Swan's Grace

by Linda Francis Lee

  Then she looked at Grayson. “And since you are so good at drawing up contracts, draw one up for this. I want a specific date and terms of payment. I’d hate for Niles Prescott to have second thoughts at some point down the road, and try to back out. My time is valuable,” she offered, and smiled her best diva smile. “I bet you didn’t realize I go for a hundred dollars an hour.”

  Then she quit the room, leaving her father, stepmother, and Grayson in a crystalline moment of completely stunned silence.

  Chapter Nine

  The clay was soft in her hands, smooth and cool, yielding to her touch.

  Emmaline sat on her high stool in a simple cotton gown, her gray hair in one long braid coiled at the back of her head. The smell of clay filled the room. Clay and glazes. Firing and heat.

  Breathing in, she sat up straight and arched her back. It was early, the day after the Wentworths’ party at The Fens, an event that had been oddly strained. She had sensed that the only person there who had enjoyed herself at all was Sophie.

  Dear, sweet Sophie.

  Emmaline knew that Bradford wanted Sophie and Grayson to marry. He said a good marriage always distracted from scandals. And even she had to concede that Matthew and Lucas had certainly caused their share of those. Now her husband was depending on Grayson to make Boston forget what his brothers had done.

  Yes, a marriage could do just that. But that wasn’t what she cared about. She believed Sophie could make her son happy. Grayson had spent too many years being serious and responsible, with a breathtakingly tight rein on his control. Sophie had spent too many years being independent and wild wild. Together, Emmaline believed, they would find the perfect balance. No couple could be too much of only one trait.

  But what if her son did to Sophie what Bradford had done to her, trying to force her into a mold that never fit?

  She shook the thought away. Grayson was demanding, but more of himself than of those around him. He was good and kind, and he would make Sophie the perfect husband. Plus, Sophie was strong and confident. How else could she have become so successful on her own?

  As a result, when Bradford had told her of the impending marriage, she hadn’t mentioned the rumors she had heard years ago in the women’s circles she moved in regarding her dear friend Genevieve and that awful Niles Prescott.

  It had been so long ago that Emmaline couldn’t imagine that anyone remembered the gossip and innuendo. But Bradford might not see it that way.

  Emmaline stretched the muscles that weren’t used to sitting on a backless chair so high off the ground for such extended hours. While working, she had forgotten about everything but the clay before her.

  Not that her suspended state of mind had helped the work, she thought as she studied the misshapen lump before her. She had made more mistakes than progress, but still, it felt good to be laboring with her hands after all these years.

  She grimaced when she thought of the story she had made up so she would be left in her room undisturbed— yet again. She had mumbled something about a sick headache. She wanted to make up an excuse so she could go out. But her husband always insisted she be seen about town with a companion. In truth, a chaperon.

  The thought made her bristle. Surely her son wouldn’t turn out as harsh and demanding as his father.

  But the sick headache had worked well enough. Not that it would take much to keep people away, especially her husband. Bradford Hawthorne hadn’t come to her room, much less her bed, since shortly after Lucas was born. And that was nearly thirty years ago.

  For a long time she had given little thought to her husband’s absence. She had been too busy with three young boys to raise, servants to oversee, menus to plan, and good works to contribute to society. And when she finally had begun to wonder, she hadn’t had the energy at the end of the long days to worry about it. She had been sure that as soon as the boys grew more independent, and the Hawthornes’ place in financial circles had been well and truly reestablished, she and Bradford would come back together with all the passion he had directed her way during their courting.

  She had been wrong.

  Embarrassment stained her cheeks as she remembered the times she had tried to attract him. The provocative nightwear. The intimate dinners. But at the end of each night, she was dutifully kissed on the forehead and sent off to bed like a child.

  She bit her lip and looked out the grimy window as she remembered the night she had swallowed her pride and boldly gone to her husband’s bed, her heart in her throat. The sudden sight of him standing at the window in his shirtsleeves, so handsome, so strong. But when he had turned to her she saw the hardness in his eyes that she somehow always managed to forget. And his words.

  “What is it, Mrs. Hawthorne?”

  Even in the intimacy of the bedroom he was formal.

  Her courage had started to desert her, but she had come too far.

  “I thought… well, perhaps… we might, or rather you might want…”

  Her words trailed off as his gaze boldly ran the length of her. For a moment she was encouraged, but then his eyes met hers.

  “I will pretend I don’t understand your meaning, Mrs. Hawthorne. I would hate to learn that my wife thinks of the baser aspects of life as anything other than a duty to conceive children. You have given me three sons. Your duty is done.”

  He had turned back to the window then. Emmaline had stood frozen, mortified, desolate, and desperate to shout at this man who so callously turned his back on her. Her duty was done, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have desires. Or was she different? Was she truly wanton and improper? Did other wives truly want nothing to do with their husbands after they had children?

  But she asked no questions. Made no demands. She only turned slowly, mechanically around and slipped back through the doorway to her room.

  The following morning her belongings had been moved to the opposite end of Hawthorne House.

  “Emmaline, love! I’m so glad you are here and working! Your sculpture is… interesting!”

