by Bliss Bennet
He took a step closer, curiosity overcoming anger. “What is it?”
“A drawing, by an artist named Géricault. I’ve longed for something by him ever since I saw his Raft of the Medusa on display at the Egyptian Hall two years ago.”
Hearing the name of the young French painter sent a tumult of memories cascading through Benedict’s mind. He’d spent a few electric, if confusing, months in Europe in Théodore Géricault’s company, caught between fascination and dismay at the artist’s decidedly unconventional painting style.
“You admire The Raft?” he asked as Clair eagerly unwind the cord that kept the portfolio closed. His breath caught as Clair opened the folder to reveal a pen and ink sketch—an early, smaller scale drawing of what would later become the larger-than-life-sized painting of the aftermath of the infamous wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse. A raft of the shipwreck’s survivors, the dead entwined with the dying, the still living in torment, starving, naked, a few grotesque souls even cannibalizing the flesh of others.
Outrageous.
Appalling.
Riveting.
Beside him, Dulcie shivered. “Admire is not quite the right word. That pile of corpses, the anguish of the survivors—so excruciating, yet so utterly compelling. I confess I nearly ran mad when I first laid eyes on it.”
“But I thought—are you not a devotee of the classical style? What of the dictates of the academies, that insist only ideal beauty, not mundane reality, is worthy of the name of art?”
“Mundane reality?” Dulcie flung a hand towards the sketch. “You call such a terrifying depiction mundane?”
“No, indeed. Yet how can such a hideous subject be suitable for painting? Is not art supposed to elevate, rather than repel?”
“Perhaps. But while Géricault breaks the rules, there is something in his work that is not so easily dismissed. Lord, Benedict, it makes even me feel, hardhearted creature that I am.”
Benedict gazed down at the sketch once again. Yes, that is what had drawn him to Géricault’s work, too, the artist’s ability to make his viewer feel, even to the point of being overwhelmed by the power of the emotion evoked. For a few short months, Benedict had even tried to create something similar himself, filling pages and pages with sketches of the ghastly things pulled from his own dreams and night terrors. Yet so many of France’s art critics had been disgusted by The Raft, denouncing it with such vehemence after it had been shown at the Paris Salon that poor Géricault had fallen into a deep melancholy. Benedict himself soon gave over his own poor attempts at something not constrained by the classical ideals of harmony, simplicity, and proportion endorsed by all the academies in England and on the Continent.
Clair stroked a trembling finger against the edge of the sketch. “It is the most beautiful work I’ll ever own,” he whispered.
If a wild wolf had dropped to its back and exposed its vulnerable underbelly to him, Benedict couldn’t have been more surprised. The reverence of Clair’s words, the elation crinkling his eyes—Benedict had never seen such raw, open emotion from him before, at least not since Harrow. Had Clair known how Géricault’s provocative work would crack open the shiny shell of his composure? How could he have not? Why, the body next to him fairly thrummed with barely-contained feeling.
Benedict swallowed, his throat thick with yearning. If Clair ever gazed at a lover the way he was staring at that sketch . . .
“I, too, once admired Géricault’s work,” Benedict finally said, his eyes fixed on the portfolio.
“Once? Not any longer?”
“I don’t rightly know. I haven’t looked at the sketches he gave me in some years.”
Clair’s eyes blew wide. “What? Géricault gave you some of his sketches?”
“I spent some time with him in Paris, and did him a small service.” Accompanying the painter to the Salpêtrière where he had been commissioned to paint portraits of the mad, watching as he struggled to capture the essence of each subject’s particular mania even as he fought to keep hold of his own sanity—a small, but harrowing, service. One he’d not wish to repeat anytime soon. “He offered me a few of his sketches in thanks.”
Clair clutched both hands against his ribcage, as if to keep his own longing from spilling right out of his chest. “Please tell me you haven’t sold them off, or misplaced them. Or that you’ve left them behind in London.”
