Page 12 of These Violet Delights
He hadn’t expected his heart to stop either, but some faces demanded stillness.
Yet he had chased her off. Her face, her beauty, was known to him. Had they met before? Perhaps he had been too eager to shout, but then, nobody was meant to be there. This wassolemn ground, a monument to grief, and he would suffer no trespassers. He looked around, realizing he was in the shambling remains of the west wing; his father had perished there, and if he listened too closely to the hollow, rising wind, he heard his faint whisper.
There you are, Cub. You’ve been away too long.
Alasdair slid from the saddle, tucking his crop under one arm and striding to the scattered easel and canvases on the ground. The offense he had taken at the woman’s presence remained lodged in his throat as he knelt to flip over one of the paintings. That arresting face stared up at him with the same impertinent mouth, not open in surprise as he had just seen it, but the lips slightly parted in dawning realization. It was a self-portrait of the lady, and a good one.
“Incredible,” he whispered.
And you screamed at her like a lunatic.
He glanced up at the broken towers that seemed to stand in judgment of his every move. Julianna considered him an emotionless hunk of stone, no different from the pillars surrounding him, but here the protective membrane of his stoicism thinned, and his chest tightened until he could hardly breathe. Looking again at the canvas in his hands, he was struck by the idea of a lady coming here to make new life in what he regarded as a tomb. Art, after all, was an act of creation. It was something he longed to sit with longer, but a fat raindrop slapped against his cheek. Alasdair swore under his breath and gathered up the other painting that had been beside the fallen easel, then ripped off his coat and wrapped it around the canvases. They were watercolors, and the smallest bit of moisture could destroy them utterly. Why he felt desperate to preserve them was a question to be interrogated later, preferably beside a fire.
The ride back to Sampson Park was a race against the clouds. Hilary, a groom who had served the family since the days when Clafton stood proudly on the hill, met him in the drive. Before ducking into the front hall, Alasdair directed him to send someone back to the ruins for the easel and anything else the woman had left behind. She was no doubt local to the area, and returning her possessions was the gentlemanly thing to do.
Returning the painting, however, was less attractive.
Alasdair found the house in a state of practiced bustle; the dinner chime would sound soon, but he had an hour or so to change before sitting through a tense meal with Danforth, Freddie, and his mother. He wasn’t looking forward to it; if the evening before was any indication, he was staring down many strained, uncomfortable dinners in his future. Freddie, hotheaded and opinionated, could not possibly contain his dislike of Danforth while the clergyman extolled the virtues of sobriety, piety, and propriety. All of the-ietys, really, none of which Freddie embodied. It was little better for Alasdair, who had heard similar speeches from his mother since boyhood and was far more interested in discussing the Clafton rebuild.
As requested, the staff had placed a bottle of last year’s cherry brandy in the hidden globe compartment in his chambers. It was perhaps not so hidden anymore, but needs must. He unwrapped the paintings covered by his coat and placed them against his desk, cheered to see that they had survived the rain. Discarding his wet shirt and damp breeches, he fetched out a dressing gown and sipped brandy while positioning the watercolor self-portrait on a short bookcase to the left of the door and across from an obliging window. He wiped the lenses of his round spectacles on his sleeve, finding them stained with dried raindrops.
“Thank God for those silly spectacles,” Julianna once told him, laughing. “Without them you’d be too, too menacing.”
It was true that he had his late father’s hulking size. Sir Kerr had always insisted that came from the Scottish blood in their line, that one boy in the generation always inherited the Highlander strength. Alasdair had hated it as a boy, finding that others assumed him to be a bully, but now, nearing thirty years of age, he didn’t mind it so much. Strangers tended to give him a wide berth, and that suited him just fine.
