Charity Begins at Home (17 page)

"There it is, my studio."

They had come at the Hall from the back, and Charity shaded her eyes to see where he was indicating. "Oh, the old sunroom! We used to have puppet shows there when Kenny's little cousins came to visit. He used to chase us outdoors onto the balcony, and we'd climb down that oak tree to escape him."

The preserving oak still spread its branches over the balcony. She put an affectionate hand on its sturdy trunk. "You see, the rungs are still here. Francis nailed them in, for he feared Ned and I would come to grief climbing down. Even Kenny made use of them when he wanted to sneak out at night."

She gazed nostalgically up at the branches, recalling those childhood adventures, when the almost-grown Kenny was just as boyish as Ned and Francis was left to supply the mature wisdom. "We had such fun."

She glanced guiltily at Lord Braden, wondering if he had had such childhood exploits. From what she knew of his life, she thought it unlikely. But he gave no sign of feeling deprived. Instead, he grinned at her. "It's unfortunate that you are too old and too dignified now to make the ascent."

Charity had never in her life been able to turn down a challenge, even one she knew was unintended. "Too old'? You are mistaken, Lord Braden. I climbed a tree only last week to rescue a kitten. It's all a matter of skill—and privacy."

"Privacy?"

"Surely you know the rule—boys up first, girls down first."

Lord Braden considered this somberly, his brows drawn together in a frown. "When I used to climb trees, propriety wasn't really a consideration. But if you insist—"

She had never really supposed he would do it. He was lithe enough, of course, but it was rather at odds with a man's dignity to climb a tree. He didn't even take the easy route, up the rungs, but caught the first branches and swung himself up, something she in her encumbering skirts could never attempt. He was well into the sheltering branches before she remembered his hands, which were necessary not only to finish the whale triptych but also to fence that Saturday. "Be careful of your hands, do! Don't scrape them on the bark "

His protest floated down from the upper branches. "Really, Miss Calder, I do know how to climb a tree without risking permanent disability."

She strained to look up through the concealing leaves but did not see him again until he dropped onto the balcony and leaned over the wall. He was laughing at her, holding his hand out as if she might jump up and grasp it. "Are you coming? Or have you decided to take the long way through the house?"

Charity sensed the Italian warmth now in his cool voice, the vowels were a bit longer, the consonants gentle. She recalled how tense he had been when they first met—was it less than a fortnight ago? He must have felt so inadequate to the task before him, and he was, like Charity, the sort to hate feeling inadequate. But now he was quick to laugh, quick to tease her about being a coward, showing a playful side she thought he usually kept hidden.

I have been good for him, she realized, warming at the thought. She was used to having a positive effect on people; it was rather her purpose in life. But to make Lord Braden carefree, unreserved, that was especially gladdening.

Now, laughing down at her from above, he looked like one of his own paintings of young gods, slim and golden in the noon sun. He had taken off his cravat and left the lawn shirt open at the neck. Charity's gaze lingered on that tantalizing triangle of chest, with its suggestion of dark curling hair, usually kept concealed. How came this to be tanned as golden as his face? She dropped her eyes, the heat rising in her cheeks as the likely answer came to her. On the Italian coast, she imagined, he dressed even more casually.

It signified adventure, that careless dress, allowing quick escapes and freedom from restraint. She sensed again that foreignness surrounding him like a faint glow, as if the heat of the Italian sun still radiated from his body. She knew he was a gentleman, no rogue at all, but somehow he seemed more hazardous than the proper—or even the improper—English gentlemen she knew.

His recklessness was contagious. She set aside any notions of modesty and decorum and glanced around to make sure the boxwoods encircling the garden concealed tier misdemeanor. Then she gathered her skirt in one hand and with the other took hold of the trunk and climbed up the rungs. She lost her sunbonnet before she reached the balcony. But her light sandals didn't slip off, and her feet stayed secure on the thick branch until, taking the hand Lord Braden held out to her, she dropped lightly over the wall.

Once she found her footing on the stone floor, he released her. But that momentary contact was enough. She found that his fingers were callused, rough and smooth at the same time, and left behind a trail of heat on her hand. His merest touch thrills me, she told herself. But along with that illicit thrill came disquiet; she didn't know if she were quite ready to be thrilled, or if, indeed, this was the right sort of man to thrill her, this dark solitary man who was so foreign to her experience. Of course, she reminded herself, I wouldn't want to be so reduced that an ordinary man would thrill me.

"What fun! I hope the doors aren't locked, after all our work!"

But at Lord Braden's touch, the French doors swung open smoothly, and she saw that the old sunroom had undergone a transformation. This studio bristled with evidence of artistic activity, and Charity, usually disoriented by mess, found the chaos oddly appealing. Forgetting for a moment the man who created the place, she squeezed between two easels and made a slow circuit around the sun-filled room, examining each unfamiliar item.

The shelves along one wall, once used for repotting plants, held the artist's supplies: jars of oil paints stuck on sheets of an Italian newspaper, a box of brushes, a clutch of palette knives, a jug of linseed oil with a wide cork stopper. A pitcher and ewer, the water a muddy gray, took up most of the marble surface of a console table. Next to it was a jar of brushes soaking in turpentine. She wrinkled her nose at the sharp smell and went on, stepping carefully to keep from catching a heel in the dropcloths that protected the plank floor.

She stopped at a table strewn with charcoal pencils, their box lying discarded on the floor. She retrieved it and gathered up the pencils, tapping them on the table to even them and then boxing them up. She looked up to Lord Braden's laughing eyes.

"I wondered how long it would take you to begin tidying."

Charity flushed and placed the box of pencils back on the table. "I'm sorry. It's just a habit."

"Don't apologize! It's rather endearing, actually."

