Forty-one
“What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?” Cam said to Peter.
Chaos had exploded in the gallery. The reporter reeled his story into the phone at double speed, like he was afraid it might slip away, while Ball, who knew how much the directorship meant to her and the deleterious effect this story would have on her chances, essayed a series of urgent, low-toned, and undoubtedly fruitless pleas as to why the story, or at least the revelation that the subject of the paintings was Campbell Stratford, should be buried.
Three art collector types trooped in on the heels of Ball’s wife, who could be heard saying, “…It’s absolutely the Mount Everest of public fornications.
” They were followed by a server carrying a tray of coffee and pastries who called, “Careful, Natasha, careful,” as she tried not to trip over the family dog, and Natasha herself, who in true Labrador fashion bounded among the humans with a mouthful of a plush woodpecker toy as if she were the only creature on Earth.
“Painting is what I do,” Peter said irritably.
“It’s my livelihood, you may recall.” He wore a suit the color of midnight, a pale blue shirt open at the neck, and a meticulously groomed three-day growth of beard that brought to mind an older Clive Owen.
His hair had been cut short, bringing out the curl, and the dog made such a beeline for him one would have thought he had a pork chop in his pocket.
Dogs, she thought philosophically, should be taught not to reward the wicked.
“That,” she said, pointing to the cyclorama of embarrassment that surrounded them, “is not your livelihood.” She began a silent list of the people to whom she’d have to explain this horror—a list that began with her mother and Lamont Packard and ended with Rusty the maintenance man and the nice old lady at the dry cleaners. “Nor, might I add, is it the truth.”
“Which part?” Peter crouched to offer a vigorous two-handed scratch to Natasha, who dropped the woodpecker devotedly at his feet.
Cam glanced at each unexpurgated vignette, looking for the one that would prove him a liar, but at each detail a blurred memory of the evening they’d shared sharpened into embarrassing focus.
And yet the details together gave the impression of a much different liaison than had occurred.
Why, the title alone suggested secret meetings and a long, clandestine affair—the sort, she thought with a bitter shake of her head, she had actually wanted to share with him once.
But there was no one detail to which she could point and say, “That did not occur.”
Peter scooped up the bird and offered Natasha the other end. “Aye?”
Then it struck her. She turned, victorious. “I was dressed when we did it!”
The reporter stopped talking, the maid sloshed coffee onto the Limoges platter, and one of the collectors, a slight man with a Mahatma Gandhi face and Lilly Pulitzer trousers, rubbed his hands together and said, “Now, that’s what I call provenance.”
Peter looked up from the tug-of-war in which he was engaged and said to Cam under his breath, “I suggest you stop talking about it. You’re doing yourself no favors.”
“Stop talking about it? Stop talking about it?! I’ll spend the rest of my life having to talk about this. How could you have done this to me?”
Peter let go of the woodpecker. He took Cam’s elbow and guided her into a small alcove off the gallery.
“I didn’t do this to you,” he whispered fiercely. “If you’ll recall, I was chivalrously silent on the matter of my muse. You’re the one who revealed yourself. I had no intention—”
“No intention, my ass,” she said and caught Mahatma whipping around to see what part of the painting she was referring to now. “Fiction. Those paintings are fiction.”
“‘All art is fiction,’ someone told me once. ‘Mine more than most.’”
Cam growled. “If you think for one minute this is going to stop me from writing my book, you’re mistaken. It only makes finding the ending a little easier.”
“The ending?” Peter’s eyes flashed. “What ending do you mean?”
Suddenly the alcove felt far smaller than its eight-by-eight area. She crossed her arms. “I know all about Ursula.”
“Do you?”
“Yes,” she said quickly, feeling the intensity of his gaze, “I do.”
“And?”
“It’s not a secret, Peter.” She heard the tone of researcher rise defensively in her voice.
“There is very little written about your personal life. Because you’re a painter of less reputation than Van Dyck or Vermeer, the record you have left behind is almost strictly about your work, a fact I imagine you’ll be glad to hear.
” He hadn’t been glad to hear “less reputation,” she noted, and had made a gratifying wince.
“Nonetheless, you left behind several portraits of Ursula, including,” she added, hoping her voice did not crack, “one entitled Lady Lely.”
The muscles in his jaw flexed, and his eyes took on the color of molten iron.
So, it really was true, she thought, feeling the last brutal slap of betrayal.
She didn’t need a marriage record. The look in his eyes was all the proof she needed.
Ursula might have abandoned him, but he had been left not just bitter, but bitter and married, and for whatever sins Cam might have forgiven Peter, she would not forgive him for drawing her into infidelity without her acknowledged consent.
“There is one entitled Lady Lely, another Ursula, and another,” she went on, “in which you are so enamored of your wife, you have painted her four times in one painting—the maiden, the Madonna, the muse, and the whore.”
The last word was a blow, and he seemed to double in bulk.
“And what did you make of this?” His words were as sharp as blades.
“You mean other than the fact that you lied to me?”
“Aye. Other than that.”
“What I made of it is a story—and a damned fine one, I might add. I was able to lay out a classic, Peter, a classic. Wealthy painter meets woman of the street. He falls for her face—the Cupid’s-bow mouth, the wide, childlike eyes, the porcelain skin—but he falls for her body too.
” Cam thought of the slim, high-breasted form, so unlike her own, to which Peter had paid homage on canvas and undoubtedly in his bed, and hated herself for the black jealousy that poured into her heart.
“He saves her, he marries her, and, in his greatest ode to her, he paints her four times, surrounded by the cherubim of heaven, so great is his love for her.”
“They were not cherubim.”
She heard a note in his voice that was not there before, but his face was still as cold and hard as steel. She wondered what it would take to break that damnable reserve.
“But his ego is too great,” she went on. “Samuel Pepys, a chronicler of the time, calls him ‘a mighty proud man’—”
“Bounding little catchfart.”
“—and having won his prize, the painter tires of it and begins to pursue the women of the court, whoever warms his posing chaise, until brokenhearted and cast aside, Ursula, the girl he raised from the streets to the rank of Lady Lely, finds herself falling for—”
“Stop,” Peter cried. “She was not my wife.”
He said it with such a look of pained sorrow, Cam hesitated.
“I know you’re doing this because you’re hurt,” he said, “and I’m sorry. But you must stop. She was not my wife. I never married her.”
Cam looked into his haunted eyes and saw the desperation there. “The way I see it,” she said slowly, “either you’re lying or you’re sacrificing her name to avoid being called a liar. Either way, Ursula would not be proud.”
“You’re not fit to speak her name.” He was white-faced with anger. “And you’re certainly not fit to lecture anyone on the truth.”
The rebuke was too much. She brought her hand across his cheek, a gratifying crack that finally broke his infuriating calm.
Like a tempest unleashed, he took her by the wrists and kissed her, a bruising, searching kiss, and her body betrayed her, telling him her feelings hadn’t changed.
When he released her, leaving his salty-sweet taste on her tongue and his crisp scent in her head, she saw him holding something. It was her ring still on its chain—the ring Jacket had given her—and she realized her shirt was agape.
“Perhaps,” he said, still breathing like a runner, “when we write the summary of that fateful night, you’ll consider the possibility that not every lie told then was mine.”
He opened his hand and the chain fell back against her skin.
The reporter stuck his head around the corner and cleared his throat. “I’d like to ask you a few questions,” he said in Peter’s direction.
“Nothing,” Peter said without turning. “I have nothing to say.”
The reporter looked at Cam. “Would you like to—”
“No comment.”
“Yep, that’s about what I expected.”