The Serpent Garden - Judith Merkle Riley Read Online Free PDF

the painter’s pleasure. She ordered little Master Pickering, whose round, dark head and large brown eyes had more than a passing resemblance to the painter’s, carried off to bed by the nursemaid. Master Dallet had amused the baby and his mother both with his rapid drawings of the bearbaiting he had attended with several gentlemen the previous week. Then she had played the virginals and he had sung in a mellow baritone about the faithlessness of women. Now he returned his attention wholly to the mother of the recently removed infant and to the food on the little candlelit table by the bed. The amplitude of Master Dallet’s stomach was already beginning to bear witness to his passion for the table. In time this passion might undermine his dark good looks, and thus his pursuit of other passions, but for now all his passions, as it were, carried equal weight.
    “You have no idea what I go through. No man can abide a clinging woman. Whereas
you
are far too lovely to ever cling,” he opined, setting down a gnawed leg bone and delicately wiping his fingers. Mistress Pickering loosed her long, black hair, smooth as silk, shaking her head to spread it over her half-bare shoulders like a dark cloak. She half smiled in answer. “Glorious,” enthused the painter, admiring the shining blue lights in the flowing dark mass. “You are perfection. Your hair. Your lovely little waist. I want to paint every inch of that delicious skin of yours. Would you prefer to be Venus, rising from the sea foam, or perhaps Delilah the temptress, reclining on a lion?” He held up his hands together, the thumb and fingers forming a hollow square, like a picture frame, to surround the imaginary scene.
    “The temptress,” answered Bridget Pickering, looking up at him through her long, dark lashes with adoring eyes. It was a bit tricky for her to accomplish this, her most effective little gesture, since she was three inches taller than the painter. But height in a lover was never her first concern. In those proportions that mattered most to her, she had found the painter a perfect specimen. And when you added to this a flattering tongue, a pleasant and frequent offering of gifts, and a random schedule of work that allowed for convenient trysting, it was small wonder that Rowland Dallet was her favorite, if not exclusive, way to beguile the time while her husband was away at sea. She thought, for a brief moment, that she had lost him when he married, but soon enough the
Magdalen
had left port and the painter had arrived once more at her door, not the least chagrined.
    “Naughty man,” she had said, “what makes you think I will have you back?”
    “My damned fine equipment, madame, and your randy eye. Surely you didn’t think you could be outmatched by a shaggy little Flemish cow, did you?” And since he had brought her a perfectly stunning bracelet, she’d taken him back in a flash.
    “Tell me, how’s that virtuous little wife?” she asked, glancing slyly at him as she unpinned her sleeves.
    “Fatter than ever. Her face puffs like a bladder. She bleats after me like a sheep. ‘When will you be back? Can’t you fetch me some oranges? I’m wanting some so.’ She irritates me. She positively drives me off. She should study your ways if she wants to be attractive.” Mistress Pickering smiled a little, as if she thought any imitation of her to be impossible. Rowland Dallet shrugged a little as if to say, Well, I suppose you’re right, and then went on. “Ever since her parents died she’s been more of a useless lump than ever.” Dallet was seated on the bed now, undoing the points that kept his codpiece and hose snugly fastened together.
    “Mmmm,” responded Mistress Pickering, “did they leave you anything?”
    “Twenty pounds and some ugly foreign furniture, plus a cross-tempered old servant-woman who came with the lot. Oh yes, some cooking pots and a Turkish carpet they brought over the water with them. I suppose I could sell