Lady Jenny's Christmas Portrait

him her hand and was tugged into an embrace, Elijah’s cheek resting against her hair.

“While you sketch your cat, visit the sick with your mother, and seethe with frustrated artistic talent. Let’s hear a curse, Genevieve. Let the drink, the lateness of hour, and the company inspire you, hmm?”

No cat came between them, no stays, no layers of proper attire. Held against Elijah’s body, Jenny felt the implacable structure of a large, fit man. His person was as soft and giving as a sculptor’s block of raw marble, but much, much warmer.

“The only curse I know is damn—double damn.”

“That’s a start, like a few lines on a page. Damn has promise, but it needs embellishment. Bloody double damn?” He spoke near her ear, his breath tickling her neck.

“Bloody is vulgar and graphic. Also quite naughty, and daring.”

“All the better. Come, let’s be vulgar and graphic on the subject of my sketches for the day.”

He turned her under his arm, as if they were drinking companions, and Jenny felt a little more inclined to curse: she’d wanted him to kiss her, wanted a cat-free kiss, a whisky-flavored kiss that went further than a dose of foul language toward resolving what she felt when she got her sisters’ chatty, conscientious, and unwittingly condescending letters.

“I like perishing damn,” Jenny said as Elijah settled with her on a sofa. Like the desk, this was an elegant piece of furniture, and he seemed to take up more than his half of it.

“Bloody, perishing damn,” he said, tucking his arm more closely around her. “Say it. You’re off to make war on France soon, like that We Happy Few fellow the Bard wrote about. Nobody will understand your English curses.”

Jenny considered that Elijah might have been drinking for a while before she’d come upon him—except the bottle had been nearly full, so this whimsical crankiness on his part was not entirely fueled by drink.

“I won’t need my curses in Paris, because I’ll have something to write about besides… my bloody, perishing, damned cat.” She’d surprised him—she’d surprised herself. “Now I feel I must apologize to Timothy.”

“Timothy owes me an apology,” Elijah said. “Damned beast about disemboweled me. I invite you to do the same.” He took a breath, and because Jenny was sitting right next to him, she felt the whimsy go out of him. “I can’t get Rothgreb’s little fellows right, Genevieve. It’s been two days, and nothing is… I should be half-finished by now.”

He trailed off and scooped up a half-dozen sketches from the low table. These he deposited in her lap on a huff.

“Why don’t you fetch our drinks,” Jenny suggested, picking up the first drawing. She wanted him off that couch, wanted him wandering the periphery of the room or the coast of Wales while she examined these nothing sketches.

He obliged, and even detoured to poke up the fire before he set Jenny’s drink before her. Thereafter, he took up a position leaning in the bedroom doorway, dressing gown gaping open, drink in hand.

The Artist Before Retiring. Jenny took in the composition she’d make of him there, framed by the doorway, fatigue and frustration.

“These are technically stunning.” For studies, for quick renderings used to work out details of composition and content, Elijah’s sketches of Kit and William were masterly. She selected one and put the rest aside. “This is your best one. Let’s discuss it.”

He pushed away from the doorjamb and came down beside her without putting his arm around her. Jenny passed him the sketch and took another swallow of courage.

“This is technically adequate,” Elijah said. “If I can’t structure an adequate composition by now… The dog is truly amazing. Not my drawing of him, but that old hound. I’ve never seen a beast as tolerant of children.”

The image on the page was William astride a recumbent Jock, the old dog somnolent in contrast to the child’s gleeful countenance. Whereas Jock looked as if he would be found before that hearth until spring was well advanced, William’s bare foot was raised, and his hand grasped one of Jock’s floppy ears like a rein, as if to urge his canine steed to take flight.

“You’ve caught the trust between the dog and the child,” Jenny said. “Jock would give his life for those boys, and in his eyes, they can do no wrong. He might chastise them with an admonitory growl, but only when they’re older and ought to know better. I think that’s what you drew.”

“I drew a sleeping dog.”

“You drew a sleeping dog who is also part guardian angel. Jock holds all of Rothgreb’s confidences, you know. Lady Rothgreb says she had best die before the dog, so somebody adequate to the task can comfort his lordship in his bereavement.”

Elijah set the drawing aside. “The elderly can take a morbid turn with their humor.”

“The elderly have courage we can only guess at, like soldiers facing battle. That is a good sketch, Elijah. You should consider it for your portrait of William. Rothgreb would love it.”

Jenny would love it, and as he grew up and prepared to step into his father’s and Rothgreb’s impressive shoes, William would love it most of all.

“I was commissioned to do one portrait of both boys.”

He leaned forward to move the sketch to the bottom of the stack, and Jenny felt as if he was hiding her praise from view too. She turned to tell him as much when she caught sight of Elijah’s chest, naked beneath the gaping dressing gown.

“You’re not wearing a shirt or waistcoat.”

The corners of his lips turned up, the first real humor she’d seen in him—and at her expense. “You spent a half hour sketching me, and you’re only noticing this now?”

An hour sketching him, taking him apart visually and putting him back together on the page as a composition, a study. As he’d hunched over his letter, his chest had been a shadow she’d avoided.

“I noticed.” Though she’d noticed by omission. Her gaze traveled down. “What is this?”

“The cat…” He didn’t move, didn’t leap off the couch and hold the door open for her.

Jenny pushed the dressing gown farther apart, revealing two long, angry red welts running up Elijah’s belly to his sternum. “Timothy did this?”

She touched the welts, surprised they weren’t hot. Elijah’s stomach went still beneath her fingers, as if he’d stopped breathing.

“Timothy was an uninvited guest at a kiss,” he said. “An ill-advised kiss. He absented himself from the proceedings as best he could.”

As Jenny would absent herself from England after the holidays. Abruptly, her travel plans loomed not as a daring response to impending spinsterhood and artistic suffocation, but as a parting from everyone she held dear.

And her family would not understand, though Elijah would understand. She wanted to kiss his bare, warm belly, kiss the hurt and make it go away. She settled for running her fingers over the lacerations, while Elijah finished off his drink in one swallow.

“Genevieve…” He sat directly beside her, his flat abdomen exposed to the firelight, his expression suggesting he’d welcome eagles tearing at his flesh rather than endure her touch.

“I wanted to sketch you without your shirt, but I was afraid to ask. I wanted to sketch you—”

The look he gave her was rueful and tender. “You will be the death of me, woman.”

He sounded resigned to his fate, and Jenny liked it when he called her woman in that exasperated, affectionate tone. She did not like it quite as well when he hoisted her bodily over his lap, so she sat facing him and his exposed, lacerated torso.

“You will note the absence of any felines,” Elijah said, hands falling to his sides. “And yet, I must warn you, Genevieve, indulging your curiosity is still ill-advised.”

He thought this was curiosity on her part, and some of it was, but not curiosity about what happened between women and men. Jenny’s curiosity was far more specific, and more dangerous than he knew: she wanted to know about Elijah Harrison, and about Elijah Harrison and Genevieve Windham.

“My parents will be home in a few days, Elijah, possibly as soon as this weekend.” The notion made her lungs feel tight and the whisky roil in her belly.

He trapped her hands and stopped her from tracing the muscles of his chest. “It’s all right. I understand.