Daring Widow: Those Notorious Americans, Book 2

by Cerise DeLand

  “All right. But you shouldn’t go alone.” They’d both come out today without their personal ladies’ maids because both servants were ill with coughs and sneezing. Not even the Comtesse de Chaumont was out with them today because she was busy closing up her house in Paris to travel with them soon to London.

  This was the perfect time for Marianne to accomplish her objective. “The day is young and the gendarmerie can save me from any person of ill repute.”

  “If you’re sure…?” Lily asked, eagerness in her tone.

  “I am.” Lily could spend the entire afternoon in the book shop, spending a fortune on novels. Since well before Christmas, Marianne had been hoping for an opportunity to walk in Paris alone. “Take as much time as you wish. Stay and I will come back for you when I finish.”

  “Very well.” Lily bid her goodbye and pulled opened the bright blue door to the cozy shop along the river.

  Marianne whirled around and made for the Place Dauphine. She’d memorized the address of the exhibit and though she’d never traveled there before, she knew where it was and that it was a fine neighborhood. She could walk there safely, a woman alone in the middle of the afternoon on a crisp winter’s day.

  She was grateful for the whip of the wind and the way she had to keep her little wool hat from flying away. Fighting the weather kept her mind from fighting her skepticism—and from giving in to the voices in her head that asked the same alarming questions over and over again.

  What if this Remy, the sculptor, is not the same man as the duke she’d met?

  Ridiculous. There could not be two dukes of Remy. Plus, the article she’d read in an edition of last week’s Paris Monde had spoken of the “prince du sang” who was “becoming recognized for his nouveau style.” Her subsequent conversation with Chaumont about him revealed that he did work in bronze and marble and worse, that he was renowned in society for keeping one mistress at a time for a very long time.

  He had told her nothing of either. Not that he should. Nor even that such were proper topics for polite conversation between acquaintances. But the first omission saddened just as it intrigued her. The latter sparked jealousy. It also infuriated her.

  “As if I have the right to be angry with him,” she murmured and walked on.

  Still she’d seen the billboard for “Une Exposition pour duc de Remy!” and her curiosity would not die.

  She paused. What if I dislike his sculpture?

  What if I see someone there whom I’ve met?

  What if they require my name and tell Andre I was there?

  No matter. Really. Was she a ninny?

  She marched onward.

  But she fretted. What if Andre is there?

  Indeed.

  What if he is?

  The answers did not kill the hunger that had plagued her since last she’d seen him in September at the opera. To feed her memory, she’d drawn him. Over and over again, she created him. She had sketchbooks full of him. His face, his cheek, his hands, his eyes. His remarkable eyes. In graphite or ink, he lived in her hands, in her mind, in her foolish fantasies. There, he appeared without threat to her equilibrium. There, he became more human than myth. There, he was flesh beneath her fingers and wild emotion for her soul to feed on. Her conclusion was that she could not continue as she had without knowing him better. Because he had taken her order not to call upon her, she was left no other recourse to satisfy herself about him than to view what he loved, what he had created.

  She hurried along the boulevard, proud of herself for this necessity to attend his exhibit of his latest works. During the past few months, she’d sometimes thought she might go mad with not being able to admire the symmetry of his form or the drama of emotion in his face. Summoning courage, she’d committed herself to feeding her hunger by drawing him.

  Now there was this visit. Pure whimsy. To do it easily. Anonymously. Many weeks ago, she’d seen the billboard near the Louvre advertising the display of his works and she’d lost her breath with the hope it aroused. She’d view his artistry and—she assured herself—feel nothing. She’d recognize no chord in his work that spoke to her. Nothing of the man who had bewitched her. Then, and only then, would she force herself to accept that he was not what she had imagined.

  He was not kind or sweet. He was assertive, self-centered, driven. Even arrogant. What artist could become accomplished without such characteristics?

  No. He was not for her.

  Not her kind of man. Her type of friend. Not at all one whom she could take to her arms and her bed and her care.

  Not.

