How to Impress a Marquess(53)

None of the artists knew her whereabouts, sending him on to someone else, but only after offering him tea and a look at their work, explaining their artistic vision. What he once scoffed at now intrigued him, and even inspired him. He understood in a deep, wordless way why capturing the pure moment when the white light slanted across the empty glass was far more important than shoring up the crumbling walls of the fortress wing. In fact, Tyburn Hall could fall to the ground as he stayed up late in his study, trying to capture the way that same white light had bled through the breakfast-room window and danced on Lilith’s face. The first few nights he struggled with his fears as he put his paintbrush to the canvas. It had been so long since he painted last, secreted away in a closet at Eton. But soon, he was lost in his work again.

Penelope, also unable to sleep, would join him late at night and ask what all those blobs were that he had painted and if he needed glasses, because everything was blurry on his canvas. He would launch into a lengthy discussion about the reality and subjectivity of experience. By God, he was losing his mind, but it felt so much better than droning on about stamp duty and other such nonsense. Even in his sorrow, he’d never felt more alive. At least he felt pain—deep, acute, throbbing pain—and not the dull nothingness that had characterized the last decades of his life.

After a week with no news about Lilith, George went around to McAllister’s Magazine and bandied about the word “lawsuit,” but it didn’t help. They hadn’t heard from Lilith either, and she had missed her chapter due date. He wanted to tell them that she hadn’t been negligent. A new chapter waited beside his bed, atop his drawing of Lilith the night he made love to her. The pages were worn from reading and rereading.

He returned to his study and hung his head in his hands. “Please, Lilith, please,” he pleaded. “Have mercy, woman.” He picked up his brush, mixed a little red paint into brown and added a stroke to his canvass. As if this were a prayer to her.

“She’s here! She’s here!” he heard his sister cry outside his door. He dropped his brush, his heart pounding. He turned, expecting to find her tender, forgiving smile.

“I love—” he stopped.

Beatrice and his sister rushed through the door.

Beatrice stopped in her progress and gazed about the study, taking in the paintings of Lilith and then his ruffled appearance.

Concern wrinkled her brow. “Are you well, Cousin George?”

“He has taken up painting again,” Penelope explained. “Aren’t the canvasses beautiful?” She tried to sound unconcerned, but he knew that she was as anxious about him as he was of her.

“And your face,” said Beatrice.

“He’s growing a fashionable beard,” Penelope interceded again. She beckoned Beatrice to the sofa. “Come, come, how did you manage to escape? I was terribly worried about you. Did you receive my letters?”

Beatrice described how the guests had politely scattered from the house party the morning after the ball. Lady Marylewick had raged to Beatrice that she hoped everyone in England saw what underserving children she had and how poorly they treated their mother and dishonored their family’s name.

“She said that if I left, I was as horrible as you,” Beatrice concluded. “I didn’t mean to say that you are horrible, I’m merely repeating her.” She twisted her hands in her lap. “But…but…Lilith was correct when she said Oxford was allowing women to attend. I can’t stop thinking about it. I know I should care about finding a husband and dresses and other stupid things, but I—I so want to learn about astronomy and physics and what really matters. I can’t help—”

“Good God, Beatrice, if you desire to go to Oxford, just tell me to whom to write,” George said. “However, my reputation as an insane, cruel sultan might affect their decision.”

“Really?” Beatrice rushed to his arms, embracing him. “I love you, Cousin George. They can’t turn away the Marquess of Marylewick’s recommendation, even if you are insane.”

He chuckled to himself. Yes, perhaps he was insane. Did an insane man know he was mad?

There was a gentle tap at the door and the butler slipped inside. “A telegram has arrived, my lord.”

George and Penelope exchanged glances.

The butler handed him the slip of paper and bowed. “I shall be happy to send a return should you require it.” Then he left.

George read the sparse words. They weren’t what he wanted to see. He closed his eyes, swallowing down the pain.

