Lady Jenny's Christmas Portrait (5 page)

Fortunately, the Evil Chimney of Distraction had fallen silent about a half hour ago.

Elijah moved furniture around to make window light more available. He organized stretched canvasses, pigments, linseed oil, walnut oil for the lightest colors, brushes, and the containers where he stored bladders of paint, then he moved the furniture around some more.

Where
was
she?
Was she staying under the same roof as he?

“Mr. Harrison?”

At first he thought the chimney had spoken to him, then he realized Lady Jenny stood in the doorway to the guest room he was converting to artistic use.

He bowed. Not because she was a duke’s daughter, not even because she was a lady. He bowed because something in him finally was able to focus now that he knew where she was—and because she was carrying a small tray. “Lady Jenny.”

“I’m having tea sent up, and I brought you some stollen fresh from the kitchen. I gather this is where you are to work?” She hovered in the doorway, much as she had at Kesmore’s house the previous night.

“My temporary studio, the most recent of many. Won’t you come in?”

Won’t you please come in?

He shoved two heavy chairs nearer the hearth, then realized he hadn’t lit the fire. “I apologize for the cold. Moving furniture about warms one up.”

She came closer, peering around as if in a curiosity shop. “You have some of the heat from the kitchens too, I think.”

“Which we will lose if that door remains open.” He crossed the room to shut the door, and not because the room would get cold. “Shall I light a fire for you?”

She set the tray down on the raised hearth and sent him an unfathomable look. What had he said? What had she inferred? Why was she destined to find him in shirtsleeves, cuffs turned back, rumpled, and untidy? He cleaned up decently when he made the effort.

“The tea will be along presently. That will warm us up if needs must. You made a sketch of me.”

She wanted to talk about art, and he wanted to eat whatever was on that tray and simply behold her.

“You made one of me. Artists often perform reciprocal courtesies for one another. For years, my anatomy was available to model for Antoine’s students.” He should
not
have said that.

“I know.”

And she
really
should not have said that.

The knock on the door felt every bit as intrusive to Elijah as if they had been on the point of a kiss—another kiss—or perhaps on the point of issuing each other a challenge.

“That will be our tea.” He hustled over to the door, took the tray from the maid in the hallway, and closed the door in the servant’s face. “Shall you pour?”

“While you butter our bread.” She smiled as if this informal, impromptu picnic were a delight to her. Her smile wasn’t loud, and it wasn’t particularly merry.

That smile—he was astonished to conclude—was a trifle
naughty
.

He dropped into one of the heavy chairs without asking her permission and lifted the linen from the small tray. The scent of yeast and sweet bread hit his nose, and in the chilly room, fragrant steam rose from the half loaf of bread.

“Cutting it when it’s warm takes skill,” she said. “You need a good sharp bread knife and a light touch. Don’t mash it.”

She stirred cream and sugar into his tea while he feathered slices of holiday bread from the loaf. “You don’t skimp on the goodies.” The loaf was liberally full of candied fruit and nuts, to the point that Elijah’s mouth watered.

“My sister Sophie doesn’t skimp on anything related to the comfort or pleasure of her family. This is her recipe, or her version of our grandmother’s recipe.”

“Your grandmamma was German?” The tea in his cup was steaming too. To make a painting of steam was difficult—probably better suited to watercolors than oils.

“We’re German on Her Grace’s mother’s side. My father would call it the dam line, and he’d use that language in company too. About that sketch, Mr. Harrison?”

He passed her a thoroughly buttered slice of warm holiday bread. “First things first. I arrived here after luncheon was served because I detoured clear back to the posting inn to make sure my baggage had been sent on ahead.”

“And like a man, you did not want to impose on the kitchen when you got here, and you forgot to see to your victualing at the inn because you had a task before you. When you arrived here, you denied my sister the pleasure of caring for an honored guest—and you went hungry.”

She was scolding him, which made him want to miss more meals so she might scold him some more. Surely the cold was addling his wits? “You have no patience for the starving-artist mentality?”

She held up her slice of bread, regarding it as melted butter drizzled onto her plate. “Art should be joyful, so joyful it sustains its creator in ways that have nothing to do with physical nourishment.”

He took a bite of bread rather than snort at her naïveté. He’d believed the same thing, once upon a long, silly time ago. “Art should be pretty and remunerative. You say I’m an honored guest, but in reality, I’m a tradesmen reluctantly admitted into houses above my station.”

