A Lady's Dream Come True

by Grace Burrowes

  “Pleasured herself?”

  He leaned closer to the canvas, studying the drape of the quilt over the lady’s ankle, a subtle suggestion of a silken manacle.

  “As you pleasured me earlier today. Onanism, self-gratification, manufriction, manustupration, masturbation.” He lifted the painting and held it at eye level, the painted surface parallel with the floor. “Self-pollution, to use the preacher’s vocabulary.”

  Vera knew exactly one of the terms he’d tossed out. “Women do that?”

  Oak set down the painting. “Dirk Channing wasn’t much of a lover. I’m sorry. Yes, women do that. Some men do it a lot. There’s no harm in self-gratification and much pleasure, which might be the message the painting is trying to convey.”

  “That is not a message most people want to hang on their walls.” And why—why, why, why—had Dirk hidden these works in his own home? What was Vera supposed to do with them?

  “Some people collect erotica, and for works of this quality, they’d pay a handsome sum. Much more than they’ll pay for the leavings of your attics, Vera.”

  “I cannot sell such, such… I don’t know what to call them.” The painting upset her, not only because of its subject matter. “Dirk might have created a few more dashing scenes of battle or restful Hampshire landscapes. Those I could sell, but these…”

  “These are art,” Oak said, as if that decided the matter in all its particulars. “They will be respected as such. Are you concerned that he painted images like this of you?”

  Vera’s imaginings came to an abrupt, determined halt. “Dirk could not have painted images like this of me. I wasn’t… We didn’t… He wasn’t a strutting young buck when I married him. He had a daughter to raise, an established reputation to safeguard. Our marriage was cordial.”

  And compared to the passion Dirk had shown his Anna, cordial was second best. A make-do compromise undertaken to provide Catherine a mother and Merlin Hall a hostess, leaving Vera with…

  What?

  Oak propped his hips against the worktable and folded his arms. “I suspect half the works in your gallery are hiding images such as these, Vera. They are worth a fortune to the right buyer.”

  “But the instant they leave Merlin Hall, they destroy Catherine’s chances of a decent match, to say nothing of what they’ll do to Dirk’s reputation.” Or my own.

  “To those who appreciate art, this caliber of painting can only increase his stature.”

  “And to those less sophisticated?” Vera asked, thinking of her step-mother. “To those who regard modesty as the defining womanly virtue? I regret to inform you, those folk outnumber your connoisseurs by a fair margin, Mr. Dorning.

  “And setting aside the Puritans for a moment,” she went on, “Dirk’s associates at the Academy will fall upon these paintings like a pack of jackals. One will claim they are forgeries, another will claim they are inferior compositions. The third will assert—quite confidently and in the most public venue possible—that they are inferior and forgeries. They do so, all of them, while assuring each other they hold Dirk’s memory in nothing but highest esteem and his scheming widow in the lowest contempt.”

  She looked away from the painting, unable to bear the combination of beauty and betrayal it represented.

  Oak uncrossed his arms and went to the window, wedging it open another two inches and propping a tall jar beneath the raised pane.

  “You will have to decide, Vera, whose opinion matters.” He took off his jacket and laid it over the back of a reading chair. “This is great art, however the small-minded might view it. I will continue exploring the gallery, but don’t be surprised if we come upon images of you in similar situations.”

  A breeze stirred through the room, bringing with it the fresh scent of the countryside in high summer. Vera’s neighbors, who generally regarded London as the seat of all wickedness, would never grasp the aesthetic subtleties of nude paintings, much less nude erotic paintings.

  They might silently tolerate a naked Roman, provided he sported a few strategic fig leaves. Amazons of old were permitted to bare an occasional breast, and satirical prints could be filthy as long as they were humorous, but an erotic portrait?

  Vera would no longer be troubled with invitations if word of these paintings got out.

  “This is all just a discussion of art to you,” she said. “Of canvases and asking prices. I cannot claim that degree of disinterest. I never posed for Dirk unless I was fully clothed, never sat for him in anything less formal than a morning dress. He could not have included me in his collection of… naked ladies.”

