Grahame, Lucia

by The Painted Lady

  The Painted Lady by Lucia Grahame

  A DESPERATE BEAUTY TRAPPED BY FATE

  Sadness shadowed Fleur Brook’s lovely, famous face. Because of her young husband’s success as a painter, all of Paris and London’s beau monde recognized the proud, dark-haired woman who had not only been his wife but his most inspiring model. Few knew the secrets behind his untimely death and the terrible betrayal that had left Fleur without a penny and with a heart she felt had turned to stone.

  A DARKLY BROODING NOBLEMAN ENSNARED BY PASSION

  Reserved and understatedly elegant, Sir Anthony Camwell could not have been more different from the exuberant Frederick Brooks — except in his captivation by the exquisite Fleur. Now, newly widowed, she had reluctantly accepted Sir Anthony’s proposal of marriage, although she remained indifferent to his touch … not noticing the flame that burned behind his cool gray eyes.

  A BARGAIN BORN OF DESIRE

  Amid the lavish surroundings of the Camwell ancestral estate he was fire, but she was unmelting ice. Then he made his stunning offer: her freedom and a fortune to live on if she agreed to his terms — five nights of unquestioning, unrestrained surrender to what he planned to teach her … the exquisite art of love.

  Surrender of the Heart

  At last Anthony leaned over me, but without touching me.

  “You’re so compliant tonight,” he said, almost tenderly. “You must be very hungry for your freedom, mon fleur du miel.”

  I felt a twist of sadness. For an instant I thought he had used Frederick’s nickname for me. But he had called me something quite different—a flower not of evil but of sweetness… honey.

  He brought his hand to my cheek and stroked it softly. I closed my eyes. Only the sudden sharp intake of my breath could have told him of the effect of that light touch.

  He bent his head. I caught the scents of mint and smoke and my own secrets as his mouth moved close to mine. How long I had resisted those kisses! Now I craved his mouth, wanting to savor and prolong every sensation.

  He barely grazed my lips with his.

  “You are free now,” whispered my husband at last, releasing me, “to do as you like…. How will you use your liberty?”

  For an answer I put my arms around his neck, pulling him down to me, and brought my wild mouth to his….

  FANFARE are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1993 by Susan Andres.

  Cover art copyright © 1993 by Wendi Schneider.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-39009

  ISBN 0-553-29864-X

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  PROLOGUE

  PARIS, SEPTEMBER 1888

  “Who is that woman?” murmured Anthony Camwell, just as his dining companion, Philip Harborough, broke off a monologue in midsentence to take another swallow of wine.

  The two young men were sitting at a corner table in the low-ceilinged dining room of the Coq d’Or in the Rue Montmartre. Both were English, but Philip, who had come to Paris a few years earlier to study at the School of Decorative Arts, now made his home there. Anthony was merely a visitor.

  “Woman! What woman? You haven’t heard a word I’ve said!” exclaimed Philip. He had shaggy brown hair and a drooping moustache, and his sack coat, though obviously well made, looked as if he had slept in it.

  Anthony leaned back in his chair with a cool, amused smile. He was fair-haired and clean-shaven, and the flawless tailoring of his impeccable evening clothes whispered of Savile Row.

  “You are unjust, Philip,” he said, subtly mimicking Philip’s aggrieved tone. “I have been hanging upon your every syllable as if my life depended on it.”

  Yet even as he spoke, his gray eyes traveled back across the room to a table where an exuberant party of six were clinking their goblets—five of champagne and one which appeared to hold nothing stronger than eau minéràle. It was the abstemious member of the group who had captivated Anthony’s attention. She seemed, in a way, so familiar; he might have known her for years. But he had never seen her previously; he was certain of it, for had he glimpsed her only once before, she would not be a stranger to him now. He would not have allowed her to be.

  “You liar! Your eyes have been wandering for the better part of an hour! I’ll stake a bottle of Château-Lafitte that you have no idea what I’ve just told you!”

