chapter Thirteen
“I know that I said I was willing to do anything you suggested, but how exactly is this supposed to help?” Gabriel asked, eyeing Penelope skeptically.
It was midafternoon the following day and the two of them were alone in Somerton Park’s long gallery. The massive high-ceilinged room was dotted with comfortable-looking tufted benches, chaise longues, a walnut pianoforte and the occasional overstuffed chair. A fire crackled in the massive hearth, centered along the interior wall. The other side of the room boasted tall windows separated by scarcely a yard between them, and every available patch of wall space was covered with colorful portraits and landscapes in gilt frames of varying shapes and sizes.
But the only canvas that interested him at the moment was the blank one on the easel in front of him.
Penelope grinned at him as she removed the lid from a cylindrical earthenware container about the size of a large pumpkin.
“When I first started visiting the soldiers at the hospital, I really had no idea how to reach them.” Dipping her hand into the pot, she withdrew a walnut-sized pouch and shook droplets of water from it until it stopped dripping. “Oftentimes we would just talk about our lives and interests. When they discovered I was an artist,” she said, taking a pin and piercing the pouch, “they asked to see some of my work.”
Red paint oozed out of the tiny hole she’d made, and the crisp tang of linseed oil reached his nose. Pen squeezed a dollop onto a wooden palette and then plugged the hole with a tack before placing the bladder of paint back into her container.
“After some great discussions of art, the men wanted a demonstration, so I did some painting for them.” She withdrew another bladder and pricked it, this time eliciting a bright green. “Then I encouraged them to try, and over a period of weeks, I discovered some interesting things.”
Green was replaced by yellow. “I already knew, you see, that the very act of painting made me feel better. I’d been pouring out my emotions onto the canvas since I’d picked up my first paintbrush. Thankfully”—she flashed him an eye-rolling grin—“the melodramatic canvases of my youth have long since been destroyed.”
Blue paint now joined the others on the wood. “Anyway, as the men created their own works, I started noticing symbolism in some. Others were able to externalize their emotions through their art, and once they were on the canvas, separate themselves from the feelings enough to talk about them.” Purple joined the mix. “And for some, painting simply improved their moods enough to make it through their day.”
He crossed his arms and lowered his chin. “You expect me to . . . paint my feelings?”
She smiled and added another color to the palette. “I have a theory that the mere act of creating puts us in a place of positive emotion. Sometimes we can gain insight simply by observing what we’ve created. And I believe that sometimes the artistic process can bring feelings to the forefront for us to see, even when it is not our intention. Once we can view those feelings objectively, we are free to abolish them as we see fit.” One last dollop, white this time, and she placed the lid back on her pot.
Setting the palette on the table near the easel, she reached for brushes, fanning the sable hairs with her fingers. “Liliana wants me to prepare a paper on my findings, though if I did, I expect it would be laughed out of the Royal Society before they even read the title. Imagine me, trying to pretend that I’m brilliant.”
He looked at her, gathering art supplies and speaking passionately about the ways she’d discovered to relieve others’ suffering—men like him. Didn’t she see that she was brilliant? But even more, she was compassionate and kind. All of the intelligence in the world would be fruitless without those higher qualities that Penelope had in abundance.
But that seemed too deep for the moment, so he just repeated dryly, “You expect me to paint my feelings.”
She pursed her lips, but the corners of her mouth tipped up in a smile despite her efforts to look stern. “It might do you good to try, you know.”
He snorted, uncrossing his arms and stepping closer to the easel. “I haven’t an artistic bone in my body.”
Pen slipped a smock over her dress. “Everyone has a spark of creativity within them,” she protested.
“Not me. I am utterly unimaginative, I assure you.”
She raised a blond brow as she tied her strings. “I’m certain we could find something to inspire you.”
Gabriel’s breath caught in his throat. Pen had already turned her attention to readying her brushes and wasn’t looking at him at all. He knew she hadn’t meant her words to imply anything, but as he watched her graceful movements, he thought, You, Pen. You could inspire me to do whatever you wanted. He’d paint if she desired it. He’d burst into song. Hell, he’d build her a bloody temple with his bare hands if she wished it, chiseling every stone himself. With a spoon.
“However, I am going to do the painting today,” she said, snapping his attention back to her. “And you are going to be my muse.”
“What?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about your different symptoms. While they may be part of a whole, I’d like to attack them one by one, and the one I’d like to take on today is the vertigo you experience around ballrooms.”
