Emma navigated the darkened corridors of the sleeping house with practiced ease. She’d always been the night wanderer of the family, restless when others slumbered. The grand staircase creaked beneath her weight, each sound magnified in the hushed darkness.
A sliver of golden light spilled from beneath the kitchen door. Emma paused, her hand on the cool brass knob. Someone else was awake at this ungodly hour. Likely a servant preparing for the morning’s duties. She hesitated, reluctant to intrude, but the persistent ache in her shoulder drove her forward.
The sight that greeted her stole the breath from her lungs.
The Duchesse de la Coeur sat at the scrubbed wooden table, a half-empty bottle of burgundy at her elbow and a plate of cheese and fruit pushed to one side. Her midnight-dark hair tumbled loose over her shoulders, unbound and untamed in a way that would have scandalized polite society. She wore not a nightgown but what appeared to be a man’s silk dressing gown, the deep crimson fabric pooling around her like spilled wine. She snacked on soft cheese and late summer berries with seductive lips. Her ever-present sketch book splayed open as she bent over it in the dim lamplight.
She looked so entirely herself, so unguarded, that Emma nearly retreated, embarrassed by her own intrusion.
Amélie did not startle. She swallowed and regarded Emma with a look that was neither surprise nor censure, but something softer—amused, perhaps, or simply awake to the odd intimacy of two sleepless women in a kitchen after midnight.
“Miss Goode,” she said, as if greeting a guest at a civilized hour. “You are troubled by your shoulder?”
Emma nodded, covering her unease with sarcasm. “And the prospect of surviving my brother’s wedding. The pain keeps me honest.”
Amélie smiled, the lines at the corners of her mouth deepening. “Honesty is a rare luxury in this house. Will you join me?”
She gestured to the empty seat, and Emma, unwilling to retreat like a scolded child, sat. The table’s old wood was deeply scarred, the surface cool beneath her hands.
For a moment, neither spoke. The silence between them was not uncomfortable, but charged—like the hush before a thunderstorm. Emma studied the sketchbook, unable to stop herself. The woman’s body, rendered in bold, undaunted lines, was both beautiful and undeniable. There was a wildness to the angle of the neck, the curve of the hip, the defiance in the thrust of a shoulder.
“You draw from life,” Emma managed, surprised her voice held steady.
Amélie’s gaze followed Emma’s, then returned to her face. “Always. Anything else is…dishonest. And I have had my fill of dishonesty, in men and in art.”
She closed the sketchbook with a snap. Not abruptly, but decisively—an end, not a rebuke.
Emma wanted to look away, to break the spell, but found herself caught in a peculiar, pleasant paralysis.
“Did you study in Paris?” she ventured, anxious to fill the space between them with words, any words.
“Yes. At the Académie, though they do not admit women, not truly. I attended in disguise, for a time, and then as a…‘model.’” Amélie’s mouth twisted, not quite a smile. “The masters were less interested in my talent than in my anatomy. But I learned to draw the human form, and to see the world without flinching.”
Emma blinked. The idea of this proud, impossible woman passing as a schoolboy, or standing naked before a hall of leering artists, sent a strange hot thrill through her. She could not imagine ever possessing that kind of courage.
“Your family must have been furious,” Emma said, surprised at her own boldness.
“At the time, yes.” Amélie’s eyes glittered with amusement—or was it something more dangerous? “There is no one left in France to mind the reputation,” she replied, and her smile faded a little. “My father died when I was quite young. My husband—a man old enough to be my grandfather—cared nothing for my ambitions, only that I provide an heir. I did not. So I drew, and I learned, and eventually I inherited, and then I ran.”
Emma, who had never heard a woman speak this way, found her heart thudding hard against the inside of her ribs. “You ran?”
Amélie shrugged, the silk lapels of her robe slipping, revealing the curve of her throat. “From Paris. From my stepson, who would rather my fortune end up in his pocket than my own. From the gossips and the vultures. I have been…in exile, as it were. These English coastal towns are safer than Marseille or Dieppe, though the food isn’t nearly as good.”
She swirled the wine in her glass, the deep velvet of it catching the lamplight. “I did not expect to find myself here, in a kitchen in Brighton, talking to you.”
Emma held her own cup, the porcelain clammy against her palm. “I am hardly worth the trouble, I assure you.”
“Oh, but you are,” Amélie replied, the words slow and deliberate, as though she were tasting each syllable before speaking it. “You are the first honest thing I have encountered in months.”
Emma’s jaw worked with the effort of not reacting. She looked down, seeking distraction in the pattern of ingrained flour dust on the table. “Is that why you sketch so late at night?” she asked, but there was a tremor in her voice now—an ache beneath the jest.
Amélie’s smile was a line of resignation, pulled taut against the weight of unwanted memories. “I have always been a poor sleeper. When I cannot rest, I make art. It is better than the alternative.”
Emma found herself desperate to know what the alternative was, but afraid to ask. The raw honesty in the duchesse’s tone—the way she didn’t shy from the ugly or the unseemly—made Emma’s own reticence feel childish.
She reached for the bottle of willow bark, twisting the cork with her left hand and pouring a careful measure into her now-empty teacup. She half expected the duchesse to mock her, or at least to comment on the childishness of needing a soporific, but instead Amélie just watched, steady and unjudging.
“I took a fall once, in the Camargue,” Amélie said after a moment, her eyes distant. “A wild horse, not unlike your English mares. I broke my arm—snapped it clean through. My father insisted on setting it himself, with only the contents of his flask for anesthesia.” She held up her hand, flexing it delicately as if the memory still lived in the bones.
