More than a Mistress/No Man's Mistress (29 page)

“I always enjoyed church,” she said quietly. “And there are always blessings for which to be thankful.”

He laughed softly.

Most often during the afternoons he painted. He did not want after all, he decided, to paint just her face. He wanted to paint
her
, as she was. Jane had looked sharply at him when he said that, and he had raised his eyebrows.

“You think I am going to drape you in a lascivious pose on the floor, Jane, dressed only in your hair?” he asked. “I would put you to better use than to paint you if I did that, believe me. As I will show you tonight. Yes, definitely. Tonight we will have candles and nakedness and hair, and I will show you how to pose for me like the Siren you could be if you set your mind to it. I will paint you at your embroidery. That is when you are most yourself.” He gazed narrow-eyed at her. “Quiet, industrious, elegant, engaged in creating a work of art.”

And so he painted as she stitched, both of them silent. He always stripped off his coat and waistcoat before he began and donned a large, loose shirt over his good one. As the days passed it became smudged and streaked with paint.

He would not let her see the painting until it was finished.

“I let you see my embroidery,” she reminded him.

“I asked and you said yes,” he replied. “You asked and I said no.”

To which logic there was no further argument.

She worked at her embroidery, but she watched him
too. Covertly, of course. If she looked too directly or stopped work too long, he frowned and looked distracted and grumbled at her. It was hard sometimes to realize that this man who shared her most intimate space with such mutual ease was the same man who had once told her he would make her wonder if starvation would not be better than working for him. The infamous, heartless Duke of Tresham.

He had the soul of an artist. Music had been trapped within him most of his life. She had not yet seen any product of his brush, but she recognized the total absorption in his work of the true artist. Much of the harshness and cynicism disappeared from his face. He looked younger, more conventionally handsome.

And entirely lovable.

But it was not until the fourth evening that he really began to talk, to let out in words the person who had lurked behind the haughty, confident, restless, wicked facade he had shown the world all his adult life.

H
E WAS ENJOYING THE
novelty of being in love, though he kept reminding himself that it was
just
novelty, that soon it would be over and he would be on safe, familiar ground again. But it saddened him, at the same time as it reassured him, that Jane would ever look to him just like any other beautiful woman he had once enjoyed and tired of, that the time would come when the thought of her, of
being
with her, both in bed and out, would not fill him with such a welling of gladness that it seemed he must have taken all the sunshine inside himself.

His sexual passion for her grew lustier as the week advanced. He could not be satisfied with the almost
chaste encounters of their first two times together, but set out to teach her—and himself—different, more carnal, more prolonged delights. The previous week he might have exulted in the bed sport with his new mistress and proceeded with the rest of his life as usual. But it was not the previous week. It was
this
week. And this week there was so much more than just bed sport. Indeed, he suspected that bed was good between them just because there was so much else.

He dared do things he had craved as a boy—play the pianoforte, paint, dream, let his mind drift into realms beyond the merely practical. He was frustrated by his painting and exhilarated by it. He could not capture the essence of her, perhaps because he looked too hard for it and thought too much about it, he realized at last. And so he relearned what had once been instinctive with him—to observe not so much with his senses or even his mind but with the mindless, wordless aspect of himself that was itself part of the essence it sought. He learned to stop forcing his art to his will. He learned that to create, he somehow had to allow creation to proceed through him.

He would not have understood the concept if he had ever verbalized it. But he had learned that words were not always adequate to what he yearned to express. He had learned to move beyond words.

Gradually the woman who had become the grand obsession of his life took form on the canvas.

But it was words that finally took him into a new dimension of his relationship with his mistress on the fourth evening. He had been playing the pianoforte; she had been singing. Then she had sent for the tea tray and they had drunk their tea in companionable silence. They
were both sitting idle and relaxed, one on each side of the hearth, she gazing into the fire, he gazing at her.

“There were woods in Acton Park,” he said suddenly, apropos of nothing. “Wooded hills all down the eastern border of the park. Wild, uncultivated, inhabited by woodland creatures and birds. I used to escape there for long hours of solitude until I learned better. It was when I came to realize that I could never paint a tree or a flower or even a blade of grass.”

She smiled rather lazily. For once, he noticed, she was leaning back in her chair, her head against the headrest.

“Why?” she asked.

“I used to run my hands over the trunks of trees,” he explained, “and even stand against them, my arms about them. I used to hold wildflowers in the palm of my hand and run grass blades between my fingers. There was too much there, Jane. Too many dimensions. I am talking nonsense, am I not?”

She shook her head, and he knew she understood.

“I could not even begin to grasp all there was to grasp,” he said. “I used to feel—how does one describe the feeling? Breathless? No, totally inadequate. But there was a feeling, as if I were in the presence of some quite unfathomable mystery. And the strange thing was, I never wanted to fathom it. How is that for lack of human curiosity?”

But she would not let him mock himself. “You were a contemplative,” she said.

“A what?”

“Some people—most people, in fact,” she said, “are content with a relationship with God in which they have Him pinned down with words and in which they address Him in words. It is inevitable that all of us do it to a certain
extent, of course. Words are what humans work with. But a few people discover that God is far vaster than all the words in every language and religion of the world combined. They discover tantalizing near glimpses of God only in silence—in total nothingness. They communicate with God only by giving up all effort to do so.”

“Damn it, Jane,” he said, “I do not even believe in God.”

“Most contemplatives do not,” she said. “Or not at least in any God who can be named or described in words or pictured in the imagination.”

He chuckled. “I used to think it blasphemous,” he said, “to believe that I was more like to find God in the hills than at church. I used to delight in the blasphemy.”

“Tell me about Acton,” she said quietly.

