He could bear it easily, Dain thought now, as he hurried up the north staircase to his room. Furthermore, she needed to be taught that she could not manipulate him, and this lesson would be considerably less painful for him than the one he’d given her last night. He’d rather let carrion crows feast on his privates than go through that horrific experience again.
He would go away, and calm down, and put matters into perspective, and when he returned he would…
Well, he didn’t know precisely what he would do, but that was because he wasn’t calm. When he was, he would figure it out. He was certain there must be a simple solution, but he could not contemplate the problem coolly and objectively while she was nearby, bothering him.
“My lord.”
Dain paused at the head of the stairs and looked down. Rodstock was hurrying up after him. “My lord,” he repeated breathlessly. “A word, if you please.”
What the steward had to say was more than a word, yet no more than what was needed. Her Ladyship had been exploring the North Tower storage room. She had found a portrait. Of the previous marchioness. Rodstock thought His Lordship would wish to be informed.
Rodstock was a paragon, the soul of discretion and tact. Nothing in his tone or demeanor indicated any consciousness of the bomb he had just dropped at his master’s feet.
His master, likewise, evidenced no awareness of any explosion whatsoever.
“I see,” Dain said. “That is interesting. I had no idea we had one about. Where is it?”
“In Her Ladyship’s sitting room, my lord.”
“Well, then, I might as well look at it.” Dain turned and headed down the Long Gallery. His heart was beating unsteadily. Other than that, he felt nothing. He saw nothing, either, during the endless walk past the portraits of the noble line of men and women he had never felt a part of.
He walked on blindly to the end of the hall, opened the last door on the left, and turned left again into the narrow passageway. He continued past one door, and on to the next, then through it, and on through the second passage to the door at its end, which stood open.
The portrait that wasn’t supposed to exist stood before the sitting room’s east-facing window on a battered easel, which must have been unearthed from the schoolroom.
Dain walked up to the painting and gazed at it for a long while, though it hurt, badly—more than he could have guessed—to look into the beautiful, cruel face. His throat burned and his eyes as well. If he could, he would have wept then.
But he couldn’t because he wasn’t alone. He did not have to take his eyes from the portrait to know his wife was in the room.
“Another of your finds,” he said, choking a short laugh past his seared throat. “And on your first treasure hunt here, too.”
“Luckily, the North Tower is cool and dry,” she said. Her voice was cool and dry as well. “And the painting was well wrapped. It will need minimal cleaning, but I should prefer another frame. This one is much too dark and over ornate. Also, I had rather not put her in the portrait gallery, if you don’t mind. I’d prefer she had a place to herself. Over the dining room mantel, I think. In place of the landscape.”
She came nearer, pausing a few paces to his right. “The landscape wants a smaller room. Even if it didn’t, I’d much rather look at her.”
He would, too, though it was eating him alive to do so.
He would have been content merely to look at his beautiful, impossible mother. He would have asked nothing…or so very little: a soft hand upon his cheek, only for an instant. An impatient hug. He would have been good. He would have tried…
Mawkish nonsense, he angrily reproached himself. It was only a damned piece of canvas daubed with paint. It was a painting of a whore, as all the household, all of Devon, and most of the world beyond knew. All except his wife, with her fiendish gift for turning the world upside down.
“She was a whore,” he said harshly. And quickly and brutally, to have it said and done and over with, he went on. “She ran away with the son of a Dartmouth merchant. She lived openly with him for two years and died with him, on a fever-plagued island in the West Indies.”
He turned and looked down into his wife’s pale, upturned face. Her eyes were wide with shock. Then, incredibly, they were glistening…with tears.
“How dare you?” she said, angrily blinking the tears back. “How dare you, of all men, call your mother a whore? You buy a new lover every night. It costs you a few coins. According to you, she took but one—and he cost her everything: her friends, her honor. Her son.”
“I might have known you could make even this romantic,” he said mockingly. “Will you make the hot-blooded harlot out to be a martyr to—to what, Jess?Love?”
He turned away from the portrait, because the howling had started inside him, and he wanted to scream,Why?Yet he knew the answer, always had. If his mother had loved him—or pitied him at least, if she could not love him—she would have taken him with her. She would not have left him alone, in hell.
“You don’t know what her life was like,” she said. “You were a child. You couldn’t know what she felt. She was a foreigner, and her husband was old enough to be her father.”
“Like Byron’s Donna Julia, you mean?” His voice dripped acid irony. “Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps Mama would have done better with two husbands, of five and twenty.”
“You don’t know whether your father treated her well or ill,” his wife persisted, like a teacher with a stubborn student. “You don’t know whether he made the way easy for her or impossible. For all you know, he may have made her wretched—which is more than likely, if his portrait offers an accurate indication of his character.”
And what of me?he wanted to cry.You don’t know what it was like for me, the hideous thing she left behind, shut out, shunned, mocked, abused. Left…to endure…and pay, dearly, for what others took for granted: tolerance, acceptance, a woman’s soft hand.
