Malcolm in a black three-piece suit. That was the painting. At the bottom of the canvas was a name of a portrait painter she recognized at once, because they’d had an exhibition of his portraits of women at The Red Gallery five years ago. A man famous for his paintings of England’s high society. A man who had been dead since the 1950s.
Mona turned the painting over.
It couldn’t be. No. It couldn’t.
And yet, there it was, written in pencil on the back of the canvas.
Portrait in oil, 1938.
The Rape of the Sabine Women
Three months later
"The Times called again,” Gabrielle said as she stood in the doorway of Mona’s office.
"What do they want this time?” Mona asked, barely glancing up from her auction catalog.
"They say they wish to run a feature on the gallery for the Society page. I think you should do it, yes?”
Mona looked up at her assistant. Gabrielle was tall and shapely and black and had the loveliest French accent that made every word sound like it had been dipped in silver. "Society” was Zociety and "yes” was yezz. The combination of her beauty and her accent had made Gabrielle the perfect hire for The Red. No one could tell this woman no when she said, "You wish to buy it, of course. I will wrap it up for you.”
"I suppose we ought to say yes,” Mona said. "The Times has given us good free press.”
"I’ll call them and let them know tomorrow morning. It’s good to let both men and newspapers sweat a little before you tell them yes.”
"Good advice,” Mona said. Gabrielle smiled and strode from the doorway in her black suit and towering black high heels. It was so nice to be able to afford employees again. Since the discovery of the paintings rolled up and hidden in the brass bed, The Red Gallery’s telephone had been ringing day and night with buyers, reporters, and all the curious. Mona had found two paintings hidden in the bedposts, though the art world only knew of one—a lost Picasso, a painting of one of his many mistresses. The second painting she told no one about. She’d had it framed and hung in a place of honor in The Red Gallery with a tag that read "Unknown Man, 1938, artist Anthony Devas.”
The Picasso she’d had authenticated, and, despite the lack of provenance, the art world had gone mad over it. Mona had lent it to an art museum which could provide the best security, cleaning, and crowds to see it. She was entertaining offers from buyers for the Picasso and all the sketches and etchings Malcolm had given her, but she didn’t want to sell them quite yet. The Picasso had been Malcolm’s parting gift to her. Since he’d left her without giving her the child she’d wanted from him, she was reluctant to give up anything associated with him. Every single day she thought of him. She woke up remembering him. She fell asleep and dreamt of him. She pleasured herself fantasizing of him. And every day she came to The Red, unlocked the door, pushed back the curtains, and stared into his dark smiling eyes that stared back at her from inside the gilt frame. She’d hung the portrait of Malcolm where she’d once hung The Fox Hunt by Morland. In her mind, Malcolm was standing there staring at that painting, one hand on his hip, the other on his chin. In her heart, he would always be there. It was in her body where she wanted him, but that wasn’t possible. If Malcolm had been forty or so in 1938, then he would be over one hundred now, making it unlikely he was still alive. Had it been his ghost that had come to her? Had he somehow traveled through time, or otherwise found a way into her in dreams? She didn’t know; she would, most likely, never know. But he’d kept one part of his promise. He’d saved The Red. After the Picasso had been appraised in the millions of dollars, the collections agencies had stopped calling. The bank restructured her loan and she’d been able to take out a line of credit again, hire Gabrielle, have the gallery painted and repaired, and once more the art world was calling. She should have been so happy…
And yet.
Malcolm.
He’d said she could keep him and so she had. She kept him in a frame on the wall. It wasn’t what she wanted, but it would have to do, wouldn’t it?
Mona sighed. A tear fell from her eye and landed onto the auction catalog. Silly girl, crying over a man who’d paid her to have sex with him. Nonsense. She should act like the grown woman she was and not a lovesick schoolgirl. She yanked open her desk drawer to fetch a tissue and found a book of art she didn’t recall putting in there. She took it out and found a page marked with a red velvet ribbon.
Malcolm?
She couldn’t breathe. She had to force herself to inhale and exhale as she extracted the book from inside the drawer and laid it atop her desk. She opened the page to the ribbon and gasped.
A Rubens painting. The Rape of the Sabine Women, 1637.
Shivering in fear and shock, Mona stared at the famous painting. She knew it well. They’d studied it in one of her many art history courses. The painting, a riot of movement and color and light, depicted the famous abduction of the daughters of the Sabine men who had refused to allow the Roman men to marry into their families. Mona’s mother had hated that the word raptio—meaning "abduction”—was translated into English as "rape.” She said it made the women sound like victims, when in fact they bravely intervened during the subsequent war between the Sabines and the Romans to put a stop to the killing of their husbands by their fathers and the killing of their fathers by their husbands. But that was the sort of thing her mother would take issue with. Mona had reminded her that even if they hadn’t been raped, they had been kidnapped and forced into marriage. Her mother waved the objection off and told Mona they’d been veritable prisoners of their fathers anyway, so it wasn’t as if life was sunshine and roses before they were abducted. Mona accused her mother of applying her "beauty over truth” standard to history. Her mother had only scoffed and said, "You’ve never heard of the Holy Sabine Empire, have you? The Romans won for a reason.” Mona had let the subject drop and had given the painting little thought since then.
