Major Rodney colored painfully and treated her to a look of something close to loathing.
“I’ve seen the one of Lady Cantlay.” Virgil Smith screwed up his face. “I wouldn’t buy it if it were on sale. It seems kind of—heavy—to me. Not like a lady should look.”
“What do you know about such things?” the old lady snapped derisively. “Do you have ladies wherever it is you come from?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t reckon you would call them ladies,” he said slowly. “But I’ve seen a few over here. I think Miss Verity is surely a lady and deserves a portrait that says so.”
Verity blushed with pleasure and treated him to one of her rare smiles. Alicia found herself suddenly liking him very much, in spite of his manners and his plain face.
“Thank you,” Verity said quietly. “I think I shall like to have a portrait done, in the summer, if Alicia does not mind?”
“Of course not,” Alicia agreed. “I shall make inquiries to find someone.” She was aware of Virgil Smith looking at her. She was a handsome woman and she was used to admiration, but there was something more personal in his gaze, and she found it uncomfortable. She wanted to break the silence, and she rushed to find something to say. She turned to Vespasia. “Lady Cumming-Gould, can you recommend anyone who might paint Verity pleasingly? You must have been painted many times yourself.”
Vespasia looked a trifle pleased. “Not lately, my dear. But I will ask among my acquaintances, if you wish. I am sure you can do better than Godolphin Jones. I believe he is very highly regarded by some, or so the price he fetches would indicate, but I agree with Mr. Smith; he is somewhat heavy-handed, a little fleshy.”
The old lady glared at her, opened her mouth, met Vespasia’s unflinching stare, and closed it again. Her eyes swept over Virgil Smith as if he had been an unpleasant stain on the carpet.
“Precisely,” Carlisle said with satisfaction. “There is an abundance of portrait painters about. Just because Godolphin lives in the Park, that is not a reason to patronize him, if you prefer someone else.”
“Gwendoline Cantlay had two pictures done,” Miss Priscilla offered. “I cannot imagine why.”
“Perhaps she likes them?” Miss Mary Ann suggested. “Some people must, or they would not pay so very much money.”
“Art is very much a matter of taste, isn’t it?” Alicia looked from one to the other.
The old lady snorted. “Naturally. Good taste—and bad taste! Only the vulgar, who know no better, judge anything as a matter of money.” Once more her eyes darted to Virgil Smith and away again. “Time is the thing—whatever has lasted, that is worth something! Old paintings, old houses, old blood.”
Alicia felt embarrassed for him, as if she were both receiving the hurt herself, and at the same time responsible for it because the old lady was part of her family.
“Pure survival alone is hardly a mark of virtue.” She surprised herself by speaking so vehemently and with something that could only be regarded as insolence by the old lady, but she wanted to contradict her so badly it was like a bursting in her head. “After all, disease survives!”
Everyone was staring at her, the old lady with a look as if her footstool had risen up and smitten her.
Somerset Carlisle was the first to react. “Bravo!” he said cheerfully. “An excellent argument, if somewhat eccentric! I’m not sure Godolphin would appreciate it, but it just about sums up the relationship between art, survival, and price.”
“I don’t understand.” Miss Priscilla squinted painfully. “I don’t see the relationship at all.”
“That is precisely what I mean,” he agreed. “There is none.”
The old lady banged her stick on the ground. She had been aiming at Carlisle’s foot and missed. “Of course there is!” she snapped. “Money is the root of all evil! Bible says so. Do you argue with that?”
“You misquote.” Carlisle was not daunted, and he did not move his feet. “What it says is that ‘the love of money is the root of all evil.’ Things are not evil; it is the passions they stir in people that may be.”
“A piece of sophistry,” she said with disgust. “And this is not the place for it. Go to your club if you have a taste for that kind of conversation. This is a funeral breakfast. I would oblige you to remember that!”
He bowed very slightly. “Indeed, ma’am, you have my sympathies.” He turned to Alicia and Verity. “And you also, of course.”
Suddenly everyone remembered this was the third time they had attended such an affair, and Major Rodney excused himself rather loudly in the awkwardness that followed. He took his sisters by the arms and almost propelled them out into the hallway, where the footman had to be sent for to bring their coats.
Vespasia and Carlisle followed; Virgil Smith hesitated a moment by Alicia.
“If there is anything I can do, ma’am?” He looked uncomfortable, as if he wanted to say something and could not find the words.
She was aware of the kindness in him, and it made her also feel a little clumsy. She thanked him more hastily than she meant to, and with a faint color in his face, he followed the others out.
“I see your Mr. Corde didn’t come!” the old lady said spitefully. “Other fish to fry, maybe?”
Alicia ignored her. She did not know why Dominic had sent no word, no flowers or letter of sympathy. It was something she did not want to think about.
On the morning of the interment Dominic had been in two minds as to what to do. He had got up and dressed, intending to go, as a support to Alicia in a time which was bound to be extremely trying for her. Verity was too young and too vulnerable herself to afford much comfort, and he knew the old lady would, if anything, make matters worse. No one would find his attendance odd; it was a mark of respect. After all, he had been invited to the original funeral.
Then as he stared at himself in the mirror, making the final adjustment to his appearance, he remembered his visit to Charlotte. He had never been inside a house of working people before, not something on a level with a tradesman’s house, like Pitt’s. All things considered, it was odd how comfortable he had felt, and how little Charlotte had changed. Of course, it would have been different if he had stayed there long! But for that hour or so, the surroundings had been unimportant.
But what Charlotte had said was a totally different matter. She had asked him if he thought Alicia capable of murdering her husband in all but as many words. Charlotte had always been frank to the point of tactlessness; he smiled even now to recall some of the more socially disastrous incidents.
The image smiled back at him from the mirror.
Of course, he denied it—Alicia would never even think of such a thing! Old Augustus had been a bore; he talked endlessly and fancied himself an expert on the building of railways, and since his family had made money in their construction perhaps he was. But it was hardly a subject to pontificate on interminably over the dinner table. Dominic had never met a woman yet who cared in the slightest about railway construction, and very few men!
But that does not move to murder! Actually to kill someone, you have to care desperately over something, whether it is hate, fear, greed, or because they stand in the way between you and something you hunger for—he stopped, his hand frozen on his collar. He imagined being married to some sixty-year-old woman, twice his age, boring, pompous, with all her dreams in the past, looking forward to nothing more than a sinking into slow, verbose old age—a relationship without love. Perhaps one day, or one night, the need to escape would become unbearable, and if there were a bottle of medicine on the table, what would be simpler than to dose a little too much? How easy just to step it up a fraction each time, until you got the amount that was not massive but just precisely enough to kill?
But Alicia could never have done that!
He pictured her in his mind, her fair skin, the curve of her bosom, the way her eyes lit up when she laughed—or when she looked at him. Once or twice he had touched her more intimately than mere courtesy required, and he felt the quick response. There was a hunger underneath her modesty. There was something about her, perhaps a mannerism, a way of holding her head, that reminded him of Charlotte; he was not sure how. It was indefinable.