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place a jar of red-orange huge on the simple wooden shelf before adding “And he is my protector. A
girl needs one.”
“Even here?” Rayley said. “In utopia?”
“A liberal man is just as eager to fuck as a conservative one.”
Rayley was shocked. More than shocked. He was stunned, and for a moment he felt as if he’d had
the wind knocked out of him. He paused in his own task of stirring some nondescript shade of blue
and looked out the window at the fields far below. He had never heard that particular word spoken
by a woman, not even a prostitute – 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.”