Lady Jenny's Christmas Portrait (6 page)

“I want to go to Paris.”

The ear was a curious organ, more complicated than most people thought, like a horse’s hoof. Lots of angles and shadows to the typical ear, but an ear could also be beautiful. “Paris in spring is lovely.”

“I want to go
now
.”

The point of his pencil broke, and he muttered an oath. Still her features did not shift from the serene, contemplative, secret-veiling expression she’d worn for long moments. Da Vinci would have been desperate to sketch her—nobody did justice to a sensual madonna like he had.

“A crossing this time of year can be quite rough, my lady.” He feathered his eraser over the slight flaw in the line made by his infernal pencil, reshaped the point, and paused. “You want to go to Paris
now
?”

“Directly after the holidays, and I would not go to shop, hear the opera, or polish my French.”

“Your eyes hold a wealth of determination.” Also sadness. How to sketch both so they didn’t overshadow the beauty? “
Why
do you want to go to Paris?”

Her gaze measured him. He could feel her studying him even as he concentrated on the image taking shape on the page.

“I want to sit someplace besides Gunter’s and eat a pastry in public without it being a scandal. I want to have my pastry without a maid and a footman, as well as an immediate family member—preferably male, but at least married—within two yards of me at all times.”

The determination in her eyes flared hotter. God in heaven,
Wellington
had eyes like that. Calm, unstoppable, capable of banking a world of grief behind a slight smile—and this over a
pastry
?

“Do you think to acquire that freedom by outlasting all the bachelors on the marriage mart, Genevieve?” This was worse than the randy bishop, the idea that she might be purposely seeking spinsterhood—and it made no sense at all.

He sat back, feeling winded as a disconcerting notion rendered his pencil still. “Do you prefer
women
?”

Her lips twitched. “I love my sisters, of course, and my brothers’ wives are lovely too—” Those slightly darker than perfect brows rose. “That’s not what you meant.”

She’d attended Antoine’s classes. In every batch there was at least one pair of young sprigs who fancied themselves classically Greek in their lust for each other. They’d sat practically in each other’s laps, called each other
cher
, and tossed languid, calf-eyed gazes at Elijah as he’d lounged about in his birthday attire.

He’d found it amusing and vaguely irritating. If young men brought to their art the same focus they brought to their breeding organs, the world would have many more works like Dürer’s hare.

“I did not mean to offend, my lady. I see the Sapphic preferences aren’t entirely unknown to you.” Her family would be scandalized that she even knew of such things.

Her
family
would
be
scandalized
if
they
knew
how
closely
he
was
sitting
to
her,
and yet, he wasn’t about to shove his chair back to a decorous distance in the shadows and chill farther from the fire.

“I want to go to Paris to study art. I shall go, eventually.” She did not gird her words with determination; she clad them in certainty, though Elijah had the sense it was a newfound certainty—very newfound.

Two thoughts collided in Elijah’s mind, one sane, the other demented. The sane thought was:
She
jolly
well
could
study
art
in
Paris.
Genevieve Windham was abundantly talented enough. Then, too, in Elijah’s lifetime, the French had lost all gallantry toward their womenfolk.

French ladies managed commercial establishments, strolled about unescorted, and took unseemly interest in the nation’s ongoing political debacle. Rational Englishmen had long stopped trying to explain the French, and look where France’s democratic impulses had gotten her: her aristocracy butchered, her land beggared, her almighty, plundering emperor going slowly mad on some island.

Bugger France, even if Paris was lovely.

The second thought, the demented one, was so raw Elijah rated it more as a stirring of instinct:
He
could
not
let
her
go.

And then, more raw still:
He
could
not
stop
her
, not unless he were her husband or her guardian.

“Paris smells like cat piss.”

His observation made her laugh, a merry, surprised sound that warmed him every bit as much as the fire, and yet he’d spoken the perfect truth. The whole damned city had a pissy stench in certain weather, worse even than Rome—though London had a prodigious stench of its own, especially near the river in summer.

