Lady Jenny's Christmas Portrait

Seven

“It’s from my sister. My youngest sister.” Beside Jenny, Elijah popped a strawberry into his mouth and chewed mechanically.

A sister? Jenny had the sense he was liberally blessed with same. “Are you concerned for her?”

“Sarah has never written to me before. She’s the youngest by three minutes, though our mother claims they were a memorable three minutes.”

Sitting right there beside her, so close Jenny could catch a hint of his scent, he’d gone away to some familial place in his mind.

“Open the letter, Elijah,” Jenny said, passing him another strawberry.

He cast her one glance—a gentleman did not read correspondence at table—then slit the epistle with an unused knife.

If this sister called Elijah home before Jenny had pried from him just how those pastels merited the term “brilliant,” she’d hunt Lady Sarah down and ensure that a lump of coal for Christmas would be the least of the young woman’s problems.

“She’s well,” Elijah said, “and uses a fine vocabulary for somebody who doesn’t yet put up her hair consistently.”

“A bookworm, possibly. Louisa was the same way. I learned many a term from her that impressed our elders.”

He peered at Jenny over his letter. “She and Ruth are both mad for books. I always know what to send them for their birthday and Christmas.”

Twin sisters, then, which was common enough in large families. Two more strawberries disappeared while Elijah finished reading his letter, and Jenny stifled the urge to pace.

She was not ready to have him snatched from her. She needed these days with him, artistically and… otherwise. All too soon Their Graces would return from Town, the children’s portraits would be completed, and Jenny would be heading off for Paris.

If she’d doubted her resolve on that goal before, she didn’t now.

Come fire, flood, or famine, as His Grace would say. Jenny was more determined on her destination than ever, and Elijah Harrison was part of the reason for her conviction.

“Sarah misses me.” He got up and crossed to the window, where bleak winter light did little to brighten the parlor.

Jenny glanced at the epistle long enough to see “Greetings, dear and long lost brother…” in the salutation.

Jenny had two long lost—forever lost—brothers, and would have given her right hand, the hand with which she painted, not to have it so. “You’ll see her at the holidays, won’t you?”

He remained facing away. “She can’t possibly miss me. She hardly knows me.”

Jenny rose and went to him, wanting to see what he saw out that cold window. “She can miss you. I barely recall my grandparents, but because most of my memories of them came from holiday gatherings, I do miss them.”

Missing loved ones at the holidays was always part of the season. How could he not know that?

“I left when Sarah was little more than a toddler. I used to read her stories, her on one knee, Ruth on the other.”

Jenny slipped her hand into his, because he seemed not simply gone away, but lost. “You’ll be with them at Christmas, won’t you?”

He let out a sigh of sufficient depth that the window fogged before him. “After Christmas, and then only if I’m made a member of the Academy.”

“They often don’t announce the results of their votes until the New Year, when the honors list comes out.” And what had membership in the Academy to do with sisters who missed him?

“Then I’ll wait until the vote is cast, but I will not go home until I can do so with sufficient standing that my father will have to admit he was wrong.”

Jenny had been raised with five brothers and four sisters, each sibling a living tribute to their parents’ legendary stubbornness. She recognized foolish pride when confronted with it, and recognized as well that to the person displaying it, it wasn’t foolishness and never would be.

“What was your father wrong about?”

Elijah glanced down at her, then at their joined hands. He kissed Jenny’s knuckles and gave her back her hand. “Very little, as it turns out. He told me I lacked the fortitude necessary to succeed as an artist, told me I was turning my back on my birthright out of laziness and self-indulgence, not because I had an artistic vocation. He told me I wasn’t prepared for what my artistic inclinations could cost me.”

“And you think he was right?” The hound stirred at the sharpness of Jenny’s tone, but Elijah smiled.

“He was spot on about much of it, but not all of it. I’ll admit that when I go home with an Academician’s status. I’ll admit I had no notion of the cost and effort involved in pursuing an artist’s life, that I was a spoiled lordling with no understanding of the greater world—provided my father rescinds his judgment of my character.”

So Jenny could blame this familial drama on honor, the worst of the crotchets male pride was prone to, and not just Elijah’s honor, but the marquess’s honor as well. She linked her arm through Elijah’s and led him around the table, lest they disturb old Jock at his slumbers.

