Page 72 of A Thousand Painted Hours

“Under the table?”

“Hell no!” Alexander cried. “Fuck the bloody bastards.”

No one corrected his language. The rest of the party crawled out from under the table, Peter reaching a hand back to help Trudy stand. She blinked up at him with grateful eyes.

I glanced at Nina, who remembered the days in Cairo as well as I did.

I felt a chill of foreboding.

“Never mind,” Nina said at my elbow, inhaling smoke from her cigarette. “You don’t, do you? Mind?”

“What he does is none of my business,” I said. “It’s just the—” Eyeing Peter in thrall to Trudy, I spoke my worry aloud. “Do have Jonathan keep an eye on that.”

“He has been. We all say it was the war, but I remember that weekend in the country, when the prince was there, Peter was ... rather rough ... with a village girl.”

A chill twisted through my gut. I’d always believed his violence had been a result of his shell shock in combination with drink. “And you never thought to mention this?”

She pressed her lips together. “It was only the once. And anyway, you were otherwise engaged.” She took my arm. “That was a good party—I took care of you.”

It had been a beautiful weekend in many ways, but it had also been laced with sorrow and the coming losses. But to reassure her, I covered her hand. “It was an important time in my life.”

The Last Golden Week Before the War

Summer 1914

Clystmere Hall, Kent

—37—

When I arrived at Nina’s country home on Friday afternoon, the sky held a purplish layer that captured my attention emphatically enough that I waved to Nina and ran toward the back garden. A storm gathered over the hills to the west, pregnant with rain, and the light turned the grassy hillsides an almost electric green. The undersides of leaves showed pale and restless in the rising wind.

But the mesmerizing thing was a line of copper threading between two banks of clouds, edged with rose and streaks of gold. I drew it as quickly as I could, trying to press the colors into my mind. My paints were in my bag, and I wished briefly I’d taken the time to pull out my watercolor tin.

“Use mine,” said a voice behind me, as if he’d read my mind. “Extraordinary, isn’t it?”

I saw a man, perhaps in his mid-twenties, dressed casually in a shirt and loose trousers. He handed me a clutch of colored pencils with soft tips, and I sat down to spill them in my lap, using layers to capture the spirit of that light, if not the exact shades. Yellow on top of brown, green layered over white and yellow, the ribbons of pink represented by light lines of red. And over it all, the eggplant sky, muscular and brooding.

“Thanks,” I said, standing up. I gave him back the pencils and brushed off my bum. “I’m Elsie. We haven’t met.”

“Grayson.” He had the look of a film star, dark hair a little rakish, a thin mustache across his lip. “I’m a friend of Rocky’s.”

“An artist, obviously. What are those pencils? I love the marks they make.”

“I had them made in Germany last year.”

“But that isn’t a German accent, is it?”

“Quelle horreur!No, no, I’m Belgian.”

“Nice to meet you. I’d best greet Nina properly. I’m sure we’ll speak again.”

“Au revoir.”

I heard voices in various rooms as I ran up the stairs to the chamber I knew by now would be mine. A maid was busily unpacking my things, tucking them into drawers, the gown for Saturday night already hung. “Thanks, Matty. I’ve got it from here.”

“You sure, ma’am? I’m nearly done. There’s no rush.”

“Go ahead, then. I’ll go wash.”