He was glaring down at her in a way that intimidated most people, but Amy didn’t back away. “What did you tell her your name was?”
“I have many names,” he said, not looking at her but watching the women pack a basket full of food.
“What are you up to?” Amy asked.
Russell took the basket a woman handed him, then smiled down at Amy. “Do not worry about us. I am going to let her give me drawing lessons.” Turning, he walked toward the back door. “MacKenzie is my mother’s name,” he said over his shoulder.
Amy looked back at her kitchen staff. They were all standing still, doing nothing, but gazing at the place where Russell had been. She could practically see their hearts beating. “Work!” she said sharply as she clapped her hands twice. “Is that soup ready? Check that the oven isn’t too hot. Agnes, tuck your hair up. I don’t want any in the bread.”
Amy turned away from them so they wouldn’t see her smile. She knew that underneath his giant ego Russell was a good man. And she also knew that if she’d introduced Zoë and him as they actually were, they would have instantly taken a professional dislike to each other. Russell would have wanted to let her know that this was his commission and he wanted no competition. And Zoë would have been disdainful of his work even if it rivaled Michelangelo’s. All she’d wanted to do was to get them to spend a few hours together before the truth was told. She had a feeling that if they got to know each other, they’d become friends, maybe even very good friends.
Amy refused to let herself think about what would happen when they left in three short weeks, but she believed in taking love whenever and wherever it could be found.
So now Zoë and Russell were going off on a picnic with a box of art supplies. It couldn’t get more romantic than that.
She took the smile off her face before she turned back to the army of people working in the kitchen.
Fourteen
“It’s beautiful here,” Zoë said, her hand on a tree branch above her head, as she looked across the lake. Behind her MacKenzie was putting out the food on a cloth.
“Aye, it is,” he said, glancing at the lake, but his eyes were spending more time on her. “Come and eat and show me what you did while I was away.”
Turning, she smiled and went to sit on the cloth across from him. “What’s this?” she asked as she picked up what looked to be a pewter mug.
“Perry,” he said as he opened the art case. “Have you not had it before? It’s made from perry pears.”
She took a sip. It was delicious and she could feel that it was potent. She’d better not drink too much. She picked up a chicken leg, but stopped when she saw that he was looking at her sketches.
For a moment she waited for him to tell her they were fabulous, the best he’d ever seen. It was what most people did when they saw Zoë’s drawings. But he didn’t comment. Instead, he studied them, spending several minutes on each one, then he propped them against the tree, and looked at them from a distance.
Zoë swallowed. It was as though her work were being critiqued by a gallery owner, something that always made her nervous.
She got up and went to stand beside him to look at the drawings. She’d made three sketches of what she saw. First was the stableyard with the horses’ heads turned toward her. After that was completed, she’d moved to the back of the stable and drawn the parkland, with a tall wall in the background. Last, she’d made a quick sketch of a wildflower she’d never seen before and had added a bit of color with the few chalks that were in the box.
“What do you think?” she asked. She wanted to sound cocky and sure of herself. After all, she was the artist and he was a stable lad, but her words came out sounding as though his opinion were important to her.
“Good,” he said after a while.
“But what?” she asked.
“Nothing.” He looked at her and smiled. “They are wonderful. I think you will be a good teacher. Now, what has Miss Amy given us to eat?”
“Hot dogs and Diet Coke,” she said.
He looked at her with a twinkle in his eye. “You cannot befuddle me, Miss Zoë. I have been around Miss Amy for too long. When she first came here, the place was abuzz with all the odd things she had to say. Her language, even her ideas of what was right and wrong, were of great amusement to us. But now we are used to her. And she has changed us so much that I do not know what is hers and what is ours. Two months ago I went to London and I said to a shopkeeper, ‘That’s super.’ He thought I was mad.”
Zoë laughed. “She does have a way of making people do what she wants them to.” She hesitated. “She seems to like the earl a lot.”
“Poor man,” he said. “Never the same after he lost his wife and wee babe.” He picked up Zoë’s cup and handed it to her. “Drink up. It’s good for you.”
“Some things are the same wherever you go. Men always want to get women drunk.”
He put his head back and laughed so hard that she wanted to kiss his throat.
“Let’s eat,” she said, “then I’ll give you a drawing lesson.”
It took them nearly an hour to finish their meal. Zoë realized she hadn’t eaten since…She didn’t know what to call what had been done to them. The transfer? She’d managed to find the outhouse, but she’d had no food.
While they’d eaten, he asked her about herself, where she’d grown up and what she’d done as a child. It wasn’t easy to answer his questions and not give away that she was from a different time. She didn’t want him to think she was insane. She had grown up in Oregon, but in 1797, no one had heard of the place. She thought about her grandmother’s stories. Their family had traveled to the new country of America in the early 1700s and had settled in Williamsburg. Her grandmother hinted that they may have lived in the governor’s mansion. “More likely worked in his kitchen,” her mother said.
Whatever they did, in the 1800s the family packed up and went by wagon train to Oregon and stayed there.
