by Sophia James
The worry of a few minutes ago began to subside and she laid her head back against the smooth leather of the seat.
Well, she had done it. She had survived the first foray. Winterton hadn’t suspected her and she knew initial impressions always lingered. It would be a protection and the answers she was seeking were beginning to be understood.
She would not confront the Viscount yet because underneath the strangeness she felt a kinship and a vulnerability she had not expected in a man she barely knew. It was surprising and worrying, both vengeance and absolution tumbling into another feeling entirely.
She clenched her fists together until they shook before releasing the tension.
‘Enough,’ she whispered to herself. ‘I am enough.’
* * *
‘You look worse for wear, Winter, for your wounds are visible even in this dim room and God knows what fracas you have been in now.’
Moving forward, Arabella turned his cheek into the light and he winced as one finger brushed across the bone beneath the reddened eye. ‘The artist is very beautiful. I think he should have been a girl. Do you know him well?’ Raising the brandy he had poured for her, she drank a good third of it. Rafe wasn’t drinking at all, a fact that surprised James.
‘I have just met him, Bella. He has come to do my portrait.’
‘A lovely job, then, to look at you for hours. Would you not agree, Rafe?’ She laughed, the sound filling the room.
‘I’d say you have not told Winter that you are pregnant, Arabella, and you are teasing him in that way you regret later.’
‘A baby.’ James snatched the brandy from her. ‘I read an academic treatise in America that warned against consuming too much alcohol whilst with child. It was most adamant in its conclusion.’
‘I’ve told her about that already.’ Rafe spoke now. ‘And I have stopped drinking to try to convince her to do the same.’
‘He would put me in isolation and keep me there, Winter, and nine months is a long while to worry. Frederick Rutherford was trembling quite markedly. Did you notice?’
He was used to Arabella’s penchant for changing the subject when it suited her and he smiled. ‘I am the boy’s first private commission. Perhaps it’s nerves?’
‘And you would scare anyone, James, especially with your blood-red eye, let alone an unprepossessing and effeminate artist.’ When Bella stated this, the timid uncertainty of Rutherford came back, a young man caught in the expectation of others.
James had felt his tension and desperation. He had also understood that the lad was lying about everything. He had been in the game of deceit for too long to believe otherwise and he’d known many a man trying to hide his identity.
The cough was the first giveaway, of course, a means of diversion that was poorly executed. Rutherford had not coughed even once with Arabella and Rafael in the room. The glasses were also wrong for he doubted anyone so young needed all that magnification, especially one adept at building a detailed and intricate likeness of a stranger in the precise medium of charcoal and paint.
But what could Frederick Rutherford want of him that a hundred others had failed to discover?
‘Well, I think that the little artist is intriguing.’ Arabella said this as she pulled back the curtains.
‘In what way?’ He couldn’t help taking the bait, as he squinted against the light.
‘Frederick Rutherford looks at you as though you are a prize, but then everybody is inclined to admire you, if only you could see it. But you never stop in a place long enough to notice those who would lay down their lives for you and there are so damn many of them. Perhaps this artist, Rutherford, is just another you will not notice because you do not love yourself enough.’ She shook her head as he went to speak. ‘You are flawed in some way, Winter, that is incomprehensible, you with all your money and beauty and strength. You who can lead men anywhere you want them to go and they will follow.’
He could hear the blood hammering in his ears. ‘You are spouting nonsense, Bella.’ He looked across at Rafe for support, but Arabella was not yet finished, not by a long shot.
‘We are all of us too good friends to lie to each other, James, and you have been my best friend since I was ten. Now it is my turn to help you. You will be thirty before you know it and for the past years, from what you say, you have not let a woman into your life. Not in any way that matters, at least. Oh, granted, you flirt with the possibility and allow your paramours to believe that there is a chance for everything, but you never take it further. A quick romp and then a parting, no true emotion in any of it. In Boston it was said you could have had your pick of any of the women and I have heard accounts of it being exactly the same in London. The Heron daughters, for example, have apparently spoken of nothing at all save of your allure since the Allans’ ball. There is also talk of a stately home in Herefordshire.’
‘How could you know this? You abhor society, Bella?’
‘Rafe hears things in the same way as you do, Winter, because the channels of intelligence are never still and because once you are part of an underworld you never truly escape it. As for me, well, I was not born in such elevated circles as you both were, but in the worlds below that of the ton everyday life is most connected. The servants talk. The shopkeepers gossip. The man on the corner who sells herrings for a shilling has a story to tell for the right price and your name at the moment, Winter, is exchanged for the top currency. And I listen well to all of the gossip.’
‘God help me.’ He began to laugh. Arabella had always been beautiful, but few had understood the cleverness that ran along with it or the iron will that she had had to cultivate to survive.
Rafe finally pushed himself away from the wall and spoke.
