Page 49 of An Innocent Bride for the Duke

“Let’s join Fanny and Ezra and look through our old sketch books,” Seraphine enthused, clapping her hands. “You have finished your breakfast, haven’t you, Louisa? We can leave the gentlemen with Aunt Beatrice.”

Louisa hesitated, not really wanting to revisit memories that must surely now be only painful. At the same time, this was an opportunity to politely leave the room and stop herself from compulsively glancing at Benedict and wondering what he was thinking.

“Yes, let’s do that,” Louisa agreed at last, standing up and dropping her napkin onto her plate. “I haven’t been in there for an age.”

As she left the room arm-in-arm with Seraphine, Louisa could not help one look back over her shoulder, her eyes meeting the blue and green gaze of the Duke of Northwick which had evidently been following her. Although she turned quickly away, that single moment of non-physical contact sent a shock of thrilling unease through her body all over again.

“That’s not a dog!” laughed Fanny at her younger brother’s efforts with a brown crayon.

“It is a dog!” Ezra insisted crossly. “Mama, it’s a dog!”

“Yes, it’s a lovely dog,” Seraphine soothed her son, smoothing his hair with her hand. “It is only different to the dogs that Fanny draws. As you both know, there are many different types of dog. Fanny has drawn a Dalmatian, I think. Ezra has drawn…”

She looked to Louisa for help in somehow describing the oddly shaped creature on Ezra’s scrap paper with a tail as long as its body and a big smile on its face.

“Well, it’s not a thoroughbred, I don’t think,” Louisa remarked with a smile as she considered the picture, “but some of the friendliest dogs are mongrels.”

“It’s a friendly dog,” Ezra confirmed with a nod, having no idea what a mongrel was. “It’s smiling.”

“So it is,” Seraphine acknowledged, turning back to Louisa again as the children became absorbed once more in their pictures. “Looking at some of my own early efforts, I don’t think I’m in a position to offer very much art criticism at all today.”

Seraphine opened an old sketchbook at a page with some four legged and horned creature that looked something like a demented cow in a cloak.

“If I had not taken the trouble to label this one a unicorn, I do not believe I should have known what I intended by it,” she said.

Louisa giggled.

“You can only have been a little older than Fanny when you drew that,” she observed. “Are those wings, do you think? Or a winter coat?”

“I have no idea! You always were the better artist of the two of us. Just look at that one, Louisa. The detail is impressive, especially as it was all drawn only from the imagination.”

She reached out for a sketch book open at a page with a packed scene including a knight on horseback, a beautiful lady holding out her arms towards him and a dead dragon beside a crowd of cheering peasants. It had originally been sketched in pencil, with some of the image later filled in with water colors.

“I was much older when I drew this one. It’s a very busy picture, isn’t it?” Louisa said. “I remember working on it for days and there always seemed to be more to add. Sir Benedict is even carrying a book of poems he found time to write for Lady Elizabeth! The insignia on his shield, the sun shining in the sky, that child pouting to the dragon…”

As she continued to study the picture, Seraphine laughed again before raising her merry eyes to Louisa’s.

“Do you notice anything more significant about this picture now, Louisa?”

“Well, I think the perspective is very out for the size of the dragon, although as they are imaginary beasts…”

“No, forget the dragon. Look at Sir Benedict. What do you see?”

At Seraphine’s instruction, Louisa looked at the broad-shouldered and valiant knight. She had drawn him after his victory against the dragon, still on horseback but with his helmet off and his sword re-sheathed.

Sir Benedict’s thick, dark hair was tousled above his handsome face with its firm jaw and sculpted cheekbones. As he gazed upon Lady Elizabeth, young Louisa had managed to place a hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth.

“Forgetting the armor, does he remind you of anyone?” prodded her cousin and Louisa smartly closed the sketch book, not wanting to admit to herself what was obviously true.

She had once drawn Sir Benedict as a man who looked very much indeed like the Duke of Northwick the first time she had seen him on the drive at Wexford Manor.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Louisa tried to claim but then dissolved into sheepish laughter. “Oh, of course, I do see it. It’s a funny coincidence, I suppose, just like the name.”

“Perhaps your imagination is so powerful that you conjured him up,” jested Seraphine. “Just think, you might have met any man, but you met someone who not only looks like the hero of your favorite book but shares his name.”

“If I had met any other man, I would not be in this predicament,” pointed out Louisa, tears coming to her eyes again.

Her emotions seemed to be up and down all the time at the moment, like the weather on a changeable day in springtime. One moment she was close to laughter and the next to tears.