“Luckily, the North Tower is cool and dry,” she said. Her voice was cool and dry as well. “And the painting was well wrapped. It will need minimal cleaning, but I should prefer another frame. This one is much too dark and overornate. Also, I had rather not put her in the portrait gallery, if you don’t mind. I’d prefer she had a place to herself. Over the dining room mantel, I think. In place of the landscape.”
She came nearer, pausing a few paces to his right. “The landscape wants a smaller room. Even if it didn’t, I’d much rather look at her.”
He would, too, though it was eating him alive to do so.
He would have been content merely to look at his beautiful, impossible mother. He would have asked nothing…or so very little: a soft hand upon his cheek, only for an instant. An impatient hug. He would have been good. He would have tried…
Mawkish nonsense, he angrily reproached himself. It was only a damned piece of canvas daubed with paint. It was a painting of a whore, as all the household, all of Devon, and most of the world beyond knew. All except his wife, with her fiendish gift for turning the world upside down.
“She was a whore,” he said harshly. And quickly and brutally, to have it said and done and over with, he went on. “She ran away with the son of a Dartmouth merchant. She lived openly with him for two years and died with him, on a fever-plagued island in the West Indies.”
He turned and looked down into his wife’s pale, upturned face. Her eyes were wide with shock. Then, incredibly, they were glistening…with tears.
“How dare you?” she said, angrily blinking the tears back. “How dare you, of all men, call your mother a whore? You buy a new lover every night. It costs you a few coins. According to you, she took but one—and he cost her everything: her friends, her honor. Her son.”
“I might have known you could make even this romantic,” he said mockingly. “Will you make the hot-blooded harlot out to be a martyr to—to what, Jess? Love?”
He turned away from the portrait, because the howling had started inside him, and he wanted to scream, Why? Yet he knew the answer, always had. If his mother had loved him—or pitied him at least, if she could not love him—she would have taken him with her. She would not have left him alone, in hell.
“You don’t know what her life was like,” she said. “You were a child. You couldn’t know what she felt. She was a foreigner, and her husband was old enough to be her father.”
“Like Byron’s Donna Julia, you mean?” His voice dripped acid irony. “Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps Mama would have done better with two husbands, of five and twenty.”
“You don’t know whether your father treated her well or ill,” his wife persisted, like a teacher with a stubborn student. “You don’t know whether he made the way easy for her or impossible. For all you know, he may have made her wretched—which is more than likely, if his portrait offers an accurate indication of his character.”
And what of me? he wanted to cry. You don’t know what it was like for me, the hideous thing she left behind, shut out, shunned, mocked, abused. Left…to endure…and pay, dearly, for what others took for granted: tolerance, acceptance, a woman’s soft hand.
He was appalled at his own inner rage and grief, the hysteria of a child…who had died five and twenty years ago.
He made himself laugh and meet her steady grey gaze with the mocking mask he wore so well. “If you’ve taken my sire in dislike, feel free to exile him to the North Tower. You may hang her in his place. Or in the chapel, for all I care.”
He headed for the door. “You needn’t consult me about redecorating. I know no female can live two days in a house and leave anything as it was. I shall be much astonished if I can find my way about when I return.”
“You’re going away?” Her tones remained steady. When he paused and turned at the threshold, she was looking out the window, her color back to normal, her countenance composed.
“To Devonport,” he said, wondering why her composure chilled him so. “A wrestling match. Sherburne and some other fellows. I’m to meet them at nine o’clock. I need to pack.”
“Then I must change orders for dinner,” she said. “I think I’ll dine in the morning room. But I had better have a nap before then, or I shall fall asleep into my plate. I have been over only about one quarter of the house, yet I feel as though I had walked from Dover to Land’s End.”
He wanted to ask what she thought of the house, what she liked—apart from the soul-shattering portrait of his mother—and what she didn’t like—besides the offensive landscape in the dining room, which he hadn’t liked, either, he recalled.
If he were not going away, he could have found out over dinner, in the cozy intimacy of the morning room.
Intimacy, he told himself, was the last thing he needed now. What he needed was to get away, where she could not turn him upside down and inside out with her heart-stopping “discoveries”…or torment him with her scent, her silken skin, the soft curves of her slender body.
It took all his self-control to walk, not run, from the room.
Jessica spent ten minutes trying to calm down. It didn’t work.
Unwilling to cope with Bridget or anyone else, she ran her own bath. Athcourt, fortunately, boasted the rare luxury of hot and cold running water, even on the second floor.
Neither solitude nor the bath calmed her down, and napping was impossible. Jessica lay on her large, lonely bed, stiff as a poker, glaring up at the canopy.
Barely three days wed, and the great jackass was abandoning her. For his friends. For a wrestling match.
She got up, pulled off her modest cotton night-gown, and stalked, naked, to her dressing room. She found the wine red and black silk negligee and put it on. She slipped into the black mules. She shrugged into a heavy black and gold silk dressing gown, tied the sash, and loosely draped the neckline so that a bit of the negligee peeped above it.
After running a brush through her hair, she returned to her bedchamber and exited through the door that opened into what Mrs. Ingleby had called the Withdrawing Chamber. At present, it housed part of Dain’s collection of artistic curios. It also adjoined His Lordship’s apartments.
She crossed the huge, dim room to the door that led to Dain’s rooms. She rapped. The muffled voices she’d heard
while approaching abruptly ceased. After a moment, Andrews opened the door. As he took in her dishabille, he let out a gasp, which he quickly turned into a small, polite cough.
She turned a sweet, artless smile upon him. “Ah, you haven’t gone yet. I am so relieved. If His Lordship can spare a minute, I need to ask him something.”
Andrews glanced to his left. “My lord, Her Ladyship wishes—”
“I’m not deaf,” came Dain’s cross voice. “Get away from there and let her in.”
Andrews backed away and Jessica strolled in, glancing idly about her while she made her way slowly into the room and around the immense seventeenth-century bed to her husband. The bed was even larger than hers, about ten feet square.
Dain, in shirt, trousers, and stockinged feet, stood near the window. He was glaring down at his traveling case. It stood open upon a heavily carved table which she guessed had been built about the same time as the bed. He would not look at her.
“It is a…delicate matter,” she said, her voice hesitant, shy. She wished she could command a blush as well, but blushes did not come easily to her. “If we might be…private?”
He shot a glance at her, and back to the valise almost in the same instant. Then he blinked, and turned his head toward her once more, stiffly this time. Slowly he surveyed her, up and down and up again, pausing at the revealing neckline of her dressing gown. A muscle jumped in his cheek.
Then his face set, hard as granite. “Ready for your nap, I see.” He glowered past her at Andrews. “What are you waiting for? ‘Private,’ Her Ladyship said. Are you deaf?”
Andrews left, closing the door after him.
“Thank you, Dain,” Jessica said, smiling up at him. Then she stepped closer, took a handful of starched and neatly folded neckcloths from the valise, and dropped them on the floor.
He looked at her. He looked at the linen upon the floor.
She took out a stack of pristine white handkerchiefs and, still smiling, threw them down, too.
“Jessica, I don’t know what game you’re at, but it is not amusing,” he said very quietly.