by Megan Chance
My brother and I had always shared everything, but I began to yearn for something special of my own, that belonged just to me, someone who could love me apart from Joseph. Perhaps it was too much to hope for, because such a thing seemed to elude me. Every boy seemed so young, so unlike my brother. If I could only find someone like Joseph. . . . When I complained to my brother he laughed and teased that my expectations were too high. You’re not likely to find a knight in shining armor in New York society. But I saw too that he was glad.
And then I met Edward Roberts.
Edward had just returned from the Continent. His father had sent him to look into the prospects of a partnership with a Parisian art dealer. Of course, the moment I heard those words, I knew I must do my best to charm him. I used all the wiles that Joseph had taught me, the ways to keep a man interested, and I’d been glad when it seemed Edward was. At least, that was how it started. I’d meant all of it only to help Joseph.
In retrospect, I saw the things that should have told me what a disaster it would be, but to look at Edward, you would never have suspected him of being so devious. Joseph thought him stupid, in fact, which was odd, as my brother was rarely wrong when it came to people. But I knew why he thought it: Edward had that sort of perpetual puppy-dog look about him, large and winsome chocolate-brown eyes beneath a shock of golden-blond hair, an endearing willingness to please. At least, I thought it endearing. Joseph found it irritating, and I saw the measuring, half-angry way my brother looked at Edward when he thought I didn’t see.
“He’s after something,” Joseph told me one morning as I posed for him in the sunlight coming through the nursery window.
“Not our inheritance, surely. It’s barely enough to keep us for another two years. And he has money of his own.”
Joseph rose and reached over to drape a lock of hair more artfully over my breast, then assessed it quietly before he sat and took up drawing again. “It’s his father’s money, not his, and I think his father doesn’t quite approve of him. He’ll need an heiress, which isn’t you, so why is he wasting his time?”
“Because he likes me, perhaps? And he knows how talented you are. He says it all the time.”
“Does he? To whom?”
“To everyone he sees. He admires you. You should try to like him. If you made half an effort, he’d fall over himself to introduce you to his father.”
Joseph looked thoughtfully down at his sketchbook. He smudged something on the paper with his thumb, then wiped across his jaw, leaving a streak of charcoal before he went in to smudge again, distracted.
I came over to him and pushed away the tablet despite his protests. It fell to the ground and I plopped myself into his lap. I took his face between my hands, holding him still to meet my gaze. “You’re not listening. We’ve been invited to Mrs. Ballast’s for tea tomorrow. Please come with me.”
“Mrs. Ballast can do nothing for us.”
“No, but Edward will be there. And I want you to be kind to Edward.”
He dropped his charcoal with a sigh and wrapped his arms around me, pulling me close. I felt his mouth against my bare skin as he murmured, “All right, Soph. You know I’ll do whatever you want.”
“You needn’t sound so glum about it.”
“I don’t like him. But if you think he can help—”
I strung my fingers through his thick, dark hair, pulling his head back so he must look at me. “I do like him. Very much. And I know he can help. But you have to be nice to him too. And you can’t be jealous. Please.”
“What does my jealousy matter? It’s not as if . . .” He let out his breath and jerked his head from my hold. “I’ll be good, all right?”
“Thank you.”
His wide and beautiful mouth quirked, though I saw how forced it was. “You sound half besotted. Don’t tell me you’re falling for him.”
“What if I am?”
“He’s not good enough for you. And he’s not very smart.”
“You would say that about anyone who showed an interest in me.”
He planted a lingering kiss on my collarbone. His hold on me tightened, fingers clenching, and then he sighed and pushed me gently away. “On the contrary. The man who truly falls in love with you will be the most intelligent man in the world.”
I got off his lap, taking my post at the window again, arranging my hair over my shoulder the way he’d had it. “You think Edward won’t be that man?”
“No, I told you: I think he wants something from us. I just don’t know what. Especially as we’ve almost nothing.”
“But that will change, won’t it? Once the world sees what you can do, it will all change.”
“Yes, it will change.” Joseph rose, reaching for my dressing gown and handing it to me.
“Are we done?” I asked in surprise.
“For now,” he said. “I’ve got to go out.”
“Out? Where? For what?”
“Just out,” he said with a forced smile and that haunted look I knew too well. “I won’t be late. Accept Mrs. Ballast’s invitation for the both of us. Good enough?”
I nodded as I put on the dressing gown, fastening it as he left the nursery. I heard his footsteps down the hall, echoing in the emptiness. I knew where that haunted look came from, and where he was going to try to ease it, and I hated it, but there was nothing I could do. I would only make it worse if I tried. The will to resist felt sometimes held with only the flimsiest of strings.
I looked around the nursery, feeling the press of memories, both good and bad, though it was the room we spent most of our time in still, the world we knew. Joseph would not even go into his bedroom—he hadn’t since he was old enough not to be forced—and now it was kept locked, opened once a week only for the maid to dust and air the bedding for one who never slept there. I understood that too. The room held too many memories of Miss Coring.
