She counseled, she flattered, she pretended to inspect her embroidery. He would adore this woman until his dying day.

Flint passed her the letters and a pair of his reading glasses.

* * *

“I am going to heave this cat at the next Windham sibling who just happens to come through that door without knocking.” Jenny kissed the top of Timothy’s head, so the cat at least would know she was blustering.

Though only just.

Elijah glanced at the clock then resumed studying the side-by-side portraits of the duchess. “We have at least another twenty minutes before the next sneak inspection. Your portrait of Her Grace is superior to mine.”

She put the cat up on the mantel, having realized the room’s higher spaces were warmer than any place closer to the floor. When she turned back to the easels, Elijah was still before them, arms crossed, lips pursed.

What had he been—?

“I beg your pardon. What did you say, Elijah?”

He held out a hand. “I said, your portrait of Her Grace is superior to my own.”

She did not take his hand. “You spend better than a week carping, criticizing, and sniping at my work then pronounce it better than yours?”

He dropped his hand. “I do not snipe.”

“The Duke of Moreland is not a pair of old riding boots, Genevieve,” she quoted, folding her arms.

“He’s not. I’m trying to figure out how your portrait is better,” he said. “I’m trying to find the technical terms, the details of execution, the subtle compositional differences, and I can’t. It’s simply… better.”

She wanted those details too, wanted him to enumerate them, write them down in triplicate. She wanted him to send a copy to The Times, give the second copy to her, and post the third copy on the door to the breakfast parlor. “Both portraits are fine likenesses, and I’m having more trouble with His Grace.”

“I think most people have more trouble with your father.” He stepped back. “Color is part of your secret. Your palette is more varied. You have different colors of shadow.”

She was not going to let him start on her shadows. Not when he’d paid her such a fine, rare compliment. “It’s time we took a walk.”

“Yes. Because in”—another look at the clock—“seventeen minutes, one of your sisters will burst in here, all smiles, and ask if you’d like to take the children down to pet the horses’ noses, or get up a game of hoodman-blind.”

She gave Timothy a farewell caress. “I’ve always hated that game. Nothing about being without sight has ever struck me as enjoyable.”

The door swung open, and a shaggy canine behemoth padded in, followed by a dark-haired little girl. “Hullo, Aunt Jen!”

“Bronwyn, hello. Please tell Scout not to knock anything over.”

On the mantel, Timothy had come to attention, though he remained sitting. He hissed at the dog and added a low, menacing growl for good measure.

“Scout, come.”

The dog ignored his owner, another Windham grandchild, this one down from the North with St. Just and his countess. The scent of Elijah’s boots was apparently more compelling than the punishment for indifferent hearing.

“Scout, come here this instant.” Bronwyn sounded like her papa, the former cavalry officer, but the dog had apparently never bought his colors.

Elijah nudged the beast in the direction of the door with his knee. “Miss Winnie, was there something you were looking for? Something you wanted to tell us?”

“Yes!” The dog walked over to the girl while Jenny steadied a jar of brushes his tail had nearly knocked to the floor. “I forget—oh, I remember. Aunt Eve is here. You have to come get kissed. She’s going to have a baby, and Papa says from the size of her he thinks it will be a baby horse.”

Jenny hoped St. Just hadn’t said that within Eve’s hearing—though he probably had. “We’ll be along presently. You can tell everybody we’re coming.” The child whirled and darted from the room, and the dog trotted after her. “Elijah, do you have your key?”

He produced the key from his watch pocket. “Always. Yours is in the lock. If Lady Eve’s arrival merits as much celebration as Rose’s and her parents’ did, then we won’t get a thing done for the rest of the day.”

He was right, and that was fine with Jenny. She wanted to treasure his judgment of her portrait for at least a few hours before she again tackled the challenge that was her dear papa.

Eve was, indeed, well along in her pregnancy. Deene, her husband, hovered like a mother cat, until Westhaven suggested the ladies might want their sister to themselves for a bit, and Deene was all but forcibly dragged off to the billiards room by the menfolk.

While Jenny and Elijah slipped out the door.

