The Heartbeat Thief (25 page)

They rounded a corner. “Ah, there she is.”

And there
she
was.

Senza Fyne, standing in her garden, wearing her robin’s egg blue dress, her hair in a hasty pile, Della’s desperate attempts at a coif with only two minutes to dedicate toward the endeavor. The hair, the green eyes, the paleness of her hand upon the roses. The wrought-iron
F
of the gate beyond.

Senza went rigid and cold. There was only one time in her life when she wore a dress such as that, only one time she was innocent enough to wear that expression. And it was plain to see there had been no jeweled locket painted upon her breast.

That meant there was only one person who could have painted her.

“We call this painting
The Fire That Consumed Him
. Dramatic, I know, but the passion of the stories would have it no other way.”

The details were not perfect; the subject had a fuller bosom, a more slender waist, a more inviting smile. But it was as accurate as any heart could recreate from memory—the image of a girl during a six-week stay in the country, a prospect too good to be true, a would-be-but-not-as-yet failed courtship.

Senza chewed her lip and stared up at her former self. Was she truly so different then? What emotion had he captured on that canvas? Was it an emotion she’d ever experienced or was it, like every year that had passed since that summer, a fiction?

“You seem alike, somehow. Despite the difference in hair. Your eyes, your face. I wonder, could she have been a relative?”

Senza fingered the tips of her wig, the black strands close against her cheek. “She seems spirited. Lively. It wouldn’t take a great stretch of imagination, would it?”

She played out the last words as a coy flirtation, keeping with her pretense, but all the while the gears in her mind were spinning, spinning. “Your great-grandfather, the artist. Did he ever speak of what became of her?”

“Not at all. She was a mystery, even to him, I think.”

“What about his wife? Did your great-grandfather ever paint her?”

“Actually, yes, although she hangs in the parlor. We could not pair the women, staring each other down through painted eyes while the rest of the world went on as if nothing ever happened.”

“Intriguing,” she murmured, careful not to let her voice betray her. “What, exactly, happened?”

“We will never know. All that was said was that great-grandmother never spoke about what she knew of the red-haired woman. Her vehement objection to the painting was great cause for speculation. I dare say we all took turns, coming up with theories and stories and scandalous suppositions.”

He bowed to admit her into the parlor. Senza went at once to the portrait, one of Aggie shortly after the wedding. Thomas had painted her carefully, had caught every detail of the young woman, now some seventy years passed.

Senza felt not a single one of those years. Seeing that face made the past disappear, along with all the insulation that had weaved itself about her most precious memories.

“Oh, Aggie,” she whispered, reaching up to press her fingers to the bottom of the frame as if it were a relic. “I never meant for you to be second. You know I loved you too well.”

From her vantage on the wall, Aggie stared down her nose at her, eyes bright with fierce condemnation.

“How did you know?” Breckenridge had quietly come up behind her, his tone a mix of curiosity and suspicion. “You went right up to the portrait as if you knew.”

“Oh.” She pressed the corners of her eyes, stifling the sting, before turning around. “I didn’t know, I just found this one so…compelling.”

“Yes, there is something distinctive about her eyes.” He stood next to her and looked up at the canvas. “And it is well-featured, well-displayed. Father wished her to have a place of honor.”

“And Winnie? Did he ever do a self-portrait?”

Richard turned sharply to her. “What did you call him?”

Senza stammered, trying to play it off, but it was to no avail. He took her arm, not unkindly, but a no-nonsense tug to command her attention.

She slipped her arm free. “It was a mistake, is all. My brother’s name is Winston. We call him Winnie and I suppose it was just a slip, a habit of speaking.”

He narrowed his eyes. “I do not remember telling you his name.”

“Of course, you didn’t,” she said, putting steel in the wilt of her voice. “The night we were introduced. I believe it was the minister who mentioned it. Everyone was talking about you, you know. How else could I have known?”

“I suppose.” He chuckled and dropped his gaze. “I apologize, I—I admit, I have been going along somewhat in a daze since we met. To answer your question, no. He never composed a self-portrait, but we do have a commission from the firm in the library, if you’d like to see it.”

Voices from a distant room caught their attention. Breckenridge lifted his chin to listen a moment, his expression brightening. With a decisive nod, he captured Senza’s hand and tucked it under his arm. “She’s awake, I believe. Come. I want you to meet her.”

“Who?” Senza batted her long lashes, trying to stall him. She wanted to know who. But more than that, she dreaded it. These paintings, these connections, it was too much, all at once.

He strode off in a confident march, trailing his prisoner alongside him.

Shock. Mind-numbing shock, pure and simple. How else could she account for the ease with which he carried her off, unsuspectingly, toward what could only be a doom-inspiring event? She couldn’t even stammer a polite refusal. She, the very art of detachment, having spent more than half a century avoiding every sort of social confrontation, every unwanted advance, each perilous opportunity to be a moment alone should intimacy be in the intentions—

Down one cavernous hallway, through a series of drawing rooms and parlors, along a bright window-filled breeze-way. Senza bobbed along in his wake, barely registering his happy chattering.

“Gran will be delighted. But you need to know—she’s not one hundred percent. The old girl is ninety, now, and the last twenty have been especially difficult. Poor dear suffered a stroke, they said, and she’s not been able to communicate in any appreciable way since.”

They entered at last into a grand sun room, with a comfortable arrangement of settees and chairs nearest the tall windows. A pretty garden had been constructed outside in the courtyard, a colorful piece of the fragrant country tucked away in the corner of a cold, stone city.

Facing the window was a huddled figure in a wheeled chair. So reminiscent of her last days with Henry—a tiny sob slipped free, a hiccup, before she squashed her bruised feelings back down to where they couldn’t harm her.

