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you have come like all the others - to ask him for a favor, to make some suggestion for the betterment
of the colony, to fawn at his feet?” Without waiting for a response, she rushed on. “Well, you needn’t
have bothered. He is gone.”
“Gone?” said Trevor, genuinely startled, for this was the last thing he would have predicted. “Gone
where?”
“Do you think I know?” said the girl and she weaved on her feet, so unsteady that Rayley reached for
her arm.
“We all should go,” he said gently. “Let us leave this treacherous place and return to the safety of
London. Christmastime is approaching. It is only right to be home with one’s family, is it not?”
There was a beat of silence, just enough that both men hoped the girl would nod and say yes, that she
was prepared to leave at once. But then Anne drew herself up and said, “But he shall be back soon, I
know he shall. And you needn’t think I would leave the man I love on such foolish provocation. I
know who the two of you are, you know. I have known from the very first night.”
Now there was more than one beat of silence. There were several. Rayley was conscious he was
clenching his jaw and he dared not look at Trevor.
“You are not an artist,” Anne said haughtily, fixing her light grey eyes on Rayley’s face. “Your work
is dreadful, everyone says so, and you hide behind the term ‘impressionism’ in an attempt to delude us
that your ridiculous splashes of paint bear a sort of secret meaning. And you,” she added, turning to
Trevor, “are even less of a poet. Poets talk all the time. They love the sound of their own voices and
they drink at the fountain of words. They drink deeply, Sir, and their words flow out at every
opportunity, yet you lurk about the fields saying nothing to anyone. No, I know full well why the two
of you have traveled to Hever, so you need dissemble no more.”
Both men held their breath. The girl pushed back her hood of her cape and spat the next words.
“You are here for the sex.”
Trevor let go an explosion of pent up air, which could have been interpreted as either a laugh or a
cough.
“Men of your sad ilk come to the colony often,” Anne went on, surveying first one and then the other
with narrowed eyes. “Drawn by the tales of free love and the promise of unguarded women. You
pose as artists, but your true art is lovemaking and you imagine that we are all –“
“I saw him slap you.” Trevor’s voice cut into the girl’s mad torrent of words and she paused, looking
at him uncertainly. His abrupt change of topic was a calculated effort to grab the reins of this runaway
conversation, and, judging by the sliver of fear which came into Anne’s face, it had worked.
“Why would you remain loyal to such a man?” Trevor went on, seizing the advantage and determined
to remain unmoved by the tears in the girl’s eyes. “I have heard your shouts of rage, your anger at the
cruel position in which you have been cast. LaRusse poses you naked in the winter cold and yet
paints the face of another, is that not the crux of the matter?”