Scandalous Brides: In Scandal in Venice\The Spanish Bride (21 page)

“Just as you lied to him, you foolish girl,” she said aloud, her voice thick with bitterness at that flash of self-realization. She
had
lied to him, as he had to her, for their entire acquaintance.

“Talking to yourself, Elizabeth?”

Elizabeth looked up with a gasp to see Peter leaning negligently against the tree. He was dressed for riding, and his horse was tethered nearby.

She had been far too preoccupied with her musings to even hear his approach.

“You are always creeping up on me so!” she answered. “And, no, I was not speaking to myself, I was talking to that sheep over there.”

“Hmm. May I join you, then, or is this a private moment for you and the sheep?”

She hesitated, then nodded and slid over to make a space on the rock.

“Lady Haversham tells me she asked you if you would paint her portrait,” he commented, as he took the proffered seat.

“Yes. We spoke of it last night over the whist table. She wants a new portrait to present to Lord Haversham on their anniversary.”

“Will you accept?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps. I am rather out of practice.”

“I think it would be a very good thing for you to work, perhaps lift you out of these doldrums.”

She laughed shortly. “I
was
working, until I came here.”

A heavy silence fell, broken only when Peter said, “Would you care to go to Town for the Season?”

Elizabeth blinked, certain she had not heard correctly. “London?”

“Yes. That is the only Town I know that will be commencing its Season in a fortnight. I received an invitation to Lady Ponsonby’s ball.”

“But ... you detest London.”

Peter shrugged. “Detest is surely too strong a word. I prefer the country, certainly, but I have been spending more time in Town of late. It has many diversions I am sure you would enjoy—balls, theater, lectures, museums, and galleries.”

Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed. “Why? Is there someone there you wish to betrothe me to? Some ancient duke or marquis?”

Peter clicked his tongue. “How very suspicious you have become! I merely thought you might enjoy a broader society. You may even secure some commissions. London is certainly full of people who have nothing better to do with their time than sit about having their portrait painted.”

Elizabeth was still suspicious. London did sound tempting, full of more of the amenities of civilization that she had come to enjoy while on the Continent. And she could seek out new patrons, as Peter had said, try to build a new career. If only she were certain of Peter’s motives.

“Perhaps,” was all she said.

“Elizabeth,” Peter said slowly, “I do not want you to be unhappy, as I see you have been.”

“I am not
unhappy.
Merely at ... loose ends.”

“Nonetheless, I want you to feel as if Clifton were your true home. I also wish you could forgive me.”

“Forgive you?”

“Yes. You were fond of me once; could we not try to rebuild something of that?”

She rose to her feet, almost shaking with disbelief. “Peter, you treated me shockingly when you came home from the Peninsula. You forced me to become engaged against my wishes. Then, when I had found a life, a happiness of my own, you snatched it away.”

“Elizabeth, be reasonable ...”

“No! You
men
—you think you can do the most outrageous things and we will just forgive you, smile, and go on as if nothing had happened. Well, no. It does not work this time. It simply cannot.”

“This cannot go on!”

Elizabeth didn’t even look up from the sketchbook she had propped up beside her plate of toast and marmalade, though inside she was thoroughly shocked. In the days since their scene on the hillside, Peter had never burst out in such a fashion, or even spoken to her of anything but the weather. Their meals had been silent, her days in the studio solitary. Elizabeth had even begun to bring her drawing to the table.

Apparently, this breakfast was to be different.

“Cannot what?” she asked quietly.

“You know what I am talking about, so do not insult my intelligence by pretending otherwise.” Peter threw his crumpled napkin down beside his untouched plate. “I am speaking of this spoiled, childish attitude you have been exhibiting since I asked if you cared to go to Town.”

“Spoiled! Childish?” Elizabeth dropped her pencil and exchanged glare for glare along the polished length of the table.

“Yes. You drift about like a wraith in some bad novel, walking the fields all hours of the day. When we do go out, you insist on shocking everyone with your language and your gowns. You are even refusing to show basic table manners and converse politely.”

