Once or twice they strolled in the garden, and Jane showed him what she had already done with it and explained what she still intended to do. But most of the time they spent indoors. It was a misty, wet week anyway.

Jane had simply abandoned herself to sheer pleasure. She spent hours stitching by the fire, necessary because of the damp chill, the autumn woods spreading in glorious profusion across one corner of the linen cloth, then another. Sometimes he read to her – they had reached almost the halfway point of Mansfield Park. More often in the evenings he played the pianoforte. The music was almost all his own composition. Sometimes it was halting, uncertain at the start, as if he did not know where the music came from or where it was going. But she came to recognize the point at which it went beyond an activity of the mind and hands and became one simply of the heart and soul. Then the music flowed.

Sometimes she stood behind him or sat beside him and sang – mostly folk songs and ballads with which they were both acquainted. Even, surprisingly, a few hymns, which he sang with her in a good baritone voice.

‘We were paraded to church every Sunday,’ he told her, ‘to cushion our superior backsides on the plush family pew – though never, at our peril, to squirm on it – while lesser mortals sat on hard wood and gawked in awe. And you, Jane? Were you orphans marched in a neat crocodile, two by two, to sit on backless benches and thank God for the many blessings He had showered on you?’ His hands played a flourishing arpeggio.

‘I always enjoyed church,’ she said quietly. ‘And there are always blessings for which to be thankful.’

He laughed softly.

Most often during the afternoons he painted. He did not want after all, he decided, to paint just her face. He wanted to paint her, as she was. Jane had looked sharply at him when he said that, and he had raised his eyebrows.

‘You think I am going to drape you in a lascivious pose on the floor, Jane, dressed only in your hair?’ he asked. ‘I would put you to better use than to paint you if I did that, believe me. As I will show you tonight. Yes, definitely. Tonight we will have candles and nakedness and hair, and I will show you how to pose for me like the Siren you could be if you set your mind to it. I will paint you at your embroidery. That is when you are most yourself.’ He gazed narrow-eyed at her. ‘Quiet, industrious, elegant, engaged in creating a work of art.’

And so he painted as she stitched, both of them silent. He always stripped off his coat and waistcoat before he began and donned a large, loose shirt over his good one. As the days passed it became smudged and streaked with paint.

He would not let her see the painting until it was finished.

‘I let you see my embroidery,’ she reminded him.

‘I asked and you said yes,’ he replied. ‘You asked and I said no.’

To which logic there was no further argument.

She worked at her embroidery, but she watched him too. Covertly, of course. If she looked too directly or stopped work too long, he frowned and looked distracted and grumbled at her. It was hard sometimes to realize that this man who shared her most intimate space with such mutual ease was the same man who had once told her he would make her wonder if starvation would not be better than working for him. The infamous, heartless Duke of Tresham.

He had the soul of an artist. Music had been trapped within him most of his life. She had not yet seen any product of his brush, but she recognized the total absorption in his work of the true artist. Much of the harshness and cynicism dis appeared from his face. He looked younger, more conventionally handsome.

And entirely lovable.

But it was not until the fourth evening that he really began to talk, to let out in words the person who had lurked behind the haughty, confident, restless, wicked facade he had shown the world all his adult life.

He was enjoying the novelty of being in love, though he kept reminding himself that it was just novelty, that soon it would be over and he would be on safe, familiar ground again. But it saddened him, at the same time as it reassured him, that Jane would ever look to him just like any other beautiful woman he had once enjoyed and tired of, that the time would come when the thought of her, of being with her, both in bed and out, would not fill him with such a welling of gladness that it seemed he must have taken all the sunshine inside himself.

His sexual passion for her grew lustier as the week advanced. He could not be satisfied with the almost chaste encounters of their first two times together, but set out to teach her – and himself – different, more carnal, more prolonged delights. The previous week he might have exulted in the bed sport with his new mistress and proceeded with the rest of his life as usual. But it was not the previous week. It was this week. And this week there was so much more than just bed sport. Indeed, he suspected that bed was good between them just because there was so much else.