Perhaps it was only a half-compliment, but it warmed Charity. He wasn't a flirtatious man, given to rhapsodies and raptures whenever a lady was in earshot. No, usually he had that slight formality she attributed to his foreign heritage. His relaxed bearing with her was even more of a compliment.

"I do like your studio," she said, clasping her hands firmly behind her back out of temptation's way. "I can see now that underneath the disorder, it is organized in a fashion to suit you. I will wager your last studio was arranged much the same way."

He gazed around him in some surprise, as if he had never really seen this room before. "Indeed, I think you are right. I like to keep all my supplies accessible, not away in some cabinet." He crossed to an easel and pulled the cover off, saying over his shoulder, "And I like a southern light. I've already chosen the room I'll use for my studio at Braden, and it is very like this. But then," he added thoughtfully, studying the painting, a barely started still life, "I don't know if Braden Hall is up to this sort of chaos. It's very precise. A Palladian house, you know. Perfectly symmetric. Geometric order. Manicured and squared lawns."

"You must have a very good steward," Charity commented. "Especially as—" She broke off before she said something impolite about absentee landowners, but Braden looked up from the canvas to laugh.

"Oh, your brother's already taken me to task for that. Says the steward should have robbed me blind, were he not a devout Methodist. But he's done me better than I deserve, I suppose. I should be pleased. But—"

"But?" She wished he wouldn't examine the painting so minutely, that he would move away so she could see it, too.

"But it doesn't look much like a home. Too perfect. Nothing to soften that stark facade."

This, at least, was an art Charity knew something about. "You need a few great flowering trees right in front. Two on one side, perhaps, and one on the other, to break up the uniformity. There is a dome, I imagine?" At his nod, she said wistfully, "I love domes in houses. If only we didn't have a Tudor house—a dome would never fit in a Tudor. Then," she added briskly, returning to his landscaping problem, "a nicely overgrown garden along the drive, tall flowers, lilac bushes."

"Flowers will not be enough to make that museum a home."

"Oh, no. Only living in it will. But once you move in, prop your paintings against the wall, and toss some rugs about, it will no longer be quite so perfect. A house can only be a home when there are people there to muss it a bit."

Finally, with a bit of ceremony, he yanked the cover off a large wide canvas. "This one is closer to completion, but I've been neglecting it of late."

The painting was a seascape, much like the one she had seen in the Royal Academy exhibition, a pretty whitewashed village around a harbor filled with fishing boats. It was a picture full of light and color, and very charming. "Oh, that's lovely. Is that Ferendisi again? You know it very well, don't you?"

"We stayed at a villa there every winter when I was a child. And I still winter there."

Every winter in Italy? No wonder he felt alien here. "Surely you didn't continue after the war started up again."

Lord Braden's expression became abstract, and he gazed at his painting as if someone else had painted it and he were seeing it for the first time. "Actually, we did. We were trapped for two years when I was thirteen, when the French took Naples."

British subjects in occupied Italy—it must have been terrifying for a sensitive boy. Charity almost reached out to touch him, as if she could soothe away the memory somehow. But she drew back her hand and looked back at the sunny painting. "How did you escape arrest?"

"Oh, Mother's cousin is an archbishop, and so—" that unexpectedly merry grin flashed, and the abstraction was gone—"well-acquainted with lowlife sorts. He got us forged passports and smuggled out letters to my father in Oxford and bank drafts back to us. We weren't in any real danger. In fact, it was rather a lark. Anna got to dance with all the defeated officers who had gone to cover in Lecce, and I spent the time in Florence, studying art. My teacher was in a direct line from one of Leonardo's students." Thoughtfully he added, "The da Vinci connection has added a certain cachet to my reputation as no one else at the Royal Academy school was able to study in Italy during the war."

To Charity, who hadn't even been to France except for one weekend after the war ended, it seemed a most nomadic life. She didn't know whether she envied him or pitied him. "But you must have found it hard to accustom yourself to England on your return."

"Oh, children are adaptable. My mother never learned to feel at home when we came back to England, it's true. Too damp and cold." A wave of his hand included the pretty vista outside—the tender green backdrop of an English spring, the dots of lilac and pink and yellow flowers, the clusters of tan and brown houses, the gentle blue sky. "And all these misty pastels. She used to say the landscape here made her drowsy."

It was odd, she thought, that sometimes Lord Braden spoke of the English as an alien race. With a flash of intuition she wondered if in Italy he spoke of the Italians the same way. But she did not voice this speculation directly. "Unlike those shocking primary colors you have in Italy?"

She knew she had spoken his thoughts when he rewarded her with a quick grin. "Precisely."

The next painting was a closer view of the same harbor, but the entire tone was different. It was at sunset, and the colors were duskier, cooler. Charity reached out to touch the mast of a fishing boat, its sails furled, its deck deserted. The paint was still damp but didn't smudge under her curious touch.

"Such a lonely view, isn't it? Looking back to the harbor where everyone works. But everyone's gone home for supper and left the boats behind."

Lord Braden didn't like this interpretation, she could tell from his frown. "A painting's a painting. It's not a story."

Well, she saw a story in it, a story about an artist and his necessary isolation from everyday life. "But it captures a moment surely. There's a story in that moment and in why you chose to paint that moment."

"I chose this moment because of the composition. The harbor and the beach are the horizontals, and the masts and cliff the verticals. And the light links it all. It doesn't have a story to tell, except about light and shadows and heights and widths."

She had to admit that she didn't have the sort of mind that viewed a scene and saw geometric shapes, and that perhaps the audience saw what the artist never intended. But about the next picture's meaning, there was no doubt:

A ship afire against the black night. The sails were long gone, the masts charred and broken, residual flames flickering along the hull. The smoke was dissipating into shadows in the darkness. It was truly a moment suspended, an interlude between death and burial.