Chapter 10 #2
“Tell me about Florence,” she said then. “Tell me what it would have been like. If I had come.”
The warmth in his face dimmed slightly, the old wound surfacing despite itself. She saw him decide, consciously, not to look away from it.
“You would have hated the crossing,” he said at last. “The Channel in February is miserable in every particular.”
She exhaled a soft laugh. “And after the crossing?”
He settled back against the arm of the settee. She drew her wrapper close and curled into the opposite corner. The fire crackled steadily, while Sebastian told her about Florence.
He told her about arriving in the rain, exhausted and furious and heartbroken, and how the city had met him anyway, indifferent to his misery.
The city had seen too much history to be troubled by a single young Englishman’s suffering.
He told her about the first morning the sun came out and he had walked to the Piazza della Signoria and stood before Perseus holding Medusa’s head.
He told her about the small apartment above a baker’s shop where the smell of bread woke him every morning, and the coffee he had grown to love. Lorenzo had arrived like a force of nature into his careful, grieving solitude and had simply refused to leave.
“He would like you,” Sebastian said. “He likes people who argue back.”
“I excel at that.”
“I know.”
She asked him to describe the paintings.
He did, slowly, as if holding a deep reverence for each masterpiece.
The Birth of Venus, the way the light fell differently on it at different hours.
The frescoes at San Marco, each one a private conversation between the artist and God, painted for an audience of one monk in one small cell.
“And the painting,” she said carefully. “Matteo’s painting. Remind me what it looks like.”
He described it, and she listened, and she thought of it hanging upstairs in her bedchamber and said nothing, only watched his face as he spoke of it, the way it had first moved him as a boy, the way it had determined the entire course of his life.
The candles had burned very low by the time he fell silent. Outside, London had quieted to its late-night murmur, with the occasional clatter of hooves over wet cobbles.
He had not meant to fall asleep. It was evident in the angle of him, still half-turned toward her as though he had intended to say one more thing.
One hand rested open upon his thigh, his head tipped back against the settee, the guarded lines of his face softened by exhaustion.
The fire had sunk low in the grate, gilding him in amber, making him seem younger and older at once.
For a long moment, she did not move.
Sebastian had crossed a continent and half a lifetime to return to England, had fallen asleep in her painted room while speaking of the one thing she had no right to keep from him.
Harriet sat very still and watched the rise and fall of his chest.
His long frame was ill-suited to the settee to a laughable degree. One booted foot had slipped to the carpet, and his shoulder pressed awkwardly against the carved wooden arm. A faint furrow remained between his brows, the mark of some dream or old hurt refusing to release him entirely.
Her heart tightened.
“Foolish man,” she whispered, though the words held no real rebuke.
She rose carefully, gathering her wrapper close, and crossed to the folded blanket kept near the hearth. When she returned, he stirred but did not wake. Harriet paused, breath caught, waiting.
Nothing.
Only the soft rhythm of his breathing and the quiet shift of embers settling in the grate.
She draped the blanket over him, taking care not to brush him more than necessary.
Yet when the wool caught against his arm, she allowed herself the smallest indulgence of smoothing it into place.
A ridiculous thing. A dangerous thing. The gesture of a woman pretending she had any right to tend him.
She stood beside him until the chill of the room crept through her wrapper and reminded her that she, too, had a body. That morning would come. That explanations would be required. That secrets did not cease to be secrets simply because a man had fallen asleep by one’s fire.
Harriet forced herself to step away.
At the door, she looked back once before slipping away from the painted room and climbing the stairs with a candle cupped in one hand, the flame trembling in the draft.
The house was silent around her, every shadow familiar and accusing.
By the time she reached her bedchamber, the ache beneath her ribs had sharpened into something nearly unbearable.
The painting waited above her writing desk.
Matteo’s lost work hung in the dim glow as though it had been expecting her.
Harriet stopped just inside the room, the door clicking shut behind her with a sound far too final for so quiet an hour.
The candlelight trembled across the painted surface, catching on the subtle turn of a hand, the mournful grace of a face half-lifted toward unseen light.
She had always known it was beautiful. She had known it was valuable.
But tonight, for the first time, she understood it as Sebastian had described it.
She set the candle upon the desk and turned deliberately away.
She did not wish to think about the painting tonight.
Tonight belonged to something else entirely.
To the smell of bread from a Florentine bakery she had never visited, to Perseus standing in defiant splendor in a piazza she had never seen, to Lorenzo arriving like a force of nature into a grieving man's solitude and simply refusing to leave.
She had been given, for one extraordinary evening, the life she had forfeited.
She had walked its streets and breathed its air and sat beside the man she had not been brave enough to choose, and she intended to hold that close for as long as she possibly could before morning arrived with its ordinary cruelties.
She moved about the room quietly, unpinning her hair the rest of the way, letting it fall. Setting her wrapper aside. The small rituals of the end of a day, performed in the dark at the edge of something she could not yet name.
When she finally lay down, the room was very still.
Downstairs, Sebastian slept beneath her blanket. He had spoken of frescoes and a city that had saved him, and she had listened to every word as if she could memorize her way into having been there. As if wanting it badly enough, even now, even this late, might count for something.
Perhaps it did. Perhaps that was what tonight had been. Not a beginning, not an ending, but a doorway she had been permitted to stand in for a few hours and look through.
She closed her eyes.
It would have to be enough.
For tonight, it was more than enough. It was everything.