Chapter 51
Fifty-One
Wrapped in the pale light of her tablecloth cocoon, Marguerite pressed her fingers to the lingering warmth where Marcus had kissed her forehead, before telling her to add his decorating services to her father’s bill.
He was the most confounding man she’d ever met, she thought, surveying the pile of passes and certificates, pencils, pastels, chalk, and the leather-covered sketchbook he’d left her.
Her breath quickened, her heart began to beat faster; she reminded herself he hadn’t told her she had to draw. He’d only said to look, study, to take her time.
Taking a deep breath, she inhaled the scents of toasted bread, fried eggs, and freshly ironed linen.
Her father had given Gerard a handsome dowry upon their marriage, and yet her husband had never treated her with such gentle care. Neither had he suggested she turn her talents to forgery.
Marguerite reached for Marcus’s sketchbook. As she opened it, she couldn’t help thinking of the verse scrawled in the margin of her art book: If ever the Devil leads me to love again, I shall demand of my lover, do not tell me of your heart, fair one, but show me your art.
“So, Marcus Tyndale,” she murmured, slowly turning the pages, “show me your art.”
His drawings were small, the lines tightly controlled, the details incredibly fine.
She stared at the fine hairs on the drawing of a cat, the weathered face of an old woman peeling onions.
She couldn’t imagine any man, woman, or beast sitting for the hours it must have taken to capture them in this way.
She remembered the first time she’d seen him, leaning against the wall of the courtroom with this very sketch book in his hands. She’d imagined he was part of the crowd reveling in the despair of their neighbors.
Seized by the desire to know how he’d drawn her, she flipped past a sketch of two men in tattered military jackets playing cards on a barrel, peasant girls eating a meat pie, a boy with a dog on his lap.
Ordinary people doing ordinary things.
Until, there she was. Captured in a moment that had been far from ordinary.
She stared. Transfixed. She’d been sketched and painted before. By friends, fellow artists, artists employed by her father. But those portraits always seemed to emphasize her prettiness, like a pastry with too much icing.
Here was something very different.
She’d drawn him as an ideal. He’d drawn her as a strong woman.
Unsettled, she turned the page. And found more drawings. As if she were a gem and he was determined to examine her every facet. To portray not just her beauty, but her depths, her changeability.
She felt…seen…known…but also, laid as bare as if she’d posed nude for him.
She turned more pages until at last she reached the blank ones. She fanned through them, about to close the book, when caught sight of a joltingly familiar hand.
I agree to pay twenty thousand pounds for her safe return to me.
She didn’t need to see the flourish of initials to know they belonged to her father.
It was a staggering sum.
Marcus had said he was rescuing her for the money. Here was the proof. However much she might wish it wasn’t true.
Marcus Tyndale was a mercenary.
But if she could understand his motivation, she was less certain about her father’s.
No one had ever called Amaury de Joley a generous man.
Nor was loving father a description that leapt readily to mind.
She thumbed through the pages of the sketchbook, searching for the drawing Marcus had shown her as proof of his meeting with her father. There it was. Just as she remembered. Her father, face gaunt, hair wild, arms outstretched, entreating the two figures seated before him.
At the time, she’d focused on the face, trying to be certain it was truly her father.
The Comte Verignac she knew was wily, manipulative, and opportunistic.
She’d never known him to beg.
Encased in the tablecloth cocoon, Marguerite suddenly felt as if she might smother.
Was it for her life? Or was it the money he’d placed under her name to keep the revolutionaries from seizing it, now sitting in her account in Switzerland?