The name still made me shudder, nine years after her death. One would think it no longer had the power to wound, but still sometimes I tensed, thinking I heard her footstep, and I still dreamed of her bending over me, her dark eyes lit with that cruel excitement I’d grown to dread. Come now, Sophie, dance for me and your brother. . . .
I pushed the image away, replacing it instead with another, better one: Joseph on the floor, lying on his stomach while the summer sun gilded his dark hair, the voices of the street filtering in from a city we had never explored, a land that seemed foreign and removed, not anything to do with us. The only land we cared about was the one we invented, the one he drew while I described it for him, detail by painstaking detail. He’d put a hooked nose on my favorite prince, and I’d thrown myself at him in protest, wrestling the charcoal from his fingers while he laughed and laughed, then he’d held me so tightly I could hardly breathe, whispering in my ear, Well, he can’t be too handsome, can he? I don’t want him replacing me.
Joseph had been Miss Coring’s target so much more than I. He had been too beautiful even as a boy, too talented. People noticed him. His beauty tormented her, as did our connection. The intimacy between us alienated her and made her angry—until we grew older and her hold on Joseph began to fade, and she figured out a way to use me to keep him close. We had been so isolated that I had not known the things she did to us to be different or to be wrong. Not until the night Joseph had come to my bed and stayed there, begging me to hold him tight, to keep him from answering a call he both dreaded and desired.
I could not forget the look on her face when she found us together the next morning, still wrapped in each other’s arms, that expression that made me sick to my stomach even now. That morning, my love for my brother—the best thing in my life, the only thing that mattered—became tangled with shame and pain. It was the one thing I could never forgive her.
She died a year later. It seemed her heart was bad in more ways than one. I still remembered how I’d been sorting through things in the nursery when I’d heard these terrible, guttural animal sounds coming from the hallway. I’d
gone out to see Joseph sitting at the top of the stairs, his head buried in his arms. It was a moment before I realized those terrible sounds were coming from him, before I realized he was sobbing. I’d sat beside him, wrapping myself around him, whispering, It’s all right, Joseph. It’s all right. I’m here, and he’d said without lifting his head, I hated her. I hated her. I hated her. Over and over again, like a song, and I knew he had to say the words. I also knew they weren’t the whole truth.
He’d laid his head in my lap while I ran my fingers through his hair where it curled against his collar. I told him, Remember what you said? That we were marked for something special? Now we can be what we were meant to be, Joseph. Now that she’s gone, we can do everything we’ve dreamed of.
I had blinked the memory away that day, listening to the door close behind Joseph as he left. I had told myself it was better not to think of those things, to never remember, though the sting of what she’d done to us was still so sharp it was sometimes hard to do.
I’d left the nursery and waited for Joseph to come home, knowing that the yearning that had made him go would be allayed when he returned. He was so much luckier than I when it came to finding appeasement. But then again, he was a man, and such things were easy for them. When he came back—hours later, smelling of cheap perfume—he was himself again, and I had been relieved.
“I’m sorry,” he said to me, smiling, playing. “I know you worry.”
I knew he had no wish to talk about it. Neither of us did.
So I said, “Tea is at four o’clock tomorrow. Don’t forget it and disappear.”
I had no real hope that he would remember; he was never dependable. He’d be out walking and see a scene he liked, or a detail he’d missed before, and lose himself in sketching or painting. Hours would pass before he remembered the time. But he surprised me. At three thirty the next day, he was washed and shaved and presentable, though he never lost that slightly disheveled aesthetic that marked him as the artist he was.
When Joseph and I arrived at Mrs. Ballast’s tea, Edward Roberts was waiting. His face lit when he saw us. He came forward to kiss my cheek and shook Joseph’s hand perhaps a bit too long and enthusiastically. Joseph excused himself to speak to Mrs. Ballast’s daughter, Angelica, and Edward drew me into the shade of a climbing rose. “Your brother doesn’t like me,” he complained.
I pressed my hand against his vested chest. “Don’t be absurd. Of course he likes you. He’s just . . . well, he’s distracted. Something’s always catching his eye.”
Edward frowned. “A woman, you mean?”
I shook my head. “Something new to paint. My guess is that when he saw you he was already noticing the way the sun hit the yew, or something like that. He can’t help himself. But I know he likes you, Edward. Why, he said something about it just this morning.”
“He did?”
“He said”—I struggled to think of something—“he said you had a way with words.”
Edward looked pleased. “My father says the same thing.”
“You see?” I smiled. “I think you have a way with other things too.”
His gaze darkened. He brought his hands around my waist, pulled me close, and kissed me. And it was no chaste kiss, either. For the first time, he kissed me until I was breathless, until I felt the stirrings of desire, until I thought maybe.
He drew away. His pale face was flushed. He said, “I’ve been thinking it’s time I introduced you to my father. Your brother too. I think he would like you both,” and I felt a flush of victory that made me kiss him again.
Joseph said to me later, “Now that we’re to meet his father, you don’t need to take this any further.”
