By the time all the carriages met at Vauxhall and the group had reassembled and found each other, they were around twenty persons. Charlotte felt a moment of annoyance. She hated large parties where you never got to talk to anyone seriously and you spent all your time shouting over someone’s shoulder. Besides, Alex was behaving in a most offhand manner, strolling on ahead with a group of men. The men had all lit cigars and were talking loudly of a boxing match scheduled for the coming week. She found herself next to Chloe van Stork, walking toward the brightly lit pavilion. Charlotte studied Chloe’s profile again and felt a quickening of interest. Yes: This was the person she wanted to paint next. Chloe was very beautiful, even though she didn’t know it, but more interesting was the painfully honest look she had. As if she would always blurt the truth and would never gain the smooth social apparatus that Sophie was probably born with and which she herself had painfully acquired in the last three years.

“Miss van Stork,” she said.

“Yes, my lady,” Chloe replied.

Oh dear, Charlotte thought. “Please do call me Charlotte,” she said. “Why don’t we sit over here?” She steered Chloe toward a large table, away from the smaller table where a group of beaux were already clustered, looking expectantly at Charlotte.

Chloe sat down, wondering where in the world Will had gone. He had behaved (to her secret disappointment) like a consummate gentleman in the carriage, and then she seemed to lose him on the walk. The party itself was also unexceptionally proper. The marquis appeared to be a little drunk to her inexperienced eye, and the marchioness frigid with annoyance, but there was nothing remarkable in that. She had noticed that ton marriages seemed invariably strained. Probably, she thought, it was all that alcohol they drank. It fuddled your brain, her mother said.

Lady Charlotte seemed to be staring at her in a very peculiar way. Probably she was entranced by the novel idea of sitting with a bourgeois cit. Chloe raised her stubborn little chin.

“Why are you regarding me so … intently, Lady Charlotte?”

Charlotte’s face glowed. “That’s it! That’s exactly the look I want!”

Chloe looked confused. The woman must be mad as a hatter. How odd that the papers hadn’t mentioned it.

“No, no,” Charlotte said hastily. “I’m not making any sense, am I? I paint, you see. I’ve just started painting people—well, I have painted Sophie, that’s all. And I’d like to paint you.” She paused. Chloe van Stork was looking at her doubtfully.

Charlotte gave her a deliberately charming smile. Unlike Will, Chloe didn’t unbend an inch. Charlotte leaned across the table. “I don’t dabble with paints.” She broke off. “May I call you Chloe?”

Chloe nodded silently.