Page 10

LONDON

Mr Challender (but he wasn’t Mr Challender, was he? He was Lord Fairmount; somehow he was Adrian’s elusive and clearly not decrepit, elderly father) recovered much faster from the upset than Bianca did. Perhaps this was because he had known this morning that he was to meet a young female artist who was painting his son. Therefore, the idea that this artist might turn out to be the woman of the same profession that he’d had a scandalous liaison with last year in Venice wasn’t such a great leap: a surprise – clearly it was a surprise – but not earth-shaking. Whereas Bianca had had not the least idea that this house she’d been spending so much time in, this house that was just across the square from her sister’s home, was his. This man who’d been her lover. This man she had lied to and left, thinking – hoping – she’d never set eyes on him again.

‘Miss… Constantine,’ he said with barely a hesitation. ‘I am pleased to make your acquaintance, ma’am. My son has told me a great deal about you.’ There was an edge to his voice. Of course there was.

Bianca managed a decent enough curtsy, in the very trying circumstances. ‘Lord Fairmount,’ she responded. She hoped her face did not reveal her shock; she hoped Adrian would not see it and wonder at it, and ask why. ‘I am most grateful for the opportunity that you and Lady Deborah have given me. I hope you will find my work to your taste.’

‘Oh, I am most interested to see this example of your work. I would not think to doubt your skill for a second. May I…?’

The canvas stood on her easel in a convenient corner of the room; she always carried it safely out of the way once the day’s session was done. They moved towards it, the three of them, and she made a helpless little gesture and stood back, watching them, father and son. Adrian took his papa’s hand, a touching gesture she could not help noticing even in her current sad state of disorder, and drew him towards the painting in wordless anticipation, darting anxious glances up at his face, as if he, the sitter, would be judged along with the artist who had painted him. The main figure was almost completed, needing just a little more work, and then only the backdrop, which she meant to keep deliberately vague, remained to be done. She knew it was some of her very best work; she did not flatter herself one jot in believing that it was Lord Dawbney to the very life. The pair studied it in silence, and she studied him. Xan.

He had not changed, but then, why should he have done? It had not been so very long. When she had known him, last year, he had always been well dressed, and he still was, in clothing that was perfect in every respect and yet unobtrusive in its quality, expensive yet unfailingly discreet. He was not one for show. His shoulders were broad as they had ever been, his tall frame elegantly lean, though she had cause to know that strong muscles lay beneath the wool and leather and linen. His hair was almost as dark as hers, with only a few threads of silver, which she had teased him over, once, because he had not yet turned thirty. Had he now? She did not know when his birthday was, though she knew what he looked like when he came, and how his body shuddered in ultimate release. She had held that dark head between her breasts. His ridiculously long eyelashes had brushed her skin. His mouth… Good God, his mouth.

She felt as though she had been plunged into boiling and then freezing water. She was dizzy. She must not reveal any of it.

She could not possibly have suspected that such a calamity was about to descend on her, she told herself over and over. She’d never heard Adrian mention his family name, only his current title and his father’s. Lady Deborah, of course, had been married, and as a result had a different surname. Perhaps a woman who was an aristocrat herself would have realised immediately that Challenders and Dawbneys and Fairmounts were all the same people; perhaps Viola, twice a duchess, had learned that sort of thing in the last twenty years. But she, Bianca, hadn’t. Her family were Surrey gentry of no great distinction, and the peerage was largely a mystery to her. She recalled Adrian saying on their first meeting that his uncle had quite recently died; he must have been the previous earl, and this told her why Xan, his younger brother, had been plain Mr Challender (the Honourable Mr Challender, though, which she had not realised) when she had met him in Venice. It could all be explained with perfect ease, unlike her own part in this farce, which was far more tangled a matter. Xan had not boasted of his noble birth, of his status as an earl’s heir presumptive. Perhaps he had thought his brother would still marry – he couldn’t have been very old when he died – in which case Mr Challender and Adrian would likely have been disinherited by the birth of a nephew. He hadn’t ever struck her as a man who cared overmuch for such distinctions of rank, in any case.

She dragged her attention back to the present. Father and son were still looking at her canvas together. They hadn’t spoken, either of them. Half an hour ago she might have imagined that there was little in the world she cared for more than the first adult opinion of this, her most accomplished work to date. Now she had far other concerns.

‘It’s very fine,’ that familiar deep voice was saying, almost as if he meant it. ‘Really, it is. I am impressed.’

‘Do you truly like it, Papa?’ It was impossible to mistake how much this mattered to the child.

‘I do, very much. It is an excellent likeness of you, my dear boy, and a work of great skill that I must appreciate on its own merits even if I had never laid eyes on you.’

‘Well, that’s what I think. It’s not just good because it’s me, though it definitely is a proper likeness. I think Miss Constantine is a very excellent artist, and she is teaching me a great deal besides.’

Lord Fairmount’s grey eyes were on her again, harder and colder than she had ever seen them. That mouth, previously so sensual, so vulnerable in the extremes of passion, was a hard slash of pure contempt, which she hoped only she could see. ‘Oh, I am sure she is, Adrian. Miss Constantine is a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, there can be no doubt. How very fortunate that you should have happened to bump into her in the very square where we live – that’s what happened, is it not? Almost a providential meeting, one might say.’

