Flirting With Forever (9 page)

How long would Ursula’s death haunt him?

A double tap at the farther door roused him from his thoughts. Stephen. Peter felt disloyal for returning here, like a spy, into the lives of his friends and the people who worked for him, with no admission of his prescient knowledge of his future as wel as theirs. Mertons, however, had insisted Peter tel no one, and so no one had been told.

“Come,” Peter said.

Stephen, as upright as a bishop, but with the broad, good-natured face of a tavern owner, ducked in and began to gather the stray dishes from breakfast.

“Miss Quinn?” Peter asked as he took his seat.

“Attended to.”

“Good. And Sir David?”

“Gone.”

“Which reminds me.” He caught Stephen’s eye and let the corner of his mouth rise. “The king has taken a new fancy.”

A look of horror came over Stephen’s face. “We cannot begin the painting over. Not again. First Nel , then Barbara Vil iers, then Nel again, and now someone else? The paint on the face has been scraped down so many times the canvas is getting to look like my gran’s lacework underneath.”

“I think we are safe with Nel for now,” Peter said. “We should endeavor to finish it this week, however. With that delivered the king’s only choice wil be a new commission.”

So long as the king maintains his royal prerogative with the women of the court, Peter thought, I shal always have work.

“How are the mezzotints today?”

“Good, good. Except for Col ins with the broken finger, we’ve been producing at a prodigious rate. Nothing to worry about there.”

Peter felt the pause. “But?”

“Might I observe the new apprentice, the tal one with no hair, is not going to make much of an artist.”

He meant Mertons. Peter snorted. “He is my cousin.

From my mother’s first marriage. I’m afraid it was this or transportation to the New World.”

“Ah. Wel , perhaps a stint stretching canvas would be more to his liking.”

“Excel ent notion.”

Stephen started out but paused at the door. “Peter,” he said, taking a deep breath, “I have taken the liberty of placing one or two very handsome widows on your diary this week, and I thought perhaps—”

“No,” Peter said with a choking rush of sorrow. “It has been but a year.”

“Nearly two, Peter. Nearly two. And one of the widows has twice been kind enough to—”

“Enough,” Peter said. It had been two years in Stephen’s memory, but for Peter, who had already endured the rest of his life here and more beyond, it had been eight. Eight long years, and even now his heart felt as lifeless and il -

prepared for the intimacy of another person as a stone.

“You mope,” Stephen said. “You brood. You bury yourself in your work. Ursula would not have wanted this. There. I’ve said her name. I’m tired of tiptoeing around as if she never existed. We al are. Peter,” he said more softly, “she was my friend, too. I know she would not have wanted this. You know what she would have said. She would have damned you for your foolishness.”

Peter smiled in spite of himself. “Aye, I can hear her now.”

Stephen’s eyes twinkled. “A fair temper, that one. I could tel the day I first laid eyes on her, the first day she came in to model.”

“ ’Twas the coloring. The red hair.”

“The coloring, the eyes, the way she refused to lower her shoulder.”

An obscure sentimental joy came into Peter as he considered the scene, as clear in his head as if the years gone by were no more than a snap of his fingers. “God help us, she was a terrible model—stubborn, short-tempered, easily bored.”

“But so, so beautiful on canvas.”

“Indeed.” Peter’s eyes started to smart, and he turned away.

Stephen sighed. “I have said enough. More than enough, I expect.”

Far more. Peter felt the familiar wave of grief.

“I have finished tomorrow’s schedule,” Stephen said, deftly changing the subject. “Might I observe your trade is as strong as ever?”

Peter grunted. At this point in his career, his schedule had always been ful , not that the schedule had mattered to him. He had always taken the commissions he desired, worked until he was done, and let Stephen handle the patrons whose appointments had been delayed or canceled. Al that mattered to him now was appeasing the king until he signed the document that would issue an edict of marriage for a long-dead woman and the man who had loved her.

Stephen, evidently sensing his master’s wish to be alone, made his exit bow. Peter held up a hand.

“I know your intentions are good, my friend,” he said. “But I … I cannot. Not yet. Do not ask it.” He cursed Mertons and the Guild for the torture he must relive.

Stephen bowed again, added a long-empty wineglass to the col ection of dishes in his hand and went out.

Cam fidgeted on the hard bench. She’d been marched to the waiting room by Mertons, who was now describing the process patrons must fol ow to secure a place on Lely’s schedule. She was waiting for a pause into which she could reasonably insert a request to use the privy, cover for another try at the models’ room, when the door behind the secretary’s desk opened. It wasn’t Lely, but the man in the smock who had reported on Miss Quinn’s disposition earlier. The man looked at her and nearly fumbled the stack of dishware he was carrying.