“I believe I had them sent here when I returned from the Continent.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” Dulcie grabbed Benedict’s hand and yanked him towards them door. “Show them to me now, this instant!”
They spent the waning twilight ransacking the family apartments, searching for the folio in which Benedict remembered storing the sketches in question. It hadn’t been in the room Benedict had slept in since his return to Lincolnshire, nor had it been in any of the empty guest bed chambers. Dulcie would have barged in on poor Mr. Atherton, still recuperating from his fit earlier in the summer in the one remaining guest chamber, if Parsons had not suddenly remembered carrying a portfolio to the attics earlier in the year. In the end, though, the stray folio finally turned up in his mother’s sitting room. Its pastel yellow and blue walls, the elegant symmetry of its plaster relief, and the intricate rococo Chippendale furniture served as an incongruous setting for the macabre work of the French artist. But Clair, too impatient to wait, jerked on the string to the folio’s closure as soon as Benedict had pulled it from where it had been shoved amongst his mother’s own unframed paintings.
“Lord, Benedict!” Clair flipped quickly through the contents of the portfolio, then returned to the top of the stack and fanned out the first group of sketches across the table so that they could be viewed simultaneously. “How could he?”
“I know,” Benedict said, staring down at the severed arms and legs and other body parts carefully arranged in sickening parodies of still lives. “Most painters study anatomy by drawing living nudes, but during the time I knew him, Géricault was obsessed with collecting and drawing severed heads and limbs.”
“I hardly know whether to fall to my knees in veneration or to vomit.”
“If you think these are appalling, you should have seen the finished paintings. So realistic, yet so devoid of life. I thought perhaps he made them in protest of the death penalty, especially the guillotine.”
Clair shuddered. “I can barely stand to look at them. But I can’t look away, either.”
“That is his gift, I think. Confronting you with what you would rather not see.”
Benedict gathered the still lives and placed them back in the folio, then pulled out another stack, less horrific, perhaps, but still shocking nonetheless. Subjects from the myths of the Greeks, yet rendered with none of the polite decorum dictated by academic classicism. No, there was nothing moralizing in that pen and ink sketch of a satyr attacking a nymph, nothing civilizing in the two crayon drawings of naked couples sinuously entwined, copulating with abandon. Violence, sensuous exaltation, perhaps even death, yes.
But were they beautiful? Were they art? Part of Benedict’s soul cried out yes. But Géricault’s own despair, his retreat to a clinic to be treated for melancholia after his Raft had been denounced, had made Benedict doubt. Especially when coupled with the confident pronouncements of Julius Adler, made soon after their first meeting that same year, that Géricault’s work had been painted solely to please the vultures, that any mother would cast off a son who would stoop to depicting such depths of depravity as the mad painter had.
What would his own mother, kind, gentle woman that she was, have thought of them? Gone, now, for more than a decade, she would never be able to say.
“But surely these are not by the same hand,” Clair said as he pulled two drawings from the folio and laid them beside the others.
Benedict snatched them away. “No, they are not.”
Clair’s eyes fixed on his hands, clutching the drawings to his chest. “Yours?”
Benedict glanced away, th
en nodded.
“My God. How could you be content to paint such insipid portraits when you have something as powerful as that within you?” Clair whispered, gently pulling the sketches from his fingers. His hand smoothed out the two drawings of male nudes with something almost akin to awe.
Benedict had drawn the men in balanced poses inspired by Greek and Roman sculpture, yet deviating from the perfect symmetry demanded by classical art. Each muscle clearly articulated, the tendons and sinews clear, each body expressive with barely-contained energy. Ideal beauty was all well and good, but these were bodies that moved, that strained and toiled, that spat and stank and sweated. Bodies that lusted, and acted on that lust.
The slap of Clair’s hand against the table jerked Benedict from his mental absorption. High color flushed over his face as stabbed a finger at the drawings. “This, Benedict. This is how you must paint me.”
