“You’re certain?” He looked worried. Should she be?

“I am.” She wasn’t.

The tremors that had started as trills of anticipation in her heart now traveled through the rest of her body. She drew a breath and told herself she had nothing to worry about. She and Donovan were friends. He was sweet, gentle, amusing to be around. Nothing he’d ever said or done in her presence could in the slightest way be construed as threatening. She had no reason to feel vulnerable.

After all, she had seen the fellow at his most exposed state—totally naked. If either of them held an advantage—it was she.

Yet, she mused as she gathered her skirts and stepped down from the carriage, he hadn’t seemed at a disadvantage while posing in the altogether on his platform. His attitude was always proud, removed. As if he owned the school, as if the students and staff were his guests, whom he chose to ignore until he dressed again and struck out with them in a companionable manner for a bite to eat.

His ability to remove himself emotionally from a situation was a trick Louise envied. There were times she would have liked to mentally absent herself from a royal reception or formal dinner. And she longed to show those around her that she was in charge. That she was not a woman whose future was to be negotiated for the purpose of others’ power, wealth, or property. She was the one who would control her own life.

“I won’t be long,” she repeated firmly to her footman.

Of course, she had no proof that Donovan would be here at all. And even if he were here, he might be asleep after spending the night out with friends or working tedious hours for Rossetti. On the other hand, for all she knew, he might have moved on to yet another job by now.

But she felt compelled to at least try to find him. She had so few real friends it seemed tragic to lose one.

Louise checked the names scrawled on little paper cards in metal slots beside the door. ROSSETTI/MORRIS: THIRD FLOOR. Three flights of creaking, splintery wooden steps later, she was facing a warped, water-stained door with functioning but rusty hinges and latch. She raised a gloved hand to knock, but the door swung open before her knuckles touched wood.

Donovan stood in long, loose muslin pants, gathered by a drawstring at the waist, riding low on his narrow hips. He wore nothing else.

She swallowed, smiled nervously. A tickling sensation traveled up from her knees and settled cozily in her stomach. “How did you know I’d come?” she asked.

He laughed and jerked his thumb toward the windows. “Do you suppose one of HRM’s carriages pulls up outside a place like this every day?”

She felt her cheeks go hot as she remembered the royal crest embossed on the barouche’s door. “I suppose not.”

He studied her, still standing in the doorway. Beyond his bare shoulder, she could see two men, each painting at an easel. A woman wrapped in a paisley shawl sat in a ladder-back chair, the illumination from a skylight above her brightening her features.

“Why are you here, Princess?”

She jumped at Donovan’s voice; he sounded more irritated than happy to see her.

“I was worried about you and wanted to see that you were well.”

“And do I look well to you?”

She blushed hotter, brought her fan up to cool her cheeks and tried to focus on his face rather than his naked chest . . . or bare feet . . . or smoothly muscled arms. “You appear in good health.”

He reached out his hand, taking hers, drawing her a little closer. “As do you,” he whispered.

She shot a worried look at the painters, but they seemed involved in their work. The noise of pots banging together in one of the other apartments mixed with the shouts of vendors down in the street. Everything seemed so normal, so unremarkably ordinary. Why should she feel uneasy?

“I am well,” she said. She didn’t know what else to say.

He still held her hand. She looked down at their touching fingers. Hers gloved. His naked and pale, long and graceful. She would sculpt a model of his hand one day, if he let her.

“Can you come back, Louise?”

She wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. “Come back?”

“Another day when I’m not working. If you like. Say, on Thursday after school?” He lowered his voice still more. “Rossetti and Morris will be gone then, to the exhibition hall, setting up their paintings for display.”

She peeked over his shoulder again at the two men, so intent on their work. They probably hadn’t even noticed the carriage outside. Or her standing like a peddler at their door. She looked back at Donovan. “We’d be alone then?”

He nodded, his eyes fixed on hers. She wondered that she hadn’t already melted under his gaze, as if she were pinned beneath a magnifying lens like the one Leo, when he was little, had used for roasting flies and moths in the sun’s burning rays.

