Lady Jenny's Christmas Portrait

Blessed, blasted saints. She should not be telling him this. She should not tell anybody of this, ever.

“The second time?”

“I was mortally disappointed. One reads poetry and overhears the maids giggling and one’s brothers boasting, and one develops expectations.” She produced a penknife and sharpened her pencil to a lethal point. “I am not as ignorant as you and the rest of the world might think. Lift your chin.”

He obliged, when what he wanted to do was hunt down this sketch-pad-toting Lothario, shake the man’s teeth loose, and break his untalented, presuming fingers. “Are you trying to make me look imposing by sketching me from below?”

“I’m trying to find a position where I can be comfortable for an hour.” At his feet, of all places. “Hold still.”

She set her sketch pad aside and rose up on her knees. Elijah was obediently staring straight ahead, so he didn’t divine her intention until deft fingers undid his cravat. That was bad enough, but then—merciful deities preserve him—she stroked her hand over his throat.

“The textures of a man’s skin are a challenge,” she said, stroking him again. “Your cheeks are roughened with a day’s growth of whiskers, but your throat is smooth, and your chest…”

She unbuttoned his shirt, revealing a chest sprinkled with dark hair, a chest trying not to rise and fall rapidly.

“If you spend much more time posing your subject, Genevieve, you’ll not have an opportunity to sketch the poor devil.”

With one finger, she nudged the placket of his shirt aside, off center, baring some muscle to the light of the fire. “Like that,” she said as she drew the finger down over his heart, moving the shirt aside another inch. “Now do that off-in-the-distance look you have. Contemplate deep things.”

She sank back on the hearth rug and took up her sketch pad.

He could contemplate nothing, because all thoughts led to her and to the sorrow and surprise of finding out that she’d broken the rules while still a girl. Many did. Many broke the rules only to redeem themselves by marrying their partner in mischief.

The cat jumped into Elijah’s lap, a heavy, purring mass of fur and warmth.

“Leave him,” Jenny muttered. “He’ll keep leaping on you until you give up attempting to deport him. Timothy becomes fixed on his goals.”

Elijah shifted slightly as the cat settled in and commenced washing itself.

“With your drawing master, Genevieve…?” How did he ask an impossible question?

“Mr. Denby. Louisa called him the pulchritudinous Mr. Denby.”

“Of course he would have been beautiful, and he would have known how to use his beauty on young girls, but why him? You are the daughter of a duke, lovely to behold, well dowered, and notably agreeable in disposition. Why risk your entire future for disappointment in some dusty attic or stable?”

Her pencil paused on the page. “He preferred the minstrel’s gallery in the ballroom, which was dusty enough, but bore little risk of discovery.”

Not even a cot, no candlelight, no fragrant, leafy bower with the murmur of a stream nearby. No sensation of the soft summer breeze or gentle summer sun on naked, eager young flesh. No place to drowse in a lover’s arms, no intimacy about such a setting at all.

“Stop making a fist, Elijah. It was a long time ago, and hardly memorable.”

And yet, she hadn’t resumed drawing.

“You haven’t told me why.” He needed to know, needed to understand. “Sixteen is a legendarily confused age.”

“When Louisa turned sixteen, she threatened to go up to university as Mr. Louis Windham. His Grace found someone knowledgeable to tutor her in maths then, some formidable old fellow who spouted Newton in the original Latin.”

“While you planned an escapade of a different nature. Was it merely curiosity, Genevieve?” God knew, boys were curious at that age—boys at sixteen were nothing but curiosity, most, if not all of it, sexual.

She peered up at him, her posture and expression by firelight making her look young and bewildered. “I fancied myself an artist, and artists understand passion. I wanted to understand passion too.”

As if some fumbling, itinerant bounder would have bothered to teach her about passion? About pleasure? In her innocence, she could not have comprehended the folly of her choice.

“You understand passion as well as anybody I know, Genevieve.”

She gave him a confused look, and he saw that she had yet to make the distinction between simple sexual desire, to which even the birds and beasts were prone, and a passionate nature. He wanted to throttle Denby all over again.

“I am determined, Elijah, which is not the same thing as being ruled by impulses. Please face forward, and do be quiet.”

Her tone made plain that being ruled by impulses was a sorry condition.

Elijah wanted to argue, wanted to shake her for her erroneous conclusions and dangerous experiments, but he remained quiet, as she had remained quiet about her lascivious drawing master.

Sitting motionless, the cat in his lap, Elijah did not contemplate deep things. He contemplated a good girl, a pretty girl, but an innocent trying to slip through the bars of propriety’s cage out of passionate curiosity. She’d been experimenting with shadows at the age of sixteen.

She’d been experimenting with social damnation too, an experiment she’d apparently resumed, though with a different aim. She sought answers now not in the minstrel’s gallery, not in Antoine’s drawing classes, but—if she had her way—in blighted, stinking Paris.

In her pigheadedness, she might have been telling the story of his own adolescence. “Let me see what you’ve got there.”

“Not yet.”

For another fifteen minutes, Elijah petted the cat and endured the animal’s stentorian purr. In the face of such audible contentment, it was difficult to sustain agitation, and yet, Elijah did.

She’d been sixteen, curious, desperate for some recognition of her talent—of her —and buried under a pile of rambunctious, confident, older siblings. She’d had nothing she trusted to differentiate herself from that pile but a love of art.

How well, how bitterly and how well, Elijah understood her motivations, and yet, Genevieve Windham had remained on good terms with her family and was on good terms with them still.

For now.

“Your time’s up, Genevieve. Time to pay the piper.”

Uncertainty flashed through her eyes. “You needn’t bother with a critique. I insisted on ruthlessness and that other whatnot, but it’s getting late, and you’ve had to put up with Timothy, and tomorrow there will be more sittings with the boys—”

He extended a hand down to her while she recited her excuses. Perhaps in the last decade she’d learned some prudence after all, for she fell silent. “Come sit by me and prepare for your fifty lashes.”

She passed him her sketch pad, put her hand in his, and let him assist her to a place on the hearthstones beside his chair. She brought with her a whiff of jasmine. All day her fragrance had haunted the edges of Elijah’s awareness, a teasing pleasure lurking right beneath his notice.

“A good critique always starts with something positive,” he told her. “This raises the critic in the esteem of his victim, and lowers the victim’s guard. When the bad news inevitably follows, the victim will be paying attention, you see, and will have no choice but to hear at least some of the difficult things hurled his way.”

His tone was teasing; his warning was in earnest.

“I will clap my hands over my ears at this rate, Mr. Harrison. Please get on with it.”

He studied her sketch for some minutes while the cat purred and Genevieve radiated tension beside him. She took her art seriously, so it was fortunate she was genuinely talented.

“You are accurate, your command of perspective is solid, and you’ve learned a lot about how to suggest details quickly since last I saw your work at Antoine’s.”

He liked having her leaning close to him, liked bending his head near to hers to torment himself with her