She told MacKenzie of her life as though her family still lived in Williamsburg. She knew that back then her family’s name had been Prentiss.
“An old English name,” he said. “Do you know where your family lived in England before you went off to the foreign country that doesn’t want the interfering English telling them what to do?”
She laughed. “We did have some issues with them.”
“More than a few,” he said as he poured her more of the perry. “Now, shall we start the lessons?”
“Sure,” she said, but she didn’t really want to. For her part, she’d like to stay there for the rest of the afternoon and look out at the lake and they could…She put down the mug of perry. Enough of that!
Maybe it was the alcoholic beverage, or maybe it was the man so close to her, but Zoë had never felt less like giving an art lesson to anyone. She’d certainly done it often enough. In the houses where she’d stayed, one of the extra things she’d agreed to was to give art lessons to the children of the house. Zoë found that the rich loved to load their children down with lessons and having a professional painter teaching them had been a coup.
“What turns you on?” she asked as he picked up the pad of drawing paper.
“I beg your pardon?”
Zoë swallowed. “I mean, what would you like to draw? Landscapes? Flowers?” She pointed to the remnants of their picnic. “Maybe a still life.”
“What about if I draw you?” he asked, looking at her.
“I won’t be able to direct you if you’re drawing me,” she said. “How about the lake? We’ll start with this angle. See the way the water shimmers? And see that little building on the far side? Look, like this.” Reaching out, she lifted his hands in hers and moved his fingers so he formed a square with them. “Frame it, see what you like best, then draw that.”
His face was close to hers and his eyes were looking at her, not at what he saw through his squared fingers.
“Cut it out!” she said, then moved away from him. Her face became serious
. “We can’t do this if you don’t behave.”
“All right,” he said, smiling as he held up his hands and moved them about so he was framing different aspects of the landscape. “This one. I think I like the folly to the left of the picture and that tree in the foreground.”
“Very good!” Zoë said, impressed. “That’s a balanced composition. Okay, so the first thing you do is—”
“What does ‘okay’ mean?”
“If you’ve spent even ten minutes around Amy you’ve heard it before,” she said, sounding like the stern teacher she was trying to be.
He just smiled and looked down at the paper on his lap. “Now what do I do?”
“You need to make a basic sketch to get your proportions right. This is the foundation of your drawing. If this is off, when you finish, no matter how good your technique is, the drawing will be bad.”
He looked at the lake, then down at his paper, then up again. “You must show me,” he said.
Zoë moved close to him, put her hand over his, and directed him in putting the curve of the lake on the paper. “See? Like this. Now where is the folly?”
His face was turned toward hers. “Here,” he said, not bothering to look at the paper.
“That’s—” She had meant to tell him that was wrong because he wasn’t looking, but his finger was in exactly the right spot. “All right, so now we sketch in the little building.”
Since the folly was on the far side of the paper, she had to reach across him to block it in.
“Would you look at the paper?” she snapped, then sat back on her heels. “You know, you really are throwing away the chance of a lifetime. I know about the class system in England and right now I’m giving you a way to get out of being just a stable boy all your life. Maybe you’ll never be a real artist, but it’s the eighteenth century. You could get away with making crude portraits and still make a living. Wouldn’t you rather have that than shoveling horse manure for the rest of your life?”
He blinked at her a few times as he digested what she’d said, then he took the pencil from her, looked up at the lake and made a few quick marks on the paper. He turned it around to show her. “Is this what you had in mind that I should do to get myself out of the stables?”
Zoë looked at the drawing, saw that it was perfectly in proportion, and that in just a few marks he’d captured the entire setting.
It seemed that a thousand thoughts went through her mind at once. Obviously, a trick had been played on her. This man was the painter, Russell Johns. She was going to kill Amy for lying to her, telling her he was a scrawny little man with bad teeth.
Besides Amy lying to her, so had he. He’d said his name was MacKenzie, and he’d worked at not letting her know the truth.
The first emotion she felt was anger. Two people had treated her like a moron. They’d lied, kept secrets, and made her the butt of a joke. But her second emotion was laughter. They’d got her a good one.
She saw that the man was looking at her with a fake expression of defiance, but underneath it she could see worry. He knew she’d figured out who he was and he was concerned that she was going to tell him she never wanted to see him again.
She wasn’t going to do what he expected her to. “Your work is a bit primitive, totally unrefined,” she said as loftily as she could manage, “but for a first attempt, I guess it is acceptable.”
There was such relief in his eyes that she had to work not to laugh. “Primitive, is it?” He turned the pad around and looked up at her then back down as he made quick marks on the paper. After only a minute, he turned the paper toward her. “Is that crude?”
Zoë had to prevent herself from gasping. His sketch of her was as good as a Boldini, the magnificent portrait painter from Edwardian England. However, he’d made her look as though she thought she was better than he was. “Mmmm,” she said, as though it were nothing special.
