Love's Reward (12 page)

Fitzroy dropped into a chair and steepled his fingers together.

“Except that he was my groom in the Peninsula, and two other men who served closely with me there have been similarly killed. Not the officers, who might still be carrying weapons to defend themselves, but the men. Dear God! I’ve been back from Spain for two years. What the hell is going on?”

Lord Grantley gazed at him steadily. “That’s what you’re supposed to be finding out.”

“With how much to go on? The dying words of Herring, my poor batman, for God’s sake, with a ball through the lung and trying to make jokes about it? Just after I received a message that he was down on his luck and in need of a visit? Instead, I arrived like Azrael and saw him shot down in front of his wife.”

“But he had a message for you and it may be vital.”

Fitzroy dropped his head and buried his strong fingers in his hair.

“A message! Some mumbled words about a threat to Lord Wellington. Along with the conviction that one of the ladies I danced with on a particular evening will be given secret information, and is expecting me to pursue her favors at a ball she will hold on a Friday. The lady will identify herself with a response to some inane statement about Helen of Troy, and the reward for my cooperation will be the details of the plot. It’s like a damned melodrama. Meanwhile, men are dying for no other apparent reason than that they were once contaminated with my presence during the Peninsular Campaign. It makes no sense at all. It would make no damned sense even on the stage.”

“But Green and Herring—and now Flanders—have been attacked, Tarrant. Wellington’s safety is crucial to achieving a lasting peace in Europe. It’s barely a year since Waterloo. Since the duke’s been in France, there’s already been more than one assassination attempt. Though Cambrai is proving safer than Paris, we have to take this seriously.”

Fitzroy closed his eyes and pressed a hand over them, leaving his hair curling in wild disarray over his forehead.

Lord Grantley watched him for a moment. The young man’s body was limned in lines of exhaustion. Grantley was not surprised to see a trace of moisture on the square palm when he dropped his hand and looked up, nor the too bright shine of his eyes.

Though the bite of sarcasm in the viscount’s subtle voice remained unchanged.

“You think for one moment that I do not? Lady Reed holds a ball this coming Friday. I am invited. Let us hope to God she is a devotee of the
Iliad
.”

* * *

The day after her wedding Joanna packed everything she owned and retraced the slow journey with Lord and Lady Acton back to London.

She spent one night at Acton House on Park Lane. The next morning several footmen and grooms accompanied her to her new home, the house where Fitzroy had shown her the room she could use as a studio.

As the menservants carried boxes and trunks up to the suite set aside for her private use, she walked straight to that elegant drawing room on the north side of the house.

She opened the door with a certain trepidation, then stared in amazement. It had been completely stripped: no furniture, no carpet. The walls gleamed with a fresh coat of white paint.

Packages were piled at one side of the room. Joanna opened them immediately. Everything she had wanted: easels, pigments, canvas.

He had remembered. The fearsome Fitzroy Monteith Mountfitchet had kept his word.

He was not at home. He had left no messages. The servants quietly accommodated her. She was expected, but that first evening she dined alone.

It was possible that he did not return that night at all, for Joanna retired to her lonely bed at midnight without having seen him or heard him come in. She thumped at her pillow with her fist and told herself that she was far happier that way.

The next morning she set up her studio, and then she was truly absorbed, mixing pigments and preparing a palette.

She had no idea that it was already afternoon when the door opened and a footman came in.

“There is a lady to see you, my lady.”

“A lady? Did she leave a card?”

A pale face beneath a sleek cap of dark hair peered in past the footman.

“Lady Tarrant? You will forgive me, I pray? When I couldn’t come to your wedding, I hoped you wouldn’t mind very much if I made myself known as soon as I could. We were both at Miss Able’s Academy. Perhaps you remember me? I am Lady Mary Mountfitchet, Fitzroy’s sister.”

Joanna pushed back a stray lock of hair and rubbed her hands down the smock she wore to work in. She had probably left a smear of paint on her cheek, but she hurried forward anyway, her heart light.

