A Pursuit of Home

by Kristi Ann Hunter

  Realizing he still had her arm in his grip, he dropped it and nodded to the bookshelf. “Look at these and tell me what you see.”

  She gave him that smirk that said she thought he’d left the lantern lit in an empty attic, but then she dutifully looked at the paintings.

  “The subjects are rich.”

  Derek nodded. Gold, jewels, and expensive gowns abounded. As much to move away from her as to make some sense of what they were seeing, he grabbed a candle and lit it from the lantern before moving to the desk to make notes. “Rich. What else?”

  Jess sighed. “Those two are inside.” She pointed at two of them. “That one isn’t, though, so I guess that’s not important.”

  The people at the picnic weren’t inside, but they were under the shelter of trees. From an art perspective, that could be a building of sorts. Derek didn’t say anything, not wanting to distract her, but he made the note.

  “Those two are sad.” Once again she pointed to two of them before waving a hand at the third one dismissively. “That one’s most decidedly not sad, despite the fact that they don’t have any food.”

  He jotted more notes down, but something about the last statement niggled at him. “Food.” He licked his lips. “Food is always important in art. Well, not always, but often.”

  “There’s nothing the same there, though.” Jess started at one end and poked at each picture in turn. “They don’t have any food, they’re giving all of it away, and their food is getting ruined.”

  Derek sighed. He’d thought they’d been on to something, but what she said was true. Without a commonality, they couldn’t learn anything. “What else do you see?”

  Her eyes flitted between the pictures, the line between her brows getting deeper and deeper. Finally she rubbed a hand across her face and sighed. “I don’t know what you want from me, Derek.”

  Derek looked at her, the light playing across her face like a Caravaggio painting, the shadows behind her growing darker as the night filled the house.

  He wasn’t sure what he wanted from her either.

  Chapter Thirty

  Feeling that the something they were missing was somehow locked in her own mind was almost as frustrating to Jess as the waiting had been.

  Queen Marguerite had sent the diary back to Verbonne. That had to mean she thought the paintings would mean something to someone from there. Of course, more than one hundred years had passed between the diary and Jess’s life. Had the country been similar enough for her to experience the necessary elements in her childhood?

  The diary was the connection between the paintings the refugee group had created and the home they’d left behind. Even if Queen Jessamine had a surviving child, the obvious intention had been for the royal line to remain with the existing king. It had been about Verbonne.

  Jess slept fitfully all night, using every technique she knew to ease her body back into a restful state every time she awoke. Sleep was a commodity that sometimes had to be skipped, so it was only smart to gather it when she could.

  Still, at the first sign of a new day, she was up, dressed, and headed toward the study. She passed a servant in the hall, a young girl she didn’t recognize—a true sign that life here in London had moved on without her. The girl nodded as she passed, but Jess called her back and asked her to see if breakfast could be sent to the study.

  She was going back in there and she wasn’t leaving until she’d found whatever it was Derek had needed from her last night. Was there something she’d already seen that was important?

  Derek had been excited about the food at first, but the only thing Jess saw was that the people who didn’t have any food seemed a great deal happier to not be eating than the people watching their food float away in the rain.

  Jess stumbled to a halt on the stairs. The people were happy not to be eating.

  There wasn’t much she remembered about her life before the cottage and what she did remember was painful to think about, so she avoided doing so with remarkable dedication. However, that was the Verbonne the painters had known. That was the Verbonne she needed to connect the paintings to.

  Heart pounding, she ran down the stairs and into the study. The translation papers were strewn about the desk, but she didn’t know where to look.

  Kit and Daphne found her in there a few minutes later.

  “I told you this was where we’d find her,” Kit said, folding her arms. “You’ve been avoiding us.”

  “You can’t really blame her,” Daphne said in her gentle voice. “It can’t be pleasant to know we might be as blunt with her as she was with us.”

  Kit snorted a laugh. “I’d like to see you lose tact.”

  Jess shook her head. She did not have time for these two this morning. She waved a hand through the air to cut them off. “I need Derek.”

  Daphne blinked. “Well, that was easier than I expected.”

  Jess growled. Why did she consider these women friends again? Not even mere friends, but family she’d been unable to leave even when her conscience prodded her to. Right now she would have no problem telling both of them farewell.

  In fact, she needed to do just that. Something was lurking in her mind, something important, and she wouldn’t lose it because some people were so in love they refused to see that others were simply too scarred to be comfortable in it.

  The maid she’d stopped in the corridor entered with a breakfast tray in hand, Derek trailing behind her. “Getting an early start this morning?” he asked. “Did the last sketch come in?”

  Jess rounded the desk and took the tray from the maid, placing it on the table by the fireplace, then shooed the other women from the room. “Out, out.”

  The maid gave Jess a quizzical expression but turned and strode away without a word.

  Daphne and Kit were not quite so accommodating.

  “Should we leave them alone?” Daphne asked. “It’s not proper, is it?”

  “This room is ten times the size of that carriage,” Jess said. “Out.”

  Daphne bit her lip but edged toward the door. “It seems different.”

