“Emmy?” He looked at her curiously. “Explain, if you will. I can feel the painting, if that makes sense, but I cannot understand it.”
Oh,she told him with eyes and hands, and he knew that she was spilling over with eagerness to tell him what the painting was all about. She showed him the trees around them and the sky above and stretched her arms and her hands and her fingers upward. Her head tipped back and her eyes closed. There was a look of near agony, near ecstasy, on her face. Her arms moved in small spirals.
He looked back at the canvas. Yes. Ah yes, he could see it now, though it was unlike any other painting he had ever seen. It was like music. Wild, passionate music that exalted the spirit. He could imagine himself lying on the forest floor and gazing heavenward to that point where tree trunks and branches reached up and met the sky and merged with it. Emmy had seen that in her mind? And somehow reproduced it on canvas? She had been that close to—to what? To understanding the meaning of it all? He looked back at her, intrigued, almost awed. The wary look had intensified in her eyes.
Powell had not understood, he realized, or been willing to try to understand. Powell had hurt her. He had expected her to read his lips but had been unwilling to read her painting. Perhaps he had thought there was no meaning there. Perhaps he thought Emmy would be an empty receptacle, a comfortable but unchallenging life’s companion.
“You see life spiraling through everything,” Ashley said. “It comes through the soil and bursts upward, through everything and on out into the whole universe. Life is too powerful to be contained in one living thing but must be joined to all other living things. Life is a passionate celebration—a dance, perhaps. Is that what you saw this morning, Emmy? What you painted?”
Her eyes were bright with tears then and she closed her right hand into a loose fist and pulsed it against her heart. Ah yes. He remembered immediately.I feel it deeply.She bent to gather up her paints and brushes.
He felt somewhat awed, somewhat humbled. He had always known that there were depths to Emmy that all but a few of those who loved her had never even suspected. He had experienced her sympathy, her happiness, her peace. He had devised a very rudimentary language of signs with her so that they had some form of two-way communication. But for the first time he had glimpsed something of the complex depths of her vision. He felt... privileged.
“Emmy, my dear,” he said, sensing that he had entered one of those rare moments of insight in his life. “If you could but speak.” But she could not, and she would not be the person she was if she could, he realized. Besides, she was not even looking at him to know that he had spoken. Or to know that bitter despair had welled up suddenly inside him.
When she did look up, the rush of tears had gone and she raised her eyebrows and gestured toward the house. Was he ready to return with her?
“Go,” he told her. “Leave me here. I am not good company for you this morning. Or for anyone else, either. You must guard your innocence and your happiness and your inner peace from such as me, Emmy. I could only destroy them.”
She did not look startled or hurt, as he had half expected she might, though he knew she had seen his words. She looked calmly at him, but the sadness in her eyes almost had him grabbing for her. He had spoken the truth, though: If once he gave in to the lure of confiding completely in Emmy, unburdening himself to her, as he had used to do, he would destroy her. He would cling and pull her into his own darkness and never let her go free.
It terrified him that he was tempted.
“Go,” he told her again, and heard with surprise the harshness in his voice. He wondered if it showed in his face.
She went, taking her easel and her painting with her.
She was in communion with all that was light and joy and life-giving, he thought, or so it seemed to him. He had felt it in her painting, strange and wild as it was. He had seen it in her silent explanation.
And he was all darkness. The very antithesis of what she had found.
Emmy had grown up, he realized. And grown beyond him in the process. She had taken the limited opportunities that life had offered her as a woman, and a handicapped woman at that, and had used them to make herself into a mature and interesting person—he was sure she would be fascinating to know. He longed to know her as he had once longed for her to know him.
He was suddenly appalled by the selfishness of that former self of his. And by something else too: He had taken the limitless opportunities that life had offered him and used them to discover—hell.
He must stay away from Emmy, he knew. If there was something good he could still do in life, he must do that. He must stay away from her.
She was a woman now—beautiful, fascinating, alluring. Oh yes. He closed his eyes and smiled twistedly. Even that demon had found him out. There was no point in denying it. She was alluring.
•••
Lukeembraced his brother when Ashley entered the breakfast parlor, there being no one else present.
“Harry has decided to kick his heels and exercise his lungs,” Luke explained. “An unusual time of day for him. ’Tis the advent of teeth, Anna swears. She has stayed in the nursery to help Nurse soothe him. Zounds but ’tis good to see you, Ash.” He indicated a seat at the table.
Ashley smiled crookedly and sat. “I have been up these two hours or more,” he said, “riding and walking. English air is more conducive to exercise than to sleep.”
“Yes.” Luke had seated himself and picked up his coffee cup. But he returned it to its saucer. “Sultan was in something of a lather when you returned him to the stables, Ash. I was obliged to take him out again to calm him and to cool him gradually.”
Ashley laughed. “Deuce take it,” he said, “have you taken to trotting sedately about the park, Luke, at a pace to suit your children? ’Tis time, perhaps, that your mounts knew that there is a pace known as a gallop.”
Luke pursed his lips. “There is such a thing as respect for one’s horse,” he said. “Sultan is particularly difficult. ’Tis my theory that he was abused by his previous owner. Ihadadvised my grooms that until further notice no one was to ride him but me. One of my grooms received a tongue-lashing from me this morning—probably unfairly.”
“I beg your pardon,” Ashley said somewhat frostily, turning to indicate to the footman at the sideboard that he was ready to be served. “I had forgotten that I am a mere stranger here now.”
Luke sat back in his chair, one hand playing absently with his cup and saucer until Ashley’s plate was heaped with food and the footman had been informed with a mere lift of the ducal eyebrows that he might withdraw.
“We have quarreled,” Luke said with a sigh when they were quite alone together. “On your first morning back. ’Twill not do, Ash. I refuse to quarrel further. What brought you back to England?”
