by Nia Farrell
“Father would have.” His lips curved in a half smile, softening his features. “I suggested that such news was best delivered in person, and that I was willing to be the bearer of it. I have wanted to come to America since the end of the war, to witness democracy in action and see how a country copes in the aftermath of such division. I followed the path of your President Lincoln’s funeral train to get here and will be returning by way of New York. I hope to witness from the gallery whom the Democrats choose to run against Grant and Colfax.”
Politics. I hated them as much as the professor seemed enamored of them. That said, I—and any American male with the right to vote—would be following the news from the national convention due to start in two day’s time.
“When do you leave?” I tried not to sound desperate, but if God was merciful, he’d stay long enough for me to sketch him, to capture his image for posterity, even if I never saw him again. Mother was gone, taking any connection between us with her. He was not my stepbrother any longer.
No, he was not.
“Your sister Elena—is she here?”
I shook my head. My heart twisted with remembered sadness. “No one has seen her since I left Richmond to enlist in the Union cause.”
I remembered our parting words, spoken the week before.
Don’t leave me.
I must. I’m sorry. I have no choice.
Daniel looked shocked, but then, I’d never spoken of Lanie, nor of Masey, whose portrait hung upstairs. The past was still raw, the pain of loss still fresh, even layered beneath scores of more recent wounds, names and faces etched in blood upon my soldier’s heart.
“I am sorry,” Professor Wainwright murmured, looking pensive, perhaps trying to comprehend how a sister could behave in such a manner.
If he only knew.
I shrugged it off. “It was wartime,” I reminded him. “She did what she had to. We all did. Didn’t we, Daniel?”
Professor Wainwright took my assistant’s measure for the first time, so focused had he been on me and the purpose of his visit.
I introduced them. “Daniel and I served together three years in the infantry. We fought at Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Petersburg, and Appomattox Court House. We watched Lee ride away after surrendering to Grant.”
God, the excitement on his face. Wainwright was a history professor, and we had been living it.
“Perhaps I can stay,” he said, eyeing Daniel and myself with equally keen interest. Not that I cared. Whatever it took to keep him here. I’d let Daniel be his Scheherazade, tell him a thousand stories and weave a war-weary version of Arabian Nights, if only he would stay. Then maybe, just maybe, I could talk him into posing for me.
I wanted him naked.
I needed him naked.
He wasn’t exactly forbidden fruit, but I’d gone years without tasting any of it, hadn’t I? Was he so different, that I couldn’t look without touching? Couldn’t draw him without open lust burning in my gaze?
Jesus, get a grip.
I could, I told myself. I must. There’s no way I could touch him, if it meant letting him touch me. I’d be lost. Lost.
“Are you staying nearby?” I asked. There were a number of hotels in the city, but the population swelled on summer weekends, more so on holidays.
“Close enough.” He raised his glass and drained it, strong throat muscles moving the slight bulge of his Adam’s apple. I pressed a hand against the front of my neck and hoped he had not noticed.
“Have you plans for dinner?” I strove to keep my tone casual, rather than overtly curious about this history professor who seemed more wolf than sheep, more mentor than brother. “There’s a boarding house down the street. The proprietoress offers meals as well as accommodations. It’s plain but hearty fare, although likely not what you are used to.”
“I have survived thus far,” he pointed out, crooking half a smile. “It would be my pleasure to dine with you and, perhaps, share stories over our board, hmm?”
Judging from the shadows, I guessed it to be about four o’clock. A quick look at my pocket watch confirmed the time at ten after the hour. “Daniel, please send word to Mrs. Tackett to reserve two seats at the small back table, if possible, for, say, six o’clock?” I looked at Wainwright, who nodded his approval. “If not the back table, then the one in the parlor, or as close as we can get to it.” There would be little or no conversation between the two of us, were we to sit at the larger tables, thronged with men hungry for food and news. The addition of Professor Wainwright was enough of a curiosity. Being a foreigner, having crossed the ocean, coming from a country that had been courted by the Confederacy to support their cause, he’d be hard-pressed to stop answering questions long enough to eat.
