Chapter 7 Painting
When Jamie woke again, he felt much more normal.
Very thirsty, but that was easily corrected.
His head still pounded, but nothing was spinning and he was tolerably sure that, so long as he kept away from food for a while, his stomach would not rebel.
He dressed rather slowly, found his spare spectacles and went downstairs.
Breakfast was long over, so he went straight to the study and unlocked the box on his desk where a neat pile of letters awaited him.
No one else was there, fortunately, so he rang for some coffee and began mechanically opening the letters.
His mind, sluggish as it was that day, refused to focus on such matters.
He could think only of Georgie— And that was another effect of the brandy, he supposed.
Somehow during the night they had gone from the polite ‘Mr Hammond’ and ‘Mrs Hastings’ to Christian name terms. Well, that was appropriate, since they had ended up in bed together.
He assumed they had both been in bed at some point, but he could not remember it at all.
He had hazy memories of sitting on the floor with the brandy bottle between them, and then…
nothing until he woke in the middle of the night.
He could hardly believe it! He, James Hammond, the most respectable and timid of the duke’s household, had seduced a virtuous widow.
What on earth had he been thinking? He had not been thinking at all, of course.
He had heard of men who stepped off the path of righteousness and then claimed it was the drink, but he never, ever supposed that he would one day be of their number.
What a fool he was! He groaned, and laid his head on his arms.
Pyott came in and Jamie had to force himself to behave normally. Fortunately, Pyott liked the sound of his own voice too well to notice that Jamie was unusually subdued, and after he had recounted some stable gossip, he took his own letters and went away again.
It was sometime later when the door opened again, so softly that he might not have noticed it if he had not been waiting for it.
She slipped in, looking rather sheepish, glancing around the room quickly, as if to reassure herself that they were alone.
“How are you?” he said quietly.
With a low chuckle, she said, “Better than I was! Heavens, I was so sick. Remind me never to drink so much brandy again.”
She reached into her reticule and pulled out his spectacles.
“They’d got kicked under the bed,” she said, with a sudden smile.
“At least you have a spare pair. I found a stocking of yours, too, if you have somewhere to stow it safely out of sight. Oh, and the empty brandy bottle! I have locked it away so the maids won’t see it when they come in to clean but—”
“I can deal with that,” he said hastily. “There is a peculiar blue vase with handles on the table at the top of the stairs. If you leave it in there, I shall dispose of it. Mrs Hastings, I—”
She laughed, suddenly. “No, no! We really don’t need to be formal, not after last night.”
“Georgie, then,” he said, “I cannot apologise sufficiently—”
“And none of that, either,” she said firmly. “We both drank too much brandy, so let’s simply say that we both went a little bit insane and leave it at that.”
“But I cannot!” he burst out.
“You must,” she said, sitting down across the desk from him. “What’s done is done.”
“But that is precisely the point! What is done? Did we—? I mean, I suppose we must have, but… did we? Because I cannot remember a thing about it.”
“Neither can I, but I assume we must have, since we ended up in bed.”
“Then we must marry!” he cried.
She burst out laughing. “Oh, Jamie! You’re the sweetest man, but truly, there’s no need for this. I’m not some innocent maiden who’s been despoiled, you know. I’m a married woman, and whatever happened, it’s no great tragedy.”
That struck him as exquisitely funny. “But it is! It is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions!”
“How so?” She was still laughing.
He sighed, and took his spectacles off to polish them. “For the first time in my life, I was stark naked in bed with a woman, and I remember nothing of it. Not a thing.”
But the laughter died inside him almost at once, for if he could not remember the pleasure, he could not remember anything else, either. Had he hurt her… or, worse, had he forced her? But how could he even ask?
She laughed again. “Oh, yes, that is a tragedy. I’m disappointed that I can’t remember anything, either. Perhaps we should repeat the exercise tonight, but omitting the brandy this time.”
He jumped up, too agitated to sit still, and paced across the room and back. “How can you speak of it so lightly? This is serious — what if you find yourself with child?”