  She stood in front of Number 10, her destination. A three-story stone structure with grape leaves carved in relief into the frame, the building had two abnormally large doorways. They appeared to be proportioned to receive a sculptor’s works. The one with a large cut glass window seemed to be the entrance. Inside, the concierge in a somber black suit spied her, hurried out and opened the door for her.

  The address was the same as on the billboard. The plaque on the door proclaimed it as the “Gallerie de la Cite.”

  “The Duc de Remy’s exhibit is here?”

  “Oui, Madame. Through the foyer and up the grand staircase.”

  “Merci beaucoup.” She sailed through the lobby and up the steps. Four other patrons casually climbed the broad steps.

  At the top, she halted her in her tracks. A man and woman passed around her. But she stared at the sculpture before her. It robbed her of breath.

  Here upon a black granite plinth stood a man of white Carrara marble, eight or nine feet tall. All muscle and bone, honed by battle and hewn by strife, massively masculine and robust, he was of such proportions that any other human would fall down in honor of him. He stood in the center of the oval entry to the rest of the exhibit, sunlight from a semicircle of windows shining on him, shadowing the arc of a bicep here and emphasizing the indentation of a deltoid there.

  Yet he did not stand tall, but was hunched. His back was curled, bowed in new defeat. His hair long and ragged, etched in the pristine marble to invoke its filth, shrouded him to the waist. Ropes circled his torso and hung from his wrists. His noble head hung lax from his corded neck as he stared at the nothingness before him.

  The beauty of this body was nothing to the grand agony of his face. She gasped at the sight and could not look away.

  She walked around him and bent to face him. He looked at her, but beyond her. He was blind, in torment. She drew back, aghast once more at the brutal honesty of what she saw.

  This was a strong man brought low. By loss. By self-destruction.

  She ached with him. Once proud, dynamic. A man others had once envied and emulated. A man so capable, so honored and now, abandoned by others and most tragically, by himself.

  She stood for how long she did not know. The power of him infusing her. And the power that he’d lost draining her of envy and inspiring pride at Andre’s talent to portray him so precisely.

  Across the room, beyond the giant, a young man in an apprentice’s smock tipped his head in question. Not at her. But someone who stood behind her. He tipped his head and, as if on signal, he departed.

  Her skin tingled.

  The hunger she’d felt for months dissipated. She’d be sated now.

  “Bonjour, ma petite,” Andre said in that bass voice she heard in the bleak hours of her lonely nights. “I dared not hope you would come.”

  She closed her eyes, wishing to hang on to this moment when he was happy to see her and she was as delighted to be with him. In this slice of time, there was none of her inner conflict, no yearning to find him, see him, laugh with him. There was just satisfaction. But it could not last.

  Why not tell him the truth? He had asked for honesty and he did not deserve duplicity. He had only told her how he admired her and she had rebuffed him out of…what? Not convention, no. But her own fear to allow such a strong man near her heart or body. Perhaps even her own fear of her outrageous ambitions to enjoy him physically?
She faced him, and oh, the delight to see him again ran through her like cool water after a drought. He was as tall, as incomparable as she remembered him. Perhaps more so, since she had pined for him so badly.

  “Bonjour, Andre.” She gave him that, his given name as he had allowed her use of it. During these past months, she’d thought of him that way, the sound of his name slipping through her lips at night as she attempted to draw him. Andre. “I saw a billboard and I could not stay away.”

  He stood against the white marble wall, the gold veins of the stone highlighting the gilded mien of his own long waving hair. He had folded his arms and one leg was casually crossed before the other. He wore a loosely cut black wool suit, a bright vermilion vest, a white linen shirt open to his strong throat and a purple kerchief tied at his neck. Every inch of him denoted the artist at his leisure.

  “I’m glad I’ve come. This—” she said and lifted a hand toward the statue, “—this is glorious. I heard others speak of him but they did him no justice.”

  He gazed at her with hollow eyes.

  “No words can,” she went on, wanting to give him more praise and unequal to the task. “Will you tell me about him?”

