A Fresh Perspective, A Regency Romance (2 page)

“Let me catch my breath,” he said jovially. “You are squeezing the life out of me. Yes, I am staying to tea. As for my being changed by the Tour, I have had quite enough of change. Every day has seen change for this year and more--new vistas, new food, new hotel rooms and new languages to deal with. Do you know that every time I asked for something I lived in fear of what might actually arrive. I am ever so relieved to come home to the familiar, to that which has not, and never should, change.”

Megan let go her hold on him. “Oh, but Reed, you are wrong. While you have been gone everything has changed.”

Chapter Two

“I
am off on Monday,” was how she began.

“Off?” He was not alarmed, calmly settling himself on the creaky wooden swing he always favored when he visited the Breech’s back garden.

“Yes. Timely of you to stop by today. We have three days in which we must do nothing but catch up, unless you care to come with us. You never wrote to say.”

“Where are you off to?” He gave a languid push with his heels.

“The Lakes. Gussie and Tom. Fortnight in a cottage. Nothing to do but enjoy the scenery and paint.” She fairly sparkled with happiness at the prospect. Mouth, eyes and hands would not be still. Like the leaves above his head, she shifted and blew in the winds of emotion. It fascinated him to watch her when she talked.

“Family outing? Sounds lovely.”

Her mouth dropped open. “You did not receive the letter? Do not tell me it is so. It was a very private letter. I do not like to think it went astray.”

“Letter? I received a great many letters from you Meg. A breath of fresh air from home, every one of them. To which do you refer?” Reed planted his feet firmly on the ground, stilling the swing, and drew the Claude glasses from his pocket. He held a lens to his mouth and breathed steam onto its surface.

“You do not know then, that Harold Burnham proposed to me?”

The glass slipped from his hand, propelled by his abrupt exhalation. “Are you funning me?”

Megan laughed and clapped her hands like a child. “No. Isn’t it wonderful? I was never more surprised or delighted.”

“You do not mean to marry him?”

All traces of the girl vanished. For an instant her expressive face and the articulate hands fell still. “Is there some reason why I should not? He is completely infatuated with me. Do you not care for Harold?”

“You do not care for him. Do not tell me you do. I will not believe a word of it. You are the one who told me that Harold’s squint is characteristic of his narrow outlook on life.” Reed bent, picked up the glass, relieved to find it unbroken and fell to breathing on it again.

A pucker appeared between Megan’s brows. “He is awfully nearsighted,” she admitted, “but it was impolite of me to point it out. I cannot hold nearsightedness against every candidate for my hand, after all. Most everyone I know has trouble seeing something.” The pucker disappeared. A mischievous smile brightened her mobile features. “He is simply mad about me, Reed. I have never had the pleasure of a gentleman doting on me. It is very flattering.”

Reed polished at the glass with far more energy than the simple task required. “You’ve not agreed, have you? Not based on nothing more substantive than that you are flattered.”

She stilled again. Hazel eyes regarded him with reproof. “Of course I haven’t. Do you take me for a simpleton? I would never do anything so flighty and foolish.”

“What does your father say?”

She tossed her head, shining curls bouncing. “Oh, Reed. You disappoint me. Can you not be happy that I have received my first proposal? He got down on his knees and everything. I was sitting right there.” She waved her paintbrush at the swing.

“Here?” He rose uneasily.

Megan smiled as she daubed at her painting with a leafy green. When had she begun to paint her landscapes in greens? She had favored burnt umber and raw sienna, as he did, when last he had watched her paint. He crossed to the easel, examining her creation.

“There is something very exhilarating about receiving one’s first proposal, before one has even come out.” She fairly preened. “I could not wait to tell you. I wrote you the longest letter, explaining everything in perfect detail. I knew you would find the whole incident as entertaining as I. It is quite disturbing to think that of all letters, that one should go astray.”

It was disturbing. All of it. Even the painting disturbed him.

“You have changed your ground colors--even your brushwork looks different!” Reed felt a dizziness that had nothing to do with the swing to which he returned, to regard Megan as if he had never seen her before. Harold had proposed! He might have returned to find her married! The idea was too big to comprehend. “Do you really care for so much green in your landscapes? Have you given up the Romantic?”