Benedict’s shock made the words tangle in his throat. “What?” he finally managed to squeeze out. “A nude for your wife-to-be? Dulcie, really!”
“No, of course not a nude. But something more vital, more alive, than you’ve done before. Something like you’ve captured in these life drawings. And not for Miss Adler, or for any other young miss. You will do it for me. And you will do it for yourself.”
Almost frightening in its intensity, that look of determination in Clair’s blue eyes. As if he were a captain urging his team onto the cricket pitch, or a commander sending his men into battle.
Shaking his head in disbelief, Benedict backed away from the table. “No.”
But Clair stalked after him, his eyes fixed on Benedict’s. “Yes. You must and you will.”
“No,” Benedict said, one hand grabbing hold of the doorframe. He would not allow the man to send him fleeing him from the room, as if he were a hound and Benedict a fearful beast of the chase. “If I won’t even paint your engagement portrait for Julius Adler, what makes you think I’ll take up my brush for you?”
“Because it would be a sin to keep such passion from the world. A far greater sin than any of my halfhearted threats against your family could ever be.”
Benedict choked out a laugh. “Is that meant to be an apology, Dulcie?”
Clair’s shrug, half elegance, half abashment, pulled at something soft deep inside Benedict. “Of a sort. But you’ll never get me to say the actual words, not if you refuse this commission.”
His fingers twitched, imagining the feel of the brush in his hand, the way he might wield it to capture that infuriating combination of vulnerability and insouciance of the breathtakingly open Clair hiding behind the mask of Lord Dulcie. Imagining the colors and the strokes that would capture the flex of the man’s arm, the curl of his hair against his nape, the well of feeling that hid behind the charm . . .
He’d intended to leave Lincolnshire after the fete, meant to remove himself from the torment of a Sinclair Milne always at hand but forever out of reach. It would be wrong to remain here, everything inside him longing for Clair but unable to touch him in body or in spirit. Far better to leave and dream of what might have been than stay and struggle in silent anguish.
But what if those dreams—or some semblance of them—had a chance of becoming reality? If, instead of longing in vain for an ideal lover who could never truly exist, Benedict made a real effort to coax out the actual man? If, while he sketched and painted his unconventional portrait, he also talked with Clair, enticed him with questions and ideas that also pushed beyond convention? Might such an effort give Benedict a chance to slip behind the hard shell of Clair’s self-protection and make the man feel, just as Géricault’s drawings had?
“You will pose for me, without protest?” Benedict asked after a long silence.
Clair’s back immediately straightened. “I will.”
“And allow me to paint you how I wish, the way I see you, without critique or comment?
“If you paint me in the same style as those sketches, then yes.”
Benedict took a step closer. “And you will explicitly apologize for your ill-considered threats against my family, even if you never intended to carry them out?”
“I will, and I do.” Clair offered up the courtliest of bows, sweeping an invisible courtier’s hat from his head to the floor. “Mr. Pennington, please accept my deepest apologies for trying to influence you by implying I would defame your brother and your sister. Even though you should have known I would never have caused anyone you held dear intentional harm.”
Benedict wanted to shake his head at the unrepentant coda to that charming apology, but instead, he nodded. “Then I accept your commission. But it will have to wait until we return to London, as I don’t have the tools or the paints I would need here.”
A smile wider than the Thames radiated from Clair’s face. “Then I will order my valet to pack my things immediately. How early can you be ready to set forth?”
The vibrant pinks and subtle oranges of a midsummer dawn skimmed London’s rooftops, limning the windows of Benedict’s London studio with stunning light. But even the unusually vibrant sunrise couldn’t fix his attention for long this morning. Though he and Clair had arrived in town well after midnight, he’d still woken before the sun, the itch of inspiration tingling in his fingers, fizzing in his brain.