“What does it say?” Penelope demanded. He couldn’t bring himself to form the words. Penelope gently took the page and read aloud: “I am well. Don’t worry. Love to you, P, and B. Don’t forget to draw with joy.” She turned the page over. “There is no return address or originating office. No way to find her.”

A glum pall permeated the room.

“She has always been like this,” Beatrice said quietly. “She never wanted anything to do with us. Yet she told me about Oxford, and we made that silly sisterhood vow. I wanted to believe that she really desired to be my sister. True sister. How could she leave after she wrote those silly stories and performed the mating dance with Cousin George? How could she be so cruel to everyone?”

“What?” George cried. “She told you about the, um, mating dance?”

“It’s hard to love Lilith.” Penelope embraced Beatrice. “When she’s near, she shows you this sparkling, wonderful world in which you so want to belong. She says yes when everyone tells you no. She fills your heart with hope, but now that I’m holed up in this house, reading the dreadful articles in the papers and watching poor George suffer, I realize she offered a false hope. I feel very misled.” She released her cousin and slumped onto the sofa. “Maybe I shouldn’t divorce Fenmore. I’m only causing more pain. Mother is angry. I’ve embarrassed George. The things those hideous papers say…”

“No!” George said quietly. “Lilith didn’t deceive you.” He paced to his painting, letting his gaze follow along its lines. “She felt horrible about Colette and the Sultan and begged my forgiveness. We fought that night. She left because she thought I didn’t love her. She didn’t want to burden me with a loveless marriage of responsibility and duty. She wanted me to love someone as much as she…” He faltered. “As much as she loved me. She so much wanted us”—he gestured to Beatrice and Penelope—“to be the loving family that she had never known. Everything she wrote, she wrote out of pain, not vengeance. She showed me that sparkling, wonderful world of which you speak and I slammed the door in her face.”

“But you do love Lilith, don’t you?” said Beatrice. “After all, you did the mating dance with her and painted these pictures of her.”

He raked his hands through his disheveled hair. “I didn’t tell her. I kept it from her. Because I was afraid of…of…”

“What?” asked Penelope.

“Myself,” he confessed. “My real self. The one she loved.”

Penelope stared at him, tears glistening in her eyes. “Oh, George,” she cried, and then her sweet voice hardened with anger. “You lost Lilith, you idiot! You lost our sister. Her heart must be broken. That poor lady. Come, Beatrice.” Penelope linked her arm through Beatrice’s and began leading her to the door. “You and I must do something to find her. We made a sacred vow, after all.”

“Wait,” George said. “I can find her.”

“You haven’t succeeded so far,” was the nasty and unhelpful response he received from Penelope.

“There is one course left,” he admitted. One desperate and humiliating course.





Twenty-three


Lilith lay on the worn sofa in the morning parlor, the only quiet room in the Brighton Artist Colony, and stared at the cracked ceiling. This particular ceiling had a W-shaped fissure. The one in her cramped bedchamber, which she shared with another writer who enjoyed writing through the night, while smoking and asking Lilith’s opinion about every paragraph she scribed, had an S shape. Lilith had been staring listlessly at ceilings for days and days, hoping in the plaster heavens to find the words to end the cruel Colette story, but all she thought about was George. He would have fixed the ceiling. He took care of the smallest things others might view as trivial. He saw the wonderful details, shapes, and colors that others missed.

Now the newspapers were ablaze with the stories that her sensitive George had inspired the villainous sultan. Of course, the simple truth was too dull and must be embellished for the audience’s insatiable taste for scandal. Sensational tales circulated that George had punched Lord Charles at the Tyburn ball and then threatened to murder him with an ax. Some papers claimed George had gone mad and his family had hidden him away in an asylum. The lurid accounts didn’t stop at George but extended to Penelope, who, according to the lowest of scandal-mongering rags, had run away with her French lover and demanded a divorce from her husband, and that Lady Marylewick burned down Tyburn Hall in a fit of rage.