Until now.
Mona rose from her chair and ran to the back room. She threw open the door and found…nothing. Nothing but paintings, sculptures, boxes, and supplies. Mona had moved the brass bed to her apartment. The back room was nothing but storage now. Malcolm certainly wasn’t there. She’d half-expected to find him in a Roman centurion’s uniform ready to throw her over his horse’s saddle and ride off with her to his home where he would make her his wife. A nice fantasy, but only a fantasy.
Someone was playing a cruel trick on her. Mona closed the door to the back room behind her.
"I’ll lock up now if you like,” Gabrielle said in the office doorway.
"Yes, thank you,” Mona said.
"Are you working late again?”
"Always.”
"You work too much,” Gabrielle said. "You should take time off. You know I can watch The Red for you and Tou-Tou. You haven’t taken a day off since I started.”
Mona smiled. Gabrielle was kind and they got along well, but Mona had never worked up the courage to tell her lovely assistant that she came to The Red every day because of Malcolm—because she missed him, because she was certain he wasn’t quite done with her yet. How do you tell a woman as rational and intelligent as Gabrielle that you were in love with a man who was most likely a ghost? You didn’t, of course. So Mona kept her secrets to herself.
"I’ll think about that,” Mona said. Perhaps she would take some time off. She couldn’t be held hostage by a memory all her life, could she? "Although I don’t know what I’d do with myself.”
"You will figure that out.” Gabrielle turned to leave. "Or not.”
"I won’t figure it out?”
"No, I won’t lock up.” Gabrielle looked at Mona over her shoulder. "He’s still here.”
She whispered the last words and Mona narrowed her eyes at her assistant. Gabrielle crooked her finger at Mona and Mona walked over to the door.
"Who is that?” Gabrielle whispered. "He’s been here for over an hour.” Mona peered into the gallery. A man stood in f
ront of the portrait of Malcolm, one hand on his hip, the other in his pocket. "Tou-Tou likes him.”
The little black cat sat on the floor at the man’s feet. They both seemed to be staring at the painting.
"I don’t know,” Mona said.
"He’s terribly handsome,” Gabrielle whispered.
Mona couldn’t deny it. She straightened her red skirt and black blouse. "You can go out the side door,” Mona said. "I’ll lock up after he’s gone.”
Gabrielle smiled. She unbuttoned one button on Mona’s blouse, revealing the lace edge of her black bra.
"You’ll thank me later,” Gabrielle said before leaving Mona all alone in the gallery with the man in the suit.
After Gabrielle was gone and the gallery empty but for her, Tou-Tou, and the man, Mona forced herself to go out to him. She almost buttoned her blouse up again but didn’t. Why bother?
"Sir? We’re closing,” she said. The man didn’t look at her, nor acknowledge that she’d spoken. He had reddish brown hair, wavy and rakish, and his eyes were very dark…but unmistakably blue. Midnight blue. Lean but broad-shouldered, strong nose and strong chin and strong jaw, he was more handsome than any man had a right to be.
He looked very familiar to her, but she couldn’t quite place him.
"Sir?”
"I need to speak to the owner of this establishment,” the man said in a crisp English accent.
"I’m Mona St. James. I’m the owner.”
"Well, Miss St. James, how much for the painting?”
"It’s not for sale,” she said.
"Everything is for sale. Name your price, I’ll pay it.”
"This painting is priceless.”
He scoffed. "Priceless? I refuse to believe it means anything to you. You don’t even know who he is, do you? Besides, your card is wrong.”
"I disagree,” she said. "My assistant is very thorough in her research. The painting is clearly marked 1938 and the artist is undoubtedly Anthony Devas.”
"That’s not what’s incorrect. The subject of the painting is the problem. He’s not an ‘unknown man.’ I know that because I know him.”
"You know him?”
"His name is Malcolm Arthur Augustus Fitzroy, thirteenth Earl of Godwick.”
Mona covered her mouth with her fingers, silencing her gasp. Finally. At last. She knew his name. Malcolm Arthur Augustus Fitzroy. The Earl of Godwick.
"You know this for certain?”
"I know this for certain,” the man said.
"How?”
He turned and looked at her directly in the face. He had a commanding air to him. Commanding and powerful. A man used to having his way.
