Lady Jenny's Christmas Portrait

Four

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.

“I want to go to Paris.”

The ear was a curious organ, more complicated than most people thought, like a horse’s hoof. Lots of angles and shadows to the typical ear, but an ear could also be beautiful. “Paris in spring is lovely.”

“I want to go now.”

The point of his pencil broke, and he muttered an oath. Still her features did not shift from the serene, contemplative, secret-veiling expression she’d worn for long moments. Da Vinci would have been desperate to sketch her—nobody did justice to a sensual madonna like he had.

“A crossing this time of year can be quite rough, my lady.” He feathered his eraser over the slight flaw in the line made by his infernal pencil, reshaped the point, and paused. “You want to go to Paris now?”

“Directly after the holidays, and I would not go to shop, hear the opera, or polish my French.”

“Your eyes hold a wealth of determination.” Also sadness. How to sketch both so they didn’t overshadow the beauty? “Why do you want to go to Paris?”

Her gaze measured him. He could feel her studying him even as he concentrated on the image taking shape on the page.

“I want to sit someplace besides Gunter’s and eat a pastry in public without it being a scandal. I want to have my pastry without a maid and a footman, as well as an immediate family member—preferably male, but at least married—within two yards of me at all times.”

The determination in her eyes flared hotter. God in heaven, Wellington had eyes like that. Calm, unstoppable, capable of banking a world of grief behind a slight smile—and this over a pastry?

“Do you think to acquire that freedom by outlasting all the bachelors on the marriage mart, Genevieve?” This was worse than the randy bishop, the idea that she might be purposely seeking spinsterhood—and it made no sense at all.

He sat back, feeling winded as a disconcerting notion rendered his pencil still. “Do you prefer women?”

Her lips twitched. “I love my sisters, of course, and my brothers’ wives are lovely too—” Those slightly darker than perfect brows rose. “That’s not what you meant.”

She’d attended Antoine’s classes. In every batch there was at least one pair of young sprigs who fancied themselves classically Greek in their lust for each other. They’d sat practically in each other’s laps, called each other cher, and tossed languid, calf-eyed gazes at Elijah as he’d lounged about in his birthday attire.

He’d found it amusing and vaguely irritating. If young men brought to their art the same focus they brought to their breeding organs, the world would have many more works like Dürer’s hare.

“I did not mean to offend, my lady. I see the Sapphic preferences aren’t entirely unknown to you.” Her family would be scandalized that she even knew of such things.

Her family would be scandalized if they knew how closely he was sitting to her, and yet, he wasn’t about to shove his chair back to a decorous distance in the shadows and chill farther from the fire.

“I want to go to Paris to study art. I shall go, eventually.” She did not gird her words with determination; she clad them in certainty, though Elijah had the sense it was a newfound certainty—very newfound.

Two thoughts collided in Elijah’s mind, one sane, the other demented. The sane thought was: She jolly well could study art in Paris. Genevieve Windham was abundantly talented enough. Then, too, in Elijah’s lifetime, the French had lost all gallantry toward their womenfolk.

French ladies managed commercial establishments, strolled about unescorted, and took unseemly interest in the nation’s ongoing political debacle. Rational Englishmen had long stopped trying to explain the French, and look where France’s democratic impulses had gotten her: her aristocracy butchered, her land beggared, her almighty, plundering emperor going slowly mad on some island.

Bugger France, even if Paris was lovely.

The second thought, the demented one, was so raw Elijah rated it more as a stirring of instinct: He could not let her go.

And then, more raw still: He could not stop her, not unless he were her husband or her guardian.

“Paris smells like cat piss.”

His observation made her laugh, a merry, surprised sound that warmed him every bit as much as the fire, and yet he’d spoken the perfect truth. The whole damned city had a pissy stench in certain weather, worse even than Rome—though London had a prodigious stench of its own, especially near the river in summer.

“I daresay parts of the Morelands stable bear the same distinctive scent. One is told it keeps the mice down.”

He dreaded to dim that smile, and yet he had to know the truth. “Does your family pity you because they regard this ambition as folly?”

Any reasonable ducal English family ought to.

