A Grave Matter

by Anna Lee Huber

  I knew Father and Mother had both loved Elwick, and Trevor showed every sign of following in their footsteps. But, of course, he owned Blakelaw House, so his home was here. I, on the other hand, felt as adrift as ever.

  I had left my sister’s household because I knew I couldn’t stay there indefinitely. It was true, I had needed to get out of Edinburgh and find a place to heal after Will’s death, but I had also been escaping a situation I knew no longer suited me. Alana had her own family. She didn’t need me constantly underfoot, no matter her protests to the contrary.

  So I had come to Blakelaw House. But I knew my childhood home was not the place for me either. Trevor had welcomed me with open arms, and shown me every consideration. I knew he was grateful for the companionship, no matter how poor my company had been in the past seven weeks. But I could not settle here—there was a restlessness in my spirit—and I suspected that once this investigation was concluded, it would be time to move on. Whatever healing I had been looking for, I had not found it at Blakelaw.

  I would return to Edinburgh to help my sister with the birth of her fourth child in a few months’ time, but once she was safely delivered, I knew I couldn’t remain. Where I would go was still a mystery to me, but I felt the surety of the decision in the depth of my bones. I had three or four months to decide what to do. Perhaps I would know by then.

  Sir Anthony had left me almost nothing. Even the dowry I had brought to the marriage had been spent. I had the proceeds from the sales of my artwork, done mostly under an assumed name, so I was not without means, modest as they were. I could live comfortably on my own if I was careful with my money.

  I rarely played the game of “what if.” It was futile. But standing before my mother’s grave, I couldn’t seem to help but do so. I wondered what my life would have been like had she lived. Would I still have married Sir Anthony, or would my mother have seen the truth about him that my father and I had missed? Maybe she would have insisted I have my London season rather than allow my father to arrange my marriage as I’d requested, too consumed with my art to be bothered to meet eligible gentlemen.

  For all of my father’s properness, my mother had been the one who most easily related to people of all classes, high and low. She had been the one to force my head out of my sketchbooks, to make me accompany her on calls so that I might learn to socialize, to insist I take better care with my appearance when I would have been happy to go about covered in charcoal dust. At the time, I had disliked her meddling, but now I could see the truth for what it was. Left to my own devices, as my father had done upon her death, I retreated into the safety of my art. It was satisfying to paint such skilled portraits, but it was also a rather lonely existence. I observed others and captured them on canvas, but I rarely interacted with them in any meaningful way.

  I thought that was what I wanted. But now I wasn’t so sure. And maybe my mother had seen the truth of that long before the rest of us.

  The sound of approaching footsteps alerted me to my brother’s presence, for I knew no one else would disturb me here. I didn’t look up as he came to stand beside me, his hands clasped behind his back. I wasn’t sure what he would see reflected in my eyes, so I kept them trained on my mother’s gravestone, lest he read too many of my thoughts.

  “I miss them,” he surprised me by admitting. “Mother’s been gone almost seventeen years, and Father for just three, but I still miss them both.” He huffed a laugh. “Whenever I enter the study, I still expect Father to be seated behind his desk working.”

  I smiled in response and said quietly, “I thought the same thing when I first returned.”

  Trevor nodded. “Sometimes I catch myself thinking about some bit of estate business I want to ask him about, and then I realize . . . I can’t.”

  I shifted closer, linking my arm with his.

  We stood there silently staring at our parents’ graves while the others filed out of the churchyard behind us. The howl of the wind blocked most of the noise of the voices and the crunch of the gravel from the departing carriages. I knew our servants would be waiting to depart, but still I was reluctant to leave.

  And then Trevor spoke.

  “You always go to Mother’s grave.” Our eyes met for the first time since he’d joined me, and I frowned. “When you come here,” he clarified. “You always go to Mother’s grave. You seem to barely be able to look at Father’s.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I scoffed uncomfortably. “Mother’s is just closer to the tree, and thus out of the wind.”

