Page 101 of Souvenir Heart

“I think I started to fall in love with you the moment I saw your self-portrait.” He sighed, shook his head, and said, “If ever the Devil leads me to love again, I shall demand of my lover, do not tell me of your heart, fair one, but show me your art.”

“Are you mocking me?” Her hand flew to her chest. “Did you read that in my book?”

“Read it?” He laughed, a sound like flesh torn open. “Mon coeur, I wrote it.”

Sixty

“You wrote it?” she repeated in disbelief. The lines that had burrowed under her skin like a splinter, an insistent, painful hope that somewhere out there, was a man who would see her for herself. As something more than a woman to be wedded, bedded, or bred.

And here he was. Marcus Aurelius David George Tyndale, Viscount Radcliffe. She wanted to laugh. She wanted to cry. But the best she could manage was a choked out, “Why?”

He ran a hand through his hair. “I was drinking. I drank a lot back then. And because I’m cursed with the ability to recall perfectly the things I see, that bit in the De Arte Graphica about the artist having the power to ‘correct and amend the common Nature, and to represent it as it was first created without fault,’ got stuck in my head. Made me furious every time I thought about it. Scribbling that wretched bit of nonsense was my attempt at an exorcism.”

“It wasn’t nonsense,” she said softly.

He studied her as if she was a foreign language he was struggling to translate, then said, “It didn’t work, of course. So, I told myself a woman like you didn’t exist. That it was time to stop dreaming.” He smiled ruefully. “My first step in that campaign was to sell the book.”

“Which I bought.”

He shook his head, “I never imagined anyone would see it.”

“I know the feeling. I seem to remember saying almost that exact thing.”

“That damned cartoon.” He shook his head again. “I know I owe you a proper apology. It was just…seeing your work, then seeing you in that courtroom, surrounded by those jeering monsters. All I wanted to do was sweep you up and carry you out of there.” He folded his arms behind his back, as if still resisting the urge.

The movement placed his lantern behind him, making the circle of light between them smaller. Encircled by darkness, Marguerite could imagine that the world above them had ceased to exist.

“When Fouquier-Tinville held up your drawing, I knew it was a death sentence. That it would be so much more difficult to free you. I overreacted. Forgive me.” He sighed ruefully. “If it had been a battlefield, I’d have known what to do.”

“Like Rouen?” As much as she didn’t want to ask, she had to know.

“Rouen?”

“What happened there?” Because the world, after all, did exist and they’d soon be returning to it.

He sighed. “We were a few miles from the coast, on our way to the rendezvous with the sloop that was to carry your father to England. We were stopped by a company of national guardsmen. They’d been informed about our activities. They had a description of two of our company. They attempted to arrest them. I couldn’t…”

“Leave them behind,” she finished for him.

“I wouldn’t.” His eyes were fixed on her face. “I’ll always fight for the people in my care. The people I love.”

Marguerite stepped closer to him. “Do you love her?”

“Who?” His brows knit in confusion, he added uncertainly, “Lady Elizabeth?”

“Lady Elizabeth?” It was Marguerite’s turn to look confused. “Is she the viper?”

“Lady Elizabeth is a vixen,” he chuckled. “Not a viper. That’s her gown you have half on, by the way. She’d have still been in the nursery, no doubt driving her governesses to Bedlam, when I wrote that verse. But since you ask, no, I don’t love the viper. Thinking back on it, I think I was mostly in love with the idea of her.”

Marguerite was close enough to see the rapid rise and fall of his chest, close enough to stretch out an arm and touch the tensed muscles beneath the linen of his shirt. “How can I be sure you aren’t falling in love with an idea of me?”

“The verse might have been rubbish, but I do believe that art—good art, reveals the true nature of the artist. I may have seen your determination, your wit, and your passion in your art first, but I’ve also seen it in the way you’ve faced the horrors you’ve been through. The way you’re facing me now.”

Before I tell you of my heart. She pressed on, “I’ve seen your forgeries and the amount my father has offered you in your sketchbook. How can I be sure what you’re saying now is true?”

“And you’ve seen my sketches, so you know I speak the truth when I say I’m no artist. As for what your father wrote in my book, I made no effort to hide it.”

“It’s a tempting sum.”