Page 67 of The Lady Makes Her Mark

A piece of paper had been pinned to the wall above the table. A drawing. He took it down and held it up to his eyes, trying to make it out. He recognized the jagged spire of the church and the long, low lines of the house. But the sketch was unfinished.

He clutched the picture in his hand, heedless of wrinkling the paper. Surely, she wouldn’t go without—

The studio.

He knew the odds of finding her there were long. The storm predicted by the curate had begun to rattle the windows. She would not have wanted any delay in setting out.

Nevertheless, he dashed back across the schoolroom, down the stairs, and through the abbey to the cloisters. Wind whipped icy rain into his face. On the door to the west wing, the padlock hung open.

She might have come and gone, he cautioned his racing heart. But if she had left for good, wouldn’t she have closed the lock behind her?

It was a slight hope, but he clung to it as he picked his way through the rubble and across the moss-slick stones to the stairs.

In sharp contrast to the blazing candelabras in the drawing room, the equally large studio was lit by a single lamp, whose glow barely penetrated the gloom. Her valise sat open on the table. She was gathering up various fragments of papers, sketches, supplies, sorting them into piles. Though his approach had been muffled by the howl of the storm, when he paused on the threshold, she looked up.

She didn’t seem surprised to see him. Neither did she exactly seem pleased.

“I thought certain your guests would distract you a little longer.”

“You can’t leave now,” he said, closing the distance between them. “You can’t leave things”—he gestured with the sketch of the abbey crumpled in his clenched fist—“unfinished.”

She glanced from him to the paper and back again. “Some pictures are like that. Sometimes you begin a work with a grand plan in your mind. Other times it seems to grow beneath your hand with a will of its own. And then, just when you’re sure you’ve got it, the perfect rendering of everything in your head . . . or your heart . . . you”—her shoulders rose and fell, as if she wasn’t sure of the right word—“you stumble. Perhaps you’re interrupted. Or a crucial line refuses to lay right, no matter how you try. The spark fizzles. You set it aside, vowing to finish it another day.” Mournfully, she shook her head. “But that day never comes.”

Then she turned away and began placing things in her bag. “You haven’t said—how do you like your portrait?”

“Is that how you see me?”

Even in profile, he could see the wicked smile that lifted the corners of her mouth. “This is how I see you,” she said, sliding another piece of paper toward him. He knew without looking that it was the nude sketch she had made on that fateful afternoon, after they had given in to their desires. “But I didn’t want to give your aunt an apoplexy.”

“I don’t want it,” he told her, pushing it back across the table to her. It would only resurrect uncomfortable memories, things better forgotten.

She put a few more items in her valise and then closed it, leaving the sketch where it lay. “A picture like that should stay with its subject, rather than risk having it fall into the wrong hands.”

“You can’t go,” he insisted again, pleading now. “There’s a terrible storm brewing.”

“I know. That’s a good thing. It will mean fewer people out and about.”

Was she still afraid she was being followed? “This is madness. We had a plan.”

“You had a plan,” she countered, plucking up her mantle from a nearby chair and draping it over her shoulders and the simple woolen dress she now wore. “Correction, you have a plan—and it cannot include me.”

Desperate, he stepped between her and the door. “But I—I love you.”

He could see how valiantly she fought to keep all expression from her face. But hope swelled in his chest when her eyes flared, catching the meager light.

“Do you know why I went to Exeter?” he asked.

One brow arced. “Other than to avoid seeing me?” He could not help but wince at that—she wasn’t entirely wrong. “To speak with a solicitor,” she amended her answer. “Or so I was told.”

“To see if there was some other way for me to—to—” It was too much to put into words. He gestured again with the hand holding the crumpled sketch, toward the east wing of the abbey and his family.

“And was there?”

Hope sputtered, like a guttering candle. Reluctantly he shook his head. “But still, I could—”

“You could not. More important, you would not. Because to do any such thing would jeopardize the future of Rylemoor and your dear sisters. It would be selfish—and, unlike your father, you are not a selfish man.”

Then she hoisted up the bag with both hands—though she still favored her injured wrist, he saw—and prepared to go around him. She was close enough now that he could see the tears glittering in her eyes when she looked up into his.

“Do you know why I painted you in profile? Because I could not bear to think of some girl standing in front of that picture, fancying you were looking at her—looking at her the way you once looked at me.” It was, he thought, her way of confessing that she loved him too. “Goodbye, Alistair.”

Then she stepped past him and out the door.

Every fiber of his being screamed at him to stop her. But her fierce independence was one of the things he loved most.

He let her go.