Five #2
Cam scanned her memory banks. Surely there had been some woman somewhere who’d been shared by Van Dyck and another artist. Unfortunately most of Cam’s research had been about the man and his work.
Sure, there had been the various bits of information about his life, but Cam had used that to flesh out the story of his painting.
The sources she’d found had been somewhat dry regurgitations of where he studied and how he progressed to being the chosen painter of Charles I.
If she was going to sex this puppy up, she needed something else.
She was just starting to clear a path to her keyboard when her cell phone rang.
She dug it out of her purse and checked the display.
It was Joe. She hit the answer button. “How’s my favorite sibling? ”
“Gee, I’d feel more flattered if I didn’t know my only competition was Stacy.”
“That’s Anastasia to you, pal.”
“You guys still going strong?”
“You know I can’t get enough. What are you up to?” she asked lightly.
Joe had lost his wife and son in a car accident ten months earlier. It would be a long time before she’d feel him living inside their conversations again.
“You know. Same old. I just wanted to tell you I’m making my reservations for Christmas—”
“Oh, you’re coming up!” she cried happily and instantly regretted it. The accident had happened shortly after the holidays.
“Yeah, I want to do it. I-I can’t promise you a lot of Christmas spirit—”
“God, if you can just promise to sit between me and Stacy at dinner, that’ll be holiday enough.”
He laughed. “I’m looking forward to it.”
“Me too.”
“Gotta run.”
“Yeah.” His conversations were often cut short by unexpected short waves of tears, and Cam had grown used to allowing it to pass without comment. “Love you. Bye.”
She clicked the phone and cursed the Fates for punishing such a great guy.
“Is he okay?” Jeanne asked.
Cam shrugged. “The same. It’ll be a while, I guess.”
She dropped the phone in her clutch and checked to see if she still had that half of a Mounds bar left over from breakfast yesterday. Nope. Oh boy. Not a good sign. No wonder those Spanx were getting tighter. With a sigh, she dropped the bag on her desk.
She pushed the folders off her keyboard, where she found her smashed hot dog.
Sighing, she tossed it in the wastebasket.
Then she pushed aside her tubes of paint and the little, half-finished still life of the stapler and pencil cup she’d work on when she wanted to be reminded that she’d once studied to be a painter, and called up .
She hated to resort to mass-market research, but if she found something that offered a meaty tidbit, she could count on having the book in her hand by tomorrow. If she ordered it from the library, it might take weeks.
She typed “Anthony Van Dyck” into the search box and got 241 results. Sighing, she began to page through. Most she’d seen before and either passed on or read. On the eighth page something caught her eye.
Inside the Artist’s Studio: A Glimpse into the Personal Lives of the Greatest European Painters of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.
Well, that certainly had an interesting ring to it.
Cam clicked to open it and read the description.
There was no review from Publishers Weekly, which surprised her, since they were usually all over that stuff, but the first reader review—the only reader review—was eye-opening.
“Everything I wanted to know about my favorites. Reads like Jansen’s History of Art meets Sex and the City. Felt like I was there. Hot, hot, hot.” From a “Madame K” in Sofia, Bulgaria.
This will definitely be worth the overnight delivery charge.
Cam added it to her cart. Her computer made a loud, angry buzz, like she’d given the wrong answer in Jeopardy! The screen didn’t change. Her cart was still empty.
Hm.
She tried again and got the same angry buzz. On the third try, Jeanne looked up.
“Something I can help you with there?”
“No.” Cam tried two more times with no change in outcome.
She tried exiting the screen and returning.
No luck. She tried another book site, but they didn’t have it listed.
She went to the website of her local library and couldn’t find it there, either.
She even tried the biggest used-book site she knew. No go.
Crap!
This book seemed like the answer to her prayers. She tapped her fingers. Well, there was a “Look Inside!” feature. With a little luck and a hell of a lot of patience, she might be able to find what she needed.
Cam ran her mouse over the cover of the book and the image of the book changed.
Now, that’s a little weird.
What had been a bland detail of a Rembrandt painting became a full portrait of a red-haired woman in a gorgeous olive satin frock. Cam looked closer. If she didn’t know better, she’d almost have to say the woman looked like, well, her.
