Careful to avoid the flames from the candelabras, she peered at the sketch as he turned it towards her. It was another attempt to capture the quality of the moonlight as it fell onto the bare, wintry trees outside. Several others lay either completed, discarded or set aside for further development on a nearby table.
“Moonlight is hard to work with,” Dorian tried to explain. “It is so rarely this bright and clear. I must capture as much as I can when the opportunity arises. Then I can draw on these sketches for my paintings later.”
“I should not stop you working in that case,” Rose pronounced, caressing his shoulder and drawing an involuntary sound of appreciation from his lips.
Taking up a candelabra, she passed onwards to the easel where his incomplete painting of the forest scene lay, barely touched since the night he had first claimed her.
Dorian was still unsure what he would place in the centre of that scene, or whether he would only fill the entire canvas with shadowy wariness and glinting animal eyes. Tonight, he was focused only on capturing the fall of moonlight.
The door into the next two rooms was open and he heard Rose padding through. Normally, the rest of this suite was locked, its contents deliberately hidden from potentially wandering bed partners. Wherever he had lived, Dorian had kept a similar locked room beside his studio. For a moment, the duke’s body tensed, but then he relaxed, recognizing that he felt no need to hide his finished paintings from Rose.
She lived here too and she was the Duchess of Ravenhill. It would do no harm, he supposed, even if she came upon the nudes of past lovers, or the mirror-drawn sketches of himself in congress with various masked ladies… Rose knew his nature by now, both by reputation and personal experience.
The duke was even curious as to what might interest her, and listened to each small sound of interest or enthusiasm as she browsed. When he heard a noise that was close to distress, however, he put down his sketch pad and went to join her.
“Did you find anything you like?” Dorian asked, picking his way across a room filled with hung, piled and leaning pictures of all sizes and types.
Both this room, the former dressing room of the Duchess of Ravenhill, and an old sitting room beyond, were empty of almost all furniture and used only to store Dorian’s private art works.
Rose turned and looked at him and he saw tears in her eyes. Had he misjudged her capacity to be shocked?
“This one makes me feel so sad,” she told him, but indicated a painting that contained no human figures at all. “You are talented to be able to paint so well, and so movingly.”
The painting before her was a vivid depiction of a black stallion caught in a storm at night, the poor, bewildered beast rearing amid lightning and rain but unable to outrun the threats surrounding it on all sides. God, how long ago had he painted that image?
“It’s a very old painting,” Dorian told her, something stirring inside him with this recollection. “I was maybe seventeen when I finished it; fifteen years ago…”
“The poor horse can’t escape from the storm,” Rose murmured. “I can feel it when I look at him. He is trapped by terrors he can’t understand.”
Dorian gazed at the picture and swallowed what began to rise in him at the sight.
“The lightning was a struggle,” he commented. “It is even more ephemeral and harder to capture than moonlight…”
Despite his efforts to keep memory at bay, Dorian’s mind replayed the sound of a crashing vase and a slamming door. Then, his mother’s voice screamed that she wished his father was dead…
This had been the unmusical accompaniment to the movement of Dorian’s hand over the canvas, adding those hints of red to the whites of the terrorized animal’s eyes, and emphasizing the lines of tension in its straining muscles.
Back in the present, Rose had put her arm around his waist and was leaning against him.
“It was not an easy time in my life,” he admitted to her with a sigh. “Some of that comes out in the painting, I suspect.”
“Were you very unhappy when you were young, Dorian?” Rose asked.
“My adult life has certainly been happier than my youth,” he replied with studied insouciance. “The best thing about my childhood is that it is long over and need never be revisited.”
“You did not like your parents,” observed his wife, making a statement rather than asking a question.
“They were not parents in the sense you likely mean,” Dorian told her. “Certainly not like your parents, nor your friends’ parents. They wanted very little to do with me and I was usually glad of it.”
“But who looked after you? Who fed you and dressed you? Who educated you?”
“Oh, whoever was around at the time and being paid to do so. It was a relief to go to school when I was eight. At home, my father had one of his many affairs with the woman who was meant to be my governess. My mother paid him back by having a fling with the young Oxford graduate who briefly took over my tutoring.”
Rose’s face was sad rather than shocked on hearing these admissions.
“Why was it like that in your home?” she asked him.
Dorian did his best to answer honestly and factually.
