His at Night (22 page)

“Oh, no, she’s fine. You left her room key about, so I visited with her earlier while you were still abed. We even had our breakfast together.”

He had to be joking. This was a man who forgot that he needed to change his egg-stained trousers by the time he went from the breakfast parlor to his own room. How could he possibly have remembered her aunt?

“I invited her to come with us today, to call on your uncle. But she—”

“Excuse me?” Her head spun. “I thought…for a moment I thought you said we are going to call on my uncle today.”

“Well, yes, that is the plan indeed.”

She could not speak. She could only stare at him.

He patted her on the arm. “Don’t you fret; your uncle will be thrilled to see you respectably married—you
were
getting a bit long in the tooth, my dear. And I
am
a marquess, you know, a man of considerable stature and influence.”

“But—my—she—” Elissande stopped. In her fear she was stammering. “Mrs. Douglas, what did she say?”

He urged her into her blouse. “Well, I told her that we would be delighted if she could accompany us, but that I understood she must still be weary from her travels yesterday. She said she would prefer to rest today.”

Elissande barely noticed that he was buttoning her blouse. “I thought she would,” she said. “But don’t you see, I can’t leave her. She doesn’t do well in my absence.”

“Nonsense. I introduced her to my housekeeper and they are getting on famously.”

“Your
housekeeper?”
She supposed he must have one, since he could scarcely be expected to keep his own house. But in the rush of the past thirty-six hours, she had not once thought about where he lived or what his household arrangements must be like. “Your housekeeper is in town?”

“Of course. I don’t usually close my town house until early in September.”

He had a house in town and they were at a hotel?

“I’d like to see my aunt,” she said. She had little faith in his ability to hire good servants.

However, Mrs. Dilwyn, his housekeeper, turned out to be quite the pleasant surprise. She was a tiny dumpling of a woman in her late forties, soft-spoken and meticulous. In her notebook she had recorded everything that had transpired since her arrival at eight o’clock in the morning: the amount of fluid
Aunt Rachel had ingested, her visits to the water closet, even the precise number of drops of laudanum she had taken—Elissande noticed she’d taken three more drops than usual, no doubt to erase the horror Lord Vere had brought about by proposing to take her back to Highgate Court.

“See, I told you,” said her husband. “Mrs. Dilwyn will quite pamper Mrs. Douglas. She spoils me extravagantly whenever I’ve the slightest sniffle.”

“My mum was bedridden the last two years of her life—Lord Vere was kind enough to allow her to share my rooms, so I could care for her,” said Mrs. Dilwyn.

“I quite enjoyed having her about. She used to tell me I was the handsomest man alive.”

“Oh, you are, sir,” said Mrs. Dilwyn with what appeared to be genuine fondness. “You are.”

Lord Vere preened.

Mrs. Dilwyn leaned closer to Elissande and lowered her voice. “Mrs. Douglas, might she be a bit irregular? I know my mum was.”

“Yes, unfortunately she is,” said Elissande. “She does not like vegetables and she hates prunes.”

“My mum hated prunes too. I will see if Mrs. Douglas might like a stewed apricot better.”

“Thank you,” said Elissande, half-dazed. She was not accustomed to having anyone share her burdens.

She did have a look at Aunt Rachel, who was dozing in bed. Then Lord Vere hurried her out of the bedroom and out of Aunt Rachel’s suite.

“Quickly now, or we’ll miss our train.”

She made a last-ditch appeal as he marched her down the corridor toward the lift. “Must we? So soon?”

“Of course,” he answered. “Don’t you want the man who raised you to meet your very fine husband? I must tell you I’m quite excited. I’ve never met an uncle-in-law before. We shall get along splendidly, he and I.”

Freddie owed much of his development as a painter to Angelica. She was the one who had seen his pencil sketches and recommended that he try his hand at watercolor and, then later, oil painting. She’d read the daunting book on the chromatography of oil paints and summarized it for him. She’d introduced him to the works of the Impressionists, with the art journals she’d brought back from her family’s holidays in France.

He had never been able to work with anyone next to him, except her. From the beginning she had been there with him, usually with a thick tome on her lap, absorbed in her own interests. From time to time she might read aloud from her book: the scientific reason why sugar of lead in paints resulted in the rapid darkening of the finished painting, a spicy sonnet from Michelangelo to a beautiful young man, an account of the infamous Salon des Refusés of 1863.

So in a way, it was inordinately familiar to work with her in proximity.

Except for her nakedness, that was.

She lay on her side on the bed he’d had his servants install in his studio, her back to him, her head propped up on one hand, reading
The Treasures of Art in Great Britain
.

Her hair fell loose, a tumble of umber locks interspersed with shades of raw sienna. Her skin gleamed, lit from within. The softness of her bottom made his fingers grip hard at his pencil. And that was before he even took into consideration her breasts and the shadowed triangle between her thighs reflected in the mirror she’d strategically placed on the far side of herself.

He had to remind himself every other minute that his purpose was art and the celebration of beauty. The comeliness of her body was as much a part of nature as the smooth bark of a birch or the sunlit ripples of a summer lake. He should have no difficulty appreciating it as form, color, interplay of light.

