Charity Begins at Home (23 page)

When she faltered, Tristan prompted gently, "He was about Lawrence's age, wasn't he, when the youngest boy died?" Unobtrusively Charity withdrew her hand from his and edged a bit away. How had he learned of her brothers' deaths? Not that she had been keeping that a secret. But dwelling on it was useless and sad, so she and her brothers didn't talk about those years, when their family of eight was reduced by half. She supposed someone had mentioned the deaths. Perhaps Anna knew the history and had told her brother. "He was a bit older, perhaps. Eight. Joey was closer to Lawrence's age. It was a long time ago."

"Were they like that, always competing, but best friends?"

Charity pulled up wild daisies for a chain, willing her hands not to tremble. "I don't recall. I'm sure they fought. I—" Joey's face, set in pugnacious lines, appeared in her mind, and she said softly, volitionlessly, "I remember whatever wooden soldier Charlie had Joey wanted, so Francis always carved two identical ones. But they would find some minor distinction and both claim the biggest or the brightest." The white petals of the daisy she gripped wavered as if brushed by a breeze. "After Joey died, Charlie threw all the soldiers into the fireplace. So many hours of work for Francis all burned up. I thought he would cry when he saw them in flames."

Finally her words halted, not by her choice, for she had not chosen to speak them, but simply because there were none left. And they were gone now, and she couldn't call them back.

"That must be why Charlie is so quiet now." To her relief, Tristan fell silent, studying the boy below them, little Charlie with his slight shoulders hunched as he examined his specimens. Charity could imagine his intense gaze and looked up to see Tristan's own eyes dark with concentration. "Because he felt responsible. Because he should have protected Joey better."

Charity drew a sharp breath. "Joey died of influenza. There was nothing Charlie could have done. Nothing anyone could have done. Or I would have—"

She pressed a fist against her mouth, tasting the tanginess of the daisy stem she still clutched. She was almost grateful to hear him speak again, for his accent's gentle rhythm almost dissolved her harsh words lingering in the air.

"But he wouldn't have known that. He would just know that he should have been a better brother and it wouldn't have happened."

Charity didn't know why Tristan spoke so about a boy he hardly knew. And it angered her, this assumption that somehow he knew Charlie, understood him, when Charity had raised him since he was a babe. She had to freeze the hot words trembling on her lips. They would show only her defensiveness. She knew that however she tried she couldn't break through Charlie's shyness, couldn't teach him to open up to life, to laughter. She loved him anyway, the more so because she feared no one else would. But she couldn't tell Tristan that, couldn't confess her fear that Charlie would always be apart, even in the midst of his family. She only bent her head and focused on her daisy chain, carefully picking off the bruised petals.

But Tristan wouldn't let the subject go. "Would you like him to come live with us?"

With us. It sounded sweet, seductive, strange. "I don't know. Francis is his guardian, of course. And he's to go to Eton in the autumn, if he ever learns his Latin."

Tristan looked down at Charlie and shook his head. "I can't imagine him at Eton. It's a hellish place. I only lasted a few months. I was never so happy to set sail for Italy as that year."

Charity stood up, tugging angrily at her skirt. "My other brothers have gone there. It can't be so terrible. Francis learned a great deal, and Barry liked it well enough."

"Francis would doubtlessly learn a great deal on a desert island. And Barry would like any place with a crew team."

Tristan rose also and held out his hand. But she pretended not to see it. It wasn't polite, but then neither was his comment, which intimated that he knew better than she or Francis what Charlie needed. With an effort she concealed her feelings. "Well, you might get your wish. The vicar tells me Charlie is hopeless at Latin. And he shan't be allowed in if his Latin is poor."

"Smart lad."

That flashing grin was so attractive she almost gave in and forgave his effrontery. Then she heard a splash and looked down to see Lawrence standing in the stream, pulling a laughing Jeremy down with him. "I know they'd end up wet! There's something about water that magnetically attracts boys."

