If James thought he was going to get any peace and quiet at home, he was sorely mistaken. The moment he walked up the path to the house, he could hear loud bangs coming from inside.
“What on earth?” he muttered to himself, quickening his pace.
The butler answered the door with a consternated expression on his face. “It’s Her Grace…” he said by way of explanation. “She is… redecorating.”
James stepped into the hall and saw exactly what the butler meant by that.
The hall was filled with men hauling canvases out of every room and packing them into large crates. James recognized many of these canvases. They were paintings that he had collected or inherited, works of art that he or his forefathers had purchased either as investments or for aesthetical reasons. And now they were being piled into crates and nailed in.
At the center of all of this, of course, orchestrating the stripping of his home, was his wife.
“What on earth is happening in here?” James thundered.
The men, at last, stopped what they were doing and looked up at him. Violet, who was standing in the middle of the room, talking to a man holding a clipboard, turned around as well. To his vexation, she didn’t look remotely embarrassed as she took in his shocked and appalled expression.
“Ahh, you’re home,” she said. She turned back to the man with the clipboard and said, “Yes, I agree, these ought to be donated. They’re valuable, and we could get a fair price for them, but it would be better for the duchy—not to mention the world—if we showed our generosity by donating them. A museum would undoubtedly want them, but I think that a charity might be?—”
“You didn’t answer my question,” James cut her off, stopping behind her.
He was more than a little irritated that she was currently giving away some of his possessions for free without even consulting him. He might have had something to say on which paintings to give away—although he already knew he would have said,None of them.
“Oh, yes,” she said, sparing him a glance. “I’m organizing our paintings.”
“Mypaintings,” James corrected.
Violet raised an eyebrow. “I thought it wasourhome, no?”
“Well—”
“And you must have noticed that you have far too many paintings. The whole house is cluttered. Not to mention mismatched. Your taste is good, I’ll give you that. Some of these paintings are of the highest quality, and expensive, undoubtedly. But they are arranged in a very odd way, with the best ones hidden in corners and the worst ones on display in the center of the rooms. So I’m taking it upon myself to organize everything.”
James put his hands on his hips. Truthfully, he didn’t care that much abouthispaintings, but he still said, “What if I wanted to keep the pieces you’re throwing away?”
He reached into the crate in front of them and took out a painting at random, to prove his point. Unfortunately, the moment he glanced at it, he knew it would not help him win their argument.
The painting was of a poker game between several gentlemen, each with a redder and more jowly face than the next. It could have been a depiction of a real scene, except that James could not imagine three men being so ugly in real life that anyone would ever paint a portrait of them—even if it was commissioned.
“Ahhh,” he murmured as he stared down at the painting. “You see, this one is an important depiction of gentlemen relaxing. I believe that my father purchased it directly from White’s when they decided to redecorate at the turn of the century.”
“Well, I can see why they would redecorate if that was on their walls,” Violet commented tartly.
But James had committed to defending the painting, which meant he wasn’t going to give up without a fight.
“How harsh of you! But then you clearly do not understand the importance of the brushwork here.” He pointed to a random spot beneath the cards. “You can see that the artist was trained in Paris and is a master of his craft. It’s an important part of the realist—err, the hyper-realist movement that started in the Austrian Empire, I believe, before making its way to Paris and then England.”
James had no idea what he was talking about, and from the sardonic expression on his wife’s face, she knew it.
But instead of challenging him, she feigned a look of intrigue and leaned closer to the painting.
“Indeed, I think you’re right,” she murmured. “This is a masterwork! And it deserves a much higher place of honor in our home than you were giving itin the scullery.” She smiled at him, and he flushed. “Why don’t we hang it above your bed, since you admire it so much? And since, as you say, it is so priceless?”
“I—” James didn’t know what to say. She had completely outwitted him.
Smiling devilishly, Violet turned to the man with the clipboard. “Make sure that this fine example of Austrian hyper-realism is hung above His Grace’s bed.”
“Very good, Your Grace,” the man said, bowing low.
James had no option but to watch as several men hauled the painting up the stairs to hang it—to his horror—in his bedchamber, right above his bed.