Yet he wanted nothing more than to throw down his pencil, walk up to this particular combination of form, color, and interplay of light, and—

He looked down at his sketchbook instead. Not that it was much help. He’d produced several drawings already, one a general outline of the entire tableau, one a study of her profile and her hair, one of her midsection, and one of what he saw in the mirror.

“Do you know, Freddie,” she said, “before I returned to England, I thought surely your experience with Lady Tremaine would have left you brooding
and resentful. But you are the same man you always were.”

It was just like Angelica to raise unexpected topics. He looked at the empty canvas he had prepared.

“It’s been a long time, Angelica. Four years.”

“But are you completely recovered from her?”

“She wasn’t an illness.”

“From the loss of her then?”

“She was never truly mine.” He took a sharper pencil from his box. “I think I knew from the very beginning that we were on borrowed time.”

He’d been gloriously happy with Lady Tremaine. But there had always been an element of deep anxiety to his happiness. When she had reconciled with her husband, he’d been heartbroken but not bitter—because it had not been a betrayal, but only the end of a wonderful era of his life.

He flipped to a new page in his sketchbook and drew Angelica’s shapely calves, wishing his hands were his pencils, that as the drawing took shape, he could slide his palms across her cool, soft skin.

Lady Tremaine had once told him that Angelica was in love with him. Freddie rarely questioned Lady Tremaine’s pronouncements, but this particular one had come when Lady Tremaine had decided to reunite with her husband, when she no doubt wished that Freddie too would settle down with someone. Anyone.

If Angelica had been in love with him she had certainly said nothing of it, ever—and she had never been
one to censor her words around him. And even if Lady Tremaine had been right, four years had passed, a long time for affections to remain constant from far away.

He glanced back at Angelica. Her head was bent, her attention absorbed in her book. She was even jotting down notations in the margins. A seduction this wasn’t.

“I think that’s enough for today,” he said, closing his sketchbook. “I’ll step outside.”

Angelica would not say that she had been in love with Freddie forever. Forever meant the mist of time, the blurred years of childhood. Her love had a definite moment of origin at a much later point, when she had been seventeen, he eighteen.

He’d come home following his first year at Christ Church. And she, set to join Lady Margaret Hall that autumn, had plopped herself down on a picnic blanket not far from him as he painted on the bank of the River Stour, to ask him as many questions about Oxford as it pleased her and to critique him as he worked. (She didn’t paint herself, but she had an excellent eye. And she was exceedingly proud of the fact that she’d been the person who’d explained to him, four years prior, that one did not use pure white for highlights, but a paler shade of the color one wished to highlight.)

She had been eating a tangy, firm-fleshed peach,
tossing pebbles into the river—hardly wider than a bathtub—and telling him he needed to mix more blue into his green if he wanted to capture the proper deep hue of summer foliage. She was never sure whether he heard her on that particular tip, because he did not say anything, but instead clamped the filbert brush he was using between his teeth and reached for an angled brush.

Then and there lightning struck. She stared at him as if she’d never seen him before, her oldest friend all grown-up, and wanted nothing more than to be that filbert brush, to feel his lips on her, and his tongue, and the firm pressure of his teeth.

But whereas she’d been a confidently commanding friend, always certain that their friendship would gracefully weather all the advice and criticism she fusilladed his way, she’d proved completely hopeless as a seductress.

He did not notice the new frocks and hats she bought for enchanting him. He did not grasp that her effort to teach him to dance better was to give him an easy opening to kiss her. And when she talked excessively of some other man, in the hope of arousing jealousy on Freddie’s part, he only looked at her quizzically and asked her was this not the same man whom she could not stand earlier.

The better approach would have been to confess her love and declare herself as a candidate for his hand. But the more her subtler efforts at winning his heart failed, the more cowardly she became. And just when she’d come to believe that perhaps he
simply could not form a romantic attachment to an independent woman, he had to fall for the glamorous and audacious Lady Tremaine, who cared for no one’s opinion but her own.

When Lady Tremaine had left Freddie to go back to her husband, Angelica’s chance had finally come. He was distraught. He was vulnerable. He needed someone to take Lady Tremaine’s place in his life. But when she’d gone to him, she’d stupidly said,
I told you so
, and he had asked her, in no uncertain terms, to leave him alone.

She finished dressing. He was outside the studio, waiting for her. During the four years she’d been away, he’d lost the baby fat that had still clung to him when he’d been twenty-four. And while he would never be quite as chiseled as Penny, she found him incredibly lovely, his features as gentle as his nature.

Even when he’d been chubbier, she’d still found him incredibly lovely.

“Can I offer you a cup of tea?” he asked.

“You may,” she said. “But I’d like to return your favor first. Are the photographs you took of the painting ready?”

“They are still in the darkroom.”

“Let’s see them.”

His studio was on the top floor, to take advantage of the light. His darkroom was one floor below, about eight feet by six feet in dimension, not much bigger than a closet. In the amber-brown glow of a safelight, the apparatuses for development were neatly laid out, with the sink, the baths, and the negative lamp along
one wall, a worktable along another. Bottles of clearly labeled chemicals lined shelves built into the walls.

“When did you assemble a darkroom here?” He had taken up photography after her departure—after Lady Tremaine’s departure, to be more precise. Once he’d sent Angelica a photograph of himself and she’d pasted it into her diary.