Six #2
Cam remembered Peter’s particular penchant for skin.
She hoped the gowns had bodices. She searched for an explanation for her appearance here.
She remembered having dreams where she became aware she was dreaming, but that realization usually made her wake up.
This felt nothing like a dream, nor was her obvious awareness of the incongruity having any impact on her wakefulness.
The phone booped. The sound of a text. She made a show of peeking inside her bag, as if to root for rouge or cheek lard or whatever they called it here.
“Is the puppy asleep?”
Cam halted for an instant, then found the phone and made a show of patting it gently while still keeping it out of sight.
“Good little boy,” she said in a baby voice.
“Yep,” she added to Kate, “sleeping.” The text was from Jeanne.
“Where did u go?!!!!” Cam flung her hand back like she’d been burned.
Kate’s brows knitted.
“He nips.”
“Typical man.”
Jeanne didn’t know where Cam was. A bad sign. A very bad sign. Cam felt a band of fear begin to tighten around her chest. She needed to move, to act, to do something. She jumped to her feet. “I’m going for a walk.”
“Outside?” Kate eyed the drop cloth.
“Bathroom—er, privy?”
Kate pointed to the closet/hallway Cam had just left. “To the right. Down the hall. Left at the statue of Mercury. First door on the right. Ring the bell when you finish.”
Cam fled, jogging through the maze of hallways and past Mercury, who not only towered over a grand staircase leading down to an entry hall but was unquestionably a Bernini, which nearly caused her to trip.
A Bernini. Jeez. Lely was wealthy. There was no doubt of that. She whipped out her phone and hustled into the first door on the right. Then she froze. She wasn’t in a privy. She was in a small alcove adjoining a much larger room in which two men’s voices could be heard. One was Lely’s.
“Sir David,” Lely said with impatience, “’tis not a matter of an unfinished portrait. ’Tis a matter of a woman seated in my waiting room who desires to be painted.”
Lely spoke in a low, courtly voice, and Cam decided the undercurrent she’d heard there was Teutonic—a preciseness that gave his words quiet resonance.
She flattened herself against the wall and immediately regretted the movement, which she saw reflected on wall-to-wall mirrors across the room.
But the mirrors also gave her a view of the men’s backs.
The men didn’t move, however, except for Sir David, who shifted under Lely’s obvious displeasure like a child being reprimanded by a teacher.
She tightened the canvas around her and slowed her breathing.
Lely’s clothes were as finely cut as his companion’s, with white silk stockings, low velvet shoes, and gleaming charcoal breeks adorned with crimson ribbon that showed beneath his long frock coat.
As confused and frightened as she was, Cam couldn’t help but feel a small thrill at seeing a painter like Lely in the flesh.
Too often when studying long-dead painters, students were left feeling a distance that didn’t occur with more contemporary artists.
Yet here he was—a handsome, living, breathing, and obviously irritated man.
Beyond the double doors, she could also hear the sounds of industry—voices engaged in conversation, the random movement of feet, the squeak of a chair on wooden floor, the sounds of cloth being torn.
Lely’s studio was a hive of activity, and this room was the quiet eye of a well-oiled and hardworking storm.
All of it, she thought distractedly, her authorial mind turning even as her practical mind was struggling to keep afloat, would create an exceptional scene in a book.
“My relationship with Miss Quinn is at an end,” Sir David said, “and Miss Quinn has been informed of that fact. This appointment should have been canceled weeks ago—”
“But wasn’t.”
Sir David shifted. “Aye, I apologize for that. My secretary has been ill and—”
An older man—a servant—with pale eyes, a shock of white hair, and a well-worn smock, opened the hallway door and looked in. Cam held her breath. The man bowed to Sir David but spoke directly to Peter. “Miss Quinn has been moved to the Red Room, sir.”
“Thank you, Stephen.”
The servant bowed and exited.
Sir David cleared his throat. “I mean to do my duty. Tell her to go to this address.” He handed Peter a card. “She knows it. It is a place where I conduct my business affairs. Desire her to come in a quarter of an hour. My secretary will explain the situation. You needn’t be further discommoded.”
Peter placed the card on a nearby table with a snap that made Cam straighten. “The portrait, then, is canceled?”
“Yes,” Sir David said with a rush of relief. He turned as if an exit were imminent, but Peter readjusted his stance, facing the nobleman head-on, which made his companion shrink.
“As I’m sure you understand,” Lely said carefully, “I do not charge by the hour. I charge by the commission.”
Cam rolled her eyes. Shelter, food, water, air, adoration. Only one thing ranked higher in an artist’s pyramid of needs, and that was cold, hard cash.
Sir David straightened his cuff. “Naturally I have no objection to paying you. My wife’s portrait was eighteen six. I shall offer you half that for Miss Quinn?”
Lely’s lip rose perceptibly, and for an instant Cam wondered if he intended to bloody the man’s nose.
“Keep your money, sir,” he said with manufactured bonhomie. “I shouldn’t be able to live with myself were I to treat a treasured acquaintance so abominably.”
Sir David blinked, wondering with understandable justification if he had just been insulted.
Lely returned the small card as if he were removing offal. “You may settle the details of this arrangement with Stephen.” With a bow, he withdrew, followed, after an audible harrumph, by Sir David.
Cam peeked down the hall and, over Sir David’s head, spotted Lely disappearing into another doorway guarded by a well-fortified desk.
Like painters in her time, painters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often had a secretary or assistant to negotiate arrangements for a commission, freeing the painter to concentrate on his work.
That desk reminded Cam a patron would have to be very rich or very determined to score face-to-face time with that god among men, the artist. She found herself making a mental note to include this in the Van Dyck bio.
She lifted her phone, got into Favorites, and pressed the button for Jeanne.
She held the phone to her ear, waiting for the silence to turn to a ring.
One beat. Two beats. Three beats. Exasperated, she pulled the phone down to look at it and saw “Call Failed.” She checked.
No bars. No signal. No tether at all to the place she’d left. A chill went through her.
Then she remembered Jeanne’s text. Wait a second…
She typed out a quick “U there?” and hit Send.
The green sending bar didn’t budge. No service meant no service for texts, either.
But how could that be? She’d gotten the text from Jeanne, after all.
There must be a signal here. She held up the phone and began to retrace her steps.
What she saw when she turned, however, made her stop.
There, in front of her, was a wardrobe stuffed with gorgeous gowns spilling their skirts like satin waterfalls to the floor.