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“I must pay a call on a member of the Academy’s nominating committee then visit my family at Flint Hall. Your hospitality these past two days has been much appreciated.”
Particularly when a foot of snow had fallen Christmas Eve into Christmas Day. Kesmore had offered to take Elijah home with him after the open house, and Elijah had left Morelands, bag and baggage, rather than remain where at least one duke and one duchess held him in mortal dislike.
As well they should, though not for the reasons they did.
Kesmore capped the flask. “Are you paying the least attention, Bernward?”
“No.” Elijah tested the snugness of the horse’s girth, because he might have tightened it, and he might have not. Such were the mental faculties of a man with a broken heart, a man who’d waited in vain for Genevieve to leave the upper reaches of the house and join the party below on Christmas Eve.
“She leaves New Year’s Day for the Continent,” Kesmore mused, and abruptly the foggy, boggy morass that was Elijah’s brain regained the ability to focus.
“Genevieve is going to Paris?”
His initial reaction was… a sentimental mix of gladness for her, pride in her resolve, and the certain knowledge that no amount of drinking or rumination was going to ferment those feelings into outright joy.
“Eventually. Seems a widowed aunt wants to visit relations in Vie
England without Genevieve would be a lonely place. Any studio without Genevieve would be a lonely place.
The back of Elijah’s horse would be a very lonely place, particularly when that horse was pointed away from the lady. That she was achieving her heart’s desire was much less comfort than Elijah had hoped it would be.
“Wish me safe journey, Kesmore, and thanks for all of your hospitality.”
Kesmore shoved the flask at him. “Louisa says you are an idiot, but I must be patient because you are an idiot in love with an imbecile. She says that’s the general case where tender sentiments are involved, and I am ever grateful for my countess’s guidance. Safe journey.”
Kesmore yanked him into a hug, walloped him once on the back, then let him go.
As Elijah swung down from his horse, long, weary, frigid miles later, the force of Kesmore’s blow still reverberated in memory, almost as if the man had been trying to knock sense into him.
“Mr. Buchanan will see you now, my lord.”
They all my lorded him now, the entire committee. He didn’t like it from them any more than he’d liked it from Genevieve—for different reasons.
“Bernward, welcome, and what a pleasure!” Buchanan’s face was wreathed with a smile that suggested he knew things Elijah did not. That smile went onto the growing list of things Elijah did not like.
“Buchanan. Apologies for the lack of notice, but I was passing through Town on my way to Flint Hall.”
Those words dimmed the smile, blending it with consternation. “You’re off to the family seat?”
“For what remains of the holidays, yes. My mother’s wishes trump royal edicts, papal bulls, and likely the whims of the Almighty. I did, however, want to discuss with you—”
A footman appeared bearing a tray. Buchanan gestured the man into a room, the walls of which were crowded with old masters growing dark with age—and not a smile to be seen among them.
“You wanted to discuss the committee nominations,” Buchanan said when the footman had withdrawn. “Shall we sit?”
No, they shall not sit. “Afraid I haven’t the time, sir. You will understand the urgency of keeping the Marchioness of Flint from a display of stubborn temper?” Mama would kill him for that prevarication. Her menfolk were the ones afflicted with stubborn temper.
Buchanan’s expression became considering, the look of a politician rearranging his chess pieces. “If you’re going to Flint Hall, perhaps you’d take a package for me to Lord Flint?”
“Of course, though the purpose for my call was to retrieve from you the sketches I’d passed along of a certain portrait.” The best portrait he’d ever done, and the best likeness he’d rendered of a certain young lady.
Who was on her way to the bloody, sodding Continent in only a few days’ time, there to kick up her heels, admire art, and be admired by not just Frenchmen—those were bad enough—but Germans, Austrians, Dutchmen, and Italians. Possibly Russians as well, and those dear chaps had burned three-quarters of Moscow in the dead of winter rather than allow Napoleon the satisfaction of sacking it. Genevieve would be right at home among them.
“So you don’t want to discuss the committee’s nominations?”
Turpentine and paint fumes could addle a man’s wits, particularly when they were all he breathed for decades at a time. Elijah spoke gently. “I do not care that”—he snapped his fingers under Buchanan’s sizable nose—“for the committee’s nominations.”
Plainer than that, he could not be. Not without lapsing into profanities, but what mattered the committee’s blessing when Genevieve was packing for the Continent, and the last coffin nail was being pounded into Elijah’s relationship with his family?
Genevieve had told him to go home, so home he would go.
Buchanan regarded him for another moment, looking less like a politician and more like a man who’d once rendered portraits and had the knack of reading faces. “I’ll get your father’s package. It’s in my study, and your drawing is with it.”
Elijah followed him through a chilly, dank house—the damp could not be good for all the art displayed on the walls—into an equally chilly, damp, and cramped room toward the front.
Buchanan’s study had good light, though. As Buchanan opened a cupboard and extracted a leather tube about thirty inches long, Elijah realized they were standing in what had once likely been a studio.
“Do you miss it?” Elijah asked.
Buchanan passed the leather case over, his eyes revealing comprehension of the question. “I do. I should not have stopped, but the Academy is a fine institution, and it wanted guidance. I was never as talented as some, but I miss the painting. I do miss it.”
He let go of the case, and his lips quirked up. “I’ll keep your sentiments regarding the committee to myself, for now. That is a fine, fine portrait, Bernward.”
Elijah turned to follow Buchanan’s line of sight, only to be gut-punched by the painting hanging against the far wall.
Genevieve and the busy, laughing little boys, old Jock snoozing happily, and everything Elijah had ever wanted summarized in one painting. Even as his mind comprehended that the portrait was good—better than he’d known—his brain was scrambling to make sense of the painting in its present context.
“What is that doing here?”
“I agree,” Buchanan said, stepping closer to the painting. “If I’d commissioned this, I would never have let it out of my sight, but it arrived with a note from no less than His Grace the Duke of Moreland, with leave for the committee to consider it when deciding upon their nominations. Said his daughter, whose artistic sensibilities eclipse those of any academy member, required it of him. Even Fotheringale shut up for once. You apparently have a talent for rendering children.”
Or for rendering any setting that included Genevieve Windham, and yet the committee’s flattering reception of this one painting did not change anything—anything of consequence—one bit.
Though Elijah spared an internal sigh for Genevieve’s generosity of spirit. Maybe a return to the Harrison family seat would help ease that ache—and maybe not. “I’m off to Flint Hall, Buchanan. You’ll want to send that painting back to Kent with all due care.”