Grahame, Lucia

by The Painted Lady

  He gave this comment a moment or two of earnest consideration before he rejected it cautiously.

  “Nooo,” he said. “Not quite.”

  But then his mouth began to twitch.

  “I prefer women with hands,” he announced, and then added, after a tiny pause, “and lips.”

  There was nothing insinuating in the matter-of-fact way he said this. His tone was not at all suggestive. It was simply mischievous, and I laughed.

  “I suppose you favor the works that have been restored, then,” I said.

  “What, the ones all patched together like Frankenstein’s monster with heads that don’t belong to them!” He sounded highly insulted. “Certainly not! I detest sham! Battered and broken she may be, but this lady has at least kept her integrity.”

  For the remainder of our visit, I enjoyed myself wholeheartedly. It wasn’t until I was alone again that I reviewed my behavior and berated myself for having drawn our conversation toward a level of such ease and intimacy. Sir Anthony had only followed my lead. I knew very well that had I been more reserved, had I behaved in a manner more appropriate to an inconsolable widow, he would have respected my distance entirely….

  But to think of all the little pleasures I would have missed!

  CHAPTER THREE

  The rules of polite conduct require a widow to mourn no less than two years for her departed husband. During the first year, she must not go into society. For a woman whose child has died in infancy, three months is considered the proper length of time to grieve.

  It seemed that I had turned the etiquette of bereavement topsy-turvy.

  As I lay in bed the night after my jaunt to the Louvre, I recalled vividly the feeling of Sir Anthony’s light, confident but unassuming hand upon my waist; it was as if some neglected and half-forgotten inner bowstring, pulled tauter and tauter over the years, had been lightly plucked.

  Better for me had it remained in oblivion.

  Already it was beginning to tighten again—but this time I could feel every teasing, agonizing increment of tension.

  It had nothing to do with Sir Anthony Camwell, of course. What was he? A rich and idle dilettante who’d sought some brief amusement in my company. A grave and reserved young man who seemed to consider his words too carefully before he spoke: Even that small witticism about the Nikè of Samothrace had sparkled in his eyes well before he’d shared the joke with me.

  I felt myself blush in the darkness. The remark of his, which had seemed so innocent amidst the austere classicism of our surroundings, now struck a hot little flame in my drowsy mind, and I let myself wonder for a moment or two just how Sir Anthony Camwell would use a woman’s hands and lips….

  What was I thinking! I had never thought of any man but Frederick in so bold a way. And Sir Anthony, of all people!

  I turned over, pressed my face into the pillow, and inhaled with faint hopefulness, but Frederick’s familiar scent was long gone.

  The bed was too warm, that was why I couldn’t sleep.

  I sat up and flung off my blankets.

  I couldn’t keep my thoughts from straying back to my childhood as I lay down again.

  My grandmother had always worried I was too hot-blooded. “I live in fear,” she used to say, “that you’ll throw yourself away on the first man who strikes a match to your loins.”

  And so I had.

  My mother had, too. Against my grandmother’s wishes and to her fury, she’d married a poor, but ambitious, man for love, and had paid the ultimate price for that piece of folly by dying as I entered the world. My father begged my grandmother to raise me and promised that he would send money to support us to the extent that he was able. Soon afterward, he’d sailed for America. He never returned. He sent money faithfully, but he never communicated with us otherwise.

  I had written to him, upon my marriage to Frederick, telling him that I could manage without his further assistance but begging him to continue sending money to my grandmother until Frederick and I were able to assume that responsibility. How I’d hated having to ask even this of a man I had never known.

  The only other letter I wrote him was to tell him, two years later, that Frederick and I were at last in a position to assume responsibility for my grandmother’s financial support and to thank him again for all he had done in the past.

  After that, his checks to my grandmother stopped coming.

  Now, as I tossed between the sheets I could hear my grandmother’s voice again, cautioning me to resist dangerous impulses, warning me never to do anything in the heat of passion that might later bring me to grief.

