She’d smiled to cover pain, because the wish was as much for him as for her. He did love her and want the best for her, but he wanted peace in his new nest, too. This journey had been her escape, but after just three days in a coach with the Trayce ladies, she fretted for solitude.
She realized she’d come to a halt and hurried on again. Was she impossible to please? Was she one of those people who could never be content, no matter where they were? Surely not. She’d been blessed with much happiness and knew how to appreciate it.
She was simply upset by today’s events, but they would set a saint on edge. As a result, she was in no state to think clearly about anything. What she needed was a good night’s sleep. With luck, Thalia would be tucked up and snoring by now.
She turned to retrace her steps, but realized she had no sense of where she was. Which way? How embarrassing to become the first truly lost guest.
She picked a direction, trying to steer a straight linethrough random corridors, then turned a corner and saw light. It was cool and pale, so must be moonlight through a window. She headed for it, sure she could get her bearings from a look outside. She could even, she thought with amusement, navigate by the stars.
The light spilled through an archway, not a window, an archway into a long room moonlit by a wall of tall windows. She walked in and turned, not surprised to see ranks of pictures. This was the Malloren portrait gallery.
The wash of light turned the ancestral faces a ghostly gray, which seemed disturbingly appropriate, as if any of them might step out of a frame to haunt her. Facing her, however, was a portrait of someone very much alive—the current marquess.
He stood in formal dress, haughty and austere, young but very much the magnate. He seemed unoffended by her invasion, but his direct gaze was so perceptive that she shivered. She looked away—and saw another marquess.
Lord Ashart lounged on a window seat, long legs stretched before him, hands in the pockets of his breeches. He was studying her in a manner chillingly like that of his cousin.
Disregarding courtesy, he did not rise. “Is this a damsel which I see before me?” he said, misquoting Shakespeare. “Come, let me clutch thee.”
She hesitated, as much from sizzling response as from fear. She was in no state for another encounter, but pride would not let her turn and run away.
She replied from the same speech of Macbeth’s. “Perhaps I am but a damsel of the mind, my lord.”
“The worst sort. What are you doing here, Miss Smith?”
“If marquesses may wander in the night, may not we lowly commoners do the same?”
“Ah, you’re fleeing Mallorens, too, are you? Then flee this room. It’s full of them.”
“In fact, my lord, I’m fleeing Trayces.”
“Still a mistake. You’ve found me. And”—he gestured lazily—“my infamous aunt.”
Genova couldn’t resist. She walked closer to him until she could turn and study the picture on the opposite wall.
She shivered at a truly ghostly effect—the features floated into nothing. Then she realized it was a sketch for a portrait either hung elsewhere or never completed. The picture showed head and shoulders of a girl in Grecian costume, arms bare, holding a lyre, her dark hair tumbling around her laughing face.
“She doesn’t look mad,” Genova said.
“But madness is mad itself, and can come and go.”
“Do you truly think her husband drove her mad?”
He gestured to a portrait beside the sketch. “There he is.”
Genova studied a formal portrait of a powdered-haired man with a mild, amiable face. Beyond that was one of a lady who looked both lovely and sweetnatured. There was a matched kindness and poise that made Lady Augusta seem wild.
“Portraits can lie,” she said.
“But generally to conceal fat and warts, not soul.”
“I’ve seen the one of you the Trayce ladies have.”
“Ah, that. I remember being deadly bored. But that is the condition of man, is it not? Inconstancy, anxiety, and boredom.”
She turned to study him. “Are you drunk, my lord?”
His heavy-lidded eyes could give a deceptively sleepy appearance. “Don’t people say, ‘drunk as a lord’? It’s clearly my duty to be drunk, and of course, noblesse obliges. May I oblige you?”