‘It is rumoured that the Rutherford chit is related to the Warrendens.’
‘I’d heard that said. Do you know how?’
‘Closely, by all accounts. Mr Rutherford has brought no servants with him from Kent, not even a valet, and those in Warrenden’s employ are not allowed anywhere near the locked room that Rutherford uses at his town house. The most worrying thing is that the artist has also been asking questions about you, Winter, about your past. Quietly, I will give him that, but still...’
The shock of Rafael’s revelation had James lifting his glass and drinking the last of his brandy.
‘My past?’
‘Your time in the Americas. Your family. That sort of thing. He will know that you are looking into buying Atherton Abbey and that you have returned to England wealthy. Was the portrait expensive?’
‘Very.’
Rafe laughed. ‘Well, then, perhaps there is method to his madness after all. Choose one wealthy mark and milk his vanity for all it is worth and then go on to the next. It could indeed work for a while.’
James shook his head. ‘From what I have heard the man is prone to alter the appearance of his subjects. At the Allans’ ball the oldest Miss Heron told me she was worried that she might not be drawn with quite the fineness she would hope to be. I do not think an artist like that would pander to the shallow conceits of the very rich.’
‘Interesting.’ Arabella took hold of Rafe’s hand and held it close. ‘I’d like him to do my portrait then, for I am sick of all the wooden beautiful ones I seem to engender.’
‘I doubt Rutherford will be tempted. I think this is his first and last effort at pleasing his agent. He told me as much.’
‘It gets more and more fascinating. But why you, in particular, Winter? Do you know him? Have you met Mr Rutherford before?’
‘No.’
‘Could your father have?’
That thought had not occurred to James. William Waverley had gone bankrupt after a gambling spree that had lasted for ten years. Could the Rutherford family have been somehow involved in that scandal?
The artis
t did not look well off for a start with his old-fashioned clothing and scraggly hair. But in the lines of his body there was a fineness that was easily discernible and a watchfulness that hinted of other things.
He’d observe him more carefully tomorrow and try to ask his own questions. He’d make certain that no one was expected to visit either to allow him the hours of uninterrupted time he might need to persuade the lad to trust him.
He wished Rafe and Arabella had arrived when they were supposed to have, for he would have liked to speak with Rutherford longer. He’d seemed frightened and timid. James wondered how he had injured his hand for the scar upon it looked so very out of character.
* * *
Flora visited the church she’d found near Grosvenor Square because after her day she felt as if she needed to pray for guidance and help.
Her reactions to Lord Winterton made no sense. She should be loathing and blaming him for all the trouble that he had caused in her life and here she was wishing that he could look beneath the disguise and hurt to understand just exactly who she was. Ridiculous. Foolish. Imprudent.
The anger that had been building all afternoon under bewilderment and question bubbled over as she sat in the pew in the third row from the back of the empty church.
The candles were burning and she tried to concentrate on them, tried to inhale their scent and pull herself free from this fear she was consumed with. A statue of Jesus on the cross in marble looked down at her from the font. She wished the sculptor had made his eyes more believable. The lines of his arms were wrong, too. Foreshortened and thick.
Her sister had wanted to know everything that had happened with Lord Winterton, every nuance and word that had passed between them when she’d arrived home. Maria had been waiting in the front room, worry crossing her brow and darkening the blue in her eyes, but had then immediately taken her hand and shepherded her upstairs where their privacy was assured.
Flora had told her a little of her time at Lord Winterton’s, but left out many of the more pertinent facts. She’d said nothing of the Viscount’s unexpected visitors or of the offered brandy. She had not told her sister how she’d been made to wait either or of the darkness of the room she was finally ushered into or of the battered beauty of the man within it.
Shallow she knew to base so much of her opinion on simple appearance, but there it was.
By all accounts he was a womaniser. The kiss Arabella Carmichael had given him in front of her husband had been scandalous and it told her that the Earl ran in fast company and did not apologise for any of it.
She wondered what had happened when she left. Had they spoken of her? Had they laughed at her countenance, recalling her cough and her glasses and the dull colour of her wig? Or had she been a person of no consequence and very little thought? Dismissed completely the moment she had left the room.
Mocked or forgotten, both options had her bringing her hands together and praying...for what?
For his redemption. For her forgiveness. For her vengeance. For his atonement. For some resolution. For a hundred different things that could never be. For the life she’d been forced to live and for her papa who had slid into a depression fed by the worry of an entailed property and an unmarried ruined daughter.
She frowned and stood. The Lord above would not want to hear such complaints and whining from a woman who was hardly as desperate as a thousand others. Oh, granted, she had had her trials, but even those paled against the everyday life of many Londoners without enough food to eat or a warm and safe place to sleep.
No, she needed to deal with this effectively by herself. Tomorrow she would go to meet Lord Winterton again and begin the portrait. She knew his face. She could have closed her eyes and drawn him from memory. And she had done so for the painting in her wardrobe at Albany held a likeness she would never better, not even with him there right in front of her.