“I daresay parts of the Morelands stable bear the same distinctive scent. One is told it keeps the mice down.”

He dreaded to dim that smile, and yet he had to know the truth. “Does your family pity you because they regard this ambition as folly?”

Any reasonable ducal English family ought to.

Her smile didn’t fade; it winked out like a snuffed candle. “I am not so stupid as to confide such a thing to people who think only in terms of when the next Windham baby will come along. These are the same relations who will not allow me to be alone at Morelands with thirty servants in attendance if my parents tarry in London. I am shuffled about, a spinster in training, because even thirty servants and the very gates of Morelands itself cannot guard my antique and pointless virtue.”

Elijah was studying her still, his pencil re-creating the clean line of her nose, so he saw that these babies born in such numbers to her siblings made her sad too. He also saw that she likely didn’t know this herself. She protected herself from sadness with a silent, determined anger, and that made him sad too—
for
her
.

And none of these insights, the insights every portraitist resigned himself to and tried to leave behind when a commission was complete, were cheering in the least.

A clock chimed down the hall, and outside, the full darkness of a winter’s night had fallen.

“You’ve had your thirty minutes, Mr. Harrison, and I must change for dinner.” And yet, she did not move, and Elijah’s pencil sketched more quickly. She might flee the honesty of their exchange, but she’d manage her retreat with dignity.

“Another moment.” Now that he knew of her hare-brained scheme to exile herself to the land of cat piss and flirtatious republicans, he was more determined to get her likeness on the page. “Your family doesn’t know about your ambition to travel, so I must conclude they pity you because you have no babies coming along.”

She turned her head, and it was as if the shutter on a lighthouse signal had opened. Her glare was ferocious, wounded, and magnificent, as was her silence.

He caught
her
then, in that single moment of genuine ire—all the ducal drive in her, the female passion, the thwarted artistic sensibility. His hand went still so he might behold her glory, and his mouth made words because he could not stand her heartache.

“Genevieve, I’m sorry. I’m sorry you’ve had to dance with spotty boys when you wanted to be sketching in the British Museum. I’m sorry you were not allowed to make a grand tour of the Continent. I’m sorry you stopped attending Antoine’s classes.”

Though he’d been relieved too. And then last winter, when he’d thought that strutting puppy Honiton had decided to snatch up an unmarried Windham daughter, he’d been rabid to warn the man off.

The battle light in her eyes dimmed to a mere spark, a spark Elijah suspected her family never noted. “Will you let me assist you while you’re working here, Mr. Harrison? Even if I could merely observe, or distract the boys as you sketched them…?”

The humility with which she made her request walloped his senses, which was the only explanation for what came out of his mouth.

When he should have told her that the age of tolerance toward women in the ranks of professional artists had passed, when he should have lectured her about the gratification of the true amateur’s calling… he instead said, “Yes, of course. I would never turn down an artistically knowledgeable assistant. You must join me here whenever you like, to observe, assist, or critique. I’ll enjoy the company.”

Though God help him, how was he to concentrate on a pair of wiggling, sticky little boys, how was he to concentrate on
anything
, when she was in the room?

***

“You could ask him.”

Tristan Leopold Harrison, Marquess of Flint, and father to more children than a sane man could manage, took a sip of holiday libation. The wassail bowl came out earlier and earlier each year as more and more of those children approached adulthood.

His lordship kept his voice down when addressing the second oldest of those children. “I am not asking your brother to come home for Christmas. A man doesn’t need an invitation to come to his own home for the holidays, much less home to the estate he’s going to inherit ere long.”

Across the family parlor from where the gentlemen sat, Lady Charlotte Elizabette’s lips pursed in an expression that presaged a telling silence when her husband escorted her above stairs later. She never scolded, never ranted, and yet, the marchioness always made her opinions known.

