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The portrait showed a young woman with bright red hair sitting on a bench heaped with gold velvet cushions and reading a leather-bound book.
“I wish I’d known my aunt,” she said with a wistful expression.
“Why didn’t you know her?”
“She was my father’s eldest sister. She fell in love with Mr. Castle and was disinherited by the familyfor making an imprudent marriage with a shopkeeper. It’s nearly unfathomable to me that she lived so close by and I never even knew she existed.” Her brows knit together. “It’s not right.”
“No, it’s not right, but it’s common practice. My mother, Joyce, was born into a wealthy tradesperson’s family and fell in love with my father, a mere carpenter. She was cut off and disowned for her choice. She and her father have never reconciled.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
It made him furious that he would never know his aunt, or his nieces. His mother only visited her sister once a year, in utmost secrecy, for fear of retaliation from his grandfather. She would arrive in London for their yearly meeting soon, and then she would bid Ford farewell.
He threw the pencil down. “I always laugh when I hear people express the sentiment that our world should live in peace and harmony. How can we achieve peace between nations when families are torn apart so easily and so often?”
Lady Beatrice nodded her agreement.
“I’ve seen enough of war,” he said bitterly, “to know that men thirst for it, that they say they want a diplomatic solution, but instead they charge toward it, guns at the ready, pointed straight for hell. Families are no different. One transgression and a beloved daughter, or a sister, becomes a stranger, an enemy.”
“It’s tragic. How I should have liked to know my aunt. Anyone who reads a book while having a portrait painted would have been a bosom friend of mine. She was very beautiful, wasn’t she?”
“You look like her,” Ford pointed out. “The same red hair and slender figure. The same pale brows and straight little nose. And definitely the same expression of pure bliss when you’re turning the pages of a book.”
Lady Beatrice stared at him. “Don’t be silly. I look nothing like her.”
“You don’t see it?”
“Mr. Wright.” She turned fully toward him, into the light from the windows. “I was born with palsy of the facial nerve caused by damage from the instruments the doctor used during my birthing. I speak plainly of it, using none of the euphemisms my mother employs. It’s become more manageable and less noticeable over the years, but there’s no use attempting to ignore the condition, hide it, or pretend that it doesn’t exist. This is my face. Nothing more, nothing less. And I’m no beauty.”
Her vehement denial gave him pause. He’d read her diary entry, but that had been written by a young girl in a fit of passionate humiliation. Surely she’d realized by now how lovely she was.
“Clearly, you won’t believe anything I tell you. You should have your portrait painted. Maybe then you’d see the resemblance.”
She turned away. “I’ve no interest in having my likeness painted.”
And he shouldn’t have any interest in telling, or showing her, how attractive she was. This conversation was far too intimate for a simple business transaction. It was time for some lighthearted banter, to regain the earlier footing of their interactions, and then it was past time for him to leave.
He framed her face with his hands in the air. “If I were an artist, I’d paint you reclining on a velvet divan with your hair unbound. Rather like that dairymaid we saw earlier. I think your hair is long enough to have much the same effect.”
“Wright!” His name came out somewhere between a laugh and a snort. “I’m not having my portrait done and certainly not in the style of that most objectionable frontispiece.”
The dairymaid had been reclining on a bed, her hair streaming over her bare breasts, and her arms outstretched to test the girth of the two enormous pricks being offered to her by the two farmhands.
Her gaze dropped to the bed and then lifted to him. “Perhaps...” Her voice had gone throaty and soft. “Perhaps we should go back downstairs.”
There was nothing between him and Lady Beatrice except some teasing banter and professional services rendered.
And a bed.
A large, comfortable-looking bed. Her coppery hair would look stunning spread across that coverlet.
Don’t look at the bed.
He’d had enough fantasies about her involving desks. He didn’t need to replace those with images of her on this enormous bed hung with a very suggestive shade of pale pink velvet.
He cleared his throat. “I think that would be a good idea.”
He waited for her to flounce toward the door and out of his life.
