by Ella Carey
Emma almost dragged Arthur out the door of their second obligation in Belgravia as soon as she thought it polite to get away. Pellets of sleet spattered the darkened windows of their carriage, and the horses tapped on the glistening gray cobblestones. Emma’s older brother reminded her of her departed mother.
Arthur simply got on with things without questioning the status quo, just as her mother had done, while Frederick questioned everything. It was as if Arthur and her mother before him lived life according to the established pattern that was set out, seeing no reason to challenge society’s rules or restrictions. Their attitude wasn’t due to a lack of intelligence but rather a contentment in security. There didn’t seem to be a need to soar like Frederick, Emma, and Freya so yearned to do.
And as for her father, Emma saw him as frustrated. While he clung to the old social tenets when it suited him to do so and while he clearly missed the way Emma’s mother had run the household, Emma wondered if he had held fast to the old ways to please her mother, while feeling the need to stretch his wings in the way Frederick, Freya, and Emma were trying to do. It was almost as if in watching them do so, he became increasingly angry at his own paralyzed state.
Emma had given up expecting any honest affection from her mother as a little girl, and she accepted that she was not going to receive any real warmth from her father.
Color was what inspired her, drawing her away from the coldness of her homelife. Her childhood walks with her siblings and their nanny in Kensington Gardens every afternoon had started it, and she’d embraced getting out of the dark and stuffy house close to the park. Her delicate senses became assaulted and captivated, drawn in by the blowsy, rain-soaked greens and the whites of meadow flowers, the deep reds and brilliant oranges of spring tulips, the fresh air, the blossoms and blue sky and birds. She’d wanted to capture it, bottle it as soon as she returned home, so it didn’t get lost. Nature seemed the opposite of rules, so that was what she drew and painted early on. The park.
Her excursions with her father to the National Gallery awakened her in a different way. She felt every bit of the passion in the paintings she saw with such intensity that she could not wait to go home and pick up her pencils to draw. It was in the gallery that she was first struck with the idea that there were no restrictions or rules in the world of the imagination. If nature inspired her to revere color, it was her early viewings at the art gallery that drove her need to capture on paper the otherness that was missing at home and to allow her feelings to roam free with intensity while she worked.
She jumped when Arthur’s voice boomed into the swaying carriage, loud over the clack of hooves and the thunder of rain on the windows.
“Did you talk to someone interesting, Emma?” he asked, his bulky body jolting around the carriage.
“Goodness, no,” she murmured, half hoping he wouldn’t hear, half hoping he would.
“You should make more of an effort. We’ll get you out on the horse tomorrow. Get you married by the end of the year.” He laughed at his own witticism.
Emma pressed her forehead against the cold window and glared at the wet torrent outside.
As they pulled up outside the house, the horses puffing and stomping with exertion, the footman rushed out to meet them with a large black umbrella, along with Freya, her dark hair loose and wild, her eyes darting to Emma, pushing forward in the rain toward her, ignoring the footman’s entreaties to keep dry.
Emma stepped out into the rain, while Arthur took the umbrella, moving inside and disappearing into the house. Emma went straight to Freya, whose face in the lamplight was white as freshly fallen snow. Emma’s younger sister took Emma’s hands and held them, standing there in the rain, her own hands unduly hot, as if she were affected by a fever. Emma felt something sinister dart through her system.
“It’s Father,” Freya shouted above the streaming water.
Emma wiped her sodden hair from her face, pulling Freya in through the wrought iron gate. She turned down the footman’s offer of another umbrella. Any such protection was going to be useless now. They stopped in the black-and-white entrance hall.
“Half an hour ago,” Freya moaned, her voice rising, undeniable hysteria entwining it, vinelike, gripping her features until her face, for the most part a beautiful mirror image of Emma’s own, had twisted into a terrified grimace. Emma drew her brows together. The dark dread spread into her stomach, down through her legs. She brought a hand up to the restrictive collar of her evening dress and tugged at it uselessly.
“He’s gone!” Freya howled.
Emma heard Arthur shouting at the servants. She took her younger sister in her arms, holding Freya’s chattering, shaking body, her hands protecting the delicate hearing that she knew was part of her sensitive younger sister, staring at the empty, still hallway. The grandfather clock struck one o’clock in the morning. Pain pounded searing, flint-sharpened arrows at the very core of Emma’s heart, but somewhere—perhaps it was in the distance, perhaps it was in the future—she swore she heard a nightingale sing.
CHAPTER FOUR
London, 1980
Laura’s bow scratched against the strings, rendering the simmering first movement of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet unbearable. Her Guadagnini’s glistening tones were replaced by screeches that assaulted her ears as she struggled on, trying to play the achingly beautiful violin that the Royal College of Music had lent to her from its collection of rare and special instruments. While the darkness of D minor suited her mood, she was unable to produce anything beyond hopeless, irritated, angry jabs that wrecked the brewing soul of the music, reducing what she’d always thought of as Schubert’s brooding testimony to the inevitability of his own death to something insufferably trite.
