A Portrait of Love (The Academy of Love #3) - Minerva Spencer Page 0,7
portrait that summer.
Daniel Keyes had been a self-absorbed man in many ways, but not when it came to his daughter. He’d known it would have been unbearable to expose her unrequited love to questions, but this painting was proof that he’d felt every ounce of her suffering in his heart. Just looking at the pain in her eyes was enough to make Honey’s throat tighten
She was beautiful in the portrait—far prettier than she was in life—her eyes like shards of broken ice, haunted, turned in on an internal landscape that was pure pain.
The portrait reminded her how her fifteen-year-old self hadn’t believed that her bleeding heart would keep beating. Yet here she was: hearty and hale all these years later.
Her hand shook as she pulled the sheet from the fourth painting and looked into the smiling hyacinth-blue eyes of Simon Fairchild, the Marquess of Saybrook.
As it always did, the breath froze in her lungs. Honoria had painted many portraits in the past fourteen years but in none of the others had she captured the pure light and human essence of a subject as she had in this one.
Her technique was far superior now to what it had been over a decade ago, but she’d never painted anything better. The laughter in his eyes was so vivid she could hear its echo.
Honey dropped the cover back over the image that had haunted her far too often over the years. Simon wasn’t the only man she’d been fond of, of course, but no other man had inspired such depth of feeling.
She knew he’d gone to war because she’d read his name in the paper—first among the missing, and later when he’d returned. Both times she’d wept: first with sorrow and then with relief.
Why had he gone to war? What had happened to the young woman—Bella—and his plans for a life in the country?
Honey sighed and locked the door on those questions and dozens of others.
She went to the small mirror beside the door and inspected her uninspiring reflection. Her heavy hair had come loose from its severe moorings and long tendrils floated around her narrow face like a dun-colored gloriole.
To be honest, her narrow face with its pale gray eyes were significantly more appealing with disheveled locks as a frame, but it did not suit a woman of her age and position, so she did her best to tidy the loose strands without actually unpinning and re-braiding it all. The result was good enough for an afternoon tea with her housemates, who were spinsters like Honey.
A diminutive garden packed with blooms separated her painting studio from the small house where she’d spent her entire life. After her father died, she’d chosen to set up her painting studio in the carriage house, rather than his studio. It was foolish, but she’d left the studio untouched, not a shrine to him, but a place so full of his essence that she could not bear the thought of dismantling it.
As Honoria traversed the narrow walk that led to the back door of the house she noticed that Freddie’s peonies—the size of cabbages—had bloomed and died. It was another summer of her life, her twenty-ninth summer.
That notion was vaguely depressing but she was in no mood to ask herself why that was, not today.
Freddie—Lady Winifred Sedgwick—glanced up from the small writing desk in the corner when Honey entered the parlor.
“Serena will be here in a moment. She has become embroiled in a battle of wills.”
“Ah, a skirmish between Mrs. Brinkley and Una?”
“Who else.” It was not a question. Their housekeeper and cook were both the best of friends and the worst of enemies, depending on the day.
Honey dropped into her favorite seat, a battered green leather wingchair that had been her father’s favorite. She swore she could still smell the unmistakable combination of turpentine and bay rum she associated with him even though he had been gone eight years. He’d died not long after her twenty-first birthday, passing away in his sleep—a quiet death utterly unlike his passionate, flamboyant life.
The door to the parlor swung open and Honey smiled. “Hello, Oliver. Have you escaped your lessons?”
Serena’s ten-year-old son dropped a creditable bow. “Mama said that I might come down for tea.”
“And Una’s biscuits?” she teased. He grinned and came to sit beside her. Honoria ruffled his messy brown curls. “What have you been working on? I haven’t heard any explosions lately.”
“Mama said no more experiments with the electricity maker.” He sounded mournful about that.