A Fresh Perspective, A Regency Romance (4 page)

Without a hint of the pain it caused her to admit as much, she said, “No, Reed. I know that it would never cross your mind to ravish any female. If it did, it would certainly not be me.”

He nodded. “There you have it. No more nonsense about chaperones then. If you cannot trust me, who can you trust? Harold Burnham? Have you given him answer yet?”

“No. We have agreed to discuss the matter of marriage when we meet again in London.”

“He is in London? Excellent. I shall have you all to myself until you leave for the Lakes.”

Innocently clasping a hand that took hedonistic joy in his every contact, he led her up the remainder of the stairs, to his library. The room spoke in every inch of its space of Reed, in the books he loved, in the ordinance maps he marked with colored flags like a general mapping battle strategy, as he kept track of what he called the encroaching hand of man over the land’s natural beauty. A watercolor she had painted as a gift for him on his leave-taking, hung above his desk. He had taken care to have it framed in his absence.

“How lovely!” She stopped to stare.

He thought she referred to the plush new rug at their feet in shades of blue, salmon and gold. He dropped his hold on her hand as nonchalantly as he had taken it up. “The rug is not what I meant to show you.” He waved a cursory hand at it. “Had it sent back from Austria. The tapestry as well.”

“Oh!” she breathed. “This must have cost you a king’s ransom. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen!”

“The scene depicted in the tapestry was of the beautiful son of a river god, Narcissus, languishing beside a mirroring pool of water, gazing lovingly at his reflection. Nearby, the comely mountain nymph, Echo, gazed longingly at her beloved, her body almost as transparent as the gauzes she wrapped herself in. According to myth, Echo had faded away, so desperate was her love, until she was nothing more than a voice. The subject matter made Megan uncomfortable. Like Echo, she pined for a man who was not equally affected by tender feelings.

But, fade away? Megan sniffed contemptuously and lifted her chin. She was in no such danger. Indeed, that was why she meant to go to the lakes--though Reed was just returned. London, too, for a Season. She would wean herself away from unobtainable desires--not fade away.

“Never mind the tapestry,” Reed crossed to the cabinets that lined the walls. “This is what I want you to see. Aren’t they marvelous?”

A score or more bronzes, one of which he had picked up to cradle, were, as he said, marvelous. Each statuette was about two feet tall. Superbly crafted replicas of Roman art, or originals done in the Roman style, each depicted the female form. Girls, young maidens, women and goddesses---mythological and mortal, row upon row of miniature women captured in bronze. Youthful, supple and lithe--happy or mournful, they were locked forever in time and metal. Every face, hand and perfect ankle gleamed with a rich patina. Together, they were nothing short of an altar to women--a gathering of graven images in which man might worship woman’s every manifestation.

Overwhelmed by their perfection, Megan took the weighty figure Reed held out to her of Salome, draped in nothing more than a bronze scarf, eyes downcast, not out of any discomfort with her thinly veiled nakedness, but in a meditative manner.

“I wonder what thoughts distract her,” Reed said.

“One would hope she is questioning the wisdom of having obeyed her mother’s wishes in asking Herod for the head of John the Baptist,” Megan murmured.

“There is that,” Reed agreed. The expression on his face as he regarded a statue of Venus pained Megan. That he might look upon a bronze female with more passion than she had ever witnessed in the gaze he turned in her direction--no matter that he held her dearer than any other female of his acquaintance--left her feeling hollow, even jealous.

“She is perfect.” Her voice was thick with unexpressed emotion. “Too perfect, perhaps.”

“Gorgeous, are they not?” He caressed an Artemis, her arm tensed forever on the string of a bow. “Together, as a collection, they become something more. Don’t you agree? The essence of woman captured for all eternity.”

Megan felt these figures were too beautiful to describe the essence of woman. She had never met a single female who measured up to the yardstick these statues set. One by one, she examined them. In so doing, she felt she came closer to understanding what it was in women that Reed found beautiful. In looking at the beauty and strength, the graceful symmetry of feature and form caught forever in bronze, Megan felt hopelessly inadequate. Her chances of attracting Reed’s love and devotion seemed more remote than she had ever before imagined.

