Love & War (Alex & Eliza #2)(63)
Earl accepted the bottle with somewhat shaky fingers, pulled the cork from it, and took a long—quite a long—pull. His eyes closed, and a contented sigh passed from his mouth. Then he took a second, shorter nip and stowed the bottle inside his coat.
“It gets so chilly in here,” he said, patting the bottle beneath his breast pocket. “This helps.”
Eliza did not find the room too chilly, but she had just been outside, where the breeze was stiff and the ice hadn’t melted on the streets for the past three days.
“You will forgive me if I seem rude, Mr. Earl, but you are not what I expected of a, of a—”
“A man in prison?” Earl said in a self-mocking tone. “I have done my best to pretend that I am in the salon of some elegant hostess in Philadelphia or Paris—or Albany,” he added with a wink, “and, God willing, I will one day again, soon enough. Please,” he said, beckoning toward a chair on Eliza’s side of the bars. “Be seated. I feel as though I am conducting an interview.”
Eliza unbuttoned her coat but, seeing no place to hang it, kept it on and sat in the chair, an elegant piece of carved oak covered in dark tufted damask that would have been at home in one of the salons Mr. Earl had just described. A heavy brocade curtain hung behind it, cleverly draped so as to reveal the gold fringe at its borders yet still hide the rough stone of the wall.
After taking another pull from his bottle, the artist sat down on the edge of his cot, his back ramrod straight. A stick of charcoal appeared in his hand, which only now did Eliza realize was stained with soot, as if he had been practicing his craft all day. His hand began to fly across the pad propped on the easel, which was turned in such a way that she was able to see his hand move yet could not see the results of its actions.
Several moments passed in silence. Eliza was afraid to speak lest she disrupt his concentration.
“You will forgive me for diving in immediately,” Earl said at length. “Normally I would make some excuse about the light going quickly on winter afternoons, but of course we are all candles here. And thank heavens, too. The cells with windows may be filled with light, but they are unconscionably cold. All you can do is watch yourself freeze to death. No, here we are merely racing against Mr. O’Reilly’s return.”
“Of course,” Eliza said. She felt somewhat out of sorts, even though this is what she had come here for.
“May I suggest that for your next couple of visits you wear something more comfortable? Though that gown is beautiful, and you are a vision in it, I will not be ready for oils for at least a few days. I must first learn how your face paints.”
“My face paints?” Eliza laughed nervously. “Unless I were to take the brush between my teeth, I do not think it will paint at all.”
Earl smiled at her quick wit.
“There are some faces, you see, that seem to lose their plasticity when they are drawn and become all rigid lines and a single dimension. Others lose precisely this definition and become nothing more than flesh-colored blobs, as lifeless as death mask. The painter has to discover the contours—the concavities, the convexities!—with good old-fashioned chiaroscuro, and fill them with the most quotidian shading before advancing to the tint of blush. The goal is to find the balance between the permanent, arresting shape that can fill a frame for centuries, and the breath of life that will ensure that no one forgets the subject was once a living, breathing beauty.”
Eliza had been drawn and painted before, but mostly by Angelica and Peggy. But this was a different experience entirely. Earl’s eyes roamed her body with a directness that would have been improper in any other situation (and in fact felt a little improper in this one). She had a sudden sense of her face as a thing apart from her, an intricate mask mounted before her cranium. But at the same time, she felt that mask growing hot with a blush.
“Do I—do I need to remain still, or is it permissible for me to speak?”
“From what Mr. Hamilton has told me, it would be a crime to silence you. He has told me that your beauty is only matched by your brain. Given that my sole conversational partner for the past eight months has been Mr. O’Reilly, I long for tones more dulcet.”
“He’s been learning his colors, though.” Eliza smiled. “Coral and champagne pink and his favorite, periwinkle.”
“It takes a true innocent to make a word like periwinkle sound scurrilous!” he said.
Eliza sat quietly, thinking that she had determined to do useful work instead of being merely decorative, and yet here she was sitting for a portrait. But she was helping somewhat, wasn’t she? Giving this man a job of some sort? And doing what her husband bid her?
A few minutes later, in one quick motion Earl sat back from his easel and turned it toward her. The light from the four candles shone directly on the page, yet it still took a moment for Eliza to make sense of the wavering black lines that floated on the yellow parchment. It seemed impossible that anyone could have captured a likeness so quickly, and in so few strokes. Then she gasped.
For there she was. Her posture—the line of her back, the set of her shoulders, the demure press of her knees beneath her skirts, the drape of her silken gown and woolen overcoat. It was remarkable. With just a few hash marks and wavering strokes he had managed to capture the pattern in the lace covering her décolletage. And with seemingly imperceptible shadings, he had brought out the moiré luster in the dress itself. Yet even more incredible was the way in which he captured the flesh beneath the garments. Just looking at it deepened her blush.