Lady Jenny's Christmas Portrait

concentration.

“My family can provide well. If I must be a doting maiden aunt, then a doting maiden aunt I shall be.”

Her features were rife with the small imperfections that made beauty interesting: Her mouth was not perfectly symmetrical, which gave her the appearance of considering a smile moment by moment, even when her eyes were serious. Her brows were a trifle darker than her hair, and her chin, upon close examination, bore a hint of stubbornness.

She hadn’t answered his question about why she was unmarried; she hadn’t answered his question about what filled her pretty head. He focused on her jawline and forgot all about putting the subject at ease.

His downfall as a boy had been Albrecht Durer’s watercolor of a young hare, a rendering so precise, the animal’s nose practically twitched as one beheld it. How did so much life, so much vitality, fit into a simple two- dimensional rendering? And not even an oil, but a watercolor?

Elijah had become desperate to comprehend Durer’s genius. Somewhere along the way—Rome, maybe, or Vienna, possibly Copenhagen—he’d acquired technique and lost sight of the desperation.

“You are very quiet, Mr. Harrison.”

He was supposed to say that she was a very absorbing subject, then smile and compliment a particular feature.

“I’m busy. What are you thinking?”

She wouldn’t tell him, that was clear by now. Genevieve Windham was a master at keeping her cards out of sight.

“I want to go to Paris.”

The ear was a curious organ, more complicated than most people thought, like a horse’s hoof. Lots of angles and shadows to the typical ear, but an ear could also be beautiful. “Paris in spring is lovely.”

“I want to go now.”

The point of his pencil broke, and he muttered an oath. Still her features did not shift from the serene, contemplative, secret-veiling expression she’d worn for long moments. Da Vinci would have been desperate to sketch her—nobody did justice to a sensual madonna like he had.

“A crossing this time of year can be quite rough, my lady.” He feathered his eraser over the slight flaw in the line made by his infernal pencil, reshaped the point, and paused. “You want to go to Paris now?”

“Directly after the holidays, and I would not go to shop, hear the opera, or polish my French.”

“Your eyes hold a wealth of determination.” Also sadness. How to sketch both so they didn’t overshadow the beauty? “Why do you want to go to Paris?”

Her gaze measured him. He could feel her studying him even as he concentrated on the image taking shape on the page.

“I want to sit someplace besides Gunter’s and eat a pastry in public without it being a scandal. I want to have my pastry without a maid and a footman, as well as an immediate family member—preferably male, but at least married—within two yards of me at all times.”

The determination in her eyes flared hotter. God in heaven, Wellington had eyes like that. Calm, unstoppable, capable of banking a world of grief behind a slight smile—and this over a pastry?

“Do you think to acquire that freedom by outlasting all the bachelors on the marriage mart, Genevieve?” This was worse than the randy bishop, the idea that she might be purposely seeking spinsterhood—and it made no sense at all.

He sat back, feeling winded as a disconcerting notion rendered his pencil still. “Do you prefer women?”

Her lips twitched. “I love my sisters, of course, and my brothers’ wives are lovely too—” Those slightly darker than perfect brows rose. “That’s not what you meant.”

She’d attended Antoine’s classes. In every batch there was at least one pair of young sprigs who fancied themselves classically Greek in their lust for each other. They’d sat practically in each other’s laps, called each other cher, and tossed languid, calf-eyed gazes at Elijah as he’d lounged about in his birthday attire.

He’d found it amusing and vaguely irritating. If young men brought to their art the same focus they brought to their breeding organs, the world would have many more works like Durer’s hare.

“I did not mean to offend, my lady. I see the Sapphic preferences aren’t entirely unknown to you.” Her family would be scandalized that she even knew of such things.

Her family would be scandalized if they knew how closely he was sitting to her, and yet, he wasn’t about to shove his chair back to a decorous distance in the shadows and chill farther from the fire.

“I want to go to Paris to study art. I shall go, eventually.” She did not gird her words with determination; she clad them in certainty, though Elijah had the sense it was a newfound certainty—very newfound.

Two thoughts collided in Elijah’s mind, one sane, the other demented. The sane thought was: She jolly well could study art in Paris. Genevieve Windham was abundantly talented enough. Then, too, in Elijah’s lifetime, the French had lost all gallantry toward their womenfolk.

French ladies managed commercial establishments, strolled about unescorted, and took unseemly interest in the nation’s ongoing political debacle. Rational Englishmen had long stopped trying to explain the French, and look where France’s democratic impulses had gotten her: her aristocracy butchered, her land beggared, her almighty, plundering emperor going slowly mad on some island.

Bugger France, even if Paris was lovely.

The second thought, the demented one, was so raw Elijah rated it more as a stirring of instinct: He could not let her go.

And then, more raw still: He could not stop her, not unless he were her husband or her guardian.

“Paris smells like cat piss.”

His observation made her laugh, a merry, surprised sound that warmed him every bit as much as the fire, and yet he’d spoken the perfect truth. The whole damned city had a pissy stench in certain weather, worse even than Rome—though London had a prodigious stench of its own, especially near the river in summer.

“I daresay parts of the Morelands stable bear the same distinctive scent. One is told it keeps the mice down.”

He dreaded to dim that smile, and yet he had to know the truth. “Does your family pity you because they regard this ambition as folly?”

Any reasonable ducal English family ought to.

Her smile didn’t fade; it winked out like a snuffed candle. “I am not so stupid as to confide such a thing to people who think only in terms of when the next Windham baby will come along. These are the same relations who will not allow me to be alone at Morelands with thirty servants in attendance if my parents tarry in London. I am shuffled about, a spinster in training, because even thirty servants and the very gates of Morelands itself cannot guard my antique and pointless virtue.”

Elijah was studying her still, his pencil re-creating the clean line of her nose, so he saw that these babies born in such numbers to her siblings made her sad too. He also saw that she likely didn’t know this herself. She protected herself from sadness with a silent, determined anger, and that made him sad too—for her.

And none of these insights, the insights every portraitist resigned himself to and tried to leave behind when a commission was complete, were cheering in the least.

A clock chimed down the hall, and outside, the full darkness of a winter’s night had fallen.

“You’ve had your thirty minutes, Mr. Harrison, and I must change for dinner.” And yet, she did not move, and Elijah’s pencil sketched more quickly. She might flee the honesty of their exchange, but she’d manage her retreat with dignity.

“Another moment.” Now that he knew of her hare-brained scheme to exile herself to the land of cat piss and flirtatious republicans, he was more determined to get her likeness on the page. “Your family doesn’t know about your ambition to travel, so I must conclude they pity you because you have no babies coming along.”