She shot glances at the other members of the quartet. Marguerite was wrapped in her own world, leading the furtive dark passages as if nothing were amiss with her second violin player at all. Ed’s eyes were closed while he played his cello. Laura fought the urge to scream at him to stop. Only Jasper’s gaze was fixed on her, until he finally brought her disastrous, distressed rendition of the jagged music to a stop by stopping playing himself.
For the first time in her life, Laura felt as if she were drowning while playing the violin.
“Laura?” Jasper’s voice broke the sudden, forced silence while the atmosphere of the fevered music still hovered in Marguerite’s charming Covent Garden apartment.
Marguerite’s breathing was hard, and her dark eyes glistened with irritation toward Jasper and Laura for interrupting the rehearsal.
Laura focused downward, on Marguerite’s smooth cream carpet. She heaved out a sigh and tapped her bow on her knee.
She still battled the agitation that enveloped her as she’d cycled herself into a frenzy on the way to rehearsal today. Her hair and coat flying behind her, she’d ridden through Bloomsbury to Covent Garden, her violin case strapped close to her back. All she could do was picture the wasteland that her life would be without music and the desolation that Emma would feel were she to learn that the man whom she adored all her life had fobbed her off by engaging some student to paint Emma’s portrait, not bothering to lay a finger on his paintbrushes himself.
Laura sat, useless. Helpless. Her plan to fight this, compiled with such confidence at Emma’s house, seemed futile when aligned with the possibility that she might lose her music for good. Because if she couldn’t play at the level that she was beginning to attain at the Royal College, then there was no point playing at all. It was hard to explain the soaring nature, the closeness that she’d been able to achieve with her music since she’d started studying there. Being among students who understood what she felt when she played and who felt the way she did about not only music but life, had opened endless possibilities. Up until this morning, it had seemed as if there were no limits when it came to either music or opportunities for her career.
The idea that she could achieve her dream of being a soloist, traveling and working in Europ
e, motivated her to strive to attain that elusive level of interpretation that was as close to the composer’s intentions as she could get. The point was to achieve complete oneness with the music—no distance between her and what she was interpreting. This meant more to Laura than anything else in the world. If her music was taken away from her, she would only live a limited, dull, gray life. How was she supposed to continue on without music, and who was she if she was not a violinist?
“Let’s go from bar thirty. Laura’s entry. Again.” Marguerite frowned at the page, focused as always.
Laura peered mute and hopeless out at the tops of the trees in the street.
A siren sounded in the distance.
How could the world continue as normal when someone’s life was falling apart?
Laura felt the shuddering possibility that she seriously might lose it all.
“Do you want to take a break and have a chat?” Jasper asked, resting one of his sensitive musician’s hands on her forearm.
“I don’t know what to say,” she managed.
“Ten-minute break, guys.” His voice was merely a murmur.
“Keep it to that.” Marguerite’s French accent seemed to lend further irritation to her voice.
“Sorry.” Laura placed her violin on her chair.
“Come on, Laura.” Jasper stood up.
Laura followed him out onto Marguerite’s small terrace. What if the bank closed in on her and Emma straightaway?
Once outside, she hovered, aware of the sunlight trickling only scant warmth onto her face.
“Talk to me,” Jasper said.
Laura looked across the small terrace, her eyes only half seeing the London rooftops. Covent Garden. Emma said she’d loved living so close to the theaters when she moved to Bloomsbury after her father died. She’d reveled in being able to walk home in the evenings to Gordon Square. Where would either of them go if they couldn’t afford to live in Bloomsbury anymore?
Jasper stood close enough that she could almost reach up and brush her lips against his. The attraction, hopeless as it was, that had always lingered in the air when they were together still hung between them, as if it were a phrase from some old song.
And that was the rub. It was part of the reason that Laura felt such a strong sense of kinship for her grandmother. Emma had always been in love with Patrick in the exact same way that Laura knew she loved Jasper.
Her grandmother’s love for Patrick was something that was never going to change. The Circle’s critics called it a tragedy that Emma had loved a gay man all her adult life—and now Laura was grappling with the very same thing. How Emma’s critics derided her for sacrificing her own happiness for a man who could never love her the way she needed to be loved. Others, more sensitive biographers and art historians, described Emma and Patrick’s long-standing mutual devotion as one of the most romantic love affairs in artistic history—comparing it to that between Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. Laura, for one, knew only too well that what Emma and Patrick shared was real. It was a beautiful relationship, despite what the gossips said.
And while Lydia and Laura would do what they could to protect Emma, Laura knew that the sum of Emma’s parts was far more complex and finely wrought than she ever showed to the world or even to those around her.
If some art critic proved that the man Emma had adored all her life—the man who was her rock—had lied to her about the most treasured symbol of their entire relationship, then Laura had no confidence that Emma would want to go on living in this world.
Patrick’s death had shaken Emma to her core. They’d planned to be buried next to each other in the old churchyard near Summerfield. Patrick was already there . . . but with Emma’s heart broken by Patrick’s death and then again by this perceived betrayal, Emma might follow sooner than Laura was ready to say goodbye.