  Emmaline jerked in surprise on the stool and nearly fell off. But Andre Springfield caught her.

  “Gathering wool, were you?” he asked, his smile as bright as the day.

  “Guilty as charged,” she said, thoughts of Bradford fading away. “And you are being much too kind in your assessment of my work. It is interesting only if you find a misshapen block of clay intriguing.”

  He threw back his lion’s mane of hair and laughed, startling the other sculptors in the cavernous room.

  “Come,” he said, pulling her away, “have tea with me. Colette has it ready.”

  “Andre, I can’t.”

  “Of course you can.”

  He didn’t wait for her response. He dragged her out of the room and onto a glassed-in back terrace, the gardens dormant just beyond. It would be beautiful in spring.

  He held a chair for her, then took one for himself. He poured for each of them into old, chipped cups of fine china. From a coat pocket he produced a bottle.

  “May I sweeten your cup?” he asked, the bottle poised to pour.

  Her surprise at the decadence brought a smile to her lips. She remembered long days in the summer when she was struggling to be an artist. Wine and cheese. Long conversations in cafes on street corners. But those days were gone. “No, Andre, but thank you.”

  He laughed. “All the more for me then,” he said as he poured a generous portion of what looked like brandy into his cup.

  He didn’t bother to stir. He reached into another pocket and produced a pipe and a packet of tobacco. With the ease of someone used to smoking, he made quick order of the implements, then sat back with a sigh as he lit a match. But just as he brought the flame to the pipe’s bowl, he hesitated, looking at her through the orange flare.

  “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you, Emmaline?”

  “Of course not,” she all but stammered.

  “Good,” he said, then sucked on the stem as he brought the flame to the tobacco. />
  “God, life is fine,” he offered on an exhale of smoke. “I might not have much money, but I have a satisfying life.” He busied himself straightening the china and matches, then looked at her. “Can you say the same thing, sweet Emmaline?”

  Flustered, she sat back in the chair, grimacing when her spine hit a bent slat of the metal chair.

  Andre nodded knowingly. “I see you can’t.”

  “I hardly think that grimacing after nearly maiming myself on a piece of metal constitutes an answer. I was thinking.”

  “Thinking about how unfortunately correct I am.”

  “I have a lovely life. My boys are wonderful. My home is beautiful. My life is full.” But not satisfying.

  The unspoken words hung in the air.

  “And what about your marriage? Is that full, too?”

  Her inclination was to cry out the truth, to finally share the secret disappointment she carried with her. She and Andre had always been able to discuss all the things men and women didn’t talk about. Love. Life. Hopes and dreams. She realized now how much she had missed his friendship.

  But long years of training since her marriage never to show one’s feelings, much less talk about them, kept the words securely back in her throat. She could hardly speak at all over the lump.

  “My marriage is quite full, thank you,” she said primly, the effect somehow lost as she sat with a man not her husband who sipped brandy in the middle of the day.

  “Then why are you here?” He leaned forward, his tea sloshing carelessly as he planted his elbows on the rickety table. “I thought the minute you saw Richard Smythe, I’d never see you again.”

  She looked away.

  “He still affects you. Is that why you are really here?”

  Her head snapped back and she met his eyes. “I am here to sculpt. Nothing more. I have no interest in ever seeing Richard again.”

  “Perhaps you should tell him that.”

  “I’m married, Andre. I shouldn’t have to tell him anything. But I will if I need to.”

  “I think you do. And now is your chance.”

  Her breath caught when Andre sat back and looked toward the doorway.

  She whirled around and found Richard standing there, much as he had only a week before when he suddenly had appeared, leaning against the doorjamb. Amused. Arrogant. Breathtakingly handsome. Making her want to reach out to him.

  “Em, I knew you’d be back.”

  Outrage mixed with her pounding heart, and she tried to push up from the table. But the chair was heavy, and her long skirt caught on the crooked arm.

  “Let me help you,” Richard said, suddenly at her side, his voice a breath against her ear.

  She slapped at his hands and managed to break free.

  “Don’t tell me you are going to run away again.” His smile was wide and fall, revealing straight, white teeth. “I tried to talk to you last time, but you slipped out the front door and into traffic before I could catch you.”

  “You have no business trying to catch me.” The words were strained; even she could hear that.

  “True, but I never had any business catching you. Not now. Not back then.”

  She felt his words like heat to her skin.

  “And we both know that there was a day when I did.”

  “Stop!” She slapped her hands over her ears. “Stop this instant,” she said more quietly. “My coming here is not about you!”

  He reached out and gently took her hands away, but he didn’t let them go. “If that’s true, then what is it about? You had to have known I would be here.”

  She turned on him then, his arrogant assumptions unleashing her long-held anger. “I’d have to know? Why? How? All I know is that years ago you disappeared without a word of goodbye or explanation.”

  She pulled free with a yank and she could feel her hairpin give way. The long braid loosened, and tendrils escaped to curl about her face. She was fifty years old, standing in a pottery house with wild hair, feeling like a wayward schoolgirl. “Don’t stand there and tell me what I know or don’t know. I am here to sculpt. Nothing more.”

