“What in the world is this place?” Zoë asked when he led her to it the first time.
“Be quiet,” he said. “I don’t want anyone to hear us.”
“Who could hear us? Nobody’s been here in years. Well, except for whoever cuts the weeds. It doesn’t even have a roof.”
“That’s what I thought,” Russell said as he went up some narrow stone steps that were nearly hidden in the hill that the tower stood on. When they were at the top, she watched him pull a huge iron key from his pocket and slip it into the lock. She figured it would be rusted shut but the key turned easily.
“Where did you get that key?”
“Borrowed it,” he said, glancing around as he opened the door.
“From whom?”
Russell just smiled as he pulled her inside the tower, then closed the door behind her.
It was very warm inside the stone circle and there was indeed a roof, but it was made of glass. In the center was a round stone bench, and along the edges were big shrubs with pale green leaves. They smelled wonderful. She looked back at him. “Okay, I’ll bite. What is this?”
“It’s the family secret,” Russell said, his voice low.
“Some secret. Plants have to be taken care of so somebody looks after this place. And they cut the grass outside. So who takes care of it?”
“Beth.”
“What?” Zoë said, running her hand over the leaves of the plants, then she drew back. “These aren’t poisonous, are they?”
“I have no idea what they are. All I know is that young Beth takes care of this tower by herself with only a little bit of help from Thomas.”
“Thomas? Is that another brother?”
“Not quite. He’s the big guy. The giant? He stays near William, waiting to be needed.”
“Oh yes, I saw him at Faith’s.”
Russell shook his head at her. “And when did you see her?”
“For the ten minutes when I wasn’t with you,” she said, then looked at him from the corner of her eye. “You haven’t seemed to mind that I’ve given you all my attention.”
“No,” he said, “I’ve not minded at all.”
She glanced about the tower. “Tell me about this place.” They’d been lovers since the second day after they met. Zoë thought that she’d teach him a few tricks she’d learned in her years of living in the houses of the rich, in her century. But if Russell was an example of his century, there wasn’t anything they needed to learn.
They spent three days doing nothing but making love. Russell knew the estate well and knew lots of interesting places they could go and not be discovered. Although one day Faith had nearly seen them when she’d gone into the old house that was near the orangery where she was staying with Tristan’s sick uncle. Zoë and Russell grabbed their clothes and hid in a little anteroom until they heard Faith leave.
“That was a close one,” Zoë said.
“And what would she have done if she had found us?” Russell asked as he took her clothes out of her hands and began to kiss her neck.
“Faith? She’d probably die of embarrassment on the spot. From the story she told us, she got married and became a virgin. Or at least a saint.”
“And what about Amy?” Russell was kissing his way down her chest as he pushed her against the old bed that was still in the house. It was too big to remove. He ignored the squeaks of whatever creatures they disturbed when he pushed her onto the bed.
“Amy?” Zoë asked, as she arched her back. “She’s a dark horse. I can’t figure her out. I could believe that she doesn’t touch that hunk Tristan or she’s in the bed with him half of every day. She could go either way.”
“What’s a ‘hunk’?” he asked.
“You,” she said, then kissed him back.
After three days of lovemaking, their second love took over and they began to draw and paint. It was Russell who started it. “Lie there,” he said as he picked up his pad and pencil. “Just like that. I want to capture you in that exact position.”
It had taken only half a day before they were in competition as to who was going to pose and who was going to draw.
It was on the fifth day that Russell had grown serious and pulled out the oil paints. Zoë had used oils before but she didn’t favor them. She preferred watercolors, and pencils and chalk. Her portraits were done in these media and her clients had loved the sweetness of them.
“I want to have something of you,” Russell said.
Zoë started to reply, but she didn’t. Somehow, he knew that she was going to leave. And she knew he sensed that she was going to leave as abruptly as she’d appeared, and he wanted some piece of her to keep forever.
Zoë had done her best to keep it light between the two of them. She felt that not going to bed with him for a full twenty-four hours after they met had been a giant strength of will. She’d never been a promiscuous woman. She’d had two intense flings with men her age while living in the houses of her clients, but when the job was over, she’d had no problem leaving them.
She liked to tell herself she was going to feel the same about Russell, but she knew it was a lie. She liked him. She liked his sense of humor, the earthiness of him, and she loved his talent. She especially loved that his life was driven by a passion for art. He was a kindred soul.
One of the things she liked most about him was where his passion took him. While he stayed with a family for at least a year, ostensibly to make portraits of all of the family members—just as Zoë did—the truth was that he spent several hours each day drawing the people who worked in the fields and in the house. The ordinary people. “The people who make the world function,” he said.
She was impressed at how fast he could draw. He told her he’d had to learn speed to keep his old master from whacking him on the knuckles with a sanding board. Whatever the reason, Zoë said he was the original camera—then she’d had to make up an explanation of what she meant. He’d never shown his quick sketches to anyone before Zoë. “People would not like them,” he mumbled, and she saw that he was pretending that her opinion didn’t matter to him—but it did.
