Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
He would not be working with her to design a theater, of course.
He would not be doing anything with Miss Cerys Van Der Welle Evans.
He must remember she had shown herself from their first meeting to be one of those arrogant and over-confident young women who assumed her taste and opinions were superior, and therefore everyone about her must bow to her wishes.
She said she’d grown up in an abbey. Her family was wealthy then, and old, if they’d taken over one of the religious houses stripped from the Church during the Reformation and granted to favorites of Henry VIII.
She was a spoiled, willful little princess who had never gone without a single comfort, never been deprived of a toy in her life.
Well, she would be deprived the pleasure of toying with him.
She had liked his library, though. And she had praised his designs for his house.
That was not the point. Having been hounded out of the study by her supremely distracting presence, Dante took refuge in the room he’d been allotted for his bedchamber and tossed his sketchbook onto the table.
He sorted through the drawer to find the old papers, pencil marks erased, that he kept for scraps.
Parchment was costly, and an architect must be thrifty.
He pulled a chair to the window, pushed it open to admit air and light, and fell to making sketches.
He entered the reverie almost at once. This was what he loved: creating beauty out of thin air.
It was almost a kind of ease, to give vent to the images pressed in his head.
Every word the minx spoke had charged something in him, like lighting a fuse that led to a firework.
Her theater would combine classical elegance with modern convenience.
He would take the old patterns and articulate them in a new way.
He would create a showcase worthy of her beauty, and—
Dante put down his pencil and stared at the sketches that had emerged.
There was the front of a theater, built like a Roman temple, with the pediment and columns and the decorated frieze.
There was the spacious curve inside, with tiered balconies that gave every member of the audience an obstructed view of the stage.
Boxes placed so conversations and chatter wouldn’t overpower the actors.
The whole offered a sense of intimate grandeur, of elegance and inspiration that still had its roots in the earth, in the tragedy and comedy and absurdity of human experience.
Filled with the same kind of wisdom he thought he detected in the eyes of the little minx, for all her youth.
And there in the margins, from every angle, profile, three-quarters, and staring straight at him as if she might peer through his eyes into his soul, was the minx.
He’d sketched her half a dozen times in a variety of expressions: the glower she’d thrown at him at Thompson’s baths.
The look of wonderment that softened her face as she regarded the proportions of the library.
The amusement, curiosity, and irritation that animated her features when conversing with him.
Devil take it, she’d burrowed into his head and infected his imagination. Dante crumpled the papers in his hand.
His father had always said Dante shouldn’t draw figures.
Andrea had been encouraged by his son’s early readiness to take up the pencil, the crayon, the bit of charcoal.
He’d coached and chided, tried to confer everything he knew all at once—and perhaps too soon—on the growing boy.
And his father, a gifted sculptor to whom the human form came naturally, as if a language he was born knowing, had cried with dismay, again and again, at each halting effort that emerged from Dante’s hand.
By the time Dante was old enough to begin the first stages of his apprenticeship, he knew not to show his father the clumsy hands, the disproportionate features, the awkward bodies that emerged from his pen.
Instead he turned to drawing buildings, finding a soothing coherency in the rules of balance and symmetry and simple engineering that explained how a structure came together.
Andrea kept to his studio, grumbling that he had no son to take on his work, and Dante learned everything he could about architecture, earning his own way, finding his own mentors, following in the train of lordlings traveling abroad, and staying in the great Continental centers of art and culture for as long as he could afford to.
Dante had been in Florence when his father died while installing a gallery of classically inspired statures for some Scottish lord.
The dutiful son, he had come home to take charge of the family, discharging his father’s debts, finding his own commissions, looking for ways to bring stability at last to the lives of his mother and sisters.
Looking still for ways to emerge from the shadow of others and make a name for himself.
He would not be distracted in his efforts by a woman. Not again.
A scratch at the door surprised him, and Dante shoved the rough scraps between the pages of his folio. “Enter.”
Andover strolled in, tapping his riding crop against a leg encased in leather breeches. He looked about the room as if trying to detect what personal effects Dante had installed. There were none.
“Gotten the theater folk settled, have you? Much obliged to you for staying here to do the pretty for me.”
“It is no matter,” Dante said. He’d not mention the little harpy with the cloud of dark hair had turned up her nose again, treating him like the staff instead of a fellow lodger. “How long do you intend to keep them?”
“Long enough to be friendly. They’ve a need, and I’ve the space. Besides.” Andover winked. “Can’t leave the pretty one without a roof over her head, can we? That’un needs someone wiser to look after her.”
“Whom do you mean?” Dante asked, keeping his voice bland and free of the sudden rage that spiked within him. “I saw several females among them.” There was only one of the troupe he could be referencing.
Andover chuckled and strolled about the room, tapping his crop in rhythm with his steps. “I do hope they won’t cut up your peace too badly. Mama is depending on you to lay out her gardens. She’s persuaded only you can arrange things exactly as she likes them.”
“I shall do my best, though I have not laid out many gardens. There may be someone more suited for the task.”
Andover shrugged and strolled to the window to peer out. “She wanted you. Said you’ve got the eye.” He made a face. “And what Mama requests, Mama receives. The way of the world, no?”
“I suppose,” Dante answered. What he supposed was that Andover, heir to an earl, must be another who had been granted everything he wished from the moment of his birth. He would simply assume that was how the world worked.
But no, Dante recalled, Andover had not been born to the title.
He’d been born the second son of a man who was an officer in the Foot Guards at the time.
Capricious Fate had made a brigadier general an earl, and then Fate and a hunting accident had snuffed out the life of Charles Howard and left Thomas the only son standing.
The new elevation had made him worthy of the Baron Sherborne’s daughter, Dutton’s sister.
And everything his parents built, Andover had an interest in, as the man who would inherit. Little wonder he gazed out the window at the rolling green beyond, knowing someday this would all be his.
“It’ll be quite the party at dinner tonight.
” Andover left the window and made another turn about the room, which was not large, but felt spacious thanks to Dante’s careful design.
“Ran into some new visitors when we called at the Great House. Lady said she’s a friend of yours, so I invited her directly.
” He made another face. “Have to trot out Cousin Diana to be my hostess at table. Suppose I ought to call my sister up from Malmesbury, with all the company we have?”
“I would think the theater group should chaperone themselves.” Certainly someone should take charge of the harpy. She had a tendency to poke her beak into places that were none of her business.
Andover winked. “In particular the little chough, aye? Wouldn’t want aught to befall such a pretty bird.”
Dante set his teeth together. This was the second time Andover had cast out a broad hint regarding Cerys. “I suspect that Miss Evans can look out for herself, should anyone attempt to meddle with her. But I don’t know who would make the attempt, unless he wants the little cat to bite him.”
“So that’s the way of it.” Andover regarded Dante with a level look, then bobbed his head once, as if deciding something. “Dinner, then. Turn yourself out well. Maybe this former friend of yours will prove amusing.”
Dante nodded curtly, hating that Andover should be looking out for him like some self-appointed patron of the arts.
The viscount might not have been born to the nobility, but he’d adopted with ease the ancient sense of noblesse oblige.
Dante could make his own way in the world, thank you very much.
He’d been looking after himself since he was old enough to cast plaster, with his father away so often currying favor or attending to a commission and his mother absorbed with looking after the girls, who’d always seemed to need so much more than Dante did.
He pushed the little harpy out of his mind as he donned his white waistcoat and tied his neckcloth. She had a nerve, eavesdropping on his conversations. A gently bred girl ought to have made her presence known the instant a gentleman entered the room.