Lady Jenny's Christmas Portrait

“You’ll go home soon,” Jenny said. “I’ll go to Paris, and you’ll go home to see your family.”

Her tone held an ominous sense of resolution, and while Elijah didn’t want to think of sweet, quiet Sarah and the more boisterous Ruth missing him, the notion of Jenny removing to Paris made him positively ill.

“Go!” William kicked out this time as he bounced, and the little house of cards went sailing in all directions. Elijah braced himself for a burst of outrage from Kit, but the boy clapped his hands.

“Let’s do it again,” Kit said. “This time I can be a wolf who blows the house down!”

* * *

Elijah Harrison could see the truth in others. He could find something attractive in a gouty old squire, a schoolgirl who hadn’t yet put up her hair, or a princess expected to one day effectively rule a nation when she’d never seen peace between her own parents.

Elijah had no idea, not the first inkling, how attractive he was, lounging on the rug with William, scratching the ear of an old hound, or giving Jenny a crooked smile and asking for a critique.

She would show this attractiveness to him, just as he had shown her how much art she was leaving in the shadows of her sketches.

“You were expecting me,” she said as he stepped back to allow her into his sitting room.

“The way Wellington expected the Corsican at Waterloo.” He closed the door behind her, locked it, then leaned back against the door. “That was rude. I apologize. I am out of sorts.”

“You are tired.” So she would sketch him tired, but she would not, not even for the sake of his rest, give up her hour. “Let’s begin then, shall we?”

He scrubbed a hand over his face then glanced around the room, as if looking for his wayward manners. “I’m imbibing. Would you care to join me?”

Parisians drank at all hours, and the ladies indulged in spirits there too. “Yes, please.”

He prowled over to the sideboard, his blue velvet dressing gown making a beautiful line of his back. “Have you ever taken spirits before, Genevieve?”

“Of course.”

He turned, a glass stopper in the shape of a winged lion in his right hand. “Don’t lie to me, my lady. I’ll find you out.”

He could too. He could look her in the eyes and know all her secrets—or at least paint them.

“When we’re ill or ailing, Her Grace advises the medicinal tot. She says one learns to appreciate medicinal tots as a function of marriage and children.”

“Does she say that within the duke’s hearing?”

Jenny accepted a glass with about an inch of amber liquid in the bottom. “She smiles directly at him when she says it, and he generally smiles back and toasts her.”

Jenny smiled at them both, pretending the prospect of others’ marital bliss, even in its mellowed and subtle forms, did not hurt. She lifted the glass to her mouth but was prevented from drinking by Elijah’s hand wrapped around hers.

“Slowly. Bad enough you’re secreted with me in dishabille at a late hour. If you’re found tipsy or worse, I will not forgive myself.”

The scent hit her nose before the liquid touched her lips—peat smoke, apples, oak wood, and a complex of things… botanical. Almost a perfume, and not the same as brandy.

She took a modest sip, which bloomed like a small firework in her mouth, the streams of glory trailing down to her belly. “What is it?”

“A fine old Scottish whisky. I travel with it, packed with my paints and frames and easels. Where will you pose me tonight?”

She wanted him stretched out, as he had been on the floor with William. Relaxed, a little preoccupied, and not very clothed. Her nerve deserted her, though, when she considered he’d probably balk at posing as her odalisque.

“Have you written to your sisters?”

He paused with a glass halfway to his mouth. “I’m to write to all six? I’d be at my desk the entire night, and that would mean an unproductive day tomorrow.”

He had been drinking. The Jenny who’d been secretly relieved to see the last of Denby, the Jenny who’d made a perfect bow before the Queen, the Jenny known and loved by every Windham of every age—and their pets—would have pled a headache, set her drink down, and bid Mr. Harrison good night.

This Jenny, who was going to study art in Paris, took another sip of her whisky— lovely stuff, whisky, no wonder her brothers partook regularly—and considered her subject.

“Write to your sister, then. Just the one, at your desk.”

He took a swallow of his drink and eyed the desk like a martyr beheld the lions’ den. The escritoire was pretty and French, japanned and decorated with inlaid gold scrollwork more feminine than masculine, but Jenny liked the elegance of it.

He sat. She moved candles, positioned his drink to catch the light, passed him a white quill pen, shifted the inkwell, moved his drink again, and then considered how to position herself. She couldn’t very well stand when she sketched him, but she wanted his face in shadows again, the better to apply what she’d learned the previous night.

“I have an easel,” he said, rising and disappearing into the bedroom. He emerged a moment later with a sturdy wooden frame, one sporting clamps at the corners for holding paper if one were not inclined to work on a canvas.

“How did you know?”

He set it up a few feet from the desk, exactly where Jenny would have asked him to—after pondering all her choices and wasting half of her allotted hour.

“You don’t want to be directly in my line of sight lest you distract me, and if you’re doing a night study of me, you want a bit of distance and superiority, some detachment about the point of view.”

No, actually, she wanted intimacy, but he wanted the distance, so she did not argue.

He resumed his seat, moving his drink a few inches closer to the blotter, which was where Jenny should have put it. She got her paper affixed to the board and regarded him, slouched back, brooding, vaguely dissolute and palpably annoyed, but at what?

“Is that how you want to remain for the next hour, Elijah?”

He glanced at the clock. “Forty-five minutes, Genevieve, and no. I might as well tend to my correspondence while you work.”

Jenny said nothing, starting her composition with the structural elements—the mantel behind him, the flat plane of the heavily lacquered desk. Candlelight and firelight brought out the inlaid work, giving the surface the quality of a fish pond, the top a visual window to a different world.

Which would need oils, of course.

Elijah had assembled the requisite tools for correspondence: paper, pen, penknife, sand, ink, and a focused expression. While he stared at the blank page—assembling thoughts, perhaps—Jenny focused on his face.

An hour later, Elijah sat back and sprinkled a final quantity of sand over his letter, just as Jenny made a final appraisal of her study.

It would do. In fact, it would do nicely, and yet, she didn’t want to show it to him. For a time, she wanted to revel in the notion that she’d applied what she’d learned the previous evening, and the result was impressive.

“You wrote only the one page,” she said, unfastening her paper from the easel and laying the finished sketch on the table by the door.

He tossed the pen on the desk and capped the ink. “One doesn’t want to be too loquacious. Females take their epistolary connections seriously, and I will be deluged with letters if my sisters decide I am a reliable correspondent.”

“I dread hearing from my siblings for just that reason.”

A hint of a smile scampered around his mouth. “You are teasing me. I deserve it.”

“No, I am not. My siblings have lives, you see. This child cut a tooth. That husband is annoyed by some buffoon in the Lords. This wife is absorbed in a new project with the dame school—”

He rose and held out a hand to her, and Jenny hoped it wasn’t the whisky inspiring Elijah’s overture. She gave