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  Lady Mary stood and crossed to the window, hiding another spate of coughs in her handkerchief.

  “You’re not well,” Joanna said. “You shouldn’t have come out today.”

  “No, I had to.” Lady Mary smiled, as if ill health were nothing. “My doctors are worried about my lungs, you see. So I’m to go to Switzerland—I leave in a few weeks—for a change of air. I’ll be there for at least six months. If I take Fitzroy’s portrait, I can pretend that I still have him near me. Then I shan’t feel that I’m so all alone.”

  Joanna scrambled to her feet and ran up to her new sister-in-law. Impulsively she put her arms around the older girl.

  “I’ll be delighted to do it.”

  “And there’s another favor, too, that I’m trying to get the courage to ask you.”

  “Name it.”

  Mary blushed a little. “Would you also do a portrait of me for Fitzroy? I could come here every day, if you like.”

  “I would be honored, Lady Mary. We can start tomorrow, but I’ll come to you. Meanwhile, please let me ring for a chair to be brought here, and some tea.” Joanna crossed to the bellpull. “Is it very typical of your brother Fitzroy to be this highhanded and let you do the asking?”

  Lady Mary laughed, then coughed again. “I’m not sure what’s typical of him any longer. He’s been strange ever since he came back from the Peninsula. I only know that I love him. I hope that doesn’t sound odd.”

  Older brothers often indulge their little sisters, don’t they? Even the wild, demonic Lord Tarrant, apparently.

  Joanna wondered briefly what Fitzroy was like when alone with his sister. The man who had smiled so reassuringly at her wedding and enabled her to get through it? The man whose dark gaze had fired her imagination for a moment at the folly?

  “No,” Joanna said, with a strange constriction around her heart. “It doesn’t sound odd at all.”

  * * *

  She could no longer concentrate on her pigments. Her blood had begun to sing at the prospect of these two portraits.

  To do a portrait of Fitzroy! Desire for it burned in her fingertips.

  Joanna wanted to paint him as he had looked in the moonlight at King’s Acton. She wanted to capture that wild, mysterious humor tinged with the strange desperation that she had seen on his face when he had left her standing at the church door after their wedding.

  Would her hand reveal more of him in a painting than she had consciously seen with her eyes?

  With the painful honesty that she brought to her work, Joanna once again faced her feelings about him, the fascination diluting her animosity, the attraction mixed with her doubt.

  Fitzroy was also an artist! Why had he not mentioned it?

  She faced the answer with the same candor: Because you are nothing to him, Joanna Acton, but a nuisance, a problem, a lady he was forced to marry to save his brother. Why the devil should he include you in anything that he is or does?

  After her lonely meal that evening she paced through the house, looking for signs of him.

  Though it was only a rented house, this was his home. He had lived here since returning from the Peninsula. Yet it seemed devoid of individual touches. There was nothing that revealed him, neither the arrogant man who had arrived at the Swan, nor a man who used to paint before going for a soldier.

  Candlelight flickered over the books in his study, a selection of authors that any gentleman might own.

  She studied the paintings. They were all from the previous century, of landscapes or horses, nothing personal.

  It was a house that he hadn’t really lived in, as if for the last two years he had been suspended, belonging nowhere.

  “Were you looking for something?” a subtle voice said.

  Joanna whirled around. “Yes, you!”

  Her husband peeled off his gloves and threw them into a chair. He looked tired, the tanned skin drawn tightly over the strong bones of his face.

  “You were looking for me? Why?”

  “No, not the physical you. I was looking for the man you really are—inside all that pride and sarcasm. The man whose portrait I am to paint for his ill sister.”

  “Dear God,” he said. “And what did you find?”

  “Nothing. It’s as if you don’t exist in this house. Do you exist in the world?”

  He paced restlessly to a writing desk in the corner of the room and began to sort through the small stack of letters there. He looked formal, remote.

  “I would hope so,” he said dryly. “Several people would say I exist only too much, your brother Richard for one. He’d rather see me out of it.”

