Angel of Hever Castle, The Read Online Free PDF Page A

working was an eternal mystery, but he stared out into the distance as if he were waiting for some grand inspiration. 
    His eye fell on a rosebush by the side of the gatehouse.  It still bore blossoms – at least four large white ones, the edges tinged with pink, and he wondered if it might be the same plant Geraldine had mentioned, a Christmas Rose.  A flower capable of thriving under the least hospitable of conditions and he had a sudden urge to pluck this remarkable blossom, to press it and take it back to Emma.  Dare he go so close to the gatehouse?
    But why not ? he thought. I am a poet, after all, a man who seizes inspiration wherever he finds it. 
    So he ventured closer to the bush and just as he was about to reach for the plump white rose, he was startled by the sound of Anne Arborton’s voice, coming through the open window.
    “You fancy her,” she was saying, her voice somehow managing to sound both scathing and desperate.
    “I assure you that I do not,” came LaRusse’s reply. 
    “Then how do you explain….that?”
    They seemed preoccupied, so Trevor took the chance of tilting his head, stretching his neck, and looking through the window.   Anne was pointing at a large canvas on an easel.  From his odd angle, Trevor could not see the whole thing, but it was clearly a more complete rendition of the sketch they had viewed in Geraldine’s home two days earlier.  A bare-breasted young woman with a cloth draped across one shoulder and over her lap.
    “I cannot explain it,” LaRusse said quietly, and something in his tone convinced Trevor that he spoke the truth.  “ I am as mystified as you.  Except I might say that an artist…an artist does not always know what he is creating in the moment of its creation.  He goes into a sort of trance born of the work and when he looks on it later, at times he is like a stranger who does not –“
    “That’s poppycock,” snapped the girl. “You pose me and yet you paint her.”
    LaRusse was silent for a moment and then picked up one of his artist rags to wipe his brow. “The subconscious mind –“ he began, but Anne was playing that womanly game all men know so well:  demanding explanations then refusing to listen to them.
    “Precisely,” she said.  “You desire her and part of your mind knows this , even if the other part does not.  That is why you can force me to sit here, hour after hour, in this cold and dirty hovel, in this…this shameful condition, and the resultant portrait bears her face and not mine.”
    “No one is forcing you,” LaRusse s aid, suddenly as snappish as she.  “Go if you wish.  Go back to your mama.”
    “That bridge is burned,” Anne said, turning away from him and back toward the window.   Trevor ducked down, hopefully out of her sight.  “When I think of the promises you made…”
    “Promises I shall keep,” LaRusse said, his mood shifting yet again.  Now he was back to the smooth lover, a man whose tone was as sweet as honey, as soft as velvet. “Your portrait shall hang in galleries all over Europe before we are done.”
    “What you mean is a portrait of my naked body with her face,” Anne said, and her voice held such hopelessness, such emptiness, that Trevor, still crouched beneath the window, closed his eyes. 
    “I swear to you, my darling, it shall be corrected.  Sit here, just now, and we shall begin again.  And you must believe me.  The artist does not always know his own work.”
    “Especially if he is drunk.”
    And at this a slap cut the air, accompanied by a startled cry from the girl, and it took all the willpower Trevor possessed not to reveal both his hiding place and his identity.  He pressed his hand against the stone wall and swallowed, trying to gain control over his beating heart and his palm brushed against the rosebush, a thorn scratching the skin and bringing a sharp line of blood to the surface.  He raised his palm to his mouth and sucked it.
    “Strike me if you