Grace Burrowes - [Windham Sisters 05]

by Lady Jenny's Christmas Portrait

  “He wore his favorite pair,” she said. “They are comfortable rather than impressive, so don’t start in with your dratted lectures again.”

  To Elijah, a portrait was not a likeness, so much as a commentary on the subject—and a flattering commentary, at that. He propped his fists on his hips, sails clearly filling.

  “Genevieve, do you know why the grand manner of portraiture found favor for more than half a century? Do you have any idea the problems that result when a sitter does not like your work? Can you imagine how limited your commissions will be if you—?”

  He could go on like that for eternities. Jenny shut him up by the simple expedient of setting aside her palette and brush and kissing him.

  His arms came around her, but then the dratted man lifted his head. “Somebody could come in, Genevieve.”

  At least he’d muttered that with his lips against her temple. “Nonsense. As much as this place was a madhouse yesterday, this morning it’s quiet as a tomb.” A tomb where the shades were much in need of headache powders.

  Her logic must have appeased his overactive conscience—his worries were for her, she knew that—because he commenced kissing her back.

  And oh, the pleasure of it. Elijah was never a frantic, pushy kisser, and yet in the very deliberation of his attentions there was passion.

  “I wasn’t going to do this,” he informed her earlobe. “We were to have a footman in here, to—”

  “Kiss me.”

  “Not to—”

  He kissed her. He kissed her with a building heat and banked desperation, such that when Jenny realized she might be getting paint all over his shirt and waistcoat, she also realized it was already too late.

  In so many ways, it was already too late.

  She subsided against his chest. “We need to clean up. Luncheon will be served soon.”

  This was a pretext. Her Grace kept a buffet with varying selections available in the breakfast parlor from dawn until midafternoon. People would wander in and out as their appetites and overindulgences dictated.

  “You’re hungry. I’m sorry. I should have realized—” He glanced at the clock. “You would let me starve you, woman.”

  Elijah, when not painting, could also be gruff. Jenny particularly liked that about him. She slipped her arms from his waist, knowing he’d tolerated as much kissing as the moment would allow. “Your portrait is coming along very well.”

  He didn’t take that bait, but instead studied her, rather than the color of her eyes.

  “You looked lonely yesterday, sitting in your dark corner, eavesdropping on the men like a tired tavern wench.”

  “I will miss my brothers.” Miss them with an ache of much greater proportions than she’d realized. Miss their wrists and chins, miss the way any two of them smiled together over some complaint made by the third. Miss the way each of them had known she was there, and none of them had given her away.

  Elijah continued to study her. “Let’s clean up, then. I wanted to ask you about something.”

  Jenny gathered up her brushes, hoping he meant to ask her about something artistic. He argued with her, he exhorted, he lectured, and he explained, but he seldom asked her opinion regarding anything artistic, and usually took issue with the ideas she did express.

  She was unschooled, he said, and he wasn’t wrong.

  They set their canvases across the room from the fire. Jenny took off her smock; Elijah rolled down his cuffs. He tolerated her doing up his sleeve buttons, just as she held still while he wiped a dab of paint off her nose, and then allowed her to wipe off his chin.

  These small intimacies were a consolation of sorts, though Jenny thought kissing would have consoled her rather more.

  “What did you want to ask me?”

  Before he answered, he turned a full circle, hands on hips, inspecting their work space. She saw his gaze light on a sketchbook lying near where the cat sat in sphinxlike repose on the mantel.

  “When the regiment decamped yesterday to take their wives in hand, I spent some time in here getting organized, and I found yonder feline sitting on this.” He passed her the sketchbook. “It has to be one of yours—the style is yours—but the subjects are unusual. I don’t recall seeing it before.”

  Jenny opened the book and knew at one glance exactly what folly Timothy had led him to, the wretched beast. “These are just some old sketches. Are you hungry?”

  “Those are not just some old sketches, Genevieve.”

