Twelve
Peter’s heart sank as he hurried after the duchess.
Around him, apprentices were running like rats before a flood, the king was alternately arguing and soothing, Stephen was quietly locking doors as if the horse hadn’t already jumped the stile, and even Mertons was rushing about trying to reassure Peter’s bewildered patrons, but all Peter could think about was that if Charles lost his temper over this, as he rightfully ought, Peter would never get his paper signed.
And that paper must be signed. He owed it to Ursula.
“Your Grace, please,” Peter implored.
“I will not hear it,” the duchess snapped. “You conspire with heem.”
Peter was a Dutchman, but he loved the English and had long ago acquired the disdain they nursed for their reckless, power-hungry French neighbors across the sea.
“Never, Your Grace, never,” Peter said. “Why, I should rather consign my soul to the fires of hell than lie to you. You are welcome to look anywhere you please.”
She paused. “I am?”
Peter looked at Stephen, who gave him a small nod. Peter dropped a deep, courtly bow in acquiescence and hoped Stephen was surer about this than he had been about the painting. If Nell was found anywhere in a five-mile radius, the king—and therefore, Peter—would have the devil to pay.
The duchess flung open the first door she found, and a half dozen of his newest apprentices, already keenly aware of the maelstrom engulfing the studio, gripped their brushes, unsure what new terrors might lie ahead.
With an aggrieved huff, the duchess spun around, clipping the closest easel with her skirt and causing the owner to drop his palette. She swept back into the hall and tried another door, only to find a closet filled with pots of painting supplies.
The next door was the dining room, and Peter’s heart was in his throat. Nell would certainly be smart enough to hide if she had heard the duchess. But had she heard?
The duchess jiggled the knob and turned with a triumphant “Locked!”
Peter already had the key on his outstretched palm.
She grabbed it and jammed it into the lock.
An instant later, the door opened onto the empty but exquisite room, decorated in shades of turquoise and brown in the style of the Turks, with lacework brass lamps, minaret centerpieces, and tufted, tasseled ottomans instead of the usual chairs.
It had been the only room of his home accessible through the studio, laid out by the architect to extend like an arm from the town house next door, where he and Ursula had lived, in order to facilitate the dinners he’d been expected to provide his patrons.
Its contents, from the rubbed teak table inlaid with bits of mirror and lapis to the solid silver, hand-chased drawer pulls, had been chosen by her.
Peter had shuttered the town house after her death, and though Stephen had insisted in keeping this room tidy and polished, Peter himself never entered it and even now felt the sharp stab of sorrow that overtook him whenever he saw such a reminder of his former life.
But his heart lifted as the duchess gasped. Even she appreciated the sheer delight of Ursula’s decoration. Stephen’s furtive glance toward the sideboard, however, the only possible place for Nell to hide, and his resultant look of concern worried Peter.
“Where is she?” Peter whispered fiercely.
“I don’t know! Oh, Lord, I don’t know.”
Charles, who had witnessed this exchange, gave Peter a warning glance. Peter in turn gave Stephen a glare that suggested Nell had better be found and rehidden if Stephen were to have the slightest hope of keeping his position. Stephen hurried off.
“Here,” the duchess demanded. “Open this one.”
It was the door to his studio.
“Let me ensure there is no sharp glass or metal lying about. This is a room used for—”
“Open it! Open it now!”
Peter bent reluctantly and opened the door.
The duchess barged by him. “There she is!”
Peter’s heart dropped into his shoe.
“My dear, I can explain—Oh!” the king exclaimed. “Oh dear.”
Peter drew up behind the duchess and looked past her heavily powdered wig.
There, on the chaise, laid out like Venus herself, was Peter’s visitor, Mrs. Post, or whatever her true name was, reading a broadsheet.
Unlike Nell, however, this Venus had her robins-egg blue dressing gown knotted demurely at the waist, though the fabric yawned enough to give everyone in the room a glorious view of a pink calf, a flawless knee, and the most remarkable sliver of thigh.
He didn’t know how or why she’d done it, but wanted to fall on his knees and thank her for the deception.
The woman lowered her broadsheet, gazing at the spectacle before her.
She’d undone her hair, Peter noted with a tickle in his belly, letting it trail over her shoulders exactly as Nell’s hair was in the portrait, even though her hair was not quite a match.
