Lady Jenny's Christmas Portrait (22 page)

Lord Valentine took the place beside Kesmore; St. Just simply sat on the floor.

“Your brothers might miss you, Bernward,” Sindal said, “but we’ve a few brothers to spare. In the spirit of holiday generosity, we’ll lend them to you. You may have Westhaven here on indefinite loan, for starters.”

By the time they’d gotten around to wondering how His Grace not merely endured but thrived on the holiday mayhem, Elijah had reached an insight that did not provide even as much comfort as the four-ton cat contentedly shredding his breeches.

His sisters missed him, and his mother was threatening essentially to cut him off if he remained “as stubborn as his father.” She might make good on her threats, though Elijah could ambush her in Town and wear her down over the next few years. That prospect was daunting, much like facing the melee below stairs daunted these happy, tipsy men who were delighted to spend time with one another.

Elijah’s brothers missed him too. He’d known that.

What he hadn’t known was how badly he missed his family—the entire lot of them—and how difficult it was going to be to ever gain entrance to the Academy. The latter realization didn’t disturb him nearly as much as it ought to, while the former disturbed him far more than it should have.

***

“Look at me.”

Elijah muttered the words, as if the effort of speaking had been snatched from the orts and leavings of his ability to concentrate. He got like this when he painted—gruff, absorbed, and to Jenny, fascinating.

She looked directly at him. “I am not my mother.”

He studied her for perhaps ten consecutive, silent seconds then went back to scowling at the image taking shape on his canvas. “You have the same shade of green in your eyes, you have the same—” His brush paused, and he fired another glance at her. “Almost the same shape of upper lip.”

He would not have heard anything she said in reply, so Jenny resumed work on her own effort, which was His Grace’s portrait. Without planning it, she and Elijah never worked on the same subject at the same time.

And thank goodness her brothers had appropriated the studio yesterday afternoon, or Elijah would have been much further ahead.

“You are displeased about something. I can feel it.” Elijah spoke without shifting his focus from his canvas.

“Not displeased. I’m glad you got nothing done yesterday. I like to watch you work.”

He wrinkled his nose then added a touch of paint to Her Grace’s shoulder. “You’re daft.”

“Look at me.”

He obliged. He had a smear of white near his chin, his hair was sticking out in all directions, and his eyes were not the same blue as His Grace’s, but Jenny studied them as if they might be.

“I know you spied on us yesterday,” he said, touching his brush to his palette.

“I came in the same door as everybody else, Elijah. How can you call that spying?”

“Nobody noticed you. They were all too absorbed with Sindal’s tale of winning the fair maid over a pile of dirty nappies.”

They had been, the sentimental, kissable, happy lot of them. Jenny had eavesdropped in a quiet corner, wondering why Sophie—her own sister—had never shared so much of her courtship.

“I believe there was mistletoe involved, and my brothers claim to have had a hand in matters.”

They fell silent. Fifteen minutes from now, Elijah might reply to her comment, or he might curse the fact that he’d run out of green paint, or he might decide he’d reached a place to pause in his own efforts and rip up at her morning’s work.

Jenny had listened to Sindal’s tale yesterday, then listened to Joseph add his Christmas recollections, but she’d also used the time to study her brothers. Each man bore the stamp of His Grace’s paternity, in the eyes, in the chin, and oddly enough, in the way their hands joined their wrists.

His Grace had beautiful wrists, and he’d passed that trait down to his progeny.

“Why are you staring at your wrists, Genevieve? The portrait won’t paint itself.”

“I have my father’s wrists. I wonder if His Grace ever had artistic aspirations. I can’t imagine he did.” And why had she never noticed this?

“My father did—amateur aspirations, from what my mother has said, though his sense of color is abominable. I need to mix up more brown. Why must all wood be brown?”

Wood was not brown. It was red, blond, black, sable, and many other colors that only looked brown. Jenny did not correct Elijah. She’d realized, in the first hour they’d painted together, that she sometimes disagreed with him for the…
spark
of it.