  “They are juvenilia, Elijah, not even worth your criticism.” Which would be considerable, she was sure. She folded the sketchbook against her chest, unwilling to watch him examine the contents. If he tore into these sketches the way he carped at and criticized everything else, she would cry.

  “Come here, Genevieve.”

  She followed him over to the sofa and watched with foreboding as he tossed more fuel on the fire. Was he preparing for a long harangue? “If you want me to sit beside you on that sofa, Elijah, I might fall prey to an impulse to kiss you again.”

  “I delight in your impulses, Genevieve.” He offered this with a crooked, pained smile, suggesting his delight was tempered with regret.

  She took a place beside him on the sofa. “What did you want to discuss?”

  “Give me that.” He took the sketchbook from her and opened it on his lap. Timothy leaped onto the sofa and settled into a perfect, feline circle at Jenny’s hip. “These sketches are brilliant.”

  Brilliant. Now, when he’d found a book Jenny never wanted to see again, he pronounced her work brilliant.

  “I had no sense of the rules. I had no judgment about what was a suitable subject. I had no business sketching those children.” Many of whom had likely perished.

  “You’re wrong. You’re more wrong about that than about anything you’ve been wrong about since you first sketched me at Kesmore’s.”

  Timothy began a rumbling purr against Jenny’s body, as if Elijah’s pronouncements were so much small talk, not arrows aimed at Jenny’s conscience. “Can we put this book away, Elijah? I find I’m really quite peckish, and by now even my brothers ought to be stirring. They’ll want me in the breakfast parlor to help with the little—”

  He shut her up by virtue of his lips applied lingeringly to her cheek. “These are your best work. Tell me about them.”

  His buss to her cheek was the first kiss he’d initiated since his speech about babies and folly, which Jenny could probably have recited to him verbatim but for the lump in her throat.

  “I sneaked out to the poorhouses when I was supposed to go shopping for the holidays. I went to the poorhouses in winter, when it was so cold I had to sketch with gloves on. The children had no gloves.”

  They’d had no gloves, no coats, no food, no coal, no health, no hope. Every time, her brother Victor had forbidden her to go, and every time, he’d waited right beside her, until she could bear the scent of death and despair no more.

  Elijah’s arm came around her shoulders. “What was a duke’s daughter doing in the poorhouses?”

  “I don’t know. Trying to understand, I suppose, as adolescents must understand everything, as they must rebel against everything. Why do I have so much, why do others—equally valuable in the eyes of God, we’re told—have nothing? Why do some children have only five years of life on earth, and every day of that five years is miserable with illness, starvation, and vermin? And I have loving family, health… everything, in abundance?”

  He turned a page, to an image of a small child huddled near a puny, smoldering fire. Gender was not apparent, so huge were the eyes, so pronounced the facial bones, and shapeless the rags that passed for clothing. The child’s expression was vacant to the point of death, death at least of the soul.

  “As a gently bred young lady, you should not have seen these things.”

  “My brother Victor sa
id the same thing. He said when I was older, perhaps, and in a position to take on charitable works. He always brought money for us to leave, but those places are corrupt.”

  Elijah turned the page again, the scene a cozy parlor, the fire blazing in the hearth, rugs thick on the floor, and heavy curtains over the windows. A portly fellow stood beside a desk, his attire that of a prosperous burgher, his smile genial—though in their coldness, his eyes had something in common with that of the child on the previous page.

  Examining the sketch now, Jenny realized she’d used the idea of illumination from below to imbue a cozy scene with lurid, satanic shadows. The choice had not been conscious, but it had been effective.

  Now, Jenny could barely stand to glance at the sketch. “I noticed that the people who tend to the poorhouses were always well fed, always comfortable. It drove me mad to see that. I gave away all my pin money for years, until Westhaven remarked that I wasn’t wearing new frocks—or perhaps Victor peached on me. As sick as he was, he fretted for me and encouraged my art without ceasing.”

