Page 160 of The Ladies Least Likely

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

H e must still be bosky, Ren thought. The smashing and fires of the rioting mob had left his ears ringing. He was hearing things.

“What’s that again?” he asked hoarsely.

She chuckled, a low, throaty sound that made the dents at the sides of her lips deepen, and he knew he hadn’t misheard. Just as he raised his arms to clasp her, she stepped away to the table set with their simple meal.

“I think I was clear.”

She stood behind her chair, waiting patiently, until his brain shifted into action.

He staggered to the table. He would have liked to have moved cleanly and with great assurance, in part to give her no reason to change her mind if she had in fact just offered him what he’d been dreaming about for days.

Years. But his leg had had enough of the exertions of the day and dragged behind him as he moved.

He leaned on it as he pulled out her chair.

“You expect me to attend to my dinner? After that ?” He bent his head and spoke the words into the soft red-brown waves that fell past her shoulders. He was gratified to see her shiver as his breath brushed her neck.

“You’ll need an appetite for what lies ahead.” Still wearing that small, secret smile, she seated herself and laid her serviette in her lap, then started preparing a plate.

Ren seated himself, but his thoughts were not on the food. Every nerve in his body drew taut with anticipation, a heavy, pleasant heat settling in his groin. He watched Harriette’s graceful hands butter his bread, then lay slices of cheese and cold cuts of meat on his plate.

The light from the candles teased auburn glints from her hair and cast shadows under her cheekbones, chin, and in the deep cleft between her breasts.

Her skin gleamed like fresh butter, creamy and soft as silk.

She’d been through a singularly trying day, and she sat as calm and collected as if they dined tête-á-tête every night.

“I am sorry your mother’s procession was disturbed,” he said softly.

She shrugged one elegant shoulder. The gown slipped slightly, revealing more skin. She made no move to adjust it.

“She would have enjoyed the melodrama, I suspect. Certainly Mrs. Demant and her friends will have much to fret over, which should please them no end.”

“What was that small spectacle about the knocking?” He accepted the plate she handed to him. Her fingers brushed his hand, and when he met her eyes, he saw from her steady, sly look that the touch was intentional.

“The plea for admittance?” She fixed her own plate. “It’s a Catholic custom, reserved usually for emperors when they are laid in their tombs. I read about it once and liked the idea that even the mightiest must acknowledge they enter the realm of death as poor, naked sinners, like the least of us.”

“What will you do now?”

She bit through the golden crust of her bread to the soft, fragrant middle. A smudge of butter lingered on her upper lip as she chewed thoughtfully.

“I wrote my Aunt Calenberg. She will want to pay her respects somehow. I don’t foresee there will be very much of my mother’s affairs left to put in order.”

“And your marriage?” Ren tried to keep his voice level. “Your grandfather and mother arranged it, I understand, and now they are both—not here to see it accomplished.”

She speared a pickled beet on her fork and nibbled at it. A shadow of sadness settled on her brow as she stared past him a moment, lost in thought. Then she sighed and shrugged again.

“Now it feels all the more important that I go through with it.”

She lifted her eyes to his face. “Lord knows it’s not what I want. The chief benefit I could see in marrying Franz Karl was ensuring my mother had a place to live out her life, I hoped in luxury, enjoying all that she gave up when she fled to protect me from the wars.”

His heart sank, but he fought to keep his voice measured, keep it from cracking. “And you are the Duchess of Lowenburg now. You shall have to go back for your investiture, and to take proper possession of your lands.”

“Yes, and to keep my husband from looting them, if that’s the kind of husband he intends to be.” She scowled.

She would go and leave him behind, along with all the other causes she had taken up.

She had yet to finish his portrait, though she’d worked hard to bring his figure to life.

She wouldn’t know until much later if her intercession with Amalie had worked.

She had tried to make him popular and desired with those prints she had circulated about town, tried to give him every advantage in his choice of marital partner, but she would not be there to advise him on whom to select.

There was so much left unfinished. Barely begun.