“This one is for you.” He held out to her a female figure with curling hair, a basket of flowers in her arms.

“Reed! How marvelous. This looks rather like that drawing you made of me. Uncannily so!” There was no mistaking the face, her face was on the bronze! It was the oddest sensation to see herself captured by a sculptor’s hand. “It is your drawing! How?”

Reed watched her reaction keenly. A smile claimed his lips. “Like it? Will your father will have my head for making a graven images of you?”

Her expression serious, she pondered the matter. “I cannot answer for father, but I love it!” She laughed. “I am immortalized. A heady but thrilling experience.” She could not take her eyes off of the bronze.

His face lit with relief. “I thought the man captured your features remarkably well from the sketch I sent him.”

So dear was this gesture of his affection, that she all but forgot the statue in her hands. “How thoughtful, Reed. How carefully you must have planned to bring something so special home to me.” She wanted to throw herself at his neck. She wanted to weep.

His expression stopped her.

The lines of concern deepened between his brows, “I believed the thing well thought out, but I have involuntarily kicked up a bit of dust. I hope you will see fit to forgive me the mess I have made.”

“Mess? What mess?”

Reed chewed his lower lip a moment before grabbing up a crate in one hand and a stack of sketchbooks in the other. “Come, I’ll show you.”

He took her to their favorite painting spot. It would be easier, he thought, to tell her there. Yat Rock offered a marvelous view of the River Wye, slipping silver in the sun far below. They often brought a picnic lunch here, along with paints and easels. Today they took only his sketchbooks and the crate with one broken slat, from which a flurry of sawdust issued with every step.

The weather favored them with blue skies and sunshine. A few clouds, rare and unexpected masses passed above, momentarily blotted the sun’s light and the heat. The Yat smelled rich and fertile and green. A startled yellowhammer exploded from a volunteer private hedge as they passed--a feathery flash of yellow, chestnut and brown.

“This mess you mentioned? You must not keep me in suspense for another moment,” Megan insisted.

Reed was unsure how to begin. As if girding himself for battle he removed his jacket, rolled shirt sleeves and set to work breaking open the crate. “The bronze I gave you was taken from my drawing.” There, that was a start. “I sent it to a highly recommended Italian sculptor, asking him to carve it for me.”

“He did a fine job.” She prodded when he paused.

He nodded. “That, and more.”

The crate successfully pried open, he reached into the sawdust packing and pulled forth a paper bundle tied in string. “If you will flip through the green sketchbook to the section where a page has been torn out. . .” He paused in what he was doing to watch her reaction.

“Oh my,” she gasped, her mouth a little O of shock. “Reed!” Her surprised gaze rose to meet his. Her cheeks were flushed. She spoke in a rushed manner. “These sketches are not in your usual style.”

“No.” He felt rather like he had inappropriately exposed himself to her. He paused to collect his thoughts.

Megan had never been one to suffer silence gladly. “They are marvelous, in a worldly sort of way. A lovely sense of motion. The articulation of limbs is . . .”

He cut her off. “I considered them too provocative for you to view.”

Her blush deepened. He had never before noticed how vulnerable she looked with pinkened complexion.

“Protecting the vicar’s daughter again?” she teased with a pretty toss of her curls. “Do you find me so worldly you think I may now look on them without blushing?”

“I never intended that you should see them,” he said ruefully. “But, given the circumstances, I’ve little choice. The thing of it is, several of the studies for these sketches were roughed out on the back of the sketch I sent the sculptor.”

He pulled from the nest of paper a bronze sculpture.

“Oh my, Reed!” She could not contain her awe.

He was pleased by her reaction. It matched the proud feeling he had met in first seeing the bronze. As if the sketch had leapt from the page and gained form and substance, a pair of young lovers were clasped in a whirling embrace so fervent she was lifted from her feet, bronze skirt swirling around both their legs.

Reed could not look at the pair without flushing. Pure, joyous passion seemed captured in metal. He pushed his forelock out of his eyes. “Do you like it?” Pride spill into his voice.

Her eyes glowed with unadulterated wonder. “Reed! It is staggering in its perfection. Magnificent is too tame a word to describe the thing!”

