Chapter 20 #2
“Yes, it’s a lovely dog,” Seraphine soothed her son, smoothing his hair with her hand. “It is only different to the dogs that Fanny draws. As you both know, there are many different types of dog. Fanny has drawn a Dalmatian, I think. Ezra has drawn…”
She looked to Louisa for help in somehow describing the oddly shaped creature on Ezra’s scrap paper with a tail as long as its body and a big smile on its face.
“Well, it’s not a thoroughbred, I don’t think,” Louisa remarked with a smile as she considered the picture, “but some of the friendliest dogs are mongrels.”
“It’s a friendly dog,” Ezra confirmed with a nod, having no idea what a mongrel was. “It’s smiling.”
“So it is,” Seraphine acknowledged, turning back to Louisa again as the children became absorbed once more in their pictures. “Looking at some of my own early efforts, I don’t think I’m in a position to offer very much art criticism at all today.”
Seraphine opened an old sketchbook at a page with some four legged and horned creature that looked something like a demented cow in a cloak.
“If I had not taken the trouble to label this one a unicorn, I do not believe I should have known what I intended by it,” she said.
Louisa giggled.
“You can only have been a little older than Fanny when you drew that,” she observed. “Are those wings, do you think? Or a winter coat?”
“I have no idea! You always were the better artist of the two of us. Just look at that one, Louisa. The detail is impressive, especially as it was all drawn only from the imagination.”
She reached out for a sketch book open at a page with a packed scene including a knight on horseback, a beautiful lady holding out her arms towards him and a dead dragon beside a crowd of cheering peasants.
It had originally been sketched in pencil, with some of the image later filled in with water colors.
“I was much older when I drew this one. It’s a very busy picture, isn’t it?
” Louisa said. “I remember working on it for days and there always seemed to be more to add. Sir Benedict is even carrying a book of poems he found time to write for Lady Elizabeth! The insignia on his shield, the sun shining in the sky, that child pouting to the dragon…”
As she continued to study the picture, Seraphine laughed again before raising her merry eyes to Louisa’s.
“Do you notice anything more significant about this picture now, Louisa?”
“Well, I think the perspective is very out for the size of the dragon, although as they are imaginary beasts…”
“No, forget the dragon. Look at Sir Benedict. What do you see?”
At Seraphine’s instruction, Louisa looked at the broad-shouldered and valiant knight. She had drawn him after his victory against the dragon, still on horseback but with his helmet off and his sword re-sheathed.
Sir Benedict’s thick, dark hair was tousled above his handsome face with its firm jaw and sculpted cheekbones. As he gazed upon Lady Elizabeth, young Louisa had managed to place a hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth.
“Forgetting the armor, does he remind you of anyone?” prodded her cousin and Louisa smartly closed the sketch book, not wanting to admit to herself what was obviously true.
She had once drawn Sir Benedict as a man who looked very much indeed like the Duke of Northwick the first time she had seen him on the drive at Wexford Manor.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Louisa tried to claim but then dissolved into sheepish laughter. “Oh, of course, I do see it. It’s a funny coincidence, I suppose, just like the name.”
“Perhaps your imagination is so powerful that you conjured him up,” jested Seraphine. “Just think, you might have met any man, but you met someone who not only looks like the hero of your favorite book but shares his name.”
“If I had met any other man, I would not be in this predicament,” pointed out Louisa, tears coming to her eyes again.
Her emotions seemed to be up and down all the time at the moment, like the weather on a changeable day in springtime. One moment she was close to laughter and the next to tears.
“My dear Louisa,” Seraphine responded, putting an arm about her shoulders and drawing her into a corner away from the children. “There, take my handkerchief. Is it really that bad?”
“I don’t know,” confessed Louisa. “I only know that I would never have kissed any other man, and then we should not have been discovered as we were and made to marry. You see, when Benedict kisses me, something happens, and I cannot control it…”
Her confession did not seem to shock her cousin in the slightest. Rather, Seraphine smiled a curious little smile, that communicated more approval than disapproval.
“Does he kiss you often, Louisa?” she pressed her cousin.
“We kissed last night, in the library. I didn’t mean to. I only went downstairs for a book, but he was there and then I was in his arms again and I could not help myself. He is nothing like Sir Benedict with Lady Elizabeth. Their love was so chaste and pure. What is wrong with me?”
“Let me get this right, Louisa,” Seraphine spoke again, her smile broadening further. “The man whom you are engaged to marry has kissed you several times and you enjoyed it? Yet this disturbs you?”
Louisa nodded, her cheeks burning.
“Louisa,” sighed Seraphine. “Believe me, marriage is not meant to be chaste, and neither of you would really want that. You will be sharing Benedict’s bed soon enough and will find out well enough for yourself. We will laugh about this in a few weeks time. ”
“Oh!” gasped Louisa, burying her face in her hands at the all-too-exciting thought of finding herself in the Duke of Northwick’s bed. “I cannot even think of it.”
“There is nothing wrong with you at all that you want Benedict to kiss you, Louisa, or to touch you, or even to take you to his bed,” continued her cousin reassuringly.
“But it is nothing like the story,” Louisa repeated her earlier puzzled complaint. “How can I want something that is so far from my dreams? It frightens me, Seraphine.”
“Real life is not a story. Sometimes it is better than that. The next time Benedict kisses you…”
Louisa turned away her face at this look forward, and Seraphine’s assumption that Benedict would soon kiss her again. Her cousin reached out and gently turned her face back.
“Listen, Louisa, for I know far more of these things than you, don’t I?”
Unable to argue this point with someone who had been happily married for six years, Louisa allowed her cousin to continue.
“So, the next time Benedict kisses you, stop worrying about what you should or shouldn’t feel about it, Louisa. Stop fighting yourself and enjoy his kisses.”
Louisa felt herself tremble at this idea, afraid of the consequences of obeying Seraphine’s recommendation.
“But I feel I will be overwhelmed, that I will lose all control,” she admitted.
“Enjoy Benedict’s kisses and what comes afterwards too, for it is truly wonderful, and it is your right,” Seraphine continued to insist. “Do not be afraid, for I am sure he will take care of you. In fact, if Benedict came to your bedroom this very night…”
Here she shrugged and Louisa gasped at the outrageous implication that there would be nothing wrong in letting the Duke of Northwick into her bedroom before the wedding.
“Seraphine!” she exclaimed, her consternation prompting another laugh from her cousin who now slipped an arm through Louisa’s.
“I’ll leave you with that thought, Louisa. Now, the children may stay here with Gertie while we go and dress for our walk.”
Louisa could not argue and let herself be drawn along by Seraphine. She was breathless at the very thought of Benedict opening her bedroom door and stepping inside, a smile on his lips and his blue-green gaze full of that intent that made her body ache and throb so strangely.