“Perhaps I’ll invite him, then.” Joshua suggested this possibility with the casualness of a grown man who knew exactly how to taunt his aging papa. “Or maybe I’ll offer to join him in Town, and take Abner, Silas, Pru, and Solomon with me.”

And like a seasoned papa, his lordship leaned back in his chair and contemplated his drink rather than the prospect of the holidays in exclusively female company. “Any invitation to remove Prudholm from the premises has a strong appeal. Teaching your sisters how to smoke cigars was bad enough, but experimenting with fireworks should have seen him brought up before the assizes for the toll he’s taken on your mother’s nerves.”

At sixteen, Prudholm had spent one term at Cambridge and now considered himself quite the brilliant scientist. Thank God he was the youngest boy, and his older brothers mostly kept him in line.

“Don’t you miss Elijah, Papa?”

Joshua was the family barrister. He’d been arguing with all and sundry since he’d been in dresses, but this tactic—an agile descent into pleading and sentiment—was dastardly.

“I miss your brother every day, and I pray for his well-being every night, as does your mother, who will not thank you for pressing me on this.”

“She
would
thank me. Mama’s too soft-spoken by half.”

If the boy only knew… except Joshua wasn’t a boy. He was a respected member of the legal profession—to the extent any member of that gang of rogues could be respected—and he was going to raise the next Marquess of Flint if Elijah continued to turn his back on his patrimony.

“Your brother and I exchange regular letters in which he asks after and I report upon the well-being of each sibling and relation in our vast and busy family,” Flint said. “He also gets copies of the steward’s reports, though I’m not supposed to know about that, and neither are you. Elijah has had many opportunities to announce that he will join us for Christmas and has not indicated a willingness to do so. I must respect his wishes in this regard.”

Joshua took on the thoughtful expression that made him most closely resemble his older brother. “You, my lord, miss him until you’re cross-eyed with it. The girls hardly recall what he looks like, and if you make good on your perennial threats to die of exasperation with your offspring, he’ll become their guardian.”

“He is heir to the title. Of course he’ll become their guardian.”

Joshua crossed long booted legs and ran a hand through the dark wavy hair her ladyship had bequeathed to all the children. “Little Gwynn makes her bow this Season.”

A man who took stewardship of his acres seriously, a man who had no patience with the ordeal of the social Season, needed another sip of stout potation before he parsed out the ramifications of this half-yawned, diabolical aside.

“You’re saying Elijah will run into his sister at some Society gathering, and there will be awkwardness.”

And dear little Gwynn—all nearly six feet of her—would be mortified not to be recognized by her brother, which was a sorry, sorry possibility given how quickly and recently she’d acquired her statuesque proportions.

“I don’t foresee any difficulty, Papa, unless she recognizes him first, which grows increasingly unlikely when she hasn’t seen him to speak of for what… ten years?”

“Nine.” And eight months, except for some chance sightings or cordial visits in Town. Where in all of creation had Elijah come by such stubbornness?

Joshua eased to his feet and ambled over to the punch bowl. The twins had pleaded a cold and gone above stairs, there to no doubt devour a lurid novel provided by their indulgent elders. The older girls were playing cards over in the corner, cheating shamelessly and gambling like sailors on shore leave—for hairpins. Pru, Abner, Silas, and Solomon were drinking more punch than they ought to and playing their own version of whist for God knew what stakes, while her ladyship presided over the whole with a serene beauty that never dimmed in her husband’s eyes.

And yet, Charlotte was sad. Damn that stubborn boy; he was making his mama sad.

His lordship rose, snatched up his empty glass, and joined Joshua at the punch bowl. “You are a rapscallion and a pestilence, Joshua Harrison.”

Joshua took his father’s cup and ladled more of the Brew of Misrule into it. “Those qualities can be inherited, Papa. Excellent punch.”

“It’s my father’s recipe, and while I will not invite Elijah to join his own family at his own home over the holidays, where any proper fellow would know
he’s welcome unconditionally at any time
, I can hardly take exception to correspondence between siblings that extends felicitations of the season, can I?”