And he had returned again the day after that. He had never set foot inside a gallery of art in all his life. He hadn’t even been certain one could buy a piece of artwork like that or if it had just been hung for the appreciation of all. But on the third day, he had pushed open the gallery door and walked in.
He had acquired the canvas at an amazingly low price for the amount of satisfaction it brought him. He knew nothing about the cost of art. In all likelihood they had named an absurd price in hopes of obtaining half that, but Peter had merely signed the bill and walked out with the package and not questioned the cost in the days since. For all the money he had thrown away in gambling and drinking and whoring, not one cent had brought him the contentment of that painting.
Arriving at his flat, Peter dismissed his valet for the evening. He retired with a bottle of madeira to the study he had purchased complete with books. Settling into his desk chair, he admired the framed canvas on the wall before him.
The lamp lit below it cast the oils in murky shadows, but he knew every line and color by heart. Not that there was a wide range of colors. Almost the entirety of the background was filled with the broad gray stone walls of some substantial country mansion. The walls could only be seen from behind a forest of trees, shrubbery, and climbing vines, but the darker greens seemed to blend into the very nature of the building until, after a while, it became difficult to detect where nature ended and man’s work began. Peter delighted in discerning new and previously unnoticed quirks in the house’s exterior: the griffin on the lintel, a child’s toy in a window, a shutter painted with a rose in the corner.
But the artwork he appreciated most in the picture had naught to do with house or grounds and all to do with a fleeing fairy figure in the forefront. In broad daylight the figure all but disappeared into the landscape of trees and overgrown shrubbery, but by night, with the lamp at just the right angle, she flew wild and free through that landscape, moonlit hair streaming in long cascades down a back as slender and feminine as any he had ever seen.
That figure fascinated him. She held her arms up in glorious embrace of the night, head flung back, face turned toward the moon that couldn’t be seen anywhere in the portrait. And the face! Peter moved from his desk to the wall to better observe the delicate features.
She shimmered with moonlight even from this proximity. Her skin seemed to sparkle with silver. Large, almond-shaped eyes danced with a darkness that made his blood shiver. Perfectly formed rosebud lips turned upward in a smile of welcome that stripped him of all pretense and left him longing for more. He ached to reach out and touch her, to know the warmth of that welcome, to feel at home in that house with rosebuds on the shutters and toys in the windows.
How just one painting could bring him so much happiness and so much misery was beyond Peter’s ability to reason. It represented everything he wanted while disguising it all in shadows and mockery. There were times when he had drunk enough that he thought it might be best to destroy the canvas, to slash it from top to bottom and heave it from the window into the night. And there were other times, like now, when he only wished he could step inside the painting and became a part of it.
Imagining being another shadowy figure in that forest of trees, one toward whom the lady was running, Peter smiled and lifted the canvas from the wall. He was not only growing maudlin, but fanciful.
Perhaps the painting was a sign that he had chosen the wrong place from which to make his entrance into society. The country house and the trees called to him. He had always enjoyed the country as a boy. He could remember fishing in wide ponds, hunting in rolling fields, tumbling down snowbanks in the winter. The country was a good place to raise children. Perhaps the women were easier to meet and less arrogant in their requirements in a solitary place such as the one in the painting.
Setting aside his whimsical fantasies, Peter pried at the back of the painting with his pocket knife. Perhaps he could find some clue as to the house’s origins. Much of everything in this world was for sale. It would be amusing to locate this place and see if anyone would accept an offer for it.
The protective backing peeled off without a great deal of trouble, revealing a blank canvas and some spidery writing in one corner. Peter carried it to the lamp on the desk and tilted the frame until the light caught on the words and played them back to him: Lady Honora Chelsey, Rosebud Cottage, near High Wycombe
Peter sat down in his chair and studied the name with a sense of satisfaction. Perhaps he had just found a home.
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Crossed in Love by Patricia Rice
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Indigo Moon Page 38