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Authors: Patricia Cabot

Tags: #Romance, #Adult, #Historical

Portrait of My Heart (36 page)

BOOK: Portrait of My Heart
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Maggie hadn’t seen Anne in nearly a year, and she did not think her sister looked particularly well. Then again, Maggie didn’t suppose she looked all that fit herself. The shock of seeing the Princess Usha at her exhibition had been a hard one. Hadn’t she just been standing there, entertaining the thought that Jeremy might have decided Usha was right for him after all? Then, to see him striding toward her with that grim expression on his face, with the princess just a few feet behind …
Well, Maggie had never felt faint in her life, but at that moment, her knees went weak.
Fortunately, Augustin had noticed, and had swiftly steered her toward a vacant bench. Sinking down onto the soft cushion, Maggie barely had time to gather her wits about her before Alistair Cartwright, of all people, was dancing nervously in front of her.
“Sorry we’re late, Maggie,” he said, in his usual jovial manner. “His Grace hustled us out of Yorkshire so fast, we felt sure we’d make it by seven. Only the damned roads were coated in ice, and it ended up taking forever to get from the train station … .”
Even then, Maggie didn’t really understand. Anne had actually had to step into her line of vision before she began to understand. Her thoughts seemed to be coming so slowly, as if one by one, they were squeezing through some narrow door in her mind. When Anne sat down on the bench beside
her, and lifted her hand, Maggie still didn’t quite understand what was going on.
“Oh, Maggie.” Anne’s gloved fingers nervously plucked at hers. “Are you … May I … speak to you?”
Maggie, a little surprised at her sister’s hesitant manner—Anne, though shy around strangers, was generally quite forthright when it came to family members—said vaguely, “Why, yes. Of course.”
Anne, with a nervous glance at her husband, licked her pale lips and said, “What I’ve come to say will only take a minute. I don’t … I don’t want to keep you from your party—”
Maggie was starting to come around now. She was beginning to notice things again. She saw, for instance, that her father was perched on a bench very like her own, and that Mr. Corman was fanning him and waving a snifter of brandy under his nose. And that Augustin was talking to the critic from
The Times,
moving his arms enthusiastically as he described something. And that, across the room, Jeremy was talking to the princess’s interpreter.
“I don’t expect you to forgive me for the way I’ve treated you, Maggie,” Anne was saying, in a soft voice. “I realize I was wrong now, and that excuses are only that … excuses. I’ve never been like you, Maggie. I’ve never been very confident or outspoken. The only brave thing I ever did was marry Alistair, and I only did that because he made it so easy for me. He pursued me … it was so simple to say yes. And since that was the only courageous act I’d ever undertaken, it … hurt me to have failed so miserably at it—”
“Failed at it?” That caught Maggie’s attention. “What are you talking about? You’re the perfect wife, Anne, and the perfect mother. It’s a wonder to me my nieces and nephews aren’t completely spoiled, the way you coddle them.”
Anne said, in a voice so low Maggie could barely hear it, “But I managed to lose so many of their brothers and sisters. How could I not treat the ones that lived so preciously?”
Maggie felt a pang of pity for her sister that was so sharp, it was almost physical. “Is
that
why you think of yourself as a failure? Because you miscarried? Anne, that’s ridiculous.
You can’t blame yourself for that. And you know Alistair would never—”
“Yes.” Anne held up a gloved hand, as if to ward off the onslaught of Maggie’s words. “I know. I suppose I always knew, deep down inside. But it’s only today that I realized how much Alistair cares. Enough to let the Duke of Rawlings transport us to London, practically at gunpoint, in an effort to reunite us with you.”
“Gunpoint.” Maggie did not laugh. “Do you hate me that much, Anne, that you’d only come to see me on pain of death?”
“I believe I did, once,” Anne said honestly. “After all, you did what I was never brave enough to do: You followed the desires of your own heart. I’m not saying there’s anything I’d rather be than Alistair Cartwright’s wife, and mother to his children. Only that … I lacked the courage to find out. Mother knew it. That’s why out of all of us, she liked you best. You were the only brave one. Nothing frightened you, not the dark, not mice, not heights, nothing—”
“Anne,” Maggie interrupted, thinking of that day, five years earlier, in the Rawlings Manor stables. “That isn’t true.”