“I see,” he said, snagging a long-handled brush from the tabletop. “And we’re going to defeat it with art supplies,” he said, brandishing it in front of him like a sword. It was easier to tease than to acknowledge the knot already forming in his stomach.
Pen laughed and snatched the brush back from him. “In a way. Remember when I told you that our minds make certain associations—sometimes unbeknownst to us—that can then take over our senses?”
He nodded.
“Well, I think that when you entered those ballrooms, your mind may have interpreted something perfectly innocuous as a threat and convinced your body that there was danger—even though you rationally knew that not to be true.”
He frowned. As much as he desperately wished that Penelope’s strategies would help him, this sounded like so much mumbo jumbo. “How can that be?”
“My guess would be that something you saw, heard or smelled recalled to your mind the danger you were once in, and your body reacted accordingly.”
“It is an interesting theory.” And a frightening one. If this reaction was unbeknownst to him, what could he do about it? “Let us say you are correct. How would we stop my mind from heading down that path?”
“Sometimes, it is as simple as dissecting the situation and figuring out what, exactly, your mind is erroneously associating with danger. Once your rational mind knows what sets it off, you can effectively break that association. So what I want you to do is close your eyes.”
Rather than obey, Gabriel lifted a brow.
“Just trust me,” Pen encouraged.
“If you say so.” He dropped his lids, feeling foolish. “It can’t be any worse than blistering, I suppose.”
“Very funny,” she said, but he could hear the smile in her voice. “Now, I want you to think back to that very first ball on the Peninsula and describe everything you see and feel in great detail. I am going to paint what I hear you say. When we are finished, I will stand you directly in front of the painting, and I want you to blurt out the first thing that comes to your mind when you see it. Hopefully, that will give us a clue into exactly what it is that frightens you.”
He cracked one eye open and half stared at her dubiously.
She lifted her paintbrush and her eyebrows and stared back.
He sighed and closed his eye again.
“All right, you said your vertigo hit when you approached the dance floor. Was that just a coincidence? Or was there something about the dance floor that reminded you of something else?”
He tried to remember. The air had been humid, the breeze blowing moisture in from the Zadorra River on the warm June night. He’d entered the villa through an ancient stone archway, anticipating a rare night of revelry after a battle hard won.
“I can see you thinking, but you’ll have to verbalize everything for me, so I can put it to canvas,” she reminded him.
“It was night,” he said, “but the room was lit by flame. Candles, torches and fires flickered, casting everything in a golden light reminiscent of late afternoon.”
“You certainly talk like an artist,” she teased. He heard the first scratchings of her brush against canvas, however, which encouraged him to go on.
“The room was large and rectangular, made up of blocked gray stone. It was laid out much like a cloister, with stone arches side by side by side.”
It was the noise he’d noticed first that night. A cacophony of voices. They were raised in celebration, but it made him uneasy, particularly when someone shouted out unexpectedly. “It was crowded . . . very crowded. Not just on the dance floor but throughout the entire room, with people spilling out onto the lawn. I approached the dance floor, looking for a willing partner. But as I got near—”
Gabriel’s heart pounded in his chest and sweat broke out on his brow, even though he knew he was safe in a manor house in Shropshire. As his head began to spin, he opened his eyes. “I can’t, Pen.”
“Don’t look!” She flashed a hand out, blocking his vision. Linseed and walnut oil flooded his nose as her fingers darkened his sight. “You can do this,” she assured him. “Just take me with you. Imagine I’m by your side.”
He pictured Pen, not as she was now, in her black dress covered by a smock dotted with smears of color, but as she’d been at her wedding ball, in a flowing dress of the lightest yellow. He nodded.
Her hand fell away from his eyes.
“People were dancing,” he said shakily. “A lively tune. Much swirling and even the occasional leap,” he tried to joke.
“Describe the people to me,” she said, her voice whistling a bit on the hard consonants, as if she were speaking while holding one of the paintbrushes in her mouth. “Were there equal numbers of women and men? What colors are they wearing?”
In his mind’s eye, he walked out onto the dance floor, Penelope by his side. Images swirled around him, but with her near him, they didn’t bother him as much. Indeed, his heart had slowed to a clip rather than a gallop, and his breathing was not nearly so choppy.
“Men outnumber the ladies by half. Many of the officers are wearing their uniforms. I see members of the Foot in their waist-length red jackets and gray trousers. There are riflemen in green and the Portuguese officers in blue. Some are wearing black hats. The ladies are in all colors—whites, lighter blues, yellows.”
