The Prince

by Katharine Ashe

  Ziyaeddin carried the package for her into the parlor. The stacks of books on tables had become towers and the writing desk entirely covered with piled papers. A page on top seemed to be a list of tasks to accomplish.

  Syme botany lecture notes

  Fine grain files

  Solution to Mrs. Bailey’s scar tissue

  Write out chemistry results

  Steel knee joint (Potts)

  Dorsiflexion and planter flexion

  Memorize Bell, Dissertation on Gunshot Wounds

  Monro secundus, Observations on the Structure and Functions of the Nervous System

  Archie: how many sisters?

  Purchase 12 notebooks

  The list continued nearly to the bottom of the page, the penmanship neat, with close-set letters, the strikethrough lines equally tidy. Her mind was a cyclone of thoughts, ideas, questions, curiosities, and desires. Seeing this, her method for ordering that cyclone, brought heat into his throat. She was more extraordinary than any man would ever know. Any man but he.

  Returning to the foyer he perused the post. It included an invitation from the Duchess of Loch Irvine to spend the Christian holidays at Haiknayes Castle. He would not accept. He would not leave Elizabeth. Wherever she was, he now understood, there he must be as well until his destiny took him away from her.

  Another letter was addressed to him in a loose, confident hand. He read as he walked toward his studio.

  Your Highness,

  Intrigued by your wish for confidence, and conveniently on furlough (Titan is in dry dock receiving an iron hull), I have investigated thoroughly. I am delighted to assure you that Lewiston Bridges is above reproach. A man of no little skill, he is admired widely. His naval service of twenty years came to an end after an infection rendered him deaf in one ear and without perfect balance. Since then he has practiced surgery in Edinburgh, where he also teaches surgical students. While he is not known to be a scientific genius (as most regard your friend Charles Bell), Bridges’s record is distinguished and his reputation unblemished by public quarrel.

  I am curious as to your application to me for information when you live in a city well supplied with medical men. Yet I know that university towns can breed the worst petty gossip, and I would be a rogue not to comprehend your wish for discretion in this, as in all.

  Respectfully,

  Seamus Boyle, Surgeon, HMS Titan

  The pain in Ziyaeddin’s right ankle now was an illusion, for there was nothing there to feel pain. In repairing his leg seven years ago, Seamus Boyle had performed a miracle.

  Crumpling the letter he walked into his studio.

  “You should tell me your name.”

  She was perched on the stool, the winter light bringing to life her complexion that had lately turned toward pallor. She wore a skirt to her toes and a shawl thoroughly wrapped about her upper body, which she was holding tightly together beneath her chin.

  “Obviously it was a mistake to allow you to know that Ibrahim Kent is not my name.”

  “If it were a mistake you would not have revealed it to me.”

  He leaned back against the doorjamb. “I have been known to do foolish things before.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as inviting a tenacious woman to live in my house while posing as a young male medical student. If I wished the world to know my name, I would use it.”

  “I am not the world.”

  She was. To him she was.

  “There are sixteen hours yet until you are due on that stool,” he drawled as though it mattered nothing to him that she was here, voluntarily, when she might be—should be—elsewhere. “Has the watch or perhaps your clever clock malfunctioned?”

  Her hands loosened and the shawl fell to the floor.

  “I decided to do this only this morning,” she said. “But I discovered I was far too anxious to wait until tomorrow at ten o’clock. I heard Mr. Gibbs leave. So here I am.”

  Bare from the waist up, she was pale as the light that illumined her, save for the shadows beneath her breasts and arms and of her navel, and the aureoles that were the same hue as her lips: dark rosy pink. He saw her all at once, swiftly: the lowest ribs that protruded just a bit and gave way to a flat waist; the gooseflesh prickling the fine, silvery-gold hairs on her forearms; the squared bones of her shoulders that allowed young men to mistake her for one of them; the pulse that beat in her throat; and the blue eyes fixed on him.

  Intelligent and determined, those eyes dared him to deny her.

  “According to the terms of our agreement, which I only fully understood yesterday,” she said, “I have come to sit for you.”

  Chapter 17

  The Portrait

  He said nothing.

  Libby’s nipples tingled as they tightened, and heat filled her cheeks.

  “Will you claim now that telling me your wish yesterday was also a mistake?” she said.

  “I will make no such claim, for that wish remains.”

  He moved across the room and drew the draperies until they were almost closed. Then at the hearth he built up the fire. “That said,” he added, rousing flames from the embers with the poker, “this is not the wisest idea you have had of late. And that is saying something.”

  “It was not my idea. It was yours.”

  He turned to her.

  “Thank you for the fire,” she said before he could reject her.

  He bent his head and passed his hand over his face.

  “Now that you see me,” she said, “have you changed your mind?”

  “On the contrary.” His chest rose upon a hard breath. Then he walked to the easel.

  “You have painted naked women before.”

  “As you have seen.”

  “With dispassion?”

  “Yes,” he replied, turning the page of the sketchbook on the easel and taking up a piece of black chalk.

  “Not pencil?” she said.

  “Not today.” The muscles in his jaw looked like rock.

