More than a Mistress/No Man's Mistress (29 page)

“Tell me about Acton,” she said quietly.

And he did. He talked at length about the house and park, about his brother and sister, about the servants with whom he had had daily contact as a child, including his nurse, about his play, his mischief, his dreams, his fears. He resurrected a life he had long ago relegated to a dim recess of memory, where he had hoped it would fade away altogether.

There was silence at last.

“Jocelyn,” she said after a few minutes, “let it all become part of you again. It
is
whether you wish it to be or not. And you love Acton far more than you realize.”

“Skeletons, Jane,” he told her. “Skeletons. I should not have allowed any of them out. You should not be such a restful companion.”

“None of them seem very threatening,” she commented.

“Ah,” he said, “but you do not know what is crowding
behind them, Jane.” He got to his feet and held out a hand for hers. “Time to put you to work upstairs.” But he grinned at her when her eyes sparked. “And time for you to put me to work. Will you, Jane? Hard, physical labor? I’ll show you how to ride me, and you can use me for your pleasure as long as you choose. Come and ride me to exhaustion, Jane. Make me beg for mercy. Make me your slave.”

“What nonsense!” She got to her feet and set her hand in his. “I have no wish to enslave you.”

“But you already have, Jane,” he said meekly, his eyes laughing at her. “And never tell me my words have not aroused you. There is a certain telltale flush in your cheeks and breathlessness in your voice that I am coming to recognize.”

“I have never pretended,” she told him primly, “that duty is not also pleasure.”

“Come and let me show you, then,” he said, “how very pleasurable it will be to do the riding rather than always to be ridden, Jane. Let me show you how to master me.”

“I have no wish—” But she laughed suddenly, a sound of delight he enjoyed coaxing from her. “You are not my master, Jocelyn. Why should I wish to be yours? But very well. Show me how to ride. Is it like a horse? I ride horses rather well. And of course
they
have to be taught who is in charge, wonderful creatures.”

He laughed with her as he led her from the room.

H
E FINISHED THE PORTRAIT
on the last day of the first week, late in the afternoon. He had a dinner engagement during the evening, which fact was a disappointment to
Jane, but she expected that he would come back for the night. One week of her precious month was already over, though. There were only three left. She coveted every day, every hour.

She loved to watch him paint even more than she loved watching him play the pianoforte. With the latter, he very quickly entered a world of his own, where the music flowed effortlessly. At his easel he had to labor more. He frowned and muttered profanities as much as he was absorbed in his task.

But finally he finished. He cleaned his brush and spoke.

“Well,” he said, “I suppose you have been sneaking peeks every time I leave the house.”

“I have not!” she said indignantly. “The very idea, Jocelyn! Just because it is something
you
would undoubtedly do.”

“Not if my word were given,” he said. “Besides, I would never need to sneak peeks. I would boldly look. Come and see it, then. See if you like yourself.”

“It is finished?” He had given no indication that he was nearing the end. She threaded her needle through the cloth and jumped to her feet.

“Come and discover the truth of my claim that I merely dabble,” he said, shrugging as if he did not care what her verdict was, and busying himself with the task of cleaning his palette.

Jane was almost afraid to look then, afraid that indeed she would find an inferior product about which she would have to be tactful. Though he would tear her to pieces, she knew, if she were less than brutally honest.

Her first impression was that he had flattered her. She sat at her work, every line of her body elegantly arched.
Her face was in profile. She looked industrious and absorbed by what she was doing. But she never saw herself thus, of course. In reality it was a good likeness, she supposed. She flushed with pleasure.

Her second impression was that the likeness or otherwise of the portrait was really not the point. She was not looking at a canvas produced merely so that the sitter might exclaim at the flattering likeness. She was gazing at something—something more.

The colors were brighter than she had expected, though when she looked critically she could see that they were accurate. But there was something else. She frowned. She did not know what it was. She had never been a connoisseur of art.