  And she was. She wanted something for herself. She wanted more in her life that said something about her. Something more than being the Ladies Society’s most diligent member, or her sons’ mother. Or Bradford’s wife. She pressed her eyes closed. A wife in name only.

  “I am here to sculpt,” she repeated, all traces of weakness gone from her voice. “And if I have to go someplace else to do it, so be it.”

  “But you won’t go someplace else,” Richard said, a smile in his voice, as if she hadn’t said a word against him. “You’ll come back. And I’ll be waiting.”

  Chapter Ten

  How dare they?

  Long hours after the gala, Sophie paced the east drawing room of Swan’s Grace, reeling with shock. How could her father and Grayson have made decisions about her future without so much as a word to her in regard to what she wanted? Good God, would she spend the rest of her life at the mercy of men?

  But on the heels of that thought came another. Grayson had chosen her.

  A swift joy pierced through her anger before she ruthlessly stamped it out. She had already seen that Grayson wanted her, but that desire was strictly physical. And physical attraction wasn’t enough.

  If just once he had mentioned love, no doubt she would have been putty in his hands, with every one of those five long years of struggle dropped aside as swiftly and as easily as his cashmere robe. Because if he loved her, didn’t that mean he could accept her for who she really was?

  But he hadn’t mentioned the word, not even some approximation. She knew him well, and undoubtedly the truth was that he saw her as an asset. A marriage between two fine, old families. He was treating her like a possession, just as her father had. Used by one, bartered away by another as if she were no more than a business transaction.

  Betrayal snaked through her.

  She had learned long ago that Conrad Wentworth lived by standards, traditions, propriety, and social order—sometimes more vehemently than blue-blooded Boston Brahmins. But that, she had learned as life began to teach her lessons beyond reading and music, frequently was the case with men and women who weren’t born into the world they inhabited. Those people took on ways with fervent dedication that insiders took for granted. Her father espoused those beliefs, never wavering.

  Except for once, when a month after her mother died he had married her nurse.

  But time had passed, and as long as Conrad Wentworth had money, Boston could forgive him anything. Even Patrice.

  Though as long as Sophie lived, she would never forgive the woman who had come into her home and insinuated herself into their lives, dissolving the adhesive that held them together. Her father had seemed oblivious to Patrice’s manipulations, coming into their home to help his wife, and ultimately taking the woman’s place.

  Bitter anger welled up inside her. Sophie knew her father’s calling card into the most prestigious drawing rooms of the old town had been her mother’s centuries-old name and his fat bank accounts. He had already lost her mother. If he lost his coins as well, Sophie suspected Bostonians wouldn’t be so forgiving.

  Because of that, her father was using her to replace the silver and gold he had lost. And he had the power to do it since she had signed a document that put him in charge of her assets and her life.

  Even she understood now that she had given him the power to do whatever he wanted with Swan’s Grace. She had also given him the power to sign agreements on her behalf. But never in a million years would she have believed he would use that power to sell her home and sell her into marriage. The notion was archaic.

  In hindsight, she could hardly credit being so foolish as to agree to such an arrangement. It seemed idiotic now. But at eighteen, after losing her mother and the promised debut concert—losing her direction in life—she hadn’t cared. And when her father told her Patrice would be her new mother, she would have done anything
to get out of Boston. Signing that document had been her ticket out.

  Forcing her mind clear of thought, she sat on the divan and attempted to play. She needed to play, needed to feel the music fill the emptiness in her soul.

  It was early in the morning, the sun barely a hint on the horizon. She started a few measures of an adapted piece from The Marriage of Figaro, a favorite of audiences. But today it held no interest for her.

  Next she tried The Love Nest. Still nothing. No feeling. Until finally she moved through the opening bars of a simple piece called The Waltz of Swans, which a composer and admirer had written for her. With that, she managed to forget. The long C, the soothing A. The G that made her heart soar. Time was lost, her escape found.

  “I thought you said you were going to practice.”

  Her mind halted, her escape lost. Last night tumbled in on her, and her hand froze midstroke.

  Sophie glanced at the doorway as Henry entered the room. The dog she had found lay curled up on the divan, improving every day.

  Word had been put out that the animal had been found, but as yet, no one had claimed her. Sophie hated to think that she was thankful no one had shown up. The last thing she needed was to become attached to this dog. She would be leaving just as soon as advance money arrived.

  But what about the house? Could she give it up now? Could she toss aside the one thing she had relied on in order to escape the manipulations of men? Could she live without the knowledge that it was there for her?

  “I am practicing,” she said with force.

  To prove her point, she began again, music filling the room.

  Henry held a cup of coffee in his hand. He wore a black satin smoking jacket with fine gray flannel trousers and a paisley cravat at his neck. “No, you’re playing.”

  “Playing, practicing, what’s the difference?”

  “You know better than I what the difference is. Practicing is working on technique, mastering sections of a piece. Running through scales,” he added pointedly.

  Sophie made an indistinct sound in her throat, then immediately started the prelude of another audience favorite called Love Circus. Her breathing grew even with the heartfelt opening passage played all on the G and C strings, the intensity and passion filling her. “I hate scales,” she said on an intake of breath as she kept the cadence.