  “Him?” he asked, as if she had insulted him with the question.

  She knew why. He wanted her to ask about himself. And she would. She would.

  He stared at her. “You know who he is.”

  She did. “Who could not? To view him was to know. No pamphlet or placard need declare it.”

  A light glimmered in Andre’s blue eyes. “What do you see?”

  “A man torn by his own desires and ruined by his own misjudgments.”

  His marvelous mouth firmed. Pride lit his face. “And?”

  “He will never see himself again.”

  “He did not truly see himself before he was blinded.”

  “A punishment,” she acknowledged, “to fit his crime.”

  Andre shifted, peering at her with narrowed eyes. “There is another he will not see.”

  Oh, yes. “He will never see her again.”

  “The one who betrayed him.”

  She nodded. “The one whose beauty he believed was soul deep.”

  Andre pushed away from the wall and approached the statue. “He must pay for his own failure to perceive her true nature.”

  “She was not equal to him.”

  He whirled to face her. “That’s not what he believed. He thought she was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen.”

  “The beauty was outside. Her core was hollow.”

  “He pays for his miscalculation,” he said.

  She dropped her gaze to the floor, anxiety eating her that they spoke of more than the statue or the Biblical story of the blind man and the woman he had loved so unwisely.

  “Do you think she pays?” he asked, his deep voice wistful.

  She raised her face to consider the statue’s tortured expression. “Delilah?”

  He waited.

  “Oh, yes. She forevermore will hate herself for her own failures and unworthiness.”

  Andre took her by the wrist. “Come with me.”

  Her pulse jumped.

  He led her down a hallway toward a room where he shut the heavy wooden door and drew her into an atelier crowded with bronzes and plasters, scattered about on tables and shelves. Two ivory overstuffed chairs stood in one sunlit corner near a sumptuous black velvet chaise longue.

  She had not expected a private audience. Whatever he wished to discuss in private summoned her defenses. To examine his works would help soothe her. “May I…may I see these?”

  Hands on his hips, he glared at her. Silent, he tipped his head as if to give her permission.

  Before her was a glazed multi-colored china bowl, large as a Virginia farmer’s whiskey vat. The huge green and blue base was balanced by the figures of four muscular men who held it on their shoulders. Their strength reminded her of the Samson in the entry, but she knew these were Titans holding up the world. On another table stood three plasters in various stages of completion. All were of the same figure, a lithe woman rising from a frigid white foaming sea. The model’s facial features reminded her of herself. Alarmed, she shrank backward and wondered why the model was incomplete. “Why is she unfinished?”

  “I thought I knew her, but I was wrong.”

  She inhaled sharply. His words reminiscent of their conversation about Samson and Delilah seared her—and compelled her to look again at the woman. Indeed, it was an attempt to recreate her. “This is not Delilah.”

  “Perceptive of you,” he said and strode away from her toward the window. “She was to be Diana. I miscalculated.”

  Unable to stare into her own face again, Marianne moved on to the far table where a model of a child stood. Done in bronze, he was a chubby baby holding his toes and giggling. Yet he was not complete for his face was half obscured by one foot. She turned to Andre. “You have not seen him fully yet?”

  “No.” Glancing at her over his shoulder, he shook his head. “I allowed the casting and should not have. Next time when I have a half-formed vision, I will know better than to rush to form him before he is truly whole.”

  She continued onward to view other pieces in wet clay, all of a woman, nude, arching upward as if in ecstasy or pain.

  “How long have you been sculpting?” she asked, facing him. So far across the room, she felt safe from his allure.

  “Since I was young. Our chateau in Tours is old and filled with friezes and sculptures. The house needed new plaster on the walls and I amused myself to watch the peasants work. Then I joined with them. When they finished the walls and the painters came to do the murals, I wanted to draw as they did. My mother gave me graphite, pen and ink and parchment. I drew until my fingers ached, filing sketchbooks that I keep in the chateau as a reminder of how I began.”

  “I should like to see them.”

