“That is an exaggeration,” he said. “My mother is correct in that a gentleman’s family can continue for some time with crippling debt.”
“But without your contribution, there would have been no escape from that debt. Your father said there was no longer any land nor any rents. You would have had to leave university, for example.”
“That is true.”
“You saved your family’s financial future, and in response, they disowned you publicly.”
“Again, an exaggeration,” he remarked. He turned and stared out the window. “My parents are simply disappointed that I continued to invest in the market after the most immediate necessity had passed.”
She rose and ran over to him, standing at his elbow. “Lucius, you paid your family’s debts, and then they threw you out because of it?”
His jaw was tight. “That casts their actions in an unpleasant light.”
She slipped her hand into his. “Yes, it does.”
He was silent. Then: “You must understand that from my mother’s point of view, I could have done nothing more egregious. She lived with her parents’ disapproval of her own marriage, which became a fear that my father’s blood would show itself.”
“So to her, it has,” Tess said softly. “And since that date, you have continued to pay for your parents’ maintenance?” No answer. “Lady Griselda mentioned that your family owned a large estate in the country.”
She was shocked by the irritation in his eyes. “Does it matter where the estate came from, Tess? Of course they are happier with the land preserved.”
She returned his gaze steadily. “Your mother’s diamonds?”
He turned away again.
She pulled him to face her. “It’s precisely the same thing you did for Imogen, and without even telling me. You saved Imogen’s reputation by paying for a special license, didn’t you?”
“That was nothing,” he said, shrugging again.
“You didn’t save merely Imogen’s reputation. It was all of us.”
“I told you before, Tess, money is simply not something that I care about very much. Remember?”
She did remember. He had told her that he would never care deeply for her, that he was incapable of strong feelings. Tess would—would spit before she believed that nonsense. He even loved his mother, for all she was a woman so obsessed with civility that she had discarded her only son like a worn garment. There was no other explanation for his buying a house on St. James’s Square. And there was no other explanation for the portraits he sprinkled about the house. Not unless he missed his own family, unpleasant though they were.
“Lucius,” she asked, looking up at him, “I have a question, and then I promise that I’ll let you go back to work.”
His eyes instantly lightened. “Anything you desire,” he said.
“The morning when I was to marry Mayne,” she said, gathering all her courage into the question, “I heard him come down the stairs. And then you left the room.”
He seemed to have stiffened.
“What did you say to him?”
He stared down at her. She counted the seconds with the beats of her heart.
“I asked him to leave,” he said finally.
Her heart leaped, but she still wanted to make certain. “Did you pay him to leave?”
A shadow crossed his face. “Is that what you think? That I use money as a stick to force people into compliance with my wishes?”
“No!” And: “Why did you ask Mayne to leave?”
“I wanted you,” he said. “I wanted you myself.”
“Then why didn’t you ask me?” she said, and it was the most important question of all. “Why didn’t you simply ask me?”
“I did ask—”
“Not then,” Tess said. “We barely knew each other when you asked me at the Roman ruin. Why didn’t you ask me again? Why did you allow Mayne to propose?”
He just stared down at her. “You deserve better than I. I’m not capable—”
But her eyes were glowing with some emotion that he couldn’t quite define, and the words died in his mouth. She had turned his life upside down, thrown his reliance on civility to the wind as if those rules were no more than straw.
“I wanted you more than I could admit to myself,” he finally said. “So I asked Mayne to leave.”
“You fixed the problem,” Tess said with satisfaction. “Just as you fixed the problem in your parents’ finances and Imogen’s elopement.”
“No.”
“No?”
“It wasn’t the same, not at all.” He reached out and brushed a lock of hair from her face. “I never wanted to fix anything as much as I wanted to fix your life, Tess. That was the frightening part. It was easy to make the money my father needed; I gambled on the market, and because I don’t really care about money, it came easily. But I couldn’t pay to fix your life. I could never buy you.”
Her eyes were a little teary, but he thought it was with joy. And she was holding him very tightly.
“I care about you too much,” he whispered, pulling her against him so that he didn’t have to look in her eyes as he said it. “I fell in love with you, Tess. And now I love you more than—more than life itself. I know you’d rather be with Imogen, and that your family comes first in your heart—”
But she was shaking her head and pulling away from him. “I thought that…I thought that I was marrying for my family, and I thought that my heart would break when Imogen cast me out. And I was worried that your heart was destroyed by a similar event. But it’s not, is it?”
“No,” he said, searching her eyes.
“My heart would break if you ever left me,” she whispered. “If you ever threw me out.”
He pulled her back against his heart, into his arms. “I would never leave you,” he said. “Never. I could no more throw you from my life than I could take my heart from my chest.”
She raised her eyes to see the love there, and it was so fierce that it burned into her heart, never to be doubted. Never to be questioned.
The words, “I love you, I love you” came from one pair of lips to the other, a rough whisper from one heart to the other, a promise from one soul to the other.
Epilogue
T hey were sitting for a family portrait. They had been sitting for it for the greater part of eight months, since Benjamin West was so old that his hands grew tired after an hour or so of wielding his brushes. But it seemed he was finally done. He lifted his head and nodded, signaling to his assistant to take his brushes. He was a delicate old gentleman, dressed in black velvet and high heels, wearing a powdered wig of the style of his youth.
“I believe that I am finished,” he observed, standing up. He drifted away. “I shall leave you to contemplate yourselves in privacy.” And with a wave of a lace handkerchief, he was gone.“The only trouble,” Tess said to her husband as they stood before the portrait on its easel, “is that Phin walks now, and he’s pictured as a mere babe in white lace.”
In Benjamin West’s portrait, Phin was an angelic infant with no more than a tuft of hair and a sweetly sleepy expression. In fact, they all looked rather indolent, if exquisite; it seemed to be a marker of Mr. West’s work.