Her smile didn’t fade; it winked out like a snuffed candle. “I am not so stupid as to confide such a thing to people who think only in terms of when the next Windham baby will come along. These are the same relations who will not allow me to be alone at Morelands with thirty servants in attendance if my parents tarry in London. I am shuffled about, a spinster in training, because even thirty servants and the very gates of Morelands itself cannot guard my antique and pointless virtue.”

Elijah was studying her still, his pencil re-creating the clean line of her nose, so he saw that these babies born in such numbers to her siblings made her sad too. He also saw that she likely didn’t know this herself. She protected herself from sadness with a silent, determined anger, and that made him sad too—for her.

And none of these insights, the insights every portraitist resigned himself to and tried to leave behind when a commission was complete, were cheering in the least.

A clock chimed down the hall, and outside, the full darkness of a winter’s night had fallen.

“You’ve had your thirty minutes, Mr. Harrison, and I must change for dinner.” And yet, she did not move, and Elijah’s pencil sketched more quickly. She might flee the honesty of their exchange, but she’d manage her retreat with dignity.

“Another moment.” Now that he knew of her hare-brained scheme to exile herself to the land of cat piss and flirtatious republicans, he was more determined to get her likeness on the page. “Your family doesn’t know about your ambition to travel, so I must conclude they pity you because you have no babies coming along.”

She turned her head, and it was as if the shutter on a lighthouse signal had opened. Her glare was ferocious, wounded, and magnificent, as was her silence.

He caught her then, in that single moment of genuine ire—all the ducal drive in her, the female passion, the thwarted artistic sensibility. His hand went still so he might behold her glory, and his mouth made words because he could not stand her heartache.

“Genevieve, I’m sorry. I’m sorry you’ve had to dance with spotty boys when you wanted to be sketching in the British Museum. I’m sorry you were not allowed to make a grand tour of the Continent. I’m sorry you stopped attending Antoine’s classes.”

Though he’d been relieved too. And then last winter, when he’d thought that strutting puppy Honiton had decided to snatch up an unmarried Windham daughter, he’d been rabid to warn the man off.

The battle light in her eyes dimmed to a mere spark, a spark Elijah suspected her family never noted. “Will you let me assist you while you’re working here, Mr. Harrison? Even if I could merely observe, or distract the boys as you sketched them…?”

The humility with which she made her request walloped his senses, which was the only explanation for what came out of his mouth.

When he should have told her that the age of tolerance toward women in the ranks of professional artists had passed, when he should have lectured her about the gratification of the true amateur’s calling… he instead said, “Yes, of course. I would never turn down an artistically knowledgeable assistant. You must join me here whenever you like, to observe, assist, or critique. I’ll enjoy the company.”

Though God help him, how was he to concentrate on a pair of wiggling, sticky little boys, how was he to concentrate on anything, when she was in the room?

“You could ask him.”

Tristan Leopold Harrison, Marquess of Flint, and father to more children than a sane man could manage, took a sip of holiday libation. The wassail bowl came out earlier and earlier each year as more and more of those children approached adulthood.

His lordship kept his voice down when addressing the second oldest of those children. “I am not asking your brother to come home for Christmas. A man doesn’t need an invitation to come to his own home for the holidays, much less home to the estate he’s going to inherit ere long.”

Across the family parlor from where the gentlemen sat, Lady Charlotte Elizabette’s lips pursed in an expression that presaged a telling silence when her husband escorted her above stairs later. She never scolded, never ranted, and yet, the marchioness always made her opinions known.

“Perhaps I’ll invite him, then.” Joshua suggested this possibility with the casualness of a grown man who knew exactly how to taunt his aging papa. “Or maybe I’ll offer to join him in Town, and take Abner, Silas, Pru, and Solomon with me.”

And like a seasoned papa, his lordship leaned back in his chair and contemplated his drink rather than the prospect of the holidays in exclusively female company. “Any invitation to remove Prudholm from the premises has a strong appeal. Teaching your sisters how to smoke cigars was bad enough, but experimenting with fireworks should have seen him brought up before the assizes for the toll he’s taken on your mother’s nerves.”

At sixteen, Prudholm had spent one term at Cambridge and now considered himself quite the brilliant scientist. Thank God he was the youngest boy, and his older brothers mostly kept him in line.

“Don’t you miss Elijah, Papa?”

