Beckman: Lord of Sins (29 page)

“You grew up.”

“Perhaps, or I realized I could serve some purpose if I’d sober up enough to be of use. Then too, I found in Sussex, working each day on a specific patch of land, using my own wit and will to make the place healthier was much better for me than sailing off to foreign ports to carouse with strangers. I had never been successful running from my regrets, but I found some measure of peace in rising from the same bed, day after day.”

“You needed something to care about.”

“Apparently so.” Beck nuzzled her temple. “And someone to care about, someone to love.”

She went still beside him and remained silent. In that silence, she felt her heart sinking like a stone bound for the bottom of the sea. If she had viewed a continued liaison with Beckman as difficult before, it had become impossible with his raw truths and unvarnished trust.

“I do love you, you know,” Beck went on as the ache in Sara’s chest threatened to choke her. “And I think you must love me a little, too, Sara, or you would not have given me your virginity.”

Another instant of silence as the import of his words cascaded through Sara bodily.

“God help me.” She scooted forward and again would have left the room, but Beck put his hand on her nape, not gripping, just a warm, careful weight.

“I beg you, Sara.” He took a breath, his lovely, precise voice dragging like a rasp over Sara’s soul. “I
beg
you, do not lie to me now. Do not lie to yourself.”

The fire hissed and crackled on the hearth, the rain pelted the windowpanes, and the wind soughed around the corner of the house. In the warmth and solitude of the cozy sitting room, Beckman fell silent, and Sara…

Gave up.

Gave up pretending it didn’t hurt so badly to be without him, didn’t devastate her to consider his leaving, didn’t leave her howling in endless inner darkness to sleep one floor and a load of regrets away from him each night.

She loved him. He’d carried her secrets for her, waited for her, and now, in the face of his relentless pursuit, she just… gave up. Gave up her loneliness, her fears, her insecurities, and her bondage to a past that had come to cost too much. She curled back against him, along his side but facing away, because she could not bear for him to look upon her eyes. She felt Beck shift to curl himself around her on the sofa, the warmth of him providing a comfort beyond words.

“A man can’t tell if a woman is chaste. I’ve been promised a man can’t know for sure,” she said, barely above a whisper.

“I couldn’t tell with my body,” Beck said, “though I suspected, but with some other sense, I knew. You were like a gift, just for me, not like a woman who’d had a child with a man she loathed.”

“Reynard assured me our affection for one another would grow after we wed, though when he whisked me off to the Continent, it soon became apparent his affection was for the coin I could bring him. Being married to him gave me a veneer of respectability, but I think he sensed that if he forced me, I would take Polly and go, regardless of the folly involved.” She hoped she would have, and hoped equally some vestige of honor had informed her late husband’s unwillingness to assert his intimate marital rights. “So you knew about Allie all along?”

“I still don’t know about Allie,” Beck countered, wrapping an arm around Sara’s waist. “I only suspect and worry and wish I could help.”

“Reynard got to Polly.” Sara heaved a sigh the dimensions of the universe. “His strategy was to divide us, divide our loyalties, so Polly would fall in with his schemes and set herself against me. She was so young, Beckman. A child, and it never occurred to me Reynard would seduce a fifteen-year-old under his protection.”

“He cannot be dead enough to suit me.”

How she loved Beckman Haddonfield. “Once Polly conceived, Reynard was of course off on his other liaisons,” Sara said. “He nearly destroyed her, nearly destroyed us both. She tried to talk herself into hating me, but when his perfidy became undeniable, she hated the child and herself and me—and him.”

“For the last, we can be thankful.”

“If that kept her alive, then yes, we can be thankful even for a hatred like that.” Sara found herself lifted bodily and settled on Beck’s lap. “She nursed her baby but couldn’t really open her heart to Allie, not as a new mother.”

“Hence the subterfuge was made easier,” Beck said. “The child was yours and legitimate, but alas, as a legitimate child, also under Reynard’s authority. He went along with the scheme to put you, Polly, and Allie more firmly under his control, and probably saw the advantages to him from the start.”

“Of course,” Sara said, burying her face against Beck’s shoulder. “I think so far as he was capable, he loved Allie, but then when we visited England, she began to draw, and her talent was obvious.”

“
That must have hurt you, to see such tangible evidence of her relationship to Polly.”