“Well?” There were impatience and a world of hauteur in his voice. And a thread of anxiety too? “Did I not make you beautiful enough, Jane? Are you not flattered?”

“Where …?” She frowned again. She did not know quite what it was she wished to ask. “Where does the
light
come from?”

That was it. The painting was an excellent portrait. It was colorful and tasteful. But it was more than just a painting. It had
life
. And there was light in it, though she was not quite sure what she meant by that. Of course it had light. It was a vivid daytime scene.

“Ah,” he said softly, “have I done it then, Jane? Have I really captured it? The essence of you? The light is coming from you. It is the effect you have on your surroundings.”

But how had he
done
it?

“You are disappointed,” he said.

She turned to him and shook her head. “I suppose,”
she said, “you never had an art master. It would not have been allowed for a future Duke of Tresham. Jocelyn, you are a man in every sense that you think important. You must dare to be more fully a man as you have been in this room this week. You have an amazing talent as a musician, an awesome talent as a painter. You must continue to use them even when I am gone. For your own sake as much as that of the world.”

It was typical of him, of course, to choose to comment on a very small point.

“You are going to leave me, then, Jane?” he asked. “Go to greener pastures, perhaps? To someone who can teach you new tricks?”

She recognized the source of the insult. He was embarrassed by her earnest praise.

“Why should I leave you,” she asked briskly, “when the terms of the contract are so favorable to me provided you are the one who does the leaving?”

“As I will inevitably do, of course,” he said, regarding her through narrowed eyes. “There is usually a week or two of total infatuation, Jane, followed by a few more weeks of dwindling interest before a final severance of the relationship. How long have I been totally besotted with you now?”

“I would like to have time to practice skills other than just embroidery,” she said, returning to her chair and folding her silk threads to put away in her workbag. “The garden needs more work. There are all those books to be read. And there is much writing I wish to do. I daresay that once your interest dwindles, I shall find my days richer and filled to overflowing with any number of congenial activities.”

He chuckled softly. “I thought,” he said, “we were not supposed to quarrel in this room, Jane.”

“I thought,” she replied tartly, “the Duke of Tresham was not to be brought into the room. I thought we had agreed not to allow him over the threshold, nasty, arrogant man. The very idea of telling me
when
I might expect to find your interest in me waning and how long I might expect to enjoy your wearying favors after that. Come here looking as if you believe you are doing me a favor, Jocelyn, and you will be leaving faster than you arrived, believe me. I have to consent, remember, before you so much as touch me.”

“You like the portrait, then?” he asked meekly.

She set down her workbag and looked at him, exasperated.

“Must you always try to hurt me when you feel most vulnerable?” she asked. “I love it. I love it because you painted it and because it will remind me of this week. But I suspect that if I knew more about painting I would love it too because it is great art. I believe it is, Jocelyn. But you would have to ask an expert. Is the painting mine? To keep? Forever?”

“If you want it, Jane,” he said. “Do you?”

“Of
course
I want it. You had better go now or you will be late for your dinner.”

“Dinner?” He frowned, then appeared to remember. “Oh,
dinner
. To hell with it. I shall stay here and dine with you, Jane.”

One more evening of her month to hug to herself.

T
HEY DRANK TEA AFTER
dinner and he read to her from
Mansfield Park
while she sat relaxed in her chair. But after
that they sat in companionable silence until he started talking about his boyhood again, as he had done for the past two evenings. Having started, it seemed he could not stop.

“I believe you should go back, Jocelyn,” she said when he paused. “I believe you need to go back.”

“To Acton?” he said. “Never! Only for my own funeral.”

“But you speak of it with love,” she said. “How old were you when you left?”

“Sixteen,” he told her. “I swore I would never go back. I never have, except for two funerals.”

“You must have still been at school,” she said.

“Yes.”

She did not ask the question. That was so like Jane. She would not pry. But the question might as well have been shouted out. She sat quietly and receptively. Jane, to whom he had opened so much of himself in the past week.

“You do not want to know, Jane,” he told her.

“I think perhaps,” she said, “you need to tell.”