“The regent sings your praises. Sir Thomas sings your praises. Surely you don’t need the Academy’s imprimatur to prove your father wrong?”

“The last thing I said as I tossed my brushes and spare shirts into a traveling bag was that I would come back as an Academician or not at all. I knew I had enough talent, and I was determined he should admit it.”

Jenny wanted to tell him he was an idiot. She wanted to tell him that young men rode off, full of themselves, their talent, and their invincible honor, and they came back in coffins. When they were dead, one couldn’t write them letters, couldn’t apologize, couldn’t explain what had driven one to sharp words and stupid taunts.

“Tell your sister you’ll see her at Christmas,” Jenny said. “Or shortly thereafter. She really does miss you, Elijah.”

Just as Jenny would miss him, even as she boarded her packet for Calais.

Elijah had a reputation for completing commissions quickly. He’d learned the necessity for speed early in his career, when his fees were modest and a gap in work meant a gap in coin.

Though in truth, he wasn’t all that quick. He was organized and disciplined, and work tended to get done when a man rose early and spent time in his studio rather than at the numerous distractions available in London Towne.

Then, too, he’d cultivated the social nap, using fashionable Society’s evening gatherings to catch up on his rest, fill his belly, and remind all and sundry that artistic talent was near to hand.

“My ability has gone begging today,” he said. “I can render the dog down to every wrinkle and hair, but the children are beyond me.”

Jenny glanced up at him from where she was building a house of cards with Kit. Wee William was astride old Jock, who dozed on the hearth rug at Elijah’s feet.

“Come down here, Mr. Harrison. Your perspective from that chair has to be awkward.”

She had a point, and she had a way with children, both on the page and on the thick carpet before the fire. Elijah gave up his seat and stretched out on his side on the floor. William dismounted from his perch on the dog and came careening into Elijah.

“Go for a ride!”

Elijah caught the boy with two hands on his chubby middle. “He is a solid fellow, is William.”

Jenny balanced cards in a carefully inverted V. “He’ll take after his parents and soon be as big as Kit.”

Elijah rolled to his back and lifted William straight up above him.

“Weeee! Ride!”

“Won’t Kit take after his parents too?”

“Kit is a foundling,” Jenny said, helping the older boy to make his own inverted V. “Sophie and Vim took him into their household when he was less than a year old.” She took the card from Kit’s little mitts, where it would soon be bent beyond use. “Like this, my man. Gently and slowly.”

When, all odds to the contrary, Kit managed to lean the two cards against each other, Jenny made a great fuss over her amazing, exceptional, clever nephew.

Elijah blew against the top of William’s head, making a rude sound and feeling not in the least amazing, exceptional, or clever. He couldn’t sketch worth a damn today because of his blasted sister’s note, a bit of familial sand thrown into the gears of a morning that ought to be taken up with professional concerns… and with Genevieve Windham.

“You caught something of William’s solidness in your pastels,” Elijah said, lifting the gigging child up again. “You conveyed that he’s a healthy, substantial young fellow.”

“Because I’ve carried him around on my hip, and he is substantial.” Jenny carefully, carefully placed a card crosswise over the two supports she and her amazing nephew had constructed.

“I-unt-up!”

Elijah lifted William straight up, realizing he’d forgotten this about youngsters. They were insistent and tenacious in their play, persevering at their fun when sense, strength, and adults had long since had enough.

“William is training me, like a bear at the circus.”

“William is enjoying himself,” Jenny countered. She had constructed another V, and was trying to show Kit how two cards had to balance perfectly together to become stable.

“You caught that too,” Elijah said. “The fixity of purpose common to the young at their play.” Whereas he had focused on rendering an accurate impression of little William’s curls and Kit’s small fingers.

“You have the same fixity of purpose,” Jenny said. “Careful, Kit-my-love.”

She sat, serene and graceful, with her legs tucked under her, and yet Elijah knew that Genevieve Windham’s determination likely eclipsed that of all the males in the room combined, including the hound. He rolled to his side, the better to behold his stubborn lady, and settled William astride his ribs.

“You have it too, Genevieve. Your determination is one of your defining accomplishments.”

