A Lady of Talent (5 page)

“Surely not.” Again a sly smile crept across Neville’s face. “As someone who has taken the trouble to understand the female mind and its motivations, I can say in all modesty that Miss Wyatt was most responsive to my obvious admiration for her person as well as for her exquisite taste. A woman who conveys that responsiveness, even as demurely and delicately as Miss Wyatt did, is hardly immune to such things. I would even venture to say that, given the right companion, she might even be ... ah, very susceptible to those things.”

“Neville! Do not even
think
of setting up a flirtation with someone who is not only my patron, but the affianced bride of the Earl of Charrington. Neville?” Cecilia’s frown was thunderous. “I will not have it, do you hear me? I
will not
have it!”

Her brother laughed. “Relax, Cecy. I was merely fanning. But you are positively puritanical when it comes to those ridiculous scruples of yours, professional or otherwise. You take it all far too seriously. One simply cannot help but find it amusing.”

Neville yawned and glanced absently around the room. His eye fell on the hastily deposited sketchbook that lay open to the half-finished sketch of a serious-looking young lady reading a book. “There, see?” He indicated the drawing with a languid wave of his hand. Your subjects are all so very dull—wealthy Cits or raving bluestockings. There is not a speck of amusement to be found among the lot of them. Small wonder that I should find your latest subject so very attractive.”

“Almeria Wolverhampton is
not
a bluestocking; she is simply a clever young woman with a quick wit and a conversation that extends beyond the latest fashions in
La Belle Assemblée.
She is a woman of interest and character, as is Dorothea Lieven whose sketch is on the page before hers.” Cecilia took up her sketchbook and, closing it firmly, removed it from her brother’s mocking gaze. “I like painting women of character. Capturing their likenesses offers far more challenge than reproducing the boringly symmetrical lines—or trying to instill a spark of interest in the face of—some vapid beauty.”

“If you were not so preternaturally prejudiced against the Incomparables of the world, you would admit that Miss Wyatt has a lively and charming countenance. But it is clear you decided to dislike her from the outset.”

“What absurdity! I neither like nor dislike Miss Wyatt. I am to paint her portrait, nothing more. What I think of her, or don’t think of her, is immaterial.”

Neville shot a quizzical look at his sister. Her face was flushed and her eyes sparkled with annoyance. It was unlike Cecilia to allow herself to be drawn into what she would ordinarily dismiss as a thoroughly ridiculous and time-wasting discussion. A slow grin spread across his face. “Do you know what I think? I think you are intrigued by her sober fiancé, and it irritates you to see two such unlikely people embarking on a life together. The sheer illogic of two such different people being married to one another offends your innate sense of order, and so, instead of accepting it as the way of the world, you find you must like one or the other of them, but not both. And naturally the sober, intelligent, hardworking Charrington is the one whose side you have decided to take.”

“Oh do go away, Neville, and leave me alone,” his sister retorted crossly. “As usual, you are being utterly ridiculous. Now leave. I have work to do.” And picking up a brush and her palette, Cecilia turned determinedly to Sir Jasper’s portrait.

But the brush remained poised in midair even after her brother had closed the studio door behind him. Cecilia gazed down at the small twisted tree and the few stunted rose-bushes in the garden below and a pang of longing shot through her—a longing for the sweet-scented breezes and the broad blue vista of the Bay of Naples, the warmth of the Mediterranean sun, the music and the laughter that had always surrounded her, the simple pleasures and the enlivening conversations that had been her world until the Corsican monster had forced her, her father, and her brother back to England. Would she ever return to that cherished land, even if she could never return to that cherished time?
Not if you waste the precious hours of light daydreaming like a simpleton instead of working,
a severe little voice in her head admonished her.

Sighing, Cecilia applied the brush to Sir Jasper’s bushy eyebrows. The Earl of Charrington was right, no matter how nastily superior he had sounded: her male portraits somehow did lack the vitality of her female ones. She stepped back, frowning thoughtfully as she considered why that was so. Was it because she lacked the affinity with men like Sir Jasper that she felt with people like Almeria Wolverhampton and Dorothea Lieven? Unbidden, the tall frame, high-bridged nose, and strong jaw of the Earl of Charrington flashed before her. The man’s entire being exuded energy. His dark eyes, set deep under straight dark brows smoldered with a suppressed passion rarely seen in any of her brother’s fashionable acquaintances—and few if any of their other friends, for that matter.