  Oak undid his cuffs and slipped the sleeve buttons into his pocket. “I could draw you without your clothing easily. Artists are imaginative, and Dirk surely had opportunities to observe you. Perhaps he walked in on you at your bath or came upon you with Alexander at the breast. What Dirk didn’t observe with his eyes, he explored with his hands, or I hope he did.”

  Not very carefully, he hadn’t. “See what’s lurking in my gallery before you turn to the restorations, please, but you will find no risqué renderings of me. I’m sure of that.”

  Oak turned back his cuffs and propped his fists on his hips. “Would it be such a terrible thing, Vera, if your husband had paid artistic tribute to his desire for you?”

  She hadn’t an answer to that. Either way—if Dirk imagined her as a houri and if he never had—she had grounds to be upset.

  “Explore the gallery. I’ll see you at supper.”

  “As you wish, but before you go, I’d like to deal with one other matter.”

  A gentleman did not typically remove any article of his attire before a lady, and thus the sight of Oak, his wrists exposed, his chest and arms clad in a shirt and waistcoat, affected Vera. She’d seen him naked and aroused, but was still susceptible to this minor display of dishabille.

  With Dirk? Vera shut that line of inquiry down before her mind could form an answer. “What other matters have we to discuss, Mr. Dorning?”

  He crossed the room to stand before her, and Vera was assailed by the memory of him hoisting her so easily against the wall. Perhaps the hardest part of a discreet liaison was not exchanging pleasantries over the breakfast table, but managing this unexpected inner tumult.

  This desire.

  “I passed a very agreeable night in your bed,” he said, “and woke to even more agreeable activities, but I neglected to so much as kiss you. Not well done of me.”

  “Oh. Well. We managed to find other—”

  He pressed his mouth to hers, a nearly chaste kiss, except that it was lip to lip, and he touched her nowhere else. Why did that make her yearn to be touched?

  He lingered near for a moment, close enough that Vera could feel the heat of his cheek next to hers, close enough that she could pick up the fragrance of his lavender soap beneath the painterly scents in the room.

  “Enjoy your visit with the neighbors,” he whispered, just as Vera would have put her hands on his arms and commenced to kissing him properly—or improperly.

  She stepped back. “I’ll see you at supper.”

  He held the door for her, and she abruptly wanted him to close it, lock it, and tup her against the wall.

  “Have a pleasant day, Mrs. Channing.”

  “You too, Mr. Dorning.”

  She walked past him into the corridor, and he quietly closed the door behind her. The soft snick of the lock said he’d work in his studio for the next several hours. Vera was halfway to the main staircase when it occurred to her that Oak had said some men pleasure themselves a lot.

  Perhaps he was one of them, and perhaps that was part of the reason why he worked behind a locked door. The thought had her smiling before she reached the steps.

  Jeremy had left the table at the end of supper claiming he had lessons to prepare. Miss Diggory had pleaded fatigue, and thus Oak was ending his day with Vera and Catherine in the family parlor.

  Catherine sat at the pianoforte and did justice to a Haydn sonata
. Vera occupied a wing chair and worked at some piece of embroidery. No fire burned in the hearth owing to the mildness of the evening, and thus the room was illuminated only by candles.

  Oak had taken the end of the sofa, where he sketched—what else was he to do in such a pleasantly domestic situation?—and wondered if Miss Diggory and Jeremy were canoodling in their stolen hour. That Oak’s imagination had been pulled in canoodling directions all day left him annoyed and mentally weary.

  “A bit slower on the adagio,” Vera murmured. “Take your time with it, Catherine.”

  Catherine reduced the tempo of her playing, and the music was better for it.

  “How did your social call go?” Oak asked, for want of anything else to say.

  “Quite well,” Vera replied. “Mrs. Treeble’s nephew, a little fellow by the name of Samuel, has come to live with her. He and Alexander got on splendidly. Catherine and Tom Treeble graciously agreed to mind the younger boys in the garden, so Mrs. Treeble, Miss Diggory, and I could enjoy a quiet conversation.”

