Lady Jenny's Christmas Portrait

Thirteen

Genevieve Windham was an unscrupulous, lovely, audacious fiend who also happened to be a genius with paint. Elijah leaned closer to her and tried not to inhale jasmine and folly through his nose.

He gestured at her canvas, toward the beginnings of a fire in the hearth. “How did you do this?”

“You put yours closer to the corner of the canvas, where it won’t be structural,” Jenny said. “I wanted mine to anchor the illumination in Her Grace’s expression as she listens to her husband’s voice.”

“Your father reads Shakespeare very well.”

She stepped back from the paintings just as Elijah’s hand—without any communication with his common sense—came up as if to touch her hair.

“I’m sure Papa has Her Grace’s favorite sonnets memorized by now, just as I’m sure Her Grace will send a footman up any moment to fetch me. The hordes will start arriving ere long.”

“Then let her send a footman, Genevieve. Let her be the one to think, ‘Jenny certainly is intent on her painting.’”

She studied the beginning of her portrait, which was like no work Elijah had ever begun. Her use of color vaulted over the rules—rules for the oil medium she’d likely never been taught—to achieve results that stunned, intrigued, and pleased.

“If Her Grace were going to get the message that I’m intent on my painting—if anybody in this family yet living were—they might have gotten it when I was sixteen. I’ve managed to knot my smock…”

She turned around, presenting Elijah with temptation in the form of her exposed nape. He knew how that skin tasted, knew the warmth and sweetness of it against his tongue.

He stepped closer. “Are you doing this on purpose, Genevieve?”

She sent him a cross look over her shoulder. “Yes. I typically knot up all my smocks so I’m held prisoner in them until a passing stranger rescues me.”

She had made a knot, probably because she’d been too proud to ask him to tie her a simple bow. He had to bend down to study it. “Hold still.” The thing was stubborn, so stubborn that when Elijah gave it a stout yank, Jenny stumbled back against him.

“Oh, damn.” He used his nose first, drew it along the top of her collar where warmth and fragrance threatened to annihilate his balance. “Your painting is a wonder.”

So was her hair, so soft against his cheek. So was the place beneath her ear, where a man was doomed to kiss her. So was—

A tap sounded on the door. Had it been the deferential scratching of a servant, Elijah might have missed it, but it was a stout tap, more of a loud knock.

“It’s stuck,” he said, stepping back. “Perhaps it will have to be cut off.”

Cut off, indeed.

She gave him a curious look and went to the door. The squealing when she opened it was deafening.

“Maggie! Oh, my dearest, dearest Mags! I’ll get paint all over you. I’m so glad to see you!”

And at the same time: “Jenny! Oh, you’re painting. Of course you are. Hang the paint and tell me everything. Let me see you. Oh, I’ve missed you so!”

Elijah had been forgotten, relegated to such insignificance he might as well have never existed, and yet he listened to Jenny and her oldest sister greeting each other and felt the sweetness of it like a punch to the chest.

His sisters carried on in exactly the same way, every time they ran into him. The twins would likely squeal him halfway to Surrey.

Jenny gestured awkwardly behind her back with one hand. “Help me with this stupid knot, and you must greet Lord Bernward.”

Elijah pulled his thoughts away from the notion that an artist need not have good hearing, and smiled at Jenny’s sister. Maggie Windham, now Maggie, Countess of Hazelton, was taller than Jenny, red-haired, and lushly curved. Her beauty was more grand and severe than Jenny’s, and Elijah would have bet his Associate Academician status that Jenny could do a phenomenal portrait of her.

“Your ladyship, good day.” He did not pick her hand up because his fingers sported splatters of brown and white paint.

“Lord Bernwood.” Her smile was cool, her green eyes full of mischief. “Good day. You will wish Jenny a Happy Christmas now, because I must have her all to myself for the duration. We have much, much to catch up on. Jenny, get out of that old winding sheet and come along. St. Just got a later start from Town than we did, but I’m sure he’s right behind us.”

The espionage of women had started up already.

“Turn around, Genevieve.” Elijah saw the countess’s eyebrows rise at his tone, but Jenny—biddable, sweet Jenny, now that her family was in evidence—turned around and swept tendrils of golden hair off her neck. The pose was incendiary, it had such erotic overtones.

