Flirting With Forever (37 page)

Peter flung the brush down in disgust. The painting he’d begun the day before, despite its flawlessness from a technical standpoint, lacked the spark that would lift it from the realm of craft to that of beauty. The word his teacher had used was
hout
—“wood” in English. No life. And he knew why. He was wracked with guilt. No matter what Campbel had done or was about to do, she hadn’t deserved what he’d just done to her. He hadn’t been the one to expose her to the reporter. That was her doing. It was clear her life was something akin to a platter ful spinning tops, perennial y ready to explode into chaos. But her life was also her own, and if what Mertons said was true, Peter had changed it for the worse.

Was losing a child you had never known the same as losing one you had? Was there a gradient to such a loss?

He kicked himself. Who was he to judge?

Peter had told himself he’d come here to protect Ursula, but he had also come to protect his reputation. And he had been wil ing to go so far as to put a woman’s good name at risk for it. He looked at the smal sketchbook and the letter it contained. In truth, he had been wil ing to do more than that. And now, no matter what he had been wil ing to do or not, he had changed her future. The realization sickened him.

He couldn’t change the past, no matter how fervently he might wish to, but he certainly had no business playing God with Campbel ’s future. He must return to the Afterlife and accept his fate.

But before he left, he had one final deed to perform. He must beg Campbel Stratford’s forgiveness. He picked up his coat and scarf, grabbed the sketchbook and left.

A block from my building? Cam looked in disbelief at the address on the paper clutched in her hand. Peter’s been living a block from my building al these weeks?

She’d driven halfway to Bal ’s house before she’d been able to raise him on the phone, and only scored Peter’s address after reassuring him she was traveling without a weapon. She’d written it down, aghast, at a stoplight, and had driven to Mt. Lebanon in her gala outfit.

She swung the car into the first space open on Alfred Street, hopped out, locked the door and began hurrying back toward Washington Road, holding her long skirt above the sidewalk. She wasn’t sure in which direction the number was, so she started south. She made her way past the Anne Gregory For the Bride shop, stopped, then realized this was the address. She almost laughed. He not only was staying a block from her, he was staying in the only building in Mt. Lebanon that was crenelated like a castle.

She doubled back to the residential door to the left of the shop windows, and with a sigh began to scan the names next to the bel s. Bal had not given her an apartment number, and, in fact, had only been able to come up with the address by rifling through the papers on his desk to find the delivery slip from the company he’d hired to transport the paintings to his house.

Three bel s, three names. “Joshua Smith,” “M. Curran”

and—
Oh, very funny
—“K.T. Holmes.”

Jerk,
she thought instantly, then bit her tongue in dismay.

She rang the Holmes bel and waited. No response. She was just about to walk away when the door swung open.

Peter was throwing a wool scarf around his neck. He froze when he saw her.

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

“That’s odd. I was just coming to talk to you.” He tucked the scarf in his coat meekly and fol owed her out onto the sidewalk.

The December wind blew down the street, lifting the curls of hair over his ears. He slipped his hands in his pockets and moved automatical y between her and the gusts. “What is it?”

How could she have missed it? That smoky quiver that had always sat in his eyes wasn’t laughter or mocking or even desire. It was pain. She should have recognized it.

She’d had opportunity enough to examine such a thing, after al .

“I found an article about you.”

The quiver disappeared, like the lens of a camera, hidden behind a protective cover.

“Oh?”

She felt her own vulnerability rise, a frightening combination of sorrow and culpability. “Why didn’t you tel me?”

It was as if a
whoosh
of vacuum had sucked al the noise and wind and traffic from the street, leaving only a blurred silence and the two of them. The lens lifted briefly, and she saw that he understood. Peter looked down at his shoes.

Cam felt her throat cramp, so afraid was she of the next word.

His gaze lifted, and a tear had striped his cheek. “One doesn’t easily fit ‘My wife died in childbirth’ into a conversation.”

She flew into his arms. “Oh, Peter. And your son.”

“And my son.”

She could feel him quake, and she was crying, too, thinking of her brother and the son he’d never see grow up, and for an instant the world seemed fil ed with such cruelty.

“My brother,” she cried into his coat, “lost his wife and son in a car accident. I’m so sorry.” And she was—for Peter, for her brother, for anyone who’d ever lost anybody.

Peter hugged her tighter. “You mustn’t cry,” he said through his own tears. “’Twas many years ago.”

She cried harder and felt a fool.

“Come inside,” he said. “Let me make you some tea.”

“For the longest time,” he said, “I didn’t know she was with child.”

He ran a hand through his hair and spoke distractedly as Cam drank. She held her tongue and let him say what needed to be said.

“I know it seems foolish now. We were, after al ”—he flushed—“quite actively in love. But I liked her plump and didn’t notice.”

The article Cam had read in
The Burlington Magazine
was not about Peter and his painting of the four Ursulas, though that picture had been included, but an analysis of a portrait by Peter of a woman of “haunting beauty” whom the author believed to be Ursula. The woman’s head covering, informal pose and domestic negligee suggested to an art expert the author consulted that “the painter was evidently in love with her.” The author went on to say that the position of the woman’s hands, holding saffron-colored fabric bunched across her lap, suggested she was “enceinte”—pregnant, in the indirect parlance of the day—a fact the author believed was supported by the almost frightened expression in her eyes, which he pointed out was “quite compatible with that condition of expectancy.”