“No.” Sara shifted slightly. “The art is what drew them back together. Polly matured a great deal and loves Allie every bit as much as I do. But as my child, Allie would be legitimate, as you say. As Polly’s, she’d be a scandalous indiscretion and reflect poorly on Polly and me both. I’m not sorry we did what we did—even Allie seems to understand the why of it—I am sorry Reynard exploited the situation for his own advantage.”

“It can’t have been easy.” Beck’s lips found Sara’s crown. “Raising another woman’s child while she looks on.”

“It wasn’t, particularly when that woman is your younger sister and blames you for the child’s existence, when she’s not blaming herself, then berating herself for feeling any resentment, and on and on. It was during one of our periodic feuds that Reynard suggested to Polly the various nude studies of me.”

“They are breathtaking.”

He
would
focus on that, and he wasn’t wrong. “What a tangled web.”

“We’ll untangle it.”

He might have been referring to enlarging Hildegard’s wallow, for the simple conviction in his tone.

“We?” Sara tried to wiggle off his lap and was gently restrained. “Beckman, I have lied to you, about myself, my daughter, my sister, my past, my marriage. You have no responsibility to me or mine. None at all.”

“You are entitled to your privacy, Sara, but I’m going to ask you a question, and would have truth from you or nothing at all.”

“Don’t do this.” Sara tried to leave him again but was again gently dissuaded. “Beckman, you aren’t thinking clearly. You aren’t considering your situation.”

Beck looked straight at her, and God help him, his every emotion was in his beautiful blue eyes. “Sarabande Adagio Hunt… I love you. I love you, and I want to marry you if you’ll have me. Do you love me?”

She reared back, surprised.

“I can live with not marrying you,” Beck went on. “I can ask you to marry me twice a day for the next fifty years, or fifty times a day for two hundred years. The only real question is do you love me? Because if you love me, there is no way on God’s green and beautiful earth that I will walk away from you. There is no foreign land I will visit, no vice I will descend into, no family project I will turn my hand to. You are my home, and I was put on this earth to love you.” He slipped his arms from around her, leaving Sara at sea and desperate to find the shore.

“Do you love me, Sarabande Adagio? Can you love me? A drunk, a fool, a man who drove one woman to take her life and that of her unborn child, a man who nearly killed himself rather than admit his family loves him and he them? Can you, do you, love that man? For he certainly loves you.”

She shook her head slowly from side to side, her face turned from him. In the patient silence, a tear fell from her jaw onto the back of her hand.

“I love your courage,” Beck said softly, lifting her hand to kiss the spot where the tear glistened in the firelight. “I love your determination, your fire, and your tremendous heart. I love your passion and the way you protect your own. I love your unbending integrity and your tender feelings, your—”

Sara pitched into him, wrenching sobs breaking from her. He encircled her in his arms while she cried for the exhausted, bewildered, mean, angry years of her marriage. She cried for herself and Allie and Polly. She cried for her brother and her parents and for the girl she’d been and never would be again.

And then she cried in relief, because she could, because Beckman Haddonfield must truly love her to hold her this way, to bear her secrets and Allie’s and Polly’s. To trust her and wait for her and trust her yet more. When she had cried herself out, she rested in his arms, absorbing the warmth and strength of him for long minutes.

Beck’s chin came to rest on her crown. “Shall I take that for a yes?”

“You may.” Sara unwadded the handkerchief she didn’t recall Beck passing to her. “But I want to say it.”

“I want to hear it. As often as you like, for the rest of my life.”

“I love you, Beckman Sylvanus Haddonfield,” Sara said, her voice hitching in the aftermath of her tears. “I love you, Beck.”

“Practice as often as you please. I love you, and I will love hearing you say it.”

“I love you.” Sara rose and extended a hand. “I love you. I will always love you. It’s a rainy afternoon, we have hours of privacy, and I love you.”

In the years to come, they often stole away for hours of privacy on rainy afternoons. Sometimes Sara would play her violin for Beck, and sometimes they’d pass hours in loving each other without words.

Other times, they’d talk, and Sara would drowse on Beck’s chest, enthralled with the music of his voice and the melodies of his hands on her naked body. Whether they loved silently or with noisy, unbridled passion, secrets never again had the power to separate them or to dim the love they shared for the rest of their lives.

