Page 82 of His Mistress, His Muse, and Other Madness
Damn. He couldn’t tell them to go away. “No. Thank you.”
“Very well,” Matilda said. “I’ll have something sent up.” As she had every night since his return here.
“Thank you.” The words felt weak on his tongue as he walked his beaten path through his drawings, and his room yawned into silence once more.
There were a few sketches of that arse Bradley and his lady, but they were rather boring. Theo had asked his mother to make inquiries about the lady in letters sent to London friends, and she’d discovered scandal. Bradley’s mistress from the house party was married, and her husband had no idea she’d been anywhere other than their country estate the last fortnight. Theo had drawn several usable satires since finding that bit of gossip out. The problem was he no longer wished to use them.
His wardrobe, doors slightly ajar, seemed to grow larger. He’d hidden the slim box of charcoal drawings that had arrived days ago from Holloway House there. The kind Earl of Pentshire had sent them to him with an invitation to join them next year and his sympathies for having not won the competition. Despite the wardrobe’s looming presence, he ignored it.
“Theodore, my darling.” No knock this time. Just his mother’s voice crooning to him. “Come out, please. Tell us what has happened.”
“I’m fine, Mother. I’m working.” He knelt and snapped one sketch off the ground. Bradley with a rat’s face, scurrying out of a moat and running beneath a lady’s skirts, the uniquely distinguishable Holloway House behind them. Promising.
“You work in London. We are not in London.”
“I work where it pleases me.”
“I had a dream last night,” his mother said. Theo groaned. “There was a woman.”
A dagger to the gut, that. Yes, there was a woman.
“But her features were unclear, and she sailed in a boat farther and farther away, and—”
“Mother, I’m fine.”
“Yes. Very well.” Her voice unsure, though a bit hurt. “It was likely only Lady Cordelia. Since she’ll be leaving our protection soon. And I only associated it with you because you’re the one who’s been trying to find her a new home.” A pause. “You have found her a home, haven’t you?”
“Everything is fine, Mother,” he snapped. He’d throw Cordelia into a coach and kidnap her if he had to, bring her here to keep her safe. She’d hate him after that, of course, but she’d enjoy the female company at Briarcliff.
“You were always such a sunny little boy.” His mother sighed. How many damn sighs would he collect outside his bedchamber door? “If you need us, darling boy, we are here.”
Then soft footsteps. Retreating, pulling the tissue of his heart too thin.
Bah.
Good. She’d left. Now he could concentrate, choose the sketch that would sell for enough pounds to finance Cordelia’s school. He held the sketch up to study it once more, winced. He saw it not as the ton would see it—with glee and no little bit of vitriol—but as Cordelia would see it, with empathy. The publication of such information would hurt not just Bradley, but his mistress. Or her children. Her husband too. But perhaps he deserved to know. Undoubtedly, he did. And Bradley would be ruined, and justice would be upheld and…
Cordelia would never see him again.
But without it he’d never be able to provide for her. And the one thing he’d never questioned, not even when leaving her damn house, was that he’d provide for her, care for her. She didn’t want his care though. It came with stipulations. Her well-being could not be funded through the ruination of others.
And he… admired that. His head hung back on his neck and growl that became a low, persistent scream scraped out of his throat. What was he supposed to do? He had no choices!
Not true, the wardrobe said. It seemed to have grown the size of the room, bigger, big enough to hold all his mistakes, all his faults, and the box of paintings peeked out at him.
They were not an option. He was not an artist. He’d failed to win a simple country house party competition. He tore across the path through his drawings and ripped the wardrobe door open, ripped the box open, and froze.
On top of the very first drawing he’d made of Cordelia—a kiss, her closed eye—lay an unopened letter with his name scrawled across it in his father’s handwriting. Had he… dropped it at some point? Left it in his bedchamber at Holloway House? Would have been better if the servants had never found it, if Pentshire had never returned it to him.
The tear in it from the knife he’d stabbed it with, weeks ago now, seemed a jagged wound.
He wore a corresponding one in his own gut. Cordelia had put it there with her accusations. She’d smashed the artifacts that had held so much sway over her and dared him to do the same. The letter winked up at him.
Fine. If she could rip up her old art, he could face the damn letter.
Theo kicked the drawings and sat amongst them, scattering the mermaid, the breakfast romance judges, and all the other useless and silly sketches he’d produced since leaving her in London. Most of them of her. Many of them fit for no one’s eyes but his. And hers. Drawings of curves and angles and hidden bits, of the mole hidden on the inside of her knee and the scar that stretched tight over his right hip.
What good would opening the letter do? What would it solve? She’d told him to be who he was, not who his father’s influence had made him. She was wrong. He’d made himself. He’d made himself.