  His stern demeanor drained to compassion. “Ma petite, to see them you would have to be with me for days.”

  She seemed to soar, light as air in her ripe desire to do just that.

  “But only just now are you capable of bringing yourself to be with me for minutes.”

  She lifted a shoulder in apology. “I go slowly.”

  “A creature of your society?” he suggested with a small crooked smile.

  “I admit it, yes.”

  “Nonetheless,” he said now with the first sign of warm welcome, “I’m glad you’ve come.”

  “So am I.” She let her gaze travel the array of his creations. There were dozens here. She yearned to touch each one, learn their contours, their secrets. “You are prolific.”

  He grinned. “One must work every day to improve one’s skill. Not every object is superb.”

  She knew that herself. How many times had she witnessed her own inadequacies in her sketches and paintings? “I have proof of that.”

  “How so?”

  Well, she had led him to this juncture. She would confess her actions. “I draw you.”

  Humor fled his features. Raw desire supplanted it. “Since when?”

  “The night I first saw you in the Rue des Abbesses.”

  He stared at her and seemed to fail to breathe. “Are your sketches any good?”

  She gave a small laugh. “I get better. The more I see you, the more I draw you—”

  His blue eyes flamed.

  She gathered her courage. “The more I try, the better the portrait.”

  “Are your drawings substitute for the man?” he asked, a note of ruefulness in his tone.

  Safer, but not as fulfilling. She shook her head, less afraid now that she saw him in the flesh. Pulled by his charm, she took a step forward. “I didn’t expect to see you here. In fact, I hoped not.”

  “Well, then,” he said with dark impatience, “why are you here?”

  She moved about in a circle, extending a gloved hand to his works. “I thought I could interpret who you are, what you admire, what you yearn for if
I could see what you create. Then perhaps I could draw you more accurately.”

  “Why is that important?”

  She frowned at him.

  He strolled toward her casually but his face held harsh intent. “Why must you draw me repeatedly? Why must you assure yourself you know me? Is it artistry? Do you not recall the exact arch of my nose?”

  A hard question, but here with him she suddenly knew the answer. “I don’t want to be wrong about what I perceive in you. Who I think you are.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Sweet. Lovable. Unapologetic for your raw ambition. Even aggressive.”

  He grimaced. “Ah, well.”

  She smiled at him, his modesty surprising and refreshing.

  “You like me?” His question was as whimsical as the light in his eyes.

  “I do,” she said with relief at speaking the truth.

  “I’m pleased.”

  Relief flooded her. “Oh, so am I. I want to sleep more easily.”

  His face fell. “You do not sleep?”

  She wanted to shake her head but she could not take her eyes from his. “I walk the floor.”

  “Is that normal for you?”

  “Only since I first saw you.”

  “What must you have to sleep?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

  “Peace,” she told him with certainty. “I draw you to…to draw you near to me.”

  He inhaled. “Is my visage so scary that I keep you awake?”

  “So elusive that I yearn to see you more,” she admitted, pleased at her own veracity. She would have him for her lover if he agreed.

  His hands flexing, he strolled away. When he faced her again he said, “You’ve asked others who I am, what I am?”

  “I have.” Uncle Killian, Lily and she had been invited to soirees and dinner parties in Paris. She’d met a few French aristocrats who’d casually mentioned Andre and his ancestry. He was thirty-six, immensely wealthy, a blue blood. He was indeed descended from the dethroned Bourbon kings and the rascally Bonapartes. He was a welcome guest, a superb horseman, an expert at cards and a leader of Parisian society as was his mother. To top it off, she recently confirmed among her acquaintances that he was a burgeoning sculptor and painter whose works gained critics’ praise. He was a friend of the impressionist painters DeGas and Renoir who lived up on the Butte in Montmartre. For his ancient name, his money, especially for his male magnetism, he was a prime catch for any young woman. Dozens—young, virginal, widowed and jaded—had him in their sites. She was no competition to any of them. Nor did she wish to be. “You’ve become increasingly popular.”