Page 100 of Flirting with Forever

“Oh?”

She felt her own vulnerability rise, a frightening combination of sorrow and culpability. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

It was as if a whoosh of vacuum had sucked all the noise and wind and traffic from the street, leaving only a blurred silence and the two of them. The lens lifted briefly, and she saw that he understood. He looked down at his shoes. Cam felt her throat cramp, so afraid was she of the next word.

“One doesn’t easily fit ‘My lover died in childbirth’ into a conversation,” he said.

She threw her arms around him. “Oh, Peter. And your son.”

“And my son.”

She could feel him quake, and she was crying too, thinking of her brother and the son he’d never see grow up. The world seemed to be filled with such cruelty.

“My brother,” she cried into his coat, “lost his wife and son in a car accident. I’m so sorry.” And she was—for Peter, for her brother, for anyone who’d ever lost anybody.

Peter hugged her tighter. “You mustn’t cry,” he said through his own tears. “’Twas many years ago.”

She cried harder and felt a fool.

“Come inside,” he said. “Let me make us some tea.”

* * *

“For the longest time,” he said, “I didn’t know she was with child.”

He ran a hand through his hair and spoke distractedly as Cam drank. She held her tongue and let him speak.

“I know it seems foolish now. We were, after all”—he flushed—“quite actively in love. But I liked her plump and didn’t notice.”

The article Cam had read in The Burlington Magazine was not about Peter and his painting of the four Ursulas, though that picture had been included. It was an analysis of a portrait by Peter of a woman of “haunting beauty” whom the author believed to be Ursula. The woman’s head covering, informal pose, and domestic negligee suggested to an art expert the author consulted that “the painter was evidently in love with her.” The author went on to say that the position of the woman’s hands, holding saffron-colored fabric bunched across her lap, suggested she was “enceinte”—pregnant, in the indirect parlance of the day—a fact the author believed was supported by the almost frightened expression in her eyes, which he pointed out was “quite compatible with that condition of expectancy.”

Cam had studied that picture for a good ten minutes. The sitter wasn’t the seductress of Cam’s imagination. She was a woman in her thirties. Beautiful, yes. A goddess, no. And Cam had agreed with the viscount: the drape of fabric and position of the hand were common painterly devices for hiding a pregnancy.

“And when she told me the news…” Peter smiled, the faraway look in his eyes suggesting an oft-recalled happiness. “Ah, how we celebrated.”

“And you painted her.”

“I always painted her, but, aye, then too. The way her face had changed. It was as if the sun had risen inside her. I couldn’t even capture it on canvas. It was remarkable.”

Cam watched his thumb and forefinger go to the emerald.

“And the birth…It started so easily. I was on top of the world. It was evening. The studio was closed. By morn I would have a son—or a daughter. What did I care? We would have more, as many as she wanted. But not long after the strike of two, she began to bleed. A surgeon was called, but he couldn’t stop it. There was nothing to be done. Not, that is”—his voice grew hollow, and Cam bit the inside of her mouth—“until it was over. Then he would bring his awful blade to bear on her and—”

His shoulders hitched, and he lowered his head. Cam returned the cup to the saucer, hand shaking, and the tinkle of china was like the blast of a trumpet in the silent studio.

He brought both hands to his mouth, cupping them as if to catch the outpouring of sorrow. But he could neither catch nor stop it.

“—and he would bring our baby into the world and leave Ursula…”

“Oh, Peter, it’s all right.”

“I held her, until the end, until her hand relaxed and her eyes lost their fear, but I couldn’t watch that. I couldn’t. I told him I didn’t care about the child, that he should save her, but he said he couldn’t. He could only save the child, and only if he were very, very lucky.”

Cam thought of her brother and how he’d had to tell the story over and over, and how the words had become a potion for him, a way to organize something that couldn’t be organized.

“The swaddled child—my son—was placed in my arms a quarter hour later.” Peter wiped the wetness from his cheeks. “I-I wanted to hate him, but I couldn’t. He was beautiful. He was her. But he was so small.”

And he was named for his father, she thought, for that was what the author’s research had uncovered in the records of the Covent Garden church called St. Paul’s. Nell had said “Old Pauly” had taken Ursula. Cam assumed “Old Pauly” was a man, but it was the church where Ursula had been buried.