As she looked at his drawings she could understand why people in his time didn’t care for them. They were the forerunners of Impressionist paintings and she loved them. She took the paintbrush away from him and did her best to show him how, in a hundred years, Monet would paint a pond.
“But it’s not finished,” he said. “It’s not clear what you’re seeing.”
“That’s the point,” she said. “It’s an impression of what you’re seeing. You have the real thing to look at, but this is paint. It’s not a real pond, not real lily pads, so you have a lot of freedom with how you reproduce it in paint.”
It was a simple concept and easily understandable to her twenty-first-century brain, but it was revolutionary to him. “A good likeness” was paramount to him. But then, he didn’t have photographs to compare with.
After Russell started with oils, Zoë quit competing with him. She knew she’d not be able to take anything back with her when she left, so she rather liked the idea that maybe she’d someday see a portrait of herself on the wall of a museum. For days now, she’d posed while he painted. It had taken only his asking to get her to pose nude.
Each day they went somewhere different and Russell began a new painting of her. They didn’t speak of it but she knew that his idea was to get as much on canvas as he could before she left him forever. She wondered when he slept because each morning he’d show her what he’d done during the night.
“Faith was here yesterday, with Beth,” Russell said.
“Did she give you the key?”
“Faith? No.”
“Very funny,” Zoë said. “If you want me to stay still, tell me what you know.”
“Every family has secrets and this one is no exception,” he said.
Zoë looked at the plants. “What are these plants?” If they were marijuana she’d understand, or maybe not as they weren’t outlawe
d yet.
Russell glanced up at her. “I do not know what they are. Beth takes care of them. Her brother never comes here and her uncle has been too ill.”
“Faith did a good job on the uncle, didn’t she?”
“More of your enlightened practices from your young country? For a people so young, you have certainly learned a lot in a short time.”
She started to reply, but instead just looked at him. He was a good listener and, more than that, he was intelligent. He seemed to take tiny pieces of whatever she said and put them together to make a whole.
“I have finished with your mouth, so why do you not tell me more about yourself?”
She laughed because he made it sound as though they’d just met this morning. “I’m boring,” she said, but in the next second she found herself telling him more of her life story. She had to adjust it to sound as though it happened in the eighteenth century, but it was the same tale. Wherever she lived, she still didn’t remember what happened.
“Love,” Russell said when she’d finished. “Whatever happened, it had to do with love. Only love can produce such hatred.”
“You sound as though you know all about true love,” Zoë said.
“More than I want to, but, no, before you ask, I have never been in love. Not in what I consider love, something that takes over my entire being. I’ve seen it in others and I want no part of it.”
“Me either,” Zoë whispered, then her eyes met Russell’s and for a moment the earth seemed to stand still. In the next second, the painting was abandoned and they were making love among the fragrant plants, on the sun-warmed stones.
Afterward, she lay in his arms. Their nude bodies were coated with sweat and they had quite a few leaves stuck to them.
“How long do we have before you leave?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper.
“I don’t…” she began, but then drew in her breath. “I have three weeks, from beginning to end.”
“Half the time is gone,” he said. “Can you not stay?”
“I don’t think I’ll be given a choice. I think I’ll just leave.”
“Then it is sorcery.”
“Perhaps,” Zoë said. She put her head on her hand and looked at him. He had become so familiar to her in the last few days that she couldn’t imagine being without him. “You will find someone else as soon as—”
He put his fingertips over her lips. “Do not say that I will find someone else quickly. I will never find someone to share my heart and my work with. It would take three people to fulfill all that you and I have together.”
“Don’t say that,” she whispered, and tried to move away from him, but he wouldn’t let her. His arm held her, close to his big body.
“Are you saying I am not to tell you the truth about how I feel about you?” he said. “I have bedded many women, but I have never told any woman that I love her.”
“Russell,” she said as she tried to keep the tears from coming, “I can’t love you or anyone. I’m not—”
“Not what? Worthy of love?”
“I don’t know,” Zoë said. “I don’t know what I did that made people hate me and you’ve said it had something to do with love. I have dreams of seeing a man shoot himself in the head. Did I do that? Did I make a man take his own life?”
He moved her head to rest on his shoulder. “You say that you do not know what you did. The truth is that you do not know what happened. It is a very different concept. I think you should find out the truth.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know. I should find out the truth about what I did—Sorry, I should find out what happened.”
He stroked her hair. “And when will you do this?”
“I guess I’ll do it when I return,” she said.
“You cannot stay here? With me?”
“And spend our lives together? Painting and learning and making love? I’m not sure I deserve such happiness.”
“Nor do I,” Russell said. “I think that all I can hope for in this life is what I was given when my mother got me a good teacher.”