For an instant, Peter imagined the weight of that liquid fire in his hands and wondered what it would be like to pull the hairpins free himself…
“Good afternoon,” the king said warmly, and Peter woke from his daydream. “This must be the Spanish countess Peter mentioned,” the king added to the duchess.
The Spanish countess? Good Lord, thought Peter, who had forgotten this important detail, I’m ruined. “Er, I beg your pardon. Your Majesty, may I introduce…” He gave his savior a panicked look.
“I am Countess de Inigo Montoya,” she said in an eager but far-from-convincing accent, “widow of Antonio Banderas.”
Peter held his breath.
“An honor.” Charles’s eyes trailed slowly over Mrs. Post’s leg.
Peter inserted himself between the two, being struck most forcefully by the reason he did not wish Charles and his guest to meet. “Countess, may I introduce His Royal Majesty, Charles, the King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as Her Grace the Duchess of Portsmouth.”
Mrs. Post rose, a breathtaking column of blue, and dropped a handsome curtsy.
All eyes turned to the duchess. Her reaction would spell success or doom.
Every person in the room was pulling for the countess’s affirmation.
Peter hadn’t felt such religious fervor since the night Charles bet the entire phalanx of his wife’s ladies-in-waiting that they wouldn’t run naked through the maze at Hampton Court.
The duchess’s odd cockeye worked the room like a beacon on a stormy night. “But…”
Stephen reappeared from nowhere and set Nell’s portrait on the easel with the charm of a mountebank.
Despite what was to Peter an obvious difference in their frames—the painted Nell had the slimness of an adolescent while Mrs. Post’s body suggested a more nuanced and, to Peter, far more interesting maturity—the dressing gown hid much and hair color provided the only visible distinction.
Both heads could reasonably be described as red, though Mrs. Post’s was slightly lighter, with eye-catching streaks of pumpkin, amber, and even a sunny marigold.
Without conscious intent, Peter’s mind began to calculate the mix of pigments such a heady confection would require.
Red madder and yellow ocher were the obvious choices, but white lead, raw umber, and even verdigris would have their place.
His hands began to tingle at the prospect—that is, were he to have further prospects of any sort, for if the duchess didn’t swallow the tale, Peter would be sketching Whitehall Palace for coppers in the street.
The duchess thrust out a trembling lip. She was not so dull as to be entirely swayed by this ruse.
Nonetheless she could hardly accuse Peter or the king of setting up such a verisimilitude with no more than a moment’s notice, especially when that moment had been spent entirely under her observation.
Peter said a prayer to Saint Luke, the patron saint of painters.
The duchess’s eyes narrowed, and she threw a shoulder back in challenge. “Vamos a ver si entiende esto, cono,” she said to Mrs. Post.
Peter gasped, as did the king. Peter’s Spanish was poor, to say the least, but there was no mistaking the wallop of the last word. He’d heard Carlo, a bargeman on the river, call a sailor that once, and Carlo had taken a pole across the cheek in answer to it.
His gaze cut to Mrs. Post. How does one signal to another that the other has just been called the worst name a woman could be called?
He cleared his throat and raised his eyes meaningfully, but he might as well have been waving English signal flags at a Chinese prow.
There was no mum show equivalent for the insult that had just been hurled, and if there were, no gentleman would employ it.
Mrs. Post chewed her lip as she attempted to decipher this sentence. Spots of red appeared on her cheeks. Her eyes darted from one face to another. She twisted the broadsheet in her hands and coughed. It was more than Peter could bear.
He held up a hand. “I am putting an end to this. I must confess—”
The rest died in his throat. Mrs. Post lunged forward and smacked the duchess across the nose with the paper.
The duchess squawked in surprise, and for an instant Peter’s heart stopped. No one spoke. No one moved. Peter could hear a dog braying in the street outside. He wondered if he’d be joining the brute there soon.
The king threw back his head and laughed.
“I must confess”—Peter stepped in front of the duchess to block what looked like the start of a second assault on the part of Mrs. Post—“your language surprises me, Your Grace.”
The king clapped his hands, filled with the sort of delight he displayed at the Windsor wrestling matches. “You have been routed, my dear. You have made an attempt, and you have been routed. Make peace with the countess. I shall not have a war started over this.”
But the duchess’s fury was not so easily doused. Her face contracted, and Peter could see another outburst coming.
“Make peace, I said,” Charles repeated sharply, all humor gone.
The duchess curtsied meekly and then turned to the king. “Please take me home,” she said with a pout. “I have a headache.”