Eleven
“If you wish my protection…” Despite a growing fear about her presence here, Cam thought there was something wildly romantic about the phrase, especially accompanied by the earnestness in those brandy-colored eyes.
She leaned against the door, tingling as Peter locked it, and it was with a small smile she pulled the phone from her clutch and checked the display for a signal.
Nothing.
She moved toward the wall closest to the models’ room, reminding herself as she did so that tingling had rarely been a harbinger of good decision making.
Jacket hadn’t offered her protection before he’d dragged her to the ladies’ room that night—in fact, she’d barely gotten him to use protection, if she remembered correctly—but he had whispered to her that the seriously sexy real-estate developer eliciting her opinions of postmodern art and buying her fifteen-dollar martinis that evening was rumored to have started the most virulent strain of genital herpes this side of the Atlantic, which, when you think about it, was about as close to protection as one was likely to get in the modern art world.
She remembered with a smile how the brandy in Peter’s eyes had stirred at her acquiescence.
“Thank you,” he’d said gruffly. “I’ll repay your trust.”
And as much as she’d like to meet the king who had not only known Van Dyck but actually posed for him, she was willing—for a bit, at least—to put her faith in Lely.
“Ah, Peter,” she said. “You are a curious man.”
“Curious?” said a voice behind her. “Upon my word, if you two aren’t fucking by Friday, I’ll be a baboon’s berth mate.”
Cam spun around and nearly dropped the phone. A slim woman in a robin’s-egg blue dressing gown emerged from a neighboring room. She held a shepherd’s hook in one hand.
“I hope you’ve got a comfortable hammock, then,” Cam said, slipping the phone back into her bag. “I am not one to be mastered by impulses.” She checked to see if her pants were on fire.
The woman eyed her as long as she politely could, then added, “I’m Nell, by the way.” She set the hook against the wall.
“I’m Campbell Stratford. Er, Eugenie Stratford. Eugenie Campbell Stratford Post.”
“That’s a mouthful.”
“Call me Cam.”
“Very nice to make your acquaintance, Cam.” She took Cam’s hand and smiled, sprouting dimples.
She had bright pink polish on her fingernails and a personality that filled the room.
“Aren’t you supposed to be locked away?” Cam asked.
“Aye. ’Tis standard procedure when Squintabella arrives. But I suspect poor Stephen thought I was in the dining room and locked that. I finished my eel pie there a quarter hour ago.”
“Squintabella?”
“The Duchess of Portsmouth. Bit of a cockeye, you know. I believe there may be hunchback blood in the family as well.”
In the hall, Cam heard running feet and furiously whispered orders. She examined Nell’s ankles. No wreaths of leaves, but there was that shepherd’s crook… “Are you to be a royal supporter as well?”
Nell laughed. “Only if cockstands are the object in question. I’m the king’s other mistress.”
Cam felt the smack of surprise. This was Nell Gwyn, the spirited young actress with whom Charles dallied for almost a decade and who was the mother of at least a couple of his illegitimate children.
And while Nell’s hair was more of an auburn than the copper of Cam’s, there were enough streaks of red to explain Charles’s attraction.
Nell Gwyn and the king! The bubble of authorial excitement nearly made her clap.
Cam said, “So no posing as the Danish coat of arms for you, then, eh?”
“No. I am the Madonna.” Nell gestured toward the opposite end of the room. There, next to a cushioned chaise, sat a nearly finished painting of Nell, utterly nude, lying on the same chaise, accompanied by a small cherub.
“Madonna,” Cam repeated, “the mother of Jesus?”
“Madonna or Venus. I forget which. Charles changed his mind so often.”
The painting was stunning. As Cam approached the canvas, the flush of Nell’s skin gleamed in warm light, the pillows on which she lay looked as if they would rise like clouds into the sky, and the pale blue dressing gown, the very one she now wore, draped off her shoulders, exposing pale breasts, a curving waist, and a long, slender leg bent at the knee.
Her head was reclined against the pillows, angled slightly as if she were sharing a sly secret with the viewer, and sensuous waves of red-brown hair trailed across her shoulders and onto the white silk.
Cam could almost see the individual strands, feel the lush fabric, smell the perfume on her skin.
Cam saw what Peter saw, and for a long moment she wondered what it would be like to be thus observed.
She also wondered if Peter was in love with Nell.
“It’s beautiful,” Cam said truthfully. It was also mildly shocking.
It wasn’t that artists hadn’t been painting women nude in this century.
They had from time immemorial. What made it shocking was that women of the court—she could hardly say upstanding women as she knew Nell had been a prostitute as well as an actress prior to going to bed with the king—did not pose without clothes.