She took a dainty bite, chewed slowly, and turned an innocent pair of green eyes on him. “You are the heir to a marquess. By rights, you are the Earl of Bernward. You outrank most of your subjects, though I suspect you keep the title quiet because your patrons would be self-conscious in your presence otherwise. Commendable of you, from an artistic standpoint.”

He hadn’t seen that salvo coming, and so he reacted less carefully than he ought. “How do you know I modeled for Antoine?”

Her ladyship munched another bite of holiday bread, not a discernible care in the world. “Your tea is getting cold, Mr. Harrison. I attended those classes whenever I could. Your generosity as a model did much to improve my understanding of the male body.”

He finished his tea in two swallows. “Women were not permitted into those classes. Not ever.” And yet, he’d known she was there practically from the first.

She popped the last bite of her bread into her mouth and dusted her hands together. “I grew tired of drawing kittens and… flowers, much as you might occasionally grow tired of painting corpulent old lords, aging beauties, and strutting lordlings.”

A Renaissance master would have known what to do with her. She was heartrendingly beautiful to the eye, more beautiful the longer he studied her, and yet—she was a minx too. On the order of a saint who prayed with her eyes turned heavenward and much of her cleavage exposed. She likely didn’t appreciate this aspect of her own personality though, which created a conundrum.

“The lordlings are the worst, and I knew you were in Antoine’s classes.”

All the languor in her manner disappeared. While Elijah watched, a blush crept up her neck, turning her perfect complexion quite, quite rosy.

“I suspected you knew when you came to Joseph’s door last night. May I ask how I was found out?”

Relief swept through him, odd but welcome. She’d been bluffing. Those looks, that thoughtful chewing, the “your tea will grow cold” nonsense had been her attempt at a sophisticated repartee foreign to her nature. He held out another piece of buttered sweet bread to her and wondered why she’d try to misrepresent herself.

“Your sketches were always the best,” he said, helping himself to more tea. “And yet, you never asked many questions, never spoke much at all. You were one of few students who had the sense to move around the room, to change your perspective on the subject from week to week. You took risks. You got down to business as soon as Antoine had described the exercise, and Antoine always had a few words to say to you when he wandered among the students.”

“From that you deduced my identity?”

“Drink your tea before it cools, my lady.”

His words provoked her minx-smile, which hadn’t been their intended effect. He buttered himself more bread rather than smile back. “I followed you home, except you didn’t go directly home. You went in the back door of a modiste’s establishment, and no matter how long I waited, the pale young man with so much dedication and talent never emerged.”

“Though Lady Jenny Windham did.”

“If it’s any consolation, I needed several attempts to figure out your scheme.”

She tore off a bite of bread but didn’t eat it. Even her fingers were beautiful—slender, graceful, elegant. “Why concern yourself at all, Mr. Harrison? You are the darling of the Royal Academy, your talent beyond question. Why would you care about one casual art student?”

A clever reply would have served them both well. They could smile false smiles at each other, finish the tea and crumpets, and perhaps dance a minuet before his nightly nap in the card room if they ended up in the same ballroom next Season.

Half a secret exchanged for half a secret.

He watched the holiday bread crumble to bits in her fingers and chose a different path. “I worried for you.”

She studied her buttery fingers while Elijah tried to find something else to occupy his imagination. “You
worried
for me, for my safety perhaps?”

Did nobody ever worry for her? Or did she never allow her loved ones to know what she was really about?

“You were safe as houses on the streets of Mayfair in broad daylight, even when you went sauntering down St. James Street in your masculine regalia at midafternoon.” That had been naughty of her—also brave.

“One wants to see more than candlelit ballrooms and sunny bridle paths, Mr. Harrison. What I saw was a clutch of dandies lounging in the windows of the men’s clubs, pretending a perfectly prosaic street scene somehow merited their devoted study. They reminded me of the lions at the menagerie—tame, twitchy, bored, and helpless to address their own miseries.”

Her description was deadly accurate. “I noticed you did it only the once.”

“One need not… I wasn’t doing it to be daring. I wanted to
see
. Why were you worried for me?”

Afternoon tea should have been an occasion for some flirtation, a little sustenance, and maybe—if he flirted well and she were receptive—a bit of sketching. Elijah wasn’t sure what to call their exchange, but it was
not
flirting.

“You never fraternized with the other students, never arrived or left with them. You never joined in the stupid, self-conscious banter that ensues when young men are in the presence of nudity.”

She was regarding him with carefully masked bewilderment. He forged on, driven by motivations he was not going to examine closely unless thoroughly drunk.