  “Unlike you two,” Jess said through gritted teeth, “I’m trying to accomplish something worthwhile.”

  “I think our goal rather noble,” Kit said with a smile, but she took Daphne’s arm. Before stepping through the door, she looked back over her shoulder with a grin. “I’ll just close this for you, shall I? Wouldn’t want the duchess walking in without a warning again.”

  Jess’s hand itched to snag a knife and bury it into the doorframe Kit was leaning against. She resisted by grabbing a piece of toast from the tray and tearing it in half before taking a large bite.

  Kit’s laughter could be heard through the closed door.

  “Jess?” Derek asked softly. “What’s going on?”

  She took another bite of bread and then left both halves on the tray before moving back to the desk. Taking the diary from the corner of the desk, she held it out to Derek. “Read it to me.”

  He watched her as if she were some sort of violent animal as he took the diary from her hand and eyed the scattered pages of notes. “It will be easier if I read the translated pages. Give me a minute to put them back in order. What part did you want?”

  “No, read it in Italian.” She placed herself back in front of the three drawings exactly where Derek had put her the night before. “If I hear it, I’ll understand it.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  Jess ignored the little jump her heart gave when he said we. She needed to focus. “I don’t know. At least, I don’t know how it connects, but all I could think about was how you said food is important.”

  “Not always,” Derek said. “There aren’t any hard rules when it comes to art.”

  “There was a holiday in Verbonne,” she said, hating that her voice and her knees trembled as she forced herself to remember, forced herself to go back. “The Feast of the Forgotten. After she left, though, it was called The Feast of Queen Jessamine. O
n that day, the royal family wouldn’t eat. All the food in the palace larder that normally would have been used to feed the people who lived there was given to the poor and needy, but the palace still held a large party. Helping was a reason to celebrate, not mourn. The queen and the rest of her party fled the day before the feast. Instead of giving the food to the poor, it was bundled up and sent with the fleeing group as provisions.”

  Her eyes darted from sketch to sketch, trying to determine how it connected, why it mattered. “That’s why they changed the name. The entire capital city went without eating that day, in despair for the country that was hoping they could survive whatever came.”

  “What are you saying, Jess?” Derek asked.

  Jess swung her arm at the three drawings. “I’m saying no one is eating. The last thing the group knew of Verbonne was the Feast of the Forgotten, and no one in these paintings is eating.” Her breathing was harsh, her chest heaving with the idea that she might just be right. “You said art was about emotion?”

  “Yes, well, sometimes, in a way.” Derek set the diary back on the desk and shoved his hair out of his eyes. “It’s about holding a moment in its entirety. Often it’s meant to draw something out of the person looking at it, but—”

  “Then we look at it that way,” Jess interrupted. “The painters loved Verbonne; they loved it enough to leave it, in the hope that they could one day save it. We have to look at the paintings with that in mind.” She swallowed hard, hating the fact that understanding someone else’s emotions meant having to open up her own.

  It took only moments for her to add all the sketches they had to the bookshelf, and then she stepped back to look at all of them in turn. “Read me the diary.”

  “‘Cavalcano e perseverano nella speranza che il vero re un giorno regni di nuovo, unto e potente e in cima alla collina,’” Derek read in a low voice. His verbal Italian wasn’t the best, but it was enough. She could hear the nuance, the shades of meaning, everything the original writer had put in.

  “They ride on and persevere in hope that the true king will one day rule again, anointed and powerful and atop the hill,” Jess whispered, looking to the drawing of horses racing over the hill and toward the trees. Toward hope? Was the hope in the trees? What other pictures had trees?

  The rained-out picnic. The country lane. If there was some sort of hidden picture in the leaves, they’d never know it from these sketches.

  Derek read on. When his voice got scratchy, Jess poured him a cup of cold tea from the forgotten breakfast tray, and he continued. Entry after entry went by. Every now and then a phrase would get Jess thinking one way, but nothing ever seemed to match up. Other times a phrase would be written and placed in such a way that it was clearly important.

  She just didn’t know why.

  “You’re right,” Jess said, gathering up everything but the three pictures they’d been looking at last night. “It’s these. The others are right there. If you have the diary and the painting it’s clear. There’s something more to these.”

  Derek didn’t respond. He hadn’t responded to any of her mumbles or rambles, letting her try to find something she wasn’t sure she had.

  “‘Ungi il re con disperazione, speranza e amore . . .’”

  Anoint the king with despair, hope, and love.

  “‘. . . poiché dove questi si incontrano, sulla sua testa sarà la capacità di governare con grazia, dignità e umiltà.’”

  For where these meet, on his head will be the ability to rule with grace, dignity, and humility.

  Derek’s words stumbled to a halt. Jess looked over to find him staring at the drawings for the first time since he’d started reading.

  “Despair, hope, and love,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  He set the diary aside, grabbed the drawings, and went to the map of ribbons.

