Sherry Thomas - His At Night

Yet he wanted nothing more than to throw down his pencil, walk up to this particular combination of form, color, and interplay of light, and—

He looked down at his sketchbook instead. Not that it was much help. He’d produced several drawings already, one a general outline of the entire tableau, one a study of her profile and her hair, one of her midsection, and one of what he saw in the mirror.

“Do you know, Freddie,” she said, “before I returned to England, I thought surely your experience with Lady Tremaine would have left you brooding and resentful. But you are the same man you always were.”

It was just like Angelica to raise unexpected topics. He looked at the empty canvas he had prepared.

“It’s been a long time, Angelica. Four years.”

“But are you completely recovered from her?”

“She wasn’t an illness.”

“From the loss of her then?”

“She was never truly mine.” He took a sharper pencil from his box. “I think I knew from the very beginning that we were on borrowed time.”

He’d been gloriously happy with Lady Tremaine. But there had always been an element of deep anxiety to his happiness. When she had reconciled with her husband, he’d been heartbroken but not bitter—because it had not been a betrayal, but only the end of a wonderful era of his life.

He flipped to a new page in his sketchbook and drew Angelica’s shapely calves, wishing his hands were his pencils, that as the drawing took shape, he could slide his palms across her cool, soft skin.

Lady Tremaine had once told him that Angelica was in love with him. Freddie rarely questioned Lady Tremaine’s pronouncements, but this particular one had come when Lady Tremaine had decided to reunite with her husband, when she no doubt wished that Freddie too would settle down with someone. Anyone.

If Angelica had been in love with him she had certainly said nothing of it, ever—and she had never been one to censor her words around him. And even if Lady Tremaine had been right, four years had passed, a long time for affections to remain constant from far away.

He glanced back at Angelica. Her head was bent, her attention absorbed in her book. She was even jotting down notations in the margins. A seduction this wasn’t.

“I think that’s enough for today,” he said, closing his sketchbook. “I’ll step outside.”

* * *

Angelica would not say that she had been in love with Freddie forever. Forever meant the mist of time, the blurred years of childhood. Her love had a definite moment of origin at a much later point, when she had been seventeen, he eighteen.

He’d come home following his first year at Christ Church. And she, set to join Lady Margaret Hall that autumn, had plopped herself down on a picnic blanket not far from him as he painted on the bank of the River Stour, to ask him as many questions about Oxford as it pleased her and to critique him as he worked. (She didn’t paint herself, but she had an excellent eye. And she was exceedingly proud of the fact that she’d been the person who’d explained to him, four years prior, that one did not use pure white for highlights, but a paler shade of the color one wished to highlight.)

She had been eating a tangy, firm-fleshed peach, tossing pebbles into the river—hardly wider than a bathtub—and telling him he needed to mix more blue into his green if he wanted to capture the proper deep hue of summer foliage. She was never sure whether he heard her on that particular tip, because he did not say anything, but instead clamped the filbert brush he was using between his teeth and reached for an angled brush.

Then and there lightning struck. She stared at him as if she’d never seen him before, her oldest friend all grown-up, and wanted nothing more than to be that filbert brush, to feel his lips on her, and his tongue, and the firm pressure of his teeth.

But whereas she’d been a confidently commanding friend, always certain that their friendship would gracefully weather all the advice and criticism she fusilladed his way, she’d proved completely hopeless as a seductress.

He did not notice the new frocks and hats she bought for enchanting him. He did not grasp that her effort to teach him to dance better was to give him an easy opening to kiss her. And when she talked excessively of some other man, in the hope of arousing jealousy on Freddie’s part, he only looked at her quizzically and asked her was this not the same man whom she could not stand earlier.

The better approach would have been to confess her love and declare herself as a candidate for his hand. But the more her subtler efforts at winning his heart failed, the more cowardly she became. And just when she’d come to believe that perhaps he simply could not form a romantic attachment to an independent woman, he had to fall for the glamorous and audacious Lady Tremaine, who cared for no one’s opinion but her own.

When Lady Tremaine had left Freddie to go back to her husband, Angelica’s chance had finally come. He was distraught. He was vulnerable. He needed someone to take Lady Tremaine’s place in his life. But when she’d gone to him, she’d stupidly said, I told you so, and he had asked her, in no uncertain terms, to leave him alone.

She finished dressing. He was outside the studio, waiting for her. During the four years she’d been away, he’d lost the baby fat that had still clung to him when he’d been twenty-four. And while he would never be quite as chiseled as Penny, she found him incredibly lovely, his features as gentle as his nature.

Even when he’d been chubbier, she’d still found him incredibly lovely.

“Can I offer you a cup of tea?” he asked.

“You may,” she said. “But I’d like to return your favor first. Are the photographs you took of the painting ready?”

“They are still in the darkroom.”

“Let’s see them.”

His studio was on the top floor, to take advantage of the light. His darkroom was one floor below, about eight feet by six feet in dimension, not much bigger than a closet. In the amber-brown glow of a safelight, the apparatuses for development were neatly laid out, with the sink, the baths, and the negative lamp along one wall, a worktable along another. Bottles of clearly labeled chemicals lined shelves built into the walls.