  “What is the difference?”

  “Do I ask you the difference between surgical instruments that I have no intention of ever using?” he said shortly.

  “No. But this is of course different. I think you are uncomfortable.”

  “Do you?” Finally his gaze came to her, but not to her face, rather to her shoulder.

  “I had hoped that, just as I as a woman of medicine would be able to work dispassionately on you if you allowed it, you as a man of art must be able to draw or paint me without distress.”

  “Hush now.”

  “Why are you always bidding me hush?”

  His eyes moved over her body with the intensity of a scientist at his microscope, as his hand began to move on the page she could not see.

  “Do you dislike my speech so much?” she said. “Is that the trouble? For you would not be the first. In fact you would be among the many.”

  “The trouble is not that I dislike your speech. The trouble is that I like it too much and would have you speak about whatever you wish, to the exclusion of all else, simply to hear the words and phrases and thoughts formed by your lips. In this manner I would gladly while away each day and subsequently accomplish nothing.”

  A surge of feeling fanned out beneath her breasts. Her tongue was abruptly useless.

  “But,” he continued, “I must paint in order to eat, and, not incidentally, to maintain this roof over not only my head but now yours as well, and to pay Mrs. Coutts and Mr. Gibbs for their services, and the butcher, and the candlestick maker. Et cetera. However unfortunate that all is, it is the tragic truth.”

  “You are not painting now. You are drawing,” she said in a raspy whisper.

  His gaze slid up to her face and his hand paused.

  “I say again.” His voice was also rough. “Hush.”

  She obeyed. But the throb of her pulse would not slow and her nipples were responding to his study without any subtlety or discretion whatsoever. She wondered if the women he had
painted nude had felt this too, desire for this man who had made them so beautiful on canvas, Pygmalion and his creations.

  “I dream of fire,” he said.

  “Fire?”

  “Aboard ship,” he said, his gaze shifting between the page and her body, back and forth again, smoothly, easily, the eyes of the artist at work. “It took the ship swiftly. When rescue arrived, I was barely conscious.”

  “Yet you remember it.”

  “I remember the flames as they overcame the deck. It is that of which I dream each night, and which causes me to disturb your sleep.”

  “You do not disturb my sleep,” she said.

  He glanced at her face and then again lower, then to the page, then to her body. He was either making a point of appearing unaffected by her nudity, or he truly was unaffected.

  “No?” he said.

  “I sleep little,” she admitted. “I study until the candles and oil are gone.”

  “Hypocrite.” He said it with a smile.

  His confessions had burrowed into her belly and rested there now like a sunbeam hidden in a thick forest.

  “I must succeed,” she said. “I cannot have done all of this yet fail.”

  He said nothing more and for many minutes she watched him.

  He set down the chalk and wiped his hands on a cloth. “Would you like to see it?”

  She nodded and bent to take up her shawl from the floor, pulling it snugly across her breasts as he came toward her. She reached for the drawing.

  In gray and ebony he had picked out her shape from the plane of ivory, raised it to valleys and peaks, and made it live. Her fingers curled around the page, her other fingertips skimming around the edges of the drawing. The lines of chalk were softer than the paper, like silk.

  “Is it to your liking?” he said.

  “You have made me appear . . .” Strong. Powerful. Even beautiful. But not in the manner of a man or even a pretty woman. “Elemental.”

  “I have done nothing but render on paper what I have seen with my eyes.” There was color on his cheeks, his satiny hair was tousled over his brow, and he was watching her, it seemed.

  She released the page. As it drifted to the floor, she shrugged her shoulder. The shawl slithered down her arm and slid across her breast and then away from it entirely.

  “Touch me,” she said.

  Without hesitation he took a single step, and the toe of her shoe met his.

  “You will?” she said, her heartbeats galloping in her ears.

  With his knee he urged hers apart, and the shock of taking him between her thighs drew a gasp from her throat. Then he was between her legs, her thighs cradling his hips. She stared at the gold buttons on his coat.

  “Do you know how medical texts describe female breasts?” tumbled from her lips. “‘Two soft protuberances situated on the thorax in females.’ It is accurate of course, but it does nothing to help a person understand the reason for their popularity with men. And it does not even begin to explain their extraordinary sensitivity or the sensations elicited when I think of you and—”

  He touched her chin, gently tilting her face upward. His gaze traveled over her features, caressing her lips, cheeks, her chin and brow and eyes as though he would paint her now out of air and fire and heat.

  “Will you call yourself a knave now?” she said, her body aching. Hungry.

  “I will call myself Ziyaeddin Mirza,” he said in a voice she did not recognize, rich with the cadence of another tongue and quietly confident. “But only with you, Saint George.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered, “Ziyaeddin.”

  His throat constricted, the Adam’s apple jerking upward. His fingers slipped from her chin to her jaw and then into her hair, so lightly, as though he barely needed to feel her to understand her. Then his palm curved around her face.

  All her yearnings and loneliness and fear were now on the surface for his keen eyes to see. The pad of his thumb slid along her eyebrow, curving with the bone, then softly over her cheek and to her lips. Desire swamped her, throbbing between her legs and catching in her throat.