“Having met the manner in which both Stubbs and Constable have used natural colors rather than the browns the Dutch Masters dictate, I decided to try my hand at something different.”

“Stubbs? You met with this painter?”

“Not the painter, silly--his works. We popped in on any number of Aunt Winifred’s friends on the way to Paris.” She said it as nonchalantly as if she were accustomed to junketing off to Paris every weekend. “One of them had a series by Stubbs, another a Constable.”

“Paris?” He was relieved to see her clean her brush.

“Oh dear, was that in the missing letter as well? Aunt Win took me to Paris for a week’s worth of shopping. She promises me a Season in London and insists I require fashionable attire.”

“Decent of her.” Reed felt strangely light-headed. A proposal! A Season in London! Even more alarming, these radical changes in painting habits! It had never occurred to him that Megan might be transformed--as if an unseen hand reshaped her--in his absence.

“A blessing. Father calls her a blessing, and indeed, I agree. She has been the perfect angel.” She untied the tapes that held her smock in place, revealing a pretty mulberry and white sprigged muslin dress he had never seen before. It was cut in the new longer-waisted style seen everywhere in Europe, the neckline exceptionally low. When had Megan’s girlish figure reshaped itself? She was right. Everything was changed. She began to look like the dreadful bronze! He had yet to tell her about the bronze.

She whirled before him. “Like it? I have half a dozen in every style and color you could imagine. New shoes, too, with little rosettes. Three new hats, one a Leghorn that I kept trying to tell Aunt Win that I could not see around anymore than a horse can see around blinders, but she told me it was the most fetching of the lot and would I like gloves to match! It is a good thing my aunt foots the bill. Papa could never afford such extravagance.”

One by one, Reed held up his Claude glasses, first to examine her new style of painting and then to examine her dress, hair and the arresting curves of her body as words of wardrobe flowed around them with the same graceful, rippling effect to be seen in her swirling skirts.

“I have evening dresses, a white court costume with a plumed headdress, a curricle pelisse with three capes and a Spencer with Gabrielle sleeves.” Her eyes sparkled with the wonder of it.

The ocher glass would not do. It left her flesh looking decidedly jaundiced while the umber glass gave her complexion a most unsettling bronze cast. Bronze! Time enough to tell her about the bronzes. It was through the rose-colored glass Reed examined her at leisure. She curtsied playfully, the girl he knew as Megan, who had become something more than the Megan of his memories.

“The color suits,” he said. He might once have said, the neckline, too.

“I am pleased you think so, Reed. You’ve an infallible eye for color.”

“Your hair is different as well?” She looked taller, her manner seemed more confident. Was she wearing rouge? Or had he never really noticed the bloom in her cheeks? She had become a stranger of sorts, a fascinating stranger.

“Yes. It is the latest fashion and a great deal of trouble to arrange every morning. Mother likes it immensely. What do you think?” She looked at him as if his answer mattered a great deal.

Reed was temporarily at a loss. Megan did not normally fish for compliments or speak to him of fashions and hairstyles. Their conversation tended to center on more serious topics, like the best methods for accomplishing a picturesque or chiaroscuro effect. How did one go about sounding natural in giving compliments one was unaccustomed to offering? “I have always liked your hair. I took to calling you Nutmeg in the first place because of its wonderfully spicy coloring.” His voice sounded too harsh for the compliment.

She eyed him thoughtfully, as unused to hearing praise from him as he was unused to offering it.

“You have the look of a Boucher today, no, a Fragonard.” It was true. She did remind him of Fragonard’s paintings.

She smiled, shyly, as she had never seemed shy before, adding to his delight in looking at her through the Claude glass. “I must paint you looking just as you do--against the backdrop of roses. I cannot imagine why I never thought to do so.”

She would not remain still in the frame of his picturing.

“What paintings have you seen? Tell me, that I may swoon with envy. But first, tell me what is this? Have you purchased another Claude glass?”

“Yes. Smashed my round one on a mountainside in Switzerland. A blessing really. I am much more pleased with this new set than I was with the old.”