* * *

When Genevieve Windham was allowed to paint for hours, she became luminous, exhausted, and serene—as if she’d been well satisfied in bed. Observations like that were only one reason Elijah found it increasingly difficult to work beside her day after day.

As they crossed the back terrace, he wrapped her hand over his arm. “What do you find difficult about your father’s portrait?”

“I find Papa difficult,” Jenny said. “He’s noisy, arrogant, absorbed with his bills and committees, and yet, he’s devoted to Her Grace, well intended, and would cheerfully—cheerfully—endure endless torture or lay down his life for any member of his family.”

That was all likely true, particularly the protective and devoted parts. “You’re afraid he’ll forbid you to go to France.”

She tucked closer, and Elijah cast around for something comforting to say besides, “So why the hell are you going?” Particularly since he’d seen that sketchbook full of dying children and Jenny’s departed brother, he’d understood why she was going, though she likely did not admit all of her motivations to herself. Unless he was very much mistaken, she had equally skilled sketches of her brother Bart secreted somewhere too.

“How do you like my portrait of Sindal’s boys, Genevieve?”

“I adore it. Sophie and Sindal adore it, and Lord and Lady Rothgreb will be crowing to all of their neighbors about it. You made two busy, grubby, noisy little boys charming, and yet, it’s them. It really is them.”

He wanted to kiss her, and not for the usual reasons. He wanted to kiss her because something about having her on hand when he’d done those sittings had given him the courage to come out of some sort of artistic exile and enjoy his work again.

They left the terrace, moving across the snowy wasteland of the Moreland gardens. “That’s what you have to do with His Grace. You have to be honest but compassionate, so your rendering really is him.”

“Because the portrait is for Her Grace, I tell myself I must try to see Papa as she sees him. He is her dear Percival, and whatever there is about him to love, Her Grace focuses on that.”

They were moving farther and farther from the house, far enough that Elijah let himself take Jenny’s hand. “My parents are the same way. Her ladyship might seem like a manipulative, scheming French baggage to some. To Flint, she’s charming, determined, and adept at managing a big family. He isn’t some fellow who likes outlandish waistcoats, he’s her dear Flint. I couldn’t see that when I was younger, but they are a team in ways I could not appreciate then.”

She paused before a gate in a tall wrought iron fence, her expression concerned. “You’re going to go home, aren’t you, Elijah?”

“Everybody goes home, eventually.” He took her hand in his again. The snow was deeper here, more than a pretty dusting. “I miss my family, and they miss me. My mother claims the Academy will never allow me full membership.”

“You think she’s scheming?”

“I think I’m as talented as the next four contenders put together, and there are two vacancies.” Though talent had never been necessary or sufficient to gain entrance. “I think a man, particularly an arrogant young man, should pay the consequences for giving his word.”

And yet, how long were those consequences supposed to last, and upon whom were they to devolve?

“I will miss my family too. I know that.”

Not the way she’d miss them when the winter wind on the Channel hit her in the face like a slap, and nobody and nothing could turn the boat around. “You’ll be fine. You’ll make new friends. You’ll have your art.”

And far from her family’s benevolent meddling, she’d effectively eliminate any and all possibility of having children and a family of her own.

She said nothing until they reached their destination, and then she turned a slow circle, taking in each gravestone and marker. “You remembered. Oh, Elijah, you remembered.”

He would remember this too, remember Jenny Windham wrapping her arms around him as the wind picked up and the flurries danced down. He’d remember that when he might have argued her away from her course, when he might have offered her marriage and frequent trips to Paris, he’d instead held her and held her and held her.

And then he’d let her go.

* * *

“Jenny has taken a daft notion to go to Paris.” Louisa knew she sounded worried, but it couldn’t be helped. The parlor door was closed, the syllabub had been served, and this was likely the only privacy the children, spouses, and parents would allow her with her sisters.

“Paris in springtime is supposed to be lovely,” Sophie observed. “Sindal says he’ll take me one of these years, but there always seems to be a baby on the way or one just arrived.”

Petite, blond Eve, her feet up on a hassock, patted her belly. “Please, God, let one arrive before I explode or Deene frets himself into a decline. Lou wouldn’t be worried if Jenny were making a quick shopping visit.”