She peered at the card in her hand, maybe wondering if he meant his words as a compliment, which he did. “I come by it honestly. My parents are strong willed.”

“Ride!” William bounced hard on Elijah’s ribs to emphasis the command, while Jenny smiled at her younger nephew.

“Vim takes them both up frequently, though lately it has been too cold. I looked at your pastels, you know.”

Elijah wrestled himself free of his rider and came to a sitting position, legs crossed, William ensconced on his boots. “And will you render a critique?”

To ask her was an odd relief. She would not be brutal for the fun of it, as old Antoine could be in the presence of dilettantes, but neither would she be timid.

“Something in you does not want to see the essential nature of your subject when you look at these children, Elijah. With your other portraits, there’s a compassion about what you render. You see the best in people. A peer might be elderly, too fond of his drink, portly, and forgetful, but you capture the humor in him, the fondness he has for his hounds or grandbabies.”

She had studied his work, and that pleased him. “I have bills, the same as everybody else. The flattery inherent in the grand style is commercially sensible, for all the Discourses would have it artistically imperative too.”

William grabbed for a card and captured the knave of hearts. Elijah took it from him and tried to balance it on the child’s crown. The card came sliding down over William’s nose, which resulted in much squealing and bouncing about.

“Sarah liked this game, though she got so she could hold quite still. Ruth never had the patience for it.”

Jenny sent him a look, a look that included but was not limited to pity. “You miss them too, Elijah.”

The second time, William purposely bounced on his little bottom to make the card slide off his head. “Maybe some.”

Jenny passed Kit a card, then another, and sat back as the boy tried to balance them against each other. “How long has it been since you’ve been home, Elijah?”

“A while.” He tousled Kit’s curls, then William’s. “What do you think the essential nature of these subjects is, Genevieve, the thing I wasn’t able to capture in my sketches?”

“How long is a while?”

The knave went sliding for a third time, and William was just as delighted. Elijah wrapped his arms around the small, ecstatic boy and kissed his ear. “Nine years and eight months since I’ve been home. My mother sees to it I run into my siblings occasionally, as if by chance. I call on her when we’re both in Town. My father and I meet at his club—it’s all very cordial.”

Nine years, eight months, and eleven days, but who was counting?

“You’ll go home soon,” Jenny said. “I’ll go to Paris, and you’ll go home to see your family.”

Her tone held an ominous sense of resolution, and while Elijah didn’t want to think of sweet, quiet Sarah and the more boisterous Ruth missing him, the notion of Jenny removing to Paris made him positively ill.

“Go!” William kicked out this time as he bounced, and the little house of cards went sailing in all directions. Elijah braced himself for a burst of outrage from Kit, but the boy clapped his hands.

“Let’s do it again,” Kit said. “This time I can be a wolf who blows the house down!”

Elijah Harrison could see the truth in others. He could find something attractive in a gouty old squire, a schoolgirl who hadn’t yet put up her hair, or a princess expected to one day effectively rule a nation when she’d never seen peace between her own parents.

Elijah had no idea, not the first inkling, how attractive he was, lounging on the rug with William, scratching the ear of an old hound, or giving Jenny a crooked smile and asking for a critique.

She would show this attractiveness to him, just as he had shown her how much art she was leaving in the shadows of her sketches.

“You were expecting me,” she said as he stepped back to allow her into his sitting room.

“The way Wellington expected the Corsican at Waterloo.” He closed the door behind her, locked it, then leaned back against the door. “That was rude. I apologize. I am out of sorts.”

“You are tired.” So she would sketch him tired, but she would not, not even for the sake of his rest, give up her hour. “Let’s begin then, shall we?”

He scrubbed a hand over his face then glanced around the room, as if looking for his wayward manners. “I’m imbibing. Would you care to join me?”

Parisians drank at all hours, and the ladies indulged in spirits there too. “Yes, please.”

He prowled over to the sideboard, his blue velvet dressing gown making a beautiful line of his back. “Have you ever taken spirits before, Genevieve?”

“Of course.”

He turned, a glass stopper in the shape of a winged lion in his right hand. “Don’t lie to me, my lady. I’ll find you out.”

He could too. He could look her in the eyes and know all her secrets—or at least paint them.