Elijah picked up a penknife and sliced through her knot. “You’re free. Enjoy visiting with your sister.”

Jenny shot a fleeting glance at her just-begun portrait, a glance of such longing Elijah nearly wished the countess Happy Christmas before pitching her into the corridor on her pretty bum.

“I’ll tidy up here, my ladies. Lady Hazelton, a pleasure.”

The women linked arms as Elijah closed the door behind them, the countess’s head bent close to Jenny’s. “Jenny, what on earth has gotten into Their Graces? I’ve never seen so much mistletoe in my life!”

While Elijah could no longer see the mistletoe, because his vision was consumed with Jenny Windham. The New Year could not arrive soon enough, but as Elijah studied Jenny’s painting, his unease on her behalf grew.

The French took their art seriously, and Jenny’s unconventional approach might draw their fire. Bad enough she was a woman, and worse yet she was a talented woman. If some of the established portraitists perceived that she was a brilliant, talented woman, the result could well be savage. Was that what she sought in France? Persecution rather than freedom?

Jenny’s cat, who had taken to following Elijah about in the secret way of cats, stropped itself against his shins. “She’s not taking you either, old boy. Best find some other lady to dote on you.”

Another rap on the door interrupted Elijah’s study of Jenny’s handling of fire.

A tall, dark-haired, green-eyed man stood there, looking fierce and disgruntled. “You’re not Jenny.” He had the same angle to his chin as Jenny, and eyes that had seen the world at less than its best.

“You must be her brother. Elijah, Earl of Bernward, at your service.”

“Rosecroft. It being Christmas, you address me as St. Just or suffer dire consequences.” The man’s bow was the merest gesture. “Where is my little sister?”

A small, dark-haired girl came galloping down the corridor. Timothy shot through Elijah’s feet and made it to the mantel in a single determined bound. “Papa! Papa, Mama says to tell you she and Baby Belle are with the aunties in the library. The aunties want to kiss you hello. They already kissed me on both cheeks, and so did Grandpapa and Grandmama!”

The fierce expression became fiercer yet. “If you value your life or your sanity, Bernward, remain above stairs until dinner.” St. Just’s daughter led him away, a man facing inescapable doom—a man who also hadn’t even glanced at the paintings.

Elijah had barely collected Jenny’s brushes for cleaning when yet another rap sounded on the door. When Elijah glanced at the mantel, Timothy was nowhere in sight.

A liveried footman held out a silver tray. “The post, your lordship.”

Elijah took the letters—three again—with a sense of foreboding that had nothing to do with the servant’s use of his title. Three letters meant his siblings were doubling up, or the cousins and aunties had been recruited for the siege, which was a drastic tactic indeed. Pru in particular hated putting pen to paper, being more a man of action—or impulse, which amounted to the same thing at his age.

Elijah tidied up thoroughly, cleaned every brush and palette knife, stacked sketches neatly in several piles, and generally procrastinated as long as he could. The portrait for Sindal was coming along nicely. He considered starting on a session with it, decided that would be rank cowardice, and opened his letters instead.

By the time he’d finished reading the third one, he looked up to find Joseph Carrington, Earl of Kesmore, standing in the doorway, Timothy in his arms. “I thought I’d find you here.”

“Are you going to kiss me? I have declared this space a kiss-free zone.” The declaration was recent but well intended.

Kesmore sauntered into the room and paused to study the portraits. Elijah could hear the cat purring and tried not to feel betrayed. “No mistletoe here, God be thanked. Downstairs, it’s a veritable gauntlet. His Grace must have appointed himself Lord of Misrule early this year. How goes the painting?”

Joseph Carrington was the closest thing Elijah had to a friend on the premises, so Elijah understood the question was not about painting per se.

“My family has taken a notion to bludgeon me into submission.”

Kesmore settled into one of the rocking chairs, the cat curling up in his lap. “You have a deal of family. I gather from the various lamentations of my in-laws that sisters are the worst.”

Sisters were bad enough. Brothers were bad enough.

Elijah brought a fragrant, single-page missive to his nose, set it aside, and took the second seat. “My mother has explained to me—ten years after it might have done some good—that I will never gain admittance to the Royal Academy.”

