The Prince

by Katharine Ashe

  Hovering between worry and elation, Libby followed him inside. But worry was an old friend. The elation, new and sparkling, seemed instead to want to settle in her heart.

  Chapter 8

  Sunday at Ten O’clock

  The swine entered first, barreling in on tiny hooves with snorts and grunts. She followed it momentarily, moving into his studio like a storm moves across a beach: with magnificent energy.

  “Thanks to the watch you have lent me I have been precisely on time everywhere I have gone for days. What splendid light this room has at this hour, so clean and pure! I understand now the reason that you bought this house. Yet the rest of the house is quite nice too. I don’t know why you do not use the dining room and the parlor. But Mrs. Coutts has made it all very comfortable for me, you know. Shall I sit there?”

  She walked to the high stool even as she spoke, and perched on the edge of it. She wore a gown of an ochre color that rendered her skin sallow yet made her eyes even more brilliant than usual. It fit snugly to her breasts and shoulders and arms.

  Ziyaeddin had expected her to wear the men’s clothing. He wished she had. He needed no more enticements to her femininity: he had plenty already in the crisp curves of her lips as she tried to hold them still and the delicate flare of her nostrils that revealed her struggle to do so.

  It seemed difficult for her not to speak every thought she had. Yet now she was trying to.

  He took up his sketching pad and pencil.

  “What will you draw?” she said, her brows arching as though she meant to look over the edge of the paper, which she could not from six feet distant.

  “You,” he said. “I should have thought that obvious.”

  “Ha ha. How clever you are, sir. I am nearly breathless with hilarity.”

  Yet she was in fact breathless, her chest moving rapidly in shallow inhalations and exhalations.

  “You needn’t fear,” he said.

  The golden lashes fanned wide. “Why would I fear?”

  “I shan’t draw you as a monster.” The lips. The lips. The bow of the upper appeared simple enough. Yet the lower . . . Neither too plump nor narrow. Uncomplicated yet unique. And the left side of the lower lip was slightly squared. Asymmetrical lips. Lips that were never still.

  “I knew I would rarely see you,” she said. “You made that clear. But I have always lived with my father and I see him regularly most days. Saw him, that is. So I think I have been disconcerted not to actually see you. It is odd to share a house with a person and not meet him even in passing. What did you spend your days doing?”

  “Awaiting this moment,” he said, more or less honestly.

  She laughed and shifted her weight from one buttock to the other.

  “Oh. You wish to remain enigmatic,” she said. “The Turk,” she added more thoughtfully.

  There. The light danced upon her lower lip, a pinkish gold raindrop that defined the shadow beneath it. The skin on her chin was reddened, above her upper lip as well, and running beneath the length of each cheekbone.

  “Are you actually Turkish?” she said.

  “No.” Not entirely.

  “Then why does everyone call you the Turk?”

  “You must ask them that.”

  “Perhaps they are ignorant, and one man of foreign features, skin, and accent seems equal to the next.”

  “Perhaps.” Most certainly. Yet he had allowed this misbelief. He had at times encouraged it.

  “If you are not Turkish, then from where do you—”

  “Be still.”

  She was. For a minute.

  “Are you still painting Mr. and Mrs. McPherson’s portrait?”

  “It is finished.” Unsatisfactorily. Unveiling it had been as an undertaker unveils a corpse. The tip of this woman’s nose in lead now showed more life than those two subjects combined.

  “Did they like it?”

  “Yes.” They had rhapsodized. They did not know to expect more.

  Not this woman. She was seizing life with both hands.

  “Turn your face toward the window.”

  “It is a great relief to have the hair off my brow,” she said, lifting a hand and swiping it over the short curls she had confined with a cloth band. She had strong hands, unlike a lady’s, rather more like a woman of the laboring class, because she used them.

  He wondered if she had ever used them on a man—not medically—and then tried to strike that from his imagination.

  Unsuccessfully.

  “Mrs. Coutts suggested that I comb it forward to cover more of my face,” she said, “but it is so short that it springs back. I employed oil to keep it still.”

  Long fingers. Blunt tips. Short nails. Wrinkled knuckles. Capable hands. She moved them swiftly yet with purpose. If she were not shortly discovered, if she remained, he would paint her hands. Her lips. The tip of her nose. And then the remainder of her. He would torture himself doing it. But he would not resist the desire to do so.

  Every other desire regarding this woman, however, he would resist.

  His original intention in seeking her as a model he now knew could simply not be. It was challenge enough to his self-control depicting her fully clothed.

  “Does the skin irritation on my face cause you trouble?” she said.

  Her entire existence caused him trouble.

  “No.”

  “You don’t intend to sell these pictures of me, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Then for what purpose do you wish to draw me?”

  He looked up into her eyes. “For your beauty.”

  “You are teasing now. I know beautiful women. Constance is beautiful. Amarantha is beautiful. My features are unremarkable. Ordinary. I am not beautiful.”

  “You are to me.”

  She stared at him, her lips parted slightly, the harsh pinkness around them as on the face of a child who had enthusiastically consumed pomegranate. But her eyes were not a child’s eyes; they were full of clean intelligence and honest wisdom.