“It is. Of course it is. And I suppose I’ve always resented you for it. It was only natural for Mamma to admire you the most, since you were always so forthright about your desires, for all we tried to warn you to try to curb them. What galled me was that you wanted all of these extraordinary things: you wanted to paint. You wanted to go to Paris. You wanted the Duke of Rawlings—and you always got them. You always got what you wanted, Maggie. And it was hard for someone like me, who never even had the courage to admit to having a heart’s desire, to watch a sister not only admitting to having one, but then attaining it, time after time—”
Maggie said woodenly, “The letter.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The letter Jeremy sent to Herbert Park, after Mamma died.” Maggie spoke with a certainty she did not really feel. “It didn’t go astray, did it? You took it.”
For the first time, Anne looked close to tears. “yes,” she said, with a sob. “I did.”
Maggie shook her head. “Oh, Anne,” she sighed. “How
could
you? I can understand your being upset with me about the way I’d behaved with him, but that letter … . How
could
you?”
“I didn’t … I just didn’t think it was fair.” Anne’s tear-stained face, framed by her beaver-trimmed bonnet, looked pathetically small. “You’d always had everything, everything you ever wanted. And to have a duke, too … it didn’t seem fair.”
Maggie, more hurt than she was willing to admit, looked down at the tops of her slippers.
“I know it was wrong of me, Maggie. I didn’t realize how wrong until this morning, when Jeremy admitted he’d asked you to marry him all those years ago … . I had no idea that your feelings for him were … returned. I mean, I always knew that you loved him, but that he … well, Maggie, you can imagine how very badly I felt. I know you won’t believe me, but when I destroyed that letter of his, I really did think I was doing you a favor. Never in a million years would I have dreamt that he’d proposed to you. Why on earth did you say no?”
Maggie just shook her head. “I’m not as brave as you credit me with being, Anne. I said no out of fear, pure and simple.”
Anne’s eyes widened, just a little. “I never would have thought it possible. You, who never feared anything.”
“I was afraid of a lot of things, Anne,” Maggie said. Suddenly, she felt very tired. “I just never let on.”
“Well. Then you ought to have become an actress, not a painter. Can you ever forgive me, Maggie?”
Maggie was about to do so, without hesitation, when a gunshot tore through the gallery, causing a plump arts patron, who’d been busily pretending not to hear the interesting conversation taking place between the lady artist and her sister, to squeal with alarm. Anne started, and cried, “Good God! What was
that?”
But Maggie knew. It was Jeremy’s assassin. He had found him. Found him vulnerable at last.
She was up and on her feet in a split second. While the rest of the crowd was stampeding for the exits, frantically trying to get away from the flying bullets, Maggie was hurling herself toward the corner of the room from which the smell of charred gunpowder was wafting. She had to employ her knees and elbows against the well-dressed Londoners struggling for the doors, in order to make known her desire to get past. Finally, with her breathing erratic and her heart in her throat, she stumbled across the last velvet train, and found herself facing an extraordinary scene.
Jeremy, one hand flung to the side of his head, had whirled around to face his assailant, in whose hand the pistol was still smoking. Mercifully, the bullet seemed only to have nicked the duke’s ear—the amount of blood that had already soaked into the collar of his shirt was horrifying—and gone on to embed itself into the painting behind him—the portrait, Maggie realized, of Jeremy. There was now a rather large hole in the chest of the portrait of Jeremy, just below the last ruffle of his cravat, right where his heart would have been … .
But the most shocking thing of all, to Maggie, at least, was not the wound Jeremy had sustained, or the damage the bullet had done, but the identity of Jeremy’s would-be assassin. For it was not Augustin, as Jeremy’s valet had insisted, though Augustin was standing there, seemingly transfixed with terror, a round-eyed Berangere clinging to his arm.
No, it was
Sanjay.
