A Lady of Talent (12 page)

“The Earl of Charrington,” Tredlow announced as the sketchbook hit the opposite wall and fell with a flop to the floor.

“What do you want?” Cecilia whirled to glower at the intruder before her visitor’s identity had fully penetrated her consciousness.

In her anger and frustration, she had still been carrying on an internal dialogue with her brother, and it was something of a shock to discover that it was not Neville, but Sebastian who stood regarding her quizzically from the doorway to her studio.

A chalk-covered hand rose to Cecilia’s lips. “Oh no! I mean, I do beg your pardon.” The hot flush of embarrassment flamed in her cheeks. It was the perfect disastrous end to a perfectly disastrous morning. At this moment, aside from wishing desperately that the earth would open up under her feet and swallow her without further delay, she wanted nothing more than to murder her brother.

“I take it that you have been having an altogether unsatisfactory morning. Is there any way I can help, or would you prefer to have me leave?” Recovering from his initial surprise, Sebastian strode into the room, stripping off his York tan gloves, for all the world as though he were preparing to do battle with her particular demons.

Cecilia could only stare at him. “What?”

“It looks to me as though you are having a rather bad time of it. Perhaps it would help you to talk about it. I am sure that you are quite capable of sorting things out for yourself, but there is nothing like talking about it to help get rid of the frustration so you can think clearly enough to solve the problem.” Sebastian smiled at her look of utter astonishment. “At least that is the way it is with me. Problems, I can solve; it is my own annoyance that is more difficult to manage.”

He had summed it up so accurately and exactly that Cecilia found herself overcome with the oddest feeling of gratitude for his wisdom and perspicacity. She could not ever remember having felt that way before. Her eyes stung with tears as unexpected as they were unwelcome. It was not like her to be such a watering pot. What was it about his few words of sympathy and a simple look of understanding that reduced her to this state of idiocy?

“My poor girl. What ever is it?” In two steps, he was across the room, hands on her shoulders, eyes dark with concern searching her face for some clue as to what was upsetting her.

The tears welled up, rolled over, and spilled down her cheeks before she even knew what was happening. Without a word, he pulled her gently into his arms.

It was too much. Waves of tension and exhaustion had been building inside her for weeks, and now they simply broke through their bounds. Helplessly she laid her cheek on his shoulder and struggled against the silent sobs that threatened to overwhelm her.

“Hush now. Tell me all about it, and perhaps we can think it through together.” Gently, Sebastian stroked the blond curls that had pulled free from the coiled braid at the back of her head. “Now what is it that is troubling you so?”

With a heroic gulp, Cecilia pulled away angrily, ineffectively dashing at the tears on her cheeks.

Sebastian, who had endured what had felt like a lifetime of tears with his mother, not to mention every other female who had ever wanted something from him—money or marriage, or both—thought himself inured to female emotion by now. But these particular tears tore at his heart.

Pulling out a spotless handkerchief, he handed it to her and led her to the chair by the fireplace, taking the seat opposite her. “There now, dry your eyes and tell me everything.”

The matter-of-fact tone had its effect, and Cecilia found herself calming down enough to speak. “It is nothing, really.”

One skeptically raised eyebrow was ample proof that the Earl of Charrington was not a man to be put off by polite disclaimers.

“Well, it is this picture. I just cannot get it right, no matter what I do. You just happened to arrive at a particularly inopportune moment, as I was giving vent to quite unladylike feelings of frustration.”

Sebastian did not think for a moment that something as simple as artistic frustration lay behind the look of exhaustion he read in her eyes, the tired slump of her shoulders. Tears in the eyes of a woman who greeted her patrons with the poise and aplomb that he had seen in few men were a clear indication that something more than frustration was at work here. No, if he had had to hazard a guess, Sebastian would venture to say that somehow that frippery brother of hers had something to do with her unhappy state of mind. But he knew very well that Cecilia would never admit to that.

