Authors: Patricia Cabot

Tags: #Romance, #Adult, #Historical

Portrait of My Heart (29 page)

BOOK: Portrait of My Heart

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She demanded that he return to Rawlings Manor at once with an explanation for both the engagement announcement and the fact that he’d remained in the town house with Maggie,
unchaperoned, for so long. Or, the note threatened, she’d sic Edward on him.

And if Edward should happen to miss the birth of our seventh child, she wrote, because he had to go all the way to London to fetch you, Jeremy, I shall personally never, ever forgive you. Your aunt Peggy.

“Christ,” Jeremy said. “From bad to worse.”

Peters, still ignoring the barking dog, said expressionlessly, “I’ve already packed your overnight kit, sir. I suspected there might ’ave been some sort of emergency.”

“Thank you, Peters.” Jeremy stuffed the letter into his pocket, though the Star of Jaipur didn’t leave a lot of room for it. Well, he thought to himself. Perhaps a trip back to Yorkshire wasn’t
entirely
a bad idea. He wanted to do things properly. In cases like this, he knew, fathers were generally appealed to first. He didn’t relish the idea of asking Sir Arthur for his daughter’s hand, but it would probably be best, under the circumstances. And, as Berangère had pointed out, it might not be a bad idea to try to patch things up between Maggie and her family while he was there.

Moving to shove his feet into a pair of Indian slippers, the toes of which curled upward, Jeremy began to issue commands, suddenly becoming very much the military leader. “Take that animal to the park, Peters, and make sure you don’t lose him. I wouldn’t let him off the lead, if I were you—”

“Right.” Peters nodded. “Little rat like ’im might get eaten by a bigger dog.”

“Exactly. And my chances of actually marrying the woman I want would be significantly decreased should my manservant allow her dog to perish on his morning walk.”

“Certainly, Colonel.” Peters saluted smartly. “You can count on me.” When Jerry, eager for his walk, struck both his front paws against Peters’s wooden leg, the valet only laughed, instead of flinching in pain, as Jeremy had. “Eh, there, tiger,” he said, bending down to scratch the dog’s ears with actual affection. “Easy, now. We’ll be off as soon as I can get me a shirt on.”

Jeremy, tying the robe’s sash around his waist, rallied internally
for his return to the White Room. He did not believe for a second that Maggie had stayed abed, as ordered. When had she ever done a single thing he’d asked her to? That was certainly part of her charm. How often were dukes disobeyed? About as often as colonels, which was to say, not often.

But the degree to which she’d managed to disobey him in this particular instance was surprising. Jeremy, returning to Maggie’s bedroom, gaped at the changes wrought in the room during the course of his brief absence. Gone was all evidence of his ever having been there … including his clothing. The bed was stripped and the dressing room door agape. From that room drifted the sounds of vigorous splashing and the nervous chatter of one of the parlormaids. A second later, Maggie herself appeared, in the tartan dressing gown he’d disparaged just the day before, her hair caught up damply in some kind of braid.

Her eyes widened upon seeing him at the threshold of her room, and with a hasty glance over her shoulder, to insure the maid was otherwise occupied, she hissed, “What are you doing back so soon? Where’s Jerry? And what have you got on?”

Jeremy looked down at himself. “My dressing gown,” he replied, in an injured tone.

Maggie snorted. “I’ll say.” She stalked over to her dressing table.

“Well,” Jeremy said. “You’re one to talk. Where’d you get the one you have on? The ragpicker’s bin?”

“Very funny,” Maggie observed, as she dipped her fingers into a pot of cream, which she began liberally applying to her face. “Where is my dog?”

“Peters took him to the park,” Jeremy said. He glanced crossly at the dressing room door. “I thought I told you—”

“I cannot believe,” Maggie declared, her eyes very wide and dark as they peered out at him from all the white stuff on her face, “that you have the gall to ask a one-legged man to walk my dog.
Really,
Jeremy.”

Behind her, the dressing room door swung open, and Pamela, a fresh-faced girl who’d been imported to London
from the family of one of Rawlings Manor’s tenant farmers, came bustling into the room, carrying an armful of clothing. “Is this the dress you wanted, miss?” she asked, directly before colliding into Jeremy.

“Oh!” Her blue eyes round as saucers, the maid dropped all of Maggie’s clothes and dipped a shame-faced curtsy. “Your Grace! I beg your pardon, Your Grace! I didn’t see you!”