  “But it’s not always windy when you visit here.”

  “True. And I stand before Father’s grave then.”

  “But you don’t.” His voice was gentle, but certain.

  I scowled, angry that he had even taken note of this. “What does it matter whose grave I stand before or . . . or look at? I’m visiting them both.”

  “Kiera. You have every right to be angry at Father for arranging your marriage to Sir Anthony. But you need to let it be.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m not angry,” I snapped, backing away from him. I hated the tone of voice he was using on me, as if I were a child he wished to soothe.

  “Then why won’t you look at his grave?”

  “I do! I am!” I turned to stare pointedly at his gravestone and then back to Trevor. “See!”

  He reached out to take my arm, but I backed away. “Kiera, I’m sorry Sir Anthony was so brutal to you. If I could . . .”

  “No!” I said, holding up a hand to stop him. “No! We are not discussing this.” My mouth tasted sour, as if I was going to be sick.

  “But, Kiera . . .” he pleaded.

  “No! You do not get to foist this upon me.” I pushed past him, hurrying across the graveyard toward the gate.

  “You’re right,” he relented, catching up with me. “You’re right. That was badly done of me.”

  I wrapped my arms tighter around myself, trying to stop the quaking his accusation had started inside me, making me confront things I didn’t want to face. Why had Trevor used the word “brutal” to describe my late husband? I thought I had hidden the worst from him, but maybe he knew more than I realized.

  I breathed in deep, trying to push the image that was forming from my mind.

  “Kiera. Kiera!” My brother grabbed my arm, forcing me to come to a stop. He looked down at me, reading the naked emotion in my eyes, for I was too shaken to hide it properly. “I apologize for upsetting you. But at some point, we do need to talk about this.”

  I shook my head, but he insisted.

  “Well, maybe you don’t, but I do.”

  I blinked up at him in surprise, seeing for the first time the pain in the depths of his gaze. I swallowed hard at the sight, not having realized that as much as I was hiding things from him, he was also hiding things from me.

  “Trevor,” I began, but a movement behind him drew my attention. My brother turned to see what I was looking at.

  “Is all well?” Vicar Grey asked, offering us a worried smile as he opened the cemetery gate.

  I looked away, trying to compose myself while Trevor assured him everything was fine. He said that the anniversary of our mother’s death was soon, and it was always a difficult time. The vicar accepted the excuse readily, but I could feel his concerned gaze still trained on me even as I climbed into our carriage.

  • • •

  The conservatory at Blakelaw House projected out from the northwest corner of the manor toward the River Tweed, so that the ceiling, and the east, north, and west walls were all covered in glass. On sunny days like this one, it was often the warmest room in the house, even in the dead of winter. And the perfect location for my art studio.

  Upon my return to my childhood home seven weeks ago, I had reclaimed the farthest corner of the conservatory as my art studio. I had spent a week shifting and adjusting things just so, and another preparing canvases and pigments, but truly I’d been stalling for time, hoping my desire to paint would return.
It seemed I’d been finding one way or another to stall ever since. The days I did manage to put brush to canvas usually ended with a terrible headache and a gnawing pain in my gut, if not an outright temper tantrum.

  I so desperately wanted to recapture my ability, my passion for painting, and I hated myself for losing control of my emotions when things did not go my way. But most of all, I lived in fear and dread that my talent wouldn’t return, that it had deserted me forever. My entire life, since the moment I discovered I could copy the people around me on paper, had been devoted to this one pursuit. If it had deserted me, like my mother, like Will, then I didn’t know what I was going to do.

  I stood at the edge of my studio space, with the late afternoon sun shining brightly down on it, and delayed again. I could turn around and go find something else to occupy my time—play the pianoforte or my viola, or answer my correspondence. Avoid the confrontation and the prospect of my failure another day. Or I could force my feet forward, don my apron, and mix my paints.

