Chapter 2
Crowns in my purse I have and goods at home,
And so am come abroad to see the world.
September
Alasdair Kerr had been considering going home for years; he lacked only the necessary inducement to finally get on with it.
Ah, he thought. And here it is, with the accuracy of Atalanta’s bow.
He watched the room fall to Julianna within heartbeats of her entrance.
The late afternoon sun swarmed to her with almost religious fervor, cradling her and brightening her reddish-gold hair until it burned.
A dozen or so others had gathered in Robert Daly’s overthought hall, but they may as well have been phantoms beside her earthly beauty.
Even slight, even delicate though she was, there was a weight to her steps that reminded him of a marble statue.
With her pure simplicity, she made the room—grand enough for a prince but furnished by a festooning pretender—seem even more unpleasant.
Julianna was there for the same reason he was—a promise of hidden treasure.
Her eye for art was perhaps even more developed than his, which was why she noticed the small table and raced toward it before realizing Alasdair was already there, silently staking his claim.
“You’re still in London,” she said, her mouth rounding with genuine surprise.
“Hello again, Julianna.”
She curtsied, and he bowed, though the drift of her hair and clothes through the air filled the space around them with her dizzying scent. His expression crusted with ice. Tucking his hands behind his back, he kept his attention firmly on the tiny painted table.
“I thought you would be in the country by now,” she said, airy.
Was that annoyance he detected or regret?
Whatever it was, he felt it, too. All of it and more, pain and frustration and rage, though he wouldn’t let her see it.
The only satisfaction to be had now was in flatly denying her. His time. His attention.
His anger.
“And you in Vienna,” he observed. “Yet, here you are.”
“Here we are. Unless everything is to be my fault.”
Alasdair’s nostrils flared. Across the garish, terrible chamber, Robert Daly bayed with laughter.
He was holding court, fiendish and smug about the gathering and what was on offer; Daly, no doubt leveraging his friendship with the Duke of Kent, had managed to commission George Dawe.
That painting wasn’t for auction today, but it was becoming clear this whole affair was really meant to be about everyone congratulating him over the piece.
Alasdair fussed with his spectacles and fumed over the table, pretending not to be jealous; Dawe was about to go abroad, and nobody knew when he would return to England and make himself available.
“Here we are,” he echoed, ignoring the needling other bit. “For the table.”
“The table,” Julianna agreed with a wistful sigh.
It was a darling object. The artist who had decorated it was obscure, but there was no denying their command of light and shadow.
Clusters of purplish-blue bilberries hid in the enameled corners, so ripe and fresh, the details so expertly plucked out with hints of carmine and grayish green that they looked real enough to pick up and eat.
Curling sprigs of forget-me-nots and violets flirted along the edges.
It was a relief to have found it; he had been all over various auctions and private exhibitions that summer, but none of them produced.
He had very nearly been tempted by a few amateur studies, but then the evening had taken a strange turn, and his view of the work had soured.
But this table! A relief. And it was just the sort of furniture his mother would adore having in her piano room—their piano room—when the family home was rebuilt and all was back in its right place.
He had always wondered what his mother might make of Julianna, his sometime paramour, but now it was clear he would never find out.
Perhaps it was for the best; Lady Edith Kerr preferred demure, pious women, as evidenced by the many she had placed in front of Alasdair in the hope he would marry one.
Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Julianna arch a fine brow in his direction.
“You really want it, don’t you?” she asked, drawing out the word want in such a manner that Alasdair almost flinched at the indecency.
When they were still courting, that sort of thing would have driven him mad.
“You can just say it, you know. I wish you would say it. In fact, if you do, I won’t fight you for it. ”
“I’ll outbid you,” Alasdair told her flatly, his face maintaining its cold mask.
He chanced looking at her and found the sight of her luminosity unexpectedly sickening, like a cream puff crammed in the mouth after one was already stuffed from dinner. She was too much now that he had diminished to so little. Withered. I’ve withered. And yes, it’s all your bloody fault.
Her golden eyes sparkled with emotion, sadness or pity that came too late.
When she frothed up like this, her Bavarian accent thickened her words.
“But you wouldn’t have to. You could have the table for a song.