“Mothers, even your mother, can be wrong. Her Grace’s judgment was not infallible where Louisa was concerned, and His Grace knew not how to intervene between two such strong-willed and dear ladies.”

“You are a good friend, Kesmore, but my mother’s logic is unassailable. She not only turned down the suit of one Mortimer Fotheringale, she told him at the time he had not one-tenth of my father’s artistic talent, no imagination, and no respect for what women could contribute to art. Mind you, my father was an amateur caricaturist only—though I gather Fotheringale was among his targets, and Papa must rely on his marchioness to match his coats and waistcoats. According to my mother, the only way I might meet with more enmity from Fotheringale is if I were her daughter rather than her son.”

Kesmore scratched the beast’s white chin. “Who is this Fotheringale person? Shall I shoot him for you?”

Tempting thought, because Kesmore was only half jesting. “Dear Mortimer is the wealthiest member of the Academy’s nominating committee, though Mother was right about his talent. He paints only academic subjects, takes forever to do them, and then gives them away, probably because nobody would pay money for them. The assassination offer is appreciated but hardly in keeping with the spirit of the holidays.”

The door opened, and Sindal slipped through, closing it quickly behind him. “I thought it might be safe in here. It’s Bedlam downstairs—children, dogs, His Grace producing sweets for the little ones at every turn, mistletoe everywhere. I’ve brought fortification.”

He held up a bottle as if it were the price of admission to the studio.

“Come join us,” Kesmore said. “Bernward here is not going to get into the Academy, and, of course, true love is to blame. He wants cheering up.”

Sindal pulled up a hassock and uncorked the bottle. “What academy?”

Hazelton came next, though how such a big man moved without making a sound was a mystery. He too brought fortification and had dragooned a passing footman into supplying more of same at regular intervals, as well as quantities of sweet breads with butter.

The cat made the round of various laps; the bottles made the rounds. Stories of Christmases past came out, and Elijah even offered a few of his own—cricket in the portrait gallery, freezing his arse off with two of his brothers to see if the animals spoke at midnight on Christmas Eve, hitting his granddame with a snowball by accident and having to visit her as penance thereafter.

“Bet she spoiled you rotten,” Hazelton groused. “Old women know best how to spoil a little fellow. My son’s nurse is eighty if she’s a day.”

Sindal took exception. “She is not. She just looks eighty so she’ll be safe from you.”

“I’ll have you know…” Hazelton began, while Elijah’s attention wandered to his brothers’ letters. His mother’s news was disturbing, because Fotheringale had no motivation for giving up his various grudges. Artistic insecurity had a prodigious memory, one that typically magnified slights and forgot praise.

Hazleton left off defending his manly honor, or his eyesight, or something. “Bernward’s brooding. Pass him the bottle.”

Kesmore passed Elijah the cat instead. Timothy’s claws went to work directly on Elijah’s thigh. “Come, young man. Tell us what afflicts you, and we’ll ridicule you for it accordingly.”

How inchoate inebriation had added years to Kesmore’s standing, Elijah did not know. “My brothers miss me.”

Looks were exchanged all around, and then the door opened. Jenny’s brother, St. Just, slid through. “I’ve brought more refugees. The carnage on the battlefield is terrible. My own dear wife kissed the butler and was sizing up the senior footmen when I escaped.”

St. Just opened the door widely enough that two more men could scurry in behind him. They both had what Elijah was coming to think of as Windham chins—a trait from the sire’s line. They had green eyes, and those green eyes looked harried if not haunted.

Kesmore gestured with the bottle. “Bernward, some introductions: The mean-looking one is St. Just. Around his mama we call him Rosecroft. The prissy one is Lord Valentine, and the sniffy one is Westhaven. Cowards, the lot of them. Afraid of a few shrieking children, a bowl of wassail, and some holiday decorations.”

“I don’t see you down there,” Westhaven said, taking a place on the raised hearth and looking, indeed, sniffy about it.

“I have three children, and I am married to Louisa,” Kesmore said. His smile was fatuous. “And don’t be fooled, Bernward. St. Just is a dear, Lord Valentine more stubborn than the other two put together, and Westhaven only looks sniffy when he’s not beholding his countess. I say this with the authority of a man who loves them sincerely and is only a bit the worse for drink.”

Lord Valentine took the place beside Kesmore; St. Just simply sat on the floor.

