having to visit her as penance thereafter.
“Bet she spoiled you rotten,” Hazelton groused. “Old women know best how to spoil a little fellow. My son’s nurse is eighty if she’s a day.”
Sindal took exception. “She is not. She just looks eighty so she’ll be safe from you.”
“I’ll have you know…” Hazelton began, while Elijah’s attention wandered to his brothers’ letters. His mother’s news was disturbing, because Fotheringale had no motivation for giving up his various grudges. Artistic insecurity had a prodigious memory, one that typically magnified slights and forgot praise.
Hazleton left off defending his manly honor, or his eyesight, or something. “Bernward’s brooding. Pass him the bottle.”
Kesmore passed Elijah the cat instead. Timothy’s claws went to work directly on Elijah’s thigh. “Come, young man. Tell us what afflicts you, and we’ll ridicule you for it accordingly.”
How inchoate inebriation had added years to Kesmore’s standing, Elijah did not know. “My brothers miss me.”
Looks were exchanged all around, and then the door opened. Jenny’s brother, St. Just, slid through. “I’ve brought more refugees. The carnage on the battlefield is terrible. My own dear wife kissed the butler and was sizing up the senior footmen when I escaped.”
St. Just opened the door widely enough that two more men could scurry in behind him. They both had what Elijah was coming to think of as Windham chins—a trait from the sire’s line. They had green eyes, and those green eyes looked harried if not haunted.
Kesmore gestured with the bottle. “Bernward, some introductions: The mean-looking one is St. Just. Around his mama we call him Rosecroft. The prissy one is Lord Valentine, and the sniffy one is Westhaven. Cowards, the lot of them. Afraid of a few shrieking children, a bowl of wassail, and some holiday decorations.”
“I don’t see you down there,” Westhaven said, taking a place on the raised hearth and looking, indeed, sniffy about it.
“I have
Lord Valentine took the place beside Kesmore; St. Just simply sat on the floor.
“Your brothers might miss you, Bernward,” Sindal said, “but we’ve a few brothers to spare. In the spirit of holiday generosity, we’ll lend them to you. You may have Westhaven here on indefinite loan, for starters.”
By the time they’d gotten around to wondering how His Grace not merely endured but thrived on the holiday mayhem, Elijah had reached an insight that did not provide even as much comfort as the four-ton cat contentedly shredding his breeches.
His sisters missed him, and his mother was threatening essentially to cut him off if he remained “as stubborn as his father.” She might make good on her threats, though Elijah could ambush her in Town and wear her down over the next few years. That prospect was daunting, much like facing the melee below stairs daunted these happy, tipsy men who were delighted to spend time with one another.
Elijah’s brothers missed him too. He’d known that.
What he hadn’t known was how badly he missed his family—the entire lot of them—and how difficult it was going to be to ever gain entrance to the Academy. The latter realization didn’t disturb him nearly as much as it ought to, while the former disturbed him far more than it should have.
“Look at me.”
Elijah muttered the words, as if the effort of speaking had been snatched from the orts and leavings of his ability to concentrate. He got like this when he painted—gruff, absorbed, and to Jenny, fascinating.
She looked directly at him. “I am not my mother.”
He studied her for perhaps ten consecutive, silent seconds then went back to scowling at the image taking shape on his canvas. “You have the same shade of green in your eyes, you have the same—” His brush paused, and he fired another glance at her. “Almost the same shape of upper lip.”
He would not have heard anything she said in reply, so Jenny resumed work on her own effort, which was His Grace’s portrait. Without planning it, she and Elijah never worked on the same subject at the same time.
And thank goodness her brothers had appropriated the studio yesterday afternoon, or Elijah would have been much further ahead.
“You are displeased about something. I can feel it.” Elijah spoke without shifting his focus from his canvas.
“Not displeased. I’m glad you got nothing done yesterday. I like to watch you work.”
He wrinkled his nose then added a touch of paint to Her Grace’s shoulder. “You’re daft.”
“Look at me.”
He obliged. He had a smear of white near his chin, his hair was sticking out in all directions, and his eyes were not the same blue as His Grace’s, but Jenny studied them as if they might be.
“I know you spied on us yesterday,” he said, touching his brush to his palette.
“I came in the same door as everybody else, Elijah. How can you call that spying?”
“Nobody noticed you. They were all too absorbed with Sindal’s tale of winning the fair maid over a pile of dirty nappies.”
They had been, the sentimental, kissable, happy lot of them. Jenny had eavesdropped in a quiet corner, wondering why Sophie—her own sister—had never shared so much of her courtship.
“I believe there was mistletoe involved, and my brothers claim to have had a hand in matters.”
They fell silent. Fifteen minutes from now, Elijah might reply to her comment, or he might curse the fact that he’d run out of green paint, or he might decide he’d reached a place to pause in his own efforts and rip up at her morning’s work.
Jenny had listened to Sindal’s tale yesterday, then listened to Joseph add his Christmas recollections, but she’d also used the time to study her brothers. Each man bore the stamp of His Grace’s paternity, in the eyes, in the chin, and oddly enough, in the way their hands joined their wrists.
His Grace had beautiful wrists, and he’d passed that trait down to his progeny.
“Why are you staring at your wrists, Genevieve? The portrait won’t paint itself.”
“I have my father’s wrists. I wonder if His Grace ever had artistic aspirations. I can’t imagine he did.” And why had she never noticed this?
“My father did—amateur aspirations, from what my mother has said, though his sense of color is abominable. I need to mix up more brown. Why must all wood be brown?”
Wood was not brown. It was red, blond, black, sable, and many other colors that only looked brown. Jenny did not correct Elijah. She’d realized, in the first hour they’d painted together, that she sometimes disagreed with him for the…
Minor tiffs and spats formed some kind of verbal mistletoe, having to do with the way Elijah’s eyebrows rose, his nostrils flared, and his chin turned an inch to the right.
“Have you ever seen your father’s work, Elijah?”
He stepped back from his canvas and wiped his hands on a rag. “A few caricatures only. My mother has talent, though. What on earth are you doing with His Grace’s boots?”
The duke had chosen to wear riding attire, which Jenny thought showed his excellent figure to good advantage and helped with the informal nature of the rendering.
“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
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.