  “She’s your nearest neighbor?”

  Catherine brought her slow movement to a conclusion, though she had played only as far as the exposition of the first theme.

  “That’s as far as I know well enough to attempt in front of other people,” she said, leaving the piano bench. “I very much enjoyed paying a call with you, Step-mama. Perhaps we can do more socializing before the summer’s over.” She snitched a piece of shortbread from the tea tray. “Mr. Dorning, good night. I will dream of skies full of rainbow clouds.”

  She curtseyed and left Oak alone with Vera.

  “Rainbow clouds?” Vera asked.

  “The undersides of clouds are particularly interesting from an artistic point of view. Catherine and I were fortunate enough to observe a parhelion, which prompted a discussion of the challenges of capturing natural light on canvas.”

  Oak’s pencil paused above the page. The undersides of a woman’s bare breasts were also fascinating. Vera’s figure would move Venus to envy, and yet, the exact contour of her breasts told Oak that she had indeed breastfed her only child.

  Vera held her embroidery hoop up to the light of the candelabra on the mantel. “What is a parhelion?”

  “A sun dog, a windgall. A little fragment of a rainbow that parallels the sun, especially in early morning or early evening. The sailors say a sun dog presages high wind. The farmers claim it’s a harbinger of rain.”

  “Either way, it portends trouble. Mrs. Treeble is a pleasant sort.”

  The subject had changed—or had it? “And you had a friendly chat free of the company of children?”

  Vera rolled up her work and stashed it in her workbasket, the movements more forceful than mere linen deserved.

  “More or less. Mrs. Treeble had to remind me that Dirk referred to me as his maid of the shires. She used the term three times, as if goading me to put aside my mourning attire.”

  “Put aside your mourning attire—half-mourning at home, I might add—and do what?” Pity the age that had not yet discovered firelight, for it rendered Vera’s complexion luminous, and her hair… Painting her hair by firelight accurately would be impossible. Perhaps with a thousand tiny brushstrokes in myriad colors, viewed at a distance…

  “Put aside my mourning and resume being some sort of ideal of rural innocence, despite having a six-year-old child, mind you. If Tamsin hadn’t been with us, I would have shortened the call considerably. Mrs. Treeble didn’t mean anything by her prattling, and that made it all the worse.” Vera rose and took up a candle snuffer from the mantel. “I am being ridiculous.”

  Oak wished she hadn’t moved, but added a few quick strokes to the page anyway. “What is ridiculous about resenting a label you never chose, one that no longer fits, if it ever did?”

  “I am not a paragon of rural innocence. As a girl, I used to hold the mares in the breeding shed. They stayed calmer for me than for my brothers, who were occupied handling the stallion. I had no idea women were banned from such activities until I mentioned this to my husband. He was equal parts fascinated and appalled.”

  She brought the snuffer down over four candles in succession, dousing one of the three candelabra in the room. Shadows deepened, and Oak realized he was in the presence of a complicated emotion with old roots.

  “I’m surprised your step-mother allowed you to assist with breedings.”

  “Mares are valuable, foals bring in money. Step-mama knew nothing of the particulars beyond that, would be my guess. A maid of the shires should have known nothing of it too.”

  Oak rose and set aside his sketchbook. “If you ever were a maid of the shires, you are no longer. You are a widow of substance and means.” Shall I join you again tonight?

  The moment was wrong to ask that question, and yet, Oak could not assume he was welcome in Vera’s bed.

  “Why is it,” Vera said, taking the snuffer to a second set of candles, “that a woman is defined only as she is related to men or to an absent man? I am a sister, a step-daughter, a widow of some fellow gone these three years. I am entitled to dwell in this house only because I am Alexander’s mother. The property belongs to him—a six-year-old—and I have a life estate only because Merlin Hall has no dower cottage.”

  “You are angry.” Vera’s ire was evident in her movements and in her tone of voice, and yet, something lay beneath the obvious air of annoyance.