He didn’t say a word, just handed her the paper and pencil. His gesture said that if she thought she could do better, she was welcome to try.
This is it, she thought. If I don’t do well at this, I’ll lose his respect. She was glad she’d had a substantial amount of the perry because otherwise she would have been nervous. Instead, on the same paper as his drawing of her, she made a quick sketch of him, incorporating it with the one he’d done of her. She drew his face as quite a bit smaller than hers, and he had a look of almost fear, as though he were frightened of the woman above him. He was looking up at her in trepidation, seeming to be pleading with her.
She turned the pad toward him. For a moment his face registered shock, and Zoë thought he might get angry. In the next second, he began laughing so hard that he rolled over onto his side.
“You deserved it!” she said, laughing with him. “Of all the rotten tricks to play on me!”
“I did nothing,” he said, laughing hard. “I was innocent, caught in a web of lies between you and that harridan in the kitchen. She rules the poor young master, but she’s never ruled me before. She told the lies, not me.”
“Oh yeah? So who was it that told me his name was MacKenzie?”
“It is. Russell MacKenzie Johns.”
That made Zoë laugh harder. “It was a horrible joke and I shouldn’t be laughing. You’re as bad as that man.”
“Which man?”
“Your boss. Or was that a lie too? Maybe you own this place and he just struts around.”
“Lord Tristan?” Russell said, beginning to sober from his laughter. “You sound as though you don’t like him.”
“I told him I’d repair the frame on the miniature of his wife but he told me that only a man could do it.”
“He said those exact words?”
“Well,” Zoë said, “not in those words, but more or less.”
“Ah, I see,” Russell said. “Perhaps he didn’t want to insult a man who has lived with him for nearly a year and who has been a friend to him. Could that have had something to do with it?”
“Maybe,” Zoë said. “Women in my time tend to take things as being chauvinistic when maybe they aren’t.”
“Your time?” he asked.
She waved her hand in dismissal. “I mean, in my country. How about if you tell me everything about yourself?”
“My favorite thing to do,” he said as he stretched out on the grass under the tree. “Where should I begin?”
“Where were you born? Where have you worked and have you had any training as an artist?”
This last question made him look at her with wide eyes. “Are you telling me that you do not?”
“I was in an accident,” she said softly, “and when I woke up, I could draw.”
“How old were you?”
“Nineteen.”
“And you are now?”
“Twenty-five.”
He looked at her for a moment. “That old and no husband? No children?”
“Never met a man I liked enough to want to keep. What about you? You’re certainly older than me. You have a wife and children?”
“None,” he said. “I have had offers. My mother has worked hard to find me a wife but I’ve liked none of them.”
“Is your family from Scotland?”
He smiled. “My parents, not me, but I sound like them. Do ye hear the heather in my voice?”
“A little bit,” Zoë answered, teasing. His accent was thick when he turned it on. “When did you know you wanted to be an artist?”
“All I ever wanted to do was draw or paint. When I had just turned three I nearly walked into the fireplace, but all I wanted was some charcoal. I drew the face of my mother on the wall.”
“And what did she do?”
Russell smiled in memory. “I was told the story many times when I was growing up. We lived in London in one of the poorer sections. My father drove a big wagon and took kegs of beer to the public houses. He was as strong as his horses, and he was a sweet man, but he was not a scholar.” He looked at Zoë as though she might condemn him for
such a lowly father.
“But what about your mother?” she asked.
“She was no beauty, but she had the brains of a wizard.” He chuckled. “And she had the gumption of twenty men. When she saw what I had drawn, she put on her best clothes and went to the house of Sir Markus Vanderstern.” He glanced at Zoë to see if she’d heard of him, but she hadn’t.
“In his day, he was a famous painter. There wasn’t an earl or a duke whose portrait he hadn’t done. It was said that his temper was as bad as his paintings were good. Everyone who sat for him feared him. He’d as soon rage at a duke as at the dustman.”
“As mean as a six-year-old boy with a rubber band,” she said, thinking of one house she’d lived in. “I bet your mother wasn’t afraid of him.”
“No,” Russell said. “The day after I made the drawing on the wall, she went to his house, knocked on his door, and told the maid she wanted him to come to her home and see what her three-year-old son had drawn.”
“I can just imagine how he responded to that.”
“He ignored her for four days, but she set up housekeeping on his front stoop. Finally, he had the sheriff come to get her and she screamed that he was a coward, that he was afraid to see that her son was better at three years old than he was at a hundred.”
Russell closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. He was lying on the grass with his hands behind his head. “The old man heard her and he took her words as a challenge. Besides, by that time a crowd had gathered outside his house. They were watching this woman who wouldn’t give up no matter what was said to her. He could see that the crowd believed her and thought that he was afraid to see a child who was a better artist than he was.
“He came out, told the sheriff to unhand the woman, then he followed her to our humble house.”
“And he saw your drawing.”
Russell laughed. “By that time I’d charcoaled all the walls that I could reach. There were faces everywhere.”
“And what did he think when he saw them?”