He dared do things he had craved as a boy – play the pianoforte, paint, dream, let his mind drift into realms beyond the merely practical. He was frustrated by his painting and exhilarated by it. He could not capture the essence of her, perhaps because he looked too hard for it and thought too much about it, he realized at last. And so he relearned what had once been instinctive with him – to observe not so much with his senses or even his mind but with the mindless, wordless aspect of himself that was itself part of the essence it sought. He learned to stop forcing his art to his will. He learned that to create, he somehow had to allow creation to proceed through him.

He would not have understood the concept if he had ever verbalized it. But he had learned that words were not always adequate to what he yearned to express. He had learned to move beyond words.

Gradually the woman who had become the grand obsession of his life took form on the canvas.

But it was words that finally took him into a new dimension of his relationship with his mistress on the fourth evening. He had been playing the pianoforte; she had been singing. Then she had sent for the tea tray and they had drunk their tea in companionable silence. They were both sitting idle and relaxed, one on each side of the hearth, she gazing into the fire, he gazing at her.

‘There were woods in Acton Park,’ he said suddenly, apropos of nothing. ‘Wooded hills all down the eastern border of the park. Wild, uncultivated, inhabited by woodland creatures and birds. I used to escape there for long hours of solitude until I learned better. It was when I came to realize that I could never paint a tree or a flower or even a blade of grass.’

She smiled rather lazily. For once, he noticed, she was leaning back in her chair, her head against the headrest.

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘I used to run my hands over the trunks of trees,’ he explained, ‘and even stand against them, my arms about them. I used to hold wildflowers in the palm of my hand and run grass blades between my fingers. There was too much there, Jane. Too many dimensions. I am talking nonsense, am I not?’

She shook her head, and he knew she understood.

‘I could not even begin to grasp all there was to grasp,’ he said. ‘I used to feel – how does one describe the feeling? Breathless? No, totally inadequate. But there was a feeling, as if I were in the presence of some quite unfathomable mystery. And the strange thing was, I never wanted to fathom it. How is that for lack of human curiosity?’

But she would not let him mock himself. ‘You were a contemplative,’ she said.

‘A what?’

‘Some people – most people, in fact,’ she said, ‘are content with a relationship with God in which they have Him pinned down with words and in which they address Him in words. It is inevitable that all of us do it to a certain extent, of course. Words are what humans work with. But a few people discover that God is far vaster than all the words in every language and religion of the world combined. They discover tantalizing near glimpses of God only in silence – in total nothingness. They communicate with God only by giving up all effort to do so.’

‘Damn it, Jane,’ he said, ‘I do not even believe in God.’

‘Most contemplatives do not,’ she said. ‘Or not at least in any God who can be named or described in words or pictured in the imagination.’

He chuckled. ‘I used to think it blasphemous,’ he said, ‘to believe that I was more like to find God in the hills than at church. I used to delight in the blasphemy.’

‘Tell me about Acton,’ she said quietly.

And he did. He talked at length about the house and park, about his brother and sister, about the servants with whom he had had daily contact as a child, including his nurse, about his play, his mischief, his dreams, his fears. He resurrected a life he had long ago relegated to a dim recess of memory, where he had hoped it would fade away altogether.

There was silence at last.

‘Jocelyn,’ she said after a few minutes, ‘let it all become part of you again. It is whether you wish it to be or not. And you love Acton far more than you realize.’

‘Skeletons, Jane,’ he told her. ‘Skeletons. I should not have allowed any of them out. You should not be such a restful companion.’

