When the Splendor Falls (77 page)

But the peace of slumber did not come quickly or easily for Leigh that night, and for hours she laid awake, tossing and turning as she sought something elusive that had been troubling her, tormenting her, until finally she fell into a deep, restless sleep, a pair of brilliant, sky blue eyes haunting her, hounding her into the deepest recesses of her mind.

When she awoke the next morning, Neil was already gone. Bleary-eyed, Leigh dressed, eyeing Jolie suspiciously as she hovered around the room, looking too smug for anyone’s peace of mind.

“Now you get down the hall an’ into the dinin’ room, missy,” Jolie told Leigh, eyeing her approvingly, for she’d chosen one of her prettier gowns today, a lavender-blue, floral-printed muslin. “I saw your dinner plate last night, an’ you didn’t eat enough to keep a bird alive. If you’re goin’ to keep that handsome husband of yours interested, you’re goin’ to have to have a lil’ more flesh on those bones,” she added slyly, smiling when Leigh turned a cool shoulder to her and left the room, but her smile would have faded had she known that Leigh never reached the dining room.

Passing by Nathaniel Braedon’s study, Leigh heard a crashing noise from behind the closed door, followed by a frightened whimper of fear. Remembering the incident the day before in Guy’s room, Leigh hurried into the room, thinking Guy might have somehow stumbled into Nathaniel’s study. Entering the quiet room, Leigh stood looking around, but the room was empty. Shrugging, Leigh was leaving when a scratching noise sounded behind her, and she turned to see one of Guy’s hounds shoot past her, his feet spinning against the wood floor as he tried to make his escape.

This time, Leigh looked around the room more carefully, searching for something broken. It was a comfortable room, with a large mahogany desk centered before the window, with a big leather armchair positioned behind it, and from where Nathaniel ran the everyday affairs of his ranch. Bookcases filled one wall, and a high-backed leather sofa and upholstered chair had been placed near the fireplace. A map of the United States shared space on one of the walls with a map of Virginia and one of the territories; another map, of a Spanish land grant, the land Royal Rivers had eventually been built on, hung between them, the focal point for all that Nathaniel had achieved in his life.

Fortunately, Guy’s hound had only knocked over one of the brass fireplace tools. Picking up the poker, Leigh was replacing it when she glanced up at the portrait hanging on the wall over the fireplace.

Leigh gazed at the portrait. She’d only seen it one other time, for she didn’t often enter Nathaniel’s study—nobody did—but she hadn’t forgotten the beauty of the woman and child.

Neil’s mother and sister. She was one of the most beautiful women Leigh had ever seen, with her midnight-black hair curling over alabaster shoulders that sloped elegantly to the lace-edged silk of her burgundy gown. Her mouth was soft and full and sweetly curved, the hand holding her daughter’s slender and delicate. And the little girl sitting next to her in a pink gown layered with lace and tied with a burgundy silk sash, showing the beginnings of great beauty in the dimpled cheek, flushed with happiness, and the finely arched curve of a black eyebrow, her lashes long and thick.

Suddenly Leigh felt a strange coldness spreading through her as she met the brilliant blue eyes of mother and daughter, eyes she’d seen just the day before. There could be no mistaking that rare shade of blue. Eyes so bright, it was like gazing into the heart of the heavens. And that slight indentation in the chin…where had she seen that before? Leigh swallowed against the dryness closing her throat. Forgetting the overturned brass tools, Leigh backed out of the room, her steps carrying her down the corridor and away from the dining room.

Leigh paused uncertainly just outside the house, feeling the sun beating down on her and taking away the chill from the study. Without thinking further about what she was doing, except that she had to prove it wasn’t true, she found her steps carrying her across the grounds.

Approaching Solange’s studio, it appeared nothing more than a very small, weathered adobe shed for storing farming implements or feed stores. But once inside, a startling transformation occurred before one’s eyes. The far side of the one-room shed was floor-to-ceiling windows with an expansive view of green pastureland, dominated by towering mountains, and, above, dazzling blue sky stretching away into the distant heavens, while the sunlight poured into the room like a golden stream of honey.