They must be here, the other sketches he’d made after he’d first met Théodore Géricault, the ones he’d done in a fever of excitement at the prospect of tossing aside all the academic rules that he’d once struggled so hard to assimilate. He wanted to see them again, those drawings he’d hidden away in embarrassment after being befriended by Julius Adler and his granddaughter, but this time through Clair’s eyes. Or rather, through his own eyes, eyes newly opened by Clair’s praise of his unconventional work.
He knelt in front of the cabinet in which he’d stored his old, unworthy productions and began rummaging through its contents. Tepid landscapes and tired portraits soon littered the floor, work hardly worth the paper they’d been painted on, never mind a framed place on the wall. Why had he held so tightly to such insipid stuff? They would have better been tossed onto the fire.
As he pulled one last stack from the cabinet, he touched the smooth surface of a leather-bound book. Not the sketch-book for which he’d been searching, no, but one far older, one he’d thought he’d lost. His fingers skimmed over the worn cover, tracing his initials in gold embossed letters. A gift from his mother, when he’d first left home for school. She must have sensed how afraid he was to leave her and Lincolnshire, for all he’d kept his fears bottled up inside. With a grave face, she’d handed him this book, telling him how lucky he was to have the chance to go to school and study with a true artist, as she herself had never had. He must take full advantage of his opportunity, and make her proud.
Little had his mother known that drawing masters at boy’s schools were far more interested in teaching their students the practical uses of drawing—recording geographical features and architectural landmarks while traveling or on military campaign—than inspiring any true appreciation of, or skill in, the higher beauties of art.
He flipped open the book, past those early lessons in line and perspective and balance, to the sketches he’d begun to make on his own time. At first, drawings of the woods and fields about Harrow, and then, as he’d become more comfortable at the school, sketches of the people around him. And then, images of one boy in particular.
His breath caught at these early sketches of Lord Dulcie, taken from a distance, inspired by hero worship of the most painful kind. And then later, more casual poses, after the older boy had befriended him, Lord Dulcie transforming right on these pages into his far more beloved Clair. His hand, twirling a leaf between nimble fingers. The fall of his hair as he bent over a book. The crinkle of his eyes, the upturn of his brow as he joked and laughed away all of Benedict’s so very earnest worries.
Awkward, yes, and unskilled, these sketches, but still, there was something vital and alive here, something important, s
omething real. Something none of the more formal sketches he’d made of the adult Dulcie had come even close to capturing.
If he could but marry this, this intimate knowledge of Clair, with a painting technique that strove not to create rational order out of vibrant chaos, not to depict him as a hero, but as a man—
Expectation, heady and potent, ripped through Benedict’s body. After scrambling to his feet, he kicked aside the bland drawings on the floor and reached for his pencil.
Only the rattle of china and the smell of toasted bread woke him from his absorption. How long had he been sketching? Several hours, if the position of the sun and the cramp in his fingers were any indication.
“Hungry?”
Benedict started, almost dropping his pencil. Clair, immaculately turned out in spite of the early hour, shouldered open the door of the studio, a tray replete with breads, butter, preserves, and a pot of steaming tea in hand.
“The staff tells me you’ve had nothing to eat all morning. You cannot create art if you starve yourself.”
The corners of Benedict’s mouth lifted. He still could hardly believe Clair had agreed to stay with him instead of at his father’s London house. Even if Parliament had adjourned earlier in the week, and Lord Milne had decamped for his country estate, Clair might have slept at Milne House, walking to Berkeley Square each day to pose. But all Benedict had to do was mention how it would be a pity to inconvenience two sets of servants rather than one before Clair jumped back onto his horse and rode the short distance from Mount Street to Berkeley Square alongside him.
He could only pray the thought of no longer living in the same household had made Clair as lonely as it had Benedict.
And that now that he and Clair were here together, alone, he’d be able to coax him out of hiding. Show him that he was in safe hands.
Clair shoved away paint pots and brushes, making space on the table for the tray. “Cream, no sugar?” he asked as he picked up the teapot.
