She simply adored him—as the father, perhaps, she'd always dreamed of but had been denied. Nicola and Sir Michael shared a language of aesthetics that Jeremy did not comprehend. Sir Michael's artistic passions were on display on walls throughout the great house. He was a lifelong collector of the works of the English artists who had painted in the Cornish coastal art colonies of St. Ives, Lamorna, and Newlyn at the beginning of the twentieth century: Stanhope Forbes, Frank Bramley, Laura Knight, Borlase Smart, and Alfred Wallis, among others. But it was Laura Knight's talent for capturing the clarity, intensity, and purity of the light unique to the far southwest of Cornwall that affected Nicola most—and later influenced her own painting.
On Christmas Day, Jeremy gave her a complete set of Winsor & Newton oil paints and a portable easel. Sir Michael gave her a charcoal sketch of a woman with a small boy in her lap. It was some days later that she learned, from Jeremy, that it was a portrait of his grandmother and his father as a boy, by Stanhope Forbes.
Then, on New Year's Eve, Jeremy surprised her by asking her to marry him, and Nicola surprised herself by accepting.
Her mother disapproved: Why couldn't she marry someone from the neighborhood, someone whose family they knew? And these people weren't even Catholic! But Sir Michael wrote Nicola's mother a long letter full of admiration and affection for her daughter, and it charmed Angela DeLucca completely.
Nicola looked down at her gin and tonic and was surprised to find the glass empty. Should she make another? The day had been strangely hot and close. Maybe it was global warming. It wasn't supposed to be humid in Cornwall, even in August.
She worried she drank too much. It hadn't always been that way. Only since St. Ives. She went to the tall window overlooking the harbor and saw below her the man from the cliffs. He was walking along the path on the opposite side of the river, past the youth hostel and the Harbour Light, toward the center of the village. His stride was easy, loose-limbed. She wondered who he was.
At the beginning, everything seemed perfect. The wedding was in late May, just after Nicola's fellowship ended. The ceremony was performed at the eleventh-century church in Zennor, the hamlet closest to the Rhys-Jones estate. The Anglican rector graciously allowed Nicola's brother James, who'd recently been ordained a Catholic priest, to participate in the ceremony. Sir Michael had flown both her brother and her mother “over the pond” for the event. The stark stone sanctuary had been bedecked with white roses and chrysanthemums. Her mother had cried.
After a damp honeymoon of island-hopping in Scotland's Outer Hebrides, she and Jeremy moved into Trevega House. It wasn't her husband's first choice. Jeremy had taken an economics degree at Cambridge and planned to work at the London headquarters of his father's financial-management firm, tending to the arcane investment problems of his father's many wealthy clients by day and enjoying the city's social scene by night. But Sir Michael had other ideas. He sent Jeremy off to apprentice at the firm's Penzance office and gave them the country house in which to live. Sir Michael tended to stay in London, close to the House of Lords and his club.
Jeremy was furious with this arrangement, but Nicola was thrilled. She loved the rambling old house, the gardens, the peaceful evenings by the fire, the long walks along the coast, and the horseback rides deep into the prehistoric granite hills. And then there was Sir Michael's wedding present to her: a little painting studio of her own overlooking the harbor in nearby St. Ives, where the light was diamond bright and the aquamarine water in the little port looked positively Mediterranean. The truth, of course—the white sand beach notwithstanding—was that the water sweeping in from the Atlantic with each tide was so cold, even in midsummer, that only children (whose nerve endings seemed yet to have developed) could tolerate it for more than a few minutes.
Children. They'd had none, though not for want of trying. Nicola's secret was that her own sexuality was complicated and fraught—she could be frisky and flirtatious one moment, remote and disengaged the next. It troubled her, but she kept it to herself, and the fact was that her husband was too involved in his own needs to even notice the shifts. Then, a few years into the marriage, years in which her husband increasingly