As if to prove her right, Charlie jumped up with a whoop and joined the younger boys. Charity's volatile emotions had to be pushed aside while she and Tristan ran down to make sure that Jeremy didn't get the worst of the ensuing water fight. It was a half-hour before they all started home, the adults now as wet as the boys.

Back at the Grange, Charity kicked off her ruined slippers, tied her wet hair back with a string, and glanced over at Tristan. He had carried the exhausted Jeremy most of the way home and now stood in his muddy boots holding the boy as Anna fussed about calling for towels and hot water. Jeremy rested his dark head on his uncle's shoulder, his eyes closing despite his valiant vows to stay awake.

Charity felt a rush of tenderness that frightened her. The rueful smile, the streak of mud on his straight jaw, the cling of his damp shirt to his muscular arm, the kiss he dropped on Jeremy's forehead before handing him over to Cammie. It was all so sweet and so compelling—and so very dangerous.

Chapter Fourteen

Rehearsing the children's play was painstaking work, especially in that restless hour after their release from the schoolhouse. Few of Charity's twelve actors could read well enough to use a script, so she patiently read each line and pointed to the appropriate child to repeat it. Fortunately once she had reworked Mr. Greenaway's play, none of the children had to say much. She had excised most of the soliloquies and long descriptive passages, relying on action rather than narration to advance the plot.

Children really were much better at moving than speaking, she decided, sitting back on her heels on the oak floor of the church hall. Lawrence and Jeremy were sitting in the front of Mr. Padden's old rowboat, straining away at imaginary oars, bellowing as if they were truly pursued by a leviathan. Behind them were two girls, gesticulating wildly and shouting. Jack Moresby, who played Jonah, thrashed convincingly on the floor, pretending that the whale had caught him in its teeth.

"Curtain!" she called out, and though there was no curtain to drop, the children took this as permission to become themselves again. Jack jumped up and announced that he was hungry, and Jeremy whined about his unquenchable thirst. Lawrence dropped his imaginary oar and turned around to yank on Mary Moresby's beribboned ringlet. He really was very much like his father, worse luck. Mary kicked him in the shin, and only Charity's intervention prevented a rift in her theater group's solidarity.

When they had collected all their belongings and got into a ragged line, she announced, "Tomorrow we will learn Act II, and by the week's end we will be able to perform it altogether."

Jeremy waved his hand for her attention, then pointed to the three canvases that, still covered, took up most of the stage. "But Charity, when do we get to see my uncle's whale?"

"When we've made it through the entire play without making a single mistake, then I will unveil the masterpiece. It isn't complete yet, anyway. I think he means to put the hand of God in there to chastise the whale for chewing on Jonah."

Too late she saw that the artist himself had come into the church hall. The sun was filling the door behind him, outlining his slim form; an artist to the last, he had waited until the fullest light was gone to seek her out this afternoon. She wasn't sure if she were piqued or relieved by this. Both, she guessed; all her feelings were so ambivalent, seeing Tristan only made her wonder if she had lost all sense of herself since his proposal.

She busied herself ushering the children out the door. Jeremy tugged on Tristan's sleeve as he passed. "I know you'll paint God's hand just right."

Teasingly Tristan asked, once the door had closed behind his nephews, "The hand of God, is it?" He kissed her cheek once, quickly, a fiancé’s casual caress, then her mouth not so quickly, then, with a sigh, released her. "This triptych of yours is getting more populated every day."

Two days of betrothal had taught her to long for his kisses but to fear them, too. There was the simple but profound physical pleasure to be enjoyed, the sweet thrill that rippled from his mouth to her heart and even elsewhere. There was a deeper desire, to know more of him, to let her hands wander from their safe harbor on his arms to unexplored territory, to let his kiss roam further, too. And there was the pride of knowing that he wanted that, too, that when he held her he loved it, that when he let her go he regretted it, that he anticipated a day when he could hold her always.

