Theresa glanced at him. “Am not.”
But she was. She wasn’t sure entirely how it had happened. The dowager hadn’t done anything, really, except try to teach Theresa manners and put her in pretty gowns…and then, when she’d realized that both of these things were going extremely badly, she had shifted tacks.
Theresa loved Judith and Judith loved Theresa.
But you harbored a different love for someone who had known you since you were a child—a love tempered by the tantrums that you had once thrown. Judith’s affection felt so conditional—given only when Theresa behaved. Somehow, that made Theresa not want to behave at all.
The dowager liked Theresa—General Register Office visits, terrible embroidery, and all.
“She’s just got good ideas,” Theresa said instead. “She understands me. Judith wants me to be a lady. The dowager wants me to be happy.”
And she likes me, just as I am.
The dowager had told her that once, and Theresa had never realized she wanted to hear it until it had been said.
But Theresa didn’t say that. It made her seem vulnerable, and the one thing she knew for certain was that she could never let her brother see her vulnerability.
* * *
Adrian had made plans to leave with Camilla tomorrow.
Mr. Singh checked the schedules to Lackwich for Adrian. Tomorrow he and Camilla would need to be up before dawn; that meant this was the last morning here before…
His thoughts wandered, and he pulled them back to the land of rationality. No point in feeling odd about the matter—they would go to Lackwich, hopefully find proof of Bishop Lassiter’s wrongdoing, head immediately to his uncle, and file the paperwork for annulment with his assistance. It was what he wanted.
Definitely that.
And if they had one more day together? He had a great deal to do. He’d show Camilla the plates and ask her opinion. They’d talk; he would go to work. It would be just like every other day.
At that thought, he heard the tap of footsteps and he looked up.
She stood at the top of the staircase, smiling down at him, and…
It took him a moment to remember that she wasn’t his.
She could not be. The early morning sunlight cascaded through the east-facing window, catching on motes of sunlight. It danced across her face, as if the daybreak itself were smiling along with her. Oh, no. What was he doing, thinking those thoughts about her?
And then she skipped down the stairs and his heart squeezed in his chest. Oh, damn. What was he doing?
Right. The china. He was showing her the first run of the china plates that Harvil was bringing to the exhibition this year.
He should offer her his arm for the walk, but even that seemed too much. Instead he gave her a smile that he hoped was friendly and not stupid with the pent-up desires that he could not indulge in. Not here. Not about her.
“You don’t have to come.” His voice felt rough.
“Of course I don’t have to.” She smiled up at him. “But I want to. How else will I know what you’ve been doing all day, every day?”
“Well.” It was a good thing she couldn’t see him blush like a schoolboy. “Let’s be off, then.”
He didn’t offer her his arm, and she didn’t try to take it. Still, he felt the phantom pressure where her hand ought to have rested on the crook of his elbow as they walked.
You know, he could have said. I like you. I think you’re lovely. I think you’re brave. I think I want you.
He hadn’t said the words, and she hadn’t said them back. But he felt them on the tip of his tongue. He could see them in the way she tipped her head back to catch his expression, in the way her eyes followed him, bright with happiness.
It wasn’t love. It was attraction, and there was no place for attraction between them now. He wanted to choose someone, not to give in to lust and physical ardor, trapping himself for the rest of his life.
“They’re really just review pieces,” he told her as they approached the building. “You’ll see. We have a lot to do. Once we’ve settled on the design, we have to make a copperplate for transfer printing the underglaze.”
He shuffled the keys into his hand and opened the door.
“None of those words made sense to me,” Camilla said at his side.
“Well… I’ll explain it if you want. Probably in greater detail than you want. Most people don’t want to hear. In any event, after it’s been glaze fired, we enamel it.” Their steps echoed in the corridor. He stopped at the door to the studio. “That was last night. I haven’t seen the review plates since they were fired.”
“Does firing change it?”
“Um…yes. The overglaze colors, see, are made of flux, minerals, and—” He stopped, catching himself. “Right. You don’t need to know.”
Her eyes glowed at him. “Oh, you can tell me anything. I don’t mind.” That shy little dip of her head, the splay of pink across her cheeks. She was so damned lovely, the way she blushed so easily. “I’d like to hear anything you find interesting, really.”
And he wanted to tell her.
He pulled away. “Well, I should show you the plates. I would go on forever, and it would make more sense if you were looking at something first, don’t you think?”
They had been laid out in a row on the sideboard.
“Here,” he said, gesturing her forward. “They tell a story. We’ll start from the beginning.”
She didn’t need to tell him how she felt—not when she already proclaimed it with every smile, with every little blush.
He didn’t need to tell her, either. Not when there were the plates, after all.
She came to stand beside him.
His heart beat heavily.
“Here,” he said, pointing. “This is the first one. You’ll notice that faint green patterned background, redolent of leaves and bamboo? That’s the underglaze painting.”
She had frozen in place, her eyes trained on the plate. “Adrian.”
“The way we get that light green underglaze is a family secret.” He smiled. “As is the orange in the enamel—that’s these colors here, you see, the stripes—”
“Adrian. It’s a tiger and her cubs.”
He felt a lump in his throat. “Well. So. It is.”
“What’s she chasing, that one cub? Is she headed to the river?”
He didn’t object to her pronoun. Now that the plate had been glazed, that little stylized dream looked like a glistening star. They’d specially made a paint for it, a mix of blues and greens so light that you could only see the color when the plate tilted into the light. Gold flecks—real gold—gave it a luminous look.
“I don’t know,” Adrian said. “Maybe it’s a star. Maybe it’s a dream. You decide.”
“It’s lovely. What’s the next one?”
He gestured her on.
On this plate, the underglaze was the cobalt blue of traditional china pottery, painted in waves and roils depicting a raging river.
The tiger kitten, caught in the current, tossed and turned, one paw still outstretched to that stylized star as if to catch it even in the midst of drowning.
Alongside the riverbank, her mother ran, desperate to catch her.
“Adrian, is that a waterfall ahead?”
“Um…yes?”
“You’re sending a kitten into a waterfall?”
“Maybe?”
She turned to the next plate. The tiger cub stood on a riverbank, looking up a sheer cliff down which the waterfall thundered. At the very top, small in the distance, were the faces of the mother tiger and her other cubs.
“You separated them?” Camilla stood in place, looking at the scene. She set a hand over her heart. “That’s not right.”
A fourth plate showed the cub sitting at the base of the cliff. Claw marks marked her attempt to climb back up, futilely. The kitten looked almost despondent—but just to the side, leading away from the cliff, that dream glittered.
In th
e fifth plate, the cub, slightly older, traversed a swamp, nervously avoiding being caught by some ugly sharp-toothed reptile.
In the sixth, the cub, now juvenile, padded through a dark forest inhabited by fantastical looking birds—drawn forward, forever in pursuit of that glittering dream.
In the seventh, the tiger stalked the stars themselves, a thousand dreams flashing around her paws.
In the final plate, fully grown, she descended a mountain, crowned in stars, to the valley where her mother awaited.
Camilla set the final plate down and looked at Adrian. “I don’t know a thing about art. I couldn’t give you any advice at all.” Her eyes shimmered.
“Did you like it?”
“It gave me feelings.” She tapped her chest. “Here.”
“That’s always a good sign.”