“Perhaps he will let you paint.” Ren cleared his throat, searching for a way to brighten his suddenly grim outlook. He would not give into despair in these last stolen moments together. He would wait to do that when she was gone.

“Perhaps,” he went on, “there is a whole society of female painters in Prussia. Or perhaps you can build it. You could found a society of the arts, if there is not one already.”

She chuckled. “The Prussian Academy of the Arts is one of the oldest in Europe, older than your English Royal Society, milord. Blaise Le Sueur is the current director, I believe. He goes in very much for the landscape and historical schools. I think in time I might like to move to historical subjects. Angelica Kaufman prefers them, though most people think women should stick to pastels and watercolors of fruit and such, if they paint at all.”

She poured a cup of wine and passed it to him, her fingers again deliberately brushing his. A warm tingle raced up his arm.

“I see you as a historical subject,” he said. “Minerva, or some other mighty goddess, powerful and wise.”

She chuckled again, the sound kindling heat in his chest. “There is some group of powerful women in London calling themselves the Minerva Society. Lady Bessington has business with them, I believe. My aunt mentioned once that she was interested in joining them, but they are select and elite.” She sipped her wine, her lips gleaming deep red.

“Someday I’ll do a self-portrait of myself in classical robes.

I’ll be one of the six women painters of antiquity that Pliny the Elder names.

Timarete, Irene, Calypso, Iaia, Aristarete, and Olympias.

” She spoke the names as if reciting a well-learned litany, uttering each syllable with a reverent caress.

Then she took an unladylike gulp of wine. “But I might choose to portray myself as Helena of Egypt. She painted Alexander the Great’s battles, or so Pliny says.”

Ren took a modest sip of his own wine. It roiled in his stomach after all the ale. He couldn’t afford to send any more of his wits a’wandering. “And if I were your subject? What historical figure would I be?”

She propped her elbows on the table and put her chin on them, careless as a girl. But there was nothing girlish in the smoldering stare she gave him.

“The Emperor Claudius,” she said. “I should put you against the mightiest monuments of early Rome, in a white toga and your imperial purple robe. Making sure your toga is slipping off one shoulder to reveal your splendidly manly chest.”

“Claudius the mad,” he said, his gut twisting at her answer despite her flirtatious tone. He knew his history. “Claudius, the idiot emperor with the stammer and the clubfoot.”

She shook her head, and a red-brown lock brushed her shoulder the way he longed to do. “Claudius was the wisest and the best of the early emperors,” she answered. “He made many improvements in administration. And Britain was conquered under his rule.”

“His mother, according to Suetonius, called him ‘a monster of a man, not finished but merely begun by Dame Nature,’” Ren said. “I believe that’s a faithful translation.”

“No one can be more monstrous than a mother,” Harriette whispered.

“But I believe it is because they so badly want the best for their children. It still astounds me that my mother, who I would have sworn had no interest in me whatsoever, sacrificed her position and her life of ease to take me away from war and protect me as my father could no longer do.”

Ren unwisely tipped back his wine cup, taking a long draught. “How do you excuse the cruelty of fathers, then? They are trying to shape us into better men?”

Her mouth turned down at its lovely corners, her brow knitting in concern. “Ren,” she said softly. “I believe your father would be proud if he could see you now.”

Ren stared into the pudding as she cut it.

He’d worked for years to improve his speech, and he’d submitted to the tortures of manipulation and surgery to correct his deformed foot.

The veneer was fragile, and it held mostly because of the deference given his title, the tacit agreement not to taunt a peer.

For a moment he envied Jock, who at least could boast of his injuries as something he’d survived.

Nobody pitied Jock on his crutches, not after they saw him atop a horse.

If Ren were a tradesman, in the class of Abel Cain, he’d be ruthlessly twitted by the Abel Cains of his world, but the jibes would not hold revulsion, not when so many of that class bore their own scars.

It was only the upper class, those born to rule, who saw such flaws as diminishing a person’s worth.

“I don’t understand how you have never reviled me.”

The confession burst from him unwillingly. He set his cup on the table and studied it so he could avoid meeting her eyes. “You have never treated me like a cripple. Like a defective.”

“My Ren.”