Chapter 10 #2
“Your shading here,” he indicated the honeycomb. “There’s such light and depth it comes off the page. Your transitions from light to dark are seamless. Here,” he pointed to some other spot. She didn’t know which one. She could not take her eyes off his enthralled visage.
He continued dissecting and then praising the quality of her work. “You’ve done far more than give a cursory inventory; you gave it life. The light touching from the window, the gleam captured reflects…”
Edgar paused. He stayed quiet or spoke low to himself. His silent scrutiny of her sketches, however, was pure torment.
Andromena spoke fast. “I learned that technique from John Constable.”
Surprise filled his eyes.
“Not… personally.” Her whole body went hot.
“When I was a lass, my parents wanted me to spend time with our aunts and uncles who live outside London. My favorite visits were with Aunt Beatrix. I was always lost in my big family, but there she cared about everything I said and did. She had a small cottage in Hampstead Village, some one hundred paces from Bishop’s Pond, but it was easily more beautiful than all the earl and countess’s English properties combined.
To a young lass like myself, it looked like a fairytale castle, draped in thick ivy and blooming roses.
” Memories called her back and she smiled.
“There was this one tree beside Bishop’s Pond.
Every day—and sometimes night—I would climb in its big, gnarled branches and draw… ” You are rambling. Stop it.
But Edgar did not look bored. If anything, he looked too intent, as though her every word mattered.
That was the trouble: her words and actions meant nothing to anyone. Many men wanted to marry her and praised her looks, but no one listened to her thoughts or cared about her mind—as Edgar seemed to now.
Andromena fiddled with her skirts. “I’m being silly. In your travels, you’ve visited a million more beautiful, wonderful places than Hampstead Heath.”
Kerr’s gaze didn’t waver. “I never saw it through your eyes, though,” he said quietly.
Andromena’s breath hitched.
“And sometimes, Andromena, when we look at such great grandeur, we forget to appreciate the beauty of our own home.”
Her lids fluttered closed.
He made it impossible to forget how she’d been charmed by him, and then deceived. That deception felt further and further away.
“I take it you met John Constable there?”
The moment broke.
Startled from her musing, she looked at him. “Hmm?”
“John Constable. You said—”
“Oh. Not…quite.”
“I sense mischief here.”
“Me?” Andromena made big eyes. “Never.”
Their laughter, his deep and resonant, hers light and airy, tangled together, like an Aeolian harp, caught in a sudden, joyful breeze.
She loved his laugh—this deep, resonant one that wasn’t forced or used to seduce.
The first time she heard that rumbling beside her at Aunt Catherine’s, Lord Culross had been sharing a story about one of Edgar’s first sailings: he’d allowed too much skylarking during a calm, and when the wind suddenly picked up, Edgar’s mistake sent half the crew tumbling from the rigging in a tangle of ropes.
She’d been too fascinated by him, to laugh.
All her male kin and their usual company took themselves too seriously to laugh at their own mistakes, let alone admit them.
Somehow, she went on to tell the story of when she, as a lass of fourteen, sneaked out for the first time.
Dressed in Oleander’s dark blue tailored tailcoat, high-collared white linen shirt, long trousers and knee breeches, she first stepped inside Kenwood House.
It had been easy enough to do so with no one the wiser.
Aunt Beatrix, as wild as any McQuoid, let her niece and nephew have free run of the countryside until night fell—and, depending on how many glasses of Scotch, oftentimes, after dark—with her not knowing.
In their later years, she still didn’t know where her brother spent most of his days.
“Your sneaking about is something of a pattern.”
“It’s very easy to do when you are the youngest of six. Throw in six cousins who are like siblings, and you are practically invisible.”
He didn’t smile or laugh as she thought he would.
Andromena cleared her throat.
“When I sneaked inside Kenwood House, John Constable had already begun his lecture. He paused and glared at me.” She smiled in remembrance.
“I was sure he saw through my disguise.” Aunt Beatrix would not have cared or said anything to her parents.
But neither did Andromena care to be publicly humiliated.
“But he looked up and said in a very stern way: We see nothing till we truly understand it, so I suggested you sit down, lad, or you will neither see anything nor learn anything.”
Heads swiveled and found Andromena.
They hadn’t rained down fury at a lady being in their midst.
“Sit!”
Someone had hissed, and she fell into the nearest chair.
And listened. And learned.
“That is my favorite day ever.” Or it was, until now, being in the presence of an art connoisseur. That it was Edgar, so knowledgeable, painted him in a new light. He wasn’t just the witty, charming captain who strewed broken hearts wherever he went.
This was dangerous. Very dangerous.
He lifted his head, looking as confused as Andromena herself. “You have a rare talent.”
“I d—”
“Stop,” he commanded. “You’re a clever woman. You aren’t one of those ladies who simpers and searches for compliments. You know you’re this good. You have to.”
Andromena’s gaze slipped to the sketch that had flipped her world upside down. “I…”
A low whistle resonated in the space. “My God, you don’t.”
She managed to shake her head.
Within the deeper, harsher quality of his voice dwelt undertones of his once mellifluous baritone. The same ones he’d used when her brother had made light of her at the dinner table and predicted she wouldn’t have a single suitor.
That night, Edgar leaned over and whispered in her ear: “You’ll have a legion of suitors to prove the lad wrong…”
When she lifted her starry-eyed gaze to his, he winked. “And I’ll be among them.”
It turned out in one way or another, both her brother and Edgar were wrong that day, she thought bitterly.
His study became too much for her.
“You are versed in art,” she said.
Andromena brushed the curls her maid left down, behind her ear. His gaze tracked that movement.
His eyes darkened. “‘My mother’s life was not easy with the late viscount. She was a good woman—kind. She sketched, and I drew with her to keep her company.”
She pictured Edgar as a boy: charming and quick to smile, but doing so to ease his mother’s pain. A sharp ache hit her chest.
“It eventually became something I enjoyed.” He had never spoken of his family, and she longed to know more. “Because you shared it with your mother?’
A dull flush settled on his cheeks.
“I became versed in art, as a necessity of my trade.”
“In order to advance to naval captain, I needed to develop basic skills in sketching: coastlines, headlands, islands. Those recordings help other sailors in His Majesty’s Navy identify land…” He shook his head. “You don’t know any of this?”
That was not what she asked, but having a twin brother and two older brothers, Andromena knew a clever dodge when she heard one.
“Should I?”
“Hell yes, you should.” He muttered what sounded like ill-opinions on her brothers’ and cousin’s intelligence. And then he outright did. “Your family wouldn’t have the sense to employ your talents.”
Strange how that disparagement of her kin sent her heart trembling.
Only then did he set her book down. She watched as he fished a small journal from inside his jacket.
He held it out. “Have a look.”
Their hands grazed, sending a sharp jolt through her body, and Andromena froze.
“I promise it won’t bite.”
There was a God, because he mistook the reason for her motionlessness.
She forced her fingers to open the book.
Shivers raced along her nerve endings. In the sketch he’d flawlessly captured the high, jagged lines of cliffs jutting from the sea. Waves broke upon those rocks, and the artist—Edgar—captured the white spray of those waters and the violent recession of the tide.
“Edgar,” she breathed.
“The necessity part.”
She pulled her gaze from the rendering. “This isn’t necessity, Edgar. This is a work of art.”