When she finally came down the inner stair to send him away properly, she found him still in the narrow stairwell. He had come in from the cold at some point, or Tabitha had let him in—she was not certain. He was sitting on the third step with his back against the wall and his hat on his knee, pale from the cold, stiff in the way a man gets when he has been still too long in low temperatures, and clearly without food.
She stood in the doorway and looked at him. He looked back at her.
She did not speak. She went back inside the room and came back a moment later with the old traveling shawl—his shawl, the one she had taken from Marwood, gray wool and worn at one corner, folded into a square. She set it on the step beside him without handing it to him directly, without touching him.
And then she went back upstairs.
She heard him pick it up. A few minutes later, she heard the street door open and close.
He wrote again. This time, the letter asked for one hour in the studio: not conversation, not explanation; one hour on her terms, to be of whatever use she would allow.
Cassandra read it at the worktable with the morning light coming through the north window, and she thought about it for longer than she would have admitted to Tabitha. Then she wrote back her reply:
Tuesday at 2:00. Bring nothing.
He arrived at 2:00 on Tuesday with nothing. She set him to grinding pigment.
"This is the muller," she said, placing the heavy glass instrument in his hands. "And this is the slab. You work in circles. Even pressure, not too fast. The color wants to be fine enough that you cannot feel the grain when you rub it between your fingers."
Marcus looked at the muller with the expression of a man accustomed to directing operations rather than performing them. And then he looked at the small mound of raw pigment on the slate slab, and he set to work.
His technique was immediately poor: too much pressure on one side, the circles uneven, the pace variable in a way that produced inconsistent results.
"Like this," Cassandra said, and she stepped forward and placed her hands over his, adjusting the angle of his wrist and the distribution of weight. She held his hands over the stone for a moment longer than the instruction required—not much longer, only a few seconds, but enough that it was clearly something other than instruction.
And then she stepped back. Neither of them said anything about it.
He came back the following Tuesday, and the one after that. She gave him an hour each time, and he ground pigment. Gradually, with visible effort and the specific awkwardness of a man attempting a skill he has no natural aptitude for, he began to ask her questions. Not social questions, not the polite inquiries of a man performing interest—real questions, with pauses before them that suggested he had thought about whether to ask.
"How do you choose who to paint?" he asked on the third Tuesday, his hands working the muller across the slab.
"I look at faces," Cassandra said, priming a fresh sheet of ivory at the table. "Most people have one face they show in public and another that appears when they forget to manage it. I wait for the second one."
Marcus considered this. "And the sitters—do they know which face you've caught?"
"Sometimes," Cassandra said. "The ones who do tend to come back."
He waited for the full answer. He did not move past it to the next thing. Cassandra noticed this. She noticed it the way she noticed the light changing on a subject's face: as a fact that required registration.
And she did not say anything, but she stopped watching the clock.
It was Tabitha who let it slip on an evening in late October, when she came up with bread and a letter from the London engraver that she had perhaps deliberately already opened.
"He wants the full set," Tabitha said, setting the letter on the worktable with the bread. "Twelve of the best pieces reproduced as prints. He says there's a market for them in three counties, maybe more. And he wants a frontispiece: your name, and a portrait of the artist." She paused. "Your actual name, he means. Or whatever name you want attached to the work publicly."
Cassandra looked at the letter.
"He says the distribution would go to Bath, Bristol, Cheltenham, and the county circuit," Tabitha continued, "which includes, if I am not mistaken, the circuit where Lord Marwood dines."
"You are not mistaken," Cassandra said.
Tabitha sat down. "You have until tomorrow morning, he says. He's got another miniaturist interested if you decline."
Cassandra set the letter down and looked at her worktable: the ivory pieces in their frames, the brushes in their jars, the seven years of accumulated work that had been made in the margins of another life—and had turned out to be the life itself.
She had one evening to decide whether to step into the light or to step back from it: whether C. Vane would remain a name known only to clients and the occasional agent, or whether it would become public, with a face attached to it, a history—a countess who sold her labor and was not ashamed of it.