‘None of them seem very threatening,’ she commented.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but you do not know what is crowding behind them, Jane.’ He got to his feet and held out a hand for hers. ‘Time to put you to work upstairs.’ But he grinned at her when her eyes sparked. ‘And time for you to put me to work. Will you, Jane? Hard, physical labor? I’ll show you how to ride me, and you can use me for your pleasure as long as you choose. Come and ride me to exhaustion, Jane. Make me beg for mercy. Make me your slave.’

‘What nonsense!’ She got to her feet and set her hand in his. ‘I have no wish to enslave you.’

‘But you already have, Jane,’ he said meekly, his eyes laughing at her. ‘And never tell me my words have not aroused you. There is a certain telltale flush in your cheeks and breathlessness in your voice that I am coming to recognize.’

‘I have never pretended,’ she told him primly, ‘that duty is not also pleasure.’

‘Come and let me show you, then,’ he said, ‘how very pleasurable it will be to do the riding rather than always to be ridden, Jane. Let me show you how to master me.’

‘I have no wish—’ But she laughed suddenly, a sound of delight he enjoyed coaxing from her. ‘You are not my master, Jocelyn. Why should I wish to be yours? But very well. Show me how to ride. Is it like a horse? I ride horses rather well. And of course they have to be taught who is in charge, wonderful creatures.’

He laughed with her as he led her from the room.

He finished the portrait on the last day of the first week, late in the afternoon. He had a dinner engagement during the evening, which fact was a disappointment to Jane, but she expected that he would come back for the night. One week of her precious month was already over, though. There were only three left. She coveted every day, every hour.

She loved to watch him paint even more than she loved watching him play the pianoforte. With the latter, he very quickly entered a world of his own, where the music flowed effortlessly. At his easel he had to labor more. He frowned and muttered profanities as much as he was absorbed in his task.

But finally he finished. He cleaned his brush and spoke.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose you have been sneaking peeks every time I leave the house.’

‘I have not!’ she said indignantly. ‘The very idea, Jocelyn! Just because it is something you would undoubtedly do.’

‘Not if my word were given,’ he said. ‘Besides, I would never need to sneak peeks. I would boldly look. Come and see it, then. See if you like yourself.’

‘It is finished?’ He had given no indication that he was nearing the end. She threaded her needle through the cloth and jumped to her feet.

‘Come and discover the truth of my claim that I merely dabble,’ he said, shrugging as if he did not care what her verdict was, and busying himself with the task of cleaning his palette.

Jane was almost afraid to look then, afraid that indeed she would find an inferior product about which she would have to be tactful. Though he would tear her to pieces, she knew, if she were less than brutally honest.

Her first impression was that he had flattered her. She sat at her work, every line of her body elegantly arched. Her face was in profile. She looked industrious and absorbed by what she was doing. But she never saw herself thus, of course. In reality it was a good likeness, she supposed. She flushed with pleasure.

Her second impression was that the likeness or otherwise of the portrait was really not the point. She was not looking at a canvas produced merely so that the sitter might exclaim at the flattering likeness. She was gazing at something – something more.

The colors were brighter than she had expected, though when she looked critically she could see that they were accurate. But there was something else. She frowned. She did not know what it was. She had never been a connoisseur of art.

‘Well?’ There were impatience and a world of hauteur in his voice. And a thread of anxiety too? ‘Did I not make you beautiful enough, Jane? Are you not flattered?’

‘Where … ?’ She frowned again. She did not know quite what it was she wished to ask. ‘Where does the light come from?’

That was it. The painting was an excellent portrait. It was colorful and tasteful. But it was more than just a painting. It had life. And there was light in it, though she was not quite sure what she meant by that. Of course it had light. It was a vivid daytime scene.

‘Ah,’ he said softly, ‘have I done it then, Jane? Have I really captured it? The essence of you? The light is coming from you. It is the effect you have on your surroundings.’

But how had he done it?

‘You are disappointed,’ he said.