“Mary, Mother of God,” he uttered. “Stephen, any word on Peter?” the reedy man said, breaking off midsentence. “I even checked the place you suggested. No sign.”

Stephen pointed wordlessly at the doorway behind him, though his gaze never left her face. He looked as if he’d seen a ghost. Actual y he looked as if he’d seen a ghost standing between Amelia Earhart and Jimmy Hoffa, holding the lead to a unicorn.

Stephen’s col eague rushed toward Lely’s door, clapped the list under Stephen’s arm as he passed and disappeared into the office.

“I think,” Stephen said firmly to Cam, “you must leave.”

“
But I haven’t seen Mr. Lely yet,
” Peter heard a voice in the waiting room declare.

Despite the explosion of Mertons into his office like a misfired mortar, he smiled. The woman had an odd, eager lilt to her words that reminded him of his countrymen when they first grew conversant in English. He knew only too wel what it was like to be a stranger in a new place. He wondered if perhaps she was Dutch or had a Dutch parent.

“Where have you been?” Mertons’s gaze went straight to the now closed storage room door.

Peter kept his eyes from fol owing Mertons’s. “I do apologize. I was napping.”

“What is your name?”
Poor Stephen was checking the woman against the list, and Peter found himself listening for the reply, partly because he thought it might give him a further clue to her origin, and partly because he had always favored contraltos.

“It’s there,”
she said. “
On the list.”

“Peter?”

“Pardon?” Mertons had said something, though Peter had not the faintest idea what.

“I said I checked your room. You were not napping there.

I checked everywhere.”

“On this list?”
Stephen said, surprised. “
I made most of
it myself. Where is your name?”

“I was in the wardrobe,” Peter replied impatiently. He wished Mertons would stop talking so he could hear.

“The
wardrobe
?”

“Oh, dear,”
the woman said. “
I can barely read your
writing.”

“Lady Humphries,”
Stephen began, evidently reading off the patrons on the list, and with a spark of delight, Peter realized she was shopping for a name. “
Miss Mary
Tallyrand, daughter of Lord Tallyrand. Henrietta, wife of
Mr. George Palmer. A widow, Mrs. Eu-jeanne Eu-jen
Eugenie Post—”

“Mrs. Eugenie Kay Post. That,”
she said firmly,
“is I.”

“The wardrobe, Peter? Real y?”

Peter stood, unable to stifle his curiosity. “It is dark, it is cool, and at least until now,” he said, drifting toward the door, “no one has thought to look for me there.” He thought if he took a spot three-quarters of the way across the room and tilted his head just far enough …

Mertons blew out a long exhale. “I-I know you don’t enjoy being here, Peter, but we’ve talked about this. You must realize your absence could have been disastrous. If the writer had arrived while you—”

“Bugger the writer, Mertons. Mrs. Eugenie Kay Post has arrived, and I intend to enjoy this little performance—”

Then Peter saw her, and a searing pain cut his heart.

Sorrow, betrayal, fear and, above al , a burning anger flared like a gunpowder charge, sucking the air from his lungs.

She was beautiful, with ringlets of sun-polished copper, eyes as crystal blue as the Zuider Zee, the proud shoulders of a sultan and a fine, high bosom. And beautiful she should be, for she was almost the dead spit of Ursula. He knew she must have been picked by Stephen like an apple in Eden to tempt him.

Wel , damn Stephen and his detestable machinations.

Damn his handsome widows. He wondered if she were a widow at al . He wouldn’t put it past his meddling friend to have hired an agreeable whore so long as she had the right face and hair.

Peter retreated a step but it was too late. The woman spotted him and smiled tentatively.

His head started to buzz. He felt manipulated, his fastidiousness made to look ridiculous. He would be forced to talk to this woman as Stephen looked on. Peter’s cheeks flushed, and a sweat broke out on his lip. He wished to run, or to shout—something, anything to master this upsetting tumult of emotion.

Stephen looked as if he would prefer to be hanged, and if Peter had had easy access to a rope he would have accommodated him without a second thought.

“Peter,” Stephen said stiffly, “may I introduce Mrs.

Eugenie Kay Post. Mrs. Post, this is Peter Lely, court painter to His Majesty, King Charles. I was just explaining to Mrs. Post that you are—”

“I need only a moment of your time, Mr. Lely,” the woman said, interrupting. She extended an arm the color of glazed bisque. “I wish to discuss a commission for a landscape.

My time in London is limited.”

“I imagined as much,” Peter said cool y, but his words emerged through a mouth so dry they lost their resonance, heightening his embarrassment. He kissed her hand quickly, then released it as his own started to quake. He hated that she had this effect on him. To have felt so little in the way of attraction for so long and then to feel this … It was too much. “My clerk has failed in his duty. Desire him to explain the complexities of my diary. I am a very busy man. I suggest you take your custom elsewhere. Good day.”