Minor tiffs and spats formed some kind of verbal mistletoe, having to do with the way Elijah’s eyebrows rose, his nostrils flared, and his chin turned an inch to the right.

“Have you ever seen your father’s work, Elijah?”

He stepped back from his canvas and wiped his hands on a rag. “A few caricatures only. My mother has talent, though. What on earth are you doing with His Grace’s boots?”

The duke had chosen to wear riding attire, which Jenny thought showed his excellent figure to good advantage and helped with the informal nature of the rendering.

“He wore his favorite pair,” she said. “They are comfortable rather than impressive, so don’t start in with your dratted lectures again.”

To Elijah, a portrait was not a likeness, so much as a commentary on the subject—and a flattering commentary, at that. He propped his fists on his hips, sails clearly filling.

“Genevieve, do you
know
why the grand manner of portraiture found favor for more than half a century? Do you have any
idea
the problems that result when a sitter does not like your work? Can you
imagine
how limited your commissions will be if you—?”

He could go on like that for eternities. Jenny shut him up by the simple expedient of setting aside her palette and brush and kissing him.

His arms came around her, but then the dratted man lifted his head. “Somebody could come in, Genevieve.”

At least he’d muttered that with his lips against her temple. “Nonsense. As much as this place was a madhouse yesterday, this morning it’s quiet as a tomb.” A tomb where the shades were much in need of headache powders.

Her logic must have appeased his overactive conscience—his worries were for her, she knew that—because he commenced kissing her back.

And oh, the pleasure of it. Elijah was never a frantic, pushy kisser, and yet in the very deliberation of his attentions there was passion.

“I wasn’t going to
do
this,” he informed her earlobe. “We were to have a footman in here, to—”

“Kiss me.”

“Not to—”

He kissed her. He kissed her with a building heat and banked desperation, such that when Jenny realized she might be getting paint all over his shirt and waistcoat, she also realized it was already too late.

In so many ways, it was already too late.

She subsided against his chest. “We need to clean up. Luncheon will be served soon.”

This was a pretext. Her Grace kept a buffet with varying selections available in the breakfast parlor from dawn until midafternoon. People would wander in and out as their appetites and overindulgences dictated.

“You’re hungry. I’m sorry. I should have realized—” He glanced at the clock. “You would let me starve you, woman.”

Elijah, when not painting, could also be gruff. Jenny particularly liked that about him. She slipped her arms from his waist, knowing he’d tolerated as much kissing as the moment would allow. “Your portrait is coming along very well.”

He didn’t take that bait, but instead studied
her
, rather than the color of her eyes.

“You looked lonely yesterday, sitting in your dark corner, eavesdropping on the men like a tired tavern wench.”

“I will miss my brothers.” Miss them with an ache of much greater proportions than she’d realized. Miss their wrists and chins, miss the way any two of them smiled together over some complaint made by the third. Miss the way each of them had known she was there, and none of them had given her away.

Elijah continued to study her. “Let’s clean up, then. I wanted to ask you about something.”

Jenny gathered up her brushes, hoping he meant to ask her about something artistic. He argued with her, he exhorted, he lectured, and he explained, but he seldom asked her opinion regarding anything artistic, and usually took issue with the ideas she did express.

She was unschooled, he said, and he wasn’t wrong.

They set their canvases across the room from the fire. Jenny took off her smock; Elijah rolled down his cuffs. He tolerated her doing up his sleeve buttons, just as she held still while he wiped a dab of paint off her nose, and then allowed her to wipe off his chin.

These small intimacies were a consolation of sorts, though Jenny thought kissing would have consoled her rather more.

“What did you want to ask me?”

Before he answered, he turned a full circle, hands on hips, inspecting their work space. She saw his gaze light on a sketchbook lying near where the cat sat in sphinxlike repose on the mantel.

“When the regiment decamped yesterday to take their wives in hand, I spent some time in here getting organized, and I found yonder feline sitting on this.” He passed her the sketchbook. “It has to be one of yours—the style is yours—but the subjects are unusual. I don’t recall seeing it before.”

Jenny opened the book and knew at one glance exactly what folly Timothy had led him to, the wretched beast. “These are just some old sketches. Are you hungry?”

