Simply Love

could be no other reason. And she had agreed because she wished to spend more time with him.

It was as simple as that.

His looks did not really matter. This was no courtship, after all.

And truth to tell, she felt grateful-even honored-that he had even asked. In ten years no other man had asked her to go walking with him.

David was the first to finish painting. He cleaned his brushes and looked up at Anne.

“Do you want to come and see, Mama?” he asked her.

He had chosen to paint a single rock. It jutted out from the edge of the promontory, Anne could see, and would eventually break away altogether and fall to the beach below. But it still clung to the headland at a slight angle, and plants still grew in its cracks, connecting it to the land. David had painted it in such a way that Anne was made aware of details she had not noticed until now even though she had been sitting idle and with open eyes for a couple of hours. And he had used a multitude of colors to depict what to her unpracticed eye had seemed simply pale gray and green. Many an adult would have been proud to produce such a painting. She would have.

“Oh, David,” she said, squeezing his shoulders, “Mr. Upton really is right about you, is he not?”

“But it is so flat, Mama,” he protested.

The countess was smiling at them over the top of her easel.

“Miss Jewell,” she said, “you have been remarkably patient. Your son and I have not been scintillating company, have we? May I see your painting, David?”

She came and looked at it after he had nodded.

“Ah,” she said after staring at it for a whole minute in silence. “You do have an artist’s eye. Would you care to see mine?”

David dashed around to her easel and Anne followed.

“Oh, I say!” David said.

They both stood for several silent moments looking at her work.

She had painted the sea, sparkling in the sunshine and reflecting the blue of the sky and the few fluffy clouds that floated across it. But it was not a pretty picture, Anne thought. It was not merely a reproduction of the visual reality. It was hard to put into words what it was. It somehow took the viewer under the water and up to the sky. Or perhaps it was not even that. It was more as if one were being drawn into the water and into the sky.

What had David said? To see things as they see themselves. How had he known to say that?

“Oh, do look who is coming,” Lady Rosthorn said suddenly, smiling warmly and raising one hand to wave. “Sydnam, well met.”

Anne turned her head sharply to look, and sure enough Mr. Butler was walking along the cliff path, dressed as he had been when she first saw him, with the addition of a hat. He doffed it even as she looked.

David collided hard with her side and shrank half behind her.

“Mama,” he whispered. It was half whimper.

“Good morning, Morgan, Miss Jewell,” he called, staying on the path. “Is it not a lovely one? I am taking a shortcut back from one of the farms.”

“And we have been painting, as you can see,” Lady Rosthorn told him. “Do you want to come and point out all the faults in my poor offering?”

It seemed to Anne that he hesitated for a few moments, but then he came. His eye met hers briefly, and she felt an absurd quickening of the pulse, as if they shared a secret. She was to meet him later. They were to go walking alone together.

How foolish to feel as if there were some sort of courtship proceeding. And how… horrifying.

“When did I ever criticize anything you painted, Morgan?” he asked, coming to stand before her easel while David pulled Anne out of the way. “I would not so presume.”

“You never did,” she admitted. “You were always kind and always encouraging. But I was always nervous when you of all people came to take a look.”

“This,” he said after standing in silence for what seemed like a long time, his head bent toward the painting, “is very good indeed, Morgan. You have grown immensely as an artist since I last saw any of your work.”

Lady Rosthorn smiled and moved closer to him, her head tilted to one side as she looked at the painting.

“Now I can see that perhaps it does have some merit,” she said, laughing. “But I brought out a fellow artist with me this morning. Have you met David Jewell, Miss Jewell’s son? David, this is Mr. Butler, the duke’s steward here and a very dear childhood friend of mine.”

“David,” Mr. Butler said, turning to look at him.

“Sir.” David bobbed his head and pressed harder against Anne. “My painting is no good. I cannot see things that big.” He indicated Lady Rosthorn’s painting with one sweep of the hand.

“And I cannot see things that little,” the countess said, nodding in the direction of his own painting. “But big and little both exist, David, and they both show us the soul of God. I remember you telling me that once, Sydnam, when I was about your age and I was convinced that I could never paint as well as you.”

Ah, Anne thought with an uncomfortable lurching of the stomach as she stared at his back and remembered her impression that his long fingers looked artistic. He really had been a painter, then?

“May I see your painting, David?” Mr. Butler asked, and they all moved around to look at it, David still pressed as close to Anne as he could get.

“It is too flat,” David said.

But Mr. Butler was examining it in silence as he had done with Lady Rosthorn’s.

“Someone has taught you,” he said, “to use a great variety of colors to produce the one the untutored eye thinks it sees when it looks at any object.”

“Mr. Upton,” David said. “The art master at Mama’s school.”

“You have learned the lesson well for one so young,” Mr. Butler said. “If you were to paint this same rock at a different time of day or in different weather, the colors would be different, would they not?”

“And it would look different too,” David said. “Light is a funny thing. Light is not just light. Mr. Upton told me that too. Did you know, sir, that light is like the rainbow all the time-all those colors, even though we cannot see them?”

“Remarkable, is it not?” Mr. Butler said. “It makes us realize that there are all sorts of things-millions of things-around us all the time that we are not aware of because there are limits to our senses. Does that make sense to you?”

“Yes, sir,” David said. “Sight, touch, smell, sound, and taste-five of them.” He counted them off on the fingers of one hand. “But maybe there are hundreds more that we do not have. Miss Martin told me that once.”

Mr. Butler pointed at the place on the painting where the rock was joined to the rest of the promontory, held there, it seemed, by clumps of grass.

“I like this,” he said. “That rock is going to fall soon and begin a new phase of its existence down on the beach, but at the moment it is clinging bravely to its life up here, and the life up here is holding on to it as long as it can. How clever of you to notice that. I do not believe I would have. Indeed, I have stood here many times and not noticed.”

What Anne noticed was that David had moved from her side to stand closer to the easel-and Mr. Butler.

“I can see the slope of the rock, with a hint of the depths below and the land above,” Mr. Butler said. “The perspective is really quite good. What did you mean when you said your painting was flat?”

“It…” For a few moments it seemed as if David could not find the words to explain what he meant. He pointed at the painting and made beckoning gestures with his fingers. “It just stays there. It is flat.”

Mr. Butler turned to look at him, and Anne was struck again by his breathtaking good looks-and his kindness in giving time and attention to a child.

“Have you ever painted with oils, David?” he asked.

David shook his head.