She held out her hand for the folio and carefully examined each of the glasses. “Interesting tints. Where are your sketches? I must see what you have done.”

“Gone on in the carriage, along with the bronzes. I have brought back something rather special.” He leaned forward eagerly. “Can you come tomorrow, to see?

A shadow darkened her smile’s sunshine. “Your mother will not care to see me.”

He laughed. “You will not be coming to see my mother.”

Chapter Three

R
eed thought about change as he climbed the hill to Talcott Keep. After a year’s absence, he had been prepared to surround himself in things blessedly familiar. Yet, everywhere he turned there was change. It had started in Italy with the impudent sculptor who had the temerity to take advantage of sketches very private to Reed-- that might have been better left undrawn. Changes had continued to confront him in London where his father had dumped a stack of ledgers in his arms saying he must look after his inheritance, they could no longer afford a solicitor.

And now Megan meant to go away for the summer with a Season in London hard on its heels and talk of potential husbands to take her away from him, perhaps forever. His world whirled on a new axis. Cresting the rise that afforded an excellent view of Talcott Keep, he wondered would there be changes here, too?

He slowed as he approached the crumbling pile his Norman ancestor’s had called home in the fourteenth century. The moated castle was set within the original twelfth century keep, hence its name. A Royalist bastion, it had held off Cromwell’s troops in 1646. The boxy, four-towered mass staved off change with equal certitude now.

Through his umber Claude glass he observed his home. Talcott Keep should be seen through the smoky brown lens that added timeless antiquity to any scene.

Oddly, it was not this place he had been homesick for during his European Tour. This was no Blythe Corner. Reed never felt at home in Talcott Keep’s dark, imposing setting. It brooded too much over the past through keyhole windows meant to keep out the arrow-slinging enemies of Talcotts long dead.

The servants claimed the keep was haunted. There were stories of a grey woman who walked the ramparts and reports of clanking chains from a dungeon no longer equipped with the instruments of torture once housed there. The North Tower, dampest of the four, was no longer in use. Too much mildew, clammy stone and rotting wood. If any part of Talcott Keep was haunted it must be there, Reed had decided as a boy. The place always left him depressed and dizzy.

He entered the castle, not by the formal, great hall entrance, but by way of the low double doors that led to the buttery. He popped his head around the door to the kitchen, to wish the staff, “Good day.”

 “Welcome home. Good day to you, milord!” He was greeted with a polite chorus, accompanied by a great deal of head bobbing and curtsying. Mrs. Daws, promised him leg of mutton, minted peas and Yorkshire pudding.

“You’ll not have had any of that in your travels I’ll be bound,” she said.

“Quite right, and hungry for plain English fare I am,” he pleased her in saying before he backtracked through the buttery to the dining hall. Linen, crystal, china and plate were being set out at each end of the long dining table for the evening meal. The glassy stare of a dozen or so stuffed deer racks artfully arranged between a score or more crossed arms above six suits of armor lent a martial air to every meal consumed. More head bobs and curtsies met Reed as he passed into the main hall, where ancient family portraits looked down from whitewashed walls.

Another aging relic of bygone elegance and beauty, Lady Talcott met him at the base of the stairs up which he had hoped to escape for a change of clothes. She wore velvet, heavily gilded and lavishly trimmed in a rich, russet shade that echoed the coloring in the tapestries, rugs, touches of rouge that enlivened pale cheeks and in the fur of the Pomeranian she carried everywhere. She had a fondness for the color, a passion for velvet. It softened the ravages of time. Or so she believed.

Reed’s impression was that it softened the sound of her approach. His mother did not so much inhabit Talcott Keep as she haunted it. Tidbit, the chestnut colored Pom who perched regally among the velvet flounces, seemed the most lively aspect of her presence until she spoke.

“So you come home at last?” Her voice, like the French perfume that hung about her in an expensive fog was penetrating, pervasive and overbearing. Reed had learned the subtleties of his mother’s moods through a lifetime of listening. Today there was no subtlety about her bitterness and recrimination. Tidbit made a harsh little growling sound, supporting his mistress’s indignation.