The Very Daring Duchess Part 8

"You're most welcome, signora." He knew that grazie meant "thank you," and the rest she'd said after that meant "dear sir." He liked the sound of dear sir, even in Italian, and especially from her. " 'Twas no trouble at all, I a.s.sure you."

"Ah, how well you play the gallant, my lord!" She sighed, and curtseyed, twirling the end of the shawl around her wrist. "But I cannot keep you from your duties any longer. How could my poor conscience endure it?"

She was right, of course. He did have a hundred matters pressing. Even sitting in a safe harbor, the Centaur and her crew demanded his attention. Any day, and with no notice, the orders could come that would send them back to sea or to battle. He had to be ready, and standing here mooning over a pretty young woman in a red shawl was hardly productive.

He should go; he must go. And yet something stronger inside him urged him to stay, to linger just a little longer in the glow of her company.

"The paintings that were stolen," he said, purposefully moving past her to study the wall. "It won't take you long to redo them, will you? At least as I recall, nothing here was near the quality of those drawings you showed me last night."

From the corner of his eye he saw her scurry to stand beside him, though this time she kept her hands inside the shawl and not on him. "They must be replaced, not redone. They weren't by my hand, you know."

He glanced down at her skeptically. "But not by the great masters you'd like me to believe, either."

"Well, no," she admitted. "I won't claim otherwise, not with you. But the artists who did paint them live in Rome, and since the French invaded, it's been impossible to send anything in or out of the city. I've been waiting for an eternity to be paid by a dealer there for three paintings of my own. Good-sized canvases, too, that I know perfectly well he's sold. War is quite bothersome to people in my trade, you know, and I rather wish the people in your trade would be done with it."

"Aye, signora, so would I." So she thought war was "bothersome." Like most Neapolitans, she'd clearly no experience with the awful reality and destruction of war, and he'd pray she never did. "But why don't you sell your own paintings here?"

"Oh, it is not the custom," she answered glibly. "Besides, my specialities are lady-portraits in the style of Raphael, and no buyer would expect to find a true Raphael in Naples. But in Rome, an Englishman can be persuaded that an elderly marchesa in embarra.s.sed circ.u.mstances has been forced to part with a family treasure, and che miracolo! Everyone is satisfied."

"Including the Englishman who's been cheated?" he asked incredulously.

"It is not a cheat, my lord," she said firmly. "It is a business. The Englishman has bought a beautiful painting that will make him proud and give him pleasure, and will make him the envy of his friends at home. He might even feel doubly pleased that he coaxed the painting from that poor old marchesa for such a pittance. So I ask you, my lord captain, where is the cheat in that, the mistificazione?"

"But what of the truth?" he demanded righteously. "What of honesty?"

"And what of making an honest living?" she retorted. "My paintings will not fade away or grow less beautiful with time, any more than the Englishman's pride in it will lessen. Surely the exchange is a fair one, my lord."

Edward frowned, clasping and unclasping his hands behind his back while he considered. Truth had always meant a great deal to him, and he'd never had much patience with anyone who juggled right against wrong. But Francesca Robin was being far more logical than he'd expected any woman to be, and grudgingly he could see how her argument made a certain sense.

"But if the gentleman truly treasures his painting," he countered, "he would also be devastated to learn it is false."

"Then do not tell him," she said with a shrug that slipped the shawl from her shoulders. "Why destroy his contentment with your smug little truth? Poor dear Raphael died when he was but thirty-seven. He could never have painted a tenth of the paintings you English lords crave."

"Thirty-seven?" He hadn't known that. One more gentlemanly bit of knowledge, he supposed sourly, that he'd missed learning when he was packed off to sea from the schoolroom.

"It is, however, entirely possible that this English gentleman's treasure is a true work of Raphael's genius." She sighed, but with the sly hint of a smile. "Or my father's. Or even mine. Who can tell for sure, eh?"

"Then show me," he commanded. "If your work is so d.a.m.ned fine, then show it to me."

Her eyes widened warily, and she drew back a step. "Alas, my lord captain, that is something I do not do," she demurred uneasily. "It is not my practice to display my own work."

"Why the devil not?" He didn't know why it suddenly mattered so much that he see the paintings. Was it only because he wanted to confront this careless deceit regarding her art, or because he wanted to regain that intimacy, that private glimpse into her true feelings, he'd experienced last night when he'd seen her drawings at the amba.s.sador's palazzo?

She took another step away, wrapping the shawl more tightly around her body. "The only two canvases I have here are unfinished, and not fit to be viewed. But if you wish, my lord, I could show you the paintings in the Oculus instead. Praise the saints, the thieves didn't touch them."

"The Oculus?" He knew he'd heard the word somewhere, but couldn't quite place it.

Francesca nodded vigorously, clearly eager to distract him. "The Oculus Amorandi, my lord! The paintings you and your lieutenant first came to me to see-the paintings that are among the most celebrated in all the Two Sicilies! The crowning works of my father's ill.u.s.trious life!"

"I want to see your paintings, not his." Why didn't she want him to, anyway? "Unless you're ashamed of them. Unless they're not as good as you claim they are."

Instantly her chin flew up, determination incarnate. "No, my lord captain. They're better."

"Then you'll show them to me?"