“So we could talk more,” he said. “Would you like that?”

“I would . . . yes, of course.” Then the words she’d been holding back rushed out of her. “I would so very much like for us to be friends, Donovan. We could talk about all the things that are important to us.”

He smiled. “Good. Come after class. Bring food if you like. There’s nothing here, and we might get hungry.”

“Yes, of course. Yes, I will.” A picnic in an artist’s garret—how scrumptiously romantic.

But part of her felt the tiniest bit unsure of the circumstances. Could she really do this? Come here, alone, to this common man’s part of the city, late in the day when it might soon become dark? Come here to be alone with a man in the place where he lived? As Vicky would have said: “This simply isn’t done.” Louise didn’t dare think what her mother would say.

Louise had already started backing away toward the top step when Donovan leaned out through the open doorway and brushed his lips across her cheek. An appalling breach of etiquette. She should slap him and leave. Refusing his invitation would certainly be appropriate.

“I’ll be waiting,” he whispered, his bashful gaze lingering, encouraging.

Her heart fluttered. “I’ll be here.”

Sixteen

To have friends, real friends—not a brother or sister or cousin required to include her in their games or make polite conversation—this was thrilling to Louise. She and her eight siblings had been isolated from the world and under Nanny’s care until the age of five, when they could be handed over to governesses for strict tutoring.

Prince Albert’s personal adviser, Baron Stockmar, took charge of their education and allowed few breaks from their books. Of course, they must all learn to ride, hunt, dance, and behave properly in court. But as young children they were not allowed at court functions and were never, ever exposed to commoners.

Louise recalled her parents describing the middle and lower classes as dirty, immoral, simple-minded folk who were incapable of anything more mentally demanding than manual labor. It was fine to pity or act charitably toward the poor souls, but that was the limit of contact. Even the sons and daughters of lesser nobility were considered inappropriate playmates for the royal offspring.

However, the crowd she’d fallen in with at the art school brimmed with brilliant young people, many from decent (though by no means noble) families. Her friends had new and exciting ideas to share with her about politics, art, and the sciences. She loved her days at the school. There she learned so much more about life than she possibly could have, shut up in one of the family’s castles. In prison, as it were—waiting to be married off to a man she barely knew. During their midday meals clever Donovan, all on his own, had been teaching her so much about the way real people lived in the world. She desperately wanted to keep him as a friend. Just a friend. She dared not think of him as more than that.

The week crept along. Louise could hardly contain her elation when Thursday came at last. As soon as her final class of the day was over, she gathered her shawl, the basket of food she’d purchased during their break, and swept down the steps, hardly noticing Amanda resting on the curb, a broom across her knees.

“I will join my lady friends for a supper in Chatham Park,” she loudly told her driver as the footman lifted the basket from her arm and set it inside the carriage on the floor. “Please hurry. I don’t want to keep them waiting.”

She hoped the lie had worked but could tell nothing from the expressions of either of the men. She had a sense of Amanda’s eyes fixed in a less than approving way on her as they drove off.

This time the neighborhoods through which they passed were not new to her. But she drank them in as she hadn’t before. Each minute detail appealed to her artist’s eye. The edges of objects felt so crisp and perfectly defined she could almost reach out and touch them. Colors shone as vividly as if they were undiluted pigments, hand ground and swathed across the London streetscape. Despite the coal dust–gray air and the filth of even the finest streets, every brick mansion or stucco tenement, every statue or signpost, ragman’s horse, leather seller, drayman, smudgy-faced crossing sweeper boy, tarted-up fancy girl, greasy sausage vendor, omnibus and cab—each stood out in sharp relief before her eyes. She longed to paint them all. And although the sun was starting to dip behind the wall of buildings, and the lamplighter would soon be making his rounds of the gasoliers, the world seemed to her a brighter place than ever before.

When the carriage neared Chatham Place, Louise rapped on the ceiling for the driver to stop diagonally across the street from Rossetti’s garret. “Park alongside those other carriages and hansoms,” she said. This seemed more discreet than pulling up directly in front of the house.