“From here, it’s two blocks down.” I pointed west, toward a sun that would soon be lost behind the artificial horizon. “The three-story house on the left with ‘Tackett’s Room and Board—Inquire Within’ on the sign out front. Would you like to come here and go down together, or simply meet me there?”
He tapped a finger against his glass. “My preference would be to arrive together. I shall collect you once I have checked into the hotel and changed, if that is agreeable.”
“Certainly. Fine. Well, then.” Crap. I wished there was some way to just…keep him here. I wasn’t ready to let him go, to lose the light of his manly beauty, shining like a beacon in the dark night of my soul.
He set his glass on the bench and rose, towering over me, his gaze focused on my mouth.
I bit my bottom lip, self-conscious. I was acutely aware of my attraction to this gallant man. I wondered, wildly, if he somehow sensed it, too. Just the possibility made my knees weak.
Taking a deep breath, I rose on trembling legs. I avoided his gaze, afraid of what he would see in mine, but there was no hiding the huskiness to my voice when I thanked him for coming. “You’ve gone above and beyond anyone’s expectation,” I said warmly, “being a stepbrother, and not even that now, with Mother gone.”
Not a stepbrother.
For some reason, the idea made us both smile.
Chapter Two
Dinner was a fiasco. It seemed on the eve of a July Fourth weekend that madness had seeped through the windows and drugged every man jack there, turning them into caricatures of the ludicrous and banal. Simply put, it was embarrassing. I had fought for the preservation of this country and was suddenly ashamed. How must we look to Edward? When he was back home in England, how would he remember my fellow Americans? What would he think of me?
My eagerness to be shed of this place must have shown. He ate with economy, not sparing more than a breath between bites, until he’d done justice to his supper, declining dessert. Just like that, we were back at my studio, where he’d instructed his driver to fetch him at nine.
I was thinking—Two hours…for two hours, he would be mine!—when it happened. Independence Day celebrants poured out of a bar and into the streets. Gunfire erupted and sent me hurtling back to my violent past. I froze, trembling, unable to move, to speak, shaking like a leaf pummeled by the wind, bombarded by memories of the horrors of war.
“Mr. Davenport? Lane?” I heard the name as if from the opposite end of a long, dark tunnel that was crawling with loathsome things. “Lane!”
Two hands, firm on my shoulders. Shaking me. Forcing me back to the present.
“I’m sorry,” I sputtered, embarrassed by the tears bursting from my eyes, ashamed that I had so little control. “I’m sorry. The war’s been over long enough, I shouldn’t be this way. I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t, but…but….”
“Come,” he said, his eyes shining with kindness and understanding rather than judgment and censure, an angel of mercy in my hour of need. “Let’s get you inside, hmm?”
He took the key from my hand and unlocked the studio door. Inside was quiet as a mausoleum. Busts of marble gleamed in the thinning light. There was enough of it to safely navigate the space between the front
door and the one in back, which opened to a rear entrance shared with my upstairs apartment.
Edward followed me up, not crowding me, giving me just enough space to let me that know he was there, ready to catch me, should I fall. I opened the door for us and left him standing while I struck a match and lit the lamp centered on the kitchen table. The yellow flame flared. I turned down the wick to keep it from blackening the globe that I replaced with shaking hands, rattling the glass against the four metal tines as I worked it back into place.
I inhaled deeply, turned, and found my breath stolen, captured by our juxtaposed reflections in the mirror of the hall tree where we would hang our hats: his tall, elegant stovepipe and my jaunty bowler. Professor Wainwright stood eight inches above me, his fairer hair and manly physique worthy of a Norse god, the unruly curls begging to be finger-combed. I’d just had my hair cut at the barber’s, a torturous session that ended with black snippets littering the honeyed wood of the floor.
