Fifteen
Nell squealed behind the changing screen. “Oh, my Lord! Look at the peacock feathers in this lining! It’s stunning!”
Cam was swinging the phone wildly in the air. If she could get three bars in the Carnegie’s lead-lined basement, why couldn’t she raise at least one bar in the seventeenth century? She was practically pressed to a window, after all. “I agree. They did a beautiful job.”
“Where do you shop?”
Oops.
“You wouldn’t know it. It’s…it’s…in Bremen.”
“I never thought the Germans would come up with peacock feathers and silk. They’re more in the burlap-and-ironed-creases line, if you know what I mean.”
A knock sounded at the door.
“Come,” Nell called without checking, and Cam yanked her dressing gown closed.
Peter stepped in, more diffident than he’d been earlier, and bowed. Cam thought she saw a flush on his cheeks. There really was something quite charming about him—when he wasn’t being an ass.
Nell peeked over the screen. “Has the dragon departed?”
Peter smiled. “With Saint George at her side. Nell, about today’s sitting—”
She popped from behind the screen still wearing Cam’s dress. “Peter, no more today. I’m tired of posing. Lend me one of your men. I want to have a dress sketched out for my dressmaker.”
“Well, I suppose we can manage something for you. Ask Stephen to pass the word for Francis. He has a crack hand at that sort of thing.” He fiddled absently with a large green-stoned ring on his finger.
“Um…” Cam drew the dressing gown more tightly around her.
“You don’t mind, do you, Mrs. Post?” Nell said. “I know you mentioned something about posing earlier. Perhaps you can take my session.” She gave Cam a wink and sashayed out.
“Posing? You are interested in posing yourself?” Peter’s brows rose. “I understood you to want a consultation on a landscape.”
Now it was Cam’s turn for flushing. “I-I—” She hadn’t really thought much about it when she’d said it, and she certainly hadn’t thought she’d be here long enough for it to matter. What she wanted was a chance to return to the models’ room.
“Did I? No, ’twas a portrait of me I wished to discuss. I was imagining myself as Athena.”
At this his eyebrows nearly jumped off his head, though he quickly concealed his surprise. “Indeed?”
She had no intention of posing as Athena or anyone else, but the look on his face was enough to remind her why she’d never brought up the subject of posing to Jacket. She didn’t fit the mold of a classical beauty, and the inspiration she could provide from a creative standpoint was limited.
“Aye,” she said coolly. “I believe I saw a shield and sword in the adjoining room. Might we conduct our conference there as I try them out?”
“If you wish.”
She snatched her bag from under the chaise, and he led her wordlessly into the hall.
The models’ room was abandoned now, undoubtedly cleared during the duchess incident.
When they entered, Peter paused. “Before we go on, I should like to thank you for your help. It was a daring action. Very spirited. I am most grateful. Though,” he added with a small smile, “smacking the duchess was perhaps a touch more spirited than I would have wished.”
“She called me a—”
“Countess. I remember. She was quite definitive.”
“That wasn’t the word she used.”
“Aye, well, we’re lucky the king has an appreciation for the absurd.”
“Oh, he’s a regular Mark Twain.”
“Who?”
“Er, my sister Shania’s son. A right comic lad, that one.”
His gaze flicked briefly to her now bare shoulder. Even with careful monitoring, the luxurious weight of the dressing gown’s fabric was making it hard to stay covered.
“I apologize,” he said. “You were kind to allow Nell to borrow your dress, but you do not have to spend the wait in a dressing gown. I’m sure you must be cold.
May I offer you…” He looked around the room.
In addition to the shield, spear, and clubs, there were a set of angel wings, a large stuffed boar, a harp, a drum, a ship’s wheel, a cradle, several large swans made of wool, and an armor chest plate that had holes for breasts cut out of it.
“…my frock coat?” He slipped off the jacket and held it open to her.
She gazed at the coat, glossy and green, and then at the finely cut shoulders and arms now outlined under his bleached linen shirt, and in a small voice said, “Thank you.”
Peter was not quite barrel-chested, though he was broader than most, and when he slipped the well-tailored wool over her shoulders, she felt like a small animal hibernating in a cave.
She could smell the barest hint of vanilla, as if he’d scrubbed paint off his hands with scented soap.