“Lady Mary! I remember you very well. You were always so kind and patient with us little girls. I’m very glad that you came. Please, come in! Oh, dear! I don’t even have a chair in here. Let’s retreat to the withdrawing room.”

“No, please! Please, no ceremony or tea or anything! I have no wish to disturb your work. In fact, I have come to ask a favor of you that involves it.”

Joanna pushed a pile of paper from the top of a crate that had contained canvases. “Then, pray, sit here!”

They exchanged pleasantries for a few moments, laughing together over memories of Miss Able and the other teachers. Yet Lady Mary did not seem well. Her skin was chalk white, except for a red spot burning in each cheek. Several times she coughed into a handkerchief, while hectic color flushed up her neck.

“Now, what can I possibly do for you?” Joanna asked, concerned.

“Well, I’ve been longing for a portrait. You can do portraits, can’t you?”

Joanna nodded, intrigued. “Whose?”

“I need a painting of Fitzroy.”

Surprise turned her back rigid for a moment. Joanna had to force herself to take a deep breath.

“Your brother?”

“And your husband.”

Lady Mary coughed again into her handkerchief and tried to hide it by laughing.

Agitation surged, almost as if Lady Mary had brought her bad news.

“But he would never agree. He would have to sit for me—pose—for several days, weeks possibly. He doesn’t intend to spend any time here at all. I don’t see—”

Lady Mary coughed again, hard. “He’s already agreed. Otherwise, I shouldn’t ask.”

“Why doesn’t he go to a professional portrait painter?”

“He doesn’t have time, whereas you’re already in the house. So he could snatch odd moments. When he came back to town he told me you’re a real artist. Fitzroy used to paint, too, so he knows what he’s talking about. It would be a very great kindness to us both if you would do it. Please say that you will.”

Joanna had to sit down. For the second time in just over a week she felt faint. Since there wasn’t another crate, she dropped to the floor and folded her legs underneath her skirts. Her mouth seemed dry, her tongue too big for it.

“He used to paint?”

“Yes, he was very good. But he gave it up when he went away to the war.”

“But why would he want his portrait painted?”

“To please me. Fitzroy spoils me. I suppose older brothers often indulge their little sisters, don’t they? Sometimes I think he’d do anything I asked, so I’m usually very careful asking. But this time I have an urgent reason.”

Lady Mary stood and crossed to the window, hiding another spate of coughs in her handkerchief.

“You’re not well,” Joanna said. “You shouldn’t have come out today.”

“No, I had to.” Lady Mary smiled, as if ill health were nothing. “My doctors are worried about my lungs, you see. So I’m to go to Switzerland—I leave in a few weeks—for a change of air. I’ll be there for at least six months. If I take Fitzroy’s portrait, I can pretend that I still have him near me. Then I shan’t feel that I’m so all alone.”

Joanna scrambled to her feet and ran up to her new sister-in-law. Impulsively she put her arms around the older girl.

“I’ll be delighted to do it.”

“And there’s another favor, too, that I’m trying to get the courage to ask you.”

“Name it.”

Mary blushed a little. “Would you also do a portrait of me for Fitzroy? I could come here every day, if you like.”

“I would be honored, Lady Mary. We can start tomorrow, but I’ll come to you. Meanwhile, please let me ring for a chair to be brought here, and some tea.” Joanna crossed to the bellpull. “Is it very typical of your brother Fitzroy to be this highhanded and let you do the asking?”

Lady Mary laughed, then coughed again. “I’m not sure what’s typical of him any longer. He’s been strange ever since he came back from the Peninsula. I only know that I love him. I hope that doesn’t sound odd.”

Older brothers often indulge their little sisters, don’t they?
Even the wild, demonic Lord Tarrant, apparently.

Joanna wondered briefly what Fitzroy was like when alone with his sister. The man who had smiled so reassuringly at her wedding and enabled her to get through it? The man whose dark gaze had fired her imagination for a moment at the folly?

“No,” Joanna said, with a strange constriction around her heart. “It doesn’t sound odd at all.”

* * *

She could no longer concentrate on her pigments. Her blood had begun to sing at the prospect of these two portraits.