  I breathed in deep, the gentle scents of the plants and flowers behind me competing with the sharp odors of turpentine, gesso, and linseed oil in my studio. I felt queasy at the prospect of picking up a paintbrush, but my brother’s words kept ringing in my ear. I could hear the concern, the confusion. The accusation. There was no choice. I had to find my way past this. And if that meant painting until the muscles in my fingers would no longer grip a brush, practicing over and over again every skill I’d ever learned, then so be it.

  I forced my body forward, breathing through the swell of nausea as I slipped my apron over my head and tied the strings behind me. After securing the kerchief I used to protect my hair, I flipped back the covering over the canvas on my easel and smiled in reluctant agreement. Trevor was right. This landscape was worse than the one hanging in Uncle Andrew’s receiving room.

  I lifted it from the easel and moved toward the corner to prop it against the wall out of the sun. Why I took such care to preserve its color, I’m not sure, except out of habit. I chose another canvas instead, this one a portrait I had begun a few weeks prior of the cook’s granddaughter. The rudiments were there, the basic outline. Now I simply needed to fill in the details, I told myself. Nothing to be concerned with. I’d done this hundreds of times before.

  I was bent over mixing the paints I would need for the little girl’s dress when I felt a now familiar brush against my legs.

  “There you are,” I said, acknowledging the gray tabby. “I wondered when you would turn up.”

  He purred as he rubbed his body against my ankle one more time before crossing the room to what had become his usual spot in the corner of the wicker settee at the edge of my studio space. He hopped up and circled twice before settling in the bed of blankets I had given him during one of my more fanciful moods. After dark it grew cold in the conservatory, and I’d worried that on the nights he failed to find his way into my bedchamber, he would be chilled. It was silly really. The house cat was one of our mousers, and was supposed to stay belowstairs with his other mouse-hunting compatriots. But he was a sly one. It didn’t matter how many times he was banished to the kitchens, he still found his way back upstairs, and attached to my side.

  I didn’t know why. I hadn’t been the most welcoming of humans when he first turned up in my studio during the week I returned to Blakelaw House. I’d never had a pet. And though I didn’t dislike animals, I wasn’t particularly fond of them either. I appreciated them more for their usefulness—like the horses we rode, or my brother-in-law’s two greyhounds he used to hunt, or the mouser cats in our kitchen—than for their companionship.

  But the tabby hadn’t seemed to mind my surly disposition, and simply ignored my attempts to banish him. He didn’t even seem to mind my temper tantrums. So I let him be. He rarely got in the way. And, I had to admit, I sort of enjoyed his silent company. It did make the day and the night a little less lonely.

  I smiled at the mouser, who watched me with his golden eyes. I could have sworn he wore a satisfied smirk.

  I lifted my palette and approached the canvas. Then after dipping my brush in the Prussian blue, I took a deep calming breath, and carefully began to apply the color as the base to the folds of the little girl’s dress.

  I worked quietly that way for some time, conscious of every nuance of my brushstrokes. I couldn’t seem to help myself from keeping tally of every stroke I got right, and every time my touch had been too heavy or too light, the wrong angle, the wrong depth of pigment. In the past when I painted portraits, I simply lost myself in the process, reveling in the beauty of each touch, each layer, each bit of shading as the subject’s image began to take shape, to unfold before my eyes. I was barely conscious of each step, knowing instinctively from many years of practice exactly what to do.

  But now I could not block out these intrusive thoughts. I could not find that space I went to inside myself, the place I so desperately wanted to locate again. I felt barraged with doubts, and the internal tally of things I’d done wrong versus things I’d done right seemed to be tipping heavily to the negative. I tried to forget that, to ignore it. Yet it was ever at the back of my mind, nagging me, driving me to make the next brushstroke perfect. But it so rarely was.

  And then my hand began to shake, and no matter how many deep breaths I took, I could not force it to stop. My fingers quavered, smudging a fold of the little girl’s skirt, and I snapped.