She turned to him and shook her head. ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘you never had an art master. It would not have been allowed for a future Duke of Tresham. Jocelyn, you are a man in every sense that you think important. You must dare to be more fully a man as you have been in this room this week. You have an amazing talent as a musician, an awesome talent as a painter. You must continue to use them even when I am gone. For your own sake as much as that of the world.’

It was typical of him, of course, to choose to comment on a very small point.

‘You are going to leave me, then, Jane?’ he asked. ‘Go to greener pastures, perhaps? To someone who can teach you new tricks?’

She recognized the source of the insult. He was embarrassed by her earnest praise.

‘Why should I leave you,’ she asked briskly, ‘when the terms of the contract are so favorable to me provided you are the one who does the leaving?’

‘As I will inevitably do, of course,’ he said, regarding her through narrowed eyes. ‘There is usually a week or two of total infatuation, Jane, followed by a few more weeks of dwindling interest before a final severance of the relationship. How long have I been totally besotted with you now?’

‘I would like to have time to practice skills other than just embroidery,’ she said, returning to her chair and folding her silk threads to put away in her workbag. ‘The garden needs more work. There are all those books to be read. And there is much writing I wish to do. I daresay that once your interest dwindles, I shall find my days richer and filled to overflowing with any number of congenial activities.’

He chuckled softly. ‘I thought,’ he said, ‘we were not supposed to quarrel in this room, Jane.’

‘I thought,’ she replied tartly, ‘the Duke of Tresham was not to be brought into the room. I thought we had agreed not to allow him over the threshold, nasty, arrogant man. The very idea of telling me when I might expect to find your interest in me waning and how long I might expect to enjoy your wearying favors after that. Come here looking as if you believe you are doing me a favor, Jocelyn, and you will be leaving faster than you arrived, believe me. I have to consent, remember, before you so much as touch me.’

‘You like the portrait, then?’ he asked meekly.

She set down her workbag and looked at him, exasperated.

‘Must you always try to hurt me when you feel most vulnerable?’ she asked. ‘I love it. I love it because you painted it and because it will remind me of this week. But I suspect that if I knew more about painting I would love it too because it is great art. I believe it is, Jocelyn. But you would have to ask an expert. Is the painting mine? To keep? Forever?’

‘If you want it, Jane,’ he said. ‘Do you?’

‘Of course I want it. You had better go now or you will be late for your dinner.’

‘Dinner?’ He frowned, then appeared to remember. ‘Oh, dinner. To hell with it. I shall stay here and dine with you, Jane.’

One more evening of her month to hug to herself.

They drank tea after dinner and he read to her from Mansfield Park while she sat relaxed in her chair. But after that they sat in companionable silence until he started talking about his boyhood again, as he had done for the past two evenings. Having started, it seemed he could not stop.

‘I believe you should go back, Jocelyn,’ she said when he paused. ‘I believe you need to go back.’

‘To Acton?’ he said. ‘Never! Only for my own funeral.’

‘But you speak of it with love,’ she said. ‘How old were you when you left?’

‘Sixteen,’ he told her. ‘I swore I would never go back. I never have, except for two funerals.’

‘You must have still been at school,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

She did not ask the question. That was so like Jane. She would not pry. But the question might as well have been shouted out. She sat quietly and receptively. Jane, to whom he had opened so much of himself in the past week.

‘You do not want to know, Jane,’ he told her.

‘I think perhaps,’ she said, ‘you need to tell.’

That was all she said. He gazed into the fire and remembered the initiation. The moment at which he had become his father. And his grandfather. A true Dudley. A man.

‘I was sixteen and in love,’ he said. ‘With a neighbor’s fourteen-year-old daughter. We swore undying love and fidelity. I even managed to get her alone once and kissed her – on the lips. For all of three seconds. It was very serious, Jane.’

‘It is not always wise to mock our younger selves,’ she said, responding to his tone of irony as if she were an octogenarian. ‘Love is as serious and painful a business to the young as it is to older people. More so. There is so much more innocence.’

