Flirting with Forever

by Gwyn Cready

  One of the card players said, “I’d be more interested in amusing Peter,” and the women laughed.

  Cam heard the sound of a far-off door opening.

  “You had better get your headdress on and be quick about it. He doesn’t like it when we’re not ready.”

  Kate held out a large furred and antlered headdress, which made Cam think of Fred Flintstone’s Loyal Order of Water Buffalo or the natives who hunted the castaways on Gilligan’s Island. Reluctantly Cam freed the bra hand to accept it.

  “Put it on.”

  Cam did. The front hung past her nose, like a centurion’s helmet with two eyeholes. Great. Now the only thing she had covered was the one part of her she didn’t care if people saw.

  “Oooh, this is a fine bit of enamel work.” Kate touched the ring at Cam’s breastbone with awe on her face. “Was it a present from Peter?”

  “I, er—” There was more going on than she could process. But before Cam had a chance to answer, the sound of men’s voices rose beyond the doorway and her heart began to pound in her now uncovered chest.

  “Peter’s here!” Kate chirped. The women bounded toward him, and Cam flew in the other direction, toward the open door of a large darkened closet, slipping between a ladder and some stacked buckets. It wasn’t till she was safely in the dark, however, that she noticed the painter’s drop cloth folded on the floor on the opposite side of the door frame.

  Thank God. Whatever was coming next in this nightmare could only be made better with a cloth around her.

  She stretched out a toe, but the doorway was wide and she couldn’t quite reach the opposite edge without bringing her body back into view of the room.

  Should she dare it? It was the old “bird in the hand versus two in the bush” question. On the bird side, she was naked but she was definitely out of sight. Given the bush in question, however, she decided that trying again was the only option.

  She hugged the wall next to the door and did a squat with one leg while extending the foot of the other. Jeez, how wide did a closet door need to be? No luck. Sighing, she decided to hold the headdress at her side and use it like a shield. With that blocking her body from the view of the room, she’d just hop over, grab the cloth, and hop back. Surely the forest of gorgeous naked women would keep Peter’s eyes off a single, mortified tree for the two seconds it would take her to snag some covering.

  Cam lowered the headdress, shot across the doorway, and bent. Just as her fingers grasped the cloth, the closet filled with light. Only it wasn’t a closet, it was a hallway, and two men now had a bird’s-eye view of her ass.

  “—better if we tried a more private entry—Oh!”

  Cam jerked the headdress over her face and unbent. She could see the looks of surprise on the faces of a tall, handsome man in centuries-old clothing and his shorter companion. It took one of her hands to hold the headdress upright, which left only one to serve as a wholly inadequate bikini bottom. Unlike those of his companion, the eyes of the tall man stayed on her face. He was exceedingly good-looking. If this were the Peter the women were waiting for, she could see why they were excited.

  “I beg your pardon, er…” He attempted to see into the eyeholes. “Er, well, I beg your pardon. We were just heading for the salon. Would you let the other models know not to disturb us?”

  “Yes,” she squeaked.

  With an abbreviated bow, the man passed by, clearing his throat sharply to snap his colleague out of his openmouthed reverie. He opened a door at the other end of the narrow stretch, and the two disappeared.

  Cam blinked. Where in the name of God was she? Naked women and costumed men—Cam could only imagine an R-rated version of a Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe play. But how had she gotten here? And where were her clothes?

  She peered around the door into the room. The women, having given up on Peter’s arrival, had begun to disperse. They spoke with English accents, and so had the tall man—Peter, she had to conclude—though his accent had an odd, guttural tone to it.

  She needed to find out where she was, and in order to do that, she needed clothes. She grabbed the drop cloth and was just wrapping it around herself when Kate wandered up.

  “Is this reticule yours?”

  The object dangling from her hand was Cam’s small fringed clutch.

  “Er, yes. Where did you find it?”

  “In the doorway. It, er, seems to be growling.”