She looked at him. “Russell, your talent is monumental. You aren’t just some hack itinerant portrait painter like I am. You have talent and training, and I want you to promise me to use it. I think you should continue your work of drawing the common people. There will be lots of portraits of the upper classes, but without you to record them, the ordinary people will be lost.”
“And you know this, do you?”
He was trying to lighten the mood, but Zoë didn’t want to. “Promise me,” she said. “Swear to me that you’ll continue with your drawings of the people in the fields and in the kitchens.”
“All right,” he said, but she could tell that he thought her words were silly.
She persisted. “Swear to me.”
“I swear on my mother’s life,” he said at last, then gave her a quick kiss and rolled away. “Go back to your pose so I can work on this painting enough to be able to finish it…”
The words of “after you are gone” hung in the air.
She wrapped the silk coverlet they’d brought with them around her and watched him dress. This is just a fling, she told herself. It meant no more to her than the other two times she’d had affairs, but she couldn’t make herself believe the lie.
She looked about the stone walls at the plants at the edges and wished she could stay here with him. Stay in this century, stay with this man. She even wanted to stay with the other people, with Faith and Amy. The whole household was abuzz with how Faith had miraculously “saved” Tristan’s uncle. Zoë had stopped by the orangery two days ago to see her.
“All I did was give him a bath and some food,” she said. “They were letting him starve to death.”
Zoë stared at her in disbelief.
“Yeah,” Faith said. “Who can understand it? But I’d read about things like this in books. There have been kings who have been starved to death under the orders of some so-called doctor.”
As Faith talked, Zoë walked around the big building, looking at it. “You’ve set this up like a home.” She motioned to the vines that grew at one end of the big greenhouse, and nodded toward the cabinets that were along the walls. “This looks like a set for a movie about Merlin.” The cabinet tops were covered with mortars and pestles, and copper pans; herbs were hanging from the ceiling and spilling out of the drawers.
“My laboratory,” Faith said. “Here, smell this.” She opened a glass jar and held it out to Zoë.
“Wonderful. What is it?”
“I have soap, shampoo, and face cream. They’re all made by Beth from secret recipes handed down from the women in her family. The products work beautifully and the smell is heaven. I’ve never encountered anything like it in all my years of working with herbs.”
“I had no idea you knew so much about these old herbs.”
“I wasn’t aware that I did either,” she said, looking out the window to where William sat in a chair in the sun, Thomas hovering nearby. “You know something, Zoë? I’m finding out that I know a lot more about everything than I thought I did.”
“Me, too,” Zoë said.
Now, holding the cloth about her nude body, Zoë looked at the plants in the tower. “I know what these plants are and what they’re used for.”
“And what is that?” Russell asked as he walked toward her. He took the cloth off her, spread it out on the floor in front of the bushes, and got her back into position as she told him what Faith had told her. When she’d finished, she said, “I knew I’d smelled something like these bushes before, and it was in the jars that Faith had.”
“The family secret,” Russell said as he went back to his easel. “A weak one as secrets go.”
“So tell me what other secrets you’ve found out in your travels.”
“They mostly seem to involve mistresses.”
“Ah,” Zoë said. “Men who love the kitchen maid but marry the heiress.”
“Exactly,” he said.
&nb
sp; They looked at each other and smiled, letting themselves believe that if they were in the same situation they wouldn’t be that stupid.
Twenty
“Tristan,” Amy said, “I can’t stay here all day. I have too many things to do. I—”
He pulled her back to the blanket spread on the ground in the center of the secluded grove of trees by the lake. “My great-grandfather planted these trees and the shrubs,” he said, ignoring her words. “See how they make a perfect circle? And no one can see in here except from the lake. Every man who has seen this thinks he is the only one to think of its use as a trysting place. I thought I was going to have to wrestle Russell for this space. He and that girl of his have spent whole days in here.”
“Zoë?” Amy asked, sitting on the far edge of the blanket. After dinner, he had come to her in the kitchen and said that there was something that he needed her for. From his expression she thought that there’d been a disaster. She didn’t say a word, just followed him out of the house, and didn’t protest when he lifted her onto his horse, then got on behind her.
When she saw the picnic he’d had laid out for them in the seclusion of the little grove of trees and aromatic shrubs, she tried to protest, but she couldn’t. “Tristan, please,” was all she could say as he stood on the ground and looked up at her on the horse.
“Come, sit with me. I have wine from France.” He held up his arms to her and she nearly fell into them. He carried her to the blanket. As he poured her some wine, he said, “How long has it been since you had a full night’s sleep?”
“Since I came here,” she said quickly, but she knew that wasn’t true. She had memories of living and working in his house for much longer than just the two weeks since she’d sat in Madame Zoya’s sunroom. That seemed like a hundred years ago.
“Now you can relax. I am here with you and we can see if anyone approaches. I am safe.”
Amy couldn’t help looking at the trees around her. For about six feet up their trunks were thick shrubs, but she could see spaces between them. Someone with determination could make a way through to him.