“When did you assemble a darkroom here?” He had taken up photography after her departure—after Lady Tremaine’s departure, to be more precise. Once he’d sent Angelica a photograph of himself and she’d pasted it into her diary.

“I don’t remember the exact date, but it was around the time your husband passed away.”

“You sent a very kind condolence letter.”

“I hardly knew what to say. You almost never mentioned him in your letters.”

He applied a slight pressure on the small of her back to guide her deeper into the darkroom. She loved the warmth of his hand—he had large hands that could nevertheless paint the most extraordinarily delicate details. For years she’d gone to sleep thinking of caresses from those strong and skilled hands.

“It was a convenient marriage,” she said belatedly. “We were leading separate lives well before he died.”

“I worried about you,” he said quietly, with that innate dignity for which she loved him so. “You used to say, when we were much younger, that you’d rather be a sufficient-unto-herself spinster than an indifferently married wife.”

She’d sorely lacked the courage of her conviction, hadn’t she? When it seemed that she could never have him, she’d married a virtual stranger and left England behind as swiftly as she could.

“I was fine,” she said, more sharply than she’d intended. “I am fine.”

He didn’t say anything, as if he did not quite believe her reassurances but did not wish to say so outright.

She cleared her throat. “Well, Freddie, show me your photographs.”

* * *

The photographs, four inches by five inches in dimension, were affixed to a drying line.

“My goodness,” Angelica said, stopping before the image of the rats. “How was that possible?”

She’d pinned her hair up, but it was a very soft knot and seemed in danger of spilling free. Or was it just him wishing to pull it free? The odor of the pyrosoda developer and the stop bath lingered in the air, but Freddie stood close enough behind her to smell the neroli of her toilette water, sweet and spicy.

“You should have heard the screaming. Penny had to slap one young lady to stop her.”

“I can’t see Penny slapping anyone.”

“He was a very authoritative slapper,” Freddie said dryly. That had rather surprised him too. “Here are the photographs of the painting.”

He switched on another safelight. She squinted at the still-wet prints.

“I see what you mean,” she said. “I have come across a painting very similar in style and execution. It had a lady angel in white—huge white wings, a white robe, a white rose in her hand. And there was a man on the ground, gazing up at her.”

“My goodness, your memory is extraordinary.”

“Thank you.” She beamed at him. “When I go home, I shall consult my diary and see if I might have made a record of it. Sometimes I do, if an artwork strikes me in some way.”

He wondered if she consulted her diary the same way she consulted The Treasures of Art in Great Britain; unclothed, with one strand of her unbound hair caressing her nipple, and one of her toes absentmindedly tracing circles on the sheets.

Their gazes locked. Hers was bright and expectant.

“Were you really fine?” he heard himself ask.

The light faded from her eyes. “It was not actively painful. But it was not worthwhile either—having a husband merely for the sake of having a husband. I was already inquiring into an annulment when Giancarlo died. Never would I make that same mistake again.”

“Good,” he said, though he ached for the nearly two years she’d lost in her not-worthwhile marriage. He squeezed her hand briefly. “I’m glad you told me at last; you need never spare me any truthful answers.”

“All right, then, I won’t.” She smiled a little. “Have you any other questions that you need answered honestly?”

He flushed. If she only knew. But how did one ask one’s oldest friend whether she wanted to lie with him? He could already see her bursting out laughing. Freddie, you silly, silly man. Where did you get that idea?

“Well, yes,” he said. “Would you care for some tea now?”

She cast her gaze down for a moment. When she looked back at him, her expression was very even. He wondered if he’d imagined the fleeting shadow in her eyes.

“Do you have coffee instead?” she asked.

Vere had hoped to arrive at Highgate Court before Edmund Douglas: far easier that way to return the coded dossier to the safe and to take an impression of the key therein. Unfortunately, as he helped his wife out of the victoria Lady Kingsley had dispatched to fetch them from the train station, Edmund Douglas came striding out of the house.

Lines furrowed the corners of his eyes and mouth, and much of his dark hair had turned gray. But otherwise Douglas’s appearance had changed little since the day of his wedding. He was still slender, still well dressed, still fine-featured and handsome.

He saw the Veres and stopped, his eyes as unreadable as those of a viper.

Vere glanced at his wife of less than twenty-four hours. For the first time in at least a decade, he’d been unable to sleep on a train. Instead, he’d observed her from underneath his lashes.

She’d kept the veil on her hat lowered, so he could not see her expression. But for most of their journey, she’d sat with one hand at her throat, her other hand opening and clenching, opening and clenching. From time to time she shook her head slowly, as if trying to loosen her collar with that motion. And very, very infrequently, she let out an audibly uneven breath.

She’d been scared witless.

The moment Douglas appeared, however, it was as if the curtains had lifted, and her stage fright was now but a dim thought next to the all-consuming importance of her role.

“Oh, hullo, Uncle.” She lifted her skirts, bounced up the steps, and kissed him on both cheeks. “Welcome home. When did you return? And did you have a good trip?”

Douglas stared at her coldly, a look that would have made grown men quail. “My trip was fine. However, instead of the joyful reunion I had anticipated, I came home ten minutes ago to find the house empty and my family disappeared, with Mrs. Ramsay recounting an Arabian Nights tale of revelry and destruction that concluded with your sudden departure.”