“Your brothers might miss you, Bernward,” Sindal said, “but we’ve a few brothers to spare. In the spirit of holiday generosity, we’ll lend them to you. You may have Westhaven here on indefinite loan, for starters.”

By the time they’d gotten around to wondering how His Grace not merely endured but thrived on the holiday mayhem, Elijah had reached an insight that did not provide even as much comfort as the four-ton cat contentedly shredding his breeches.

His sisters missed him, and his mother was threatening essentially to cut him off if he remained “as stubborn as his father.” She might make good on her threats, though Elijah could ambush her in Town and wear her down over the next few years. That prospect was daunting, much like facing the melee below stairs daunted these happy, tipsy men who were delighted to spend time with one another.

Elijah’s brothers missed him too. He’d known that.

What he hadn’t known was how badly he missed his family—the entire lot of them—and how difficult it was going to be to ever gain entrance to the Academy. The latter realization didn’t disturb him nearly as much as it ought to, while the former disturbed him far more than it should have.

“Look at me.”

Elijah muttered the words, as if the effort of speaking had been snatched from the orts and leavings of his ability to concentrate. He got like this when he painted—gruff, absorbed, and to Jenny, fascinating.

She looked directly at him. “I am not my mother.”

He studied her for perhaps ten consecutive, silent seconds then went back to scowling at the image taking shape on his canvas. “You have the same shade of green in your eyes, you have the same—” His brush paused, and he fired another glance at her. “Almost the same shape of upper lip.”

He would not have heard anything she said in reply, so Jenny resumed work on her own effort, which was His Grace’s portrait. Without planning it, she and Elijah never worked on the same subject at the same time.

And thank goodness her brothers had appropriated the studio yesterday afternoon, or Elijah would have been much further ahead.

“You are displeased about something. I can feel it.” Elijah spoke without shifting his focus from his canvas.

“Not displeased. I’m glad you got nothing done yesterday. I like to watch you work.”

He wrinkled his nose then added a touch of paint to Her Grace’s shoulder. “You’re daft.”

“Look at me.”

He obliged. He had a smear of white near his chin, his hair was sticking out in all directions, and his eyes were not the same blue as His Grace’s, but Jenny studied them as if they might be.

“I know you spied on us yesterday,” he said, touching his brush to his palette.

“I came in the same door as everybody else, Elijah. How can you call that spying?”

“Nobody noticed you. They were all too absorbed with Sindal’s tale of winning the fair maid over a pile of dirty nappies.”

They had been, the sentimental, kissable, happy lot of them. Jenny had eavesdropped in a quiet corner, wondering why Sophie—her own sister—had never shared so much of her courtship.

“I believe there was mistletoe involved, and my brothers claim to have had a hand in matters.”

They fell silent. Fifteen minutes from now, Elijah might reply to her comment, or he might curse the fact that he’d run out of green paint, or he might decide he’d reached a place to pause in his own efforts and rip up at her morning’s work.

Jenny had listened to Sindal’s tale yesterday, then listened to Joseph add his Christmas recollections, but she’d also used the time to study her brothers. Each man bore the stamp of His Grace’s paternity, in the eyes, in the chin, and oddly enough, in the way their hands joined their wrists.

His Grace had beautiful wrists, and he’d passed that trait down to his progeny.

“Why are you staring at your wrists, Genevieve? The portrait won’t paint itself.”

“I have my father’s wrists. I wonder if His Grace ever had artistic aspirations. I can’t imagine he did.” And why had she never noticed this?

“My father did—amateur aspirations, from what my mother has said, though his sense of color is abominable. I need to mix up more brown. Why must all wood be brown?”

Wood was not brown. It was red, blond, black, sable, and many other colors that only looked brown. Jenny did not correct Elijah. She’d realized, in the first hour they’d painted together, that she sometimes disagreed with him for the… spark of it.

Minor tiffs and spats formed some kind of verbal mistletoe, having to do with the way Elijah’s eyebrows rose, his nostrils flared, and his chin turned an inch to the right.

“Have you ever seen your father’s work, Elijah?”

He stepped back from his canvas and wiped his hands on a rag. “A few caricatures only. My mother has talent, though. What on earth are you doing with His Grace’s boots?”

