Page 19 of Centerpiece

She had light hair, not as pale as hay but more like honey, that spilled out from underneath the loose covering of blue, and big brown eyes, and...a streak of dirt across one cheek.

Between that and the twigs and springs of green, she had the appearance of someone who had been scrumping.But she was a lady.A lady wouldn’t need to steal apples or quince.A duchess certainly wouldn’t bother.

A duchess.Agreeable remembered himself and jerked away so he would not look as if he had been waiting for a kiss from her husband and then jumped to his feet.Uncertain, he considered bowing before he remembered his skirt and tried to hop into a curtsy like some of the milkmaids did for people like the bailiff.Then he remembered he wasn’t in his skirt and bobbed down in what he hoped was a proper bow.

“Did you have a good visit with Marie?”Holburn asked his wife, calm and unhurried, as though his good lady wife wasn’t staring at the strange lad wearing her husband’s clothes.“Where is Hilde?”

The Duchess swung her attention to her husband, pulling her lovely scarf back and brushing a few strands of hair from her eyes.Her hair had probably once been braided or twisted and pinned.It was windswept now, and...contained even more greenery.

“Hilde is downstairs getting a meal.I love Marie to bits, but her cook leaves something to be desired.”She said that with her gaze straying back to Agreeable, but then her focus was all on Holburn.“And you?I was going to ask if your journey was uneventful, but....”She gestured gracefully at the air in front of Agreeable, or perhaps at the rumpled bed behind him.

“I suspect my grandfather would be amused.”Holburn’s answer didn’t quite make sense to Agreeable, but the Duchess gave Holburn a wry look.She was not beautiful, not as Agreeable would have expected from how Holburn had described her.But that how it was with lovers, or so Agreeable understood.

Agreeable would have said that she wasn’t beautiful in the same way that Holburn wasn’t handsome.She was lovely enough to have been a village flirt, but the sharp, careful way she had stopped to take note of Agreeable and then how she’d teased Holburn probably made her too smart for many.She had a keen eye, Holburn had said.That would scare many away.

Agreeable straightened his shoulders to hopefully make a better impression.

“I wasn’t expecting you at dawn,” Holburn remarked, stepping over to her to kiss her brow, then her cheek, and then her mouth.She took each kiss with a smile—and her gaze on Agreeable.

“It’s hardly dawn,” she chided Holburn, although, in truth, it was not long past it.“There was a view I wanted to see as the sun rose.The coachman was very obliging for a hired man.We might need to keep him on.He seems kind.”

“I will ask him,” Holburn agreed immediately, then began, with wondrous gentleness, to pluck the sprigs of greenery from her hair.“Did you find this view of the sunrise up a tree, by any chance?”

“A small tree.I wanted a quick sketch so I can attempt to draw it properly later.”Finally, the Duchess looked up at Holburn.“You needn’t worry.I wasn’t about to fall out again.”

“Again?”Agreeable whispered to himself, remembering the pain from broken bones in childhood only too well.“How tall was the tree?”

He slapped a hand over his mouth too late to stop the question, and the Duchess slid him a look that said she could have clapped a hand over his mouth for him.

Holburn merely clucked his tongue and rubbed the dirt streak with his thumb.“Did Hilde not notice this?”He presented his thumb to the Duchess to show her some of the dirt.

“Damn and blast.”The Duchess reached into her dress for a handkerchief.“She told me and I forgot.And I saw the innkeeper looking like this.They’ll never believe I’m their duchess.Perhaps that’s for the best.”

“It’s the country.”Holburn said it as if people in the country walked around with dirt on their faces.

Agreeable glanced to the table and his wash bowl from the night before and said nothing.

“It’s a shame you couldn’t linger to draw the sunrise and pretty view properly.She’s a skilled artist,” Holburn added, to Agreeable perhaps, who tried to understand fully what that meant.

“Like what’s inside the church?”he wondered aloud.That was mostly images of saints and dragons and long-dead kings, the paint chipping from the walls, or faded from time, or covered in soot from the candles.

“I don’t paint anything.I only draw it.”The Duchess considered Agreeable with her keen eye and then, added, “I use a pencil or a piece of charcoal, and I try to create what I see on paper.But I don’t add color, and what I draw wouldn’t end up inside a church.”

“Oh.”Agreeable again tried to understand, or to seem as if he did.Some of the church images had trees or the sun in them.“So no saints, then?Or miracles?”

“When I draw people,” the Duchess answered with her chin in the air, “they are not drawings fit for a church.”

Agreeable stared at her, wide-eyed, and thought of as many reasons as he could why a drawing of a person wouldn’t do for a church.The most obvious one was that she didn’t draw priests and angels and the like.The second was that the wife of someone like Holburn, with his capital parties and his ways, might not be interested in covering the bodies of saints with strips of cloth to hide their soft bits.

She swept a look over his face, and Agreeable imagined he must look an innocent, gaping at her and warm in the face over the idea of naked bodies drawn on a wall.But her eyes narrowed.Grew sharper, he would have said, much like Holburn’s did.She murmured, “But I’ve a mind to draw saints now.Or an angel.”She peered at Agreeable as if she could see everything he’d been pleased to give Holburn in the bed behind them and everything he wanted to do if given the chance in the future.

“Holburn,” she said suddenly.She didn’t add anything else.

Agreeable finally tore his attention from her to glance to Holburn.

Holburn’s lips twitched as he met Agreeable’s worried stare.“Ali, this is...Remi, who might do for a page.”

“A page who doesn’t know whether to bow or curtsy?”the Duchess responded immediately, gaze unwavering on Agreeable.

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