A Lady's Dream Come True - Grace Burrowes Page 0,52
a look,” Oak said.
He’d apparently dismantled another of the mundane paintings cluttering up the gallery walls and again found a more worthy work beneath—more worthy and more shocking.
“God in heaven.” Anna again lay among tangled covers, and this time her entire body was revealed, but for an ankle draped with a ruby quilt. The composition was such that her mons occupied the main point of interest, dark curls contrasting with pale skin, wild brushwork erupting from long, smooth strokes.
“That painting is brilliant,” Oak said, “though it goes beyond what can be displayed as an artful nude.”
“Well beyond.” Anna’s breasts were entirely on display, pinkish-taupe nipples peaked, her fingers brushing the fullness of one breast. Her other hand was flung back against the pillow, and in this painting, no lover hovered in the shadows on the other side of the bed.
“She looks as if she’s been pleasuring herself,” Oak said. “The scene has an air of repletion, as if in the next moment, she’ll drag the covers up and indulge in a nap full of erotic dreams.”
“Pleasured herself?”
He leaned closer to the canvas, studying the drape of the quilt over the lady’s ankle, a subtle suggestion of a silken manacle.
“As you pleasured me earlier today. Onanism, self-gratification, manufriction, manustupration, masturbation.” He lifted the painting and held it at eye level, the painted surface parallel with the floor. “Self-pollution, to use the preacher’s vocabulary.”
Vera knew exactly one of the terms he’d tossed out. “Women do that?”
Oak set down the painting. “Dirk Channing wasn’t much of a lover. I’m sorry. Yes, women do that. Some men do it a lot. There’s no harm in self-gratification and much pleasure, which might be the message the painting is trying to convey.”
“That is not a message most people want to hang on their walls.” And why—why, why, why—had Dirk hidden these works in his own home? What was Vera supposed to do with them?
“Some people collect erotica, and for works of this quality, they’d pay a handsome sum. Much more than they’ll pay for the leavings of your attics, Vera.”
“I cannot sell such, such… I don’t know what to call them.” The painting upset her, not only because of its subject matter. “Dirk might have created a few more dashing scenes of battle or restful Hampshire landscapes. Those I could sell, but these…”
“These are art,” Oak said, as if that decided the matter in all its particulars. “They will be respected as such. Are you concerned that he painted images like this of you?”
Vera’s imaginings came to an abrupt, determined halt. “Dirk could not have painted images like this of me. I wasn’t… We didn’t… He wasn’t a strutting young buck when I married him. He had a daughter to raise, an established reputation to safeguard. Our marriage was cordial.”
And compared to the passion Dirk had shown his Anna, cordial was second best. A make-do compromise undertaken to provide Catherine a mother and Merlin Hall a hostess, leaving Vera with…
What?
Oak propped his hips against the worktable and folded his arms. “I suspect half the works in your gallery are hiding images such as these, Vera. They are worth a fortune to the right buyer.”
“But the instant they leave Merlin Hall, they destroy Catherine’s chances of a decent match, to say nothing of what they’ll do to Dirk’s reputation.” Or my own.
“To those who appreciate art, this caliber of painting can only increase his stature.”
“And to those less sophisticated?” Vera asked, thinking of her step-mother. “To those who regard modesty as the defining womanly virtue? I regret to inform you, those folk outnumber your connoisseurs by a fair margin, Mr. Dorning.
“And setting aside the Puritans for a moment,” she went on, “Dirk’s associates at the Academy will fall upon these paintings like a pack of jackals. One will claim they are forgeries, another will claim they are inferior compositions. The third will assert—quite confidently and in the most public venue possible—that they are inferior and forgeries. They do so, all of them, while assuring each other they hold Dirk’s memory in nothing but highest esteem and his scheming widow in the lowest contempt.”
She looked away from the painting, unable to bear the combination of beauty and betrayal it represented.
Oak uncrossed his arms and went to the window, wedging it open another two inches and propping a tall jar beneath the raised pane.
“You will have to decide, Vera, whose opinion matters.” He took off his jacket and laid it over the back of a reading chair. “This is