Elizabeth could only gape at him, astonished. Where had her cool, distant stepbrother vanished to?

“You used to speak with me at breakfast,” he continued. “You would tell me all you did with your days.”

“That ... that was years ago, when I was just a prattling girl. Much has happened since then, and I prefer quiet in the mornings. And, in point of fact, you are the one who has been lacking in conversation these past days.”

He had the grace to blush a little at the reminder of all that had happened since the days she would chatter through all their meals. He held up a sheaf of invitations for her perusal. “Then if you are so unhappy in this house, why not come to London? We have already been invited to many routs there.”

Elizabeth snorted. “I do not feel in the least like being gaped at at balls and card parties more than I already am! If I go to Town, it will be on my terms, and not to go to parties at the Havershams’ town house, as if we were still here.” She could feel her face turning scarlet, could feel all her loneliness, her anger at the men in her life, rushing up to the surface from the place she had so carefully pushed it down to.

“And,” she continued, “if you wish to talk about childish behavior, let us talk about you. Because I refused to live my life according to your dictates, you chased me down. No, worse, you sent a
spy
after me. You took me away from my friends, my work, and to what purpose? To have your own way?
That
is childish, not to mention morally reprehensible, Peter Everdean.”

Her temper at last spent, Elizabeth was utterly mortified to feel tears spilling onto her cheeks. She gathered her sketches up in her arms, and turned away. “Now, if you will excuse me ...”

“Elizabeth,” Peter called out softly, “please wait.”

She paused with her hand on the door, but did not turn back. “What is it?”

“I did not bring you to England for some petty revenge, though it may have seemed so to you. And even to myself.”

“No? Then what was the reason?”

“I ... I wanted to make amends toward you for my beastly behavior after I returned from Spain. I needed to make you understand that I ...” He broke off, his own eyes suspiciously bright.

Peter, crying? Elizabeth was utterly bewildered. “To make me understand what?” she asked, her voice gentle. He was seeming more like the brother she recalled from years ago, the brother she had thought long dead. “Tell me, please, Peter. I feel so overturned by this whole affair, but I want so desperately to understand.”

“Come with me,” he said, pushing back his chair. “I want to show you something.”

Elizabeth followed him to the library, the one room where she was never allowed, and watched with wary eyes as he unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk. She saw the flat case that held her own miniature, the one painted on her fifteenth birthday, which Peter had carried with him to Spain. She also saw another box, which he removed from the drawer.

“Come and look,” he said, opening the box and carefully laying out a bundle of ribbon-tied letters, another miniature portrait, a dried gardenia, and a woman’s ruby earring. “Here are all my secrets for your perusal, Lizzie.”

Still unsure, she reached for the miniature, cradling it in the palm of her hand as she examined the portrait painted on the ivory.

It was a girl, a woman, of great beauty. Elizabeth’s artist’s eye instantly envied her high cheekbones, her delicate jaw. The pale oval of her face was crowned by a heavy mass of black hair; her dark eyes seemed to flash and laugh. Swinging from her ears, peeking from loops of her dark hair, were the ruby earrings.

“She is very lovely,” Elizabeth managed to say at last.

“You look very like her.”

She looked down again at the dark lady, and shook her head. “No. We both have dark hair, but my face is much rounder than hers. She is so much more ... exotic than I ever could be.”

“I thought, when I returned from the war, that you resembled her very much indeed. In some of my less lucid moments I thought you
were
her. And I took my rage out on you, since she was beyond me forever.” He fell silent, twirling the earring absently through his long fingers. “When you fled under those horrible circumstances, I was shaken to my senses. I longed to tell you,
had
to tell you how much I loathed myself for what I had done. I wanted to make amends to you, but you were not here to listen to my apologies. For two years I lived with the knowledge that I had failed you, after our parents entrusted you to my care.” He looked up at last into her pensive face. “Lizzie, my dear sister, can you ever forgive me? For everything? It is no excuse, I know, but I was not myself.”