So he stood up and walked over to retrieve the discarded sketchbook. For some time he studied the unfinished sketch in complete silence, then slowly flipped through the other pages—Solomon deliberating over the child and its two mothers, Dido building the citadel at Carthage, Hercules slaying the Nemean Lion—examining them each in turn. At last he appeared to reach a conclusion.

“What is it? What do you see?” Cecilia, who had been watching his expression closely, could not help asking.

“I agree with you. Your latest sketch simply does not measure up to the others. It lacks the power.”

She waved her hand in a dismissive gesture of futility and hopelessness.

A slow, almost tender smile spread across Sebastian’s face. “But it has nothing to do with your skill, or lack thereof, as an artist. I would simply say the problem is that you have never been in love.”

“
What
?”

“Well, have you?” Sketchbook in hand, he walked back to her chair, where he stood looking down at her with a mysterious smile on his lips and a disturbing light in his eyes.

“No! I mean, of course not!”

“Ah. I thought so.”

For some reason that she simply could not fathom, Cecilia felt oddly defiant. “Well, have you?”

It was Sebastian’s turn to be taken aback. He considered it seriously for a moment. “No,” he admitted slowly, “I don’t believe I have. But,” he hastened to add, as he saw the triumphant look creep into her eyes, “I
have
experienced passion ... of
that sort
before, and I know what is lacking in your drawing of Cupid and Psyche: it is their passion for one another.”

“See here.” He turned to the sketch of Dido. “There is the passion of determination in her stance, the heroic acceptance of duty and danger in her eyes. And here”—he flipped to the picture of Hercules—”here again are determination and pride. All these are feelings that you as an artist—especially a female artist trying to make a name as well as a living for herself—must feel every day. Thus, you are able to capture these passions in subtle ways because you understand them so well—the clenched jaw here, the proud tilt of the head there, the compressed lips here. But in these two”—he pointed to Cupid and Psyche—”there is none of that.”

Cecilia was artist enough to appreciate the truth in what he said, and to be grateful to him for pointing it out to her, unnerving though it was. But even more unnerving was the surge of happiness that rose within her as she absorbed the implications of his own admission. He did not love Barbara Wyatt!

He had, however, admitted to feeling passion of
that sort.
Cecilia looked up at him. What would it be like to experience passion with the Earl of Charrington? Her stomach felt as though it had suddenly dropped to the floor, and her heart thudded alarmingly. Her hands felt clammy and her knees weak, as she remembered what it had felt like only minutes before to be held in that reassuring embrace, to feel the strength in his arms around her, the hardness of his chest underneath her cheek, and the warmth of his hand on her hair.

Sebastian watched with interest as color flooded Cecilia’s cheeks. He saw comprehension dawn in her eyes as her lips parted to speak, and he was seized with the most desperate urge to pull her back into his arms and explore those lips with his own, to inspire in her all the passion that he knew lay within her, powerful, but untouched and un-awakened.

“You are indeed clever, you know.”

“What?” It was Sebastian’s turn to look blank.

“You are quite right... about the picture, I mean. It
is
lifeless. That is what was bothering me about it.” Of course, how she was going to remedy the situation was something altogether different, and something Cecilia was not prepared even to contemplate.

“Perhaps I can help.” Even as the words were leaving his mouth, Sebastian realized the full implication of what he was saying, but there was no way he could take it back now. He only wished that he really could help her experience the passion she needed to feel before she could attempt to capture the essence of subjects like Cupid and Psyche. “With your career, I mean.”

He could not say why he had added the last sentence, but some devil in him wanted her to think about the implications of the previous sentence, to think about what it would be like to share passion with him—wanted her to long for him as he found himself longing for her.

“Thank you.” It was all Cecilia could do to make her lips form the words. And then, desperate to break away from the intensity of his gaze, she reached up to take back her sketchbook.