Joshua was the family barrister. He’d been arguing with all and sundry since he’d been in dresses, but this tactic—an agile descent into pleading and sentiment—was dastardly.

“I miss your brother every day, and I pray for his well-being every night, as does your mother, who will not thank you for pressing me on this.”

“She would thank me. Mama’s too soft-spoken by half.”

If the boy only knew… except Joshua wasn’t a boy. He was a respected member of the legal profession—to the extent any member of that gang of rogues could be respected—and he was going to raise the next Marquess of Flint if Elijah continued to turn his back on his patrimony.

“Your brother and I exchange regular letters in which he asks after and I report upon the well-being of each sibling and relation in our vast and busy family,” Flint said. “He also gets copies of the steward’s reports, though I’m not supposed to know about that, and neither are you. Elijah has had many opportunities to announce that he will join us for Christmas and has not indicated a willingness to do so. I must respect his wishes in this regard.”

Joshua took on the thoughtful expression that made him most closely resemble his older brother. “You, my lord, miss him until you’re cross-eyed with it. The girls hardly recall what he looks like, and if you make good on your perennial threats to die of exasperation with your offspring, he’ll become their guardian.”

“He is heir to the title. Of course he’ll become their guardian.”

Joshua crossed long booted legs and ran a hand through the dark wavy hair her ladyship had bequeathed to all the children. “Little Gwynn makes her bow this Season.”

A man who took stewardship of his acres seriously, a man who had no patience with the ordeal of the social Season, needed another sip of stout potation before he parsed out the ramifications of this half-yawned, diabolical aside.

“You’re saying Elijah will run into his sister at some Society gathering, and there will be awkwardness.”

And dear little Gwynn—all nearly six feet of her—would be mortified not to be recognized by her brother, which was a sorry, sorry possibility given how quickly and recently she’d acquired her statuesque proportions.

“I don’t foresee any difficulty, Papa, unless she recognizes him first, which grows increasingly unlikely when she hasn’t seen him to speak of for what… ten years?”

“Nine.” And eight months, except for some chance sightings or cordial visits in Town. Where in all of creation had Elijah come by such stubbornness?

Joshua eased to his feet and ambled over to the punch bowl. The twins had pleaded a cold and gone above stairs, there to no doubt devour a lurid novel provided by their indulgent elders. The older girls were playing cards over in the corner, cheating shamelessly and gambling like sailors on shore leave—for hairpins. Pru, Abner, Silas, and Solomon were drinking more punch than they ought to and playing their own version of whist for God knew what stakes, while her ladyship presided over the whole with a serene beauty that never dimmed in her husband’s eyes.

And yet, Charlotte was sad. Damn that stubborn boy; he was making his mama sad.

His lordship rose, snatched up his empty glass, and joined Joshua at the punch bowl. “You are a rapscallion and a pestilence, Joshua Harrison.”

Joshua took his father’s cup and ladled more of the Brew of Misrule into it. “Those qualities can be inherited, Papa. Excellent punch.”

“It’s my father’s recipe, and while I will not invite Elijah to join his own family at his own home over the holidays, where any proper fellow would know he’s welcome unconditionally at any time, I can hardly take exception to correspondence between siblings that extends felicitations of the season, can I?”

Her ladyship’s needle momentarily paused over her embroidery hoop then resumed stitching. She was a demon with her needle, was her ladyship. She could conjure any scene in fabric and thread, and some of her creations were quite fanciful. Even a man whose art was limited to pen-and-ink sketches could tell that much.

Joshua took a hefty swallow of a mixture that well deserved the appellation “punch.” He tossed it back so easily his lordship felt a spike of pride.

“Elijah has eleven siblings, your lordship. That would be a lot of felicitations, if I knew where to send them.”

“Include your mother’s, and it will be a veritable deluge. I always know where your brother is, and I always have.”

The barrister’s eyebrows rose, and his lordship had the satisfaction of seeing Joshua for once looking flummoxed. To eliminate any lingering confusion, the marquess touched his glass to Joshua’s and winked.

“Here’s to a happy Christmas, Joshua, for every member of my family.” His lordship offered the words not only as a toast, but also as a prayer, the same prayer he’d been sending up for nine long years.