“Good,” she said, though it sounded more like guh around her brush. “Can you smell anything?”
He frowned. “How can you paint smell?”
“I can’t. Just humor me.”
“Cigar smoke,” he said after a moment. For all intents and purposes, with the multiple arched windows, the ballroom had been open air. It had also been overcrowded. Officers milled about just outside the ballroom with their cheroots and cigars. “There was a slight haze of it wafting over the dance floor, brought in by the breeze.”
“Hmmm,” she said. The scratching of her brush against the canvas was a rapid staccato now, as if she made quick, short strokes of varying lengths.
“That is all I can remember,” he said after a few moments listening to her paint. “May I look?” he asked, feeling a fool just standing there with his eyes closed.
“Almost . . .” Scratch, scratch, scratch. Tap, tap, tap, tap.
Finally, he heard the clicking of wood as she set her palette and brushes on the table. Her small hands curled around his shoulders as she positioned him where she wanted him to be. When she had him just so, she let go. He heard her step off to his side.
“Now, when I tell you to open your eyes, I want you to say the first thing that comes to mind.”
He nodded his understanding.
“All right . . . look.”
Gabriel did. Before his gaze could even fully focus on the painting, he sucked in a breath. “It’s the battlefield,” he whispered.
It wasn’t, of course, yet . . . “The colors,” he said, swallowing against a dry throat. But it was more than that. He marveled at the painting. Penelope had captured the light of the ballroom almost exactly as he remembered it, which now that he saw it, was eerily reminiscent of the evening sky in northern Spain. The haze of cigar smoke floated over the ballroom like cannon smoke, and the crush of bodies seemed to flow around one another as if they were locked in combat.
“You wouldn’t think a field of battle could be beautiful,” he said, almost seeing the battlefield superimposed upon Penelope’s painting. “But it is in its own way. Multiple armies, countless regiments, each following their own drummer, each in their own uniforms and yet each part of the whole . . . circling . . . engaging . . .”
“I think,” Penelope said quietly, coming to stand closer to him, “that your mind saw this scene and associated it with the battle you’d just survived. Your body felt as if you were walking into danger even though your mind knew you were not, and the confusion between the physical and the mental is why you reacted the way you did.”
He remembered the stark terror of that moment, of thinking he was losing his mind. It had been the first step down the dark road that had led him to Vickering Place. Hadn’t it? “So, it wasn’t the beginnings of madness?”
Penelope’s hand slipped into his, and he gripped it tight. “No,” she said firmly. “Once your mind associated ballrooms with battlefields, your body no longer wished to go anywhere near one. That is all.”
A bit shaken, Gabriel stood staring transfixed at the canvas. “Could it really be that simple?”
“Perhaps,” she answered. “Now that you are aware of the association, the hope is that you can break it. If you start to feel panic rising next time you are near a ballroom, you can calm yourself down by remembering this moment, the moment you understood that your fear is unfounded. That it is not real.”
He would remember this moment, but it would be the woman at his side that he would hold on to, much as he was doing right now. He tore his eyes from the painting and looked at her. Darling, darling Pen. Her hand felt so right in his. He couldn’t shake the certainty that if he just never let her go, she would heal him, much as Stratford claimed his wife had done for him.
Was it wrong of him to hope for that? Hope that Penelope would want to stay with him? It had to be, of course, but it was only because of her faith in his chances that he had any hope at all. Even if it was wrong, he couldn’t squelch the desire. It burned within him.
It also must have shown in his face because Pen suddenly colored and gently tugged her hand from his.
“Th-this is just a first step toward recovery, of course,” she said, stepping away to fiddle with her brushes. “The mind is intricate and complex. It is unlikely this is the only harmful association you’ve made. Sometimes it is simple to make the connection. For example, one man I worked with experienced vivid daytime terrors anytime he smelled gunpowder or heard a loud booming noise, which are obvious reminders of the battlefields. Needless to say, he no longer goes out on the hunt.”
Gabriel nodded. “Neither do I.”
“Yes. But it can also be something innocuous and not nearly so clear, like the taste of a certain food. Another man would go into tremors upon taking a bite of mutton. Only after we explored this thoroughly did we realize he’d been eating mutton stew when the Portuguese attacked at Fuentes de Oñoro. He lost his leg in that battle, so you can imagine what his mind associated with a harmless bite of meat.”
“Has he gone off the lamb, then?” Gabriel asked curiously.