“When we’re ill or ailing, Her Grace advises the medicinal tot. She says one learns to appreciate medicinal tots as a function of marriage and children.”

“Does she say that within the duke’s hearing?”

Jenny accepted a glass with about an inch of amber liquid in the bottom. “She smiles directly at him when she says it, and he generally smiles back and toasts her.”

Jenny smiled at them both, pretending the prospect of others’ marital bliss, even in its mellowed and subtle forms, did not hurt. She lifted the glass to her mouth but was prevented from drinking by Elijah’s hand wrapped around hers.

“Slowly. Bad enough you’re secreted with me in dishabille at a late hour. If you’re found tipsy or worse, I will not forgive myself.”

The scent hit her nose before the liquid touched her lips—peat smoke, apples, oak wood, and a complex of things… botanical. Almost a perfume, and not the same as brandy.

She took a modest sip, which bloomed like a small firework in her mouth, the streams of glory trailing down to her belly. “What is it?”

“A fine old Scottish whisky. I travel with it, packed with my paints and frames and easels. Where will you pose me tonight?”

She wanted him stretched out, as he had been on the floor with William. Relaxed, a little preoccupied, and not very clothed. Her nerve deserted her, though, when she considered he’d probably balk at posing as her odalisque.

“Have you written to your sisters?”

He paused with a glass halfway to his mouth. “I’m to write to all six? I’d be at my desk the entire night, and that would mean an unproductive day tomorrow.”

He had been drinking. The Jenny who’d been secretly relieved to see the last of Denby, the Jenny who’d made a perfect bow before the Queen, the Jenny known and loved by every Windham of every age—and their pets—would have pled a headache, set her drink down, and bid Mr. Harrison good night.

This Jenny, who was going to study art in Paris, took another sip of her whisky—lovely stuff, whisky, no wonder her brothers partook regularly—and considered her subject.

“Write to your sister, then. Just the one, at your desk.”

He took a swallow of his drink and eyed the desk like a martyr beheld the lions’ den. The escritoire was pretty and French, japanned and decorated with inlaid gold scrollwork more feminine than masculine, but Jenny liked the elegance of it.

He sat. She moved candles, positioned his drink to catch the light, passed him a white quill pen, shifted the inkwell, moved his drink again, and then considered how to position herself. She couldn’t very well stand when she sketched him, but she wanted his face in shadows again, the better to apply what she’d learned the previous night.

“I have an easel,” he said, rising and disappearing into the bedroom. He emerged a moment later with a sturdy wooden frame, one sporting clamps at the corners for holding paper if one were not inclined to work on a canvas.

“How did you know?”

He set it up a few feet from the desk, exactly where Jenny would have asked him to—after pondering all her choices and wasting half of her allotted hour.

“You don’t want to be directly in my line of sight lest you distract me, and if you’re doing a night study of me, you want a bit of distance and superiority, some detachment about the point of view.”

No, actually, she wanted intimacy, but he wanted the distance, so she did not argue.

He resumed his seat, moving his drink a few inches closer to the blotter, which was where Jenny should have put it. She got her paper affixed to the board and regarded him, slouched back, brooding, vaguely dissolute and palpably annoyed, but at what?

“Is that how you want to remain for the next hour, Elijah?”

He glanced at the clock. “Forty-five minutes, Genevieve, and no. I might as well tend to my correspondence while you work.”

Jenny said nothing, starting her composition with the structural elements—the mantel behind him, the flat plane of the heavily lacquered desk. Candlelight and firelight brought out the inlaid work, giving the surface the quality of a fish pond, the top a visual window to a different world.

Which would need oils, of course.

Elijah had assembled the requisite tools for correspondence: paper, pen, penknife, sand, ink, and a focused expression. While he stared at the blank page—assembling thoughts, perhaps—Jenny focused on his face.

An hour later, Elijah sat back and sprinkled a final quantity of sand over his letter, just as Jenny made a final appraisal of her study.

It would do. In fact, it would do nicely, and yet, she didn’t want to show it to him. For a time, she wanted to revel in the notion that she’d applied what she’d learned the previous evening, and the result was impressive.

“You wrote only the one page,” she said, unfastening her paper from the easel and laying the finished sketch on the table by the door.

