Since the Surrender by Julie Anne Long Page B

memory he’d nearly drowned with whiskey swam to the surface of his brain. That angel in the painting at the Velvet Glove
    …he could have sworn it was the same angel in the Rubinetto painting at the Montmorency.
    And this he wouldn’t have known if Rosalind hadn’t driven him to drink impractical, rather juvenile, amounts of whiskey. Perhaps it was destiny.
    Then again, whiskey and destiny often felt one and the same to the man drinking the whiskey.
    Bloody Hell.
    He opened one eye to a slit, through which he could see that the housekeeper had also arranged his correspondence on the coffeebearing tray. But given that he couldn’t quite speak just yet, he wasn’t certain he could remember how to read. Correspondence would have to wait.
    Getting out of bed was his project for the next hour or so. He managed, at last, treating his body with ginger respect. He drank the whole pot of coffee in shifts, downing more of it the better he felt, his hands trembling a little less with each cup. Next, he bathed ruthlessly in the bedroom basin, scrubbing his face and beneath his arms and down his back and between his legs, all the muskier and sweatier places. He shaved himself with a trembling hand and suffered only one nick.
    He’d have a proper bath before the Callender do tonight. In a few hours his head merely ached rather than pounded, and he thought he might be able to eat. And so he made his way down the stairs, his boots and walking stick announcing his resurrection to the household staff, and carried with him his correspondence The house, he discovered, had been pitilessly cleaned while he’d been indisposed. The furniture and mirrors and silver didn’t so much shine as glare. His eyes shriveled in their sockets in torment and he clapped a hand over them.
    He took himself and his correspondence rapidly off to the much darker library.
    He threw open a window: The air smelled fresh enough, apart from the usual smells of London life carried erratically in by a breeze: dirt and coal and horse and every now and then a dash of salt and brine blown in off the Thames.
    Which he could appreciate now that all smells didn’t make him want to cast his accounts. It was time to address his correspondence. The first letter was a very welcome one from Kinkade. Glad you’re in London, you old recluse. Callender’s first, old man, then drinking, and God only knows what then.
    Yrs,
    K.
    Ah, Kinkade. It was reassuring to know that someone still lived in a world of “God only knows what then.” Judging from how he’d felt this morning, he suspected he would have difficulty living in that world now.
    It was still difficult for Chase to imagine Kinkade donating the Rubinetto to the Montmorency. Because he did know a bit about Kinkade’s taste in art.
    He recalled one typical evening sitting about a fire surrounded by bored soldiers. Kinkade had handed him a sheet of foolscap. “What bored soldiers. Kinkade had handed him a sheet of foolscap. “What say you, Eversea?”
    In the margin of a letter he’d received from his brother, with the burnt end of a sharpened stick Kinkade had sketched a nude, improbably buxom woman with nipples erect as cannon fuses.
    “I think her breasts might be too small,” Chase critiqued dryly. Kinkade had taken him quite seriously and set to work again with the sharpened stick, refining, tongue between his teeth in concentration.
    Tedium was as formidable an enemy as the French during the war. Some men kept journals. Some soldiers, like the Earl of Rawden, the poet known as the Libertine, had written poetry. Some gambled. Kinkade sketched the occasional nude woman, and was generous about passing the sketches around to the men and cheerful about accepting criticisms and suggestions, which he seldom incorporated, as he had his own vision. He signed them O. McCaucus-Bigg.
    A new soldier was always puzzled by this, given that this wasn’t Kinkade’s name.
    “O. McCaucus-Bigg?”
    “Braggart, are you?”