  She looked around the parlor as if wondering who’d put out most of the candles. “Perhaps I am angry. I have been thinking of those paintings.”

  The nudes. She was clearly uncomfortable even saying the word. “And?”

  “And I realize that I am put out with Dirk for creating them in the first place—they aren’t salable, they aren’t practical. But I am also put out with Anna for being a woman who’d pose for those images. A woman who was that… that… self-possessed. She was no maid of the shires, and she didn’t care who knew it.”

  Oak retrieved his sketch pad, took Vera by the wrist, and moved her closer to the last lit branch of candles. “Look at this.”

  She accepted the sketch pad with a frown, then peered at what he’d drawn. “Mr. Dorning, you have quite the imagination.”

  “You’re not angry.”

  “I am…” She brought the drawing closer to the light. “I am speechless. I want to say, ‘Who is she?’ Except she bears a resemblance to me. Not a version of me I see in the mirror.”

  He’d drawn her naked, curled up in the corner of a sofa, a crocheted shawl revealing as much as it concealed. Her hair was coming down, soft tendrils complementing the tassels and drape of the shawl, sturdy calves and bare feet clearly in evidence, along with the curve of her haunch and the profile of one lush breast.

  “I wanted you to know that an artist can render an image for which no model has posed. Anna might never have sprawled naked in bed while Dirk sketched preliminary studies in the corner. She might have had no idea those paintings were created. She might have forbidden him to paint her thus, and that’s why the paintings are hidden.”

  “You’re saying Dirk could have rendered similar portraits of me?”

  “He might have, but the point is, you are as lovely as any odalisque, and you must not envy a dead woman because your late husband imagined her as an erotic model.”

  Vera lowered the sketch. “You sound very stern. Almost angry yourself.”

  Oak was not almost angry, he was angry—for her, for what she deserved from the man who’d taken her to wife, for what Oak was in no position to give her.

  “I am frustrated,” Oak said, managing a smile. “The condition is normal for men in my position.”

  Vera passed him back the sketch pad and moved toward the door. “You are doomed to more frustration, I’m afraid.”

  She was rejecting him. Well, that was… that was… probably wise of her. He’d finish his restorations and be on his way. What need had she of an all-but-itinerant artist without means? Oak hadn’t seen this coming, and he
should not be disappointed, but he was.

  Oh, he was. Bitterly, howlingly. He was disappointed to a profound, undignified depth. “I apologize if I’ve in any way given you offense, Vera. That was not my intention.”

  She paused, back to him, hand on the door latch, then slowly turned. “Given offense?”

  “If you are putting an end to our intimate dealings, I will understand, and you need not speak of the matter further.” Those were the required words, spoken in the required civil tones. Oak wanted to shred his sketchbook and toss the pieces into the fire, except there was no fire and what would such a tantrum yield anyway?

  Vera crossed the room and kept coming until her arms were around his waist, and her cheek was pillowed against his chest.

  “You are such a gentleman. I have no wish to end our intimate dealings, but as of shortly before supper, I am indisposed.”

  He embraced her without conscious thought. “Indisposed. As women are regularly indisposed?”

  She nodded, and Oak would have bet his dog whelk shell she was blushing. He let the sketchbook fall to the wing chair and stroked her hair, all of his frustration muting into a peculiar tenderness.

  Women paid a high price for the ability to bring forth new life. Unfairly high, often mortally high. “Are you in pain?”

  “Crampy. Nothing of significance.”

  He wanted to cosset and cuddle her, bring her tisanes and rub her back—or whatever a devoted swain did in such circumstances.

  “I am not well versed in the miseries that afflict women of childbearing age,” he said. “My sisters delighted in inflicting upon their brothers more awareness of lunation than any boy can bear, but about the details… you must enlighten me.”

  “I am fortunate that the indisposition is usually of only four or five days’ duration and rarely more than a nuisance in terms of discomfort.”

  She was minimizing her pain as Miss Diggory had tried to minimize Catherine’s. “What helps?”