Page 43 of Not Quite a Lady
‘Miss France has indulged me by listening to me thinking out loud about various problems. I should not have bored her with them and I am amazed that Miss France should have troubled to recall any of the details.’
He kept his eyes on her as he spoke and watched the colour rise betrayingly in her cheeks. She could read him too, knew he was furiously angry with her.
‘My niece constantly surprises us all,’ the old man chuckled as he said it, but Jack could hear both indulgence and a strong will behind the words. Mr Conroy would allow his niece her whim this far, but he would not agree to her parting with a penny piece unless he and his fellow trustees were satisfied.
Every instinct was telling him to get up and walk out. But todo so would be to humiliate Lily in front of these men whose respect he knew was important to her. He wanted to shake her, to demand to know what the devil she thought she was about, but that could wait.
‘Let me introduce you to my fellow trustees,’ Mr Conroy began with the air of a man calling the meeting to order, ‘And then, despite my niece’s excellent summation of the facts, we have a great many questions to ask you.’
Half an hour later Jack knew he had lost them. They were intelligent, hard, practical men, all of them, but they were merchants and traders, not engineers or mine owners. If he had been asking them to invest in a canal, or steam pumps in a manufactory, or possibly even in mines in the Midlands, then he might well have convinced them.
But Northumberland was too far away, they could see all the problems very clearly and the solutions were outside their experience. And on the subject of steam locomotion, which Lily appeared to have been lecturing them about, they were frankly sceptical.
Lily had sat silent until then, her guilty blush faded until she was pallid, her hands locked together on the table as her gaze followed the argument and questions around the table. But when Mr Shillington, the attorney, remarked that steam power for coaches was a fantasy, she intervened, passionately.
‘It is the future, not a fantasy. You only have to read the articles…’
‘Yes, yes, Miss France. It might work very well on some short tramways in Wales, but for long distances? Or even on the roads as I believe some of these fanatics would have us believe? Madness! Why the things would be exploding and frightening the horses, and people would go mad with the speed.’
‘But there is a steam engine in Newcastle called the PuffingBilly.’
‘They break the rails, I have heard all about it. And in any case, you are not proposing spending Miss France’s money on theselocomotivesare you, Mr Lovell?’
‘No sir. I require static engines which can run pumps, provide ventilation and lift coal.’
Mr Conroy looked down at his notes, then around at his fellow trustees. ‘Do we need to ask Mr Lovell to retire while we discuss this gentlemen? No?’ His faded blue eyes looked round the table. ‘Well?’ One after another the grizzled heads shook; the only words spoken were Lily’s.
‘No.Of coursewe have to discuss it. You cannot simply dismiss this out of hand.’
Jack got to his feet. ‘These gentlemen have given me a very patient hearing, Miss France. I will not impose longer on their time. Good day gentlemen. Miss France.’
‘Jack.’
He shut the door firmly, realising that his hands were shaking with anger. He nodded curtly at Fakenham who was waiting in the hall and strode out through the garden door, carefully refraining from slamming it behind him.
The restraint lasted as long as it took him to reach the studio. The slam of that door rattled the glass in the windows, and the nearest portmanteau, kicked with the full force of his feelings, flew down the length of the room to knock over a chair with a satisfying thud.
Jack counted out money for Mrs Oakman, a tip for Percy, and began to pack his portfolio with the papers from the table.
How had she managed to study them without him noticing they had been disturbed? The thought of the deliberate care it must have taken made him angrier still. If she had just asked him, he would have told her he did not wish to meet her trustees, that it was not a suitable investment for her.
He lifted a stack of notes and found one long, reddish-brown hair curling over his fingers. Not so very careful after all.
He brushed it off, then picked it up again. It was as live and vibrant as Lily herself, curling round his fingers as she had twined herself around his heart. Impatient with himself for his weakness, Jack pulled out his notebook, dropped the hair between two pages and thrust it back into his pocket as the door slowly opened behind him.
‘Jack?’
He swung round and saw the misery on her face and a strange mixture of exasperation and love cut through the anger.
‘Jack, I am so sorry they said no. I obviously mishandled it, I did not prepare well enough…’
‘You are sorryyoumishandled it?’ Lily could always be relied upon, it seemed, to infuriate him afresh.
‘Lily,ifI had wanted to approach your trustees it would have been up to me to present my proposition to them. I did not wish to approach them, so your intervention was quite unnecessary. You wasted their time, you have put yourself to no little trouble to no purpose and, I have to say, I do not appreciate having my private papers ransacked.’
‘I did not ransack them!’ She was instantly indignant. ‘I put them back exactly how I had found them.’
‘Lily, they are myprivatepapers.’
