Portrait of a Scotsman (A League of Extraordinary Women #3)(7)
For now, his most pressing issue was Greenfield’s daughter.
He leaned back against the edge of his desk. On the business map across from him, dozens of threads representing loans, equity, and revenue flows fanned out from a pin with the Greenfield name to various countries, institutions, and industries. The picture confirmed that Greenfield was on shaky ground in Spain. Without a majority share in one of the railway companies, he stood to be delegated to the back bench in that market. And men like Greenfield didn’t care for second place.
Save the soft howl of stale air coming through the ventilation shaft, a heavy silence filled the room. He could sell Greenfield his shares. But the moment the transaction was completed, the banker would lose interest in him. Business relations were fickle bonds: reliable only as long as one could expect return favors in the foreseeable future. It was why he had ignored the lunch invites—they were, potentially, rare tickets for a place at the table, but he wasn’t yet certain how to leverage them. And he wanted that place at the table. It had taken him long enough to understand that his wealth wouldn’t buy him the changes he wanted to effect. Money, he had learned, was a wholly different beast from power. Power was held by polite society within the hermetically sealed fortress of shared experiences at Eton, Oxford, and Cambridge, strategic marriages, and inheritance laws. Politics was made in private back rooms, after dinners, during grand tours. Their crumbling castles and unproductive estates notwithstanding, these inbred circles still ranked money below name and connections. But Julien Greenfield had a foot in the door. A century after his family had settled in Britain, their money wasn’t quite new money anymore and his landholdings didn’t count as flash gentry.
He returned to his desk and took up his pen, because an altogether different avenue into these hallowed circles existed. The specifics of his plan were unclear, but his muscles were tense with the purposeful impatience he knew from spotting a winning investment. He would put his money on Miss Jones.
Chapter 4
Ruskin was right: Persephone looked lovely.
The realization struck Hattie not two minutes into her class, and she backed away, her gaze flitting erratically across the painting. The soft scratch of chalk and brushes on canvas and Ruskin’s footsteps among the easels faded into a white roar. How had she not seen it before? Here was Persephone, in the process of being dragged from her flower field into the underworld by a muscular arm around her waist, and while her expression was horrified, it was … politely horrified. The dynamic of her body as she twisted away from Hades, god of the underworld, was, at second glance, restrained. This was probably not how one would resist an abduction.
She wiped her damp palms on her apron. Disaster. Without intending to do so, she must have focused on preserving Persephone’s poise throughout her ordeal; now her heroine looked as though she was conscious of her coiffure while fighting her attacker. Where was the passion, the fury, the truth? An Artemisia Gentileschi she was not. In fact, this had to be the most tepid interpretation of the abduction since Walter Crane …. At her plaintive whimper, the collective attention of the all male students in the University Galleries shifted onto her with an audible whoosh, and she quickly shrank back behind her canvas. To her right, Lord Skeffington had ceased sketching and was watching her curiously. “Is anything the matter, Miss Greenfield?” he murmured.
Where to begin? The warmth in her cheeks said her face was red as a beetroot. She pasted on a smile. “No. Not at all.”
She dabbed her dry paintbrush aimlessly at a bit of sky, pretending to be immersed. Soon, the attention was drifting away from her. Her distress lingered. Her work, five weeks in the making, was soulless, dead.
It was the kiss’s fault. The kiss.
Three days after the fact, the memory of Mr. Blackstone’s mouth on hers had not faded. On the contrary: during her daydreams and when in bed, she had shamelessly revisited the fleeting contact over and over, and by now it was so thoroughly embellished, it had become a vivid, drawn-out, and voluptuous—rather than shocking—affair. She didn’t really wish to forget it. Several white spots on the topography of her daily life had now been colored in: she could insert the warm pressure of Blackstone’s mouth into all the countless romantic novels she devoured, when before, her understanding of what kissing felt like had been limited to feeling her own lips on the back of her hand. She finally understood what her friends Annabelle and Lucie enjoyed behind closed doors ever since they had paired off with their betrotheds. But she also knew now that being grabbed by an underworld lord elicited shock, disbelief, heat, confusion. She had slapped Blackstone before she could think. None of these base emotions were present in her Persephone. Her painting was ignorant. Now she knew. Blackstone’s kiss had made her see.
She turned to Lord Skeffington. “My lord,” she croaked.
“Miss Greenfield.” He lowered his brush, his expression inquisitive.
“Do you think it is possible to make good art without experience?”
His high brow furrowed with surprise. “Hmm. Are you having trouble with your painting?”
“No, no, it is a general question I ponder.”
“Ah. A matter of philosophy.”
“Of sorts. I wonder: must an artist have personal knowledge about the subject of her art for it to be … art?”
Lord Skeffington chuckled. “Thinking grand thoughts before lunch—oh dear.”