He tossed the pen on the desk and capped the ink. “One doesn’t want to be too loquacious. Females take their epistolary connections seriously, and I will be deluged with letters if my sisters decide I am a reliable correspondent.”

“I dread hearing from my siblings for just that reason.”

A hint of a smile scampered around his mouth. “You are teasing me. I deserve it.”

“No, I am not. My siblings have lives, you see. This child cut a tooth. That husband is annoyed by some buffoon in the Lords. This wife is absorbed in a new project with the dame school—”

He rose and held out a hand to her, and Jenny hoped it wasn’t the whisky inspiring Elijah’s overture. She gave him her hand and was tugged into an embrace, Elijah’s cheek resting against her hair.

“While you sketch your cat, visit the sick with your mother, and seethe with frustrated artistic talent. Let’s hear a curse, Genevieve. Let the drink, the lateness of hour, and the company inspire you, hmm?”

No cat came between them, no stays, no layers of proper attire. Held against Elijah’s body, Jenny felt the implacable structure of a large, fit man. His person was as soft and giving as a sculptor’s block of raw marble, but much, much warmer.

“The only curse I know is damn—double damn.”

“That’s a start, like a few lines on a page. Damn has promise, but it needs embellishment. Bloody double damn?” He spoke near her ear, his breath tickling her neck.

“Bloody is vulgar and graphic. Also quite naughty, and daring.”

“All the better. Come, let’s be vulgar and graphic on the subject of my sketches for the day.”

He turned her under his arm, as if they were drinking companions, and Jenny felt a little more inclined to curse: she’d wanted him to kiss her, wanted a cat-free kiss, a whisky-flavored kiss that went further than a dose of foul language toward resolving what she felt when she got her sisters’ chatty, conscientious, and unwittingly condescending letters.

“I like perishing damn,” Jenny said as Elijah settled with her on a sofa. Like the desk, this was an elegant piece of furniture, and he seemed to take up more than his half of it.

“Bloody, perishing damn,” he said, tucking his arm more closely around her. “Say it. You’re off to make war on France soon, like that We Happy Few fellow the Bard wrote about. Nobody will understand your English curses.”

Jenny considered that Elijah might have been drinking for a while before she’d come upon him—except the bottle had been nearly full, so this whimsical crankiness on his part was not entirely fueled by drink.

“I won’t need my curses in Paris, because I’ll have something to write about besides… my bloody, perishing, damned cat.” She’d surprised him—she’d surprised herself. “Now I feel I must apologize to Timothy.”

“Timothy owes me an apology,” Elijah said. “Damned beast about disemboweled me. I invite you to do the same.” He took a breath, and because Jenny was sitting right next to him, she felt the whimsy go out of him. “I can’t get Rothgreb’s little fellows right, Genevieve. It’s been two days, and nothing is… I should be half-finished by now.”

He trailed off and scooped up a half-dozen sketches from the low table. These he deposited in her lap on a huff.

“Why don’t you fetch our drinks,” Jenny suggested, picking up the first drawing. She wanted him off that couch, wanted him wandering the periphery of the room or the coast of Wales while she examined these nothing sketches.

He obliged, and even detoured to poke up the fire before he set Jenny’s drink before her. Thereafter, he took up a position leaning in the bedroom doorway, dressing gown gaping open, drink in hand.

The Artist Before Retiring. Jenny took in the composition she’d make of him there, framed by the doorway, fatigue and frustration.

“These are technically stunning.” For studies, for quick renderings used to work out details of composition and content, Elijah’s sketches of Kit and William were masterly. She selected one and put the rest aside. “This is your best one. Let’s discuss it.”

He pushed away from the doorjamb and came down beside her without putting his arm around her. Jenny passed him the sketch and took another swallow of courage.

“This is technically adequate,” Elijah said. “If I can’t structure an adequate composition by now… The dog is truly amazing. Not my drawing of him, but that old hound. I’ve never seen a beast as tolerant of children.”

The image on the page was William astride a recumbent Jock, the old dog somnolent in contrast to the child’s gleeful countenance. Whereas Jock looked as if he would be found before that hearth until spring was well advanced, William’s bare foot was raised, and his hand grasped one of Jock’s floppy ears like a rein, as if to urge his canine steed to take flight.