Paintings, portfolios, and rolls of canvas were stacked all around the room, except for a wide space before the wall of windows, which had been cleared of clutter, and where a lone easel stood facing the light, a half-completed canvas propped against it. Leigh stepped inside, the strong odors of linseed oil and turpentine assailing her, especially from a long, rough-hewn table crowded with jars full of varying-sized bristle-haired paintbrushes, spatulas, and pens, the quilled tips of descending degree in size and thickness, wads of paint-stained cloth, and boards dotted with splotches of paint representing every shade imaginable. Thinking it trash, she would have cleared the table of the broken sticks and short, coiled rolls of paper, but Leigh knew Solange used the odd bits to mix her paints and sometimes to apply the paint to the canvas. Molded sticks of chalky pigment were scattered across the table in a rainbow of color, and the shelves over the table were packed solid with small jars and packets of powdery pigments.

Slowly Leigh weaved her way through the jumble, careful not to brush against the fresco painted on one of the walls. Solange called it her
trompe l’oeil
because it “deceived the eye” into believing the room extended far beyond its dimensions. The imagery created a graceful arcade supported by fluted columns that led to a balustraded balcony overlooking the Tuscany countryside in its pastoral and mythical beauty, complete with a nude figure of a voluptuous woman reclining on a pillowed couch, a lute-strumming young pagan sitting at her feet in adoration, shepherds in the fields, and muscular gods in the clouds. Solange had created it from charcoal sketches and pen and ink drawings she’d made while on her honeymoon in Italy, and declared she’d felt inspired to create her own Renaissance fresco. Besides, Solange had added with a wicked wink, it brought back very fond memories of her honeymoon. But despite her apparent jest, her hand had lightly touched the silvery widow’s peak above her wide forehead, as if being marked by it had brought true the prophesy of early widowhood, for Solange wasn’t even thirty-five, the silver streak the only gray in her dark brown hair.

Leigh slowed her step to admire one of Solange’s earlier oil paintings of a bazaar, which she’d painted when she and her late husband, Henri, Comte de Beaudecoeur, had lived in Algeria, the exotic setting rich in detail and vibrant jewel-like color, the figure cloaked in a burnoose in the foreground looking as if he could step right out of the painting and into the room. Another painting was from a vantage point high above the streets of Paris, with the panorama of the city spreading out to the edges of the canvas. Next to it was a painting of the Thames wending through London, the waterway crowded with ships and barges, the banks teeming with life. And there were other paintings of Edinburgh, Venice, Florence, Rome, Madrid, Amsterdam, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Budapest, Stockholm, and countless picturesque villages and rural scenes from across Europe—all the places Solange had visited during her colorful life as the wife of a French diplomat.

Some of the paintings had been painted in delicate, painstaking detail, the brushstrokes bringing the images into sharp, clear focus. Others, however, showed less realism, with broad strokes of the brush that swirled and splashed in brilliant, luminous color, capturing movement across the canvas in boldly contrasting light and shadow. Landscapes and portraits seemed to dominate the room, and the more recent additions to the collection were of the life Solange now found around her: the desolate landscape, wildlife, and people caught forever on canvas.

A
kachina
figure, arrayed in all its splendor, with a terrifying, hideous mask, stood surrounded by several young male figures. Wearing flannel breechcloths and beaded soft leather leggings, with pelts of gray fox hanging down in back, the men danced across the canvas to the beating of drums, shaking gourd rattles for rain and waving sprigs of evergreen for long life in the ceremonial ritual of the Green Corn Dance. Other paintings showed Deer Dancers and Buffalo Dancers, the women gowned in white cotton dresses, embroidered with colorful woolen yarn worked into geometric designs, feathers decorating their long, unbound hair as they swayed and chanted.

A portrait of Pedro and Soldado occupied a place of honor in the center of the wall, the shepherd’s wizened face full of wisdom staring down at her, while Soldado’s alert eyes followed her every step as if a sheep had strayed from the flock and was trying to sneak past.

An old Pueblo woman knelt in front of a
metate
, a sandstone slab in a shallow bin, her arms stretched forward, gnarled hands grasping a stone muller as she ground maize into meal day after day. She was dressed in a
manta
of dark brown woolen cloth tied over the right shoulder, part of a white moccasin showing beneath the blue-bordered skirt enclosed around her waist with a red, green, and black sash. The painting next to it portrayed a middle-aged man who was dressed in a colorful cotton shirt and short white trousers. He wore a leather belt studded with silver
conchas
around his waist and a necklace of turquoise stones dangled from his neck. He was sitting on a stool before a loom, his fingers busily weaving cloth into the same somber, narrow-striped pattern his ancestors,
The Ancient Ones
, had from the time of Christ.