‘My father got wind of it and became apprehensive,’ he said. ‘Though doubtless if he had waited I would have been sighing over some other maiden two or three months later. It is not in the nature of a Dudley to be constant in love, Jane – or even in lust, for that matter.’

‘He separated you?’ she asked.

‘There is a cottage.’ He set his head back and closed his eyes. ‘I mentioned it to you before, Jane. With its inhabitant, an indigent female relative ten years my senior.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘There was a pool not far from her cottage,’ he said. ‘Idyllic, Jane. At the foot of the hills, green with the reflections of trees, loud with birdsong, secluded. I used to go there often in the summer to bathe rather than frolic in the lake closer to the house. She was there one day before me, bathing, wearing only a thin shift.’

Jane said nothing when he paused.

‘She was suitably flustered,’ he said, ‘as she came out of the pool, looking as if she wore nothing at all. And then she laughed and joked and was charming. Can you picture it, Jane? The accomplished, well-endowed courtesan and the ignorant, virgin youth? That first time we did not even make it back to the cottage. We rutted on the grass beside the pool. I discovered what went where and what happened when it was in deep enough. I do believe all was accomplished inside thirty seconds. I thought myself one devil of a dashing fellow.’

Jane’s eyes were closed, he noticed when he opened his own.

‘She was my first obsession.’ He chuckled. ‘The day after that I went to the cottage, and the day after that again. I labored mightily on that last occasion, having quickly learned that I could make the pleasure last considerably longer than thirty seconds. I was proud and exhausted when I was finally finished demonstrating my prowess. And then she started to talk, Jane, in a very normal, very amused voice.

‘“He is an apt pupil and shows enormous promise,” she said. “Soon he will be teaching me tricks.” And then before I could get my head up to discover what the devil she was talking about, another voice, Jane. My father’s. Coming from the doorway of the bedchamber behind me.

‘“You have done very nicely, Phoebe,” he said. “He was bucking lustily enough between your thighs.” He laughed when I jumped off the bed on the opposite side from my clothes as if I had been scalded. He was standing with one shoulder propped against the doorway as if he had been there for some time. He had, of course, been watching and assessing my performance, probably exchanging winks and leers with his mistress. “No need for embarrassment,” he told me. “Every man ought to be deflowered by an expert. My father arranged it for me; I have arranged it for you. There is no one more expert than Phoebe, though today is your last with her, my boy. She is off-limits as of this moment. I cannot have my son sowing his oats in my woman, can I, now?”’

‘Oh,’ Jane said softly, bringing Jocelyn’s mind back to the present with a jolt.

‘I gathered my clothes up and ran out of the cottage,’ he said, ‘without even stopping to dress first. I needed to vomit. Partly because my father had watched something so terribly private. Partly because it was his mistress with whom I had been dallying, and he had planned it all. I had not known until then that he even had mistresses. I had assumed he and my mother were faithful to each other. There was never anyone more naive than my boyhood self, Jane.’

‘Poor boy,’ she said quietly.

‘I was not even allowed to vomit in peace.’ He laughed harshly. ‘My father had brought someone riding with him – his neighbor, father of the girl I fancied myself in love with. And out strode my father on my heels to share the joke in all its lurid details. He wanted to take us both to the village inn to toast my newly acquired manhood with a glass of ale. I told him he could go to hell, and I repeated the invitation at greater length when we were at home later. I left Acton the next day.’

‘And for this you have felt guilt ever since?’ Jane asked. He discovered suddenly that she had got up from her place and crossed in front of the hearth to stand before his chair. Before he realized what she was about to do, she sat on his lap and burrowed there until her head was on his shoulder. His arms closed about her in sheer reflex action.

‘It felt like incest,’ he said. ‘She was my father’s whore, Jane.’

‘You were at the mercy of a ruthless man on one hand and a practiced courtesan on the other,’ she told him. ‘It was not your fault.’