‘My sister lives just opposite, sir,’ she said quietly, eager to dispel this misunderstanding if she could. ‘She moved here last year, I think; I was not in England at the time, so I cannot recall the precise date. Therefore I have taken to painting in the garden, since I am staying with her for the moment. But I am very glad that you think the picture has some merit.’ Surely he could not think that she had somehow engineered the meeting with his son, and thus inveigled her way into his house? Why would she do such a crazy thing, rather than avoid him like the plague? She had left him.

If Adrian sensed any of the undercurrents that surged beneath the polite, stilted words they were both uttering, he didn’t see fit to comment on them. Bianca could only hope that he did not. He was very clever, but not very old yet. He certainly could not have the least idea that these two adults had ever met before, so if he was aware of a chilly atmosphere, he couldn’t possibly guess the cause of it. He might feel that his father was standing rather on his lordly dignity, not welcoming this female artist as any sort of equal, despite his conventional words of praise – but even if this disappointed or surprised him, he could not possibly suspect why it should be so. She didn’t know what she’d say to the boy if he raised the topic; she could only pray he wouldn’t. The last thing she could do was reveal any portion of the truth, or so much as hint at a prior acquaintance abroad. Nor did she wish to appear to criticise Lord Fairmount in any way to his son, as she would be doing if she charged him with discourtesy or lack of welcome; that would be unconscionable.

Perhaps Xan was also realising that he needed to make a little more of an effort to give this hideous and interminable conversation an air of normality, or risk being questioned later by his curious, intelligent and persistent only child. ‘Do you make a long stay in Town, ma’am?’ An innocuous sort of a question, on the surface.

Of course anything he asked her was still bound to have an edge to it, because of all the lies she’d spun him, and above all the manner in which she’d left him. She could not blame him for that. And anything she told him now was almost bound to make it worse, because there was so much that he could not know. Was she the stupidest, most reckless woman who’d ever lived? Or just the unluckiest?

‘I am not sure yet. I’m spending a little time with Mrs Da Costa, my oldest sibling, and her family, as I said. But my sister Beatrice is fixed in Suffolk, and I haven’t seen her for an age – she doesn’t care for London – so I may go to visit her soon, or one of my other sisters, perhaps Cecilia, or Allegra on her husband’s estate in Kent. There are six of us in all.’

Just now escape – to anywhere in the world that was not here – sounded excessively attractive. She’d been avoiding his eyes, but she looked up and met them when she spoke. Not everything I said to you was a lie, she was attempting to telegraph to him. I told you I had sisters. I did do that.

‘She has a house in Suffolk, your sister Beatrice?’ he asked with polite uninterest, a man of good address making trivial conversation with a stranger of no particular consequence. She thought she might have told him that, just mentioned the house in passing, but she couldn’t really remember. They hadn’t spent enormous amounts of time talking about their pasts, either of them. But he knew she had a mole high up on her thigh. He should; he’d kissed it often enough. On his way somewhere else.

‘We do, yes. We three youngest girls inherited the property from an aunt.’ Bianca definitely hadn’t told him that. She also hadn’t told him she was an heiress, and that one of her sisters was a duchess, and another married to a prominent Member of Parliament. She’d been far too deep in the deception she’d created before she’d even met him – the fiction that she was a young widow of modest origins, with a dead Italian husband. An artist living on a small but sufficient income, with no pretensions to mixing in grand English or Italian society.

This tale had been devised, quite casually, to make her life easier, not horribly complicated as it was now. She could see that he was simmering with fury, and in all honesty – though she had forfeited the right to use that word – she could scarcely blame him. She could see no easy way out of this dreadful situation. She wanted nothing more than to run from this house and never come back, but plainly she could not; she was trapped.

14

VENICE

They could not stay talking at Florian’s forever, with the eyes of half of Venice upon them; they arranged to meet in greater privacy the next day. Xan was ridiculously eager – today could not have been too soon – but he needed a little time to make his preparations, and he’d never done anything like this before in all his life, and probably never would again, so a part of him wanted a little time to savour the anticipation.

He did not call on Bianca at her lodging, that would be indiscreet, but met her by design in a quiet corner of one of the smaller canals. He had ordered the hire of a gondola and sought the chief gondolier’s advice, since the vessel he had chosen was one of the bigger ones. He felt he was past all shame now.

Or almost so. His fantasy of making love to Signora Bianca in an open boat was all very well, and no doubt such a thing had been done before, here of all places, but it was hardly practical, for a man who had till now been of a discreet and retiring nature. He was not so far gone yet that he wished for an audience, and she most certainly would not. Most of the larger hired gondolas had makeshift cabins of some sort, so they might not necessarily be seen, but – if he was doing it right, as he fully intended to – they’d surely be heard.

No – they’d take a picnic; the gondoliers would leave them in a secluded spot for that purpose, and return for them at a set time. The senior gondolier he’d hired, who was a steady-looking man in his thirties, had told him where the best and most isolated place for such an expedition would be, and if he had suspicions of what else might be planned for the afternoon, as surely he must, he kept them to himself. This was Venice, after all, not the Serpentine in Hyde Park. Assignations of this nature could hardly be unprecedented.