“Mr. Warbly, please go help the lady by the delphiniums,” she said to the painting master she’d hired. “Her painting looks more like a giraffe than a flower, don’t you think?”
Then his cousin turned her attention to him.
“Who spat in your tea this morning?” Alethia asked.
“What a disgusting thing to say.” Vincent spied Lady Brilliance by the rose arbor. “Are there no gentlemen here?”
“Apparently not,” she said pointedly.
He blinked at her. She raised an eyebrow. Finally, he relaxed.
“I apologize for being out of sorts. It must have been the lumpy mattress.”
“I own no lumpy mattresses,” she protested.
He wasn’t going to mention a pretty lady who set his teeth on edge.
“Is the Colonel at the stream, too?” Vincent liked his cousin-in-law. Colonel Twitchard was a no-nonsense man of action whose only weakness was his wife. And while the man didn’t understand the finer points of composing music— “how can you string all those notes together in any order that sounds pleasing?”— he was still a good one with whom to hash out anything troubling.
Yet the one thing Vincent had never spoken to Twitchard about was what troubled him most. The Colonel would never have allowed his music to be stolen!
“Yes, my husband is fishing. Why aren’t you?”
Vincent shrugged. He was behaving badly, but he couldn’t enjoy himself until he’d apologized to Lady Brilliance.
“I may head down to the stream in a few minutes,” he said. With no further explanation, he stepped off the terrace and ambled toward Lady Brilliance by a circuitous route around his cousin’s whimsical topiaries and past the other painters as if he had no particular destination.
He thought some of the paintings were quite good. One of the ladies from the gallery, Lady Georgiana if his memory served him, and it usually did, looked up at him as he passed.
“Take a look at my attempt, Lord Hewitt. But be kind.”
Since she was inviting him to look, he knew it would be good. Yet she continued in her false self-deprecation.
“We cannot all be as talented as Mr. Turner.”
Her painting was certainly not similar to Turner’s, which were all light, shadow, and impressions of objects. But it was skillful nonetheless in a more pedantic and realistic way.
“That is the very likeness of those flowers, my lady. Precisely done.” He couldn’t be more enthusiastic, since her painting had no personality, merely a representation of the flowers in front of her. It would have been better as a sketch, in fact.
Lady Georgiana seemed pleased with his words, offering him a coy tilt of her head as she said, “Why, thank you, my lord. I never expected such praise.”
Nodding, Vincent continued on, hoping not to make eye contact or be brought into any more conversations with these females. Finally, he came upon Lady Brilliance. Approaching from behind her, he was able to spy her canvas while she was as yet unaware.
It was beyond anything he’d ever seen in its absolute atrocity. If he could not see the roses in front of her, he would have no idea what her subject was. Shaking his head, he recalled he had little experience in the world of art.Who was he to judge?
Unfortunately, that thought did not help. Even if he had never seen a painting before, he would know in his bones how terrible this one was. The stems growing directly up from the ground were too short and thick, while the roses looked like salmon-colored, misshapen mushrooms. And unless he was sadly mistaken, she had put one of those pieces of fruit she was always giving him — a large, dimple-skinned orange — in the distance.
Coming closer, he circled around until he was in her field of vision. “Good day, Lady Brilliance.”
Looking up at him, she shaded her eyes with her hand despite wearing a bonnet. He noticed she had paint on her cheek and her ungloved hand and now on the brim of her bonnet.
“Good day, Lord Hewitt. I should be angry at you and shun you with silence, but what is the point in that?”
He’d never met such an affable female. She entirely lacked the veneer of game-playing that covered even the nicest ladies upon occasion.
“No more point to it than fishing in a rain barrel, in my humble opinion,” Vincent said before clearing his throat. “I came to apologize for my earlier outburst. I am sorry for spilling the cherries and for chasing you away.”
Her smile was breathtaking.