“Never mind that, Pamela,” Maggie said. She wiped the cream from her face before rising calmly to help the girl retrieve the items she’d dropped. “His Grace was just leaving. Weren’t you, Your Grace?”

“In a moment, Pamela,” Jeremy said, and he bent down and seized Maggie by the arm. “I just need a word in private with Miss Herbert.” So saying, he dragged Maggie into the dressing room, where he saw traces of a hastily drawn bath. Closing the dressing room door behind them, he turned and looked down at Maggie rebukingly. “I thought I told you not to get out of that bed.”

“I thought I told you to walk my dog,” Maggie retorted.

“Your dog is being walked,” Jeremy pointed out. “I did not renege on
my
part of the bargain.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have reneged on mine,” Maggie assured him, reaching up to adjust the lapels of his dressing gown, one of which was flipped the wrong way, “if I hadn’t remembered that I have movers arriving at my studio at eleven o’clock, and that I’ve got to be there to meet them.”

“Movers?”

“Yes, Jeremy. The exhibition, tomorrow night. Remember? They’ve got to transport the paintings to Augustin’s gallery—”

At the mention of the Frenchman’s name, a glower spread across Jeremy’s face. “Look,” he said urgently. “I’ve got to talk to you.”

“Jeremy, honestly, I haven’t time. I’m running very late. And you’ve already managed to shock Pamela to the core. We’ll talk later … .”

She started moving toward the door, but Jeremy caught her by the sash of the hideous plaid dressing gown. When
Maggie turned a questioning—and somewhat annoyed—glance toward him, he said only, “Here. I’ve got to go away for a while. Watch this for me while I’m gone, all right?”

And, desperate to show her, since he could not seem to tell her, how he felt about her, he took the Star of Jaipur from his own dressing gown’s pocket and dropped it into hers.

Shocked, Maggie stared not at the enormous sapphire—she seemed hardly to have noticed it—but at Jeremy’s departing back. “Away?” she echoed lamely. “Where, Jerry? Where are you going? When are you coming back?”

But the only reply to her question was the click of her bedroom door as he closed it behind him.

Chapter 32

No painter, Maggie knew, liked to see her creations handled by anyone save herself. Who else but the artist can know the toil and sweat that goes into a certain work? And then to see that work hefted by a burly man who commented that they were “pretty enough pitchers” and looked as if he hadn’t seen a bath in years … well, what artist wouldn’t experience a sense of unease?

But for Maggie, unease over the handling of her works was the least of her worries. She also had that awkward scene with Jeremy earlier that morning to mull over. By the time she’d gathered her senses enough to go looking for him, she’d found that he hadn’t been joking … he really had gone away! His valet was nowhere to be found, either. Oh, he’d returned her dog, but then, according to a very indignant Evers, he’d disappeared out the door mere seconds later!

Maggie supposed she hadn’t handled Jeremy and his request to “talk” very tactfully. She needn’t have been so short with him. But her mind had been full of her upcoming exhibition! Surely a woman—a
business
woman—could be excused for having a more pressing engagement … .

Engagement! The very word made her want to smack her hand to her forehead.
What was she going to do about Augustin?
She had to find a way today to break off their engagement. She simply couldn’t go on letting him think that … well, that she could ever do what she’d been doing for two days now with Jeremy with
him
. It simply wasn’t in the
realm of the possible. Whatever happened with Jeremy—and she was far from convinced that the two of them would ever work out a mutually amicable arrangement, except perhaps, where the bedroom was concerned; they never seemed to have any problems when they were in bed together. It was only when they got
out
of bed that all sorts of disasters occurred—there would never be anyone else for her. However grateful she might be to Augustin for all his kindnesses to her, she knew she could
never
let him … Oh, dear, she blushed to even think about it!

It was because of these worries that what ought to have been quite simple, really, turned into a nightmare. Maggie could not seem to keep her mind on the task at hand … as Augustin, already put out with her over the fact that she arrived half an hour late to begin with, causing him to have to pay the moving men for a half hour of loitering about in the hallway, pointed out, several times.

“It just isn’t like you,
Marguerethe,”
he kept saying. “From any of the other artists I represent, I might have expected such behavior, but from you,
Marguerethe?
Perhaps there is something wrong?”

Maggie, holding her breath as one of the movers hefted the portrait of the marquis and his brother—upside down—could only murmur, “No, there’s nothing wrong.”

“I don’t mean to criticize, only if you had known you were going to be late, you might have lent me your key, so we could have started without you—”

“I didn’t know I was going to be late. Oh, do watch”—Maggie winced as the wooden frame supporting a canvas split in half under the clumsy handling of one of the men—“that stretcher.”

