Zoë was no historian and knew little about antiques, but she was sure she was looking at the finest that money could buy in the eighteenth century.
“Do you like it?” came a male voice, and she turned to see a tall man, dressed all in black except for his white shirt, standing in the doorway. She knew who he was since she’d drawn him several times. He looked like the picture of Nathaniel Hawthorne that Faith had found in one of Jeanne’s books. In other words, he was divinely handsome.
More important, he had a manner about him that let her know he owned the house. If this man were wearing rags, he’d still be in command.
Zoë found that she was completely tongue-tied as she looked at him. Between his beauty and the fact that she was a stranger snooping in his house, she didn’t know what to expect. When did they do away with drawing and quartering as a punishment for crimes?
He walked across the room to stand beside her. “This furniture is modern and some people do not like it, but I do.”
When Zoë still didn’t speak, he went on. “My mother always said that a true aristocrat sits on gold, but I never liked gold furniture. What do you think?”
“No gold,” Zoë managed to say, then got hold of herself. “I didn’t mean to trespass, but—”
“I am used to Amy’s strays,” he said, smiling and looking even more handsome. “She is going to bankrupt me.” His words would have been offensive from someone else since they were referring to her, but from him, somehow, they put her at ease.
“Amy said she’s been here for nearly a year,” Zoë said, searching for conversation.
“Fourteen months,” he said, and she had the idea that he could tell her how many days it had been. He’s in love with her! Zoë thought. He is flat-out, no-holds-barred in love with her.
Zoë turned away from him, afraid that he would read her thoughts. If he was in love with Amy, how was he going to feel when she disappeared in just three weeks? On the other hand, someone who seemed to be Amy had been here for a year, so maybe that person would stay.
Zoë could feel him looking at her, as though he expected her to say something. She was searching for words when she saw a miniature portrait nestled in a white napkin lying on the top of the sideboard. It was no more than four inches tall, in oil and probably on ivory. She picked it up. “She’s pretty.”
When he said nothing, she looked back at him. He suddenly looked as though he might cry.
“I’m sorry,” she said as she put the picture down. “I didn’t mean to be rude.” She stepped back from him.
“It is I who should apologize,” he said as he picked up the little portrait and gazed at it. “Usually, this is in my room, but the frame has a crack in it, so it’s to be repaired.”
“I could do it,” Zoë said.
“You? Do you have experience in this?”
“I’ve been working with framing for several years now,” she said. She was watching him and figuring out who the woman in the picture was. Unfortunately, Zoë’d had quite a bit of experience with that look. Many of her clients had looked at photographs of deceased loved ones like that.
“Who was she?” Zoë whispered, letting the “was” tell him that she understood.
“My wife,” he said, his eyes still on the portrait.
“I can make a larger picture from that,” she said. “I can make copies for you.”
He looked at her, blinking for a moment, then he smiled. “You are a painter?”
“Yes,” Zoë answered and straightened her back. If she had a job here she wouldn’t feel as though she were trespassing.
He put the picture back on the napkin. “I have a painter living here,” he said, “and he will repair the frame. And he will make copies for me. He is painting my sister now. You will have to ask his permission if you are to work for him.”
With that, he gave a little bow and left the room.
For a moment, Zoë stood there staring after him. He had dismissed her, and she had no doubt that it was because she was a woman. He’d said she was to work “for” the man. Didn’t he think a woman could paint as well as a man?
While it was true that Zoë had never been to art school, had never had a lesson in her life, she had certainly read a great deal on her own. She knew what itinerant portrait painters in the eighteenth century did. Sure, there was a Stuart now and then, but mainly they painted on boards in a style that was stiff and, to Zoë’s eye, ugly.
She went down the stairs to the kitchen where Amy was at the table kneading bread.
“I met your big, beautiful boss,” she said from across the table. The people in the room didn’t exactly stop what they were doing, but they did slow down, and the voices ceased.
“What’s he done now?” Amy asked, not pausing in her kneading.
“I volunteered to paint some pictures of his wife, but he said he already has a painter. If I don’t draw and paint, why am I here? What am I to do for three weeks? Play the pianoforte?”
“He told you about his wife?” Amy asked. If possible, it got quieter in the room.
“Not really,” Zoë said, “but you remember that I’ve been living in other people’s houses for years now, and I know what it means when their eyes look at a portrait in that way.”
Amy quit kneading and wiped her hands on a damp cloth. After a glance at all the people in the kitchen who were staring at them, she put her hand under Zoë’s arm and ushered her up the stairs.
“This place gossips more than any tabloid,” she said when they were upstairs. “Zoë, I know that I brought you into this and I’ll fix everything that I can, but it’s true that he has a painter living here right now. If I’d known that when we were in Maine I wouldn’t have asked you to come. I’m sorry. But couldn’t you just enjoy what you see here? I can get him to buy you some paper and pens and you can sketch what you see. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
“Why do you always call him ‘he’? Doesn’t he have a name?”