  She’d been true to her own counsel. With what businesslike determination she had gone about her career! She had raised me, and no doubt my mother, as well, with the same ruthless single-mindedness.

  She’d distrusted joyfulness and encouraged me to do likewise. But her advice had the opposite effect. Her tales of her youthful exploits were so unromantic that they’d made me swear I would never follow in her footsteps. She spoke of her lovers in terms of their wealth and station, and their gifts to her, but never did she display any hint of tender feeling… except when she touched upon the few months she had spent in Florence with an overly emotional Italian count who had allegedly attempted suicide after my grandmother had coolly deserted him for a much wealthier but considerably less noble protector.

  When I’d lived with her, it seemed that her sole remaining pleasure in life was to open the strongbox in which she kept the odds and ends of jewelry that were to be my only legacy. She loved to display these cherished possessions. Each had a story, the full details of which emerged only as I grew older. The rose pearl had studded the collar of a marquis before the besotted nobleman had it set in a gold ring for her; it was only the first of many such rewards for her favors. The silvery mask, which had a little tearlike diamond at the corner of each eye, had come from an aging crony of George IV; she had worn it, but not much else, at a splendid masquerade. Dear God, what would Sir Anthony Camwell think of me were he to know that this was my inheritance!

  Years later, when my grandmother was dying, she’d made me swear that I would never bail Frederick out of debt by selling any of the pieces she was leaving to me.

  The day came, of course, long after my grandmother was gone, when those jewels might have saved us. It was after Frederick had finally begun his erratic recovery; he had produced and sold two paintings that were at last worthy of his talents.

  But as soon as his creditors got wind of this, they came banging at our door more insistently than ever, and the money couldn’t be stretched far enough to satisfy them all.

  That was when I told Frederick that we had to sell the jewels and clear our debts up altogether.

  “No, darling,” he had said, with a weary sadness that made my heart ache. “Your grandmother was right, you know. Those jewels are the only insurance you’ll have, if anything should happen to me. I won’t let you break your word to her. It was I who plunged us into this morass of debt and it’s my job, not yours, to pull us out of it.”

  So the promise wrung from me by my poor dead grandmother remained inviolate.

  In some ways I still felt as if she had never died; she’d impressed herself so forcefully upon me, that whenever I was hesitant or indecisive, she would charge in upon my thoughts with her worldly, unwelcome advice.

  “A baronet!” she’d have cried out, had she known of today’s adventure. “But what on earth were you thinking of! That dress—why, it makes you look like a lump of charcoal! Good heavens, girl, black can be very effective, you know—if it’s worn correctly.”

  And she’d have been taking in seams, stripping away every inch of excess fabric, until the black clung to my figure like a blazing invitation.

  “There,” she’d have announced with shameless satisfaction. “Now you look deliciously vulnerable, very much in need of… protection. Not even your well-behaved chevalier can remain immune to this for long.”

  Of course, I would
never stoop to such ploys. The last thing I wanted to do was to draw to myself the kind of pointed attentions that my grandmother had regarded as the only kind worth having. Nor was I interested in a pointless flirtation.

  A pleasant friendship, yes, but that was no reason to take in my dresses!

  I tried to steer my mind away from the channels the thoughts of my grandmother had suggested. But it wandered among them longer than it should have and nudged me with a truth I had been trying to dismiss.

  Sir Anthony’s mere physical presence had had a subtle but undeniable impact upon me. Being in the same room with him made me feel as if I’d drunk a little too much from a bottle of rare old wine.

  I tried to pretend it wasn’t so. I tried to ignore the disturbing feeling or to push it away, but now, alone in the darkness, I felt a warm, slow thrill as I let the guilty awareness fill my mind.

  What was it exactly that made his company so pleasant in ways that had nothing to do with the words he spoke or the things we did?