The mover blinked at her, the painting having come apart in his hands. “It warn’t my fault!” he exclaimed, as Augustin began to curse exasperatedly in French.

“Oh, dear.” Maggie hurried over to examine the limp canvas. Fortunately, the painting hadn’t completely dried, so the oil on it didn’t split. “Perhaps I can mend it. Go—” She waved at the mover. “Go fetch those landscapes over there, if you will. Leave this one to me.”

But of course, it turned out “those landscapes over there” weren’t quite dry, either, a fact Augustin pointed out too late, so that they ended up with four paintings that had great, dirty thumb prints marring the edges. Knowing full well they were unsalable in such condition, Maggie set them up onto easels for some quick patchwork, only to find that she was perfectly incapable of remembering how to mix the correct shades to camouflage the damage. Meanwhile, the movers, confused by her flustered directions and annoyed by Augustin’s French expletives, left half the works behind that they were supposed to have taken. Maggie and Augustin were forced to chase after them, down six flights of stairs, causing no end of delight to the other artists in the building, all of whom leaned out their studio doors to shout encouragement to them as they raced by.

It was one o’clock before the movers finally left, and then they were in a bad humor, since apparently they had expected Augustin to pay them then and there, an idea at which he scoffed heartily.

“Oh, no,
mes garçons,”
he said. “Payment upon delivery.”

This generated a good deal of dark muttering on the part of the moving men concerning the dire fates that awaited Maggie’s paintings on the muddy roads back to Bond Street. Hearing this, Maggie sank down upon the divan by the window, her knees having given out beneath her.

“Oh, Augustin,” she whispered. “Go with them. Please. Go with them.”

Augustin, noticing her pale face, was only just able to stifle another stream of curses. Finally, he seized his hat and said, with as much grace as he could muster, “Very well then. I shall go with them, to insure your works are not thrown in the mud. You will stay here and repair the damaged landscapes?”

Maggie, completely dazed, nodded.

“And then you will join me at the gallery this evening, after they’ve been fitted into their frames, so that we may hang them according to your specifications?”

Again, Maggie nodded, although she felt about as enthusiastic
about hanging her paintings as she had about moving them.

Augustin nodded and left, clearly as unhappy as she was, though for far different reasons. He, of course, still had the pain of a broken nose to deal with, on top of the strain and worry over opening an exhibition featuring a new artist the following day. And the artist wasn’t helping matters any, she knew, by being so moody. Really, she ought to be falling over herself in gratitude to Augustin … he was doing so many wonderful things for her, and he had been so patient and tolerant.

Why couldn’t she love him?
Things would be so much simpler if she could just love Augustin!

But that, she knew, would never, never happen. She’d tell him tonight. She
had
to tell him tonight.

It took Maggie most of the rest of the day to repair her damaged works. It was five o’clock by the time she arrived at the gallery on Bond Street. She was freezing from her uncomfortable carriage ride, crushed in as she’d been with her canvases, and thirsty, besides, from having consumed every last drop of wine from her sideboard. She had thought the wine might help give her the courage to say to Augustin the words she’d been rehearsing all day.
Augustin,
she’d say.
I’m really very sorry, but I cannot marry you. You see, I’m in love with someone else, and it wouldn’t be fair to you if I …

Yes, that was good. Make no mention, Maggie, of the fact that you’d already tumbled into bed with that someone else … .

But the minute she stepped through the doors, she saw at once she would not be given an opportunity to make her confession. Augustin was shouting furiously at one of his assistants, who’d apparently managed to put a hammerhead straight through the wall, and into a display of kid leather gloves belonging to the shop next door. Other assistants were scurrying about, her paintings under their arms, too frightened to engender the wrath of their employer by attempting to hang anything during his tirade at one of their peers.

Wincing, Maggie crept past them, determined to deliver
her not-yet-dry canvases to the frame maker, who’d set up shop in the back, where works not yet on display were stored. But the frame maker, an Italian craftsman who apparently thought her a shopgirl of some sort, took the paintings and then waved her impatiently away when she tried to dawdle long enough to catch a glimpse of his work. Without Augustin to translate, there was no way Maggie could convey to the frame maker that she was the artist, and had every right to see how her paintings had been framed. Though she pointed at herself, and then at the canvases, and mimed painting, the Italian glared at her, and let loose a stream of threatening-sounding foreign words, so she ducked back into the gallery.