And while it was true that she preferred painting women to painting men, Cecilia suddenly found herself wishing that it was the earl’s and not his fiancée’s portrait she was being commissioned to paint. To be more exact, it was not strictly his likeness she wished to create, but his very essence that she hoped to capture for her own pet project, which was a series of historic paintings celebrating the mighty Samson and his epic struggles with the lion, the Philistines, and of course, Delilah.

Annoyed with herself, Cecilia shook her head vigorously to banish such silly daydreams. She had work to do, Sir Jasper’s picture to finish and Miss Wyatt’s portrait to begin. After all, it was not heroic historical paintings that paid their bills, but portraits, and no matter how much she longed to make a name for herself as a history painter, that would do little more than add to the luster of her reputation. For the time being, at least, portraits, and the money they brought her, were far more important than reputation.

Chapter Six

Survival, however, was not uppermost in Cecilia’s mind several days later as she emerged from Turner’s lecture at the Royal Academy on the perceptions of nature and the use of color. She was still so wrapped up in all that Turner had had to say on the subject that she descended the curved staircase in a fog, paying so little attention to what she was doing that had she not been holding on to the slender banister she surely would have stumbled. She started across the checkered floor of the vestibule heading toward the traffic of the Strand, and ran headlong into one of the marble columns that supported the vaulted ceiling of Somerset House’s impressive entry.

“Lady Cecilia!” A deep voice tinged with laughter revealed that it was a man rather than an architectural element with which she had collided.

“I
beg
your pardon.” Doing her best to overcome a sinking feeling that she knew the identity of the person she had run into, she forced herself to look up into dark eyes glinting with amusement. “What ever are
you
doing here?” Cecilia quickly stifled the irrelevant thought that when he was smiling as he was now, the Earl of Charrington was a very attractive man indeed.

Sebastian grinned. “I might ask the same of you, though I suspect the answer would be that you have been attending a lecture at the Royal Academy. As to what I have been doing here, I have been at the Royal Society listening to what my friend Charles Babbage has to say about the calculus of functions.”

“The calculus of functions?”

He laughed outright at her stupefaction. “Yes. It is a hobby of mine—mathematics, that is.” Sebastian had not realized the effect their first meeting had had on him until this moment when he had her at a disadvantage. The first time, he had been overwhelmed to discover that the woman of his dreams was actually flesh and blood. He had fallen victim to her air of competent professionalism—that and her obvious intelligence and knowledge that were so evident in every corner of her studio. He had come away from the encounter feeling very dull and very provincial indeed.

It was not often—in fact almost never—that Sebastian doubted his intellectual superiority, but this woman, by her very self-assurance and composure, had somehow made him feel like the veriest schoolboy, or, at the very least, a worthless fribble who did nothing but cater to the whims of his beautiful fiancée. He had not been aware of how much it rankled until this very moment, when he took great delight in watching an uncomfortable flush suffuse Lady Cecilia’s cheeks and a self-conscious look creep into her large hazel eyes.

C. A. Manners welcoming patrons to her studio was formidable indeed, but Lady Cecilia caught off guard and adorably flustered was completely enchanting and utterly irresistible. Sebastian was suddenly seized with the most ridiculous and almost overwhelming urge to sweep her into his arms and kiss the gently parted lips until she was breathless. “Yes, I find mathematics to be an absorbing distraction—a source of inspiration and predictability in an otherwise uninspiring and unpredictable world.”

If she had been regarding him with mild confusion before, Cecilia looked utterly bewildered now. What had ever possessed him to admit such a thing to someone who was almost a complete stranger, a woman he had met only once before in his life?

