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She gave in and simply went out ahead of him.
He shut the door and took the lead. One hallway led to another. In the soft light from the wall sconces, they worked their way toward the glorious State Rooms at the heart of the house and then on from there, along a central hallway to the damaged West Wing.
In the West Wing, he turned on the flashlight. No one lived or worked in the West Wing. At night, the dim hallway wall sconces were left off.
It was sad, really, even by flashlight, even when they were sticking only to the hallways, to see the water stains on the ceilings and walls, the emptiness where marble-topped hall tables had stood and beautiful art used to hang. Yes, much of the West Wing had once been servants’ quarters, but the central hallways used to be as finely put together as the rest of the house. There was the faint smell of moisture there now. For the sake of the West Wing, winter and the new roof couldn’t come soon enough.
Rafe led her up the stairs and along another hallway until finally they came to the West Wing Gallery, a long red room on the top floor with all its furnishings intact. The gallery and the rooms below it were protected by a small section of undamaged roof replaced forty years before.
The West Wing Gallery was not among the finest rooms at Hartmore. All the most treasured paintings and portraits hung in the State Rooms or in the East Wing where the family lived and could enjoy them. The West Wing Gallery was for all the pictures no one really cared all that much about, for portraits of forgotten ancestors painted by unimportant artists. For undistinguished landscapes by painters no one remembered anymore.
Rafe turned on the lights.
Genny stood in the middle of the room and stared up at the beautiful painted ceiling. The El Grecos, the Titians and Turners were in other rooms. Still, there were gorgeous gilt mirrors here and serpentine columns flanked the arched windows.
Rafe came up behind her and clasped her shoulders. She leaned back into the solid heat of his body—but only for a moment. Because he ran his palm down her arm and caught her hand again. “Here. Let me show you....”
He led her to a shadowed corner, to a grouping of mediocre portraits in unremarkable frames. “This one.” He shone the flashlight on a portrait of a young, powerfully built dark-eyed man with thick black hair and sideburns. The fellow wore a fitted, single-breasted tailcoat. There was a spill of snowy-white—what they used to call a cravat—at his throat. His doeskin breeches tucked into shiny black Hessian boots and he held a silk top hat to his breast. He stared into the middle distance with an expression of great seriousness.
It wasn’t a very good painting. The eyes weren’t quite right and the proportions were odd. But the likeness was still striking—eerie, even.
Genny’s heart was suddenly racing and her mouth had gone dry. She said in a whisper, “Rafe, he looks just like you.”
“He does, doesn’t he? This was painted in 1819.”
“But...who is he?”
“Richard DeValery, a second son. Like me, he was never expected to inherit. But then his older brother, James, died in a hunting accident. And that left Richard to become the fifth earl of Hartmore.”
Chapter Ten
Genny stared in amazement at the portrait of Richard DeValery. “How long have you known about this?”
“I was ten when I first saw it.”
“But...how did you know to look here?”
“Granny brought me here.”
“Eloise.” That made perfect sense. “Of course. Had someone said something to you then, about the old rumors?”
“My father had called me an ugly, hulking bastard. He’d muttered under his breath that I wasn’t any son of his.”
“Oh, Rafe...”
“And he’d beaten me again for no reason that I could understand. I had been trying to behave in a civilized manner. To pay attention at school. But it didn’t help. I couldn’t catch a break with him. That day, I can’t remember having done anything to make him furious with me—other than just being there, in his sight. Afterward, Granny found me crying like a baby in the stables. She wanted to know if I was injured. I told her no. And I wasn’t. The beatings hurt, but he never broke a bone or made me bleed. It was the way he looked at me, and the verbal abuse, that killed me. He was a master at that. Anyway, when Granny found me in the stables, I told her to go away, to leave me alone, that I wasn’t a true DeValery and everyone knew the truth about me.”
“But she wouldn’t go.”
“You know Granny....”
Genny did know. “She would have had a little lecture ready, I’m guessing.”
“Yes, she did. She said my father was a cruel and narrow-minded man and sometimes she was ashamed to call him her son. But that his father had been a cruel man, too. ‘And the best revenge,’ she said, ‘against a cruel husband or father is to live a productive, rich life anyway, and to hell with them.’”