  He was so close. Each black lash framing the dark irises seemed a miracle of shape and beauty.

  “Elizabeth.” Her name was a husky caress. “There can be nothing between us.”

  She waited for the retraction, the reversal that obviously must come, the however. For there already was something between them. He could not deny it.

  “I ask you,” he said, “do not offer me gifts that I cannot accept.”

  She nudged her face away from his hand. “Who are you?”

  His brow knit.

  “How can you not expect that question?” she demanded. Dragging the shawl to cover her chest, she swiveled off the stool and walked away from him, ordering her thoughts, so many thoughts.

  “You know I am no featherbrain. Nor am I unobservant. You clearly hide here in Scotland. Or perhaps you are trapped here. Your closest friend is a duke, which is not in any way usual, you know. But perhaps you don’t realize how unusual that is. Or how unusual it is to be fluent in no fewer than six languages. And you use a false name. So perhaps you are not simply a humble portrait artist who came to Britain to learn to paint in the European style and simply never got around to leaving. Perhaps you are not who you have convinced everybody you are.”

  “You have thought this through.”

  “Of course I have. I think everything through. And I am living in your house so I know you to be entirely unlike other men. I thought at first that was because you are a foreigner. But I don’t believe that anymore. Even so, I cannot imagine any man who would reject what I have just offered you, other than perhaps an avowed celibate—a priest or holy man of some sort—or a man who prefers the intimate company of men. But I don’t believe you are those, for the obvious reasons. I do not wish to bind you into any permanent arrangement. I intend to remain a man indefinitely. That of course makes impossible any intimate congress but of the most temporary sort. So I do not understand you.”

  She halted and faced him.

  He said nothing.

  “So be it.” She squared her shoulders. “I won’t bother you again.”

  “It isn’t—” He seemed to struggle, and his knuckles were tight about the head of the cane. “You bring me such joy, Elizabeth Shaw.”

  The ache beneath her ribs was unendurable.

  “I think from this moment forward you should only call me Joseph Smart. And I will only come near you as he. That will be wise. For I have a lot of natural confidence. But this is a new sort of rejection and I don’t care for it.”

  His gaze went to where she was pressing her fist into her ribs. She tore her hand away from her chest and hid it in her skirts.

  “I regret causing you pain,” he said.

  “Oh, sod off.” She strode from the room.

  Chapter 18

  A Labor of Love

  Archie invited her to spend the Christmas holidays at his family’s farm. Libby declined. Packing her books and notes and necessary equipment into a traveling case, and making arrangements with a carter to transport the pig to Alice’s house, she left a message for Mrs. Coutts and Mr. Gibbs on the foyer table with a pound note for each of them.

  For her host she left nothing. He would know where she had gone, and if he so desired he could regret giving her pain from the distance of two miles.

  Instructing the hackney to disgorge her at a busy posting house on the edge of Leith, she peeled the whiskers from her cheeks and changed into a gown, and hailed a different cab for the remainder of the trip. She had already done this thrice, once on the occasion that she encountered him at the party. That it made her stomach tight to remember that party, their conversation there, and the caress of his lips on her knuckles infuriated her now.

  She could not be weak. Men were not weak in this manner.

  “You are unhappy, Elizabeth,” Alice said as by candlelight she poked a needle into an embroidery frame that read “Be sure to
taste your words before you spit them out.”

  “You are mistaken. I am perfectly happy.” Her fingers were tight around the metal file. After hours spent practicing the filing of joint hinges under the watchful eyes of Mr. Syme, she nearly had it.

  Intrigued by her interest, Mr. Syme had asked her no questions when she applied to him for assistance. Young, and married to an intelligent woman, he already knew of Libby’s fascination with medicine through his acquaintance with her father, and he applauded her wish to accomplish this. She worried now that if someday Joseph Smart came to be a well-known surgeon in Edinburgh, Mr. Syme would recognize her. But doing this project perfectly was worth that anxiety.

  “You did not eat the pudding today,” Alice said.

  “I don’t care for Christmas pudding.”

  “You did not eat the goose either. Or the haggis.”

  “I have been endeavoring to eat less meat of late. But I’m afraid I like bacon too much to entirely eschew meat. Don’t worry, Pig,” she said to the creature cuddled at the hearth beside Iris. “I shan’t eat you.”

  “Of course not,” Iris said. “For I intend to keep Pig when you return to Edinburgh.” She stroked its back and it snorted and snuggled closer to her.

  “You have grown unnaturally slender, Elizabeth,” Alice said.

  “I look more like a youth now.”

  “You are intentionally starving yourself? Elizabeth Shaw!”

  “I’m not.” She simply had no appetite of late. Eating had grown too complicated: the poultry must be eaten first and then the vegetables and only then the sweets. But Constance’s cook had dressed the goose with berry jelly, which made all of it impossible.

  She knew what was happening. It had happened in London years ago too.

  She could control it.

  “You are unwell,” Alice said.

  “And she has not laughed in days,” Iris said.

  “I am sitting right here, Iris.”