  Kate held the clutch to her ear. Cam could hear the sound of her phone vibrating.

  “It’s my phone.”

  The woman stared at her blankly.

  “My phone.” Cam held an imaginary phone to her ear.

  Kate shook her head.

  Cam had a sinking feeling. “Are you an actress?”

  “Oh my, no.” Kate smiled. “Just a model.”

  “Is this a backstage?”

  Kate shook her head. She was beginning to look as spooked as Cam felt. The phone stopped vibrating.

  Kate said, “Do you have a puppy in there?”

  Cam nodded slowly. “Yes.” The sinking feeling was spreading.

  “Named ‘Fone’?”

  “Y-Yes.”

  “He must be very small.”

  “Yes.” Her head began to spin. “Can you tell me where we are?”

  “Do you mean where in London?”

  London! Cam clutched the wall for support. “Uh-huh.”

  “Covent Garden—specifically, Peter Lely’s house in Covent Garden.”

  Oh my God! Peter. The man was Peter Lely! How could she have missed it? He looked exactly like his self-portrait—dark, wavy hair, warm brown eyes, and rugged profile. Cam needed to sit. Lely’s house. In Covent Garden. A moment ago she’d been at her desk with mustard on her shoe in Pittsburgh. She looked at her foot. No mustard. Not even a shoe. Holy crap. She was in another time in another city with a Restoration-era painter! It was too much to absorb. “I-I…Can I have a seat?”

  Kate ushered her to a chair. “Quick, ladies. She’s ill.”

  The women circled her. One offered a cup of ale. Cam gulped it.

  Kate removed Cam’s headdress and petted her forehead. “You’re not warm. Did you get a bad eel? The cook here is wonderful, but you never know with eel.”

  Bad eel? Maybe a bad hot dog. Cam shook her head, which was already shaking enough on its own.

  “Are you with child?”

  Cam choked. “No—heavens, no.”

  Kate turned to her friends. “I think we should call Peter.”

  “No!” For some reason, the thought of facing Peter Lely terrified Cam. There was something about coming face-to-face with an artist from her university art history book that terrified her. “I-I’ll be fine. I just…need a dress.”

  Another woman clapped excitedly. “A dress! Is Peter doing you in a dress?”

  Whatever reply Cam was forming stuck in her throat like a broken wine cork. “Doing me?” Then it struck her. Painting. The woman meant painting! “Yes.”

  “Are you standing in for Nell? If so, you won’t need a dress.”

  Cam was definitely not standing in for Nell, then. “No. I’m on my own. And in a dress. Definitely.”

  “And how did Peter tell you to look? Like a goddess? A shepherdess? A lady? A whore?”

  “Er, not that last. A lady, I think.”

  Kate turned to the woman with the kitten. “Mary, find something in the trunk. Several new ones came in last week. Something dark, I think, to set off that hair.”

  Cam’s hair, of which she was rather vain, was long, curly, and as bright as copper pennies.

  “Peter keeps dresses on hand?” she asked.

  “You never know how he’ll want us to look. And many ladies prefer a new gown when they pose. It’s one of the reasons they come here. Peter encourages women to become someth
ing new when they sit for him. He calls it ‘putting on a second skin.’”

  Cam remembered Peter’s particular penchant for skin. She hoped the gowns had bodices. She searched for an explanation for her appearance here. She remembered having dreams where she became aware she was dreaming, but that realization usually made her wake up. This felt nothing like a dream, nor was her obvious awareness of the incongruity having any impact on her wakefulness.

  The phone booped. The sound of a text. She made a show of peeking inside her bag, as if to root for rouge or cheek lard or whatever they called it here.

  “Is the puppy asleep?”

  Cam halted for an instant, then found the phone and made a show of patting it gently while still keeping it out of sight. “Good little boy,” she said in a baby voice. “Yep,” she added to Kate, “sleeping.” The text was from Jeanne. “Where did u go?!!!!” Cam flung her hand back like she’d been burned.

