Seven Wicked Nights (Turner #1.5)

“It’s good you’re a married man.” He laughed. “You need looking after.”


“So do you.” Magnus stared at the spot where hot cigar ash had eaten a hole in the fabric. “Eleanor will have my head.” He brushed at his waistcoat before he sat again. “Portia will mend it for me, and not tell Eleanor, either. Solid as a rock, that girl. But then you know that.”

“I do.”

After several minutes more silence, Crispin put down his cigar and reached for a stack of the papers on the table. He went through them slowly, with the reverence due the pages. As always, he was in awe of Magnus’s talent. His art. Magnus Temple was a bloody genius, and here he was, the vicar of West Aubry when he ought to be in London painting for the Royal Academy. What a waste. What a bloody crime. Portia blamed herself for that, when really the blame belonged to his father. And to him. For not foreseeing that his father would threaten not Portia directly but the people she loved. “Why are all these out?”

“Organizing things.” Magnus shrugged. “Clearing out the old now that Eleanor’s here. I try to do some every few days.”

There were several drawings of Eleanor, including one in which she was clearly the inspiration for a Madonna. Crispin came to a portrait of Portia, done a few years ago. So young. His heart hurt to see her. She’d never been a conventional beauty, but he doubted any man would deny her appeal. Spend five minutes with her, and you’d soon be convinced you’d never met a finer woman. In the portrait, done in pen and ink, her head was bowed in concentration. Magnus had drawn just the tops of her hands, enough to show she held a needle. Behind her was the suggestion of the parlor fireplace. One expected she might at any moment lift her head and smile. A wave of lust hit him, pulling him under. He lay the stack of sketches on his lap, the portrait of Portia on top.

She still thought about the baby they’d made, when all these years he’d convinced himself she didn’t. How could he blame her for what she’d done as a sixteen year old girl in a desperate situation? His father had all but guaranteed she would carry that burden alone. There were women in her situation who died, and that knowledge chilled him to the marrow. She might have died, and a world without her would have been a barren place.

“My wife’s been gone more than a year, now. Nearly two.”

“We were sorry to hear that news, Portia and I.”

“I was a better man after I was married.” Marriage had agreed with him, that was true. Not a perfect union, but not a bad one either. He’d been happy in a calmer way. His wife had been a fine and admirable woman, and he had always hated himself for not loving her as she deserved.

“You’ll marry again.” Magnus nodded to himself. “You must. Unnatural if you don’t.”

“That’s so.” He did not have a son yet, and that must be remedied.

“Have you met anyone who will do?”

He shook his head, but Jesus, the lie of his denial spread ashes across his soul.

“Pity.”

“I don’t like Stewart.”

Magnus took another pull of his beer. “He writes verses. Did he tell you that? No? I expect that’s why Portia’s set herself on marrying him. The poetry did her in, that’s what I think. Lord knows she’s never paid any attention to other men, and they’ve come calling. I know you don’t see her like that, but there’s a good many men who’ve wanted to marry her.”

He did not move for fear of Magnus seeing more than he ought, but then he wondered if that wasn’t a worse way to lie to his best friend than if he plastered on a disbelieving grin. “Is that so?”

“He’s not bad, you know. Stewart.”

Crispin snorted.

“As a poet.” Magnus slunk lower on his chair. “Goes on about cliffs and bluebells flashing with dew. But there’s one about a stag I like. Noble antlers and beams of sunrise.”

“He’s an architect, I thought.”

Magnus reached over and tapped the underside of the sketches on Crispin’s lap hard enough to make the paper jump. “Only one of his occupations puts money in his pocket.”

He slumped on his chair. A poet? The man was a damned poet? “God save us from poets.”

“The Lord will strike you dead for that.” Magnus grinned and the lines of his face deepened, and it seemed to Crispin there were more now than there had been the last time he’d seen Magnus. “Might take fifty years, though.”

He picked up Magnus’s portrait of Portia, and something tugged at him as he studied the smiling woman on the page. She was unhappy now, and she did not deserve to be. Not then, and not now. He glanced at Magnus.

The words that came to his lips felt odd and foreign and right. They shook loose from wherever they’d been lodged and flew into the air. “I want to marry Portia.”

Magnus choked on his laughter.

He waited until there was silence again and then said, “I will marry Portia.”

A furrow appeared in Magnus’s forehead. “You mean that.”