“Sure,” Amy said. “It’s Tristan, but it’s also the eighteenth century. I can’t call him by his first name because I’m a lowly housekeeper, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to call him ‘my lord.’” She gave Zoë a pleading look. “I really do have a lot of work to do. Feeding the people who live here is a major undertaking every day. If I run out of anything I can’t just go to the supermarket. I have to wait for it to grow!”
“So you’re telling me to entertain myself and get out of your hair.”
“Pretty much,” Amy said. “Why don’t you find the painter and talk to him about his work? Maybe you two could…” Amy was looking at Zoë as though she’d never seen her before.
“Could what?” Zoë asked. “Paint by duet? Maybe I could set up a school and train some of these roving painters in modern techniques.”
“I think that’s a great idea,” Amy said, still looking at Zoë in wonder.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I was just thinking about something. You know that it’s been said that there are no coincidences. Maybe you came back with me for a reason.”
“And that reason was…?”
Amy smiled brightly. “To let you give lessons to these bad painters who travel around and make rotten pictures. I think you should go talk to Russell.”
“Russell being the painter?”
“Yes.”
“And since you can say his name that means he’s not of the upper classes.”
“He certainly isn’t.”
“So how do I find him?”
“He’s usually in the stables this time of day. Beth—that’s Tristan’s young sister and who he’s painting—goes out riding now, so Russell hangs around the stableyard.”
“Waiting for her?” Zoë asked. “Amy, what are you up to? Is he in love with his subject? The master’s nubile sister?”
“Maybe,” Amy said. “But I think you should make up your own mind.”
“Okay, I’ll go so you can get back to baking your four-an
d-twenty blackbirds or whatever. What does this Mr. Russell look like?”
“It’s Mr. Johns. He’s Russell Johns. You haven’t heard of him, have you?”
“No. To my knowledge, his work didn’t make the art history books.”
“Maybe you can fix that,” Amy said. “You could give him lessons.” Her eyes were sparkling as though she were enjoying a great joke. “Russell is…” She hesitated.
“He’s what?”
“Little,” Amy said. “Little and scrawny and has terrible teeth. You can’t miss him. He’s probably with the head stableman now. If you can’t find him, ask someone. I have to go,” she said, and headed downstairs before Zoë could say another word.
“Why do I get the idea that a joke is being played on me?” Zoë said aloud. She hadn’t been given much time to think about the bizarre idea of time travel, but if she had, she was sure she would have thought it would be different from this. She would have thought that they’d be three frightened, disoriented women who needed one another. Instead, Faith had disappeared as though she lived here and knew just where she wanted to go, and Amy! Zoë couldn’t wrap her brain around the way Amy was acting, as though she were some freak of nature who lived comfortably in two time periods with hundreds of years between them.
“I think I’m the only sane one,” Zoë said aloud as she left the dining room and turned left. She was in the huge central hall of the house. The floor was of black-and-white marble. There was a heavy table in the center that was probably medieval, and an enormous marble-encased fireplace in one wall. The ceiling was decorated in a geometric design comprising a large oval with curved-sided triangles around it.
The front door was open and she saw a couple of men walking past. She started to ask them where the stables were, but then she saw a wide gravel path that looked well used and she decided to follow it. She wasn’t looking forward to a confrontation with the scrawny Mr. Johns. If his lordship, the master, was any indication of the state of women’s rights around here, the little man would refuse to believe that a woman so much as knew which end of a paintbrush to use.
As she walked, she began to calm down. She was used to living in places that she didn’t know, and over the years she’d perfected her ability to settle into someone else’s home and make it her own for the time she would be staying with the family. She’d also learned how to say no. When the mistress of the house asked her if she’d “mind” putting in a load of clothes while they were out, she told her she did mind and wouldn’t do it. Never once had she been fired for her refusal to do more than make portraits.
Some of the families she’d loved and some she had run from. She still sent postcards to a couple of them, always letting them know where she was and what she was doing. It was the closest thing she had to a family. In all the years since she’d been out of the hospital she had never once been tempted to marry some guy and have her own home. She’d never admitted it to Jeanne, but it haunted her every day to think what she could have done to make an entire town hate her.
When Zoë got to the stables, she stopped and looked at the beautiful stone buildings, with the horses sticking their heads out of the stalls to look at her. She thought what a shame it would be that someday these would probably be turned into tiny houses. She thought of the two world wars that were coming and she shivered.
“Too cold for you?” came a deep voice. “Or did someone walk over your grave?”
Zoë turned to see a tall man, with broad shoulders, and a muscular body. He looked like he’d worked outdoors all his life. He had strong features, with bright blue eyes. His black hair was a thick mane and there was a dimple in his chin. Zoë had seen more handsome men, but she’d never seen one whom she was more drawn to. If she’d met him in her own time, she thought she just might have asked him to go home with her immediately.
He was staring at her, waiting for her to say something, but Zoë just kept looking at him and blinking. “Do you have a tongue, lass?”
There was a trace of a Scottish burr in his voice. She didn’t know what got into her, but she stuck her tongue out at him.
He laughed in a way that made the horses prick up their ears. “Aye, you have a tongue. Are you one of the girls that came with Miss Amy?” he asked, then without waiting for her answer, he turned back toward the stables.
