Disappointment gripped her. The nude portrait was her gambit for him to see her as a woman, and not just a friend. And she’d thought it more or less successful—he had looked at her strangely in the darkroom, as if he were on the verge of kissing her. But once he had the photographs, not only would he not need her naked, he wouldn’t even need her in the studio anymore.
“What if the photographs are underexposed or overexposed?”
“Pardon?” The sound of his voice was muffled by the black cloth.
“What if the photographs don’t come out well?”
He reemerged from behind the camera. “I’ve half a dozen plates. One of them is bound to turn out well.”
He pulled the trigger on the flashlamp. It took a moment for the cartridge of magnesium powder to ignite, and for the controlled explosion to produce a burst of brilliant white light. He ducked again under the black cloth.
This time, when he came out, he raised the height of the flashlamp, moved the cheesecloth screen forward by a foot, and adjusted the angle of a white silk screen on the far side of the bed.
The screen was only two feet from the edge of the bed. As he lifted his head, he looked directly down at her, from what seemed a great height.
She licked her lips in nervousness. His hand tightened on the screen. And then he was walking away, back to the camera.
“I’m going to draw the slide,” he said. “Make sure you are in the pose you want.”
Her heart hammered, agitated by both his nearness and his refusal to succumb to her seduction. Her lips parted, her breaths shallow, she turned her head until she looked directly into the lens of his camera.
It was late in the afternoon before Elissande noticed the oddity of Aunt Rachel’s reaction.
In the morning she had been too joyful, too overwhelmed herself to mark Aunt Rachel’s speechlessness as anything other than blissful stupefaction. She had jumped up and down like a monkey—though her landings had sounded more like those of a rhinoceros—and wept until she was a few pounds lighter.
She had thought nothing of her aunt’s request for a bit of laudanum. Aunt Rachel was frail. The day’s news was shocking. Of course she needed time and rest before she could properly cope with it.
When Aunt Rachel had fallen asleep, Elissande had sat next to her bed for some time, holding her hand, smoothing her hair, full of gratitude that Aunt Rachel had lived to see this day, and that she still had years ahead of her to be enjoyed, free of fear and shadows.
Then she’d gone to look for her husband, for no reason other than that she wanted to see him—he was the closest thing she had to an ally. And on this wonderful, triumphant day, who better to celebrate with than him?
But he had gone out already. So she contented herself with having his coachman drive her around town, and took pleasure in London for the first time since her arrival. She watched young people on bicycles in the park, walked every floor of Harrods, and then spent so long in Hatchards that her gloves were completely soiled with book dust.
She also visited Needham again and asked to be recommended a physician who was an expert on opiate addiction. As it turned out, Needham considered himself sufficiently versed in the matter to help her.
“He says it need not involve any suffering at all,” she told Aunt Rachel when she reached home. “Each day you will take the same amount of a special tonic. But the amount of laudanum in each subsequent bottle of tonic will gradually be reduced. Your body will easily adjust to the new dosage until you no longer need any laudanum at all.
“And to think, all the torment my uncle put you through, when he could have—” She waved a hand in the air. “Never mind him. We need not think of him ever again.”
Aunt Rachel didn’t say anything. She shivered, as if she were cold. Elissande immediately draped another blanket on her, but Aunt Rachel only shivered again.
Elissande sat down at the edge of the bed. “What’s the matter, my love?”
“I…I feel terrible for the man he murdered, Mr. Delaney. I wonder how many others there are in all.”
“My goodness!” Elissande exclaimed. “Isn’t one murder horrific enough?”
Aunt Rachel plucked at the top of her blanket. For no discernible reason, Elissande’s hitherto bottomless ebullience suddenly reached a bottom.
“Is there something I should know?” she asked, hoping there wasn’t.
“No, of course not,” said Aunt Rachel. “You were telling me about the doctor, weren’t you, the one who is going to treat me? Do go on.”
Elissande looked at her aunt another moment, then smiled brightly. “Well, he’s coming to see you tomorrow, and he seems a very kindly man.”
Whatever it was Aunt Rachel was not telling her, Elissande did not want to know.
Chapter Sixteen
One of the first things Vere did when he came of age was to break entail on the marquessate’s country seat. He had caused a minor scandal when he’d put the manor up for sale. But the world was changing. A grand house in the country, with land more and more ineffectual as a generator of wealth, had become an albatross around the necks of too many.
It was not the life he wanted, his destiny and choices chained to a pile of stones, however glorious and historical. Nor was it the life he wanted for Freddie and Freddie’s heirs, since there was a good chance Vere would remain unwed and the title someday pass to Freddie.
But he did have a house in the country. Most of his long walks had been along the coast of the Bristol Channel. In the spring of ’ninety-four, however, he had hiked for two weeks around Lyme Bay. On the last day of his excursion, coming back from an inland jaunt to visit the ruins of the Berry Pomeroy Castle, he had stumbled upon the modest house and its immodestly gorgeous rose garden.
PIERCE HOUSE, the plaque on the low gate had said. He had gazed at it with a covetousness he did not know he could feel for a mere piece of property: the house, with its white walls and red trim; the garden, as fragrant and lovely as a long-lost memory. When he returned to London, he had instructed his solicitors to find out whether the house was for sale. It had been and he’d bought it.
On the day he brought his wife to Pierce House, she stood a long time before it, before the garden that still bloomed indefatigably, even though the peak months for roses had already come and gone.
“It’s a wonderful place,” she said. “So peaceful and…”
“And what?” he asked.
“Ordinary.” She glanced up at him. “And I mean it as the highest compliment.”
He understood her; of course he did. It was why the house and the garden had so enraptured him, why his heart always ached as he gazed upon it: the embodiment of all the sweet normalcy of which he had been robbed.
But he didn’t want to understand her. He didn’t want to find common ground.
He knew how to manage the life he had chosen. He had the perfect companion: one who would never hurt, anger, or disappoint him. He did not know how to cope with the pitfalls—or the possibilities—of a different life.
“Well, enjoy it,” he said. “It’s your home.”
For now.
Elissande found Devonshire beautiful, its climate warmer and sunnier than anything she’d ever known. And the sea, which had always fascinated her in her landlocked imprisonment, enchanted her utterly, even though she did not gaze upon it from the high, rocky cliffs of Capri, but only from the hills surrounding that stretch of coast known as the English Riviera.
But she would have found a barren rock in the middle of a desert beautiful, for it was freedom itself that truly intoxicated. Sometimes she had herself driven to the nearest village for no reason at all, simply because she could. Sometimes she rose early and walked until she reached the coast, and brought back a shell or a piece of driftwood for Aunt Rachel. Sometimes she took thirty books to her room, knowing that no one would take them away from her.