A murmur went through the crowd, and Gemma felt herself pushed gently forward as the people around her stepped in for a closer look.
The paintings were nothing like Henrietta’s old still lifes of fruit baskets and floral arrangements.For one, these paintings all had human subjects.But instead of the usual high society portrait or scene of ladies reading or gentlemen pursuing leisure activities involving dogs and horses, each one of these paintings was a detailed, intricately observed moment from their lives since moving to Little Kissington.
“Oh my,” Gemma heard from her left.It was Bess, her shining eyes on the first painting, which showed her in her kitchen at Five Mile House, standing at the stove stirring a big, black pot.Henrietta had invested the homey image with a dignity that beamed out of Bess’s pretty face and the graceful arch of her strong, capable wrist.
The next painting was of Mr.Woodhill on his land, instantly recognizable by the squashy brown hat shadowing most of his face.All that was visible beneath the hat’s shadow was the contented curve of his smile, bright against his dark skin, as he stood shoulder to shoulder with his friend, Mr.Prince, looking out over the vegetable garden they tended together.
Mouth dry and throat tight, Gemma moved up through the crowd right to the edge of the dais, Lucy on her heels.The two sisters stood in silence amid the admiring murmurs of their neighbors.
Around them, the crowd erupted into applause, stamping their feet and cheering wildly for Henrietta, who flushed bright pink and swept a curtsy deep enough to honor the Queen.Gemma felt a wave of affection wash over her as the people nearest her patted her shoulders and shook her hand to congratulate her, as though it were her accomplishment and not her mother’s.
Gemma accepted their comments distractedly, most of her attention captured by the final painting in the series.
In the last painting, Henrietta had caught the mood of jovial peace and camaraderie that reigned on the average night in the taproom of the Five Mile, as townspeople and tenant farmers mingled with travelers stopping in for a bite to eat on their way to somewhere else.
The table in the foreground was occupied by a young family, the Courts.The dairy farmer and his wife pointed and marveled from the crowd, so pleased and proud and amused to see themselves in oil on canvas, their apple-cheeked toddler crawling under the table to make friends with the scruffy terrier curled beneath the next table.
But it was the tableau in the background of the scene that took Gemma out at the knees.
In the darkened back corner of her mother’s painted taproom, Gemma beheld herself leaning one elbow on the bar and staring out at the room full of happy guests with a cat-in-the-cream-pot expression.And there, behind the bar and watching Gemma, was Hal.
The painted Hal was tall and strong; Henrietta had taken pains with the slope of his broad shoulders and the sinews of his throat.He held a glass mug delicately in his large, blunt-fingered hands, polishing it with a rag, but all his attention was on the woman beside him.
And the look on his face…
Gemma’s heart pounded so hard, surely the people all around her could hear it.She pressed a hand to her chest to cover it, and felt the vibration through her palm.
Hal’s face, the way her mother had painted it as he gazed at Gemma—surely, it must be a mother’s fond imagining that made him appear so completely and entirely captivated.
It was clear, somehow, in the painting, that Hal couldn’t have looked away from Gemma if he’d tried.There was an invisible thread that connected the two figures, a palpable tension and attraction that bound them together and placed them just outside the cheerful scene in the foreground, in a bubble all their own.
Henrietta had painted a man deeply in love.
Gemma clenched her fists at her sides, her breath heaving sharply as she fought to control the urge to leap onto the dais and rip the painting down, slashing it to pieces with her fingernails.
It hurt to look at it, to see that silly, deluded woman basking in Hal’s attention, in the heat of his gaze that was more than besotted, more than hungry, more than entranced.
The look on the painted man’s face was all those things, but it was complicated by the thin, straight line of his sensuous lips behind the dark beard.There was a shadow in the painted Hal’s eyes, even as they glowed with desire.A darkness underlay the happy scene.
Her mother had seen what Gemma hadn’t.And that, more than anything else, made her wonder if the rest of the painting was true.
Did Hal truly love her?
The thought blew the locks off the box in which Gemma had put away her own feelings.
Everything she’d stuffed down came roaring forth, grief and panic and anger, challenge and frustration and triumph, passion and laughter and heartbreak.
Beside her, she was dimly aware of Lucy wrapping a slim arm around her shoulders just as the applause for Henrietta’s art died down.“And now, the moment we’ve all been waiting for!It’s time to crown the May Queen!”
More applause that Mr.Cartwright used his slow, booming voice to speak over.“But this year, since it’s our first year celebrating the May as a community together in a decade or more, we’re doing things a little differently.This year, the May Day committee has chosen to crown…a LordandLady of the May!Our own Hal, beg pardon, His Grace the Duke of Havilocke…and Lady Gemma Lively!Come, come, do your duty and lead us in the dance!”
“Don’t go up there withhim,” Lucy said urgently, holding onto her.“You don’t have to, Gem!”
But Gemma looked about them at the happy crowd, stomping and smiling and for this small moment, free of the cares that burdened their lives.She couldn’t disappoint them.
“I do have to.”
The scene took on a dreamlike quality as Gemma mounted the dais and stepped up to stand beside the man who had broken her heart.
