“I am sorry, I?—”
“Do not be sorry, Alice.”
“He was?—”
“Yes.”
“He looks?—”
“Yes.”
“You loved him.”
“Yes.”
“You loved him a great deal.”
“Yes, Alice.”
She did not say anything else.
After a moment, she lifted the back of her gloved hand to her face and dried the two thin lines on her cheeks with grave efficiency. It was the efficiency of a woman who had been crying privately for years before she learned to do it in front of anyone. She drew a breath, still looking at Henry’s portrait.
Cassian came up behind her. He came up slowly, his Hessian boots quiet on the floorboards. He did not touch her when he reached her shoulder. He did not kiss her or take her hand or do any of the dozen things he had spent the past hour in the library deciding he would not do this evening because he had promised her a week of no pressing.
He did, however, gently lay his hand on the back of her neck where her hair had come loose at the lake and been pinned up again by Joanna with a great deal of slightly amused effort, just like Joanna pinned all hair, and he left it there for two breaths. Then he dropped it and stepped back.
He had told her he would not press. He had not, on the whole, pressed.
“You painted this,” Alice said, very quietly.
“I did.”
“How old were you?”
“Twelve.”
“And the others?”
“Burned.”
“All of them?”
“All of them but this.”
“Because of the dog.”
“Because of the dog.”
“What did you paint in the others?”
He drew a breath. “Henry, mostly. The dogs. Joanna in her cradle. The orchard at Langton in October. The little south chapel where my mother is buried. The kitchen garden when theapples were ripe. A self-portrait, once, that I made on the day I turned thirteen and burned in the same grate because I had not, in any of the four months I spent on it, managed to like my own face.”
“Cassian.”
“It is a long list, Alice.”
“Yes.”
