Shakespeare’s Goneril had been mouthing sentiments; Mona knew Tansy meant them. Her father stopped and watched, on his face the tearing pain of grief. His bright twins, he’d called them, Titania and Paris. Both lost in the span of one single night, one to death, one to oblivion.
Damn Lucas Walker for the beauty he had ripped from this world.
Then Tansy noticed Mona and smiled, rising to float across the room with her singular grace. “My King, behold another devoted daughter. Methinks ’tis past time for tea. Perchance my sire’s bones require warmth?” She dipped a curtsy, then embraced Mona, her eyes alight with a rare impishness that brought back memories of the very different girl Tansy had once been.
Mona accepted the hug, touching Tansy’s spindrift hair and smiling past the ache. Once Tansy had been all mischief and shimmering energy, complete and fearlessly safe in her bond with her brother.
Martin responded in an echo of Tansy’s teasing tone. “‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child’…who will not run lines with her dear old father?”
His lips curved, but in her father’s gaze Mona saw the heartbreak. She squelched old pangs of envy. No matter how she wished he’d just once look at her with such devotion, she understood how special Tansy was. To resent her would be to resent starlight or a perfect rose.
Tansy laughed, bell-pure. “I’ll go ask Mrs. Hodgson to bring tea.” She left, barely stirring the air as she passed.
Martin glanced at Mona, then at the train clock beside the playbill Mona had preserved from his last London run. He sat down heavily, his face leached of color.
“Are you all right?” Mona asked.
He nodded. “Merely a combination of age and Lear. Titania and I have been running lines since just after lunch. An old man needs his afternoon liedown, I fear.”
Mona studied him, seeing him in a new light. His always regal carriage had diminished, his proud, leonine head slightly bent. Standing above him, she saw tender pink skin and realized that the thick white mane was losing purchase.
For a second, the ground beneath her shifted. She closed her eyes against the unwanted view. “You’ll never be old, Daddy.”
But in his face she saw weariness. “This is my swan song. Ten years away from my life’s blood…” He stared into the distance. “Twenty years without my Juliette. Where did the years go?”
“You still miss her.”
“One cannot help but miss the heart when it has fled the body. If it weren’t for Titania—” He faltered. Shook his head.
“What, Daddy?”
Martin captured her in those fierce eyes that could still mesmerize an audience. “I worry about your sister. Every day my eyesight dims, my body aches in new places. Lear will tax me to my limits.”
This brutal honesty was new and shocking. Her father never shared confidences with anyone but Carlton. Mona moved closer, pride a new song inside her. “Should you be doing this? Have you seen a doctor?”
He harrumphed, for an instant the imperious king of theater again. “Lear is the one role I’ve not tackled. My career would be incomplete without it.” Disdain colored his tone. “I understand Lear now. I have my own thankless children.”
Why was it that this man could reduce her—a woman who controlled her own kingdom, who influenced hundreds of thousands of people by her decisions—to a girl again, one whose most fervent wish had been to be like the golden family into which she’d been born?
The grown woman wheeled to leave. Martin’s imperious voice stopped her. “Desdemona—”
She crossed toward the door, her insides a nasty mix of shame and rage and, goddamn it, longing. “I’ll let myself out.”
“Wait—” A new note crept in. Tentative. Almost…pleading.
She paused but didn’t turn around.
“Please. It’s about Titania. Carlton has offered again to marry her so she’ll be safe when I’m gone.”
Mona whirled. “Carlton once wanted to put her in an institution. She’s not his business. Kat and I will care for her anytime you’re willing to let go.”
Lines of strain on his face relaxed. He started to speak, but just then Tansy entered the room, her long pale-blue gown gliding over the rug. She resembled their mother so much. Mona watched her father accept the cup Tansy brought, watched the way Tansy spread his napkin in his lap and smoothed her hand over his hair. She reminded Mona of a little girl playing mother, the gestures slightly fussy and nervous, lacking the confidence of a true adult.