"Because my name is Spencer Arthur Malcolm Fitzroy, and I’m the fifteenth Earl of Godwick. That ‘unknown’ man on your wall is my grandfather.”
"Malcolm is your grandfather?”
"He was, yes. Although he died long before I was born.” The man’s handsome brow furrowed. "Did you say your name was Mona?”
"Yes,” she said. "You’re Malcolm’s grandson.” She knew she was repeating herself, but she was in too much shock to stay silent.
"How did you come across this painting?” the Earl asked.
"How did you know I had it?” she asked.
"I asked you first.”
"I won’t answer until you answer,” she said.
"The Sunday Times had an article about a lost Picasso painting found in America. A painting of a woman in red and blue. There was also a photograph of the interior of The Red, with a familiar painting in the background…a painting that once hung in Wingthorn Hall, my family’s ancestral home.”
"I found it rolled up in the post of my bed,” she said.
"A brass bed. An antique brass bed.”
"Yes, it is. But how—” She hadn’t told the newspapers the bed was brass. She’d only said "my mother’s old bed.”
"My grandfather was the last of the great English rakes. His sexual appetite was legendary and his prowess even more so. He refused to marry, to settle down, to do his duty by his name and family. Instead he spent nearly every night in brothels with ‘his darling whores,’ as he called them. That’s all he spent his money on—prostitutes and art.”
"I can think of worse ways to waste one’s fortune.”
"Hardly wasted. The art he purchased saved the family fortune. The economy was in tatters after the war. But art—great art—always goes up in value. Only the Queen has more money than we do now.”
"Malcolm was a very wise man then. And I have to admire an art lover.”
"Oh, he was an art lover, all right. He and his girls would put on plays for the other brothel patrons. They’d reenact scenes from paintings, the more erotic the better. His exploits were legendary. Not too many earls performed in near-public orgies.”
"A pity,” Mona said. "They should have.”
"Yes, a pity indeed. The family was always trying to tame him. Just when they thought he’d settled down after he turned forty, he fell madly in lust with an eighteen-year-old prostitute named Mona Blessey. He showered her with gifts.”
"Art,” Mona said.
"Art, indeed.” The Earl nodded. "Sketches—Degas among them. Paintings, including the Picasso you found. And even his own official portrait he ripped off the wall in Wingthorn. At age forty-one, he finally gave in to his mother’s begging and married a girl with no money who would put up with his rakish ways and not make too much of a fuss. The very day he learned she was pregnant, he left her for Mona. An Earl’s wife is a countess. My rather foul-mouthed grandfather called Mona his—”
"His cuntess,” Mona said.
"Exactly. How did you know?”
"An educated guess. Go on.”
"When Mona Blessey’s father learned where they were holed up, he traveled to Scotland and found my grandfather in his daughter’s bed. He ordered my grandfather to return to his wife and unborn child in England and let his daughter go. My grandfather refused. So the man shot him.”
"In the chest,” Mona said, remembering her dream of The Bleeding Man.
"Yes, in the chest,” the Earl said. "Do you know—”
"Keep talking. Tell me everything.”
"He bled out quickly, but he lived long enough to cough out his last words to her father. He said, ‘If I must sell my soul to the devil to do it, I will find a way back into Mona’s bed. A whore will reign as Countess of Godwick. You’ll see...’ ”
The Earl paused. "He died laughing in Mona Blessey’s arms.”
Mona turned her back on the Earl. She covered her face with her hands and breathed.
"Hounded by reporters and vilified in the papers, Mona Blessey left for America the very next week. She had the bed my grandfather died in shipped along with her things. I thought that sounded awfully sentimental for a teenage prostitute. I should have known she was using the bed to smuggle the artwork out of the country. Somehow that bed ended up in your possession.”
"My mother bought it nearly thirty years ago at an estate sale. She told me that’s where my name came from—Mona was the name of the woman who’d owned the bed. Mother said she’d been a courtesan in her youth, and I didn’t believe it. Mother could stretch the truth every now and then. But in this case she was right, wasn’t she?”
"She was,” the Earl said. "And now you know the story of the painting. It belongs to my family. I’ll have to ask you to return it.”
"No,” she said, facing him.
"No? No isn’t an option. It’s my family’s painting.”
"It’s my painting. Malcolm was the rightful owner and gave it to Mona Blessey. Mona put it in her bedpost for safe-keeping. My mother bought the bed. I was conceived in the bed your grandfather died in. The bed is legally mine. The painting was in the bed and therefore the painting is mine and always will be. No court of law in America or the United Kingdom would disagree. And you know it,” she said. "Otherwise you wouldn’t have asked me how much I was willing to sell it for.”
"I was ho
ping to avoid a legal battle.”
"I’ll allow a professional to make a copy of the painting, if
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