  “They are studies only,” he said. “Not a portrait.”

  “May I see?”

  He nodded.

  She leaped off the stool and came to him without any grace, only movement, always movement.

  “Oh,” she said. “One feature at a time. Lips. Nose. Fingers. Why not my entire hand?”

  “You have not remained still enough for me to capture either hand entirely.”

  She trapped her lips between her teeth and met his gaze.

  “Capture?” she said.

  “Study,” he amended.

  “I think you meant capture.” Her eyes were gloriously bright, and spots of pink stained each cheek, mingling with the rash.

  “Return to your perch, güzel kız. The eleventh hour has not yet arrived.”

  She did so, this time setting her feet on the lower rungs, which tightened the gown around her buttocks and thighs.

  “What other features will you study?” she said. “My ears?”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “Chin? Neck? Feet?” She wiggled a foot shod in a plain slipper. “Eyes?”

  “Yes.” Never her eyes. Not again. Not since drawing her eyes at Haiknayes had changed his life. Too much of her soul shone in those eyes. To draw them would be to drink in that soul and make himself drunk on it.

  “What language were those words—goo-zell kuz?”

  “Turkish.”

  “But you said that you are not Turkish.”

  “You speak English?”

  “Obviously.”

  “Yet the language of your homeland is Scots.”

  “Then am I to assume that you come from a place that is now within the Ottoman Empire?”

  He should have guessed she would have knowledge of such a thing.

  “No.” Rather, a place that had existed for a millennium before the Ottomans ever came, and had broken from the ancient Persian Empire, and which still maintained its freedom from both.

  “You won’t tell me
,” she said.

  “As I have already said.”

  “Will you tell me what goo-zell kuz means?”

  “It means beautiful girl.”

  “Does it? How dull! I imagined it something like nasty harpy or persistent irritant or some such.”

  “I think I should be insulted.”

  “You must truly lack imagination, which is intriguing given the beauty of your paintings. But I have heard of artists whose work is extraordinary turning out to be deeply uninteresting people. Perhaps you are one of those.”

  Minx.

  “Perhaps,” he said.

  She smiled, and her teeth showed white and even between the maddening lips.

  “Don’t,” he heard himself say.

  “Don’t what? Tease you as you are so fond of teasing me? Oh. You thought me humorless. I don’t blame you for it. Most people do.”

  “Don’t smile.”

  That wonderful dart formed between her brows, the one that reminded him of lovers separated by land that could never be traversed.

  “Why not?” she said. “Are you trying to draw my lips now?”

  “Always.”

  “That is mysterious.”

  “Your smile affects me,” he said. “Acutely.”

  Her mouth shut. Briefly.

  “How so? I recently read a treatise in which the physician claimed that regularly seeing a smile could actually thin the noxious humors in a melancholy person. The physician was an Italian, of course. Englishmen would never bother themselves with matters like smiles. They would not consider it sufficiently scientific. Or even interesting. And the theory of humors is passé now. You are not melancholy, though. At least there are no indicators of melancholy about you that I observe.”

  “Lay your hand upon your knee and do not move it.”

  She did so and her fingers arched, the tips resting on the fabric as though prepared for imminent flight.

  “Why don’t you wear a suitable prosthetic device—an actual foot?”

  The perfect arc of her forefinger came onto the page as though a benevolent spirit guided his pencil.

  “You would walk much more comfortably,” she said. “What is your age?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “You could delay or even entirely deter the damage to your spine that is the result of an uneven gait. I have studied every treatise on the alignment of the spine that has been wri—”

  “Miss Shaw—”

  “Mr. Smart.”

  “When you appear in this studio wearing men’s clothing and speak only as a man, then I will call you Mr. Smart.”

  “You must now too.”

  “I really mustn’t.”

  “You do not want to hear my advice. I am thoroughly versed in the muscular and skeletal and nervous systems beyond even surgeons of my father’s acquaintance who have years of experience. I have been reading treatises for years, and watched surgeons perform complex surgeries as often as possible. I have cared for my father’s patients often too and assisted him with surgeries. In the hopes of someday meeting Charles Bell, I read every one of his works on the nerves, brain, and spine, as well as his colleagues’ works, works by Dutch, French, and American surgeons, and even the works of Arab surgeons that I could find translated into European languages. I am an expert.”

  “You are arrogant.”

  “I am not. I am in fact very knowledgeable. Yet you will not heed my advice. Is it because I am a woman?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Believe what you wish,” he said. “This hour is an at end.” Signaled by the chime of a clock in the parlor. “Did you purchase that clock?”

  “No. I simply wound it. I cannot wear a man’s watch while I am sitting here for you, after all.” She rose to her feet, but remained standing by the stool. “I am sorry.”

  “For winding the clock that I did not remember I owned?”

  “For badgering you.”

  Grasping his walking stick, he stood and went to her.

  “You did not badger,” he said, looking down into her face, tracing the swell of her lower lip with his gaze and feeling it in him—against his lips, beneath his fingertips, in the pigmented fibers of his paintbrush. “You asked questions. I answered those which I wished to answer and did not answer the others. Now, your time here is finished. Leave me.”