“Thank you,” I whispered, daring to find his gaze in the mirror. Wainwright’s eyes were the hue of the distant sea. Mine were gray, but right now they were the color of black powder smoke and pending storms, as changeable as the weather, turning from silver to pewter to a shade nearer to graphite and back again, once the urge to crawl inside myself had passed. I averted my gaze long enough to master this clawing need to find refuge. Looking back at him, I still desperately yearned for the safe haven that I sensed he could provide. Right now, more than anything, I wanted to throw myself in the circle of his arms and simply stay.
“Does it—” he cleared his throat, his brow furrowed above the troubled waters of his eyes “—does it happen often?”
“Yes. No.” I shook my head as if to align my thoughts. “Less than it did. More than I’d like.”
He said nothing. No judgment, no pressure, no demands. Searching his eyes, I saw patience, wisdom, compassion—virtues that I would certainly appreciate, if he were my teacher. His understanding of my needs made me think that I could trust him.
But where did I begin? He wanted stories. At this moment, the only thing I could manage was to jump to the end of the book and tell him how war had changed me.
“With what I’ve seen, what I’ve done…it’s like something inside of me is broken. Shattered,” I admitted, setting aside my pride and pushing past the shame I felt for not being stronger, for not managing better. For being less instead of more.
Clenching my tremulous fingers against my churning stomach, I prayed it would not ulcerate again. “Even if I find all the pieces and fit them back together, I may never find the glue that sticks—the means to hold them in place, exactly where they belong. Then again, if I do, won’t the breaks always be there, as clearly as a handle reattached to a favorite cup, retired to sit upon a shelf as a sentimental heirloom with no intrinsic value? They tell me that there is no cure for soldier’s heart.”
No cure—though veterans often dulled the pain or numbed the senses with alcohol, opiates, or sex, losing themselves in pleasures of the flesh. I was acutely aware of my own deficiencies in that area. The small useless bulge in my drawers was nothing to the mound of flesh shaping the front of Professor Wainwright’s trousers.
“Surely there is something,” he said, looking like a crusader, ready to take up the cause and fight to make it so.
I shook my head, wishing that were true. “I am learning to live with it. I avoid crowds. Shun areas or events where I know there will be loud noises. Steer clear of small, enclosed spaces. It makes me appear somewhat reclusive, but most people seem to put it down to being an artiste. At least the solitude affords me the hours needed to hone my skills, perfect my art. If nothing else, I find purpose and worth in my work. Surely you must feel something similar when you teach, opening minds to theory and facts and extrapolations the way that a piece of art engages the imagination and encourages the appreciation of different styles and forms of beauty?”
I stopped myself, having spilled all my words in a single gush of rhetoric. It had been years since I’d said as much, shared as much. Not since Richmond, when there were still two of us: me and the twin I had lost.
I shook my head, feeling sad, and helpless. My soul silently keened for parts that were missing. “Professor Wainwright—sir…I know you were expecting to hear war stories—and I hope that one day I might be able to share them with you—but I’m afraid it won’t be tonight. Not tonight. I am sorry to disappoint you.”
“On the contrary.” He smiled softly, intimately, as beatific as an earth-bound angel, golden lamplight illumining his classically handsome face. “Would you rather hear about your mother?”
“No. Just…no.” It would be an exercise in futility, when I was not quite ready to forgive her. “Perhaps you could tell me of your work,” I suggested. “Your field of study. What periods or cultures do you find of most interest?”
He latched onto the bone I tossed and ran with it. He was still going strong about Ancient Greece, Homer’s Iliad, and Frank Calvert’s belief that Hisarlik was the site of ancient Troy when the mantle clock struck nine.
It was time for him to leave.
“Thank you,” I told him again, “for staying. For sharing.” I dropped my gaze to his boots, aware of his scent, his heat, his presence. “I appreciate it, sir, more than you know. Most men would have neither the time nor the patience to put up with me.”
“Lane.”