She looked up from her task of cleaning brushes and smiled. “No, actually. You see, he quite liked lamb and refused to give it up. Once he knew why he reacted the way he did, he fought through it. It took some time, but now it doesn’t seem to bother him at all.”
“Amazing,” he murmured. And it was. To think, if he could reverse the bothersome effects the wars had wrought in him, he might reclaim his life. Or have it given back to him. His eyes roamed over Penelope’s lovely face. “You’re a wonder, Pen. However did you think to even try these methods?”
Her nose scrunched, and she shook her head, setting the brushes back on the table. “I’m no wonder,” she said. “I haven’t a brilliant mind at all. Association theory just seemed to make sense to me when I first heard of it. But honestly, I hardly comprehend half of what I read on the subject, and I disagree with half of what I do understand.” She sighed, her mouth opening, then closing, as if she were searching for words. “Perhaps it is the very simplicity of my mind that led me down this path. I just tried to take the logical next steps, combining the theories with what I observed and I stumbled into some successes.”
He huffed. “You are hardly simpleminded. I’ve known from the first day we met that you are highly intuitive,” he said. “And the ability to turn that intuition into results . . . that is brilliant, Pen.”
Her brow furrowed. “Well.” She took a deep breath and crossed behind him so that he had to turn to follow her movements. She settled into a pace. “We’ve discovered what could be behind your vertigo in the ballrooms. But we still have much work to do.”
He let her change the subject. “As I said,” she went on, “we’ll look for hidden associations that might explain the more bothersome symptoms first. I’d also like to explore what is behind your fear of tight spaces.” She stopped pacing to look at him, tapping the thumb of her closed fist against her bottom lip. “I’m betting that the week you cannot remember after Waterloo has something to do with it. Perhaps if we can unbury those memories, you will no longer suffer that.”
“That would be welcome,” he agreed. “Very welcome. However . . .” A fist of unease balled just below his sternum as it always did when he thought of the madness looming just out of his periphery, waiting to strike. “I fear we are ignoring the larger problem.”
“Your episodes.”
He nodded.
“My hope,” she said as she resumed her pace, “is that they are not caused by madness at all, but rather from the cumulative effect of unhealthy associations. If we can slay the minor demons, perhaps we’ll find the larger beast not to be so terrible.”
Oh God, let it be. Fear and hope twisted and twined inside of him—hope she was right, fear she was not—in a delicate balance of emotion. “Have you ever found that to be the case?”
Penelope didn’t wince, but he sensed her check the gesture. “As I’ve said, I’ve not seen episodes like yours before.”
The apology was clear in her voice.
For a moment, the balance in his heart shifted to fear, but he refused to let it take root, damn it. Working with Penelope these past few days, he felt he’d accomplished more than months at Vickering Place and years on his own before then. Even if their time together led to nothing, it felt like he was finally doing something tangible toward his own recovery. It gave him back a measure of control, illusionary though it might be.
As Penelope moved to finish cleaning her brushes, Gabriel walked back to stand in front the ballroom scene. It was quite good, he decided. Rather than clean, crisp lines, the strokes gave more of an impression than anything else. He wondered if that was Penelope’s preferred style or if it was done because she’d been painting so quickly. Either way, it was clear she was very talented.
He knew she and Michael had met in the park. Each of them had been painting landscapes, and as he’d packed up to go, Michael had stopped to look over Penelope’s shoulder.
That painting she’d been working on had hung over the mantel in their London townhome.
But this painting, she’d done for him, Gabriel.
“May I keep this?” he asked.
She turned her head and shot him a quizzical glance.
“As a reminder. That the fear is not real,” he explained using her words.
She smiled at him. “Of course. In fact, that is an excellent idea. There is a local assembly in a fortnight’s time that I’d like you to attend with me. It is the perfect venue to see whether today’s experiment worked.”
Gabriel couldn’t quell a flare of alarm at the thought, but the idea of having Penelope in his arms on the dance floor tamped it down significantly.
“Perhaps if you spend a few moments each day till then looking at the painting, it will help.” She came to stand beside him as she looked at the canvas herself. Then she reached out to point at it. “See, I’ve painted you in the center, just there. When you try, I want you to focus your attention on the image of you. Visualize yourself in the middle of the room, dancers swirling around you. If you start to feel panicked, keep staring at the painting and remind yourself that it is not a battlefield. That you are safe. Perhaps it will, for lack of a better word, train your mind to the reality.”
He looked where she’d directed him, and indeed, there was the impression of a man standing center. But beside him, there was also a blond woman. And it seemed as if their hands were entwined.