  For a moment she said nothing, and her features were quiet. At rest.

  “Until next Sunday,” she said a bit unsteadily.

  Then her gaze dipped to his mouth.

  Desire passed through him like a trail of fire across a ship deck.

  He must be dreaming. It could not be that she was staring at his lips as though she wanted him to kiss her. It was not possible that he did to her what she did to him, that he made her thirst and hunger and feel entirely at a loss.

  Even if it were so, it would not matter. This reality—this city, this house, this world, this woman—was not his destiny.

  Those lips. Unique. Perfect.

  Two and a half years ago he had been in hiding, pretending that he did not exist. Then she had appeared.

  These lips.

  These eyes. Eyes like the blue of the sea, lit with thought and intelligence and unfettered passion. Eyes that were a little hazy now.

  Slowly they turned upward to his.

  “You have plenty of commissions,” she said in a register that was neither Elizabeth Shaw’s nor Joseph Smart’s, husky and soft, that made him imagine reaching up and twining his fingers through the golden curls and tilting her face so that he could capture those lips beneath his. “Your paintings are sought after,” she said. “The other day a piece in the newspaper said that your talent is as great as Lawrence’s or Beechey’s, and that you lack only the royal patron who will hurl you into stardom, but that such a patron will inevitably come.”

  He couldn’t think.

  “Isn’t that so?” she said, her breasts rising upon a heavy inhalation.

  “Did you ask a question?”

  “I need to understand. Why did you agree to this? My friend Alice Campbell is suspicious of your motive for agreeing to this arrangement.”

  “You have what you wish,” he said. “Why do you ask me this?”

  “Is it only because you find me beautiful, however mistaken you are about that?”

  It was simply not possible to resist touching her a moment longer. He lifted his hand and, smoothing a single fingertip over her brow, tugged a silky curl free from the band around her head. It sprang forth.

  “That’s better,” he said.

  Her eyes were wide pools of blue—blue from a childhood he had nearly forgotten, aglow now from the Scottish sun.

  “Yes,” he said. “It is simply because I wish to have the freedom to draw you. That is everything, Miss Shaw. There is nothing more. Does this answer satisfy you?”

  “Nothing satisfies me,” she said. “My father has said so often, since I was a little girl, that nothing ever satisfies me, I always ask for more because there are always more questions to ask. And he is correct. For my beauty only? My nonexistent beauty?”

  “For your nonexistent beauty only,” he said. “Now, good day.”

  “Good day,” she almost whispered. “Tomorrow I begin attending anatomy lectures.”

  He laughed.

  “Do not laugh! I am experiencing an excess of nerves at present. No woman has ever enrolled in an anatomy course at this university—not to anybody’s knowledge at least. I am afraid my knees will shake, and as I will be wearing trousers Professor Jones will see it. That is the physician teaching the course. Rather, everybody would see it, my classmates as well. I apologize for mentioning knees, by the way. You cannot be accustomed to women speaking of their knees and such to you. But since you are an artist perhaps you don’t mind it. Or perhaps from where you come women and men speak of such matters all the time.”

  “Not typically.”

  “From where do you come?”
/>
  “It was so long ago, I hardly remember.”

  “In some ways you seem more Scottish than Constance’s husband and even Amarantha, after all.”

  He fought a smile.

  “Amarantha is rather worldly,” she said, “having lived in the West Indies. Still, she is English and speaks like an Englishwoman. And neither she nor Saint, who is English from the West Indies, have lived in Scotland for even half as long as you have. And your accent is inflected in places with Scots. Having grown up in Edinburgh and the port of Leith and so many other places in Scotland and England, I notice such things. I notice everything.”

  “I am coming to see that. My mother was Turkish, my father of Persian blood.”

  Her beautiful lips parted.

  “That, güzel kız, is all that I will tell you.”

  She pinned those lips together.

  “Your knees will not shake,” he said.

  “I hope they don’t. All right. I am going now.” She backed away and walked across the room. But she paused in the doorway and turned her shoulder so that she was looking at him. She was lithe, small but strong, and there was an economic control to her movements. She was not haphazardly in constant motion as he had thought, rather, in a continuous struggle to bridle that runaway motion.

  “I used to tell my father everything,” she said. “Every detail of my day. Now I am commencing the most extraordinary experience of my life and I have no one to tell about it all.”

  “Tell me,” he said and wished he could have remained silent.

  “You won’t mind it?”

  He shook his head.

  A smile lit her face. She began to turn away, but swung back again.

  “That is to say, I don’t mean to suggest that you are like my father. You could not be less like him.” Her gaze skittered along his body. “That is, you are young, and handsome of course, and—” Her neck constricted and the patches of irritated skin fused into a blush.

  “You should learn to control that,” he said.

  “Of course I should,” she muttered, covering a cheek with her palm. “There are bound to be any number of young and attractive men in my classes.”

  “Study them,” he said. “Study them as you studied my leg earlier, and you will again forget that you are a maiden and instead be only a surgeon.”