It was the essence of her subjects she loved the most to draw and his spirit was vivid and strong and clear. She couldn’t show him any of it, though, this reality she knew, because he would understand who she was, where they had met, what had passed between them on the road north all those years before. She was not ready for that just yet.
It was a fine line she was treading between lies and the truth, the diverging pathways of exposure, scandal and ruin all a part of it, too.
The quiet of the church was comforting, the solace of a space to breathe and consider. The smell of candles and incense was embedded in the polished wooden benches and ornate hangings, the scent warm across the cool darkness. Light streamed in from all angles above, the smallest sound echoed back from the walls and the roof. As a woman she would never have been able to walk these streets alone or steal into the worshipping place with such an untroubled ease.
A man’s life was a different life from the one that she had been brought up to. The boundaries were wider and there was a freedom that was exhilarating.
She wouldn’t leave London just yet. She had accepted no money and she had signed no contract, but the strictures of her life were opening again, the dullness of the last years exposed in the running risk of what she was now a part of, an animation of stillness, an exuberance that made her breathe faster and more deeply.
She wanted the liberty and the emancipation that this charade allowed her. She wanted the independence to walk exactly where she desired to, a thought that was increasingly more fascinating and satisfying.
She wanted to draw what she could see here in the hidden parts of the world she had not been allowed to venture into before as a woman. The buildings. The river. The people who hurried across the parks in the wind who looked nothing at all like those who inhabited the ton.
Chapter Five
The next morning she was shown into the company of Lord Winterton without delay, past the wicker chair and the clock, down the corridor and into the library that was somewhat changed.
Today the curtains were drawn back and the light of springtime flooded into the room, making it look bigger and much more inviting.
Lord Winterton’s appearance was different, too, his clothes this morning a reflection of his elevated station in life. He had shaved and pulled his hair back into a cue tied with leather. A severe style, but it suited him. His left eye did not look so reddened or his lip so broken. The purple bruise on his cheek, however, was much darker. It made him look rakish and dangerous.
‘I hope the room and its brightness meets with your expectations, Mr Rutherford.’
‘It does, my lord.’
Her glance was drawn to the books in long shelves on each side of the room. Milton. Edmund Burke. Swift. Shakespeare. The Viscount was a well-read man.
‘Can I help you with the canvas? It looks heavy.’
He’d come closer now, much closer. It was the first time he’d been so near and she felt herself stiffen.
Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me for if you do...?
‘No, it is fine, my lord, and most easy to handle.’
She thought she should cough, but yesterday’s marathon had left her exhausted and her throat sore and so she decided to depend on the fact that he’d have her demeanour of sickness in his mind already.
‘I have not sat for a portrait before.’ He sounded uncertain now and a little shy and Florentia felt the tension inside her soften.
‘It won’t hurt, Lord Winterton, as long as you remain very still. Here.’ She angled a small armchair in front of a window and invited him to sit, liking the way he crossed his legs in a long line and placed his arms on the chair rests.
No tightness in the gesture. No pretence. An easy subject and so very beautiful. Sliding the thick glasses down her nose so that she could see over the top, she began.
His eyebrows had risen as she watched him, arched in something akin to humour. She saw he almost went to say something, but did not
as she raised the charcoal and squinted. Sliding her thumb up and down the length of the shaft, she tried to get down the proportions in a way she was happy with. His legs. His body and his head. The quick freedom of the medium began to fill the empty canvas, as it came alive with the essence of James Waverley, Viscount Winterton.
His hands came next, the line of the fingers and the shapes of each. His nails were square and short. There were many scars across the knuckles of his right hand and her glance inadvertently went to the one at the top of her own thumb. Hurts lingered in both skin and mind. She wondered if he had other marks beneath the linen and superfine apart from that which she knew would be on his neck. Some inner sense told her that there would be. He was a man who wore his history like an armour.
She moved on to his face next for the eyes were the strongest point of any portrait, though when his glance met hers straight on it was she who looked away first. There was laughter in the clear and pale green but also question. His cheekbones were high and angled, the play of light from the window drawing them up into sharpness.
The dimple on his chin she hurried over. She did not wish to remember the portrait she had already finished of him.
The Belvedere Torso sketched in red chalk by Michelangelo came to mind, the vitality and the beauty. But this Adonis was fully clothed and she was glad of it.
* * *
For the first time since meeting him Frederick Rutherford looked as if his fleeing was not imminent, his whole attention centred on the canvas and charcoal, his mouth pursed in focus.
‘Can I talk? Or would that ruin the composition?’
He asked this carefully, fearing that even the slightest of movements might spoil things.
Rutherford looked up at the question, the surprised frown between his eyes giving the impression that he had just remembered the person he drew was alive after all.