  “Very well, but I won’t hold you to it,” was Anthony’s unruffled reply. “You’ve been boasting that the man to whom you have rented half of your studio—I assume it was the divanless half—is the greatest unsung genius in all of Paris. I congratulate you. At least now one may hope that something of value will emerge from your atelier.”

  Philip sputtered for a second. Now and then he produced exquisite pen-and-ink sketches of Parisian life, but having an independent income, he worked only when he felt like it, which was not often.

  “So you think my white nights produce nothing of value!” he cried.

  “They might, Philip, they might,” Anthony told him. “But only if you would put down your glass, send the ladies home, and take up your pen once in a while. However, tonight I will not lecture you. For once, I want to discuss a far more serious matter than your poor, wasted talents— who is that woman at the far end of the room sitting across from Marguerite Sorrel?”

  Philip twisted in his chair to follow his companion’s gaze.

  “You don’t know Frederick Brooks!” he cried. “Now there’s a man who can paint! And the woman with him? His wife, of course! And favorite model, as you—”

  He was halted midstream by the expression on Anthony’s face.

  “That’s Fleur Brooks?” exclaimed Anthony with mingled wonder, disbelief, and ill-concealed dismay.

  “As you ought to know!” concluded Philip. Then, immensely gratified at having gained his companion’s full attention, he added, “I’m shot, Tony, if I’ve ever seen you thrown! What’s done it to you?”

  He had been thrown.

  So that black-haired angel who’d fired his imagination in ways no other woman had ever done was Fleur Brooks.

  Anthony had recognized the famous Madame Sorrel from evenings at the theater, but how had he failed to place her lovely companion? His own cousin, Neville Marsden, had helped to lift Frederick Brooks from rags to riches by buying up one canvas after another. And Fleur Brooks must have modeled for at least half of them. How often had those haunting green eyes gazed down upon him from the walls of his cousin’s home in London! But even Frederick Brooks’s consummate skill had not done justice to the roses in her cheeks, much less conveyed her air of gentle, effervescent joy, as enveloping and seductive as the scent of Spanish jasmine on a summer night’s breeze.

  For the last hour he had watched her showering subtle, affectionate attentions upon the high-spirited fellow at her side, and he had felt the unfamiliar sting of envy. He had sensed, rather than heard, the soft ripple of her easy, generous laughter at her companions’ unintelligible jokes. He had been a silent witness to every tender favor she bestowed. Even now he felt his pulse race as she reached up, almost as if she could not help herself, to smooth her husband’s thick, reddish gold hair with graceful, delicate fingers. Then she leaned forward to whisper something into Brooks’s ear, and Anthony saw her lips brush his cheek.

  He pulled his eyes away.

  For not only were the Brookses one of the handsomest couples in Paris, they were uncontestably the most happily mated.

  But in the end, he could not keep his gaze from straying back to her. The enchantment was too strong. Across the room, she glowed quietly, like an unw
avering beacon.

  “Frederick Brooks is a lucky fellow,” observed Philip, following his friend’s eyes once again.

  “A lucky fellow, indeed,” murmured Anthony.

  “Would you care to visit their table?”

  “What! Do you know the Brookses?”

  “No, but I do know Théo Valory—La Sorrel’s husband. He is ignoring me tonight because we have quarreled. But it’s been three weeks already, and if I were to pretend that I had been in the wrong, I could probably patch things up with him this very instant!”

  “Oh, don’t think of swallowing your pride on my account!” protested Anthony hastily. “Besides,” he added with a wry smile, “you are my friend, I hope, and it could hardly be counted as an act of friendship to urge the moth closer to the flame.”

  He spoke lightly, but in fact he was feeling so helplessly corroded with envy, an emotion he had always regarded as far, far beneath him, that he was ashamed. He would have gladly forfeited his birthright, his name, and his bachelor freedom for the privilege of walking home in Frederick Brooks’s shoes. To think of leaving the tavern with that woman on his arm, of leading her to a moonlit bed beneath a skylight in a breathless, silent room, and of losing himself in her warmth and sweetness until the sun rose upon them both…. Oh, if he were the man at her side, he would never have lingered so long at the Coq d’Or! He would not be calling now for yet another bottle!

