested in furthering their acquaintance?
She had warned him that she would be busy; a few weeks here or there wouldn’t make much of a difference. Besides, she was busy enough with her friends from school. Unsurprisingly, étienne had become the star of their class, and while he clashed with Ma?tre Czerny nearly every day their teacher seemed to like him all the more for it. Mathilde was another favorite, and his criticism of her work was mild at best.
It was poor Daisy who most frequently attracted the ma?tre’s ire, which Helena thought horribly unfair. Her friend had made terrific progress in the last month, but Czerny didn’t seem to notice or care. Daisy’s problem, he told the class on more than one occasion, was her lack of passion.
“Miss Fields has no fire in her belly. I see nothing in her work that engages my imagination, nothing that seizes me by the throat and shouts in my face. She might as well be creating wallpaper.”
As for what he thought of Helena’s work? As she had said to Amalia in her letter, he had yet to notice her. The terror she had first felt, when he roamed the aisles of the salon searching for prey, had faded once she realized he simply wasn’t aware of her presence in his class. She had improved, she knew she had, but her drawings attracted neither his praise nor his anger. She, and they, were invisible to him.
She knew she ought to say or do something—anything to make him see, but fear stopped her throat time and time again. It was silly, and childish, to let one man’s indifference push her from the path she had chosen, but she simply couldn’t bring herself to address him directly or, even more terrifying, challenge him openly as étienne often did.
She simply needed more time; that was all. She would learn, and improve, and when she was feeling more confident she would make sure that he noticed her. For good or for ill, by the end of the year he would know her name.
In the meantime, there was the problem of her studio, or, more precisely, her lack of one. Agnes’s house was large, but every room was crammed full of artworks and antiques, and the only space suitable for a studio and its attendant mess was an unheated garret.
Agnes had arranged for the contents of the studio in Antibes to be set up in the garret, and in September, when the days had been long and mild, she’d been happy working there. In recent weeks, however, her makeshift studio’s failings had become all too apparent. It was cold, and would only get more so as winter approached; and the light that had seemed so abundant in the late summer was waning by the day.
Her friends were also desperate for studio space. étienne’s landlady had taken to complaining about the smell of turpentine and linseed oil, going so far to as warn him that he would be out in the street if he didn’t find another place to work. Daisy’s father, from what little she had said, disapproved of her “hobby” and discouraged her from practicing at all when she was at home. And Mathilde simply agreed that she, too, needed some room in order to work without distraction. What those distractions might be, Helena had no idea, and the Frenchwoman’s reserved, dignified manner discouraged curious questions.
Their mutual need for a studio soon became an obsession, although they never got very far with their discussions. The difficulty, as ever, was money. Studios, even grubby, rat-infested, and terminally damp ones, were expensive; and landlords, according to étienne, were disinclined to rent them to students who had no visible means of support beyond their art.