Sanjay, the princess’s polite, even-tempered translator, who even now looked quite apologetic as he trained the still-smoking derringer at Jeremy’s chest.
“I am so sorry,” Sanjay said, sounding as if he meant it. “I do not have the world’s best aim. I was trying to kill you—you are a very difficult man to kill, Your Grace—and succeeded’ only in causing you pain. Never fear, however. This next bullet should put an end to all your misery—”
Next bullet? Maggie inhaled to scream in horror, ready to throw herself at the tall man’s arm, when Jeremy brought his
hand away from his ear, revealing a goodly amount of blood and a V-shaped nick in the lobe, and demanded, in a furious voice,
“Me? Me?
What the devil do you want to kill
me
for? What did I ever do to
you?”
Sanjay smiled, and Maggie noticed for the first time how white his teeth looked against his brown skin. “Why, I would have thought that was perfectly obvious. You dishonored the Star of Jaipur.”
Maggie swung her terrified gaze to Usha, and was amazed to see that the Indian girl looked every bit as stunned as anyone else in the room. She was staring at her translator with wide, fearful eyes, both of her gloved hands pressed to her cheeks.
“Dishonored the—” Jeremy rolled his eyes. “Now, really, I’ve had just about as much of this as a man can take. I haven’t dishonored anybody. If anybody dishonored anybody around here, the princess dishonored herself, following me around and making such a nuisance of herself. She isn’t in love with me. She doesn’t even want
me.
It’s just my title she wants, and my money.
I’m
the one who’s been dishonored, really, if you think about it.”
“How
dare
you?” Sanjay, though he’d seemed almost eerily calm before, now began to shake with anger. Maggie saw the pistol begin to waver a little from side to side. “How
dare
you speak so of the woman I love?”
This was a development that no one, most especially the princess, who had lowered her hands from her face and was now gazing at Sanjay as if he were a newly unwrapped gift, seemed to have expected.
“You love me?”
the princess squeaked, in English that was every bit as clipped and unaccented as Maggie’s.
Sanjay tossed her an impatient look. “Of course I love you. Why do you think—” Then he froze, his mouth forming a little O of surprise that, had the situation not been so dire, might have been comical. “You speak
English?”
“Of course I speak English.” The princess looked disgusted. “I’m not
stupid.”
Sanjay seemed to go quite pale beneath his deep tan. “But … if you speak English, Your Highness, then why …
why have you pretended so long that you cannot?”
The princess rolled her eyes. “Really, Denish,” she said. “Are you so dense that you cannot figure that out for yourself?”
Apparently he was that dense, since he stammered, “But … but …”
Princess Usha looked thoroughly annoyed. “Put that pistol away,” she said sharply. “Who gave you permission to murder the colonel?
I
certainly did not.”
Sanjay hesitated, though only for a second. Still, it was a second too long for Jeremy’s valet, Peters, who stepped suddenly from behind a pillar, his own pistol trained upon the other man’s heart.
“You ’eard the princess, fella,” Peters said. “Put the piece away.”
To Maggie’s very great relief, the translator dropped the gun into the valet’s outstretched hand. Looking satisfied, Peters lowered his own weapon, then said casually to Jeremy, “Sorry, Colonel. I was watchin’ the frog-eater, like you asked. Never thought fer a minute the translator might’ve been the one behind it all.”
“Quite all right,” Jeremy said, waving a hand dismissively.
But it wasn’t all right with Sanjay. “I only did it for you, my princess,” he exclaimed with heartfelt emotion. “You cannot know how long I have loved you, and how much I wished to kill this cocky fellow here for so callously failing to return your love!”
Princess Usha snorted. Maggie stared, but there really was no other way to describe the sound that came out of the Star of Jaipur’s mouth. She had actually snorted, as any English girl might have done, when confronted by such tripe.
“
I?
Love
him?”
she sneered, nodding toward Jeremy, who by now had wrenched a handkerchief out of his waistcoat pocket, and was holding it to his ear. “You must be joking. I could never love
him.”
BOOK: Portrait of My Heart
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