That was all she said. He gazed into the fire and remembered the initiation. The moment at which he had become his father. And his grandfather. A true Dudley. A man.

“I was sixteen and in love,” he said. “With a neighbor’s fourteen-year-old daughter. We swore undying love and fidelity. I even managed to get her alone once and kissed her—on the lips. For all of three seconds. It was very serious, Jane.”

“It is not always wise to mock our younger selves,” she said, responding to his tone of irony as if she were an octogenarian. “Love is as serious and painful a business
to the young as it is to older people. More so. There is so much more innocence.”

“My father got wind of it and became apprehensive,” he said. “Though doubtless if he had waited I would have been sighing over some other maiden two or three months later. It is not in the nature of a Dudley to be constant in love, Jane—or even in lust, for that matter.”

“He separated you?” she asked.

“There is a cottage.” He set his head back and closed his eyes. “I mentioned it to you before, Jane. With its inhabitant, an indigent female relative ten years my senior.”

“Yes,” she said.

“There was a pool not far from her cottage,” he said. “Idyllic, Jane. At the foot of the hills, green with the reflections of trees, loud with birdsong, secluded. I used to go there often in the summer to bathe rather than frolic in the lake closer to the house. She was there one day before me, bathing, wearing only a thin shift.”

Jane said nothing when he paused.

“She was suitably flustered,” he said, “as she came out of the pool, looking as if she wore nothing at all. And then she laughed and joked and was charming. Can you picture it, Jane? The accomplished, well-endowed courtesan and the ignorant, virgin youth? That first time we did not even make it back to the cottage. We rutted on the grass beside the pool. I discovered what went where and what happened when it was in deep enough. I do believe all was accomplished inside thirty seconds. I thought myself one devil of a dashing fellow.”

Jane’s eyes were closed, he noticed when he opened his own.

“She was my first obsession.” He chuckled. “The day
after that I went to the cottage, and the day after that again. I labored mightily on that last occasion, having quickly learned that I could make the pleasure last considerably longer than thirty seconds. I was proud and exhausted when I was finally finished demonstrating my prowess. And then she started to talk, Jane, in a very normal, very amused voice.

“ ‘He is an apt pupil and shows enormous promise,’ she said. ‘Soon
he
will be teaching
me
tricks.’ And then before I could get my head up to discover what the devil she was talking about, another voice, Jane. My father’s. Coming from the doorway of the bedchamber behind me.

“ ‘You have done very nicely, Phoebe,’ he said. ‘He was bucking lustily enough between your thighs.’ He laughed when I jumped off the bed on the opposite side from my clothes as if I had been scalded. He was standing with one shoulder propped against the doorway as if he had been there for some time. He had, of course, been watching and assessing my performance, probably exchanging winks and leers with his mistress. ‘No need for embarrassment,’ he told me. ‘Every man ought to be deflowered by an expert. My father arranged it for me; I have arranged it for you. There is no one more expert than Phoebe, though today is your last with her, my boy. She is off-limits as of this moment. I cannot have my son sowing his oats in my woman, can I, now?’ ”

“Oh,” Jane said softly, bringing Jocelyn’s mind back to the present with a jolt.

“I gathered my clothes up and ran out of the cottage,” he said, “without even stopping to dress first. I needed to vomit. Partly because my father had watched something so terribly private. Partly because it was his
mistress
with
whom I had been dallying, and he had planned it all. I had not known until then that he even had mistresses. I had assumed he and my mother were faithful to each other. There was never anyone more naïve than my boyhood self, Jane.”

“Poor boy,” she said quietly.

“I was not even allowed to vomit in peace.” He laughed harshly. “My father had brought someone riding with him—his neighbor, father of the girl I fancied myself in love with. And out strode my father on my heels to share the joke in all its lurid details. He wanted to take us both to the village inn to toast my newly acquired manhood with a glass of ale. I told him he could go to hell, and I repeated the invitation at greater length when we were at home later. I left Acton the next day.”