corroboration that this was the woman he had seen outside Tate’s. She seemed different. The very way she was standing gave him pause. Far from open, her arms were clutching something to her chest, a seeming prop of this new mood. It looked to be a flat box, perhaps the flat box from that morning. She hugged it in front of her, in the posture of someone terribly cold. Or else straitjacketed.
It was this stiff, constrained back he came up on. Black taffeta stretched taut over moiré shoulder blades. She was staring at a huge painting that hung in the reception hall. The picture ran many feet above her head. It was a full-length portrait; Graham did not know of whom, only that it was kept for its ornateness. Rich colors, gilt-framed, and draped with heavy aging fabric. At the sound of Graham’s steps, she tried to drag her eyes away, but clearly this was difficult. Her eyes slid down the drapery and along the room, pulling reluctantly over the items that lined its walls. Picture, chair, picture, settee, picture, small table, vitrine. Until her objectivity rested on Graham.
He was brought up short. She was so unexplainably different from anything he had imagined.
She was small and thin, though not what he would have called bony, and her eyes were not the color of plums. They were merely blue. Her thick, curly hair was pale, a kind of colorless blond. It was also damp—she wore no bonnet. A fine mist of droplets had sifted into the wayward bits of hair that were trying to escape a tight chignon. Her skin looked blanched beneath a speckling of faint freckles that were more numerous across her nose. The most outstandingthing about her was that she looked very, very young, not in her thirties but in her twenties. Graham was surprised. He had assumed she would be closer to his own age.
“Lady Motmarche? Netham,” he introduced himself with a nod. Then his familiar name, “Graham Wessit,” as an act of cordiality to a cousin, an interesting cousin. “May I be of service to you?”
The little marchioness responded to his politeness with some inanity of her own. They nodded through introductions. Her voice was soft, controlled, strangely sweet. The sound of it was the nicest thing about her.
Graham dropped his eyes down the woman, as if there were something he might have missed. There wasn’t very much to her. She was all dress, yards and yards of prim, proper widowhood.
It was then that he recognized what she was holding.
Graham blinked. The room shifted. Air seemed to push up against him rapidly all at once, as if a railway train had come out of a tunnel with him standing squarely in the middle of its tracks. Like an idiot, he could do nothing but stare.
There, cradled in a pair of narrow black arms, was something he hadn’t seen in twenty years. And something he could have happily gone another twenty without. Henry’s widow was holding an art case known sometimes by the underground name of Pandetti’s Orchids and sometimes by the more bluntly crude double entendre: The little widow held Pandetti’s Box.
Chapter 6
Submit found the earl of Netham to be almost a walking corollary to the box: entirely too good-looking, suspiciously decorated; a glossy exterior.
He was tall, loose-limbed, road-shouldered. His clothes were fussy and pretentious, his coloring dark. He had black hair and black eyes that spoke of Moorish blood from the century when English titles were earned in Aquitaine. His eyes were set deep beneath a sharply defined brow, the sort of facial architecture that invited dark, dramatic circles under stress—there were traces of these now. The eyes themselves were large and heavy-lidded. They turned down at the outside edges at a melancholy angle: beautiful, romantic eyes.
They were the sort of eyes—he was the sort of man—over which women could make asses of themselves.
Submit spoke her apologies and explanations with a kind of aloofness from this fact. “So sorry to disturb you at this
It was this stiff, constrained back he came up on. Black taffeta stretched taut over moiré shoulder blades. She was staring at a huge painting that hung in the reception hall. The picture ran many feet above her head. It was a full-length portrait; Graham did not know of whom, only that it was kept for its ornateness. Rich colors, gilt-framed, and draped with heavy aging fabric. At the sound of Graham’s steps, she tried to drag her eyes away, but clearly this was difficult. Her eyes slid down the drapery and along the room, pulling reluctantly over the items that lined its walls. Picture, chair, picture, settee, picture, small table, vitrine. Until her objectivity rested on Graham.
He was brought up short. She was so unexplainably different from anything he had imagined.
She was small and thin, though not what he would have called bony, and her eyes were not the color of plums. They were merely blue. Her thick, curly hair was pale, a kind of colorless blond. It was also damp—she wore no bonnet. A fine mist of droplets had sifted into the wayward bits of hair that were trying to escape a tight chignon. Her skin looked blanched beneath a speckling of faint freckles that were more numerous across her nose. The most outstandingthing about her was that she looked very, very young, not in her thirties but in her twenties. Graham was surprised. He had assumed she would be closer to his own age.
“Lady Motmarche? Netham,” he introduced himself with a nod. Then his familiar name, “Graham Wessit,” as an act of cordiality to a cousin, an interesting cousin. “May I be of service to you?”
The little marchioness responded to his politeness with some inanity of her own. They nodded through introductions. Her voice was soft, controlled, strangely sweet. The sound of it was the nicest thing about her.
Graham dropped his eyes down the woman, as if there were something he might have missed. There wasn’t very much to her. She was all dress, yards and yards of prim, proper widowhood.
It was then that he recognized what she was holding.
Graham blinked. The room shifted. Air seemed to push up against him rapidly all at once, as if a railway train had come out of a tunnel with him standing squarely in the middle of its tracks. Like an idiot, he could do nothing but stare.
There, cradled in a pair of narrow black arms, was something he hadn’t seen in twenty years. And something he could have happily gone another twenty without. Henry’s widow was holding an art case known sometimes by the underground name of Pandetti’s Orchids and sometimes by the more bluntly crude double entendre: The little widow held Pandetti’s Box.
Chapter 6
Submit found the earl of Netham to be almost a walking corollary to the box: entirely too good-looking, suspiciously decorated; a glossy exterior.
He was tall, loose-limbed, road-shouldered. His clothes were fussy and pretentious, his coloring dark. He had black hair and black eyes that spoke of Moorish blood from the century when English titles were earned in Aquitaine. His eyes were set deep beneath a sharply defined brow, the sort of facial architecture that invited dark, dramatic circles under stress—there were traces of these now. The eyes themselves were large and heavy-lidded. They turned down at the outside edges at a melancholy angle: beautiful, romantic eyes.
They were the sort of eyes—he was the sort of man—over which women could make asses of themselves.
Submit spoke her apologies and explanations with a kind of aloofness from this fact. “So sorry to disturb you at this
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