And he did. He talked at length about the house and park, about his brother and sister, about the servants with whom he had had daily contact as a child, including his nurse, about his play, his mischief, his dreams, his fears. He resurrected a life he had long ago relegated to a dim recess of memory, where he had hoped it would fade away altogether.

There was silence at last.

“Jocelyn,” she said after a few minutes, “let it all become part of you again. It
is
whether you wish it to be or not. And you love Acton far more than you realize.”

“Skeletons, Jane,” he told her. “Skeletons. I should not have allowed any of them out. You should not be such a restful companion.”

“None of them seem very threatening,” she commented.

“Ah,” he said, “but you do not know what is crowding
behind them, Jane.” He got to his feet and held out a hand for hers. “Time to put you to work upstairs.” But he grinned at her when her eyes sparked. “And time for you to put me to work. Will you, Jane? Hard, physical labor? I'll show you how to ride me, and you can use me for your pleasure as long as you choose. Come and ride me to exhaustion, Jane. Make me beg for mercy. Make me your slave.”

“What nonsense!” She got to her feet and set her hand in his. “I have no wish to enslave you.”

“But you already have, Jane,” he said meekly, his eyes laughing at her. “And never tell me my words have not aroused you. There is a certain telltale flush in your cheeks and breathlessness in your voice that I am coming to recognize.”

“I have never pretended,” she told him primly, “that duty is not also pleasure.”

“Come and let me show you, then,” he said, “how very pleasurable it will be to do the riding rather than always to be ridden, Jane. Let me show you how to master me.”

“I have no wish—” But she laughed suddenly, a sound of delight he enjoyed coaxing from her. “You are not my master, Jocelyn. Why should I wish to be yours? But very well. Show me how to ride. Is it like a horse? I ride horses rather well. And of course
they
have to be taught who is in charge, wonderful creatures.”

He laughed with her as he led her from the room.

H
E FINISHED THE PORTRAIT
on the last day of the first week, late in the afternoon. He had a dinner engagement during the evening, which fact was a disappointment to
Jane, but she expected that he would come back for the night. One week of her precious month was already over, though. There were only three left. She coveted every day, every hour.

She loved to watch him paint even more than she loved watching him play the pianoforte. With the latter, he very quickly entered a world of his own, where the music flowed effortlessly. At his easel he had to labor more. He frowned and muttered profanities as much as he was absorbed in his task.

But finally he finished. He cleaned his brush and spoke.

“Well,” he said, “I suppose you have been sneaking peeks every time I leave the house.”

“I have not!” she said indignantly. “The very idea, Jocelyn! Just because it is something
you
would undoubtedly do.”

“Not if my word were given,” he said. “Besides, I would never need to sneak peeks. I would boldly look. Come and see it, then. See if you like yourself.”

“It is finished?” He had given no indication that he was nearing the end. She threaded her needle through the cloth and jumped to her feet.

“Come and discover the truth of my claim that I merely dabble,” he said, shrugging as if he did not care what her verdict was, and busying himself with the task of cleaning his palette.

Jane was almost afraid to look then, afraid that indeed she would find an inferior product about which she would have to be tactful. Though he would tear her to pieces, she knew, if she were less than brutally honest.

Her first impression was that he had flattered her. She sat at her work, every line of her body elegantly arched.
Her face was in profile. She looked industrious and absorbed by what she was doing. But she never saw herself thus, of course. In reality it was a good likeness, she supposed. She flushed with pleasure.

Her second impression was that the likeness or otherwise of the portrait was really not the point. She was not looking at a canvas produced merely so that the sitter might exclaim at the flattering likeness. She was gazing at something—something more.

The colors were brighter than she had expected, though when she looked critically she could see that they were accurate. But there was something else. She frowned. She did not know what it was. She had never been a connoisseur of art.

“Well?” There were impatience and a world of hauteur in his voice. And a thread of anxiety too? “Did I not make you beautiful enough, Jane? Are you not flattered?”

“Where …?” She frowned again. She did not know quite what it was she wished to ask. “Where does the
light
come from?”

That was it. The painting was an excellent portrait. It was colorful and tasteful. But it was more than just a painting. It had
life
. And there was light in it, though she was not quite sure what she meant by that. Of course it had light. It was a vivid daytime scene.

“Ah,” he said softly, “have I done it then, Jane? Have I really captured it? The essence of you? The light is coming from you. It is the effect you have on your surroundings.”

But how had he
done
it?

“You are disappointed,” he said.

She turned to him and shook her head. “I suppose,”
she said, “you never had an art master. It would not have been allowed for a future Duke of Tresham. Jocelyn, you are a man in every sense that you think important. You must dare to be more fully a man as you have been in this room this week. You have an amazing talent as a musician, an awesome talent as a painter. You must continue to use them even when I am gone. For your own sake as much as that of the world.”

It was typical of him, of course, to choose to comment on a very small point.

“You are going to leave me, then, Jane?” he asked. “Go to greener pastures, perhaps? To someone who can teach you new tricks?”

She recognized the source of the insult. He was embarrassed by her earnest praise.

“Why should I leave you,” she asked briskly, “when the terms of the contract are so favorable to me provided you are the one who does the leaving?”

“As I will inevitably do, of course,” he said, regarding her through narrowed eyes. “There is usually a week or two of total infatuation, Jane, followed by a few more weeks of dwindling interest before a final severance of the relationship. How long have I been totally besotted with you now?”

“I would like to have time to practice skills other than just embroidery,” she said, returning to her chair and folding her silk threads to put away in her workbag. “The garden needs more work. There are all those books to be read. And there is much writing I wish to do. I daresay that once your interest dwindles, I shall find my days richer and filled to overflowing with any number of congenial activities.”