He sighed. “My reaction as well when I first laid eyes on the pair. There is but one aspect that spoils my pleasure in the thing.” He turned the bronze carefully in his hands so that she saw it from a fresh perspective.

She gasped. “Oh my! He didn’t.” She bent closer to be sure. “He did. The face, the hair. . . they’re mine! Dear me.” Her gaze fled from the bronze to the sketches and back again, before she looked at him in confusion. “Your sketches do not look like me.” She flipped through the pages. “Not at all.”

“Well no,” he blustered. “I never imagined you in this pose. I never intended these figures should be cast, much less with your face incorporated.”

She wore, for the fraction of an instant, a strangely disappointed look until her mouth opened on the thought of new horrors. “Have there been dozens made? Am I circulating all over Europe?”

“Well, no. I mean, there is only this one in my possession. The mold has been destroyed. There will be no others. If you insist, this one may be destroyed as well.”

“Destroy it?” Her eyes still intent on the sketches.

He had devoted several pages to the figures: arms, torsos, legs, faces and hair. Was she frowning at the drawings, the bronze or the idea of destroying it?

“I hope you will not insist,” he blurted. “I have grown rather fond of the lovers. I even like the fact that the young woman looks like you.”

“The lovers? Is that what you call them?” Eyes wide, she turned to gaze at him, as if he were a puzzle she wanted to solve. “I cannot be offended to find myself the object of such desire.”

“No?”

“No. Every woman, no matter how proper her upbringing, holds a picture of just such rapture in her imagination.”

“Does she?” He considered this a moment. “Does he remind you of Harold Burnham, then?”

She peered at the face of the bronze man. “Harold? She laughed. “Goodness, no. I have never pictured Harold as the manifestation of my desires. This mystery man, however, is really quite splendid. I would hate to see him destroyed. It could, after all, be much worse. Your sculptor might have brought to life this creature instead.”

She held wide the sketchbook to a page in which two more figures locked in passionate embrace. He could not look at the page. He knew all too well the male figure had goat-like hooves and haired haunches. From the curling locks on his head protruded goaty horns. The female, skirts whirling about their torsos as she twisted, struggled, arms braced against the satyr’s muscular chest, forever locked in a violent unwelcome embrace.

He looked at her instead, willing her to understand. Her eyes widened. Her hand flew to her throat. “He did not, did he?” She spoke firmly, as if tone could stop him from proving otherwise.

In response, he drew the second paper-wrapped parcel from the crate.

“No!” Her voice fell to a whisper. “Tell me it is not so.”

He could not meet her gaze as he unwrapped the bronze, the second sketch given all too solid a form and substance. “Believe me, Nutmeg, I would like to deny the existence of this thing, but as you see, I cannot.”

He hoped she would not hate it too much. He could not hate it himself. Though it shamed him to admit he had a part in the creation of such a piece, there was something blood stirring, even beautiful, in his rendering of a moment’s savagery made three-dimensional.

She voiced his feelings perfectly in saying, “So alike, and yet so profoundly different.”

He cleared his throat. “Yes. The dark, to balance the light side of passion. I visualized the drawings as a pair and the bronzes work together as such, but I never intended that you should be caught up in the pairing.”

The words possessed a suggestiveness he had not intended.

Always a surprise, Megan surprised him now with a deep, throaty laugh, a flirtatious sound--as if she appreciated the double entendre of words inadvertently chosen. “Of course not. I know you too well to suspect otherwise. However,” she laughed again, an almost hysterical sound, “my parents, should either of them see this work of art, and survive the shock, would insist on your castration immediately.”

“Nutmeg!”

She had shocked him and seemed pleased to have done so. “You think I jest? Do you forget I am the daughter of a vicar? This. . .” she waved helplessly at the statues and could not restrain another breathless laugh, “this scandal is one I could never live down were it to become common knowledge. There are already those who question my maidenly virtue due to the outrageous amount of time we spend in one another’s company without benefit of chaperone.”

“Who questions your virtue?” Her suggestion made him angry.

“Your mother, for one.”

“Mother questions everyone’s virtue.” Except her own, he thought. He shook his head. He must not be distracted. There was more bad news to share. “I am sorry to say I have not told you the worst of it yet.”