To do a portrait of Fitzroy! Desire for it burned in her fingertips.

Joanna wanted to paint him as he had looked in the moonlight at King’s Acton. She wanted to capture that wild, mysterious humor tinged with the strange desperation that she had seen on his face when he had left her standing at the church door after their wedding.

Would her hand reveal more of him in a painting than she had consciously seen with her eyes?

With the painful honesty that she brought to her work, Joanna once again faced her feelings about him, the fascination diluting her animosity, the attraction mixed with her doubt.

Fitzroy was also an artist! Why had he not mentioned it?

She faced the answer with the same candor: Because you are nothing to him, Joanna Acton, but a nuisance, a problem, a lady he was forced to marry to save his brother. Why the devil should he include you in anything that he is or does?

After her lonely meal that evening she paced through the house, looking for signs of him.

Though it was only a rented house, this was his home. He had lived here since returning from the Peninsula. Yet it seemed devoid of individual touches. There was nothing that revealed him, neither the arrogant man who had arrived at the Swan, nor a man who used to paint before going for a soldier.

Candlelight flickered over the books in his study, a selection of authors that any gentleman might own.

She studied the paintings. They were all from the previous century, of landscapes or horses, nothing personal.

It was a house that he hadn’t really lived in, as if for the last two years he had been suspended, belonging nowhere.

“Were you looking for something?” a subtle voice said.

Joanna whirled around. “Yes, you!”

Her husband peeled off his gloves and threw them into a chair. He looked tired, the tanned skin drawn tightly over the strong bones of his face.

“You were looking for me? Why?”

“No, not the physical you. I was looking for the man you really are—inside all that pride and sarcasm. The man whose portrait I am to paint for his ill sister.”

“Dear God,” he said. “And what did you find?”

“Nothing. It’s as if you don’t exist in this house. Do you exist in the world?”

He paced restlessly to a writing desk in the corner of the room and began to sort through the small stack of letters there. He looked formal, remote.

“I would hope so,” he said dryly. “Several people would say I exist only too much, your brother Richard for one. He’d rather see me out of it.”

“Yes, but he won’t help you leave, unless you do something that’s outrageously unforgivable. I made him promise.”

He glanced around at her. “Thank you for your kind solicitation, Lady Tarrant. I trust you are finding everything else in the house to your satisfaction?”

Joanna knew a small stab of anger. She had been forced into this match as much as he had, yet surely it was reasonable that she didn’t want her brother to dispatch her husband?

“Yes, of course. Thank you for the studio. When may I expect you for the first sitting for your portrait?”

He tossed down the letters. “Now, if you like.”

“Very well. I can do some preliminary sketches.”

She marched from the room and through the corridors to her studio without looking back to see if he was following. Yet she knew that he was there, as she knew without looking that her shadow was there on a bright day, or that her heart beat in her chest without listening for its beat. She could feel his presence in her bones.

He is a man who can never be ignored,
she thought.
How do I capture that in paint?

When they reached her studio he stepped ahead and opened the door for her.

A small courtesy, devoid of meaning, yet she noticed the shape of his hand as he held the knob. A purely masculine hand, as beautiful as a Michelangelo sculpture.

Was that the source of her fascination? A craving, an attraction, simply that of an artist for the aesthetic?

Joanna picked up the smock that she had left across a crate and shrugged into it.

“I’m surprised that you agreed to this,” she said. “It would seem that you are always busy.”

“I am. Where do you want me?”

“Over there. Near the window. I had the footman bring in that chair for your sister. But once I begin the painting, I shall need you to sit every day. Can you do that?”

He dropped into the chair and sprawled back, looking up at her from faintly narrowed eyes.

“Name the time.”

Joanna pinned a fresh sheet of paper to her board. “Evening is best. Then I can use candlelight to create the same effect each time.”

“But I have engagements most evenings, Lady Tarrant. And so will you. In fact we are invited to a ball this Friday. My father and yours expect that we both attend, and Lady Reed would be devastated not to meet my new wife.”

He said it with that faint air of sarcasm. It infuriated her.

“Then you must sit for me when we get back.”