The duke had chosen to wear riding attire, which Jenny thought showed his excellent figure to good advantage and helped with the informal nature of the rendering.

“He wore his favorite pair,” she said. “They are comfortable rather than impressive, so don’t start in with your dratted lectures again.”

To Elijah, a portrait was not a likeness, so much as a commentary on the subject—and a flattering commentary, at that. He propped his fists on his hips, sails clearly filling.

“Genevieve, do you know why the grand manner of portraiture found favor for more than half a century? Do you have any idea the problems that result when a sitter does not like your work? Can you imagine how limited your commissions will be if you—?”

He could go on like that for eternities. Jenny shut him up by the simple expedient of setting aside her palette and brush and kissing him.

His arms came around her, but then the dratted man lifted his head. “Somebody could come in, Genevieve.”

At least he’d muttered that with his lips against her temple. “Nonsense. As much as this place was a madhouse yesterday, this morning it’s quiet as a tomb.” A tomb where the shades were much in need of headache powders.

Her logic must have appeased his overactive conscience—his worries were for her, she knew that—because he commenced kissing her back.

And oh, the pleasure of it. Elijah was never a frantic, pushy kisser, and yet in the very deliberation of his attentions there was passion.

“I wasn’t going to do this,” he informed her earlobe. “We were to have a footman in here, to—”

“Kiss me.”

“Not to—”

He kissed her. He kissed her with a building heat and banked desperation, such that when Jenny realized she might be getting paint all over his shirt and waistcoat, she also realized it was already too late.

In so many ways, it was already too late.

She subsided against his chest. “We need to clean up. Luncheon will be served soon.”

This was a pretext. Her Grace kept a buffet with varying selections available in the breakfast parlor from dawn until midafternoon. People would wander in and out as their appetites and overindulgences dictated.

“You’re hungry. I’m sorry. I should have realized—” He glanced at the clock. “You would let me starve you, woman.”

Elijah, when not painting, could also be gruff. Jenny particularly liked that about him. She slipped her arms from his waist, knowing he’d tolerated as much kissing as the moment would allow. “Your portrait is coming along very well.”

He didn’t take that bait, but instead studied her, rather than the color of her eyes.

“You looked lonely yesterday, sitting in your dark corner, eavesdropping on the men like a tired tavern wench.”

“I will miss my brothers.” Miss them with an ache of much greater proportions than she’d realized. Miss their wrists and chins, miss the way any two of them smiled together over some complaint made by the third. Miss the way each of them had known she was there, and none of them had given her away.

Elijah continued to study her. “Let’s clean up, then. I wanted to ask you about something.”

Jenny gathered up her brushes, hoping he meant to ask her about something artistic. He argued with her, he exhorted, he lectured, and he explained, but he seldom asked her opinion regarding anything artistic, and usually took issue with the ideas she did express.

She was unschooled, he said, and he wasn’t wrong.

They set their canvases across the room from the fire. Jenny took off her smock; Elijah rolled down his cuffs. He tolerated her doing up his sleeve buttons, just as she held still while he wiped a dab of paint off her nose, and then allowed her to wipe off his chin.

These small intimacies were a consolation of sorts, though Jenny thought kissing would have consoled her rather more.

“What did you want to ask me?”

Before he answered, he turned a full circle, hands on hips, inspecting their work space. She saw his gaze light on a sketchbook lying near where the cat sat in sphinxlike repose on the mantel.

“When the regiment decamped yesterday to take their wives in hand, I spent some time in here getting organized, and I found yonder feline sitting on this.” He passed her the sketchbook. “It has to be one of yours—the style is yours—but the subjects are unusual. I don’t recall seeing it before.”

Jenny opened the book and knew at one glance exactly what folly Timothy had led him to, the wretched beast. “These are just some old sketches. Are you hungry?”

“Those are not just some old sketches, Genevieve.”

“They are juvenilia, Elijah, not even worth your criticism.” Which would be considerable, she was sure. She folded the sketchbook against her chest, unwilling to watch him examine the contents. If he tore into these sketches the way he carped at and criticized everything else, she would cry.

“Come here, Genevieve.”

She followed him over to the sofa and watched with foreboding as he tossed more fuel on the fire. Was he preparing for a long harangue? “If you want me to sit beside you on that sofa, Elijah, I might fall prey to an impulse to kiss you again.”