"Naturalmente." She turned on her heel, briskly beckoning him to follow. As he did, he allowed himself a small smile of triumph that she wouldn't see. Whatever made her leery of showing her work couldn't hold a candle to her pride in those same paintings. Women weren't generally so combative, so quick to accept a challenge, but then she'd made a point of being different from other women, and to his own wry amus.e.m.e.nt, he realized he liked her all the more for doing so.

She led him up a winding back stairway with ancient steps so narrow only half his feet would fit on each one. At the top she pushed open a heavy panelled door and swept inside, holding her arms outstretched as she stood grandly in the center of the small room.

And the room was small, little more than an attic closet tucked up under the house's flat roof with the rough-hewn crossbeams visible overhead, pale light from the north filling the s.p.a.ce through three uncurtained windows.

Clearly this was a private sanctuary, without the calculated effect of the studio gallery below. If Edward had judged the studio to be cluttered, then he never could have envisioned all that was packed within this magpie's s.p.a.ce: rolls of canvas and bundles of wooden stretchers, ancient velvet costumes that mice had nibbled at, bizarre seash.e.l.ls and twisted bits of coral, curling sketches and dog-eared prints pinned haphazardly into the plaster, pots of paint and oil and pigment and jars of ink and boxes bristling with brushes and goose-quills and colored chalks.

But all of this Edward noticed later. What captured his gaze in that first minute and held it fast was the painting propped on the easel. It was a small picture, the sort that a lady or gentleman would keep for personal enjoyment and reflection in a bedchamber or closet, and it obviously wasn't completed-the landscape in the background was barely roughed in, and the larger figure of a woman still oddly suspended, almost floating, against it. Yet her expression as she watched over her infant son, reaching out for a white dove on the gra.s.s at her feet, held the same vibrant joy that he'd seen in Francesca's drawings of the young peasant women with their children.

Now Edward would never claim a conissieur's eye, and he couldn't say how the finished painting would be judged by expert critics. He didn't have much experience with love, either, especially not the kind that fair radiated from Francesca's painting, but he knew enough to recognize it when he saw it, and admire it, and, deep down in the most shadowed corner of his heart, to crave it with the desperation of that long-ago motherless boy banished from his home.

And when he smiled in turn at the mother's smile and the little boy reaching for the bird, he could forget the agonizing screams of the men who'd died around him at Aboukir Bay, forget the white-hot fire of the burning French flagship before it had exploded so close to the Centaur, forget the dismembered, blasted bodies bobbing in the sea around them, a thousand men dead in a single fiery instant.

He wasn't conscious of how this was happening, or why; it simply was. Through the rare gifts of Francesca's talent, he could briefly forget all that was evil and violent in the world and concentrate instead on what was right.

Which, for this moment, included Francesca Robin herself.

"It's not finished, of course," she was saying now, defensively misreading his silence. "I've had to put it aside while I finished another Raphael. But this painting's still nothing to be shamed of, my lord captain, and I'm not."

He looked at her swiftly. "Then why the devil do you lie and hide yourself behind another, eh? Why don't you paint only these, and sign your own name?"

"Oh, naturalmente!" she exclaimed, not bothering to hide her bitterness. "How very easy it all must seem to a fine gentleman like you, graced with birth and power! For a man, everything is so simple, so easy!"

"What in blazes does that have to do with it?" he argued. "If you're proud of what you do-and G.o.d knows you should be, with a gift like this-then that should be reason enough for not wasting your talent on forgeries."

"Perhaps my reason is I like to eat," she said, her scorn withering, "and have wood for my fire, and keep this house as my own. I must live by my wits and my talent, my lord; I have nothing else. But how much do you think a rich Englishman would pay for this painting signed by Francesca Robin? A mere woman of most humble ancestry, who has studied with no great master, served no apprenticeship, belongs to no grand academy?"

Impatiently he glanced back toward the magical painting, refusing to accept her explanation. "You said yourself, signora, that the pleasure of a picture is the same regardless of the artist. So why cheapen yourself with deceit?"

"Perdizione!" Furiously she sliced her hand through the air as if to cut through his protests. "Why must you be so thick-skulled? I have no other support beyond what I can earn for myself, and I can earn far more for a painting signed by Raphael than for one by myself. I have no choice, my lord. That drawing I made for Lady Hamilton last night-she is most generous, but she will pay me only a single zecchino for it, and most of that will go for the frame. Yet I can at the least expect three hundred times that sum for one of my Raphaels, maybe more. If that is deceit, then I am rotten with it, gladly and gratefully."

"Don't talk like that about yourself," he said sharply. "You don't deserve it."

"Why not, when by your definition the only truth in my life is a lie?" She laughed bitterly, flicking her skirts back away from him. "But then you are an English gentleman, and you always tell only the truth, my lord captain, don't you?"

He bowed slightly, wondering how she'd managed to make the truth sound as grim as death. "I endeavor to be truthful, aye. My honor as an officer in His Majesty's navy demands it."

"Aye, aye, so very English," she said, and though she defiantly raised her chin again, he thought he heard another, more vulnerable note beneath the tartness. "Truthful you are, and truthful you must be. So tell me, then, my dear, truthful, lord captain, tell me what no one else will. Will you and all the other honorable English officers soon sail away from Naples and leave us to the French?"

Instantly he felt his face freeze into the blank mask of a senior officer, caculated to reveal nothing. "Why do you ask, signora?"

She swallowed hard, and laughed, quick and nervous. "Why? Is it so very wrong to ask what my future may bring?"