  Elijah set the sketchbook aside and angled his body to wrap both arms around her. “Victor died of consumption?”

  She nodded against his throat. “The poorhouses are breeding grounds for all manner of disease. When Victor fell ill, he forbade me to go back lest I suffer the same fate, and I was”—the lump in her throat was going to choke her—“I was relieved. I was relieved never to go back.”

  “You still give your pin money to charity.”

  Another nod, because she was weeping now and burrowed so closely against Elijah, they might have been making love.

  He said nothing more, and for long moments, Jenny cried like she hadn’t cried since Victor’s death. Cried without worrying that she sounded unladylike, cried without worrying that she’d never stop.

  And throughout all of this tumult, Elijah held her close. She had the sense that if Their Graces had burst through the door, Elijah would not have moved unless and until Jenny had regained her composure.

  “I m-miss him.”

  “Victor.” Not a question.

  “He could make me laugh. Even when he was dying, he could make me laugh, and he never protested when I sketched him.” She’d filled pages of the same sketchbook with images of her brother, chronicled his long, miserable battle with an enemy nobody ever defeated. Another entire notebook held Bart, always laughing and smiling.

  “Victor understood you.”

  Three words holding a world of insight. “He understood everybody. Victor was a charming man, but by the time he died, he was a wise man too.”

  “When did he die?”

  Another quiet comment, but this one reverberated through Jenny bodily. She lifted her face, not caring that she looked a wreck. “Right before… Christmas. He died right before… I did not realize… It never occurred to me…”

  When she settled against Elijah again, she felt less at the mercy of grief, and on the strength of the one simple insight. “The anniversary of his death is next week.”

  And her family would ignore it. Perhaps in the privacy of the ducal apartment, Their Graces would acknowledge the date somehow. Maybe some of the glances between her brothers would be about old loss, but in public, the past was not part of the upcoming holiday.

  Elijah brushed her hair back from her face and said nothing, though his silence was comfortable, like Timothy purring right beside her.

  “I want to look at those sketches,” Jenny said. This was not entirely truthful. She dreaded looking at those sketches, but she also wanted to know what Elijah saw in them that was brilliant.

  “Next week, when we’ve made more progress on Their Grace’s portraits. For now, you need sustenance.” He produced a handkerchief, which Jenny put to use and did not return to him.

  “I need to compose myself.”

  He withdrew his arm but remained right beside her. “No, you needed to lose your composure. I think you also need to go to Paris.”

  An after-shudder hit her, though she was done with her tears. “You’re concluding that only now?”

  Timothy rose and stalked across Jenny’s lap—why did such soft little paws land like jackboots?—to get to Elijah.

  “I knew you wanted to go to Paris, that you longed to be there. Now I understand that you need to go. It will be hard, Genevieve. When you’re starting out, there’s competition from every quarter, and it won’t help at all that your papa’s an English duke.”

  She reached over and stroked Timothy’s sleek, dark fur. He was not purring, which struck her as odd. “I know that. Will you write me some introductions?”

  He hesitated a single instant. “You won’t need them. Your talent will be your introduction, and the French have discernment, Genevieve. They can spot ability, regardless of how unconventionally it’s presented, or how unusual the artist.”

  His refusal hurt, but his compliment was genuine. He had faith in her. The notion comforted wonderfully. She set aside the temptation to wheedle anyway. “I am famished. Shall we have our luncheon?”

  “We shall.” He picked Timothy up and rose to set him on the mantel. The cat looked about itself, clearly not pleased with the change of location.

  “He’s contrary,” Jenny said. “That’s exactly where he wanted to be earlier, but now he must find fault with it.” Would she be equally fickle about Paris once she’d arrived there?

  Elijah helped her to her feet then surprised her by pulling her into his arms. “We will look at those sketches, Genevieve. They are magnificent.”