Cam had studied that picture for a good ten minutes.

The sitter wasn’t the seductress of Cam’s imagination. She was a woman in her thirties. Beautiful, yes. A goddess, no.

And Cam had agreed with the viscount: the drape of fabric and position of the hand were common painterly devices for hiding a pregnancy.

“And when she told me the news …” Peter smiled, the faraway look in his eyes suggesting an oft-recal ed happiness. “Ah, how we celebrated.”

“And you painted her.”

“I always painted her, but, aye, then, too. The way her face had changed. It was as if the sun had risen inside her. I couldn’t even capture it on canvas. It was remarkable.”

Cam watched his thumb and forefinger go to the emerald.

“And the birth … It started so easily. I was on top of the world. It was evening. The studio was closed. By morn I would have a son—or a daughter. What did I care? We would have more, as many as she wanted. But not long after the strike of two, she began to bleed. A surgeon was cal ed, but he couldn’t stop it. There was nothing to be done. Not, that is”—his voice grew hol ow, and Cam bit the inside of her mouth—“until it was over. Then he would bring his awful blade to bear on her and—”

His shoulders hitched, and he lowered his head. Cam returned the cup to the saucer, hand shaking, and the tinkle of china was like the blast of a trumpet in the silent studio.

He brought both hands to his mouth, cupping them as if to catch the outpouring of sorrow. But he could neither catch nor stop it.

“—and he would bring our baby into the world and leave Ursula …”

“Oh, Peter, it’s al right.”

“I held her, until the end, until her hand relaxed and her eyes lost their fear, but I couldn’t watch that. I couldn’t. I told him I didn’t care about the child, that he should save her, but he said he couldn’t. He could only save the child, and only if he were very, very lucky.”

Cam thought of her brother and how he’d had to tel the story over and over, and how the words had become a potion for him, a way to organize something that couldn’t be organized.

“The swaddled child—my son—was placed in my arms a quarter hour later.” Peter wiped the wetness from his cheeks. “I-I wanted to hate him, but I couldn’t. He was beautiful. He was her. But he was so smal .”

And he was named for his father, she thought, for that was what the author’s research had uncovered in the records of the Covent Garden church cal ed St. Paul’s. Nel had said “Old Pauly” had taken Ursula. Cam assumed “Old Pauly” was a man, but she’d been so wrong.

Cam knew where the story would lead, but she also knew he needed to tel it.

“We did everything. Nursemaids, salves, whatever bolus the doctor could get down his tiny throat. But nothing could save him.” Peter made a long, low howl, like a wolf.

“Ursula,” he said, “was buried on Tuesday and my son, on Saturday. Side by side, forever. And neither have a name to be buried under because I never thought to marry her.”

His head dropped into his hand, and Cam slid onto the couch next to him, putting her arms around him.

“Oh, Peter. They didn’t need your name. They had you.”

She knew the churches then had very strict rules about burial. It was entirely possible an unmarried woman and her son would be granted nothing more than their Christian names on the headstones. They were probably lucky to have been buried in consecrated ground at al .

“Campbel ,” he said, his voice choked with tears, “I have robbed them of the one thing that even the poorest honorable man can give.”

“Listen to me. That didn’t matter to Ursula. Al that mattered to her was that you were there, holding her hand, helping her to the other side. Do you think something as trivial as a name can make a difference to a woman who knows she’s loved and protected?”

After a long moment he steadied himself. She let her arm slide down his shoulder and locked her hand into his.

He clutched it as if it were a life preserver.

“I lived eight more years, more dead than alive, and I thought dying would free me, but it didn’t. By the time death arrived, it was too late. Ursula had been reborn into her new life and so had my son.” He caught himself and looked at Cam. “Forgive me. You do not know of what I speak, do you?”

“I know. Mertons came to me. Oh, Peter, I’m so sorry.”

“And I, too. I have spent a decade sorry. I do not know what it has won me, though.”

She didn’t reply, and he just held her hand.

There was something wonderful about the warm ease with which their palms rested together. She gazed at the patternless swirl of bristle across his cheek and the way his earlobe seemed to glide off his jawline like a wing off Mercury’s foot, but nothing made her happier than the soft, dry pil ow of flesh on which her hand rested.

He lifted her hand and brought it to his mouth. The kiss was neither intrusive nor leading, but Cam felt the breath pressed out of her as if by a cinch around her waist.

“Thank you for listening,” he said. “I’ve never been able to tel it before. Never wanted to.”

“Sure.”

She could feel his breath on her skin, feel the pulse in his fingers.

“I did a terrible thing,” he said, “exposing you in those paintings.”

“I did the exposing, and I have a sense that the world was rebalancing things. You can’t decide you’l tear the covering off other people’s lives without expecting a little defrocking yourself. You know, if I’m so enamored of Jake Ryan, I might try modeling a little Samantha Baker behavior myself.”

“Jake Ryan? Samantha Baker?”

“Oh, it’s an old movie. Do you know movies?”

“‘This could be the start of a beautiful friendship,’ aye?”

When he saw the look of surprise on her face, he added,

“Mertons said it once. I made him explain. From what I could understand, movies are stories told in the form of pictures that move. It sounds interesting, especial y this
Casablanca
story, which he went into in some very great detail. Why did Ilsa leave Rick, by the way? Mertons prides himself on being a romantic, but it was very hard to get the nuance from him.”