Alice felt her face flush.
“My Lord,” Cassian interjected.
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“That was not boxing advice.”
“No, Your Grace. It was, however, advice. I shall give a great deal more of it this evening. Lady Joanna has organized a game of whist in the long drawing room after dinner with careful forfeits for the losers, and I have agreed to be the impartial judge of the forfeits which I have already determined will be undignified. I hope you will attend, Lady Alice.”
“I will, My Lord.”
“Very good, My Lady.”
Lord Greencliff bowed. He had decided, in the last quarter of an hour, that he approved of his pupil’s bride.
Then he turned and walked back toward the house.
Alice did not speak again for an hour.
CHAPTER 21
Cassian had not, in twenty years, looked at the painting.
It hung in the small portrait gallery between the morning room and the long library in a corner that did not get a great deal of light.
He had hung it there on purpose. He had hung it there because he had not wanted, in the years after his father’s death, to see it from any of the windows. He had wanted it in a corner that would require him to deliberately walk to it, and he had then arranged, with the unfailing discipline he had brought to most of his arrangements in those years, never to deliberately walk to it.
It was the only painting his father had not burned.
His father had burned the others on a particular Tuesday in October sixteen years ago in the small grate of his study at Langton while fourteen-year-old Cassian had stood in the doorway and watched a great many small black-edged squaresof canvas curl in the fire. There had been eleven of them. Those eleven had been everything he had painted in the previous four years.
That day, he had been allowed to keep only one: the small portrait in oils of his elder brother Henry, sitting on the stone steps of Langton’s southern lawn at thirteen with the dog at his feet and the apple in his hand.
His father had kept it because he had liked the dog. His father had not, on that Tuesday, been able to read the portrait closely enough to see that the painter had loved the boy in it more than he had loved any other thing in his life.
His father had been dead for twelve years now. Cassian had not, since the funeral, taken the portrait down. In fact, he had not looked at the portrait. The portrait had hung in its small corner of the gallery with the dog and the apple and the boy, and Cassian had walked past it on every morning of his life at Langton with his face turned away.
He had not arranged for Joanna to walk Alice past it this evening.
He had not arranged for Joanna to do anything. He had been lounging at the far end of the long library with Richard on the small couch by the second window with a glass in his hand and the careful expression of a man whose bride had not, since the lake at one in the afternoon, looked at him properly.
He had been telling himself that this was the natural course of his promise to her at Mrs. Hatcher’s. He had told her he would not press. He had not pressed, and she was not pressing back. He had been telling himself this for three hours and still could not believe it.
He had been on his second glass when Alice had walked through the open door with Joanna at her elbow.
He had looked up, but Alice had not seen him. She had been looking at his sister, who had been pointing at something in the small portrait gallery and saying something he could not hear, and Alice had turned obediently, in the grave way she had been turning all afternoon, to look at whatever Joanna was pointing at.
Cassian had set his glass down. Without saying a word to Richard, he had gone to the door of the long library and from there to the open door of the gallery and had stood in the door of the gallery with his hand on the frame.
Alice and Joanna were staring at the portrait.
“… actually painted it,” Joanna was saying. “He was twelve, I think. He used to paint a great deal when we were little. He had a small studio at the top of the house where he put his canvases. He painted Henry, mostly. He painted the dogs sometimes. He painted me once when I was three, but I have not seen that one in years. I believe Father burned that one, too.”
“Joanna.”
“It is all right, Alice. I am quite over it. Father burned a great many things he should not have burned, and I have made my peace with it in so far as I can be expected to. But this one… this one is the only one left. Cassian saved it on a particular Tuesday in October when Father had decided that painting was no longer a thing the heir to the duchy could be permitted. I think he saved it because Father liked the dog. There is a great deal of comedy in our family if you look closely.”
“It is a beautiful painting, Joanna.”