A significant question for me as this story wandered into my imagination was whether there are child prodigies among the painters. Mozart is the quintessential musical wundkerkind, but I hadn’t come across his like elsewhere in the arts. I asked the art historians in my family (we have two) if they knew of such, and the example that came immediately to mind was Pablo Picasso. A little nosing around also brought to light the example of Sir Thomas Lawrence, who was contributing to his family’s upkeep significantly with his sketching by the time he was ten years old. Sir Thomas went on to lead the Royal Academy, and his portraits continue to delight us to this day.

A yet more interesting case was that of Angelica Kauffmann, a Swiss-Austrian lady who became one of two female founding members of the Royal Academy. By the time she was thirteen, Angelica was painting portraits professionally, and she went on to trade portraits with Sir Joshua Reynolds. Alas for the ladies, when the two female founding members of the Academy died, it took more than a century for that august body to again admit a female artist as a Royal Academician.

I love this story, love a tale of people wandering far from home for all the wrong reasons, people who then (eventually) find the courage to come back to the love they need and deserve. Credit goes to my editor, Deb Werksman, for choosing Beckman and Sara’s tale over some less unconventional offerings, and for making time in the middle of a tempest to give the story a thorough buffing.

As always, Skye, Cat, Susie, and Danielle are manning various oars to row the manuscript along, and I cannot thank them often enough.

I’d also like to thank my parents, who early and often in my childhood loaded as many as five children into a station wagon and drove us coast to coast of a summer holiday. We learn things when we leave home, and we learn things when we come home, too.

Read on for an excerpt from the next book
in the Lonely Lords series by Grace Burrowes

Coming September 2013 from Sourcebooks Casablanca

“It’s time I rose from the dead.”

The Dowager Marchioness of Warne eyed her guest placidly over her teacup, despite the impact of his words.

Oh, to be thirty years younger—even twenty. “Is that wise, Gabriel? You never did get to the bottom of all that mischief in Spain.”

Gabriel Wendover rose to his considerable height and paced to the window overlooking the back gardens. “Here’s my dilemma: my younger brother is one of few who can convincingly identify me. If I don’t emerge from my convalescence now, Aaron could well drink himself into oblivion, or engage in one too many duels, and then I’m an opportunistic poseur, trying to do battle with Prinny’s legal weasels.”

“Surely your former fiancée could identify you.” Lady Warne enjoyed the view of her guest from the back almost as much as she did from the front. He was all lean, elegant muscle now, though two years ago he’d been at death’s door.

“I’m not sure I’d trust Marjorie that far.” Gabriel turned away from his study of the flowers. “As Aaron’s wife, and the Marchioness of Hesketh, she now commands significant wealth and respect. If she’s simply the wife of a younger son, she gets a great deal less.”

“But an adequate portion to survive on?”

“Of course.” His features shuttered, and an idea popped into her ladyship’s mind.

“Does this sudden urge to come out of the shadows have to do with a woman, Gabriel?”

Not by the flicker of a dark eyelash did he betray any reaction to the question, and in his stillness, Lady Warne found a hint of confirmation that she’d guessed correctly.

“Why would you suggest that?”

She went to stand beside him, close enough that the afternoon sun revealed fatigue around his eyes and mouth. “Two years ago, you were done searching for justice, done trying to figure out who wished you dead. You took over stewarding Three Springs for me, and despite all odds to the contrary, you made it prosper. I thought you were content there and would finish out your days as plain Gabriel North, humble, if taciturn, land steward.”

“Taciturn?”

“Reserved.” And because he was less than half her age, she allowed herself a smidgen of fun at his expense. “Brooding.”

“I was recovering from a mortal wound. This does not incline a man to a sanguine demeanor.” He fell silent. He was too dear a man, and she was too old not to wait him out. “My decision doesn’t have to do with a woman, but rather, with the absence of a woman.”

He was lonely, and he’d been lonely when they’d met two years ago, though it appeared he was now becoming
aware
of this sorry state of affairs. And when Gabriel Wendover saw a problem, he must needs address it.

“Surely, with your looks, you don’t lack for female company?”

“And all my wit and charm?” He raised an eyebrow, and Lady Warne was put in mind of those ancient, rousing days when a man took by conquest and held by main strength. Gabriel would have prospered then, too—handily—and likely had his version of fun, bashing heads and bellowing war cries.

“You’re as charming as you need to be,” she observed, “though you don’t prevaricate any better than my grandsons do.”

His brilliant green eyes showed some emotion, humor perhaps, but so briefly that Lady Warne couldn’t be sure of what she’d seen.