  But it seemed that the ebullient group was at last starting to break up. The two young men who’d completed the table of six were rising to their feet and had begun to make their farewells.

  “That’s Guy Hazelton,” observed Philip, tipping his head toward the dark-eyed one with the mane of chestnut hair. “He was at school with Brooks back in England, but lately he’s become even better friends with Madame than with her husband.”

  Anthony shot his friend a quelling glance. Surely Philip, who knew everything about everybody, could not be insinuating some illicit liaison between Fleur Brooks and Hazelton? The woman was obviously head over heels in love with her husband. It was impossible to mistake that look upon her face.

  “And that’s Lord Harry Boulmer,” Philip went on, warming to his subject. He dropped his voice. “It’s not widely known, of course, beyond their intimate friends, but he and Hazelton are lovers.”

  Anthony felt the muscles in his face relax. His enormous faith in his own astuteness would have been rudely shaken had Philip persuaded him that a woman could smile at her husband the way Fleur Brooks did while carrying on an affair with another man.

  But what difference could it make to him whether Fleur Brooks was a faithful wife or an unfaithful one, whether her circle of friends was wide and generous or narrow and exclusionary? If it were ever wide enough to include him, he was certain his life would become a hell as well as a heaven.

  Although the number at his table had shrunk, Brooks still seemed intent upon making the party last. Now he was trying to fill his wife’s glass with champagne, but she’d covered the goblet with her hand and was shaking her head and laughing up at her husband with a look that Anthony would have sold his soul to have aimed at him.

  After a short while, he managed to persuade Philip to move on to the Cafe Nouvelle-Athènes, which was already filled with some of the city’s most spectacular women.

  But tonight Anthony Camwell barely noticed them.

  At the Coq d’Or, Fleur Brooks, who had abstained from the champagne, was intoxicated with happiness.

  They had come to the tavern, one of the oldest in the quarter, ostensibly to celebrate a commission that Frederick had just won, but for Fleur every such occasion—and lately there had been many—was also a celebration of her own impending joy.

  More than five years had passed since a benevolent twist of fate had brought Frederick Brooks into her life, and so much that was equally amazing and wonderful had happened since….

  How insistently had she been warned that to marry the artist would be to condemn herself to a life of stark poverty and terrible disillusionment! Yet here she sat amidst gaiety and plenty, still wildly in love with her dashing husband and at last, after five years of marriage, about to realize her most cherished dream. In three months, she would be a mother.

  Now, as she smiled at the sly way Théo Valory had just capped one of her husband’s jokes, her thoughts were already drifting away from the Coq d’Or and back to the house off the Rue du Mont-Cenis, where the nursery walls were painted with scenes from fairy tales, where piles of warm flannel blankets and soft little wrappers, all of them hemmed and embroidered by her own hands, waited to receive the baby she carried.

  Now at last she understood completely her husband’s extravagances, which had once worried her—his compulsion to shower her with luxuries that far exceeded her wants. She felt similarly driven; nothing could be too good for this passionately longed-for child who would never be shabbily dressed, who would never feel cold or want or rejection, who would be shielded by love from the smallest discomfort, the tiniest disappointment, who must never, never know pain.

  As for herself, she was dressed tonight with aesthetic English simplicity in the virtually waistless style immortalized by Rossetti and Burne-Jones only because of her condition. Her closets, in contrast, were full of elaborate, expensive gowns, many of them from the House of Worth, selected and paid for by her doting, spendthrift husband. But he could easily afford it now; during the last three years his paintings had begun to command higher prices than she, in even her most soaring fantasies, had imagined possible.

  The hours wore on, and fatigue began to steal through Fleur’s veins. But Frederick, who inevitably grew ever more lively and gregarious as night progressed, did not wish to leave. It was close to midnight; the crowd was swelling, friends and acquaintances were still stopping at their table, and Frederick was basking in admiration and trading bon mots. It was his night, his celebration; he looked so disappointed when Fleur at last whispered to him how very tired she was becoming that she immediately wished she had cut her tongue out instead.

