The entire reason his bride insisted on black was because of Landon.
Argyll sucked in a breath through his nose.
It was settled.
I’m going to kill someone.
Phineas. Him. He’d start with him.
When he trusted himself to speak without losing his bloody mind, he looked at his wife. She lay silent, her big eyes on him.
“Daria, that painting…” As one, they looked at the piece he’d now happily toss into the hearth. “It doesn’t depict mortality as a grim noose hanging about a person. It encourages a person to live in their moment, as others who once stood in that same place did.”
Daria’s lips formed a small surprised little moue he wanted to swallow with his mouth. She lifted her gaze and appraised the rustic scene once more. “I do like that interpretation.”
“Yes, well, I should have been with you at the time of your first viewing of it,” he muttered.
She smiled; that smile reached all the way to her eyes. “I believe I love it even more.”
They would agree to disagree.
Argyll wanted to rip it from his ceiling and use it as kindling.
“Why did you want it, Gregory?”
He contemplated the vibrant piece, all too happy to navigate away from talk of tragedy and death. “I saw a pair admiring the piece. I wouldn’t have stopped otherwise.”
“You wanted it only because someone else did?”
There was a frown in her voice.
Argyll shook his head. “No. It wasn’t that.” He carefully chose his words. “Not wanting to disturb the other viewers, I observed from afar. Poussin achieved harmony between human and nature.” His lips quirked in a wry twist. “One that won’t be found in England, or the whole word over, I venture.”
“It wasn’t until the piece was removed and installed there”—he pointed overhead—“that I noted its more somber note.”
There came a faint textured shush as Daria turned her head towards him.
His skin prickled with the feel of her piercing eyes on him.
“You do not sound like a man who doesn’t know anything about art, Gregory,” Daria murmured.
Her eyes urged him to speak.
Argyll tamped down a frustrated sigh.
The only art he wished to admire and worship was considerably nearer at hand.
Alas, his wife remained impervious to his attempts at seduction.
“I am no Renaissance man, Daria. The nearest I come is a familiarity with isModi.” His smile was deliberately distracting.
She tipped her head. “What isI Modi?”
The question caught him. Not because it was innocent, but because it was exact. She asked what she meant, no more and no less.
With her, words were taken at their face value. And to his surprise, he found the clarity bracing—preferable, even, to the practiced evasions of the world he knew. It made it easier for him to disabuse his impressionable bride of the notion Argyll had any sort of artist’s mind.
“The last duke did me few favors, but early on he took away my research on Raphael and exchanged it with Raimondi’s engravings.”
