Gallant Officer, Forbidden Lady. Diane Gaston

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       London—June 1814

      It was like walking in a dream.

      All around him, history paintings, landscapes, allegories, portraits hung one next to the other like puzzle pieces until every space, floor to ceiling, was covered.

      Jack wandered through the exhibition room of the Royal Academy of Art, gazing at the incredible variety, the skill, the beauty of the works. He could not believe he was here.

      His regiment had been called back to England a year ago. Napoleon had abdicated, and the army had no immediate need for his services. Jack, like most of the young officers who’d lived through the war, had risen in rank. He’d been promoted to lieutenant, which gave him a bit more money when he went on half-pay. This gave him the opportunity to do what he yearned to do, needed to do. To draw. To paint. To create beauty and forget death and destruction.

      Jack had gone directly to Bath, to the home of his mother and sister, the town where his mentor, Sir Cecil Harper, also lived. Sir Cecil had fostered Jack’s need to draw ever since he’d been a boy and he became Jack’s tutor again. Somehow the war had not robbed Jack of the ability to paint. At Sir Cecil’s insistence, he submitted his paintings to the Royal Academy for its summer exhibition. Miraculously the Royal Academy accepted two of them.

      They now hung here on the walls of Somerset House, home of the Royal Academy, next to the likes of Lawrence and Fuseli and Turner, in a room crowded with spectators who had not yet left the city for the summer.

      Crowds disquieted Jack. The rumble of voices sounded in his ears like distant cannonade and set off memories that threatened to propel him back into the nightmare of war.

      A gentleman brushed against him, and Jack almost swung at him. Luckily the man took no notice. Jack unclenched his fist, but the rumble grew louder and the sensation of cannons, more vivid. His heart beat faster and it seemed as if the room grew darker. This had happened before, a harbinger of a vision. Soon he would be back in battle again, complete with sounds and smells and fears.

      Jack closed his eyes and held very still, hoping no one could tell the battle that waged inside. When he opened his eyes again, he gazed up at his sister’s portrait, hung high and difficult to see, as befitted his status as a nobody. The painting grounded him. He was in London, at Somerset House, amid beauty. He smiled gratefully at her image.

      ‘Which painting pleases you so?’ a low and musical voice asked.

      At Jack’s elbow stood a young woman, breathtakingly lovely, looking precisely as if she had emerged from one of the canvases. For a brief moment he wondered if she too was a trick his mind was playing on him. Her skin was like silk of the palest rose, beautifully contrasted by her rich auburn hair. Her lips, deep and dusky pink, shimmered as if she’d that moment moistened them with her tongue. Large, sparkling eyes, the green of lush meadows and fringed with long mink-brown lashes, met his gaze with a fleeting expression of sympathy.

      ‘Do say it is the one of the young lady.’ She pointed to his sister’s portrait.

      Tearing his eyes away from her for a moment, he glanced back at the painting of his sister. ‘Do you like that one?’ he managed to respond.

      ‘I do, indeed.’ Her eyes narrowed in consideration. ‘She is so fresh and lovely. The rendering is most life-like, but that is not the whole of it, I think—’ she paused, moistening her lips, and more than Jack’s artistic sensibilities came alive with the gesture ‘—it is most lovingly painted.’

      ‘Lovingly painted?’ Jack glanced back again at the canvas, but just for a second, because he could not bear to wrest his eyes from her.

      ‘Yes.’ She spoke as if conversing with a man to whom she had not been introduced was the most natural thing in the world, as if she were the calm in this room where Jack had just battled old demons. ‘The young lady’s expression. Her posture. It all bespeaks to emotion, her eagerness to see what the future holds for her and the fondness the artist has for her. It makes her even more beautiful. The painting is quite remarkable indeed.’

      Jack could not help but flush with pride.

      He’d painted Nancy’s portrait primarily to lure commissions from prospective clients, but it had also given him the opportunity to become reacquainted with the sister who’d been a child when he’d kissed her goodbye before departing for the Peninsula. Nancy was eighteen now and had blossomed into a beauty as fresh and lovely as her portrait had been described. The painting’s exquisite admirer looked to be no more than one or two years older than Nancy. If Jack painted her, however, he’d show a woman who knew precisely what she desired in life.

      She laughed. ‘I ought not to expect a gentleman to understand emotion.’ She gazed back at the painting. ‘Except the artist. He captures it perfectly.’

      He smiled inwardly. If she only knew how often emotion was his enemy, skirmishing with him even in this room.

      Again her green eyes sought his. ‘Did you know the artist has another painting here?’ She took his arm. ‘Come. I will show you. You will be surprised.’

      She led him to another corner of the room where, among all the great artists, she had discovered his other work.

      ‘See?’ She pointed to the painting of a British soldier raising the flag at Badajoz. ‘The one above the landscape. Of the soldier. Look at the emotions of relief and victory and fatigue on the soldier’s face.’ She opened her catalogue and scanned the pages. ‘Victory at Badajoz, it is called, and the artist is Jack Vernon.’ Her gaze returned to the painting. ‘What is so fascinating to me is that Vernon also hints at the amount of suffering the man must have endured to reach this place. Is that not marvellous?

      ‘You like this one, too, then?’ Jack could not have felt more gratified had the President of the Academy, Benjamin West himself, made the comment.

      ‘I do.’ She nodded emphatically.

      He’d painted Victory at Badajoz to show that fleeting moment when it felt as if the siege of Badajoz had been worth what it cost. She had seen precisely what he’d wanted to convey.

      Jack turned to her. ‘Do you know so much of soldiering?’

      She laughed again. ‘Nothing at all, I assure you. But this is exactly how I would imagine such a moment to feel.’ She took his arm again. ‘Let me show you another.’

      She led him to a painting the catalogue listed as The Surrender of Pamplona. Wellington, who only this month had become Duke of Wellington, was shown in Roman garb and on horseback accepting the surrender of the Spanish city of Pamplona, depicted in the painting as a female figure. The painting was stunningly composed and evocative of classical Roman friezes. Its technique was flawless.

      ‘You like this one, as well?’ he asked her. ‘It is well done. Very well done.’

      She gave it a dismissive gesture. ‘It is ridiculous, Wellington in Roman robes!’

      He smiled in amusement. ‘It is allegorical.’

      She sent him a withering look. ‘I know it is allegorical, but do you not think it ridiculous to depict such an event as if it occurred in ancient Rome?’ Her gaze swung back to the painting. ‘Look at it. I do not dispute that it is well done, but it pales in comparison to the other painting of СКАЧАТЬ