A young Indian girl, of the Hopi tribe, Solange had told her, stared wistfully back from another painting, the thick butterfly twists of black hair over her ears a sign of her maidenhood, the chubby-faced baby she stood watch over not hers. But the perfectly formed corncob, placed next to the bundled-up baby strapped to the wooden cradle board, was her gift to the newborn child for a life of strength and health.

There were many more paintings:
Taos Pueblo
, the five-storied structure looking like a squat, sprawling pyramid rising from the earth with the help of the wooden ladders propped against the buckskin-hued walls; a
carreta
with big wooden wheels being pulled by oxen prodded by a small boy precariously balanced in the unsteady cart; a scrawny burro half-buried beneath a load piled high on its back; a small church, with its cross, bell tower, and cemetery baking beneath the sun; and the burnished ruins of a mission long abandoned. Mountain and desert came alive as hawks and eagles, wings outspread, flew toward the beamed ceiling of the studio, soaring through painted skies. A rattlesnake was captured coiled by a mound of rocks, while a kangaroo mouse hopped safely out of striking distance beneath a cactus adorned with a solitary pink bloom.

“Solange?” Leigh called out.

“Over here,” a voice answered from behind a silk screen that partitioned off a private corner of the studio, where Solange kept a change of clothing, and other necessities for making herself decent before returning to the house each day. She claimed she didn’t wish to offend, especially overly sensitive guests who might have arrived during her prolonged absence in her studio. But Leigh knew she did it for her sister’s sake, although, she declared with a mischievous grin, she didn’t know who was more easily offended, Jolie or her aunts.

Leigh walked to the windows, waiting politely for Solange. A small-boned, thin-chested woman suddenly appeared from behind the screen, a lock of dark brown hair falling over her cheek as she struggled with the last hooks of her gown. “Spilled turpentine all over myself,” Solange said with a grimace as she quickly shrugged into her duster and pushed up the sleeves, ready to work. “It was one of my better gowns too, but I was in such a hurry to begin, I forgot to put on my smock. A good thing Henri left me well provided for,” she said and sighed. “I have ruined six gowns this year,” she added in self-disgust, throwing up her hands with Gallic emphasis.

Leigh, perched on the edge of a bench in front of the windows, glanced over at Solange and smiled, for although Solange seemed very extravagant at times in her eccentricity, she was just very French, and very practical, and Leigh suspected she knew exactly how much money she could afford to waste.

“
Ma petite
,” Solange said, coming over and kissing Leigh on the cheek. “What brings you here so early?” she asked, feigning a scandalized expression. “
Mon Dieu!
Did I not see your husband, just returned from the war, arrive last evening? And what a kiss! Ooh, lah! Were I so young again.” She sighed dramatically, her dark gray eyes alight with joy.

“He was already gone when I awoke,” Leigh said, unable to hide the slight note of disappointment in her voice.

“Ah, men! Why do we put up with them?” she asked, patting Leigh’s cheek affectionately. “You should have found a way of keeping him in bed with you longer,” she said, watching in amusement as Leigh’s face pinkened with embarrassment. “
Attendez-moi, ma petite
,” she warned, shaking her finger at her to get her to listen carefully. “A married woman should never blush, not if she is truly married. If not, then I think she is married to a hen instead of a rooster. Ah, that is better,” Solange said, hearing Leigh’s laughter. “So, it is never as we wish, eh? He rides all through the night to be by your side,
ma petite
, looking forward to holding you close and making love to you the whole night long. And what does he find? His wife has vanished! He is beside himself when he arrives at Royal Rivers and finds his loving wife had not yet returned from her ride of early morning. I feared for the safety of my young, foolish nephew. I am afraid Gilbert does not think clearly when he is around you,
ma petite
. You have enchanted him, which is good for a boy his age, he needs to have a passion for more than horses and cows, as long as he remembers you are his brother’s wife. Alas, had you not arrived when you did, and had Gilbert not been so sad-looking, I fear Neil would have skinned him and hung him up next to that buffalo skin. Never have I seen Neil so taken aback by something that has happened. What a homecoming for him, eh?” she said, not going on to mention her own disgust with Nathaniel’s cool reception for his eldest son safely home from the war. Had he been her son, she would have hugged him until he had died from loss of breath. “You make life hard for this lover of yours, eh?” She laughed, but her gray eyes were narrowed as she watched Leigh nervously play with one of her dangling golden earrings.