The Marquess Who Loved Me - By Sara Ramsey Page 0,38

but she wasn’t ready to dream about them. Instead, she let another maid prepare her for bed, since she had ordered Lucia to rest after their ordeal. As soon as the woman was gone, Ellie threw a cloak over her delicate peignoir and nightgown and took the servants’ stairs up to the former nursery.

The rooms had once housed the scions of the Claiborne family, including Nick and Marcus’s father. But with no children in residence and no plans to produce any, she had taken over. The long windows lining the south wall would have provided ample light for childhood lessons, but they were even better for painting.

Not that she’d painted anything that had pleased her in an age. Nor could she paint tonight, not without lighting every lamp and candle in the house. But she also couldn’t sleep — not when she saw the highwayman’s ruined skull when she closed her eyes.

She carried a taper with her and lit the lamps that hung on the walls. There had been fires in the grates earlier in the day, as there always were to protect the paintings in the room. But now they were banked, and the snow that had begun to fall outside no longer melted on contact with the windowpanes. She was glad for her cloak now, even though she would inevitably cast it aside, unthinking, as she sketched.

The blank canvas on her easel taunted her. She turned away from it to stand at her work table. There were great sheets of foolscap there, places for her to test her inspirations before committing them to canvas. She chewed on the end of her pencil, considering.

Wasn’t she beyond Nick as a subject? After the last time, she’d vowed not to paint him again. But those vows had failed before, and the neat row of canvases leaning against the far wall mocked her. She’d last given in four months earlier — surely she could withstand the temptation.

Temptation. She’d once thought she would be tempted to murder Nick when he came home. One of her first paintings after he left was a shamelessly derivative copy of Jacques-Louis David’s “Death of Marat,” with Nick taking Marat’s place in the bath and Ellie herself, added as a vengeful Fury, wielding the knife.

But there had been whole months when she’d managed to keep him out of her thoughts. It was only the past year, seeing her brother find such happiness with Madeleine, that had brought everything back. She hadn’t come to Folkestone since Ferguson’s wedding. Painting there, in a room that might have held her children, was enough to make her ache.

She pushed back the tide of memory and sketched. If she took Lucia’s advice and tried to make a living from her art, it would have to be more commercial than this. But she would be damned before she painted other families’ portraits, even if they sold better than more experimental fare. And thoughts of money could wait until she knew just how far Nick would go in his bid for revenge.

Her pencil flew across the paper in swift, sure strokes, with less hesitation than she’d felt at her work in weeks. She usually preferred working from myths instead of fairy tales, but for some reason, the old French tale of Persinette called to her. On paper, the tower took shape, rising up from a dense and twisted forest. A woman stood in the window at the top of the tower, in profile, her face just barely recognizable. The full moon peeked from behind a shroud of storm clouds to glint off her impossibly long plait of hair.

In pencil, there were no colors, but Ellie knew how she would paint it — dark, and tempestuous, with the woman’s red hair as a beacon. Her beauty would lure the prince to her tower, and her hair was the key to her prison. But they were destined to pay a terrible price for their love, wandering apart for years before finding each other again.

She chewed on her pencil again, her hand starting to cramp after half an hour of unrelieved sketching. Nick wasn’t in the painting — and yet he was the painting. She didn’t want it to be an omen. But her art was the one part of her life, other than Nick, that she couldn’t fully control.

She heard footsteps outside the door, both too heavy and too hesitant to be a servant. She flipped over the paper, then bowed her head like a child hoping