  “Yes, but he won’t help you leave, unless you do something that’s outrageously unforgivable. I made him promise.”

  He glanced around at her. “Thank you for your kind solicitation, Lady Tarrant. I trust you are finding everything else in the house to your satisfaction?”

  Joanna knew a small stab of anger. She had been forced into this match as much as he had, yet surely it was reasonable that she didn’t want her brother to dispatch her husband?

  “Yes, of course. Thank you for the studio. When may I expect you for the first sitting for your portrait?”

  He tossed down the letters. “Now, if you like.”

  “Very well. I can do some preliminary sketches.”

  She marched from the room and through the corridors to her studio without looking back to see if he was following. Yet she knew that he was there, as she knew without looking that her shadow was there on a bright day, or that her heart beat in her chest without listening for its beat. She could feel his presence in her bones.

  He is a man who can never be ignored, she thought. How do I capture that in paint?

  When they reached her studio he stepped ahead and opened the door for her.

  A small courtesy, devoid of meaning, yet she noticed the shape of his hand as he held the knob. A purely masculine hand, as beautiful as a Michelangelo sculpture.

  Was that the source of her fascination? A craving, an attraction, simply that of an artist for the aesthetic?

  Joanna picked up the smock that she had left across a crate and shrugged into it.

  “I’m surprised that you agreed to this,” she said. “It would seem that you are always busy.”

  “I am. Where do you want me?”

  “Over there. Near the window. I had the footman bring in that chair for your sister. But once I begin the painting, I shall need you to sit every day. Can you do that?”

  He dropped into the chair and sprawled back, looking up at her from faintly narrowed eyes.

  “Name the time.”

  Joanna pinned a fresh sheet of paper to her board. “Evening is best. Then I can use candlelight to create the same effect each time.”

  “But I have engagements most evenings, Lady Tarrant. And so will you. In fact we are invited to a ball this Friday. My father and yours expect that we both attend, and Lady Reed would be devastated not to meet my new wife.”

  He said it with that faint air of sarcasm. It infuriated her.

  “Then you must sit for me when we get back.”

  “Very well.”

  She took a knife and sharpened her charcoal, chopping fiercely at the innocent stick.

  “I find it incredible that you let Lady Mary come to me with her request. A message would have sent me to her. She shouldn’t risk the air. She is obviously very ill. Don’t you care?”

  “My sister knows that I have things I must do. She also likes to go out when she is feeling up to it. If she is dying, is that a reason to restrict what’s left of her life? Rather the opposite, I would have thought.”

  Joanna dropped her charcoal. “She is dying?”

  His tone remained level and controlled, but anguish shimmered and darted beneath the surface.

  “I hope not. But the possibility brings me here to your studio. Nothing else would, I assure you. Now, for God’s sake, start working.”

  Joanna stared at him blindly, as if h
er own shock and distress stripped what she was seeing of meaning. Then she shook herself. This was the gift Lady Mary wanted.

  “I’ll start with a profile. Stay just as you are and look at the window frame.”

  He remained as still as a marble god while Joanna let her charcoal sweep feverishly over the paper. The line of brow, nose, and chin burned into the white surface. In a set of quick strokes she blocked in the turn of his shoulder and his high collar and cravat, which blocked any view of his neck or throat. His hair lay like a shadow over his forehead.

  She stepped back for a moment to look at what she had done. Emotion had distorted her drawing into something far too disturbing. In one violent movement, she stripped the paper from the board and crushed it in both hands.

  He glanced around. “Do I contaminate your art—like the blood of Nessus—poisoning your gift into agony?”

  “No, it’s not your fault,” she said blindly. “Stay like that. I shall start again.”

  It would not come right. Every attempt dulled into meaninglessness.

  Joanna began to hate herself, and her pain threatened to spill over into something embarrassing and public. This was her one gift. She had thrown away every privilege to which she’d been born in order to pursue it: a Season in London; evenings filled with frivolity and flirtation; the chance to meet a man she could love, to marry him and bear his children.

