Alec Mackenzie's Art of Seduction (Mackenzies & McBrides #9)(44)
She gave him a nod. “Just so we understand each other. I should depart, Mr. Finn, lest you miss your next appointment.”
Alec didn’t move. “Ye don’t understand me at all.” His voice was low, harsh. “But ye can trust me. Believe that.” He took a step closer to her. “When those around ye are making your world hell, ye can trust me. Promise me you’ll remember that.”
Celia listened in bewilderment, her lips parting. “Of course,” she said with difficulty.
Alec shook his head. “No. I need ye to promise. When everything seems at its worst, ye put your trust in me.”
He fixed her with a fiery stare, as though her answer was very important. Celia swallowed. “I promise,” she said.
“Good.”
The one word, spoken in broad Scots, rang through the room. He stood motionless, fingers of one hand resting on his thigh-hugging breeches.
Celia drew a breath, ducked around his unmoving body, and scuttled out. Leaving the warmth of him was difficult, and her breath was ragged as she scrambled down the stairs, snatched her cloak from the waiting footman, and ran out into the rain to climb into the chair.
She had no idea why Alec had made her promise to trust him, but the words, his gaze, the timbre of his voice, had all declared he was a rock she could hold on to. Celia certainly hoped that if it came to it, that rock would not crumble to dust under her touch.
For the next few days, Celia attended her drawing lessons at eight o’clock on the dot and left again at the stroke of nine. Alec never referred to their discussion about trust and hell, or about his outings, the soldiers, Lord Harrenton, or anything but the picture of London he was helping Celia create.
If not for the undercurrent of tension in Alec, and indeed the entire house, Celia would have enjoyed the instruction. She learned how shadows could be made with only a few lines, altering the entire character of the drawing. How distant objects could be suggested and yet look precise, how to project a grid to the vanishing point yet not make it obvious.
On the third day Alec taught her how to mix paints. It was smelly and messy, the room filled with the sharp odors of linseed oil, beeswax, and the metals in the crushed pigments Alec lay out in mounds on the board.
With a large smock over her gown and her sleeves pushed well out of the way, Celia worked melted wax into the oil and then the pigment, scraping and mixing. After that she’d roll a round glass pestle-like tool Alec called a muller over the paint until it was smooth and glistening. They made burnt umber first, a color Alec said would lay the foundation for the London painting.
He scraped the finished paint into a glass bottle, as the lesson was over, and told her they’d begin transferring her final drawing to the canvas the next day, and begin laying on paint after that.
Celia left, excited, pushing aside her misgivings about Alec and the uneasiness she sensed whenever she walked into Lady Flora’s house these days.
Alec had kept himself distant during the lessons, no more flirtation or kissing. The more his bruises and cuts from his fight faded, the more he drew away from Celia. His tension was like a bowstring, one stretched so tight there was an even chance it would snap rather than release its arrow.
There was something about art, however, that cut through Celia’s troubled thoughts and became a reality of its own. She could float in the bubble of creation, no matter how difficult it was to make the picture come out to her satisfaction. She even enjoyed the scents and physical sensation of mixing the paint. Alec had been right—she’d felt the paint come together, the different textures melding to become a puddle of vibrant color.
Later that afternoon, Celia’s anticipation died abruptly when she entered her chamber to find her mother standing over her portfolio, turning the pages within.
“Mama,” she said, startled. “I mean, Your Grace.”
The duchess did not look at her. “This is what you have been doing at Lady Flora’s?” She pointed to the master drawing Celia had finished under Alec’s tutelage, based on the five sketches she had done using the camera obscura, each from a slightly different position.
“Yes.” Celia’s enthusiasm bubbled up. “We will start painting very soon. Al— Mr. Finn has obtained quite a large canvas for it, and says it will be like Signor Canaletto’s paintings.”
“Mr. Finn says?” The duchess snorted. “A trumped-up Irishman claiming to know about great painting is like a fish jumping off the plate and explaining how to sauce itself. You are to be learning portrait painting, Celia. Not scribbling pictures of a city anyone can see looking out their windows.”
“We will do portraits,” Celia said, her breath coming fast. “Mr. Finn says I have a talent for landscape that he would hate to see wasted. And I do need to work on faces—though he says I’m good at noses.”
The duchess listened to her babbling with a look of exaggerated patience. “That is excellent, I am certain. Let me remind you, daughter, that I allowed this mad idea of Lady Flora’s so that you could acquire a useful skill, not to indulge your strange interest in sketching views of London. Your landscapes will never hang alongside Signor Canaletto or Monsieur Lorrain, so let us put a stop to that nonsense at once.”
The duchess caught up the pages of the London drawings and began to tear them to shreds.
Chapter 14