Elizabeth did not answer. Instead, she held out the painting. “Who was she?”

An odd half smile curled at his lips. “Carmen. She was a wealthy widow from Seville, but she worked with the partisans against Napoleon. She was a spy for us—until she betrayed us to the French, and your Nicholas was almost killed in the resulting battle. She died, as well.” Peter tossed the miniature back into its box. “She was also my wife.”

Alone at last in her bedroom, Elizabeth stretched out on her bed to turn Peter’s words over and over in her mind. Her entire world had tilted yet again, and she couldn’t yet hold on to the idea that Peter was not exactly the villain she had thought him to be for so long. He was not yet her beloved brother again, either. She was not certain what he was.

Except that he was a widower.

“Another love gone awry,” she murmured. “Can love never be right in this family?”

For the first time since coming back to Clifton Manor, she remembered the utter magic of her time with Nicholas, untainted by what had come after. She remembered lazy luncheons at Florian’s, boat rides in sunshine and starlight that she had never wanted to end. She remembered how they would laugh together, how interested he had been in her work; how they had kissed. She even remembered how he would trail after her in galleries and churches, trying not to yawn and whispering delicious bon mots into her ear to make her giggle.

She remembered that the sound of his laughter was the only thing in all the world that could rival the joy of a blank canvas and a palette full of paint.

She also remembered the portrait, hidden away in her studio, that she had begun that sunny day in the Italian countryside. The portrait she had never wanted to see again.

Barefoot, she padded up the stairs to her studio and searched through the carefully crated canvases Georgina had sent her until she found the one she wanted. She propped it on an empty easel and stepped back to study it.

There, with vineyards and their white villa in the background, was
her
Nicholas. Not the Old Nick of the scandalmongers, or the Captain Hollingsworth of Peter’s regiment, but Nicholas. His shirt was open at his throat, baring a delicious V of golden skin and the merest hint of dark, curling hair; his black hair was tousled in the wind. He was laughing at her, the laughter she had always smiled foolishly at hearing. None of that had been a lie.

She did love him. Her heart had not been whole since the day she left him. She needed him as she needed air, water, and art. It was not a choice. And now she saw that she had been a fool to turn her back on that love, even if she had been so angry.

Peter’s stories of life in Spain, which he had spun for her into the small hours of the night, had made her begin to see what had made Nicholas go to Italy in the first place. Nicholas owed Peter his life—his
life.

So, in a fashion, Elizabeth owed Peter her life, as well.

She went back to her room, and took out writing paper and pencil from her desk. After an hour of contemplative nail-biting, she began:

“My dearest Nicholas ...”

She labored over that letter all night, crossing out lines, trying to sound forgiving and friendly, but not so very forgiving that she became maudlin.

It was a very difficult task, and the fire burned merrily with discards before she at last had a version she was content with. She addressed it to the lodgings she had found among Peter’s papers, sealed it—and promptly lost all her nerve. She stuck it hastily into a drawer amid her silk stockings, and went to bed to sleep and try to forget her folly.

Nicholas was probably far away from England by now. And he more than likely did not remember her or what they had shared. It had been too long, and she had been too silent.

And, after all, what chance could there really be for them, after all that had happened?

Chapter Twenty

“Y
ou see. I told you that country air was exactly what you needed.” Georgina smiled at Nicholas over the rim of her teacup. “Your eyes are much clearer already.”

“That is because there is no proper tavern in this entire blighted village. And
this
place only serves watered ale.” He indicated the small public room of the Dog and Duck Inn, where he had taken rooms and where Georgina had come to join him for a late breakfast. She, however, was comfortably ensconced in a friend’s country manor for the duration of their stay.

“Well,” she answered, “the house where I am staying boasts an excellent cellar and a fine chef. I’m sure Lady Overton would not mind in the least if you and Elizabeth were to come to supper some evening soon.”

“If we ever actually meet with Elizabeth. I think Peter must have her cloistered in that house.”