  Now her skill seemed to have seeped away, draining from her fingertips like sand flowing from a broken hourglass, making a mockery of her sacrifice.

  She tore down the sheet and crumpled it with the others.

  “What is it?” Genuine concern marked his voice.

  Joanna threw down her charcoal and walked away from the easel.

  “Nothing, Lord Tarrant. I am out of practice. Let’s try again tomorrow.”

  “For God’s sake, you’re my wife. Call me Fitzroy.”

  “Very well. Fitzroy. Anyway, who was Nessus?”

  He stood and flexed his shoulders. “The centaur who carried off Hercules’ wife, Deianira. When Hercules shot him down with a poisoned arrow, the dying Nessus convinced her to soak one of Hercules’ shirts in his blood, claiming it would act as a love charm. Instead, when she made Hercules a gift of the shirt, the poison caused the hero so much torment that he killed himself.”

  “And Deianira hanged herself, too, didn’t she? I remember now.” Joanna paced restlessly. “What do you suppose all those old stories really mean? Centaurs and gods and warriors in bronze armor? Must heroes fight monsters to prove themselves, and must it always end in tragedy?”

  “It doesn’t matter how it ends,” he replied. “It is how they conduct themselves in the meantime, and whether the monster is successfully destroyed.”

  “That’s so typical of a man. Of course it matters how it ends!”

  “Both Nessus and Hercules died. One for love, and one from its results. But only Hercules is remembered as a hero.”

  Joanna spun back to face him. “No one asked Deianira for her opinion.”

  His eyes filled with mockery. “She ran away with the wrong man, like you did.”

  “In my case they were each the wrong man, weren’t they? And we are not Greek. Our stories are so much tamer. ‘I,’ said the Sparrow, ‘with my bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin.’ England is not as well suited to high tragedy.”

  “Yet Cock Robin is just as dead.”

  He crossed the room to her easel. Pinning up a fresh sheet, he took up a stick of charcoal.

  “‘Who’ll dig his grave?’ ‘I,’ said the Owl, ‘with my pick and shovel, I’ll dig his grave.’” His hand moved rapidly over the paper. “What would Athene think, do you suppose, if she knew that her sacred bird has become a gravedigger in an English children’s song?”

  “I don’t know.” Joanna gazed at the strong, graceful line of his arm and the strangely innocent concentration on his face. “Is it merely a children’s song? Who was Cock Robin?”

  “I thought you would be able to tell me that,” he replied, turning his head to smile at her. “You’re the pagan, after all.”

  Joanna crossed quickly to the easel. Nessus’s powerful horse’s legs straggled across the turf, his man’s torso twisted in the death agony, his hands clutching at the shaft of an arrow fired by a faraway Hercules just cresting a hill top. The creature’s head and shoulders lay in the lap of a woman.

  The entire drawing was fiercely, brilliantly executed, with a stunning economy of line and a passionate depth. She could feel the centaur’s torment and his desire for revenge as his lifeblood ebbed away.

  And the woman? The wife of Hercules, who unwittingly brought about the death of these two great symbols of male power—centaur and hero?

  Deianira gazed away into a remote distance, as if the pain of these inferior creatures meant nothing to her. Black hair fell uncoiled around her face—the face that Joanna looked at every morning in the mirror. Her husband had used his own wife as a model for Deianira, though neither hero nor centaur yet boasted features.

  Confused heat flooded her cheeks.

  Someone tapped at the door.

  Fitzroy tore down the sheet, as she had done, crushing it into a ball.

  A footman entered with a letter on a tray, and bowed.

  “For Lady Tarrant, my lord.”

  “For me?” Joanna broke open the plain wax seal. A strand of bright blond hair curled inside the paper.

  “What is it?” His tone was sharp.

  “I don’t know.” She looked up, unable to hide her mistrust and distress. “I don’t know what it means.”

  She set the paper into his outstretched hand, reading aloud the one line as she did so.

