Flirting With Forever (11 page)

Nel dimpled again. “Peter knows how to make a woman look beautiful.”

Cam stepped back to admire the whole.

The only part unfinished was Nel ’s face. It looked as if he had started over at least once and possibly twice. Her eyes, nose and mouth were no more than ciphers.

A young man wearing a leather apron unlocked the door and slipped in. “Pardon me, m’um—oh, good afternoon, Miss Gwyn,” he added, his pocked face lighting up.

“Good afternoon, Moseby.”

“Regrets, ladies, but it’l be my hide if I don’t get this painting stowed. The duchess is in high dudgeon. She wants to know when Mr. Lely wil begin her portrait.”

“Advise her not to choose a three-quarter view,” Nel said. “The hump may show.”

Cam stepped out of Moseby’s way as he unfastened the canvas. “I’m getting the impression,” Cam said to Nel ,

“you’re not an admirer of the duchess.”

“She makes things damned uncomfortable for Peter.

She’s figured out Charles likes to have portraits painted of his lovers—and for some reason she thinks that because she’s Catholic she should be the only one. She’s taken to dropping in unannounced to see what she can sniff out—

like one of them Frenchy truffle pigs, upon my word.

Charles just assumes Peter wil keep the royal lovers separated and his affairs discreet, and he has a mighty temper, which is why Peter has to go through this ridiculous Merry Andrew show whenever she shows up.”

Cam shuddered. Her family had been divided into the lions and the lambs. Anastasia, who took after their father, practical y grew fangs and a stinger when she was mad.

Cam, like her brother and mother, approached the world with unwavering calm, and she had had to work hard al her life not to be crushed in the onslaught. She hated the tyranny of temper.

“That doesn’t seem exactly fair.”

Nel laughed. “Fair doesn’t come into it. Charles is like a lava flow. It isn’t that he assumes everyone wil get out of his way—he just happens to destroy the ones who don’t.”

“He wouldn’t destroy Peter, surely.” Cam didn’t know much about Lely’s later years. Was it possible he’d lost the favor of the king?

“I heard he nearly chucked him once. There was a misunderstanding over one of Peter’s whores. The king wanted her. Peter refused. Said he needed her for a painting he was completing that night and suggested one of the other girls might be more in the way of the king’s liking.

It was a reasonable suggestion, and the king is known for giving his bedmates expensive gifts, so I’m certain any of them would have been happy to take her place. Charles was in one of his Falstaff moods, grinning and playing the host, so he didn’t want to be seen losing his temper. He agreed to choose another and laughed as if the whole thing had been a joke, but the footman who was there told me Charles didn’t see Peter for a year after that, and half the court stayed away as wel out of fear of inviting the king’s displeasure.”

“Oh dear. Poor Peter.”

Nel grabbed a plum from a bowl of fruit, wiped it on her gown and sighed. “I’ve painted Charles to be a positive Old Nick, I know, but he’s a rattlin’ good cove when it comes to fun, and I do think you’d like him if you met him, but I guess Peter has other ideas.” She gave Cam a curious smile and bit into the purple flesh. “Has anyone happened to mention you’re practical y the twin of his lover?”

Cam started. “Charles’s?”

“Peter’s. That is, before old Pauly got his arms around her.”

The young man stole a look at Cam, then hoisted the painting free and hurried to the door. “Sorry for the intrusion.” As he saluted and bounded into the hal , Nel said, “You’l want to make sure—”

A shril , murderous scream exploded in the air.

“—she’s not in the hal . Oh no! Poor Peter!”

“
That’s Nell in that painting!
” a Frenchwoman cried.

“
Nell!
”

Then men’s voices—Peter’s and what Cam assumed to be the king’s—joined in with urgent reassurances. The woman on the canvas, Peter explained, was the mistress of a Spanish count. She wasn’t Nel . Couldn’t possibly be Nel .

Why, the hair was al wrong, as anyone could see. Nel ’s was much darker. But the duchess would have none of it.

“She’s here, and I’ll find her. That irritating little beetch! ”

“She’s here, and I’ll find her. That irritating little beetch! ”

The last words sent a bolt of fury through Cam. Of the dozens of painters in the art book on Amazon, she’d managed to find the only one with the Restoration equivalent of Anastasia as a client. There was only one way to deal with people like that. She grabbed Nel ’s arm and dragged her toward the storage room. “Hide.”

As Peter hurried after the duchess, he felt his heart sink.

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 al Peter could think about was that if Charles lost his temper over this, as he rightful y ought, Peter would never get his paper signed. And that paper must be signed. He owed it Ursula.

“Your Grace, please,” Peter implored. “I wil not hear it,”

the duchess snapped. “You conspire with him.”

Peter was a Dutchman, but he loved the English and had long ago acquired the disdain they nursed for their reckless, power-hungry neighbors across the sea.

“Never, Your Grace, never,” Peter said. “Why, I should rather consign my soul to the fires of hel than lie to you. You are welcome to look anywhere you please.”

She paused. “I am?”

Peter looked at Stephen, who gave him a nearly imperceptible nod. Peter dropped a deep, courtly bow in acquiescence and hoped Stephen was surer about this than he had been about the painting. If Nel 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 hal and tried another door, only to find a closet fil ed with pots of painting supplies.

The next door was the dining room, and Peter’s heart was in his throat. Nel 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 in royal blue 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 pul s, 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 inhabited, Peter himself never entered it and even now felt the deadening stab of sorrow that overtook him whenever he saw such a reminder.

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 Nel to hide, and his resultant look of concern worried Peter.

“Where is she?” he 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 which suggested Nel 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 Nel , however, this Venus had her robin’s-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 fal 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 bel y, letting it trail over her shoulders exactly as Nel ’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 pul 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 Iñigo 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 forceful y 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 wel as Louise, Duchess of Portsmouth.”

Mrs. Post rose, a breathtaking column of blue, and dropped a handsome curtsy.

Al eyes turned to the duchess. Her reaction would spel success or doom. Lord knew, every person in the room was pul ing for the countess’s affirmation. Peter hadn’t felt such religious fervor since the night Charles bet the entire phalanx of Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia’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 Nel ’s portrait on the easel with the charm of a mountebank.

Despite what was to Peter an obvious difference in their frames—the painted Nel 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 yel ow 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 swal ow the tale, Peter would be sketching Whitehal Palace for coppers in the street.

The duchess thrust out a trembling lip. She was not so dul 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, especial y when that moment had been spent entirely under her observation.

Peter said a prayer to Saint Luke, the patron saint of painters.