“As long as I turn my back on my birthright,” he said, “I am unable to marry, unable to even dally, really, because I’m living a lie.”

Clearly, Gabriel had never moved about much in society. “Dallying men are supposed to lie. It’s part of the consideration due the ladies.”

“Then I’ve lost the knack of dallying, if I ever had it.” He crossed his arms over his chest, a gesture that to her ladyship looked more defensive than stubborn. “I can’t risk that a woman close to me could become a victim of the same kind of violence that befell me, or see her used somehow as leverage against me.”

“You’ve been brooding on this.”

“Considering,” he allowed. “I cannot resign myself to watching Aaron fritter away the family fortune, much less fritter away his life, so Prinny can snatch up the rewards when escheat befalls the title. If I’m going to be dead, I’d rather die battling my enemies than of mortification at my younger brother’s moral collapse.”

“He is young,” Lady Warne pointed out. Everybody was young to her these days. “Maybe he’ll come right if you give him a few more years.”

“The longer I wait, the less credible any story of protracted delirium or lost memory becomes.”

Gabriel was not merely lonely; he had fallen in love. The notion was startling and gratifying, and the only possible explanation for a radical departure from his well-laid, ridiculous plans of two years ago. “Maybe you were captured by gypsies and held as a prisoner until the gypsy princess fell in love with you and set you free.”

His answering scowl was ferocious.

“What have I said?”

“Sara Hunt was known as the Gypsy Princess when she toured the Continent.”

“She’s Lady Reston now.” May God and a handsome grandson be thanked. “Married to my dear Beckman, and no longer a traveling musician playing for coin, or the lowly housekeeper raising her daughter at Three Springs. Beckman is arse over teakettle for his lady wife.”

Gabriel flashed her a rare, precious smile. “My virgin ears. Such language.”

“Your ears are no more virgin than your… the rest of you. What can I do to help?” Because she
would
help, will he, nil he.

“Ask your spies what they know about the goings-on at Hesketh,” Gabriel said. “I know of three duels Aaron’s been involved in over the past twelve months. I hear of particularly wicked house parties with his army cronies when his wife is up to Town, and Marjorie’s bills would finance a cavalry unit and their mounts. This makes no sense to me. Aaron was fun loving, not reckless, and he was raised as the spare. He should know how to go on better than this now that he’s Hesketh.”

“Your papa’s death was unexpected, as was your so-called demise,” Lady Warne reminded him. “Men can misbehave badly when a title befalls them on short notice.”

“So one hears.”

“I’ll listen to the gossip, but you’re going to need allies if you intend to march off smartly to Hesketh and declare yourself alive and well.”

“I can’t ask others to put their lives in jeopardy merely because I’m feeling possessive of my title.”

“Not possessive, protective.”

“Both. I have one other favor to ask of you.”

“Anything.”

He looked momentarily nonplussed by the immediacy of her answer, and that gave her satisfaction. The man had been alone too long, probably since before his injury in Spain.

“I need a place to stay, somewhere nobody will think to look for me over the next week or so.” He was gazing out over the asters and chrysanthemums again, his expression distant. “I must dress the part if I’m to make a grand reentrance at Hesketh, and I want to do some loitering in low places before I go home.”

“You want to make the rounds.” She looked him over, seeing the dusty boots, the threadbare morning coat, the cravat that sported not a hint of lace. “Gather intelligence. You are more than welcome to stay here, young man, but you’ll tell me what news you come across, and I’ll do likewise.”

“My thanks, and my lady?”

“Hmm?”

“Be careful. Beckman, Nicholas, and the rest of your tribe of grandchildren would flay me where I stood did I bring harm to you.”

“Having a little project is more likely to keep a woman of my age
out
of trouble, I’ll have you know. Now, if you want to restore your wardrobe, you will take my advice, for the tailors gossip as freely as the modistes.”

“I’m listening.”

Having made his request of her, he visibly relaxed, lounging back against the windowsill as they plotted and planned.

Oh, to be thirty years younger. Even twenty.

***

“You’ve eight commissions.”

“Eight!?”

How it gratified Tremaine to see the incredulity on Polonaise Hunt’s lovely face. “I accepted only eight, but I could have come away with twice that number.”

The smile trying to break across Polly’s face dimmed. “Do they know the artist is female?”