  “We have Milly.”

  Chapter 8

  Joanna sat on the empty chair, dropping her head forward as she stared down at the lock of blond hair.

  “What can it mean?” She felt sick and faint, the blood draining away. “Who has Milly?”

  Fitzroy savagely crumpled the note. “Your little sister is in no danger, Joanna. It’s all right. You must trust me in this.”

  She looked up. “Trust you? Why should I trust you?”

  He watched her steadily for a moment, as if regretting what he would have to say.

  “I have a man watching Miss Able’s Academy. If anything had happened, he would have sent word. Milly is safe.”

  Joanna clutched at his sleeve. “You have a man there? Whatever for? Is Milly in peril? For God’s sake, why?”

  He threw down the crushed sheet of paper, his hand white across the knuckles.

  “She’s your sister and you are my wife. So I took some simple precautions. There are people who don’t like me, that’s all.”

  Joanna leaped to her feet. “And Richard, and Harry, and my sister Eleanor? Are they in danger, too? You married me, saying nothing of this, knowing that it might put my family in some kind of jeopardy? You unconscionable—”

  Fitzroy caught her arms. “There’s no real risk, merely a little petty harassment, perhaps. I have made certain of that much, at least, Joanna. Only I am the target. Not you or your family.”

  “How can you be sure? Oh, dear God! We must go there. Now!”

  He studied her face, his eyes dark and soft.

  “By all means,” he said quietly. “If it were my sister, nothing else would content me. But believe me, Milly is safe and we race off on a wild-goose chase. It will result in nothing more than whimsy and, very likely, a good soaking. Be of good cheer, Joanna.”

  Yet he ordered his carriage. Fifteen minutes later Fitzroy handed Joanna onto the high seat of the yellow-and-black phaeton. The exactly correct amount of seriously shiny brass glimmered brightly in the light from the flambeaux.

  A couple of armed menservants on horseback were waiting to accompany them.

  In spite of his assurances Fitzroy obviously intended no risk on the journey, but perhaps he always traveled carefully at night.

  He gathered up the reins and nodded to his t
iger. His very competence and nonchalance were reassuring, somehow filling Joanna’s heart with comfort.

  The tiger released the horses’ heads and swung up behind them.

  Fitzroy gave her a sudden smile. “Are you prepared to rouse Miss Able out of bed?”

  “For my sister’s sake, I’d rouse the Prince Regent himself.”

  He laughed. “I doubt very seriously if Prinny is in bed this early.”

  They drove rapidly along the turnpike toward the school that Joanna had fled less than two weeks before.

  She clutched the strand of hair. Had Milly been kidnapped to be held to ransom, or hurt in some way? If only, if only she could trust that Fitzroy was right!

  Yet he seemed unconcerned and lighthearted, gently teasing her about her schooldays. Joanna found her fear melting away to be replaced by an uncomfortable doubt. Perhaps she shouldn’t have demanded this?

  Miss Able’s Academy lay in darkness. It had begun to drizzle, turning the sky an inky black.

  As they turned in at the gates, one of the servants that Fitzroy had sent on ahead rode up to meet them. Water beaded on his hat, sparkling in the light of the carriage torches.

  “I spoke with Vernon, my lord. The little girl’s not been approached and is safe in her bed, right enough.”

  Fitzroy grinned at him. Taking Joanna’s hand in his own, he brought it to his lips and kissed it.

  “Nevertheless, we shall rouse the academy, Simon, and create a stir of excitement for the ladies and their noble pupils, shall we?”

  Simon touched one finger to the brim of his hat, causing a little cascade of water to run down over his nose. He grinned back.

  “Very good, my lord.”

  “You were right?”

  Joanna found herself embracing his strong fingers as relief flooded through her. She closed her eyes for a moment. Nothing could come of this wild nocturnal journey now but embarrassment, surely?

  “So it would seem.”

  “I’m sorry. I should not have insisted. We have no need to disturb them.”