The Marquess Who Loved Me - By Sara Ramsey Page 0,59
sat on nearby stool. The corpse lay on the floor with a blanket covering it, and he knelt down to pull the blanket aside and reveal both arms, but not the head or chest.
“My batman discovered these tattoos when he checked for identifying marks. If you draw them, Trower can take them to the London or Southampton docks after the snows clear and possibly find which ships he sailed on.”
Ellie looked over the corpse. Most of the tattoos were simple designs and short words dyed into his skin. They would be easy enough for a novice to create during his breaks in the ship’s watches. Two or three were more intricate, created by a skilled artist — perhaps a tattooed warrior of the South Pacific?
She started sketching. The designs were small enough that she could fit them all on a single large page of her sketchbook. “Do you recognize any of them?” she finally asked after several minutes of drawing.
“No, but there is one he may have received when he crossed the Equator for the first time,” he said. “Sailors who’ve never crossed it before are put through any number of ordeals — shaving, tarring, and other, mostly good-natured, humiliations. Passengers like myself just have to contribute the alcohol on our first voyage across. But I might have gotten a tattoo myself that night if I’d had another cup of rum.”
She pictured him standing on the rail of a ship, the salt spray driving his hair back in the wind. It was enough to make her hand pause, wishing she could draw that instead of a dead man’s tattoos.
“You must have seen such wonderful sights,” she said, returning to her work.
He crouched beside her, examining her handiwork as she drew the last tattoo — a serpent wrapped around an anchor. “Sights beyond imagining. I wish you had been there to paint them. My words cannot do justice to them the way your colors can.”
“Perhaps someday, with whatever funds I have left, I shall go abroad,” Ellie said, shading in the serpent’s head. “I should have done so years ago, but I wasn’t quite ready to go alone.”
He was silent at that, but she didn’t notice until she’d finished the drawing — and realized, as she focused on their conversation rather than her pencil, how much she’d given away.
“No matter, though,” she said brightly, shoving the sketchbook at him. “Now that you’ve returned, you can take the estate. Marcus, would you care to escort me to Greece now that you may take a holiday?”
Marcus raised his brows as she stood and dusted off her skirts. “Have your forgotten that you are angry with me?”
Nick laughed. It was genuine mirth, not the cutting disdain he so often gave her. “She can be remarkably inconsistent when she doesn’t remember who she’s claimed to love and hate.”
“Claibornes,” she muttered. “I shall go to the Continent myself, then. If you are very kind to me, Nick, perhaps I will send you a sketch occasionally while you moulder in the House of Lords.”
“You would have me stuck in London for eternity, wouldn’t you?”
She wouldn’t. Nick belonged somewhere more primal, somewhere with a harsh purity to the sea and sky — not in Parliament or the ballrooms, where he didn’t have the patience to even play those murky social games, let alone win them.
“I’d have you on an isle in the Mediterranean,” she said. “Think of all I could paint there.”
His eyes flashed. But he didn’t respond. She was glad of it. She’d been too truthful, hadn’t hidden that statement beneath a jaded, sultry tone. She wanted him, all to herself, with Homer’s wine-dark sea and the flawless Mediterranean light serving as a backdrop for all the passion she’d always poured into her paintings of him.
That was a truth.
The worse truth, though, was that her heart — that poor, confused, angry beast — somehow had started painting a future with him again. A future with laughter, and love, and fire.
The future she had thought she’d finally, finally let go.
Stop mourning and find a purpose, her father’s voice said.
Ellie turned abruptly for the door, wading through the awkward, heavy silence that followed her confession. “I hope I helped,” she said, her voice too loud. “I shall see you both at dinner, yes?”
She didn’t wait. They didn’t follow. She heard Marcus’s low whistle, heard Nick mutter something that made his brother laugh, but she didn’t turn back. She knew her mythology — if she turned back, she would be