But his kisses also awakened a strange dread in her heart. He wanted her, wanted to marry her, and she must want that, too. Yet she knew what marriage meant; it meant giving herself to him. And she wasn't at all certain which self he meant her to give.

She recalled his comment finally. "Michelangelo painted God on the Sistine ceiling, didn't he? And it would be a great lesson for the children even if it's not quite true to the Biblical text."

"All these references to Michelangelo are gratifying, Charity, but rather misplaced. I don't aspire so high. Did you know," he added, uncovering the whale's swinging tail, "that God on the Sistine ceiling is modeled on Leonardo da Vinci?"

Charity took a guilty pleasure in this revelation. She loved artistic gossip. "It sounds blasphemous."

"Not to artists. We think it quite apt. On whose hand should I model God's?"

"Donatello." She decided to ignore the blasphemy involved in modeling God's hand on any sculptor's, no matter how great.

"Unfortunately I haven't any memory of Donatello's hand. Perhaps I shall just use da Vinci's. That one I can call to mind, for I had to copy that panel of the ceiling when I was a student."

She sat down on the edge of the stage and arranged the pages of the revised script in order, hoping he would pick up his brush. But he only frowned at the blank corner of the canvas where she supposed the hand of God was meant to go.

"You don't need a model, then? You can paint it from memory?"

"Yes, and lucky you are that I can. Otherwise the Midsummer play would have to wait for me to sail to Rome with my easel and come back with a reproduction of Michelangelo's work. Not to mention," he tugged off the cover on the adjacent panel, revealing a quite fiercesome whale with a gaping, sharp-toothed mouth, "that I would have to catch a whale and tie it up in the harbor."

"But isn't that the way most artists paint? From life?"

He shrugged, using his index finger to trace the outline of a hand on the empty corner of the first panel. "Some do. They drag their easel down to the seacoast to do a seascape, and they set their fruit up on a table to do a still life." He frowned at his invisible outline and redid the thumb. "They might finish the painting later, but the fundaments—" He paused to reconsider the unfamiliar and possibly un-English word. "The important parts are composed on the scene. But I don't do that. I think I must have a good visual memory. Or a good imagination. For I don't think," he added, glancing back with a grin, "that I have ever seen a whale."

The subject reminded her how different this man was from anyone else she had ever known. The mental process he spoke of was as foreign to her as his dark Italian eyes. "Do you really just paint the scenes you've remembered or created in your mind?"

"I suppose that is what I do." He gazed at the panel as if he saw something other than a half-completed painting. "Is it so strange? If I know something well enough, I just look at the canvas and see it there, and paint what I see. I might alter it, of course."

"But the critics say your paintings are realistic."

"Wait till they see our whale friend. And besides, my paintings merely appear realistic. If all I do is copy, if I add nothing of my own, then it doesn't matter who painted it, does it? A real artist can't stop with the truth. He must transform it to make it art, rather than just a picture."

Chin on fist, Charity considered this. She valued truth as a rule, but she was more likely than most to—oh, not to transform it but to manage it. Her negotiations with the vicar over Midsummer had contained quite a bit of managed truth, she recalled. She had never before thought of that as an art. "I do think art must require more than that. Mr. Greenaway certainly transformed the whale story, but I don't know if that made it art. Anymore than my changes to his story have achieved art."

"As fond as I've got of Jonah's whale, Charity, you must admit it is not the most promising material with which to start."

She was still intrigued but troubled by this artistic dismissal of the reality of reality. "But surely with portraits you must stay very close to reality. The subject will want to recognize himself."

Laughing, Tristan pulled the cover back over the canvas. "You'd be surprised. When the painter comes too close to reality, the subject always claims it is not a good likeness at all. That is why I've never painted portraits. I would likely expose their secret vices, and they would be outraged and refuse to pay my fee."

He jumped lightly off the stage and held out his hand to her.