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

and here it had been uttered by a girl of substance, a person of value, intelligent, and from a background which was financially comfortable enough to allow her to not only purchase kid gloves, but to cut the tips off them in the practice of her art.   He felt the urge to throw both Dorinda and Anne across the back of Brown’s horses and carry them back to their homes, far away from this place, which seemed more corrupt with each passing hour.
    But Dorinda was clearly pleased with herself, and the two were silent as they put their paints on a pair of trays and carried them, jars holding every color of the rainbow, down the treacherous steps and to a room on the second level.  This sunny space, which Dorinda informed him had been the childhood bedroom of Anne Boleyn herself, had now been converted into a studio.  It had the best views of any room he had seen so far in the castle, that much was certain.  An orchard on one side, the moat on another, a particularly well-composed angle on the meadows from the third.  Strange that a daughter, especially a younger one, would have been given the best room in the house as her private chamber, Rayley mused, momentarily distracted from his moral outrage by the pleasantness of the setting.  Was there something in Anne Boleyn that made her parents certain, even in girlhood, that she was the special one?  The child destined for a great and dangerous future?  The one whose rise would elevate the whole family?
    Following Dorinda’s lead, he set up his easel, poised a canvas on it, and selected one of his paints.  From his peripheral vision he could see that she worked both quickly and well.  Her horses looked like horses, her people like people, and her trees like trees.  His own attempts, to no surprise, were an utter mess.  He globbed a touch of blue in one corner, a dab of yellow in another, and then they both began to run until the bottom of the canvas was soon smeared in a rather depressing sea of green.  He had mixed the paints too thin.  But he found another, a color somewhere between pink and red and notably thicker than the others, and he managed to affix a splotch of it into the dead center of the canvas.
    “Your technique is … interesting,” came a voice from the corner.  Rayley turned to see that they had been joined by a man he had met the evening before, a man who had introduced himself as John Paul, and who was now staring at Rayley’s canvas with a palpable contempt.
    “I studied in France,” Rayley said, silently thanking Geraldine for having the sense to predict such a muddle and for offering a way out.
    “France?” John Paul repeated.
    “ Yes, Paris,” Rayley said mildly.  “I was there last year.”
    From the spasm of envy which traveled across John Paul’s heavy face, it was obvious he had never been to France, and Rayley, of course, knew that his own trip had been on police business, not studying art under the tutelage of artistic masters.  In fact, if he were to address the total humiliating truth, he would have had to confess that he had spent part of his time in Paris in captivity, languishing in a jail cell down by the river, but Dorinda and John Paul certainly didn’t need to know that.  After staring at Rayley’s canvas for a few more moments of awkward silence, John Paul’s skepticism finally gave way to a sort of bewildered respect.
    “Impressionism,” he said softly, his voice dropping almost to a whisper.   “The French miracle of light”
    “T he museums of Paris are where I first saw the technique,” Rayley said, and this much of the story was true.  After merely twenty-four hours of subterfuge, he was relieved to be able to say something honest.  It seemed as if he had been wading in a rushing river, and now for the first time since arriving at Hever Castle, he felt the sense of a solid stone beneath his feet. He would stand on this small stone of truth until he caught his bearings. 
    “I was going to get ale