“I delight in your impulses, Genevieve.” He offered this with a crooked, pained smile, suggesting his delight was tempered with regret.

She took a place beside him on the sofa. “What did you want to discuss?”

“Give me that.” He took the sketchbook from her and opened it on his lap. Timothy leaped onto the sofa and settled into a perfect, feline circle at Jenny’s hip. “These sketches are brilliant.”

Brilliant. Now, when he’d found a book Jenny never wanted to see again, he pronounced her work brilliant.

“I had no sense of the rules. I had no judgment about what was a suitable subject. I had no business sketching those children.” Many of whom had likely perished.

“You’re wrong. You’re more wrong about that than about anything you’ve been wrong about since you first sketched me at Kesmore’s.”

Timothy began a rumbling purr against Jenny’s body, as if Elijah’s pronouncements were so much small talk, not arrows aimed at Jenny’s conscience. “Can we put this book away, Elijah? I find I’m really quite peckish, and by now even my brothers ought to be stirring. They’ll want me in the breakfast parlor to help with the little—”

He shut her up by virtue of his lips applied lingeringly to her cheek. “These are your best work. Tell me about them.”

His buss to her cheek was the first kiss he’d initiated since his speech about babies and folly, which Jenny could probably have recited to him verbatim but for the lump in her throat.

“I sneaked out to the poorhouses when I was supposed to go shopping for the holidays. I went to the poorhouses in winter, when it was so cold I had to sketch with gloves on. The children had no gloves.”

They’d had no gloves, no coats, no food, no coal, no health, no hope. Every time, her brother Victor had forbidden her to go, and every time, he’d waited right beside her, until she could bear the scent of death and despair no more.

Elijah’s arm came around her shoulders. “What was a duke’s daughter doing in the poorhouses?”

“I don’t know. Trying to understand, I suppose, as adolescents must understand everything, as they must rebel against everything. Why do I have so much, why do others—equally valuable in the eyes of God, we’re told—have nothing? Why do some children have only five years of life on earth, and every day of that five years is miserable with illness, starvation, and vermin? And I have loving family, health… everything, in abundance?”

He turned a page, to an image of a small child huddled near a puny, smoldering fire. Gender was not apparent, so huge were the eyes, so pronounced the facial bones, and shapeless the rags that passed for clothing. The child’s expression was vacant to the point of death, death at least of the soul.

“As a gently bred young lady, you should not have seen these things.”

“My brother Victor said the same thing. He said when I was older, perhaps, and in a position to take on charitable works. He always brought money for us to leave, but those places are corrupt.”

Elijah turned the page again, the scene a cozy parlor, the fire blazing in the hearth, rugs thick on the floor, and heavy curtains over the windows. A portly fellow stood beside a desk, his attire that of a prosperous burgher, his smile genial—though in their coldness, his eyes had something in common with that of the child on the previous page.

Examining the sketch now, Jenny realized she’d used the idea of illumination from below to imbue a cozy scene with lurid, satanic shadows. The choice had not been conscious, but it had been effective.

Now, Jenny could barely stand to glance at the sketch. “I noticed that the people who tend to the poorhouses were always well fed, always comfortable. It drove me mad to see that. I gave away all my pin money for years, until Westhaven remarked that I wasn’t wearing new frocks—or perhaps Victor peached on me. As sick as he was, he fretted for me and encouraged my art without ceasing.”

Elijah set the sketchbook aside and angled his body to wrap both arms around her. “Victor died of consumption?”

She nodded against his throat. “The poorhouses are breeding grounds for all manner of disease. When Victor fell ill, he forbade me to go back lest I suffer the same fate, and I was”—the lump in her throat was going to choke her—“I was relieved. I was relieved never to go back.”

“You still give your pin money to charity.”

Another nod, because she was weeping now and burrowed so closely against Elijah, they might have been making love.

He said nothing more, and for long moments, Jenny cried like she hadn’t cried since Victor’s death. Cried without worrying that she sounded unladylike, cried without worrying that she’d never stop.

And throughout all of this tumult, Elijah held her close. She had the sense that if Their Graces had burst through the door, Elijah would not have moved unless and until Jenny had regained her composure.

“I m-miss him.”

“Victor.” Not a question.