It was one thing for a woman of the street or the artist’s wife to pose for him.
It was quite another for a woman who expected to maintain a place of honor and position to do it.
This was the same quality that had made Peter’s paintings of the women with a breast exposed so intriguing.
Nell dimpled again. “Peter knows how to make a woman look beautiful.”
Cam stepped back to admire the whole.
The only part unfinished was Nell’s face. It looked as if he had started over at least once and possibly twice. Her eyes, nose, and mouth were no more than ciphers.
A key scratched in the lock, and a young man wearing a leather apron stepped in. “Pardon me, m’um—oh, good afternoon, Miss Gwyn,” he added, his pocked face lighting up.
“Good afternoon, Moseby.”
“Regrets, ladies, but it’ll be my hide if I don’t get this painting stowed. The duchess is in high dudgeon. She wants to know when Mr. Lely will begin her portrait.”
“Advise her not to choose a three-quarter view,” Nell said. “The hump may show.”
Cam stepped out of Moseby’s way as he unfastened the canvas. “I’m getting the impression,” Cam said to Nell, “you’re not an admirer of the duchess.”
“She makes things damned uncomfortable for Peter. She’s figured out Charles likes to have portraits painted of his lovers—and for some reason she thinks that because she’s Catholic she should be the only one.
She’s taken to dropping in unannounced to see what she can sniff out—like one of them Frenchy truffle pigs, upon my word.
Charles just assumes Peter will keep the royal lovers separated and his affairs discreet, and he has a mighty temper, which is why Peter has to go through this ridiculous Merry Andrew show whenever she shows up. ”
Cam shuddered. Her family had been divided into the lions and the lambs.
Anastasia, who took after their father, practically grew fangs and a stinger when she was mad.
Cam, like her brother and mother, approached the world with unwavering calm, and she had had to work hard all her life not to be crushed in the onslaught. She hated the tyranny of temper.
“That doesn’t seem exactly fair.”
Nell laughed. “Fair doesn’t come into it. Charles is like a lava flow. It isn’t that he assumes everyone will get out of his way—he just happens to destroy the ones who don’t.”
“He wouldn’t destroy Peter, surely.” Cam didn’t know much about Lely’s later years. Was it possible he’d lost the favor of the king?
“I heard he nearly chucked him once. There was a misunderstanding over one of Peter’s whores.
The king wanted her. Peter refused. Said he needed her for a painting he was completing that night and suggested one of the other girls might be more in the way of the king’s liking.
It was a reasonable suggestion, and the king is known for giving his bedmates expensive gifts, so I’m certain any of them would have been happy to take her place.
Charles was in one of his Falstaff moods, grinning and playing the host, so he didn’t want to be seen losing his temper.
He agreed to choose another and laughed as if the whole thing had been a joke, but the footman who was there told me Charles didn’t see Peter for a year after that, and half the court stayed away as well out of fear of inviting the king’s displeasure. ”
“Oh dear. Poor Peter.”
Nell grabbed a plum from a bowl of fruit, wiped it on her gown, and sighed.
“I’ve painted Charles to be a positive Old Nick, I know, but he’s a rattlin’ good cove when it comes to fun, and I do think you’d like him if you met him, but I guess Peter has other ideas.
” She gave Cam a curious smile and bit into the purple flesh.
“Has anyone happened to mention you’re practically the twin of his lover? ”
Cam started. “Charles’s?”
“Peter’s. That is, before old Pauly got his arms around her.”
The young man stole a look at Cam, then hoisted the painting free and hurried to the door. “Sorry for the intrusion.” As he bounded into the hall, Nell said, “You’ll want to make sure—”
A murderous scream exploded in the air.
“—she’s not in the hall. Oh no! Poor Peter!”
“That’s Nell in that painting!” a Frenchwoman cried. “Nell!”
Then men’s voices—Peter’s and what Cam assumed to be the king’s—joined in with urgent reassurances.
The woman on the canvas, Peter explained, was the mistress of a Spanish count.
She wasn’t Nell. Couldn’t possibly be Nell.
Why, the hair was all wrong, as anyone could see.
Nell’s was much darker. But the duchess would have none of it.
“She’s here, and I’ll find her. That irritating little beetch!”
The last words sent a bolt of fury through Cam.
Of the dozens of painters in the art book on , she’d managed to find the only one with the Restoration equivalent of Anastasia as a client.
There was only one way to deal with people like that.
She grabbed Nell’s arm and dragged her toward the storage room. “Hide.”