Once a Mistress Read online

“’Tis a stinger.”

  Thomas Middleton, 1580—1627

  Wren opened the cottage door and breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief. Margo preceded her over the threshold, barking a greeting to the other inhabitants of the cottage as she entered. The welcoming chirps and squeaks, the sounds of tiny feet scurrying across the floors of their houses, and the familiar odors of paints and charcoal gave Wren a feeling of calm after the chaos brought about by the unexpected appearance of the Trevingshire hunt and of the new marquess of Templeston.

  But Wren’s sense of peace and calm was cut short when Drew flung open the cottage door and stepped inside. “We aren’t finished. What did you mean about—what in the name of bloody hell is all this?”

  The sparsely furnished room, with its cream-colored walls and morning sunlight pouring through the tall, uncovered windows, caught Drew off guard. When he’d last been inside the dowager cottage—some seven or eight years ago—his paternal grandmother had lived there. The salon windows had been covered with burgundy velvet drapes and the walls covered with huge needlepoint tapestries and priceless oil paintings in gilt frames. The place had been stiflingly dark and stuffy, the rooms packed with massive mahogany furniture from the Tudor period, most of which had made up his grandmother’s dowry. Drew had been fond of his grandmother but he’d hated visiting her in the dowager cottage, which smelled of dust and mold and decay. He had spent most of his time coaxing her outside and into the garden.

  It looked as if Kathryn had brought the garden inside. The cottage radiated sunshine and life. The only characteristic it shared with the room he remembered was the clutter. But this time the room was cluttered with easels and canvases, with jars of brushes soaking in cleaner, with pots of ink and palettes of paints and boxes of charcoal. And nature. His grandmother’s salon had smelled of old age and death, while the salon’s current incarnation resonated with the smell of life—of ferns and greenery growing in huge pots of moist earth and of the assortment of small animals that had obviously found a home here.

  A small owl snoozed on a wooden perch, a red squirrel chattered in what looked to be a straw bonnet on the top shelf of a bookcase that ran the length of the wall—a bookcase Drew hadn’t known existed because his grandmother had kept it hidden behind a hideous tapestry rendition of the plagues visited upon the Egyptians. A tiny hedgehog was curled atop a cushion near a jar of paintbrushes on a wooden table and the fox called Margo had retreated to a rug beneath a Queen Anne table. The only disconcerting notes in the whole room were the frames of mounted butterflies, moths, and small birds and the stuffed otter that was perched atop a log near the fireplace.

  “My home,” Kathryn answered. “And my studio. These are my subjects.” She spoke like a queen and looked like one, too, as she waved an arm to encompass the animals. “I’m completing the work my father started: Flora and Fauna Native to Britain.”

  Drew walked over to the nearest easel and stared at a watercolor study of the owl. The painting was clearly a work of art depicting features so exacting and detailed that Drew was compelled to touch it to make certain it was paper and not the living, breathing model asleep on his perch. “Your father’s?”

  Wren shook her head.

  He stared at her in wonder. He knew her father’s work. Dozens of Sir Wesley Markinson’s drawings and paintings adorned the walls of the marquess’s London town house. Kathryn’s father had been a most respected naturalist and a fine artist, but Drew hadn’t realized Kathryn shared his incredible gift. “I never knew you had such talent.”

  “Neither did I,” she told him. “Until Papa’s health began to fail.” She recognized the look of skepticism on Drew’s face and shrugged. “Oh, I knew I had a flair for watercolors. But many girls do. Watercolors are part of a gentlewoman’s education—like needlework, the piano, and flower arranging. It’s something we’re taught from an early age. It doesn’t make one an artist.”

  Drew nodded toward the easel. “That does.”

  Wren smiled. “Desperation is a great teacher.”

  “How so?”

  “My father fell ill. When I came to live with him, his hand had already begun to shake so much he couldn’t control his paintbrush or the pen he used for his ink drawings, and his eyesight was failing. But he had accepted a commission from the British Museum for watercolor depictions of wildlife in their natural habitats for the museum exhibits. And he had sworn to complete his life’s work and he wouldn’t hear of abandoning it. So he did everything twice. All of the color plates and many of the anatomical drawings he’d made for the book had to be re-created on canvas for the museum. Papa called it his personal Noah’s Ark. I became his hand and his eyes and he taught me everything he knew about the study of nature and the painting of it.”

  “Including how to do that?” Drew pointed toward the otter mounted on the log and the butterflies and birds pinned and glued to wooden display panels in glass cases. “Was that part of your training?”

  Wren gave a delicate shudder. “No. The live animals are ones your father’s gamekeeper, Mr. Isley, brought to me as orphans.” She paused. “I used the mounted specimens of lepidoptera and the Fringilla coelebs, of course, but I didn’t dispatch them. I’m afraid they’re part of the collection I inherited from Bertrand.”

  “Bertrand?” The name was too familiar. “Stafford?”

  Wren nodded. “Yes, Bertrand Stafford. My husband.”

  “Your husband?” Drew was incredulous. “You married Bertrand Stafford? God’s nightshirt, Kathryn, Bertrand Stafford must have been a hundred years old!”

  “He was sixty-seven.” Wren felt compelled to defend the man she’d married.

  “I would have sworn he was over ninety.”

  “He wasn’t.”

  “He looked it.” Drew was reeling from the knowledge that Kathryn Markinson had left him at the altar in order to marry one of her father’s colleagues—and not just any colleague, but a thin, pasty-faced, rheumy-eyed, wrinkled, stoop-shouldered man old enough to be her grandfather. And one who just happened to be the most famous professor of animal and insect anatomy in England. “What in God’s name possessed you to throw me over for Bertrand Stafford?”

  “I didn’t throw you over.” She blinked back a fresh surge of hot tears.

  “Oh?” Drew lifted his eyebrow in sarcastic query. “What would you call it? I was waiting at the altar of St. Paul’s at ten o’clock in the morning on the day of our wedding. Where were you? Pinning butterflies to a board with Bertrand? Studying otter anatomy? Because you couldn’t have been interested in studying male anatomy. Not with Bertrand Stafford. Not when you could have studied it with me. So what were you doing while I was waiting at the altar, Kathryn? What was important enough to make our wedding day slip your mind?”

  “Leave my mama alone!”

  Chapter Five