She looked at his nails. Fingernails were the windows into a man’s soul, and so often the windows were something you had to run by with your eyes averted, but Peter’s were clean, pink, and well tended.
He reached for a cuff, unbuttoned it, and began to roll up his sleeve. “Would you like to sit?” He paced to a stool, grabbing a pencil and a large tablet on the way, and took a seat.
This left Cam with the only other seat in the room, an armchair on a pallet. She slipped into the seat, placed her bag on her lap, and gazed down at him. If she moved slowly, she might be able to withdraw the phone unnoticed and at least check the bars.
He opened the tablet, found a clean page, and pressed the binding flat. His forearms, now uncovered, were muscular and long, swept with russet hairs that caught the last rays of sun, and his hand moved over the page with a practiced ease.
“I do not see you as Athena.” His eyes stayed on the easy line running from his pencil.
“You don’t?”
“No. I shall paint you that way if you wish, of course, pray do not misunderstand. But…” The line stretched long then reversed itself and returned.
“But?”
“But you are familiar with the phrase ‘to paint the lily’?”
She knew “gild the lily,” but not “paint.” “No.”
“The lily is on my heraldic arms, so it is a phrase dear to me.” His pencil work changed to shorter, faster strokes.
“‘To gild refined gold,’” he began, “‘to paint the lily, / To throw a perfume on the violet, / To smooth the ice, or add another hue / Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light, / To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, / is wasteful, and ridiculous excess.’ Shakespeare,” he added, smiling.
“King John. I should prefer to paint you without artifice. As unadorned as possible.”
Oh.
Her throat dried, and for a moment the scratching of the pencil on paper was the room’s only sound.
“I, ah, thought this was to be an interview.” She tilted her head toward his tablet.
He laughed. “’Tis an artist’s interview. I draw. You talk.”
“And then you’ll decide if you can paint me?”
“Have no fear on that account, milady.”
He turned the tablet and began at another corner.
“I am sorry about your husband,” he said. “Were you long married?”
She thought of her time with Jacket. “Four years.”
“It must have been heartbreaking.” He stole a quick glance at her. “Four years is not a long time.”
She felt a pang of guilt, thinking of her brother’s loss of his wife and son. “I—Yes.” She scoured her brain for a route into the conversation she wished to have. “I have heard a good many things about your work, and, of course, I have admired it myself.”
“Have you?” His pencil worked the page, making long strokes and more detailed ones, thick lines and thin.
Jacket never worked from a sketch. Wherever his reapings came from, it wasn’t a sketch pad, and Cam hadn’t seen an artist work like this in some time.
It reminded her of her own drawing classes in college.
It struck her as oddly interesting that the process hadn’t changed much in three hundred years.
The drawing had become an angular thing, with many lines in parallel. Cam leaned forward. “Ah, that’s not my face.”
He laughed again, a rich, throaty laugh that emanated from deep in his chest. Still, he didn’t look up. “No. It is your hand, milady.”
She felt an unexpected sense of discomfort.
She thought he’d been sketching her as a whole, though, in fact, he hadn’t looked at her more than once or twice since they’d sat down.
It seemed more intrusive, somehow, for him to focus on a single part of her body.
The thought was irrational, she knew, but that didn’t stop the rush of heat across her cheeks.
“Your fingers are slim and strong,” he said, defining a nail with a few quick curves, “yet without any of the coldness or implacability that can detract in such matters. There is a determined grace here, which I find interesting.”
Immediately her fingers laced together in a nervous grip.
He caught the movement and bowed his head.
“I beg your pardon. My attention has made you uncomfortable. The cardinal sin of portraitists. May I have your leave to sketch the drape of the dressing gown? ’Tis less intrusive, and the contrast of the dark against the light is really quite remarkable from this angle. ”
Cam relaxed as he turned the page. “Aye.” The three tall windows in the room showed the purple-blue of the sky to the east and the orange-red in the west, reminding her of the view from her loft at twilight, the south hills of Pittsburgh laid out like some sort of Tuscan landscape, with the towering squared spires of the Presbyterian church and the neighboring conical tower of the Catholic one sitting like a pair of medieval fortresses on the highest ridge of the town.
In the winter the structures were lit with spotlights and reigned triumphantly over the coming darkness.