“It took me a full six months to conceive with Henry, despite his enthusiastic efforts in that direction, so I think it unlikely,” she said, more seriously.
“Jamie, won’t you sit down?” When he did, she reached across the desk to take his hand.
“I’m sorry you’re upset about this, but you’ll come to laugh about it in time.
We foolishly drank too much and behaved rather badly, but no one knows, our reputations are unscathed and there’s no harm done.
I hope we can still be friends, despite this. ”
“Of course,” he said dully, but he could not quite see how they could go on as if nothing had happened. Especially when he had no idea what precisely had happened.
***
Lance liked Simon Payne. The fellow was a little strange, as all architects were — all those straight lines!
But he had some skill with the pencil, and his designs for the proposed orangery and the bridge connecting it to the house were exquisite, both in harmony with the older building but also thrillingly modern.
He had shown Payne the cloud spider on the ceiling of his room, and Payne had laughed and agreed that it was a wretched piece of work, and had even petitioned the duke for it to be repainted.
The duke would not hear of it, since it had been executed by a famous artist, so he said, although the name was not one familiar to Lance.
The initial sketches of the heir’s wife had been completed, a pose agreed, to match the one of her great-aunt, beside whom the new portrait would hang, and Lance set up his easel in the library.
He had an ancient but very beautiful rug that caught any drips of paint, and he wore a pair of slippers embroidered by his eldest sister when she was thirteen or so.
She had made them for their father, but Sir Bradley was not a man comfortable wearing embroidered slippers, so Lance had commandeered them for use while painting.
He wore a smock to protect his clothes, but he made sure it was of the finest lawn, and employed a new one for each commission, so that it began life pristine and gradually acquired a patina of paint streaks and splashes.
Then, when he was finished, it would be ceremoniously burnt.
As was usual, his first few sittings were accompanied by a gaggle of the ladies, curious to watch him at work.
He never minded that. He was very well aware that the duke was not paying him merely for a finished portrait.
There was a need to provide a memorable experience for the onlookers, too, and if that helped to cement his reputation, that was all to the good.
So he painted and answered their questions patiently and entertained them with discreet little stories of his previous sitters that might amuse them.
He never mentioned names, for that would be excessively bad ton, but he would describe each as ‘cousin to a duke’ or ‘the niece of a famous general’, for it was necessary that his audience appreciated the circles in which he moved.
Not a word of the Princess Amelia, however.
If they asked about his most famous subject, he told them gravely that he could say nothing about her.
One had to have some discretion in dealing with royal personages.
After a few days, when the initial novelty had worn off, most of his audience had drifted away to more interesting activities than watching a man daubing paint onto a canvas.
It was a large canvas, and progress was slow, so they soon realised that they need only pass by every few days to keep themselves up to date.
The sitter was never alone, however, for one or other of the other ladies sat nearby with a piece of needlework or a book, talking to her and fetching her anything she wanted.
There was one lady who preferred to sit on Lance’s side of the canvas, watching every brushstroke. The duchess came almost every day for at least some part of the session, sitting quietly on a chair just behind him, not speaking, simply observing.
One day, the sitter and her companion had been released from their posts, and even the girl who sat constantly in a chair beside the fire with a pile of books within reach had gone elsewhere.
Lance was painstakingly working on the tricky matter of the hem that frothed around the sitter’s feet, when he realised that the duchess was still there, still silently watching him.
“What do you think of it?” he said, wiping his brush and laying it down.
“I do not know enough about art to comment,” she said, her voice soft.
“Does it look realistic?”
“Oh yes, what you have done so far. Do you always leave the face until last?”
“Sometimes. For some subjects, the face is the most interesting part, so I like to do it early, but in this case—”
“But she is so beautiful!” the duchess cried. “That must be interesting, surely?”
He whisked off his smock so that he could sit beside her.
“Perfection of form is not so interesting to me as the little imperfections that mar the surface of most of us, and the smoothness of youth is less appealing than age — so much history written in wrinkles and age spots. And the eyes! I find eyes utterly fascinating.”