‘I was in love with an innocent young girl,’ he said. ‘And yet I spared her not one thought as I rutted with a woman ten years my senior whom I thought to be a relative. I learned one valuable lesson from the experience, though, Jane. I was my father’s son through and through. I am my father’s son.’

‘Jocelyn,’ she said, ‘you were sixteen. No matter who you were, you would have had to be superhuman – or subhuman – to resist such a powerful temptation. You must not blame yourself. Not any longer. Those events did not prove that you have a depraved nature. Far from it.’

‘It took me a few years longer to prove that,’ he said.

‘Jocelyn.’ He could feel her fingers playing with a button on his waistcoat. ‘Tell me something. Someday in the future when you have a son, will you ever do that to him? Initiate him with one of your own mistresses?’

He drew breath slowly and imagined it – the precious human who would be his son, product of his seed, and the woman with whom he would slake his appetites rather than remain true to his wife. Coming together, performing while he watched.

‘I would sooner tear out my heart,’ he said. ‘My nonexistent heart.’

‘Then you are not your father,’ she said, ‘or your grandfather. You are yourself. You were a sensitive, artistic, romantic boy, who had been repressed and was finally cruelly seduced. That is all, Jocelyn. You have allowed your life to be stunted by those events. But there is much life left to you. Forgive yourself.’

‘I lost my father on that day,’ he said. ‘I lost my mother soon after, once I had arrived in London and learned the truth about her.’

‘Yes,’ she said sadly. ‘But forgive them too, Jocelyn. They were products of their own upbringing and experience. Who knows what demons they carried around inside them? Parents are not just parents. They are people too. Weak like all the rest of us.’

His fingers were playing with her hair. ‘What made you so wise?’

She did not answer for a while. ‘It is always easier to look at someone else’s life and see its pattern,’ she said, ‘especially when one cares.’

‘Do you care about me, then, Jane?’ he asked, kissing the top of her head. ‘Even now you know those most sordid of all details about my past?’

‘Yes, Jocelyn,’ she said. ‘I care.’

They were the words that finally broke his reserve. He did not even realize he was weeping until he felt wet drops drip onto her hair and his chest heaved convulsively. He froze in horror. But she would not let him push her away. She wrapped her free arm about his neck and burrowed deeper. And so he sobbed and hiccuped ignominiously with her in his arms and then had to search for a handkerchief to blow his nose.

‘Dammit, Jane,’ he said. ‘Dammit.’

‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Do you have any kindly memories of your father? Anything at all?’

Hardly! But when he thought about it, he could remember his father teaching him to ride his first pony and playing cricket with him and Ferdinand.

‘He used to play cricket with us,’ he said, ‘when we were young enough to saw at the air with our bats and hurl the ball all of six inches ahead when bowling. It must have been as exciting for him as watching grass grow.’

‘Remember those times,’ she said. ‘Find more memories like that. He was not a monster, Jocelyn. He was not a pleasant man either. I do not believe I would have liked him. But he was not a monster, for all that. He was simply a man. And even when he betrayed you, he thought somehow that he was doing something necessary for your education.’

He kissed the top of her head again, and they lapsed into silence.

He could not quite believe that he had relived those memories at last. Aloud. In the hearing of a woman. His mistress, no less. But it felt strangely good to have spoken. Those ghastly, sordid events seemed less dreadful when put into words. He seemed less dreadful. Even his father did.

He felt peaceful.

‘Skeletons are dreadful things to have in our past, Jane,’ he said at last. ‘I do not suppose you have any, do you?’

‘No,’ she said after such a long silence that he thought she was not going to answer at all. ‘None.’

‘Come to bed?’ he asked her with a sigh almost of total contentment. ‘Just to sleep, Jane? If I remember correctly, we were rather energetically busy most of last night. Shall we just sleep tonight?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

He almost chuckled aloud. He was going to bed with his mistress.

To sleep.

His father would turn over in his grave.