  “These ribbons are crossing near Stonehenge,” Derek murmured. “And there was a painting of Stonehenge in the background of the party.” He pulled out the drawing of The Feast of Future Fortune and one of the sewing pins they’d stuck in the map to hold the ribbons, then fixed the paper to the map where the two ribbons crossed in Wiltshire. “There’s hope.”

  Jess looked at where two more ribbons crossed in Norfolk. “Which one goes here?”

  Derek looked between the other two. “I have no idea.”

  No. Jess knelt before the map. They were not going to have unlocked this piece just to have it taken from them. There was only one ribbon for the third placement. She picked up the rained-out picnic. “Are there any great houses on this line? One that could be this shape in the background?”

  “I don’t know.” Derek grabbed up the third drawing of the kitchen with the empty larder. “That would put love here, somewhere.”

  Jess looked at the drawing and then at Derek. “You think that one’s love?”

  “The other choice is despair.”

  A little girl in the drawing had a hand on the empty shelves as the women passed out baskets of food. Jess had hated The Feast of Queen Jessamine as a child, certainly feeling something akin to despair as she had watched roasts, puddings, and bread leave the palace in wagons while her belly grumbled and her father told her to smile.

  “Yes,” Derek said, “this is love. Whether these women are going to be able to fill their larder again or not doesn’t matter. They have to love these people to be giving them everything they have. It’s not just about helping them survive. They’re taking care with the baskets. This is a gift that the giver has to sacrifice for. That’s love.”

  If that was love, then Jess wasn’t sure she’d ever experienced it. She certainly didn’t think she’d ever given it. She’d helped others, yes, but had it ever been at her own peril?

  With difficulty, she pushed the thought aside. They were too close to solving the map for her to ponder philosophical riddles. “How do we know exactly where it is?”

  “We don’t.” Derek pinned the paper where the ribbons met in Norfolk. “Let’s see if that’s close enough. Now we just need to find ourselves a castle.”

  After a moment’s silence, Jess looked up to see him staring at her, an expression that could have been concern, pity, or a mixture of the two on his face. He cleared his throat. “We’re going to need help on this one.”

  As much as she hated to admit it, he was right. Her knowledge of England was limited, as was his. There were others in this house, though, who had traveled the land extensively. Jess sighed. “I’ll go get them.”

  The sentence was easier to say than Jess would have expected. Either the business of asking for help was getting easier, or Jess was simply too numb from the continuous onslaught of emotions to feel the pain anymore.

  In the end, it took the combined efforts and memories of everyone in the house, along with details from three travel books, but they finally determined that the picnic was in front of Lyme Park.

  “Despair,” Derek said as he pinned it to the map.

  “Anoint the king where these meet,” Jess murmured. Assuming they’d placed the pins in the correct place, the bowl should be at the center of the triangle they created.

  Holding her breath, Jess leaned in at the same time as Derek. Their shoulders pressed together, their breaths mingled, they traced imaginary lines from each of the points until they landed on Kettering.

  “Kettering?” Jess sat back on her heels, feeling every bit of the despair the flooded picnic painting implied. “How are we supposed to find it in Kettering? We can’t possibly pinpoint the places of these paintings well enough to determine where in Kettering the bowl is.”

  Derek placed a hand on her shoulder. “We’re closer than we were. I’ll keep reading the diary. There will be something there. She wanted this to be found, remember?”

  He was right. Jess had strolled into many a town knowing nothing beyond her end objective. It may have taken her a while, but she’d never failed yet.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Once the destina
tion of Kettering was announced, Derek had assumed he and Jess and Jeffreys would head out like they had before. The others did not make the same assumption. In fact, the debate over who was going to Kettering was long and loud.

  “A whole carriageload of us trooping off to the middle of the country is going to be rather conspicuous,” Jess growled.

  Derek searched her face. Obviously Jess had been of a mind to keep it the three of them as well. Was it because she thought it less conspicuous, because she wanted her friends safe, or because she wanted a bit more time with him before all of this ended? He never would have thought it, but Derek was going to miss Jess painfully when he no longer saw her every day.

  “The best thing,” Jess continued, “would be for me to go on my own.”

  That answered Derek’s unspoken question and crushed his flickering hopes. Jess was protecting the people she cared about at the risk of her own safety. How had she not understood which painting was love?

  “I think—” Derek began, refusing to be left behind. He might have to say good-bye to her soon, but not yet, and he wanted every memory of Jess that he could collect before they parted ways. She was the nuance and vibrancy of art come to life. He might never get to experience that again.

  His sentence was cut off by the duke, though. “You think it’s easiest to do everything on your own, but who watches your back when you do that?”

  “My back is a very tiny target,” she yelled back.

  “You’re being ridiculous,” Jeffreys joined in, not acting at all like a servant in this moment. “You can’t waltz into a situation like this without assistance.” He gestured one hand between him and Jess before pointing at the duke. “You didn’t let him do it before, and we’re not letting you do it now.”

  Jess jabbed an angry finger toward Ryland. “He knew there was someone waiting for him with a gun and a loose mooring. No one knows I’m going to Kettering.”

  “Actually,” Derek butted in quickly, “we don’t know what they know.”