A nurse sat next to the patient, helping her to drink broth from a sipping pot. She looked over at the pair near the door before dabbing her patient’s chin with a napkin.

“Master Richard is here, missus.” She spoke loudly and slowly, as if her patient were addled. “He’s brought company. You like company, remember?”

The nurse packed up everything onto her tray and came over to the door. In a much lower voice, she confided to Breckenridge. “Tough day, today. Be careful not to excite her.”

“Ah, Dixon. Don’t you worry. This would be a happy excitement for her. I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

Senza still in tow, Richard hastened to the woman’s side. “Gran, I’m home. I brought someone to meet you.”

The woman had lifted her head toward his voice. Senza pulled free from his grasp, allowing him to greet her in private, to share a moment of happy reunion. And when he pulled her forward, and the woman turned to look at her—

Senza slowed, ceased, fell straight out of time into a moment that in itself would last a tiny eternity. Time had been a heavy hand upon her, adding lines and layers and blemishes of the skin. Aggie looked old, withered. All that would have horrified Senza if only she could look away from her eyes.

Aggie’s eyes, untouched by the years, staring out of a face that had felt those years all too much.

And those eyes beheld Senza, and they knew her. The disbelief that shone in them was proof. The trembling of the hand that raised to point at her was proof.

Aggie opened her lips, giving a glimpse of crowded teeth, and uttered a coughing scrape of sound that seemed to rip itself out of her throat. The horrifying noise made Senza shrink back.

“Yes, Gran. This is my new friend, Senza. She saw your portrait in the gallery and wanted to meet you straight away.”

Her gaze locked with Aggie’s, Senza shook her head behind his shoulder, so he couldn’t see.
I’m sorry
, she mouthed.
I’m so sorry
.

Aggie’s eyes bulged in her head, and a fit of coughing overtook her. It sent Breckenridge into a tizzy, looking for a water glass. There was none. The coughing increased.

Breckenridge apologized and dashed from the room in search of a remedy.

The minute he was gone, Aggie’s cough subsided. She pinned Senza in place with a commanding glare and jerked a finger at the couch in front of her. Senza sank down, obediently, and faced her cousin.

They stared at each other for many long moments.

Then Aggie did the unthinkable. She reached for Senza’s face.

Senza closed her eyes, expecting a hand upon a cheek, a moment of recognition, of homecoming—

Instead, Aggie grasped the flip of hair that poked from under Senza’s hat and pulled it free. Wig, hat, all slipped off, revealing the ruby-red hair that tumbled free.

The thief, discovered.

Senza studied Aggie’s eyes, waiting for some reaction. Instead, there was only a slow deterioration of the commanding attitude, a gradual surrender to the reality of what lay between them. Disappointment may have been the overlay of it. Despair may have tinged it. But something darker was the base, and seemed all too comfortable a fit for her features.

Senza watched the roiling emotions shift into their rightful places in her cousin’s expression. She read each one, and interpreted each one, and accepted each one. Her heart had ached from the absence of Aggie’s company all these years, the loss now fully realized.

This couldn’t be easy on Aggie. Such an impossible thing to see Senza, as perfect as the day they parted.

Senza had become adept at blocking out the passage to time and the transpiration of events. Aggie’s eyes had not changed. Senza’s love had not changed. That surely would be enough to bind them, to find comfort. There had to be a way to ease Aggie’s distress. She reached for her hand, grasping it in both of hers, and whispered her cousin’s name.

Aggie’s gaze turned baleful and she pulled her hand away.

“But, Aggie.” Senza reached up and unpinned her hair, spreading it with her fingers. “It’s me. It’s really me. I know I look strange, but I promise, it’s me.”

Aggie shook her head emphatically.

Senza took to her knees at Aggie’s feet. “Please, Aggie. You don’t know what happened. You have no idea what even happened, or what I went through.”

Finally Aggie pointed at her, then held up both palms, before she turned her eyes away, an arrogant lift to her chin, shutting her out.

Defeated, Senza pushed to her feet, eyes on the floor. The silence crushed her, the air stale.

Another death of something she’d loved. Is this what eternity has come to mean? A million tiny losses instead of one merciful death?

Hastily, she coiled her hair on top of her head and slipped back on her disguise, tucking the last errant strands beneath her cap just as footsteps sounded in the hall.

Richard arrived a moment later with a water glass, tenderly ministering to his grandmother. She reached up and cupped his face with a gnarled hand before closing her eyes and drooping her head against the pillowed headrest.

Senza stood awkwardly away from them, wishing for something to do with her hands.

“Ah.” Richard looked apologetic. “I’d hoped for a longer visit. She’s frail, you know. Drops off at any moment. I’m glad you met, however. She’s my treasure.”

“She would have been mine, too, Richard. Family is the greatest treasure of all.” She pointedly turned toward the old woman, who didn’t appear asleep so much as pretending. A certain gaiety managed to force its way into her voice. “I do miss my own, but the memories I have of them are so pure, so perfect, that I fear if I were to see even a single cousin today, that cold reality would ruin forever my perfect memories of yesterday.”

“A beautiful way to express a sad sentiment. You do have such a lovely way with words.”

“I’ve had years to perfect them, Richard.” She glanced down at Aggie, who seemed intent on keeping her eyes shut tight against Senza’s offensive countenance. “We should go. I’d hate to disturb her peaceful repose a minute longer.”

He gestured with a hand and extended his arm once more, but this time, Senza did not lay her fingers in the bend of his elbow, nor did she smile her coy smile at him as they strolled out of the room. Her mind was quite pre-occupied with the fact that this charming young man was Aggie’s great-grandson.

The concept of stealing his beats seemed almost repulsive.