Page 134 of Bittersweet & Strange

I’ve seen the smaller portrait before, the one Rhys keeps protected from dust, but this one is enormous, nearly as tall as I am, and hanging alone against the stone wall. She looks younger here, standing in the garden with one hand resting against the back of a stone bench, black roses blooming around her skirts. The artist captured enough life in her expression that I find myself staring back.

She was beautiful.

Not in the delicate, perfect way women in old portraits usually are. There is something stubborn around her mouth, something almost challenging in the way she looks directly at whoever painted her. The longer I stare, the easier it becomes to see Rhys in her.

Or maybe her in him.

I step closer.

There’s another portrait hanging several feet away from Belle’s, and I don’t need anyone to tell me who the man is. He looks enough like Rhys that the relationship is obvious, although there’s something harder about his face, something unpleasant in the narrow set of his eyes and the severe line of his mouth that makes me uncomfortable the longer I look at him.

“She was considered a great beauty.”

I turn sharply and find Rhys standing behind me, his attention fixed on his mother’s portrait. I never even heard him approach.

“I was thinking the same thing.”

“My father hated when people said that.”

“Why?”

“He considered it an insult.”

Rhys comes to stand beside me. His eyes move briefly to the other portrait without any visible reaction.

I nod toward it. “That’s him?”

“Yes.”

“What was he like?”

“Paranoid. Violent. Completely convinced everyone around him intended to betray him eventually.”

The answer comes so easily that I glance at him, but Rhys continues looking at the portraits.

“He was particularly suspicious where my mother was concerned. He wanted to know where she was, who she spoke to and what was said whenever he wasn’t there to hear it himself. If a man looked at her for too long, my father noticed. If a servant whispered to her, he wanted to know why.”

“Was he jealous?”

“Jealousy implies he believed there was something to be jealous of. My father invented things and then treated them as fact.” Rhys folds his arms across his chest. “He could convince himself before breakfast that a servant was sleeping with my mother and have the man killed before lunch. Every denial became further proof that they were conspiring against him.”

I look at Belle again.

“He hurt her.”

“Yes.”

The blunt answer has me looking away from the portrait.

“How bad?”

“Bad enough that I learned very young not to leave her alone with him when he was angry.”

I turn toward him. Rhys’s expression doesn’t change.

“I used to listen outside their rooms,” he continues. “If his voice changed, I went inside. Sometimes interrupting him was enough to redirect his attention.”

“Onto you?”