When she had her father settled, Tansy drifted away, her skirts swishing against the floor. She began to hum a little tune, her face dreamy as she danced across the carpet.
“What makes you sing, sweet?”
“I dreamed of my prince last night, Daddy. Mama promised me he’d come one day to take me under the fairy hill.” She knelt on the floor before him, yearning in every line of her face as she clasped his hand. “She said I would recognize him when he arrived. I hope he’ll be here soon.”
Martin frowned. “Perhaps your mother was only telling a pretty story…”
Mona understood her father’s concern. Tansy was too gentle for this world. The eldest, but by far the most innocent. He’d protected her for twenty years. They all had. She lacked essential elements required to fend for herself in a universe that would chew her up and spit her out.
Tansy’s eyes glowed in the golden light. “He’ll come, Daddy. I’m sure he will.” Then she reached for her cup, her face pensive. “I’ve painted his form, but I can’t quite see his face.” She peered up at her sister. “Would you like to see the painting, Mona?”
“Sure.”
“Are we finished for today, Daddy? After I show Mona, I need to go see Paris.”
Her father’s eyes flashed. Tansy didn’t say it often, had learned not to speak of her belief that her twin waited for her in Riverside Park. They’d tried over the years to make Tansy understand that Paris was dead, but a remnant of her former stubbornness surfaced at such times. Paris was not dead, she insisted. She would know. She would be dead, too.
Mona and her father traded glances. He lifted his shoulders in resignation, and frankly, Mona had to agree. If not for going to the park to see Paris, Tansy would never leave this apartment. Mona had argued with her father, urged therapy, medication—anything to get her sister back. Martin wouldn’t hear of it. Tansy was so fragile that all of them sensed how critical the delusion was to her well-being. All in all, it was relatively harmless. She visited Paris most afternoons at the park, seldom straying more than a block either way.
For the first time in a while, Mona reexamined their truce and wondered if she should try again. Now wasn’t the time, however. Maybe after the premiere…or maybe not. Perhaps they should let her be.
“Yes, sweet. We’re finished.” Martin accepted the brush of her lips on his cheek and stroked her hair. “Thank you, princess.”
She smiled and slipped away. Mona followed.
Tansy’s studio was an old butler’s pantry, cleared out with barely enough room for her easel and paints. Rolls of canvas and wood for stretchers were stacked on high shelves, with its unicorn and butterflies a reflection of her younger self.
On the easel, the beginnings of a knight clad in armor greeted Mona. The body of Tansy’s prince was there, strong and tall, but just as she’d indicated, the face was missing.
“I wish I could remember his features,” Tansy said wistfully. “I’ve waited for so long. His hands…they make me feel safe.”
Mona slid an arm around her sister’s shoulders. She and Kat were tall, but Tansy was a good five inches shorter. She leaned her cheek on Tansy’s hair. “Do you feel unsafe here? Or in the park?”
Tansy shook her head. “No. It’s…” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “The other dream.” She moved away quickly and traversed the hall to her room, alight with rainbows cast by the crystals hanging in her window. Once inside, she stopped beside the bureau, where she kept Nana’s scarve
s.
“What dream?”
But Tansy turned a face as blank as slate to her. “Do you ever think of Nana?” She pulled open the slender right-hand drawer, then closed her hands around them, the bright, frothy squares of blue and red and lilac, still faintly smelling of Nana’s lavender sachet. Nana had always worn one over her hair for protection when she went outside, and Tansy followed suit.
“Of course I do.” Indignation stirred. Hadn’t Mona been left behind with Nana when Tansy and Paris were allowed to come home to New York?
“Nana’s house was a safe place. I loved her spice cabinet. Do you recall it?” Tansy buried her nose in the bright froth. “I loved the way she’d hold me and stroke my hair.”
Mona’s stomach jittered. “Tansy, tell me about your other dream.” It was unlike Tansy to be so troubled. Was she remembering?