  Was it that calm air of expectant stillness, which made me feel almost as if he were lying in wait for something, like a lion lounging indolent yet alert in a sea of tall golden grass? Or the quiet grace with which he moved—which compelled not only my eyes but my senses?

  The truth was—and even in the darkness I could feel my cheeks burn as I acknowledged it—that I liked to watch the way he used his body: I liked the way he got up from a chair, the way he walked across a room, even the slow, lazy way he smiled.

  I liked his low voice, too, and his understated way of speaking—soothing, but with enough bite to keep you on your toes.

  He was very different from Frederick, who’d moved with an expansive, exuberant energy; who’d filled up a room as soon as he entered it, with his body, with his voice, and with his robust laugh that could lift you up like a great warm gust of wind. Frederick, who’d never waited for anything. Frederick, whose language was the language of superlatives; it was how he’d talked, how he’d painted, how he’d moved. It was how he’d lived.

  No, Sir Anthony Camwell was nothing at all like Frederick. And therefore, I assured myself, if our pleasant acquaintance were to continue to develop, it would certainly be as innocent as it was enjoyable.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  To fully appreciate the treasures of the Louvre would take far longer than a lifetime. Sir Anthony and I had given ourselves less than a day. But when he’d returned me to my door, he’d said nothing about repeating the adventure. Perhaps I had disappointed him. I had not revealed the discerning and critical eye he had looked for in me. I had not explained, in disengaged and pedantic tones, why this piece of work, although charming, is indisputably inferior to that one. I had not detailed with dispassionate condescension the small failings of great talents, nor had I pointed out, with perverse smugness, the little flashes of genius in obscure works that are commonly overlooked.

  No. I had artlessly exposed to him the very worst evidence of an undisciplined mind and an uncultivated eye: I had expressed my enthusiasms!

  True, he had encouraged me to do so, but a man whose tastes had surely been shaped by a Cambridge or Oxford education must have been quickly bored by my lack of erudition.

  On the following day I received a rather formal but extremely gracious note from the baronet thanking me for the time I had spent with him. It concluded with a hope that we might visit one of the Louvre’s other galleries at some unspecified future date.

  I responded with what I hoped was a reserved and dignified yet encouraging reply.

  Before a week had passed, another note in Sir Anthony’s severely unembellished hand informed me that an engagement which he had not been anticipating with much pleasure had mercifully been called off. This freed him for the afternoon of the following day. If I cared to revisit the Louvre with him, I had only to send word. Of course, he hardly dared to hope that I would likewise be free on such regrettably short notice….

  My inexplicable but growing fascination with Sir Anthony prompted me to try to read between the lines of his economical pen.

  He was rich, unattached, and sojourning in a foreign city —surely his time was his own. He might have easily pinned me down days ago had he issued his invitation in person at the end of our last excursion, when it would have been rather awkward to refuse. On the other hand, perhaps there really were a great many unpleasant demands upon his time; there was a suggestion of earnestness in his nature which might have made it difficult for him to turn his back on the needs of others.

  In any case, had I not wished to pursue our acquaintance, he had given me, by issuing his invitation only one day in advance, a fine opportunity to make a refusal that would not seem contrived. But surely he knew by now that I had no pupils on Friday afternoon—the time of the week he and Lord Marsden had called upon me, the time of our first visit to the Louvre.

  Of course I was pleased to accept.

  Sir Anthony and I fell rather quickly into a pattern of spending our Friday afternoons together, and for the most part, we sustained the pleasant, easy tone we had established early on.

  I was now convinced it was at Lord Marsden’s instigation that Sir Anthony had begun to squire me. The Paris Season was over and the viscount had returned to England, but I supposed that, out of his long-standing regard for Frederick, Lord Marsden had been reluctant to leave me bereft of the courtly and unimpeachably correct companionship he himself had so kindly provided during the early months of my bereavement. Certainly this seemed to be the role that Sir Anthony had now assumed, and if Lord Marsden’s attitude toward me had been that of a benevolent uncle, Sir Anthony’s could best be described as cousinly.