I didn’t know how to explain to him that I wanted to. That I felt the kind of desire for Edward Roberts that I’d despaired of feeling, that I thought I might be in love at last. What had started as a way to help Joseph had turned into something else, something just for me. The way Edward looked at me, that gaze that reminded me of my brother’s, made me begin to believe that perhaps Edward was not like the others, that he saw something special in me apart from Joseph. The day Joseph and I arrived at Edward’s father’s house for dinner, and my brother impressed the old man into offering him a commission—a portrait of his wife—I knew I had fallen in love.
Joseph’s excitement and triumph only made me want Edward more. I could hardly sleep that night, tossing and turning restlessly until Joseph woke and said, “What ails you, Soph?” and I got up to wander about the house.
The next morning Edward and I had scheduled a carriage ride; when he arrived I drew him inside and up the stairs. I was trembling when I kissed him. We went into my bedroom, but I didn’t want to stay—it felt odd and uncomfortable to have him there—and the nursery was worse. So I took him down the hall, to my brother’s room, unlocked it, and pulled him inside. The room still held some of Joseph’s things, old boots and shoes, books, sketches he’d pinned to the wallpaper. Edward pulled away, frowning, saying, “This isn’t your room.” When I told him it was my brother’s, Edward seemed in a frenzy. He wrenched at my buttons as if he wanted to tear the gown from my body, and I fell into the familiar darkness of surrender without thought or resistance.
Afterward he looked at me with this expression I couldn’t read and said, “You aren’t like most women.” I thought it meant he loved me. I thought I had what I longed for at last.
When Joseph came home that afternoon, his face was hard. Though Edward had left hours before, I knew Joseph understood what had happened between us. “You’d best watch yourself,” he’d warned. “You don’t want to get with child and have to marry him.”
I’d flushed. “I think I love him.”
Joseph sat down beside me. He took my hand and pressed it to his mouth. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking it, Soph.”
“He wants me,” I said angrily. “He sees me.”
My brother gave me a tormented look and released my hand. He rose, turning to leave, and I felt suddenly guilty and afraid.
I said, a little desperately, wanting to call him back, “I’m sorry. I’ll be more careful, I promise. Shall I pose?”
He didn’t turn around or pause or look over his shoulder. “Not like this. He’s all over you.”
And that made me angry enough to forget my guilt. Joseph was only jealous. He wanted to keep me too close. He didn’t want me to find something of my own. I brought Edward home again and again, always to Joseph’s bedroom, because he seemed to like it, and one day, when I lay sleepily in his arms as he gazed about the room, he said, “These sketches are beautiful.”
“They aren’t even his best. Most of these he drew when he was young. He’s much better now.”
“It’s hard to believe he hasn’t had any training. That one of you over there, with your chin upon your hand. How old were you when he did that?”
I glanced at the sketch he spoke of. It was one of so many; I hardly remembered the day Joseph had drawn it. My hair was tied up with a pink ribbon; his pastels pinked my cheeks and made my eyes bluer than they were as the girl I’d been stared dreamily into space. “About twelve, I think. Perhaps thirteen.”
“He does you so well. That one over there too—it’s beautiful. He’s captured you entirely.”
“He’s had enough practice,” I said with a smile. “There must be hundreds of sketches of me.”
“Where are they? I’d love to see them.”
“Oh, everywhere,” I said, wanting to please, taking his interest in my world as evidence of his love. “But I know there’s one portfolio in here.”
I went to my brother’s desk, never used now, and pulled out the case I knew was behind it. I took it to the bed, laying it on the crumpled blankets, and Edward scooted out of the way so I could open it. This portfolio held only a small fraction of the work Joseph had done—there were similar folders everywhere—but when I opened it, hundreds of drawings threatened to pour out. I eased out several, sifting charcoal dust over the c
overlet, graying my fingers. Some of them I put surreptitiously aside—the ones Miss Coring had made me pose for. Joseph had never been able to bring himself to throw away anything he’d drawn, even these, and I was not surprised to find them shoved away here, but I could not bear for anyone else to see them. I could not bear to remember. The others I drew out one after another to show Edward, sketches of me dancing in a thin shift, my hair flying, another where I peeled a peach while juice dripped down my fingers, a third where I sat on a chair, wearing one of Joseph’s shirts, my knees pulled to my breasts.
Edward took in a hard breath, and I knew he found them beautiful too. I wanted him to love my brother’s talent as I did, and so I took out more, some of my favorites now: an odalisque of me on a settee, arching in a stretch, my hair falling over the side, nearly to the floor; another where I looked over my shoulder, my eyes dark and haunting; another sprawled in bed, looking ravished and sated, hair tangled, sheets crumpled between my legs.
I handed Edward one I particularly loved, where I lay on the floor in a pool of sunlight that dappled my skin, saying, “This was always one of my favorites.”
He didn’t take it. He was clutching the one of me on the bed almost convulsively. When I looked at him in surprise, he said, “You’re posing . . . from life. In almost every one.”