Tansy hunched her shoulders slightly.
“Tansy…”
Blinking, she turned to her sister and smiled. “I need to see Paris. Are you sure you don’t want to come?” She drew a pale-blue scarf from the drawer to match her dress, then slid the neat triangle over her hair as Nana would do and tied it beneath her chin. Then she stood there, eyes impatient.
“I—” Mona wasn’t sure what to do. She glanced at the Rolex on her wrist.
“It’s all right.” Tansy crossed to her, pressing one hand to her cheek before bestowing a kiss. “Go home to Fitz. I’m fine, I promise. Paris is waiting.”
Mona watched her go, heart aching.
Chapter Two
Freedom was two gates away.
Lucas Walker had long ago quit dreaming of that land of trees and air, of sunlight and birdsong, of steps in any direction he chose. It had been crucial to cut off all hope of them—or go insane. Yet here liberty lay, just past the bars. So close his chest ached and he could not breathe. A wild, buried anger stirred. Today, for the first time in twenty years, he would be a free man.
Unshackled in body, that is; his spirit would never again be unfettered. He’d lost more than his friend that autumn night when he’d been seventeen and street-savvy. Still innocent enough, though, to succumb to the lure of the Gerards. To glimpse, now and again, himself as Juliette had viewed him. To believe that lives could change, even one as worthless as his.
“Don’t get too excited, hard case.” The guard beside him sneered. “It ain’t no picnic out there. World’s changed since you was last on the loose.” He shrugged, then his wide lips split in a parody of a grin. “You’ll be back. But don’t worry—we’ll leave the lights on. Keep your cell warm.”
Lucas stared straight ahead at that last gate, still remembering the sound of doom clanging shut like the gates of hell looming over him that long-ago day. The severity of the crime had caused them to try him as an adult, and he could still feel the shudder that had racked his spine when he heard the gate close and lock out hope…choke the life from the pitiful dreams a boy had barely begun to dare.
In the pocket of his too-crisp shirt with its cardboard folds crisscrossing his chest, the yellowed letter burned.
Juliette Gerard. Angel. Mother of his dreams. Midwife of his stillborn hopes. To a boy abandoned as so much garbage by his own mother, Juliette had seemed a miracle. He’d read her letter a thousand times that first year, then never since—but it was still his most treasured possession.
He’d beaten a man half to death once for stealing it, taunting him, holding it over a flame. He’d been in solitary for a year that time, afraid every second that the letter was forever lost—and along with it, what was left of his soul.
But Mose had saved it—rescued Lucas, too. His only friend had understood that the letter was all that kept Lucas sane.
Written on pale-lavender linen gone brown with age, to him it smelled of roses, as she always had.
Mercy was its message.
The mother he’d have sold his soul to have, forgiving Lucas for murdering her beloved son, even though she was so sick herself that death caressed her like a lover.
The final door clanged behind him, but Lucas never even heard. Like north on a compass, Juliette’s mercy called Lucas back to New York to face her daughter once more.
In some circles, to be behind the times came treacherously close to cardinal sin. The most acceptable speed was full-throttle, the proper direction forward. For all its sophistication, New York was a very small town. Reputations could be made—and destroyed—with that same lightning pace.
Which was why Kat Gerard hadn’t eaten all day, almost breathless with the risk she’d taken to mount this show. Yet there was nothing she loved more than hanging out over the edge…in this case, a precipice appropriately named Gamble Smith.
She paused in shadow, listening. Observing the stage she’d set and the players now assembled. Delicate chime of crystal champagne flutes. Soft waterfall of harp strings. The bouquet of a hundred women’s perfumes mingled with crisp, almost-great champagne, melted Brie and a subtle undertone of chocolate. Voices murmuring fascination, city dwellers lost in a fantasy they’d try to dismiss when moonlight fled and day returned.
Kat strolled across Oriental carpets she’d begged from hither and yon to capture the mood of the paintings, surveying the opening-night crowd for Gamble’s show. And smiled.