The spell was broken. Sebastian slowly let out the breath he had been holding in. “I am having the house in Grosvenor Square redone and, until now, I had not given much thought to the decoration of the ballroom. At the moment it is rather dull; however, there is a medallion in the ceiling and there are panels between the pilasters that would be greatly enlivened with paintings. It occurs to me that there are just enough spaces, four on each side, in addition to the medallion, to hold pictures of the muses. It may not be history painting in quite the spirit you had envisioned, but it would be a beginning at least.

“In fact,” he added, warming to his theme, “I envision Terpsichore in the medallion as the centerpiece with the other muses on the walls below her, surrounding her.” He looked at Cecilia questioningly.

“Ah, er, I do not know what to say. Such a commission is very flattering, of course, but very expensive. I cannot accept a favor of such magnitude simply because you are a friend who wishes to help me.”

Sebastian shook his head smiling. “Always the artist of rigorous principles. I am not asking you because you are a friend. I am asking you because you are C. A. Manners, the painter whose pictures I admired at the Royal Academy exhibition—pictures I admired so much that I became your patron first and your friend second.”

He turned and walked over to examine Barbara’s unfinished portrait. “And thus far, I am extremely pleased with the work that you have done for me. You have captured the spirit well, I think. Please say that you will at least consider my offer.”

When he put it like that, he made it easy for her to accept, even though she still suspected that he was offering it out of kindness to her, rather than a real need to embellish his ballroom. “Very well, I shall think about it.”

“Excellent. I suggest you meet me there at your earliest convenience—tomorrow, if you like—so that you can see what the project entails.”

“Thank you.” She smiled shyly. “I should like that.”

And it was not until Sebastian was at the very door of her studio that he remembered why he had come. “Good heavens, I almost forgot again. Here is Sir Humphry Davy’s paper on pigments that I promised you, along with a few observations of my own. Perhaps you might look it over, and then I could explain my thoughts to you.”

Suddenly awkward, as though he had presumed too much on her time, Sebastian thrust the pages into her hand, bowed, and was gone, leaving Cecilia to gaze thoughtfully after him.

Chapter Fourteen

The door closed behind him, and with a sigh of relief, Cecilia went back to her work. But her mind refused to focus. Her eyes kept drifting back to the rough sketch of Cupid and Psyche, and she kept hearing a deep voice saying
I
would simply say that you have never been in love.

No, she never had been in love before. She had been too busy with her career, and she had had no time for love—or anything else, for that matter. Nor had she had the inclination. Love, men, marriage, were all distractions from her ultimate goal of becoming an artist. It was this very single-mindedness that had allowed her to accomplish as much as she had managed to accomplish in a relatively short space of time. And she was proud of what she had accomplished.

It was only now, for the very first time in her life that she asked herself if perhaps she had missed something along the way—closeness, intimacy, the sharing of life with another person.

Cecilia had always been surrounded by friends and colleagues—artists, musicians, writers—people whose interests were as wide-ranging and insatiable as her own. But though they had exchanged thoughts and ideas, and explored new ways of looking at things, they had never truly shared anything, and she had never truly been close to anyone.

She had never looked into anyone else’s eyes and seen what she had seen in Sebastian’s—sympathy, concern, the reflection of her soul in his. And she had certainly never wondered what it would be like to be held in someone’s arms, to feel someone’s lips on hers, someone’s hand caressing her.

Cecilia looked back at the picture of Cupid and Psyche. Even now, after the brief interlude when Sebastian had held her in his arms, stroked her hair, and comforted her in her distress, she could see what was wrong about her picture—what was lacking in it that made it seem so wooden and lifeless.

Seizing her chalk, she rubbed away some of the stiffer lines and made them more fluid, more pliable, thinking all the while as she did so of the feeling of flesh against flesh, the peculiar electric current that had seemed to flow between them wherever their bodies had touched one another, the strange hunger that had made her long for more, and regret that she had pulled away so quickly. And as the chalk moved slowly up to the faces of the lovers, she recalled the warm light in Sebastian’s eyes as he had looked at her. Her fingers suddenly seemed to have a life of their own as the retraced lips and eyebrows, the tender curve of the cheek, the glow in the eyes.