Nobody else is interested; they just want to see the Dawe, of course.
I am your sole competition, but not if you simply tell me how much you want to have it. ”
Julianna stared at him for a long moment, silently imploring. He would have the table. When he desired a thing, he got it.
Well, except Julianna.
Even after destroying his hopes, here she stood, demanding things he couldn’t give.
His mouth became a fissure in the frosted stone of his face.
“No.”
Julianna stepped away from him, her right hand fluttering nervously over her exposed neck.
All of her was ethereally pretty, but her neck was perhaps her most alluring feature.
He could have just let her have the table, but now pride was involved.
Julianna blinked once, very slowly, then let her hands fall together in a soft loop.
“I don’t know why I expected anything else,” she said, then drifted away from him and back toward her brother, Elias, with whom she had arrived.
The pair approached Robert Daly, probably to discuss the table.
Behind him, centered between two tall windows, was the Dawe portrait everyone was whispering about.
It was an enviably adroit painting of Robert’s wife, the reds so bold they looked like smears of blood over Robert’s shoulder.
Alasdair had met Robert at Cambridge; Robert was affable if domineering then, but a social lighthouse to Alasdair’s floundering skiff.
He had even been the connection that gave Alasdair entry into the Tenebris Circle, an outrageously exclusive club of art afficionados who sold rare pieces only to one another.
Now, between the noise and the boastful Dawe, he was just domineering.
Had they been similar once? Perhaps. But now their differences couldn’t be more evident; Robert needed all eyes on him whenever possible, while Alasdair vastly preferred solitude.
Alasdair liked a good, solid home; Robert wanted to live inside Parisian mille-feuille.
Even the rising portraitist Sir Thomas Lawrence was there that day, dowdy and balding but doing his best, suffering through Robert’s speeches with a pained expression, one that Alasdair was certain matched his own.
Alasdair looked around the hall with glacial impassivity, discovering he felt nothing for anyone in the room, including—increasingly—himself.
Then, he glanced down at the charming painted table, itself a sort of beacon.
I must go home. I must rebuild Clafton.
He waited until Julianna and her brother had concluded their conversation with Robert; she gestured back toward the table, spoke more to Robert, then made a hasty exit afterward.
The room seemed lighter after she had gone, though less lively.
Other women, wives mostly, had sacrificed their afternoons to come.
They hovered by the windows farthest from the Dawe melee, dreaming of places other than Robert Daly’s raffish hall.
He approached Robert as one might an aggravated hornet’s nest: slow steps, vigilant eyes, waiting for the crucial moment when the man stopped to draw breath.
Alasdair politely intervened, offering his respects to Sir Thomas before pulling Robert aside.
“That table in the corner…”
“I knew you would want it,” said Robert, smirking.
He had immense hair, copiously piled, and was sharply dressed, as any true Brummell devotee.
When they had both taken up river swimming at Cambridge, it had slimmed Robert down fashionably but managed to somehow make Alasdair bigger and broader.
Robert’s watery blue eyes flashed. “Your lady wants it also. What am I to do?”
“Please. She isn’t mine,” Alasdair replied, gruff. “But I will have the table.”
“Miss Holzer has already named a price, though you’ll have no trouble matching it.”
“I thought she would stay longer,” said Alasdair, frowning.
“Thought or hoped? She isn’t some uncivilized beast, Alasdair. She wouldn’t dare be seen aggressively bidding, nor aggressively doing anything. She made a polite bid, feel free to recklessly exceed it. Afterward, gift the table to Miss Holzer. That ought to impress her.”
Maybe Julianna ought to do more things passionately, and perhaps that was the bridge that was missing between them. “I told you—she isn’t mine.”
Robert lowered his head and clucked his tongue, uncannily like Alasdair’s own mother. “My good fellow, you ought to have both. A pretty wife to stand beside a pretty table, isn’t that just what every man requires?”
“Two hundred,” said Alasdair.
Robert’s eyes widened. “Pounds?”
Too loud. The guests swarming the portrait of Robert’s wife recoiled while Alasdair flinched.
“Just wrap it carefully, it must survive the trip to Clafton in one piece.”