My name was a gentle chide that made me dare to look at him again. His gaze was warm. Compassionate. Yet the play of light revealed a feral element to his beauty, like a tiger at rest. I’d be a fool to get too close.
“Given the opportunity, you will find that I am not like most men. Now that ill-fated fortune has brought us together, I hope that we can be…friends, hmm?”
Friends. The way that his lips shaped the word imbued it with a resonance that made me long for his friendship, at the very least. Anything beyond that would be impossible—wouldn’t it?—all things considered.
Verboten, the Western Turners would have named what I was thinking. Taboo, given who he was and what I was. The moment he realized that I was attracted to him, he would leave. Go. Pack his bags and hurry home, leaving me with nothing but a fistful of memories that would gradually slide through my fingers until nothing was left of him, of us, except the echoes of our voices tonight, asking, extolling, probing, enlightening, his tone modulating between gifted academic and enthusiastic voyeur to the discoveries of others.
“Will you come again?” I asked him, breathless, awed by the scope of his knowledge and humbled by his willingness to share it with me. “Before you leave?”
Smiling indulgently, he placed a hand upon my shoulder. I imagined it sliding upward to rub the knotted cords of my neck.
“Certainly. Do you think you might be able to break free for lunch? The announcement on the door said that your studio would be closed until the exhibition opens tomorrow evening.”
“Of course,” I stammered, mortified to feel myself blushing. But Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, he’d touched me. The thoughts of where those hands had been, and what they’d done, made my knees threaten to buckle.
I’d served in a company of boys and very young men. Those of us who’d survived had grown old before our times, yet next to Professor Wainwright, I felt so very much younger. Insecure. Inexperienced.
Virginal.
The word sounded like an accusation, a condition that could be perceived as a source of shame for a twenty-four-year-old. It spoke of failure to connect, failure to grow, failure to enter a relationship, let alone thrive therein. In truth, since the war, I had met only one man worth pursuing, but I had not dared to risk it. And so I sketched my fantasies instead of living them. I dreamed but never touched.
Tonight, however, I felt as if I’d been awakened. I stood on the threshold of discovery, lost in the gaze of a man who was temptation personified. No matter that I was doomed to fall short of the mark, the way I felt when he looked at me—really loo
ked at me, whatever he asked, I would have given him. It was just that simple.
Just that wrong.
I must be a glutton for punishment, because I agreed to meet him at his hotel at eleven, knowing damned well that I’d spend the rest of the night sketching his face.
Chapter Three
When he strode into the lobby, Edward Wainwright was sharply dressed and as beautiful as I remembered.
As tempting as I feared.
It was all I could do to follow mutely in his wake, held in tow like a kite, at his mercy as to whether or not I might fly for him. And, God, if that happened…when it happened, just how far would he let me go?
The question consumed me; the possible answers were meaty, juicy, and luscious—a sharp contrast to the tasteless lunch that was one step removed from masticated sawdust. The beef was dry, the vegetables overcooked. Oddly grateful to reach the end of our meal, I nearly missed Professor Wainwright’s saying that he needed a drink. He asked if I would join him.
When I demurred, he tsked his disapproval. He knew that I’d left Daniel at the studio to tidy up and said so. “Even if that were not the case, it is early yet. Surely you have time for one drink. Come, now. There is no need to rush back, is there?”
Refusing to allow me to prevaricate, he once again pulled me after him, in such a hurry that he could not be bothered to put on his gloves. Instead, he carried them in one hand and held mine in his other, skin to skin, sinfully delicious.
There was a tavern across the street, rather upscale for this corner of the largely unsettled West, with games of chance discreetly conducted in the back room and sports of a much different kind played out upstairs. The tables were full in the front of the house, so we bellied up to the bar. Professor Wainwright ordered for both of us.
I eyed the whiskey with the same distaste reserved for pickled herring. How in heaven’s name anyone ate fish packed in vinegar brine was beyond my ken.