  In September, Sir Anthony returned to England. We spent our last afternoon together at the Luxembourg Museum but barely commented upon the paintings. Indeed, I was all but oblivious to them. A real sadness that our lazy summer afternoons were coming to an end had me in its grip.

  My regrets were made more difficult to bear by my consciousness that it would not do at all to express them; such a confession seemed very out of keeping with the light-hearted tenor of our relationship.

  But when at last Sir Anthony handed me down from the fiacre onto the Boulevard de Clichy, his hand clung to mine for perhaps a moment longer than necessary, and when I met his gaze, I saw a much softer glow in his eyes than I was accustomed to find there.

  He escorted me up the narrow stairway to my door, where we made our farewells on the dim landing.

  “You have been very generous with your time this summer, Madame Brooks,” he said, taking my hand again. “I don’t know how to express my gratitude.”

  “Oh no,” I said quickly. “All the gratitude is mine. You have helped me through what might otherwise have been a very difficult and lonely time. I can’t thank you enough.”

  He smiled. But still my hand remained in his. It seemed that neither one of us wished to be the first to sever that innocent connection.

  “I fear I shall miss you,” I confessed at last.

  Sir Anthony looked oddly gratified by this admission.

  “I am flattered,” he replied softly, “for I know I shall miss you.”

  I felt my cheeks flush faintly. And still my hand rested in his.

  “I hope to return often and soon,” he went on, his own face coloring slightly. “Paris has come to feel like a second home to me.”

  “I hope it will always seem so,” was all I could manage, as I gently disengaged my hand.

  It wasn’t until after the fiacre had carried him away, however, that I began to fully comprehend how much his companionship had meant to me. Those afternoons had been the high point of my week.

  They must have been all that had kept at bay the terrible reality of my losses, for without Sir Anthony’s tactful and undemanding company, my grief and loneliness returned with a vengeance. Even more disturbing, however, my thoughts did not entirely confine themselves to my dead husband.

  It was Frederick’s name I whispered when I clu
ng to my pillow in the dark, but, to my shame, the lips that came to me in waking dreams were not Frederick’s lips… and this unsettling development had begun long before the end of summer.

  If I’d been wiser or more experienced, no doubt I would have more carefully examined my tangled and obscure feelings where Sir Anthony was concerned. But I could not see the need: I regarded him as a very minor player in the drama of my life. The kisses that my drowsy imagination allowed him were not chaste ones, but I never allowed my mind to race beyond them to visions of greater intimacy.

  In any case, my black gowns were my protection. The rules of correct behavior required me to continue my mourning for nearly eighteen months more, and it was my prerogative to stretch it out even longer—for decades, if I chose to. From behind my barricade of black, a fortification that demands both sympathy and respect, I could keep life’s complexities and ambiguities at bay for as long as it suited me.

  And if my interest in Sir Anthony was not entirely innocent, that was nobody’s business but my own. Certainly Sir Anthony himself would never know.

  By summer’s end, of course, I supposed that he might have been fleetingly attracted to me. Harmless flirtations between men and women who are entirely unsuited to one another are very common, as everyone knows, but sensible people can be trusted not to act on them. And Sir Anthony Camwell was eminently sensible. He impressed me as the least impulsive, most judicious person I had ever met in my life, and if a dishonorable or foolish thought had ever wandered across his mind, I was certain that he would have routed it instantly.

  Even if his attraction to me had been stronger and more enduring, he could not possibly have acted upon it. He would never insult me by trying to claim a husband’s privileges outside the bonds of matrimony, and he could not possibly think of marrying me. He was of ancient English stock and the whole weight of English tradition would require him to take a wife from a family with a bloodline as unsullied as his own. In a year or two, he would be thirty; it was time for him to begin looking seriously for a bride. Perhaps it was this very recognition of the demands and responsibilities of his station that had called him back to England and ended his pleasant dalliance in France.