“When one is talented, particularly early in one’s career, one can suffer doubts. In my experience, the doubts can be commensurate with the talent rather than inversely proportional to it. The myth of the sensitive artistic disposition is not entirely false, and I didn’t want…”

What was he saying? What was he
babbling
?

She picked up his uneaten slice of bread and held it out to him. “You did not want the quiet, withdrawn, somewhat talented student to doubt himself—herself—to the point of loss of confidence or foolish actions.”

He took the bread and stuffed a large bite into his idiot mouth. Lady Sindal’s recipe was scrumptious, and it went down like so much sawdust.

Lady Jenny held up his teacup. He washed the sawdust down with bilge water.

“Thank you, Mr. Harrison. Nobody has ever worried for me like that, and I suspect nobody ever will. Instead, they pity me. I prefer your worry to their pity, though I must apologize for giving you concern. I thank you, but I apologize too.”

The smile she offered him now was not that of a minx. They had shared secrets of a sort, it said—more secrets than she’d known—and she was pleased it was so. The silence that descended was profound. No clock ticked; no fire roared. Outside, the frightful weather had subsided to a cold, still winter day.

Inside, something expanded in Elijah’s chest—relief, happiness, he cared not what the best description might be, because words did not move him, and yet, words were necessary too.

“Lady Jenny, may I sketch you?” Those words were close but not exactly right, so he tried again. “Genevieve Windham, may I please sketch you?”

Jenny had spoken with her brother-in-law, Joseph, Lord Kesmore, about Elijah Harrison, and Joseph had been wonderfully forthcoming. Mr. Harrison was heir to a marquessate, had studied abroad before and after his years at university, and was known for napping among the potted palms at Society’s evening gatherings.

She’d seen Elijah Harrison on occasion, through the door of the card room, and wondered how bored one had to be to sleep at a Society function—or how confident of oneself.

“You’ve already sketched me, Mr. Harrison, and a fine likeness it was. Why would you want to sketch me again?” A fine, passionate, curvaceous likeness, to hear Louisa tell it—and Louisa was seldom wrong.

He rose and took a candle from the branch on the mantel. “Darkness approaches while I stuff myself with your excellent holiday bread. It’s time to light the fire, don’t you think?”

In moments, he had a cheery blaze going, moments in which Jenny became preoccupied studying the curve of his haunch under his doeskin breeches. She’d seen those flanks in the buff and knew the way his back flowed into his hips, thighs, and buttocks in perfectly proportioned bones, muscles, and sinews.

She did not know what it felt like to caress that same part of his anatomy.

He resumed his seat, managing to look regal despite his dishabille and the makeshift surrounds. “You ask why I want to sketch you a second time, my lady, and I’ll answer with a question. Would you like to sketch me again?”

“Of course.”

She should not have said that. She should have traced the seam of the chair’s upholstery, glanced out the window at the sinking sun, and otherwise affected a sophistication she didn’t have.

Though her attempts at posturing hadn’t worked well with him so far.

“You’ve already captured my likeness, so why bother sketching me again, Genevieve?”

He started his own fires, and he used her name without permission. He fell asleep in Society drawing rooms and saw her as a woman of curves and passion. She resented his self-assurance mortally, and she wanted to remain near him, for all manner of hopeless reasons.

“I would like to sketch you again, Mr. Harrison, because you have an unconventional beauty that I can understand better by sketching.”

“If we are to pose for each other, you should call me Elijah.”

“No, I should not.” He was going to pose for her again, though, which meant she smiled when she should have been shaking her finger at him.

He appeared oblivious to the cold, while Jenny wanted to move closer to the fire. “Antoine was old-fashioned. All of that Mr. Harrison this and Mr. Harrison that when I was lounging about in the altogether wasn’t to protect my delicate sensibilities.”

“I doubt you
have
delicate sensibilities.”

He went on as if she hadn’t spoken, though now
he
was also trying not to smile. “His insistence on manners toward a naked man was intended to ensure all those puppies treated their own models decently. Modeling is grueling, often chilly work. The pay is lousy, and there’s an assumption…”

His almost-smile faded. A log fell in a shower of sparks.

“There’s an assumption that models and prostitutes are interchangeable,” Jenny said. If he could use words like “naked man” and “in the altogether,” she could manage “prostitute.”

Though not without blushing.

“Stay there,” he said, springing to his feet, crossing the room, and rummaging on a table in the shadowed corner. “Sit there, just like that. I’ll trade you double minutes, in fact, if you indulge me.”

“Double minutes?”