It seemed natural to follow him as he went into a big stall. Zoë didn’t know much about horses, but she didn’t think this one looked like a derby winner.
“Zoë,” she said as the man picked up an iron tool and started for the horse.
“Is that your name?” He lifted the horse’s leg between his and Zoë saw that the man’s thighs were heavy, thick with muscle.
“Yes, that’s my name,” she said as she turned away to keep from staring at him. “I’m looking for Russell Johns.”
“And what would you want with him?”
Zoë was trying to recover from her initial clumsiness. It wasn’t often that she saw a man she was this attracted to. But how did one impress a man in the eighteenth century? she wondered. “I was told I’m to teach him how to paint.”
The man paused with the horse’s hoof in his hands. “Are you now?” he said coolly. “Are you sure he needs to learn his trade?”
From his tone, she could tell she wasn’t saying the right thing. “I don’t know. It’s just what Amy told me to do.”
“Miss Amy told you the man needed to learn to paint?”
“Not exactly.” She was backtracking because she realized she seemed to have offended him. Whatever she was doing wrong, she was going to make sure Amy got the blame for it. She decided to tell him the truth. “Amy said he was a scrawny little man with bad teeth who hung around the stables waiting for the earl’s young sister to return, and she—Amy, that is—suggested I give the man some art lessons. Amy didn’t say so, but I don’t think she believes he’s very good at making portraits.”
The man dropped the horse’s hoof and gave her a dazzling smile that showed his even white teeth. It seemed that Zoë had done the right thing in telling him the truth. “Did she now?” he said. He looked Zoë up and down in a way that made a trickle of sweat run down between her breasts.
He wiped his hands with a cloth and said, “Can you really paint?”
“A bit,” she said in a modest way that implied that she was actually very good.
“It’s near dinnertime here and everyone is away, getting ready to eat. What say you that I get Miss Amy to put some food in a basket and we take it to the lake? Look what I have.”
Her eyes widened as he held up a wooden box that was covered with runs of different colors of paint. “This is the painter’s kit. He left it here.” He turned it around in his hands as though he’d never seen it before. “Shall we take it with us and you can give me a lesson or two?”
Zoë smiled. “That’s a great idea.” She thought that if the man did have a rudimentary talent, maybe she could teach him enough to get him out of the stables.
“Can you ride a horse?”
Zoë looked at the big animal in front of her and gave a small smile. “I’ve been on a horse before,” she said as she thought of pony rides at the fair.
The man sighed. “I was hoping you could not ride so you could get behind me.” Again, he looked her up and down.
“I know nothing at all about horses,” she said quickly. “Nothing whatever.”
He smiled. “Wait here a moment and I’ll get things ready. Why don’t you look in that box and see if what you need is in there?”
Zoë sat down on the straw with the box full of art supplies. There was clean paper and pencils, charcoal, and a few pieces of chalk. There were watercolors too, but she had no water. “What’s your name?” she asked as he left with the horse.
“MacKenzie,” he said, then was gone.
Zoë looked down at the paper, picked up a pencil, and thought about nothing else.
“Miss Amy, I’d like a word with you.”
She looked u
p from the bread she was thumping and met Russell’s angry eyes. She had no doubt that Zoë had been to see him.
“I can explain,” Amy said, moving so she was on the other side of the table from him.
“I would like to hear it.” All of the women in the kitchen had stopped working and were staring at him. There wasn’t a woman on the place—except Amy and Beth—who hadn’t fluttered her eyelashes at Russell Johns.
“Zoë is a friend of mine and she’s new here,” Amy began, then picked up some carrots and started scraping them.
“And so you felt the need to lie to her about me?”
“She likes to paint and draw. She never stops. I thought you two might get on well together.”
“So you told her I was a scrawny little thing with bad teeth and that I needed lessons? That she needed to teach me?”
The entire room stopped and listened, with a few of the younger women trying to suppress their giggles. They were used to Miss Amy going at the master, but she’d never done anything to Mr. Johns.
“I wanted her to feel at ease with you,” Amy said. “I wanted her to meet you without knowing who you were at first. You know, Russell, you can be a bit intimidating to an innocent young girl.”
“Innocent? She has the conceit of my old painting master. Has she even seen my work? Has she seen that I need no lessons?”
“No…” Amy said slowly. “I didn’t let her see for fear that your great talent would make her put down her brush and never pick it up again.”
Russell opened his mouth in astonishment. “Do you not fear for your soul when you tell such lies?”
“Only a bit,” Amy said. Her head came up. “What have you done with her? So help me, if you threw one of your great rages and called her some name, I’ll put sand in your meat pies.”
When Russell said nothing, Amy looked at him hard. “You didn’t do anything, did you? Who did you tell her you were?”
He turned to the women standing at the side. “I want a basket packed. Fill it with the best. And put some perry in there.”
Amy walked around the table to him. “You didn’t tell her who you were, did you?”
“I had no chance to tell her,” he said. “She came to me with the idea that I was someone else. You told her that.”