“They don’t care.” Which was the God’s honest truth, not that Tremaine would attempt to dissemble. “They don’t care that you may take three years to execute their various portraits; they don’t care that you’re going to bankrupt them for the privilege of waiting for you. All they care about is being able to crow that P. Hunt is under contract to them.”

“Eight commissions.” Polly sank down on a red velvet settee and wrapped her arms around her trim middle. “Heavens.”

“And, my dear”—though she wasn’t his dear; she was his late brother Reynard’s sister-by-marriage, nothing more—“your show sold out.” He appropriated the spot beside her on the sofa, contenting himself with physical proximity.

“Sold…” Polly stared hard at the carpet, as if a pattern woven in red, gold, and cream wool required study. “People bought my paintings, just like that?”

“They tried to bid on them. Next time, we’re having an auction.”

“Next time.” Polly hunched forward, the look on her face suggesting she’d forgotten Tremaine and her eight commissions, and was instead seeing paintings and arranging her subjects.

He touched her hand. “Does this call for a drink?”

“Just a tot. Years in service at Three Springs leaves a woman with little head for spirits.”

“I had a letter from Beckman today.” Tremaine brought her a balloon with the merest slosh of amber liquid in the bowl. Polly Hunt said what she meant and meant what she said. If she’d wanted a larger portion, she would have told him.

“How fares my sister’s present spouse?” Polly took the drink and brought the glass to her nose, a facial feature that might be said to have character. Tremaine liked that nose, and liked her, more’s the pity. He’d liked her the first time he’d encountered her nearly six years ago, wearing a paint-spattered smock and an impatient expression.

Dear Reynard had stashed both his wife and her younger sister in a rented flat in Vienna. The air had been frigid, the scent of boiled cabbage gaggingly thick, but all Tremaine had noticed was the dab of blue paint on Polly’s nose and the ferocious concentration she’d turned on her canvas within two minutes of meeting him.

He resumed his place beside her. “Your sister is thriving in Beck’s care, the harvest was excellent, that peculiar wheat of Beck’s is coming along, and they’ve a crop of fall lambs from the Dorset rams.”

“Lambs? Sara married a country squire, it seems.”

“Who will tell anyone he meets that his wife’s sister is the renowned—and wealthy—portrait artist Polonaise Hunt.”

“Wealthy.” Polly smiled softly, and Tremaine took a fortifying swallow of his drink. “How wealthy, Tremaine?”

He named a figure that had Polly’s jaw dropping, then snapping shut.

“I’ll need a solicitor,” she said, “and I want to set up a trust, for Allie.”

He had not anticipated this, but he should have. “Sara and Beck provide for her very well, and the first person you should be looking after is yourself.”

“I am Allie’s only aunt, the person with whom she shares artistic talent. The wealthy, famous, and all-that-other-nonsense-you-said P. Hunt can dote on her niece.” Polly wasn’t a tall woman, but when she rose, she had an imposing presence. Whereas her sister, Sara, was tall with flame-red hair and lithe curves, Polly was a smaller package, her hair a dark auburn and her curves—like her nose—more pronounced.

“Allie is part of the reason I’ve scheduled your first commission down by Portsmouth,” Tremaine said, dodging the issue. Polly was Allemande’s aunt, and Tremaine was her uncle—he knew well the urge to spoil the girl.

Polly leveled a stare at him that did not bode well for prevaricating males of any species. “A solicitor, Tremaine. The most shrewd, accomplished, expensive one you can find me.”

He poured himself more brandy. Since he’d undertaken to act as agent for Polly’s art, Tremaine’s consumption of spirits had risen while his quotient of restful sleep had diminished. “Worth Kettering is your man, if he’ll have you.”

She ceased her pacing near a small framed portrait of a dark-haired, dark-eyed young mother with a laughing infant on her lap. “Why wouldn’t he have me?”

“He’s selective about his clients, and his firm is much in demand. I use him, but I have for years, and it suited him at the time to have an errant French
comte
wandering his offices.”

“Half-French, half-Scottish,” Polly muttered. “This truly is a delightful painting, Tremaine. The brushwork is lovingly rendered, and the light wonderfully delicate. Will Mr. Kettering not take me on because I’m female, or because I’m an artist? Or will it be because I lack a title?”

“I’ll write him. I think he will take you on.”

She adjusted the angle of the frame minutely. “Why?”

“Because you need him.” And Kettering had not a chivalrous streak, but a chivalrous quirk, such that Polly’s circumstances would appeal to him.