“Wow.”
“What?” Jeanne asked.
“Nothing.”
Cam didn’t recognize the painting, which didn’t surprise her, though she certainly recognized the artist. It was a Peter Lely, a minor painter of the late-seventeenth century—interestingly, the successor to Van Dyck as royal portraitist to the English court—whom the professors in grad school had only touched on.
She had to admit, though, the painting—what she could see of it—was exquisite.
Like Van Dyck, Lely had had a way of rendering fabric that made it practically jump off the canvas.
But there was something else about Lely that stuck in her head.
What was it? Something that made him a bit out of the ordinary in the art world.
She went to the bookcase and scanned the volumes of art books, looking for the exhibit catalog. And there it was. It had been in the office when she moved in. Painted Ladies: Women at the Court of Charles II. She pulled the book off the shelf and instantly gasped.
On the cover was a portrait by Lely. She recognized it now, had seen the original at the Yale Center for British Art a few years back.
The young woman, a courtier of some sort, face framed in light auburn ringlets, gazed at Lely with a look of relaxed and bemused understanding, as if she’d shared her innermost secrets with him and knew they’d be safe.
Her frock, if one could call it that, was rendered in a stunning pumpkin silk that draped in gleaming folds so realistic Cam could almost hear the rustle.
In the woman’s left hand was a pale peony, open and tinged with pink.
She held it toward the viewer. But the most eye-catching part of the portrait was the woman’s porcelain white breast, curving upward to a firm rose nipple that sat unashamedly above the neckline of the silk.
Cam put a hand to her cheek. “Wow.”
“You’ve been using that word a lot,” Jeanne observed.
Taken as a whole, the portrait packed a hell of a punch.
A woman of the court, whose hair, makeup, and clothes suggested a position of wealth and importance, yet who gazed upon her portraitist with unveiled sensuality, and who, more important, let her portraitist gaze upon her in dishabille.
Even in the licentious court of Charles II, this would have excited the attention of viewers—heck, Cam’s own belly was tingling.
And yet the portrait was not pornographic or leering in any way.
It was a masterfully executed study of classic beauty: the proportions of the woman’s face, the gleam of her skin, the delicacy of the blossom, the living, moving silk.
But it was something beyond mere craft that provoked Cam’s admiration.
It was the trust the artist had built with his subject and the obvious appreciation with which he had portrayed the woman’s assurance.
Cam found herself wondering with some intensity what sort of man was capable of seeing a woman like that.
“Look at this,” she said and turned the book toward Jeanne.
Jeanne’s head tilted slowly. “Wow.”
“I told you. It’s by Peter Lely.”
“Was he her lover?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.”
“Look at the way she looks at him. I mean, jeez. It’s like they just…”
Cam nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“Her eyes, that smile.”
“And let’s not forget that breast. Amazing, isn’t it?”
“But what sort of woman…”
“Peels the papaya? Yeah, I don’t know. A damned at-ease one, I guess.” Cam opened the book and began to page through it. “Holy moly. There’s more.”
Lely’s women didn’t all have a breast on display, though a decent—indecent?—proportion of them did. But every one of them beheld their portraitist with the same worldly, self-assured, half-lidded gaze.
Jeanne squeezed in next to her. “Did he do all of them?”
“Probably,” Cam said. Painters generally considered themselves the absolute center not only of their own universe, but everyone else’s as well.
She had to admit, though, this was like thinking-women’s porn—being adored from across the room by a man, master at his art, who saw you, fat or thin, beautiful or plain, as the most stunning, empowered, attractive woman on Earth. “He’s Jake Ryan,” Cam said.
“Pardon?”
“Jake Ryan, the hero of Sixteen Candles. The man who falls for Samantha Baker even though she isn’t cheerleader beautiful. Lely is the man who loves the woman posing for him for what’s on the inside.”
Jeanne flipped a page and found a woman with both breasts on display. “That’s what’s on the inside?”
“But look at her. Look at the way he sees her. And look at the way she looks at him in return.” Cam felt her breath quicken. Her eyes met Jeanne’s.
Jeanne said, “I’m gettin’ a little—”
“Yeah, me too.”