“Not Aunt. She says artists have to study nudes because human subjects are the most complicated. She drew naked people all the time when we were in Italy. I will draw naked people again too one day.” She wrinkled her nose and sighed in resignation. “I draw naked pigs and cats and so forth now. From what little I’ve done with them, I don’t expect people will be much different.”
“We aren’t going to talk about naked people. Or naked pigs or cats. What’s for dinner tonight?”
“Aunt is making roast chicken with smashed potatoes.” Allie smacked her lips dramatically. “And she said she’s making a chocolate cake with icing to sweeten Mr. North’s temper, because plowing makes him cranky.”
“Plowing, not getting much sleep, and dodging busy little girls with nothing better to do than plague their elders.”
“I’d paint if Mama would let me,” Allie groused. “Am I really plaguing you?”
“Of course not,” Beck assured her, though she absolutely was. He wanted to carefully examine his recall of the day they’d unloaded the hay wagon, and go over every detail of his dunking in the cistern. They’d both stripped down completely; that much he was sure of.
“I’ve decided I would like to paint Mr. North’s hands,” Allie went on happily. “It’s not quite a human subject, because I’m forbidden those, but I like hands.”
“Your mother might not approve. She was not even comfortable with your doing Heifer’s portrait.”
“But she told me it turned out well, and Aunt agreed. Aunt is never one to spare feelings at the expense of truth. She says an artist has to be ruthless.”
“I can’t like the idea of you being ruthless,” Beck said, thinking a relatively carefree Allie was challenge enough. “But tell me something, oracle of the plow, when was the last time you heard your mother play her violin?”
“I haven’t heard her play since I was little. There’s a pianoforte in the downstairs parlor, but she only dusts it, she doesn’t play it. She and Aunt argue about that too.”
“About dusting it?”
“No, silly.” Allie lifted her arms to the spring day in casual joy. “Aunt says Mama should teach me a little so I am suitably capable at the keyboard, but Mama gets all tight around her eyes and does that cranky-without-saying-a-word thing, and then Aunt gets quiet, but that never lasts.”
“Most mamas know how to do what you describe, sisters too.”
Allie lowered her arms and shuddered. “Papa could do it. I was little, but I remember him glaring and glaring. Mama wouldn’t play for him and his friends, and it was awful.”
She glared herself in recollection.
“I thought you were very young when you came back to England, Allie.” The plow hit a subterranean rock, and the team stopped.
“We came back when I was four, and we saw everything. That’s when Papa found out I could draw like Aunt. Then it was back to Italy, and I got lessons and everything. Aunt and I both had lessons. Then we came back to England again, but we didn’t see anything except Brighton and Three Springs. Papa was dead. Mama said I didn’t have to wear black if I didn’t want to.”
Beck urged the team forward and hefted the plow over the rock, his back screaming at the abuse.
“Did you want to wear black?” Beck tossed the question out as a distraction, unwilling to pry more directly. From Allie’s account and Sara’s own comments, Sara’s marriage had had its share of rough spots and challenges.
Allie smoothed her hand over the horse’s broad rump. “Of course not. I’m to have more long dresses in the fall.”
“You are growing up,” Beck said, wishing it didn’t have to be so. He missed his sisters badly and wanted nothing so much as to leave the team in the field, mount Ulysses, and see his father one last time. The realization blended with the plowing-ache to form a peculiarly poignant misery.
Allie heaved a great sigh. “I know it’s not all bad, growing up. When I’m older, Mama won’t be able to tell me what to paint. Hermione’s udder is dripping on both sides.”
“Thank you for telling me.” The plow hit another rock and sent jolts of pain up both Beck’s arms into his shoulders. “For good measure, I think you ought to tell Mr. North as well.”
“I’m being a nuisance.” Allie grinned, nuisance-ing apparently being great good fun in her lexicon. “See if I share these biscuits Aunt sent out for you, Mr. Haddonfield.”
Beck signaled the horses to halt at the end of the furrow. “If you want off that horse, my price is one biscuit.”
“Here.” Allie passed him a sweet and drew one from her pocket for herself. “They’re still warm.” They shared a companionable moment, munching their bounty, then Beck swung her down.
“Don’t sneak up on North. His language is colorful today.”
“His back hurts,” Allie said, her tone serious. “Aunt says he needs horse liniment, but he’s too stubborn to admit it. Mama agrees.”
“Then it’s unanimous. Where is the horse liniment?”
“Mama makes it.” Allie began to trot off to the next field. “It isn’t really for horses, and it’s in the still room with a purple flower on it. ’Bye!”
Leaving Beck to try to recall if, on the occasion of bathing in the cistern, he’d scratched his ass, pissed in the yard, or otherwise disgraced himself. He didn’t think so, because the business of the moment had been getting clean.
And Sara hadn’t just peeked, she’d peeked and told and was plagued by the memory of what she’d seen. He decided this was only fair. In the past weeks, he’d seen Sara on four occasions with her hair not only uncovered, but flowing down her back in a shiny, thoroughly unforgettable braid.
His sore, aching hands itched with the frustrated desire to undo that braid and touch the silken glory he’d known once before. His groin started to throb, until the plow hit another rock, and pain once again served to displace desire.
Six
After dinner, an uncharacteristically sociable North had accompanied Beck to the hot springs, and a medicinal soak had followed. As Beck hung up the new towels in the laundry to dry and made his way to his room, it occurred to him his sojourn at Three Springs was different from many of the other trips he’d been sent on.
Here, while the typical traveler’s propensity for observing hadn’t left him, he was not among strangers. He was among the same people day and night, and he was becoming familiar with them in ways a lone wayfarer in a distant land did not.
He was, in short, growing attached. Whatever plagued North, Beck wanted it resolved, not out of a need for tidy endings and neat answers, but because it weighed on North’s soul, put shadows in a good man’s eyes, and kept him scanning the horizon rather than focusing on the bounty at his feet.
And then there was Sarabande Adagio herself. Beck’s feelings for her were growing complicated, beyond the simple, powerful lust of a man who permitted himself only infrequent attractions. He watched her moving around the house, taking down this set of curtains for a good washing, polishing andirons in that unused parlor, mixing up a salve for burns to keep in Polly’s kitchen.
Sara was preoccupied, biding her time, doing what the situation called for, but she had an eye on the horizon as well, and it was an anxious eye. Beck wanted to banish her anxieties, to carry her burdens for her and offer her the comfort of a shoulder to lean on—and so much more.
Except she deserved to be able to rely on the man she bestowed her favors and her fears on. Rely on him utterly and exclusively, and Beck was not that man. He sank down on his bed, frowning, as something nagged at the back of his mind, something from the day’s flotsam of conversations and silences.