“Those are not just some old sketches, Genevieve.”

“They are juvenilia, Elijah, not even worth your criticism.” Which would be considerable, she was sure. She folded the sketchbook against her chest, unwilling to watch him examine the contents. If he tore into these sketches the way he carped at and criticized everything else, she would cry.

“Come here, Genevieve.”

She followed him over to the sofa and watched with foreboding as he tossed more fuel on the fire. Was he preparing for a long harangue? “If you want me to sit beside you on that sofa, Elijah, I might fall prey to an impulse to kiss you again.”

“I delight in your impulses, Genevieve.” He offered this with a crooked, pained smile, suggesting his delight was tempered with regret.

She took a place beside him on the sofa. “What did you want to discuss?”

“Give me that.” He took the sketchbook from her and opened it on his lap. Timothy leaped onto the sofa and settled into a perfect, feline circle at Jenny’s hip. “These sketches are brilliant.”

Brilliant. Now, when he’d found a book Jenny never wanted to see again, he pronounced her work brilliant.

“I had no sense of the rules. I had no judgment about what was a suitable subject. I had no business sketching those children.” Many of whom had likely perished.

“You’re wrong. You’re more wrong about that than about anything you’ve been wrong about since you first sketched me at Kesmore’s.”

Timothy began a rumbling purr against Jenny’s body, as if Elijah’s pronouncements were so much small talk, not arrows aimed at Jenny’s conscience. “Can we put this book away, Elijah? I find I’m really quite peckish, and by now even my brothers ought to be stirring. They’ll want me in the breakfast parlor to help with the little—”

He shut her up by virtue of his lips applied lingeringly to her cheek. “These are your best work. Tell me about them.”

His buss to her cheek was the first kiss he’d initiated since his speech about babies and folly, which Jenny could probably have recited to him verbatim but for the lump in her throat.

“I sneaked out to the poorhouses when I was supposed to go shopping for the holidays. I went to the poorhouses in winter, when it was so cold I had to sketch with gloves on. The children had no gloves.”

They’d had no gloves, no coats, no food, no coal, no health, no hope. Every time, her brother Victor had forbidden her to go, and every time, he’d waited right beside her, until she could bear the scent of death and despair no more.

Elijah’s arm came around her shoulders. “What was a duke’s daughter doing in the poorhouses?”

“I don’t know. Trying to understand, I suppose, as adolescents must understand everything, as they must rebel against everything. Why do I have so much, why do others—equally valuable in the eyes of God, we’re told—have nothing? Why do some children have only five years of life on earth, and every day of that five years is miserable with illness, starvation, and vermin? And I have loving family, health… everything, in abundance?”

He turned a page, to an image of a small child huddled near a puny, smoldering fire. Gender was not apparent, so huge were the eyes, so pronounced the facial bones, and shapeless the rags that passed for clothing. The child’s expression was vacant to the point of death, death at least of the soul.

“As a gently bred young lady, you should not have seen these things.”

“My brother Victor said the same thing. He said when I was older, perhaps, and in a position to take on charitable works. He always brought money for us to leave, but those places are corrupt.”

Elijah turned the page again, the scene a cozy parlor, the fire blazing in the hearth, rugs thick on the floor, and heavy curtains over the windows. A portly fellow stood beside a desk, his attire that of a prosperous burgher, his smile genial—though in their coldness, his eyes had something in common with that of the child on the previous page.

Examining the sketch now, Jenny realized she’d used the idea of illumination from below to imbue a cozy scene with lurid, satanic shadows. The choice had not been conscious, but it had been effective.

Now, Jenny could barely stand to glance at the sketch. “I noticed that the people who tend to the poorhouses were always well fed, always comfortable. It drove me mad to see that. I gave away all my pin money for years, until Westhaven remarked that I wasn’t wearing new frocks—or perhaps Victor peached on me. As sick as he was, he fretted for me and encouraged my art without ceasing.”

Elijah set the sketchbook aside and angled his body to wrap both arms around her. “Victor died of consumption?”