“Ah,” he said softly, “have I done it then, Jane? Have I really captured it? The essence of you? The light is coming from you. It is the effect you have on your surroundings.”
But how had hedoneit?
“You are disappointed,” he said.
She turned to him and shook her head. “I suppose,” she said, “you never had an art master. It would not have been allowed for a future Duke of Tresham. Jocelyn, you are a man in every sense that you think important. You must dare to be more fully a man as you have been in this room this week. You have an amazing talent as a musician, an awesome talent as a painter. You must continue to use them even when I am gone. For your own sake as much as that of the world.”
It was typical of him, of course, to choose to comment on a very small point.
“You are going to leave me, then, Jane?” he asked. “Go to greener pastures, perhaps? To someone who can teach you new tricks?”
She recognized the source of the insult. He was embarrassed by her earnest praise.
“Why should I leave you,” she asked briskly, “when the terms of the contract are so favorable to me provided you are the one who does the leaving?”
“As I will inevitably do, of course,” he said, regarding her through narrowed eyes. “There is usually a week or two of total infatuation, Jane, followed by a few more weeks of dwindling interest before a final severance of the relationship. How long have I been totally besotted with you now?”
“I would like to have time to practice skills other than just embroidery,” she said, returning to her chair and folding her silk threads to put away in her workbag. “The garden needs more work. There are all those books to be read. And there is much writing I wish to do. I daresay that once your interest dwindles, I shall find my days richer and filled to overflowing with any number of congenial activities.”
He chuckled softly. “I thought,” he said, “we were not supposed to quarrel in this room, Jane.”
“I thought,” she replied tartly, “the Duke of Tresham was not to be brought into the room. I thought we had agreed not to allow him over the threshold, nasty, arrogant man. The very idea of telling mewhenI might expect to find your interest in me waning and how long I might expect to enjoy your wearying favors after that. Come here looking as if you believe you are doing me a favor, Jocelyn, and you will be leaving faster than you arrived, believe me. I have to consent, remember, before you so much as touch me.”
“You like the portrait, then?” he asked meekly.
She set down her workbag and looked at him, exasperated.
“Must you always try to hurt me when you feel most vulnerable?” she asked. “I love it. I love it because you painted it and because it will remind me of this week. But I suspect that if I knew more about painting I would love it too because it is great art. I believe it is, Jocelyn. But you would have to ask an expert. Is the painting mine? To keep? Forever?”
“If you want it, Jane,” he said. “Do you?”
“OfcourseI want it. You had better go now or you will be late for your dinner.”
“Dinner?” He frowned, then appeared to remember. “Oh,dinner. To hell with it. I shall stay here and dine with you, Jane.”
One more evening of her month to hug to herself.
THEY DRANK TEA AFTERdinner and he read to her fromMansfield Parkwhile she sat relaxed in her chair. But after that they sat in companionable silence until he started talking about his boyhood again, as he had done for the past two evenings. Having started, it seemed he could not stop.
“I believe you should go back, Jocelyn,” she said when he paused. “I believe you need to go back.”
“To Acton?” he said. “Never! Only for my own funeral.”
“But you speak of it with love,” she said. “How old were you when you left?”
“Sixteen,” he told her. “I swore I would never go back. I never have, except for two funerals.”
“You must have still been at school,” she said.
“Yes.”
She did not ask the question. That was so like Jane. She would not pry. But the question might as well have been shouted out. She sat quietly and receptively. Jane, to whom he had opened so much of himself in the past week.
“You do not want to know, Jane,” he told her.
“I think perhaps,” she said, “you need to tell.”
That was all she said. He gazed into the fire and remembered the initiation. The moment at which he had become his father. And his grandfather. A true Dudley. A man.