He returned to the fire with a sketch pad, pencil, eraser, and knife. “I’ll sit to you for an hour if you sit to me for thirty minutes.” He dragged his chair closer. The chair was old-fashioned, the sort of carved monstrosity popular back before Cromwell’s nonsense. It would have served better as a battering ram than an article of furniture, and Elijah Harrison moved it around one-handed. Easily.

“Do we have an agreement, Genevieve?” He dragged the chair another few inches closer, so they were sitting quite cozily indeed.

“If I get double minutes, then yes, Mr. Harrison, though I must warn you that inactivity is foreign to my nature.”

Particularly when Elijah Harrison was sitting knee to knee with her, and the urge to jump up and leave the room battled with the more compelling urge to shape the contour of his knee with her bare hand.

***

Harold Buchanan gestured to the pile of documents on the table. “We have the usual assortment of dabblers, sycophants, and eccentrics among the predictable slate of Associates.”

“Some of the Associates are very strong candidates.”

Of course they were, or they wouldn’t be Associates of the Royal Academy. One didn’t make a fool of old Fotheringale though, not to his homely face.

With silent apologies to the old masters gracing the walls of Buchanan’s offices, he aimed a smile at Foggy.

“Fotheringale is right, of course, but we have only the two slots, and not every Associate is bound to become an Academician.”

The other three committee members glanced at one another, at the cherubs on the ceiling, or out the window, where night had fallen, without the committee making any headway at all. At this rate, they would not have their nominations ready before the holidays, and Buchanan’s wife would kill him—slowly, painfully, with a dull, rusty palette knife—if he missed spending at least some of the Yule season in the country.

“Would anybody care for more tea?” Another round of glances, some of them impatient. “What about something stronger? We’re growing pressed for time, and the Academy is relying on us to nominate people for the available openings.”

“Spot of that cognac wouldn’t go amiss.” That from Henry West, said to be a distant relation of the current Academy chair. “Do we know who has Prinny’s endorsement?”

Fotheringale sat forward, his considerable bulk making the chair creak. “Hang Prinny! It ain’t his Academy, and all this talk don’t change the logical choices. Pritchett does fine work, and Hamlin even better. All those others”—he waved a pudgy white hand at the papers—“hacks, the lot of ’em.”

As head of this little nominating committee, Buchanan knew better than to state a strong preference. He also knew if he didn’t speak up, Pritchett, Hamlin, and any other hack who toadied to Fotheringale would soon grace the Academy’s ranks. “Elijah Harrison’s reputation is growing, and Sir Thomas considers him his heir apparent.”

Fotheringale’s fist banged down on the table, making the candle flames dance. “I’ll not have it! He’s taken his clothes off for money! Ask anybody who studied under that old Frog, Antoine. The day Elijah Harrison is elected as an Academician is the day I withdraw my support entirely from the school.”

At least Fotheringale was predictable. “No one would like to see that, but West has a point: it is the
Royal
Academy. I’ll have a word with the regent, not because he will ever dictate our membership to us, but because his taste is excellent and his support unceasing.”

In other words, Fotheringale’s money was important, but not as important as the prince’s favor.

“Meet with whomever you damned please,” Fotheringale said, sitting back and tugging his waistcoat down over his belly. “Won’t make a damned bit of difference. Harrison will not do. Next thing, you’ll be nominating women again.”

Dear God, not that old argument. Buchanan scraped back his chair, trying to signal that the meeting was over, but Alywin Moser spoke up.

“Two of our founding members were ladies, I’ll remind you. The ladies exhibit wonderful work as amateurs, and artistic talent doesn’t—”

“Bother that.” Fotheringale heaved himself to his feet. “Mary Moser drew flowers. That made her hardly more than a drawing-room talent, but her father wedged her into the Academy at a time when judgment was lacking and enthusiasm high.”

Moser, who was not
officially
related to the late lady artist, was on his feet too. “Angelica Kaufman traded portraits with Sir Joshua himself, and Mary Moser’s flowers were worth the notice of Her Majesty!”

“Gentlemen.” Buchanan did not stand. “We can agree that Frogmore is lovely, and that there are not any ladies among this year’s candidates, so perhaps we might adjourn to the drawing room, where a bottle of excellent cognac will fortify us against the night’s chill.”

Or against the committee’s inane pettifogging and posturing.

“Cognac’s one thing the damned Frenchies do right,” Fotheringale grumbled. “But the only thing worse than admitting that Harrison to the Academy—a man who has done no academic work and not a single juvenile portrait, may I remind you—would be admitting a female. I trust I make my meaning clear.”