There she happened to witness Augustin cuffing the unfortunate assistant about the ears. This was more than Maggie could bear, and so she slipped out the front doors again, unnoticed by anyone, most particularly the gallery’s owner.

Miserable, Maggie hesitated on the icy street, where she was jostled by fashionably attired Londoners doing their Friday-night shopping on stylish, expensive Bond Street. Really, she thought to herself. How cowardly was
that?
All that wine, and she hadn’t even had the courage to go through with it. She was a horrid, horrid girl.

She supposed she had no choice but to go back to the house on Park Lane. The thought caused her to sigh heavily, her breath fogging in front of her. Jeremy would be there. She wasn’t at all sure she had the strength to face him. It seemed as if every time they got together, they ended up in bed, which really didn’t resolve anything. She had so many questions, so many worries concerning their relationship. For instance, why, she wondered, and not for the first time that day, had Jeremy thrust the Star of Jaipur into her pocket? She could feel its weight even now, in the bottom of her reticule. She’d had reservations about carting the heavy stone around with her all day, but she couldn’t very well have left it at the house. Lord only knew where it might have disappeared to! She trusted Hill implicitly, and Evers, too, but the other servants …

No, it was better that the stone remained with her. But
why had Jeremy entrusted it to her? It was a curious thing to give to a girl with whom one had spent the night. Almost like … well, a token of his affection. Other men gave engagement rings. Jeremy Rawlings gave sapphires the size of a plum.

Unless … the thought occurred to her as she jounced along on the seat of the omnibus … unless giving her the Star of Jaipur had been Jeremy’s way of proposing. But no. That was preposterous. He had proposed once, and been rejected. He would not do so again—would he? Besides, he hadn’t given her the stone. He’d merely asked her to look after it for him. After all, someone
was
trying to kill him. It was a thing of great beauty—Maggie had removed it from her reticule just once, as the afternoon sun had peeked into her skylight, and gazed at the way its many facets glowed. It was certainly worth killing for. Not, she imagined, that
that
was why someone had been trying to kill Jeremy. He’d hardly have given
her
the stone if he thought
that
were the case … .

Well, she would ask him, that was all. Yes, she would ask him, as soon as she saw him, why he’d given her the stone. And that wasn’t all she’d ask him, either. She’d be certain to ask him where he’d disappeared to, and just what it was he’d been so eager to discuss with her that morning.

And just where, exactly, he thought this relationship was headed … .

But when she returned to the house on Park Lane, Evers calmly informed her, while taking her wraps, that His Grace was not in. He had not come home for luncheon, and had left word that he would not be in for supper. This struck Maggie as more than a little suspicious. Where, in heaven’s name, could he be? With the princess?

But no, that wasn’t possible. Because the princess was looking for him, as well.

Maggie didn’t hear this, however, until she stepped into her own room, and found her maid, Hill, who had just returned from taking Jerry for a walk. Maggie was so surprised to see them that she nearly choked.

“Hill,” she cried, ashamed that, in her distress, she had
forgotten both her maid and her dog. “Are you well? I was very worried about you.”

The maid certainly did not look well, but she was, at least, alive. “Oh, miss,” she began, untying the strings to her cloak, as Jerry raced over and laid his paws upon Maggie’s knees. “Such a night I passed! You could not imagine. Evers insists it musta been somethin’ I et, only Cook denies it, since nobody else took ill, but oh! Such a night!” Hill puttered about the room as she spoke. “I don’t think I ever retched so much in all my born days. Though I’ll tell you, I never had such dreams in me life. Beautiful dreams, I tell you. I wish I could remember ’em properly.”

Maggie, racked with guilt over having been the direct cause of her maid’s illness, begged her to sit down and rest more, but Hill would have none of it. She was as full of chat and gossip as Maggie was depressed.

“And what do you think, Miss Margaret,” Hill demanded, as she fluffed up Maggie’s pillows, “about the duke now, eh?”

“W-what?” Maggie asked nervously.

Hill shot her young mistress a disapproving look. “You mean you didn’t see it?”

“See what?”

“This morning’s
Times
!.”

“Oh,” Maggie said, a good deal less tremulously. “No. Why?”

“Right there, on page two, it was. Mr. Evers, he showed it to me. Otherwise, I never would’ve believed it.” Hill paused dramatically. “A retraction!”

“A retraction?” Maggie echoed weakly.

“Yes, miss. A retraction of the article the day before, sayin’ he was goin’ to marry that pert heathen princess.”

BOOK: Portrait of My Heart

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