  “Only another half hour,” he cajoled. “After all, you’ve had nothing to drink—you can hold up for a bit longer, can’t you?”

  The half hour grew into an hour. In the end it was Marguerite who saw how pale Fleur had grown and insisted that they leave the tavern immediately.

  “But why didn’t you say something, darling?” cried Frederick to his swaying, exhausted wife. Overcome with remorse, he sped her home and helped her into bed.

  Once she was lying down, he remarked that he thought he might as well be off again—perhaps he could still catch up with Marguerite and Théo, who had gone on to the Nouvelle-Athènes.

  “I wish you’d stay,” Fleur whispered.

  “Now what would be the use of that?” he chided her gently. “I’m wide awake and you’re already half asleep! You need to rest—I’d only torment you by talking all night!”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” murmured Fleur, who loved to fall asleep to the sound of her husband’s voice. But she instantly regretted her selfishness. “Well, kiss me good night, then,” she said, and lifted her arms to wrap them around his neck.

  In the Nouvelle-Athènes, Philip Harborough, too deep in his cups now to resent Anthony’s inattentiveness, was recounting a violent argument which had erupted between two friends of his over the worthiness of Edouard Manet’s Olympe to hang in the Luxembourg Museum.

  Anthony’s eyes no longer wandered; but they had a distant, abstracted look which might have betrayed to a more alert Philip how far his thoughts had drifted.

  He had left the Coq d’Or because the vision of Fleur Brooks, glowing with love and joy, had awakened in him a desire that still seared him with its intensity. He wanted her, and even now, after he had removed himself from temptation, the hunger was as strong as ever.

  And he had, only a few days earlier, made plans to visit Brooks’s studio with his cousin Neville later that very week.

  To go… or not to go.

>   To become her husband’s patron, to mount images of her upon his walls, to gain the privilege of bowing to her in the street and of visiting her home…

  Or to walk away from that tantalizing beauty and cleanse the acrid taste of covetousness from his palate?

  It would have to be the latter. He knew himself too well to suppose that he could easily tolerate the continual sting of thwarted desire. He prided himself upon his sense of honor.

  With a sigh of resignation, Anthony lifted his glass and began halfheartedly to inspect the roomful of glittering women.

  But soon the image of Fleur Brooks’s incomparable warmth sliced through his heart again like a tender knife, and after that the brilliant glare of the Nouvelle-Athènes illuminated nothing but her absence.

  A short while later, the sight of Frederick Brooks strolling alone into the cafe shattered Anthony’s regard for him completely. Despite the man’s undeniable gifts and his obvious charm, Brooks was a fool. Why the devil wasn’t he at home with his wife? There was no one else in Paris—or anywhere—to compare with her.

  No, certainly he would not go to Brooks’s studio with Neville. In fact, it was pointless to remain in Paris; none of the city’s sparkling temptations could satisfy him now. He might as well return to his less alluring life in England the next day. It was his best hope of breaking the spell Fleur Brooks had cast.

  In the bedroom of the lavishly appointed house off the Rue du Mont-Cenis, Fleur was jolted from the threshold of sleep by a sudden, agonizing pain.

  Sometime around three o’clock, her husband ambled home. By then it was over; she had lost the baby. In the two and a half years that followed, she lost everything else as well, and the next time Anthony Camwell saw Fleur Brooks, she was a penniless widow.

  PART ONE: 1891-1892

  CHAPTER ONE

  Frederick, my careless, brilliant, laughing husband, was dead.

  He had squandered his talents, wasted his wealth, and exhausted his store of goodwill. And finally, one February night, he never came home.

  Sometime around dawn, a body, bobbing in the chilly waters of the Seine, came to the attention of the gendarmes. A would-be wit among the party which retrieved the corpse reported that it had been practically pickled in absinthe.