“He could make me laugh. Even when he was dying, he could make me laugh, and he never protested when I sketched him.” She’d filled pages of the same sketchbook with images of her brother, chronicled his long, miserable battle with an enemy nobody ever defeated. Another entire notebook held Bart, always laughing and smiling.

“Victor understood you.”

Three words holding a world of insight. “He understood everybody. Victor was a charming man, but by the time he died, he was a wise man too.”

“When did he die?”

Another quiet comment, but this one reverberated through Jenny bodily. She lifted her face, not caring that she looked a wreck. “Right before… Christmas. He died right before… I did not realize… It never occurred to me…”

When she settled against Elijah again, she felt less at the mercy of grief, and on the strength of the one simple insight. “The anniversary of his death is next week.”

And her family would ignore it. Perhaps in the privacy of the ducal apartment, Their Graces would acknowledge the date somehow. Maybe some of the glances between her brothers would be about old loss, but in public, the past was not part of the upcoming holiday.

Elijah brushed her hair back from her face and said nothing, though his silence was comfortable, like Timothy purring right beside her.

“I want to look at those sketches,” Jenny said. This was not entirely truthful. She dreaded looking at those sketches, but she also wanted to know what Elijah saw in them that was brilliant.

“Next week, when we’ve made more progress on Their Grace’s portraits. For now, you need sustenance.” He produced a handkerchief, which Jenny put to use and did not return to him.

“I need to compose myself.”

He withdrew his arm but remained right beside her. “No, you needed to lose your composure. I think you also need to go to Paris.”

An after-shudder hit her, though she was done with her tears. “You’re concluding that only now?”

Timothy rose and stalked across Jenny’s lap—why did such soft little paws land like jackboots?—to get to Elijah.

“I knew you wanted to go to Paris, that you longed to be there. Now I understand that you need to go. It will be hard, Genevieve. When you’re starting out, there’s competition from every quarter, and it won’t help at all that your papa’s an English duke.”

She reached over and stroked Timothy’s sleek, dark fur. He was not purring, which struck her as odd. “I know that. Will you write me some introductions?”

He hesitated a single instant. “You won’t need them. Your talent will be your introduction, and the French have discernment, Genevieve. They can spot ability, regardless of how unconventionally it’s presented, or how unusual the artist.”

His refusal hurt, but his compliment was genuine. He had faith in her. The notion comforted wonderfully. She set aside the temptation to wheedle anyway. “I am famished. Shall we have our luncheon?”

“We shall.” He picked Timothy up and rose to set him on the mantel. The cat looked about itself, clearly not pleased with the change of location.

“He’s contrary,” Jenny said. “That’s exactly where he wanted to be earlier, but now he must find fault with it.” Would she be equally fickle about Paris once she’d arrived there?

Elijah helped her to her feet then surprised her by pulling her into his arms. “We will look at those sketches, Genevieve. They are magnificent.”

She did not question the embrace, but rather, closed her eyes and breathed in his scent. “Next week, then. I will hold you to it.”

He surprised her yet again by kissing her. His lips on hers were warm, firm, and lovely—nothing fleeting or demanding. When he raised his head and did not step back, she tried to figure out what his kiss had been about. Respect, of course. Elijah was never disrespectful of her person.

But even more than respect, his kiss had tasted of awe, as if he were kissing a goddess come to earth. Jenny leaned against him, abruptly feeling fatigue to go along with her hunger.

“Come, my lady.” Elijah shifted to link their arms, ballroom promenade-fashion. “We will fortify ourselves. Your brothers will likely be stirring, the mistletoe is still threatening from every corner, and if I understand aright, yet more family will be arriving today.”

His smile said that amid all that mayhem and holiday nonsense, she would have an ally. She would have a quiet place to come and paint; she would have a handkerchief when she needed one.

She’d have a friend who would not risk any more folly with her, regardless of how badly she’d miss him once they parted.

The realization hurt with a whole new pain, particularly when she thought back to when he’d noticed her the previous afternoon as she’d sat quietly in her dim corner. She’d studied her brothers, with their wrists, chins, and glances, and she’d studied Elijah too.

He missed his family, missed them more deeply than he likely knew. She would go to Paris, but if there was any benevolence to the holiday season at all, Elijah would give in to a towering case of homesickness and take himself off to Flint Hall.