Kate called, “Don’t worry, darling. I’ll make sure he uses enough green in my eyes.” She laughed and said to a passing woman who looked at her with awe, “He’s just upset that Barnes isn’t painting him.”
The blond nude who had been Barnes’s model stared at Kate for a long moment before leaving her spot by the pedestal. She strode to the door with her bare feet slapping the wood floor, weaving through the other departing salonistes. Finally the room was empty and the door closed.
Barnes paused in his gathering of paints. “You may disrobe.”
“Oh, may I?” Kate snorted. “I prefer not.”
His disappointment was plain for an instant. Then with a wave of a color-filled hand, he brushed it away. “Remember, you are the primordial female. You are Jerusalem.”
“Isn’t that a city in Palestine?”
“Jerusalem is everything.” Barnes placed a fresh white canvas on the easel and led Kate some yards away to a short pillar surrounded by large, potted ferns. He took her arm and extended it with a caress of his fingers. “Here is where you will ponder your nature. Jerusalem is the emanation of Albion. She is the first woman to his first man, but it is even more than that because they are the same. Together, they are one, all humanity. You are she. You are the creative spark of the world. The lush forest of birth. The warm haven of life. You must embrace that power and that freedom. Before you was nothing but God.”
Kate hid her reaction to the mention of Albion. Barnes was certainly conversant in the elements of William Blake’s mythology. Though, as Malcolm had pointed out, many people had read his poetry.
Barnes touched her hair gently, breathing in her scent. “You are my masterpiece, the envy of every woman and the desire of every man.” He arranged her again, touching and prodding her into position. He studied her face with the disturbing intensity of a scientist staring through a microscope, no longer seeing her, but minute parts of her. His hands lingered a bit long on her hips, taking slight liberties in arranging the folds of her dress. Finally, he took her hand and kissed it, his eyes boring into hers.
Inwardly, Kate shuddered at the caress of his soft wet lips.
Barnes returned to the canvas and took up his brush and palette with the vigor of a hunter snatching up his gun. He enfolded her in a heated gaze that penetrated her in a threatening way. He frantically began to paint without taking his manic attention from her. There was a compelling power in his manner and Kate began to feel that same intensity growing again inside her. She almost bolted for the door. She wasn’t sure if it was her determination or his that kept her leaning against the cold marble amidst the forest of ferns.
“You are familiar with the works of William Blake?” she asked a little breathlessly, thinking that obsessed was a more appropriate word.
Barnes stopped in midstroke and stared at her. “How can one answer that? The entire cosmos is in that statement. I knew the great man. He was my guide, and I am his chosen successor. What was hidden, he saw. He saw the past. He saw the future. He laid out the path.” Barnes rested the brush against the canvas. “I now stand where the master did. My mission is to bring a light that will free this world from a shadow of oppression that hovers over it.”
He walked to a table in the corner and poured a glass of wine. He didn’t offer anything to Kate. He drank and studied her from this new angle, swirling the wine in the goblet. After another moment, he returned to the easel and took up his brush, still holding the wine in the other hand.
“That sounds radical,” Kate tried not to sound too dismissive, “for a man who so openly welcomes the approval of aristocrats.”
“I use those people for my own purposes,” Barnes said smugly. “The Red Orchid has created a steady stream of upper-class ants plowing through the dim refuse of this parish to reach my shining light of London art.” He held the brush just off the canvas, waiting for her to be ready again. “I’ve seen the fire in your eyes. Your own father was a man who made his bold way in the world. And for his efforts, they castrated him.”
“I beg your pardon?” Kate’s eyes narrowed to slits.
“They made him one of them—Sir Roland—and attached him to their failed world so he would stop striving against them. It wasn’t a reward; it was a bribe. He forgot his obligations to those who helped him.”
Kate glared with a balled fist on her hip. “How do you deign to speak of my father?”