The world blurred around him, dimmed by myopia until he perched the lenses back on his nose. He scrunched his face, adjusting the spectacles higher, standing several paces away from the bookcase. With the knuckles of his right hand tucked under his chin, he studied the self-portrait. The artist had achieved an inarguable likeness, which was always preferable, but there was more to it. Her lips were shaped into a question, her shockingly cornflower-blue eyes fixed forward, staring directly into him,skeweringhim. He felt his own lips part in the same breathless expression, as if compelled by the subtle magic of the piece. Chuckling to himself, he realized his error; those intriguing eyes weren’t meant for him but reflected the intensity of the artist’s self-study. She was questioning herself, lost in her own image, yet somehow the painter had avoided all the usual maudlin pitfalls of self-portraiture. It was the insistent use of blues, he decided, that made the painting truly special. There was nothing coquettish about it, which was an achievement, he thought, given that he knew the creator was a woman. No, this was forthright, candid, almost brazen.
What do you see in me?the figure asked.What do I see in myself?
Something thumped against the wall to his right. Alasdair noticed he was still holding his brandy, half-sipped, then heardthat infuriating noise again. Then a voice, and as it sharpened, he realized someone had been knocking and calling his name for a good long while. Alasdair leapt forward, opening the door to his brother.
At once, Freddie’s eyes landed on the brandy and sparkled. “Good God, man, are you besotted?” He wrenched the glass out of Alasdair’s grasp and drank what was left. “Give that here. I thought all the drink was removed from the house…”
“Cook found half a bottle of last year’s brandy,” he said, words coming to him slowly.
“Lucky, that. Danforth prevailed upon Mother, of course, and now it is rare even to have wine with dinner.” Freddie marched to the globe to refill the glass. He paused with the bottle’s neck in the air, his eye landing first on the portrait of one young lady, and then on the other propped on the bookcase. The sun had almost vanished, leaving them in the bruised gloom of twilight. “Why is it so bloody dark in here? And where did these come from?”
Alasdair retrieved the glass as Freddie hurried by. If the brandy was almost gone, then he wasn’t about to let Freddie have it all.
“But this is Miss Emilia Graddock!” his brother half shouted. He snatched up the other painting Alasdair had rescued from the rain and marveled at it with the dazed abstraction of a man in love. “Wait a moment, how did you come to have this?” Freddie tore himself from the amorous brink and noticed the self-portrait again, squawking with laughter. “That is Violet Arden! God help us all if Mother sees either of these…”
The brandy soured on Alasdair’s tongue.
“Violet Arden?” he repeated. A memory, some fifteen years old, slammed into him from behind, and he surged up ontohis toes. “Didn’t we play with her and some other children at Pressmore a hundred years ago?”
“Exactly so,” Freddie said, still gazing at his apparent lady love. Shewasbeautiful, he’d give Freddie that. “I used to chase the Arden girls with muddy fingers and a legion of frogs. They hated it! It was a lot of laughs until Mother put an end to it. Do you remember? She had our little boat dragged from the pond and chucked in the back garden to be filled with chrysanthemums.” Freddie managed to look away from Emilia Graddock, squinting at Alasdair. “Were you just now standing in the dark gawking at Miss Arden?”
Alasdair rolled his shoulders, trying to ward off the cold feeling slithering into his stomach. “It can’t be her.”
“Well.” Freddie snorted. “It is.”
He lifted the brandy to his lips and downed it in one. The burn was clarifying. And cauterizing. Lord. He would never give Freddie the satisfaction of a confession, but indeed, he had just lost himself standing in the dark and gawking at Miss Arden. Yet every memory of her that remained from childhood was vexing. She was a whirlwind of stentorian opinions and instructions, proposing increasingly demented schemes for who would play what sort of pirate in the forest, perching on any available rock to perform monologues with her grass-stained chin pointed to the heavens.
It occurred to Alasdair that he had been away most of his life and that Freddie, with his penchant for seduction, might know Violet Arden better than most. He didn’t like the shiver of disgust that ran through him at the thought.
“One of your conquests?” he asked, hoisting a brow.
“Her?” Freddie nearly dropped the painting. “God, no. She would eat me alive.”