  I tossed the palette and the brush down on my worktable with a cry of frustrated disgust. Breathing heavily, I planted my hands on my hips, trying to control the urge I felt to lash out at the offending canvas. It was either that or I would begin to cry.

  Then I heard a footstep shift behind me and a deep voice tsked. “Temper, temper.”

  I gasped and whirled around to find Sebastian Gage standing there, looking as handsome as ever.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded in shock when I could find my voice.

  He arched a single eyebrow and crossed the remaining distance between us. “You wrote to me and asked me to come.”

  “Yes, I know,” I stammered, wiping my paint-smeared hands on my apron. “But what are you doing here? That is to say . . . my studio.”

  His winter blue eyes twinkled, and the corner of his lips quirked into a crooked grin, telling me he was enjoying my flustered state.

  “I . . . I wasn’t expecting you yet.”

  “I beg your pardon, my lady,” Crabtree, my brother’s butler, wheezed, hurrying across the conservatory. “I would have announced Mr. Gage, but the gentleman simply would not wait.” He glared at Gage’s back.

  “It’s all right,” I told Crabtree, arching my eyebrows at Gage in gentle reproach. “Mr. Gage often doesn’t stand on ceremony.”

  Gage grinned at me unrepentantly.

  “Please tell my brother our guest has arrived when he returns from his business.”

  Crabtree nodded and retreated, disappearing behind a stand of ferns.

  Gage stood watching me with his hands clasped behind his back and that gleam still in his eyes. He looked very well in his riding attire—the navy blue coat and tight buff pantaloons. His golden hair was ruffled from the wind, and his boots were still covered with the dust of the road, making me suspect he’d ridden here on horseback.

  “I suppose I should offer you tea and a chance to freshen up.” I glanced about me. “But I’m afraid my art studio is not exactly the ideal place for such a thing.” I brushed a hand down the sides of my drab brown kerseymere gown where it showed at the edges of the apron. “Had I known you would arrive so soon, I would have been better ready to receive you.”

  Gage’s smile softened at my fidgeting and he stepped closer, crowding into my space. “You look charming.”

  “I . . . I do?”

  “Yes.”

  I felt my cheeks begin to flush with color under his regard, but I couldn’t stop it. Nor could I look away. I knew I had missed him, but I hadn’t really le
t myself admit that until now. It had somehow been easier to deny it than acknowledge that I longed to see his face. He’d distanced himself from me twice now, though, admittedly, the second time had been as much my doing as his. There was still so much I didn’t know about him, so much I didn’t understand. It had seemed foolhardy to long for him, and yet I had. I could feel the truth of that now in the racing of my heart and the ridiculous urge to giggle.

  He reached up to touch my face, and for a moment I thought he was going to kiss me, but his callused thumb rubbed along my jawline instead. “You have a little something . . .”

  “Oh,” I gasped and used my fingers to swipe at the offending dab of paint myself.

  He smiled at my embarrassment and then glanced down at our feet, where the cat was winding its way around his legs. “And who is this?”

  “That’s Earl Grey,” I answered absently as I yanked the kerchief from my head, having forgotten it was there, and tried to smooth my unruly hair back from my forehead.

  Gage laughed. “You named your cat after the Prime Minister?”

  I turned to see he had squatted down to scratch behind the cat’s ears, who was lapping up the attention.

  “He’s not my cat,” I protested. “He’s just a mouser from the kitchen.”

  “And yet you named him.”

  I frowned. “Well, he wouldn’t stop pestering me, and eventually I decided I had to call him something. He’s a gray tabby and quite imperious.” I shrugged. “The name seemed to fit him.”

  Gage rose to his feet, shaking his head as he smiled a rather secretive little smile.

  “What?” I demanded as I paused in untying my apron strings.

  “You.”

  I furrowed my brow in confusion. “Me, what?”