Return to Summerhouse (The Summerhouse 2)

She took a sip. It was delicious and she could feel that it was potent. She’d better not drink too much. She picked up a chicken leg, but stopped when she saw that he was looking at her sketches.

For a moment she waited for him to tell her they were fabulous, the best he’d ever seen. It was what most people did when they saw Zoë’s drawings. But he didn’t comment. Instead, he studied them, spending several minutes on each one, then he propped them against the tree, and looked at them from a distance.

Zoë swallowed. It was as though her work were being critiqued by a gallery owner, something that always made her nervous.

She got up and went to stand beside him to look at the drawings. She’d made three sketches of what she saw. First was the stableyard with the horses’ heads turned toward her. After that was completed, she’d moved to the back of the stable and drawn the parkland, with a tall wall in the background. Last, she’d made a quick sketch of a wildflower she’d never seen before and had added a bit of color with the few chalks that were in the box.

“What do you think?” she asked. She wanted to sound cocky and sure of herself. After all, she was the artist and he was a stable lad, but her words came out sounding as though his opinion were important to her.

“Good,” he said after a while.

“But what?” she asked.

“Nothing.” He looked at her and smiled. “They are wonderful. I think you will be a good teacher. Now, what has Miss Amy given us to eat?”

“Hot dogs and Diet Coke,” she said.

He looked at her with a twinkle in his eye. “You cannot befuddle me, Miss Zoë. I have been around Miss Amy for too long. When she first came here, the place was abuzz with all the odd things she had to say. Her language, even her ideas of what was right and wrong, were of great amusement to us. But now we are used to her. And she has changed us so much that I do not know what is hers and what is ours. Two months ago I went to London and I said to a shopkeeper, ‘That’s super.’ He thought I was mad.”

Zoë laughed. “She does have a way of making people do what she wants them to.” She hesitated. “She seems to like the earl a lot.”

“Poor man,” he said. “Never the same after he lost his wife and wee babe.” He picked up Zoë’s cup and handed it to her. “Drink up. It’s good for you.”

“Some things are the same wherever you go. Men always want to get women drunk.”

He put his head back and laughed so hard that she wanted to kiss his throat.

“Let’s eat,” she said, “then I’ll give you a drawing lesson.”

It took them nearly an hour to finish their meal. Zoë realized she hadn’t eaten since…She didn’t know what to call what had been done to them. The transfer? She’d managed to find the outhouse, but she’d had no food.

While they’d eaten, he asked her about herself, where she’d grown up and what she’d done as a child. It wasn’t easy to answer his questions and not give away that she was from a different time. She didn’t want him to think she was insane. She had grown up in Oregon, but in 1797, no one had heard of the place. She thought about her grandmother’s stories. Their family had traveled to the new country of America in the early 1700s and had settled in Williamsburg. Her grandmother hinted that they may have lived in the governor’s mansion. “More likely worked in his kitchen,” her mother said.

Whatever they did, in the 1800s the family packed up and went by wagon train to Oregon and stayed there.

She told MacKenzie of her life as though her family still lived in Williamsburg. She knew that back then her family’s name had been Prentiss.

“An old English name,” he said. “Do you know where your family lived in England before you went off to the foreign country that doesn’t want the interfering English telling them what to do?”

She laughed. “We did have some issues with them.”

“More than a few,” he said as he poured her more of the perry. “Now, shall we start the lessons?”

“Sure,” she said, but she didn’t really want to. For her part, she’d like to stay there for the rest of the afternoon and look out at the lake and they could…She put down the mug of perry. Enough of that!

Maybe it was the alcoholic beverage, or maybe it was the man so close to her, but Zoë had never felt less like giving an art lesson to anyone. She’d certainly done it often enough. In the houses where she’d stayed, one of the extra things she’d agreed to was to give art lessons to the children of the house. Zoë found that the rich loved to load their children down with lessons and having a professional painter teaching them had been a coup.

“What turns you on?” she asked as he picked up the pad of drawing paper.

“I beg your pardon?”

Zoë swallowed. “I mean, what would you like to draw? Landscapes? Flowers?” She pointed to the remnants of their picnic. “Maybe a still life.”

“What about if I draw you?” he asked, looking at her.

“I won’t be able to direct you if you’re drawing me,” she said. “How about the lake? We’ll start with this angle. See the way the water shimmers? And see that little building on the far side? Look, like this.” Reaching out, she lifted his hands in hers and moved his fingers so he formed a square with them. “Frame it, see what you like best, then draw that.”

His face was close to hers and his eyes were looking at her, not at what he saw through his squared fingers.