Behind Fotheringale’s broad back, Henry West sent Buchanan a sympathetic gaze. Harrison was talented, titled, congenial, and had done a number of academic subjects earlier in his career, though portraits were of course more lucrative. Harrison had offended nobody except, apparently, old Fotheringale—the deepest pockets on the Academy’s board.

Buchanan gestured West closer. “Have we ascertained why old Foggy is so set against Harrison?”

West glanced at the rest of the party as they shuffled from the room. “Something to do with a woman.”

Well, of course. The good news was Mr. Harrison wasn’t prone to inconvenient left-handed tendencies. The bad news was Prinny could turn up prudish with all the zeal of a true hypocrite.

Then, too, Harrison had not done a single juvenile portrait.

“Keep digging. We have only a few weeks, and I, for one, do not want to celebrate the holidays listening to Fotheringale’s bile, nor do I want to listen to the hue and cry if Pritchett and Hamlin are elevated to Academician status.”

***

Elijah used two fingers to shift Genevieve’s chin a half inch to the right, wanting the firelight to catch her at three-quarter angle.

His model flinched minutely. “I’ve never done this before.”

Urgency pulsed through him, an urgency to capture her, and yet, experience came to his rescue. One must put the subject at ease. If one was going to take a true likeness from a subject, one had to make the experience comfortable.

“Yes, you have.” He adjusted the tilt of her head as if handling beautiful women with transcendently soft skin were an everyday occurrence for him. And because he was a man who so rarely handled anything at all beautiful, he also traced his fingers back along her hairline, indulging in yet another pleasure as if it were of no moment. “You regularly sit in chairs before fires, thinking about…”

He rose to move the candle on the mantel so it would cast a touch of back light. “What is it you do think about, my lady?”

“I’m supposed to think about paying calls, stitching samplers, and reading the Society pages.”

He resumed his seat, close enough that his knee bumped hers, and still not close enough. “And none of that bears any interest for you. Stay just like that.”

Where to start?

Old lessons, lessons from his first boyhood ventures into sketching came into his head.
One
begins
by
paying
attention.

“I was under the impression that rendering a sketch involved moving the pencil across the paper, Mr. Harrison.”

Still, he did not make the first mark on the pristine page. “You’re nervous. I should think a woman with your looks would be used to men gawking at her, and you’ve dodged my question, so I’ll ask another. You said my interest was preferable to your family’s pity. Why should they pity you?”

Though her position did not shift, her expression did, and now—
now
—the sketch he would make took shape in his mind.

“I’m not quite on the shelf, and yet my fate has taken on an inevitable quality, like a prisoner awaiting sentencing when there were no witnesses for the defense.”

His pencil began to move, long, curving strokes first. The outline of her came first: graceful, pensive, and full of passion dammed up by a massive, determined reserve.

“You don’t want a husband and children? I can’t believe you haven’t had offers.” He tossed the question out to keep that infinitesimal furrow to her brow, also to establish that between him and his subject, there need not be any secrets. He would be as a blank page to her—no judgments, no opinions, nothing but a sympathetic ear. When he completed her sketch, he would still be a blank page, while every line and shadow on the paper would be imbued with her secrets.

“My sisters are the ones who’ve gotten the offers, usually. There was a bishop last year, old enough to be my father.”

“Bishops can usually provide well.” And were known to have large families. The idea nudged unhappily at his concentration.

“My family can provide well. If I must be a doting maiden aunt, then a doting maiden aunt I shall be.”

Her features were rife with the small imperfections that made beauty interesting: Her mouth was not perfectly symmetrical, which gave her the appearance of considering a smile moment by moment, even when her eyes were serious. Her brows were a trifle darker than her hair, and her chin, upon close examination, bore a hint of stubbornness.

She hadn’t answered his question about why she was unmarried; she hadn’t answered his question about what filled her pretty head. He focused on her jawline and forgot all about putting the subject at ease.

His downfall as a boy had been Albrecht Dürer’s watercolor of a young hare, a rendering so precise, the animal’s nose practically twitched as one beheld it. How did so much life, so much vitality, fit into a simple two-dimensional rendering? And not even an oil, but a watercolor?

Elijah had become desperate to comprehend Dürer’s genius. Somewhere along the way—Rome, maybe, or Vienna, possibly Copenhagen—he’d acquired technique and lost sight of the desperation.

“You are very quiet, Mr. Harrison.”

He was supposed to say that she was a very absorbing subject, then smile and compliment a particular feature.

“I’m busy. What are you thinking?”

She wouldn’t tell him, that was clear by now. Genevieve Windham was a master at keeping her cards out of sight.