“Scout, come here this instant.” Bronwyn sounded like her papa, the former cavalry officer, but the dog had apparently never bought his colors.
Elijah nudged the beast in the direction of the door with his knee. “Miss Winnie, was there something you were looking for? Something you wanted to tell us?”
“Yes!” The dog walked over to the girl while Jenny steadied a jar of brushes his tail had nearly knocked to the floor. “I forget—oh, I remember. Aunt Eve is here. You have to come get kissed. She’s going to have a baby, and Papa says from the size of her he thinks it will be a baby horse.”
Jenny hoped St. Just hadn’t said that within Eve’s hearing—though he probably had. “We’ll be along presently. You can tell everybody we’re coming.” The child whirled and darted from the room, and the dog trotted after her. “Elijah, do you have your key?”
He produced the key from his watch pocket. “Always. Yours is in the lock. If Lady Eve’s arrival merits as much celebration as Rose’s and her parents’ did, then we won’t get a thing done for the rest of the day.”
He was right, and that was fine with Jenny. She wanted to treasure his judgment of her portrait for at least a few hours before she again tackled the challenge that was her dear papa.
Eve was, indeed, well along in her pregnancy. Deene, her husband, hovered like a mother cat, until Westhaven suggested the ladies might want their sister to themselves for a bit, and Deene was all but forcibly dragged off to the billiards room by the menfolk.
While Jenny and Elijah slipped out the door.
When Genevieve Windham was allowed to paint for hours, she became luminous, exhausted, and serene—as if she’d been well satisfied in bed. Observations like that were only one reason Elijah found it increasingly difficult to work beside her day after day.
As they crossed the back terrace, he wrapped her hand over his arm. “What do you find difficult about your father’s portrait?”
“I find Papa difficult,” Jenny said. “He’s noisy, arrogant, absorbed with his bills and committees, and yet, he’s devoted to Her Grace, well intended, and would cheerfully—cheerfully—endure endless torture or lay down his life for any member of his family.”
That was all likely true, particularly the protective and devoted parts. “You’re afraid he’ll forbid you to go to France.”
She tucked closer, and Elijah cast around for something comforting to say besides, “
“How do you like my portrait of Sindal’s boys, Genevieve?”
“I adore it. Sophie and Sindal adore it, and Lord and Lady Rothgreb will be crowing to all of their neighbors about it. You made two busy, grubby, noisy little boys charming, and yet, it’s them. It really is them.”
He wanted to kiss her, and not for the usual reasons. He wanted to kiss her because something about having her on hand when he’d done those sittings had given him the courage to come out of some sort of artistic exile and enjoy his work again.
They left the terrace, moving across the snowy wasteland of the Moreland gardens. “That’s what you have to do with His Grace. You have to be honest but compassionate, so your rendering really is him.”
“Because the portrait is for Her Grace, I tell myself I must try to see Papa as she sees him. He is her dear Percival, and whatever there is about him to love, Her Grace focuses on that.”
They were moving farther and farther from the house, far enough that Elijah let himself take Jenny’s hand. “My parents are the same way. Her ladyship might seem like a manipulative, scheming French baggage to some. To Flint, she’s charming, determined, and adept at managing a big family. He isn’t some fellow who likes outlandish waistcoats, he’s her dear Flint. I couldn’t see that when I was younger, but they are a team in ways I could not appreciate then.”
She paused before a gate in a tall wrought iron fence, her expression concerned. “You’re going to go home, aren’t you, Elijah?”
“Everybody goes home, eventually.” He took her hand in his again. The snow was deeper here, more than a pretty dusting. “I miss my family, and they miss me. My mother claims the Academy will never allow me full membership.”
“You think she’s scheming?”
“I think I’m as talented as the next four contenders put together, and there are two vacancies.” Though talent had never been necessary or sufficient to gain entrance. “I think a man, particularly an arrogant young man, should pay the consequences for giving his word.”
And yet, how long were those consequences supposed to last, and upon whom were they to devolve?
“I will miss my family too. I know that.”
Not the way she’d miss them when the winter wind on the Channel hit her in the face like a slap, and nobody and nothing could turn the boat around. “You’ll be fine. You’ll make new friends. You’ll have your art.”
And far from her family’s benevolent meddling, she’d effectively eliminate any and all possibility of having children and a family of her own.
She said nothing until they reached their destination, and then she turned a slow circle, taking in each gravestone and marker. “You remembered. Oh, Elijah, you remembered.”
He would remember this too, remember Jenny Windham wrapping her arms around him as the wind picked up and the flurries danced down. He’d remember that when he might have argued her away from her course, when he might have offered her marriage and frequent trips to Paris, he’d instead held her and held her and held her.
And then he’d let her go.
“Jenny has taken a daft notion to go to Paris.” Louisa knew she sounded worried, but it couldn’t be helped. The parlor door was closed, the syllabub had been served, and this was likely the only privacy the children, spouses, and parents would allow her with her sisters.
“Paris in springtime is supposed to be lovely,” Sophie observed. “Sindal says he’ll take me one of these years, but there always seems to be a baby on the way or one just arrived.”
Petite, blond Eve, her feet up on a hassock, patted her belly. “Please, God, let one arrive before I explode or Deene frets himself into a decline. Lou wouldn’t be worried if Jenny were making a quick shopping visit.”
Maggie left off poking at the fire—no footmen would disturb this gathering—and took up a rocking chair. “Jenny told me the same thing. Told me not to be angry with her, but if she didn’t leave now, she’d never go.”
“She needs a fellow,” Louisa said. “We all needed a fellow, and the boys needed their ladies.”
Sophie considered her drink. “I don’t know, Lou. Your fellow lets you write all the poetry you want, and has you dedicate the racy verses to him. Ladies have been writing poetry for eons. Jenny’s art is a different matter.”
“Deene let me ride King William,” Eve said. “Before I got as big as King William. Maybe the right fellow will encourage Jenny’s painting.”
There was a point to be made here, and Louisa had not the patience to make it subtly. “It’s not just that Jenny paints, it’s that she paints well—better, I think, than half those buffoons in the Royal Academy. My poetry is all well and good, but it hardly ranks with Milton and Shakespeare. Joseph says Jenny is brilliant.”
And Joseph, as anybody with any brains knew, was nigh infallible.
“Amateurs can be brilliant,” Maggie said, though her tone suggested they seldom were.
Eve appeared to study her feet as if she hadn’t seen them in some time. “I gather the difficulty is not only that Jenny is talented, it’s that she’s English. Frenchmen do not limit their ladies to dabbling in watercolors and lounging about like brainless ornaments. The Germans let their ladies paint too, as do the Italians.”
Louisa glowered at her sisters. “Frenchmen no longer understand gallantry, what few Frenchman are left between the ages of five and fifty. They will pillory the daughter of an English duke on general principles, despite their convenient reversion to monarchy at the end of Wellington’s sword.”
A silence descended, not even the clink of a spoon disturbing it. Glances were exchanged. Eve, the most
