They looked to the end of the table to where the maid glanced pointedly at Mr. Harrison.
When Wade spoke, he dropped his voice. “He’s a surly bastard with everyone, but he’s also singularly focused on his work. Everything is about his art. Or it was until he was late to arrive because he was helping you.”
“Because of an obligation to my sister-in-law,” she said softly. Anything else the man before her interpreted from Caleb’s escort was wrong. It had all stemmed from her relationship to Poppy.
“Wrong. Caleb Gray doesn’t make himself obligated to anyone. That’s how he’s gone through life. Everything falls second, third, and never first to his work. But then, there he is frolicking in the snow with you.”
“You’re making more out of it than there is.” Caleb who couldn’t even bring himself to consider a formal arrangement with her. He’d rather go marry another woman and set her up as mistress of his household. Oh, God, the pain of that threatened to cleave her in two.
“Why? Because he won’t marry you? I suspect he won’t marry you because he’s afraid. He knows he cares about you, and it’s… it’s something he’s going to have to figure out for himself.”
Mr. Harrison spoke only as one who truly knew a person well might. And that reminded Claire that for everything Caleb had revealed to her, for all the pieces he’d shared, there were even more shrouded in mystery.
“How do you know one another, Mr. Harrison?” she asked.
“I’ve been friends with him longer…” He gripped the side of the table. “We were prisoners aboard the same ship.”
Her heart buckled under the hell that both this man and Caleb had endured.
Wade offered an agonized smile. “You knew that.”
She hesitated a moment. Admitting as much felt like a betrayal, and yet, this was a man closer with Caleb than anyone. Claire nodded.
“That’s my point exactly, Miss Poplar. He confided that in you. He doesn’t talk about that with anyone. Never even spoke to his own family about what happened. Hell, I lived that experience with him, and neither of us ever speak about it with each other.”
And yet, he’d revealed those painful parts of himself to Claire. Surely that meant… something? Surely it meant he did care about her, as Wade suggested. Except, it could mean all number of things about the bond they’d developed, but that did not change his unwillingness to make them anything other than what they were. Just two people briefly thrown together who’d discussed their demons. And as such, the time of learning more about Caleb Gray was nearly at an end. That did not, however, mean she couldn’t still gather some more of those pieces of him that she craved.
Determined not to let melancholy ruin her last evening at Night’s Keep, Claire rested her elbow on the arm of her chair and dropped her chin atop her hand. “I trust you know all manner of stories about Mr. Gray.”
Wade grinned. “Tons.”
With that, they began to share.
He’d had no intention of eating that night.
When his craft beckoned, Caleb heeded that call. The failure to do so only left an artist with a spiteful muse who refused to cooperate. One either sketched when the moment spoke, or one would be left to forsake whatever fleeting inspiration had come—and then gone.
Following his return from outside with Claire, he’d been gripped by an overwhelming hungering to paint. It had been such an acute need, the kind that overtook a person’s thoughts. The same one that had sent him to his rooms after his return home from the British prison ship and that had left him there for days and then weeks on end. It was a feeling he’d begun to despair of knowing ever again. And so, the moment it had stirred to life within him, Caleb had not even bothered to head to his room to change. He’d gone straight to the converted art room, ground his pigment into oil, found his brushes, and begun creating.
It had been a liberation, almost as freeing as the day the French had broken through that hatch and pulled him to freedom.
And yet, it also proved fleeting. Wiping his forearm across his brow, he stared at the partially completed canvas, the explosive color and vague shadowing that concealed traces of a human form within.
He’d been so close.
So close he’d tasted it and been moved by it.
If your muse is lost, you cannot bring yourself to stay in whatever place you happen to be residing.
Claire’s accusation whispered in his mind.
Slamming down his brush, Caleb cursed his frustration aloud into the enormous ballroom. “Damn it.” Being unable to create had nothing to do with running. A damned block had paralyzed his work.
At this particular moment, however, the only thing that had stopped him from working hadn’t been the demons that haunted him, or the blank void he’d been unable to fill these past years.
It was her—Claire Poplar. Claire, who’d come to him long ago for art lessons and whom he’d rejected at every turn. Claire, who would be leaving tomorrow morn. Maybe that was why his muse had just vanished, because she would be here for only a short while more, and perhaps his muse recognized that this posed his last opportunity to give Claire that which she’d sought. Granted, she could teach him more in the ways of finding inspiration. The only support he could proffer was the technical kind.
His muse would eventually return after Claire left and Caleb was free to devote himself to his work.
Only, as he grabbed his jacket and quit the art room to go change for dinner, it wasn’t his absentee muse he worried about, or righting past wrongs. As Caleb made his way to the dining room, there was a genuine eagerness to see Claire… and talk about art with her, and—
Laughter spilled out of that room and into the corridor, the tinkling sound of Claire’s amusement rushing up to meet him.
Then came a deeper, booming expression of mirth. Wade’s.
What the hell?
Caleb stepped into the entryway and found Claire and Wade engaged in a full discussion. Framed as Caleb was in the doorway, if Wade picked his head up, he’d see Caleb standing there. That was, if he wasn’t wholly engrossed by Claire and what she was telling him.
“I was a deplorable child,” Claire was saying. “When I was just five, my mother insisted I become proficient in French, but I was adamant that I’d not. I quite despised the French.”
“Why?” Wade asked.
“Because Boney was bent on world domination. Even as a small girl, I understood that.”
That gave Caleb pause. He’d never thought much about Napoleon’s march across Europe. To him, he’d viewed the British only as the oppressors. It was strange to think that the same people he’d come to admire for their hand in helping his country gain its independence, and who had gotten him back his freedom, had not been unlike the British in their attempt to take over that which wasn’t theirs.
“Then, my brother, Tristan, was abroad to fight the French,” Claire continued. “Every day, I lived in fear of him being hurt or dying. I was quite rebellious and insisted I’d never do something as unpatriotic as learn the frog’s tongue.”
Wade laughed, and Claire’s tinkling amusement joined in.
Dropping his elbows onto the table, Wade leaned forward. “How’d she handle it?”