“Is this you?” he asked, pointing the woman out.
She blinked at the canvas, then squinted her eyes and pressed her face closer to it. Then her creamy skin flushed pink. “Ah, um.” She laughed. “Yes. I suppose it is.”
Did she mean it hadn’t been intentional?
“Well”—she licked her lips—“it seemed to help you when I told you to imagine me beside you. And—um—I suppose it was only natural to paint myself there.”
Gabriel watched her stammered explanation with fascination. What had she said before? That sometimes the painter expressed emotions or symbolism that they would never otherwise voice? He stared back at the image of the woman holding his hand, and heat slid through him. Then he noticed something else, a bit of symbolism if he’d ever seen any.
“You even paint yourself wearing black,” he murmured.
“What?” she asked, clearly confused.
He reached out and touched the still-drying painting, his finger coming away from the woman’s dress with a smudge of black. He held it up before her. “You do realize Michael’s death was not your fault, don’t you?” he asked her quietly, in an echo of the very words she’d said to him about his soldiers.
She sucked in a breath, then closed her mouth. Her eyes shone bright with a sudden glistening of moisture, even as they fixed on the tip of his finger. At the visible manifestation of her own guilt.
“You had no control over him.”
She shook her head in quick jerks of denial. “I know where you are leading with this, but it is not the same,” she whispered. “If I would have followed him to Leeds, he might still be alive!”
“If I would have gone on the mission alone, my men might still be alive, too,” he countered. “I could have, you know. I reached Blücher and delivered the message. I could have left all of them behind and still succeeded, but I didn’t.”
She pressed her lips together.
“My point is, Pen, neither one of us knew what would happen. We did what we felt we must at the time. But you didn’t kill Michael any more than I killed my men. Other people pulled those triggers, not you and I.”
A tear slipped down her cheek. He reached out to wipe it away, remembering the black paint on his finger just in time. He wiped it on the leg of his trousers, but in the time it took him, she’d dashed her own tears away with the back of her hand, to his regret. He longed to have a reason to touch her.
“You told me that all we could control is how we live in the aftermath of trauma—how we make our lives count,” he reminded her.
She dropped her head, staring down at the floor. He reached out and curled his fingers beneath her chin, tipping her face up to him. He hated that she trembled. “And in that, I can only strive to follow your lead. Look at what you are doing. Look at the people you’ve helped. You inspire me, Pen.”
She closed her eyes.
“But this,” he said, gesturing to her attire. Since she couldn’t see him with her eyes shut, he clarified. “You, in black . . . it is an abomination.”
Her eyes opened with a startled flutter and focused on him.
“It is antithetical to who you are. You have to let it go. Do you want to know what I thought when I first met you?”
She nodded slowly, almost as if against her own will.
“I remember comparing you to a ray of early-summer sunshine. You made me happy just to look at you. You drew people to you then. You still do, but you’ve dimmed somehow. And it is not right. This penance, or . . . punishment, or whatever it is that is hiding your light must end.”
He dropped his hand from her chin and walked over to the table where her palette still sat. He picked up a clean brush and dipped it in some paint. The he grabbed a rag and walked back to the canvas, using it to dab the excess black paint until the surface was dry. Then he swiped his brush over the woman’s dress.
It took several strokes to cover properly, but when he stepped back, a rich yellow had overtaken the black.
“That is who you are, Pen,” he said gently. “And I think it is time that you find your way back to her.”
She said nothing. Just stood staring with wide eyes at that little bit of symbolism he’d put right in front of her.
And then she seemed to crumple in on herself, her shoulders and head curling protectively as her hands came up to cover her face.
His chest clenched at her quiet sob, alarm snaking up his spine. He dropped the rag and brush forgotten to the floor and reached out for her, grasping her shoulders as he stooped to put his face on a level with hers. “Pen, don’t cry. Please. Please, look at me,” he said as he dropped one hand to gently tug hers away from her face.
The pain he saw swimming in the pale green depths of her eyes pierced him as surely as the lances the French had used at Waterloo with such deadly efficiency. Good Christ, he hadn’t meant for this. He’d only been trying to help her in the same way she’d been helping him. “Oh, Pen,” he murmured, stroking her face, her tears warm and wet against his palm.
He had to stop her crying. It tore at him to see her in such anguish, even if she’d needed to hear the truth.
So he gave her something else to latch on to, as she’d done for him when he’d needed the distraction in the carriage that night.
He kissed her.