  Kate’s brows knitted.

  “He nips.”

  “Typical man.”

  Jeanne didn’t know where Cam was. A bad sign. A very bad sign. Cam felt a band of fear begin to tighten around her chest. She needed to move, to act, to do something. She jumped to her feet. “I’m going for a walk.”

  “Outside?” Kate eyed the drop cloth.

  “Bathroom—er, privy?”

  Kate pointed to the closet/hallway Cam had just left. “To the right. Down the hall. Left at the statue of Mercury. First door on the right. Ring the bell when you finish.”

  Cam fled, jogging through the maze of hallways and past Mercury, who not only towered over a grand staircase leading down to an entry hall but was unquestionably a Bernini, which nearly caused her to trip.

  A Bernini. Jeez. Lely was wealthy. There was no doubt of that. She whipped out her phone and hustled into the first door on the right. Then she froze. She wasn’t in a privy. She was in a small alcove adjoining a much larger room in which two men’s voices could be heard. One was Lely’s.

  “Sir David,” Lely said with impatience, “’tis not a matter of an unfinished portrait. ’Tis a matter of a woman seated in my waiting room who desires to be painted.”

  Lely spoke in a low, courtly voice, and Cam decided the undercurrent she’d heard there was Teutonic—a preciseness that gave his words quiet resonance.

  She flattened herself against the wall and immediately regretted the movement, which she saw reflected on wall-to-wall mirrors across the room. But the mirrors also gave her a view of the men’s backs. The men didn’t move, however, except for Sir David, who shifted under Lely’s obvious displeasure like a child being reprimanded by a teacher. She tightened the canvas around her and slowed her breathing.

  Lely’s clothes were as finely cut as his companion’s, with white silk stockings, low velvet shoes, and gleaming charcoal breeks adorned with crimson ribbon that showed beneath his long frock coat. As confused and frightened as she was, Cam couldn’t help but feel a small thrill at seeing a painter like Lely in the flesh. Too often when studying long-dead painters, students were left feeling a distance that didn’t occur with more contemporary artists. Yet here he was—a handsome, living, breathing, and obviously irritated man.

  Beyond the double doors, she could also hear the sounds of industry—voices engaged in conversation, the random movement of feet, the squeak of a chair on wooden floor, the sounds of cloth being torn. Lely’s studio was a hive of activity, and this room was the quiet eye of a well-oiled and hardworking storm. All of it, she thought distractedly, her authorial mind turning even as her practical mind was struggling to keep afloat, would create an exceptional scene in a book.

  “My relationship with Miss Quinn is at an end,” Sir David said, “and Miss Quinn has been informed of that fact. This appointment should have been canceled weeks ago—”

  “But wasn’t.”

  Sir David shifted. “Aye, I apologize for that. My secretary has been ill and—”

  An older man—a servant—with pale eyes, a shock of white hair, and a well-worn smock, opened the hallway door and looked in. Cam held her breath. The man bowed to Sir David but spoke directly to Peter. “Miss Quinn has been moved to the Red Room, sir.”

  “Thank you, Stephen.”

  The servant bowed and exited.

  Sir David cleared his throat. “I mean to do my duty. Tell her to go to this address.” He handed Peter a card. “She knows it. It is a place where I conduct my business affairs. Desire her to come in a quarter of an hour. My secretary will explain the situation. You needn’t be further discommoded.”

  Peter placed the card on a nearby table with a snap that made Cam straighten. “The portrait, then, is canceled?”

  “Yes,” Sir David said with a rush of relief. He turned as if an exit were imminent, but Peter readjusted his stance, facing the nobleman head-on, which made his companion shrink.

  “As I’m sure you understand,” Lely said carefully, “I do not charge by the hour. I charge by the commission.”

  Cam rolled her eyes. Shelter, food, water, air, adoration. Only one thing ranked higher in an artist’s pyramid of needs, and that was cold, hard cash.