Quietly, Laura talked to Jasper. He ran a hand through his shock of dark hair that never did what he wanted it to do.
“She’s putting on a brave face, I take it,” he murmured, his eyes widening as they always did when he was being serious. His almost translucent cheeks were flecked with pink. “As for you, I can’t even begin to imagine.” He pulled her into a tight embrace.
Laura continued to stare hard at nothing over his shoulder. “I’ve only hinted at the problem to her. If I have my way, I’ll sort the entire thing out before she knows the extent of it.”
“The guy who put the idea out there’s an art dealer, you said?”
“A well-respected one, according to the Times.”
Jasper held her at arm’s length, his eyes scanning her face.
“Once I’ve spoken to him, I’ll go to the bank,” she said.
“Good God, Laura.”
“We’d better go back in. There’s nothing else I can do now.”
She made her way back toward Marguerite’s elegant French doors and reached for the handle. Normally when she discussed things with Jasper, she came away with a spring in her step, but now, all she felt was heaviness. She could not bear to lose the string quartet as yet another casualty should she not be able to continue with her studies. They’d formed in their first year at the Royal College of Music and had started off playing at weddings. Now they were trying to get commissions to perform around the country—in churches, at local concerts and such places. Who knew? It might go somewhere. It could go anywhere were they to secure the interest of an agent and, even perhaps, a record label. But they all knew that in order to have any hope of getting an agent’s attention, they simply all had to keep their standards high, they all had to keep striving to improve, and that meant Laura too. If Laura were forced to give up her studies at the Royal College, she’d have to step away from the string quartet. The implications went on and on.
“Even though Patrick was gay,” she said to Jasper, “or perhaps because of it, I know he loved Gran more than anything in this world. It didn’t matter, you see.” She leaned her head on the door, sensing Jasper standing right behind her. “It was real. I know it was.” Sometimes the heart didn’t have boundaries; emotions and individual feelings were complex, not binary. Love wasn’t one thing or another, gay or straight, black or white—love was the full palette.
She swiveled to face Jasper, her eyes luminous.
He reached out and stroked her cheek.
“If we don’t get back inside to the Schubert, Marguerite’s going to lay an egg,” Laura muttered.
Nausea roiled in her stomach when she sat down to play again. It was becoming a nasty accompaniment that she wanted to rid herself of as soon as she could.
Ed rested a hand on the back of her chair. “Are you in love, darling?” he asked Laura. “Is that what that was about?”
“Only with me,” Jasper said. He was deadpan, and Laura adored him for it.
“Alors!” Marguerite said. “I suggest we get on with it. Now.”
“That’s why you play first violin, Marguerite.” Ed grinned. “We all love it when you crack the whip.”
They all raised their instruments in perfect unison, holding their bows aloft, ready for the music to start.
CHAPTER FIVE
London, 1909
Three things happened in succession after Emma’s father’s death, and those three things changed her life for good. She moved herself, Frederick, and Freya out of the tall house in Kensington; Frederick died; and Emma married Oscar Temple three days after she lost the brother she adored.
It was surprisingly quick to pack up the house in Kensington, sorting through her father’s curios and moving all his Victorian furniture into storage or selling it. Emma worked with the focus of a demon. She knew in her heart that it was no longer tenable to remain in the rambling dark house. Freya slipped into a distressing state after their father’s death, angry with Emma for her practical approach, while mourning, dreadfully, her lost childhood and, in some ways, Emma thought, the parents she’d never had.
Emma could not sit by and let Freya descend into complet
e melancholy; she also could not shake the sense that all the house did was remind them of their father’s death. When somebody dies in a house, their death can permeate it. The stench of it and the sadness never quite go away.
Emma knew her conflicting emotions about her father did not help. She battled with guilt at the irrepressible sense of freedom that took flight in her soul after he was gone. No longer did she have to be home by four o’clock every afternoon. She was becoming drawn even more to Frederick’s circle of Cambridge friends now that Arthur was, at last, courting a suitable woman. All at once, Emma had liberty to make her own choices.
Arthur’s marriage was the final catalyst for the move that she knew she had to make. Freya took their brother’s departure as another loss. Emma continued cleaning out the house.
She’d been living two lives until now. One was centered around the world at the Royal Academy of Arts. The other, at home, was focused around her father’s demands, but that life was gone. What if she now had a chance to merge the sense of freedom she felt when she painted with a whole new way of living?
She was starting to become interested in something even more radical, the new idea of abandoning all form in art. The concept of abstract art was fascinating to her, this idea of seeing art entirely as a means of individual expression, whose purpose was to strike an emotional reaction in the viewer, no matter what form or structure it took on—if any.
Absence of structure, of form, of tradition swelled into a glorious new hope. All this seemed enticingly linked with Frederick, Oscar, Lawrence, and Ambrose and their fervent discussions about the value of personal freedom above anything else in life. Frederick’s friends were becoming closer to her than her own family—modern, secular, inclusive, and radical, they refused to be subjugated by conservative and religious dogmas. Their discourse flew around new ways of imagining what a home, a family, and a career could be.