  She did not question the embrace, but rather, closed her eyes and breathed in his scent. “Next week, then. I will hold you to it.”

  He surprised her yet again by kissing her. His lips on hers were warm, firm, and lovely—nothing fleeting or demanding. When he raised his head and did not step back, she tried to figure out what his kiss had been about. Respect, of course. Elijah was never disrespectful of her person.

  But even more than respect, his kiss had tasted of awe, as if he were kissing a goddess come to earth. Jenny leaned against him, abruptly feeling fatigue to go along with her hunger.

  “Come, my lady.” Elijah shifted to link their arms, ballroom promenade-fashion. “We will fortify ourselves. Your brothers will likely be stirring, the mistletoe is still threatening from every corner, and if I understand aright, yet more family will be arriving today.”

  His smile said that amid all that mayhem and holiday nonsense, she would have an ally. She would have a quiet place to come and paint; she would have a handkerchief when she needed one.

  She’d have a friend who would not risk any more folly with her, regardless of how badly she’d miss him once they parted.

  The realization hurt with a whole new pain, particularly when she thought back to when he’d noticed her the previous afternoon as she’d sat quietly in her dim corner. She’d studied her brothers, with their wrists, chins, and glances, and she’d studied Elijah too.

  He missed his family, missed them more deeply than he likely knew. She would go to Paris, but if there was any benevolence to the holiday season at all, Elijah would give in to a towering case of homesickness and take himself off to Flint Hall.

  Fourteen

  Marriages developed a language as sophisticated and subtle as any code devised by the War Office—more so, for being flexible. The better a man understood that code, the more peacefully his marriage would proceed.

  Charlotte glanced up from her embroidery hoop in a manner that told Lord Flint she’d been patient long enough. “What does your son have to say for himself, Flint?”

  He did not pass her the letter, not with Prudholm lurking by the window, gilding the shine on some adolescent sulk. “Elijah? Just the usual. His commission is coming along. He’s in good health. Lady Jenny Windham has more than a bit of talent. He encloses Her Grace’s recipe for wassail, along with
a warning to imbibe it in moderation. He’s having to keep his studio locked when not in use to keep all the Moreland progeny from coming to harm with the paints and such.”

  “Your son is a trial to a mother’s heart, but he understands the little ones.”

  From a reading chair in the corner, Pru let loose a snort that might have resembled a cough.

  “Moreland’s letter is more interesting.”

  Her hand paused in midair, the needle drawn as far from the fabric as it would go without snapping the thread. “His Grace wrote to you?”

  “Moreland has ever been a reliable correspondent. He says Her Grace has insisted that the artists be left to their work and disturbed as little as possible, lest her present not be completed by the Christmas Eve open house.”

  “I have eleven other children to look after, Flint. I am not spending my Christmas Eve in some bouncing sleigh, freezing my—” She fell silent, her French grasp of subtleties stealing the rest of her outburst. “Artists?”

  “Elijah has asked for Lady Jenny’s aid in the studio, but His Grace says it has turned into some sort of art lesson for his daughter. She’s handy with a paintbrush, according to her father.”

  Flint leaned closer to the candelabrum, as if to see the words more clearly. He was in fact thwarting his wife’s impulse to snatch the letter from his hands.

  Charlotte stabbed her fabric as if it were the villain in a bad farce. “Handy with a paintbrush? That is ridiculous. That is a man who does not comprehend portraiture. That is a papa who is not paying attention. If Elijah says the girl is talented, then she’s likely a genius.”

  “Perhaps.”

  She looked over at him, arching a Gallic eyebrow that had captivated him across many a ballroom and every one of their bedrooms. “Flint, you try my patience worse than all your sons put together. What else does His Grace say?”

  He chose his words carefully, because Prudholm had stopped shifting and sighing and using every other aggravating means to remind his parents of his presence. If Oxford was to continue benefiting from Flint’s largesse, they’d give in to his pleading and start Hilary term on Boxing Day.