  Sir David straightened his cuff. “Naturally I have no objection to paying you. My wife’s portrait was eighteen six. I shall offer you half that for Miss Quinn?”

  Lely’s lip rose perceptibly, and for an instant Cam wondered if he intended to bloody the man’s nose.

  “Keep your money, sir,” he said with manufactured bonhomie. “I shouldn’t be able to live with myself were I to treat a treasured acquaintance so abominably.”

  Sir David blinked, wondering with understandable justification if he had just been insulted.

  Lely returned the small card as if he were removing offal. “You may settle the details of this arrangement with Stephen.” With a bow, he withdrew, followed, after an audible harrumph, by Sir David.

  Cam peeked down the hall and, over Sir David’s head, spotted Lely disappearing into another doorway guarded by a well-fortified desk. Like painters in her time, painters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often had a secretary or assistant to negotiate arrangements for a commission, freeing the painter to concentrate on his work. That desk reminded Cam a patron would have to be very rich or very determined to score face-to-face time with that god among men, the artist. She found herself making a mental note to include this in the Van Dyck bio.

  She lifted her phone, got into Favorites, and pressed the button for Jeanne. She held the phone to her ear, waiting for the silence to turn to a ring. One beat. Two beats. Three beats. Exasperated, she pulled the phone down to look at it and saw “Call Failed.” She checked. No bars. No signal. No tether at all to the place she’d left. A chill went through her.

  Then she remembered Jeanne’s text. Wait a second…

  She typed out a quick “U there?” and hit Send. The green sending bar didn’t budge. No service meant no service for texts, either. But how could that be? She’d gotten the text from Jeanne, after all. There must be a signal here. She held up the phone and began to retrace her steps. What she saw when she turned, however, made her stop.

  There, in front of her, was a wardrobe stuffed with gorgeous gowns spilling their skirts like satin waterfalls to the floor.

  This must be the cache. And a cache it was. There was a pale pink gown with ermine trim, a crimson with jet beads, a Kelly green with lemon yellow panels in the skirt, and a dozen others. Cam reached for the plainest she could find in case someone here would recognize it—a gray moiré silk that slipped like water through her hands. It also had the benefit of a looser bodice that tightened with laces at each side and sturdy shoulders, critical for someone whose bra usually prayed for mercy.

  It wasn’t till she removed it from its hanger that she saw the exquisite lining of embroidered peacock feathers in brightest cobalt, purple, and green thread. What sort of a man furnished
a woman a dress like this? The sort of man who liked to share the private knowledge of what was hidden beyond view with his sitter.

  The dress fit her perfectly. In fact, it took her breath away. The silk cupped her breasts like a lover’s hands, and when she tightened the laces, she felt an amazing transformation. She might not feel very confident, but damn if she didn’t look it. If she could just get back to the model room, perhaps she could reach Jeanne. Making a connection to the place she belonged seemed an essential first step in keeping herself from sinking into sheer, asphyxiating terror.

  She pelted down the hall, past Mercury and through a group of several surprised young men in smocks who had to be apprentices, and found herself once again in the hallway with the buckets. She grabbed the first doorknob and ran in, phone held high.

  But she had chosen the wrong door. Here was Lely’s empty studio, laid out before her like a treasure—workbench, paints, stacked canvases, and an easel.

  She found herself whistling silently. A Restoration master’s studio! For an art lover, this was heaven. She tiptoed forward, almost afraid it would disappear. She wanted to see the tints, the fabric, the workmanship on the canvases. She wanted to smell the turpentine. She wanted to feel the texture of the brushes. But most of all, she wanted to see Lely paint. He wasn’t Van Dyck, but there were only thirty years separating them at their peaks. Techniques wouldn’t have changed much. And, in any case, he would have stories of Van Dyck. They’d been alive at the same time for a number of years, and she’d never met an artist who didn’t enjoy dishing about a rival.