“You’ve caught the trust between the dog and the child,” Jenny said. “Jock would give his life for those boys, and in his eyes, they can do no wrong. He might chastise them with an admonitory growl, but only when they’re older and ought to know better. I think that’s what you drew.”

“I drew a sleeping dog.”

“You drew a sleeping dog who is also part guardian angel. Jock holds all of Rothgreb’s confidences, you know. Lady Rothgreb says she had best die before the dog, so somebody adequate to the task can comfort his lordship in his bereavement.”

Elijah set the drawing aside. “The elderly can take a morbid turn with their humor.”

“The elderly have courage we can only guess at, like soldiers facing battle. That is a good sketch, Elijah. You should consider it for your portrait of William. Rothgreb would love it.”

Jenny would love it, and as he grew up and prepared to step into his father’s and Rothgreb’s impressive shoes, William would love it most of all.

“I was commissioned to do one portrait of both boys.”

He leaned forward to move the sketch to the bottom of the stack, and Jenny felt as if he was hiding her praise from view too. She turned to tell him as much when she caught sight of Elijah’s chest, naked beneath the gaping dressing gown.

“You’re not wearing a shirt or waistcoat.”

The corners of his lips turned up, the first real humor she’d seen in him—and at her expense. “You spent a half hour sketching me, and you’re only noticing this now?”

An hour sketching him, taking him apart visually and putting him back together on the page as a composition, a study. As he’d hunched over his letter, his chest had been a shadow she’d avoided.

“I noticed.” Though she’d noticed by omission. Her gaze traveled down. “What is this?”

“The cat…” He didn’t move, didn’t leap off the couch and hold the door open for her.

Jenny pushed the dressing gown farther apart, revealing two long, angry red welts running up Elijah’s belly to his sternum. “Timothy did this?”

She touched the welts, surprised they weren’t hot. Elijah’s stomach went still beneath her fingers, as if he’d stopped breathing.

“Timothy was an uninvited guest at a kiss,” he said. “An ill-advised kiss. He absented himself from the proceedings as best he could.”

As Jenny would absent herself from England after the holidays. Abruptly, her travel plans loomed not as a daring response to impending spinsterhood and artistic suffocation, but as a parting from everyone she held dear.

And her family would not understand, though Elijah would understand. She wanted to kiss his bare, warm belly, kiss the hurt and make it go away. She settled for running her fingers over the lacerations, while Elijah finished off his drink in one swallow.

“Genevieve…” He sat directly beside her, his flat abdomen exposed to the firelight, his expression suggesting he’d welcome eagles tearing at his flesh rather than endure her touch.

“I wanted to sketch you without your shirt, but I was afraid to ask. I wanted to sketch you—”

The look he gave her was rueful and tender. “You will be the death of me, woman.”

He sounded resigned to his fate, and Jenny liked it when he called her woman in that exasperated, affectionate tone. She did not like it quite as well when he hoisted her bodily over his lap, so she sat facing him and his exposed, lacerated torso.

“You will note the absence of any felines,” Elijah said, hands falling to his sides. “And yet, I must warn you, Genevieve, indulging your curiosity is still ill-advised.”

He thought this was curiosity on her part, and some of it was, but not curiosity about what happened between women and men. Jenny’s curiosity was far more specific, and more dangerous than he knew: she wanted to know about Elijah Harrison, and about Elijah Harrison and Genevieve Windham.

“My parents will be home in a few days, Elijah, possibly as soon as this weekend.” The notion made her lungs feel tight and the whisky roil in her belly.

He trapped her hands and stopped her from tracing the muscles of his chest. “It’s all right. I understand. Explore to your heart’s content.”

A pulse beat at the base of his throat. She touched two fingers to it. “It’s late, you don’t owe me—”

He kissed her, a gentle, admonitory kiss, like Jock’s cautionary growl.

She took his meaning: no more trying to coax enthusiasm from Elijah for her company, no more trying to inspire him to reassurances that he felt something special for her. He would permit her curiosity and nothing more.

The perishing, damned man was going to model kisses for her.

Jenny rose up over him, pushed his dressing gown off his shoulders, shrugged out of her dressing gown, and framed his face between her hands. If it was curiosity he was prepared to indulge, then curiosity she would give him.