But suddenly, and completely unexpectedly, she smiled. It was a smile that was both reassuring and intimate, a smile that made him feel comfortable and strangely lighthearted. “How interesting. I had never thought of mathematics in quite that way before. For me, being forced to do sums when I longed to read or to draw was torture. Geometry was a little better because at least it was something I could see, but algebra...” She shook her head in disgust. “Even Neville understood algebra better than I. But I can quite see how someone truly skilled at it would find working with numbers intriguing—like a puzzle, in a way.”

“Precisely. Only it is far more useful than a puzzle. It helps one to look at the world in an orderly way, to quantify results and then see why things happen. If used creatively it can help one to think, and... I beg your pardon.” Sebastian broke off hastily. “It is just that I have been talking equations with Babbage, and what he had to say was so inspiring that I quite forgot how dull it is to everyone else.”

“No, it is not dull in the least. Incomprehensible, perhaps, but not dull.” Again her smile warmed him, and touched him in a way he could not remember having been touched before. “Even I, unschooled in this sort of thing as I am, can see that such interests and skills would, for example, make you a formidable opponent at games of chance—and I am sure that is only the most obvious part of it. And now that I think of it, my brother Neville did mention that you had something of a reputation for skill at the card table.”

Sebastian chuckled, oddly pleased that she had been discussing him with her brother. “Yes, actually, I do rather well at cards, but to me they are less games of chance than of probability, as are stocks and bank shares and annuities, all of which entail a good deal less risk and a great deal more reward than the toss of the dice or the turn of a card.”

“Which would make cards and dice a good deal more profitable, but perhaps less amusing for you than they are for people like my brother, who never know what to predict and thus live in a fever of expectation that the next toss of the dice or the next turn of the card will bring them a fortune.”

“Or lose it.” Sebastian fell silent. The amusement faded from his face, and a look that could only be described as bleak crept into his eyes.

Her curiosity piqued, Cecilia held her breath, waiting, wondering what memories or thoughts were responsible for that faraway expression.

Then he seemed to collect himself. His lips twisted into an ironic smile. “I myself find the most intriguing part of it all to be the calculation of the odds, but I admit that my interests are rare to the point of being peculiar. For most people, as you so aptly observed, it is the fever of anticipation, the endless possibility, that drives them to such an extent that it hardly matters to them if they win or lose. And they generally lose.”

This time there was no mistaking the bitterness in his voice or the bleakness in his expression. Inspired by an impulse she could not fathom or explain, Cecilia laid a gloved hand on his arm. “And I gather that you know someone who lost. I am sorry.”

Again he felt the oddest urge to confide in her. He did not know whether it was the warmth of understanding in her eyes or that he had become so accustomed to addressing his innermost thoughts to her picture that willed him to do so. Almost without his being aware of it, the words came pouring out.

“Yes, I did know someone like that: my father. He never met a game of chance he didn’t like, though faro was his preferred means of wasting his inheritance. He spent most of his time at the gaming tables of White’s, and then in less savory establishments as his obsession grew and his fortunes declined. My mother and I rarely saw him until the day he came riding home on a borrowed horse to tell us that he had finally lost everything, even the roof over our heads. And then he went out in the fields and shot himself. They found him the next day when the horse wandered into a farmer’s barn with my father still on his back. Unfortunately for us, he was the second son, so we had no entail to protect us and we were forced to throw ourselves on the mercy of his brother, the earl—as cold and selfish a man as you could ever hope to find.”

Sebastian paused for a moment. He rarely, if ever, spoke about this part of his life to anyone, and he could not imagine why he was doing so now, except that she seemed to understand everything he was trying to convey. At any rate, he had told her the worst of it, and there was no point in holding back now. He swallowed hard and continued with his story.

“As someone who had elected to live a bachelor existence, my uncle was not best pleased to have a destitute widow and her son suddenly thrust upon him. He accepted his new responsibilities begrudgingly. I was quickly banished to school, while my mother became little better than his housekeeper. It was a miserable existence, for he was a dreadful miser and mean-spirited to boot, but it did not last very long—for my mother, at least. Worn out with worry, and overwhelmed by the shame of my father’s death, she soon wasted away to an early grave.