No one had left yet. The air all but sizzled. She’d taken a chance on him; in her outré world, the blatant romanticism of the Texan’s work could easily be mocked. Her circle did not suffer fools—or romantics—gladly.
But it appeared she had won. The place was packed to the pearl-gray walls. Kat might not be able to paint as Tansy could—the true sorrow of her life—but she damn well had a killer instinct for good art. When she’d slammed against the wall of her limited talent, it had crushed her for a time. She’d given her brushes to Tansy, unable to bear even looking at them, and walked away from the whole scene.
But a year later she’d known her soul was withering. She returned to her favorite haunts and began talking to her art school friends. She mounted her first exhibit in the loading dock of a Chelsea building scheduled for renovation. Two more shows followed, in equally shaky locations.
At the third show, she’d met Armand Delacroix.
The renegade scion of a patrician Boston family, Armand continued to resist his family’s pleas for his return to the life to which he was born. He was a man of many contrasts: opera patron with a taste for old, scratchy blues records; a brilliant thinker with a penchant for breakneck sports; an entrepreneur who made pots of money without seeming to try and who shared it with others easily. Suave and handsome, Armand was often seen with strikingly beautiful women on his arm, but he was also a man who, despite his inborn elegance, numbered among his friends as many starving artists and tradesmen as prominent public figures. He ran every day and piloted his own plane, had once played polo with abandon and still liked the challenge of the world’s highest mountains.
Despite the wishes of his family that he come home to Beacon Hill, Armand found Boston too limiting, his family too inclined to want to peg him in one neat niche. If any city had a hold on him, it was ever-changing New York, his Gramercy Park pièd-a-terre manned by an aging butler Armand refused to put out to pasture.
The wealthy patron and the neophyte had hit it off, and she’d learned more from Armand than any school could have taught. Two years ago, on a wing and a prayer and a shoestring—and Armand’s not-so-gentle nudging—she’d leased a permanent space and lived in the back room. Six months ago, she’d taken her own apartment ten blocks away.
She would never produce works that others would buy, and it almost didn’t hurt anymore. If she couldn’t set the world on fire with one talent, she would use another. No matter what, the world would notice Kat Gerard as her father never had. Tonight was an important step.
Diandra Salud from the Voice stared raptly at a painting that was blatantly après-coital. The female figure reclined, one leg softly spread in total surrender. Absolute trust. Complete lack of defense again
st that too-deadly species: the human male.
Instead of the usual buzz that accompanied the controversial shows Kat mounted, the room hummed with something different. A silent eroticism charged the air, coupled with, of all things, a sort of peace at odds with life in this city.
Gamble Smith looked like a cowboy and painted like a fallen angel. He brought to mind a different world, something at once more earthy and voluptuous, yet more ethereal.
Kat wondered if he made love that way, as well.
Perhaps she would find out. She avoided getting down and dirty with her artists until after a show; before that time, she preferred them sharp and hungry. Teasing was great—it put them both on edge, crisped the air with appetites unappeased. She and Gamble had been fencing for weeks.
But no touching, not until afterward.
It was almost afterward now. Tonight. Here, perhaps, surrounded by his work.
Or in his studio. More than once, Kat had experienced the possibilities of paint application as it related to the human body.
She sized him up as he stood across the room, surrounded by preening women. Raw, angry and towering over them all, he was impatient, uncomfortable. Furious eyes met hers.
Kat smiled and lifted one brow. There was nothing he could do about it. She’d made sure of that. Gamble Smith resented the hell out of every person who wanted a piece of his art. He was pissed off that he needed food and a place to rest his head. He spent as little as possible on both, living and working in the sordid warehouse he called a studio. He had found one of the few remaining spaces in Manhattan an artist could afford. There were hardly any of the basic amenities—but plenty of great light and room for his rangy, rough-hewn body to move, for his big hands to turn paint into dreams. Into beauty that called like a siren.
Mercy Page 2