Free The Painted Lady by Bárbara Metzger Page A

room and the welcome fire. While the ladies readied their needlework, the physician began to read aloud from an improving treatise. Kasey thought he’d use his time to think about improving the lot of Lancaster miners, and the income from his Suffolk farms. Instead, he could not drag his thoughts or his eyes away from Miss Bannister at a small spinning wheel, swaying over it as she fed a pinch of wool into the wheel and a strand of yarn came out to the waiting spool.
    He’d seen females do fancywork his entire life, embroidery and tatting and knotting fringes. He had never seen a lady spin. The rhythm, the fluid motion of her hands and her foot on the treadle, the straight line of her back was fascinating to him. The gray of her gown, the brown of the wheel were soft, muted tones against the room’s shadows. Kasey could see the painting he would compose. For once he had no desire to see his model unclothed. Not that he would demur if the demure Miss Bannister offered to pose au naturel, but for this time, this woman, clothing did not impede his inspiration.
    The duke’s inspection did, however, make the back of Lilyanne’s neck itch. She knew what he was thinking, all right, and it was not about Uncle’s homily on the virtue of patience. She turned to frown him into obedience, which usually worked with the girls in her charge, and he smiled. The yarn broke. No, Lilyanne told herself, she would not be taken in by the handsome libertine, or his dimples. If he was suffering from aberrations, one of them was definitely not going to be the delusion that Lilyanne Bannister could be drawn into an indiscretion.
    She set the carded wool back in her workbasket. “You need some occupation, Your Grace,” she whispered. “The mind wanders without focus, and idleness causes the brain to become overheated.”
    He grinned and said, “What do you suggest, cards, chess, rolling back the rugs for an impromptu dancing party? Something else?”
    “Something else.” She handed him a pair of knitting needles and a ball of spun yarn. “Here, there is no reason you cannot do something useful with your time while you listen to Uncle Osgood. The children at the poorhouse need scarves and mittens.”
    “You expect me to take up knitting?”
    “I expect you to do everything in your power to cooperate with my uncle’s teachings, in order to restore your mental well-being.”
    Kasey had to admit he’d nearly forgotten why he was in Lytchfield. Teasing a young woman was not going to exorcize his demons. “You’ll have to teach me.”
    So she did, quietly, while her uncle droned on and Lady Edgecombe nodded off behind her tambour frame. Kasey could not get the hang of the thing at first, not with Miss Bannister sitting so near where he could study her high cheekbones and delicately pointed chin. He wanted to pull the cap off her head and see her hair, instead of seeing which way the needles were supposed to move.
    “Concentrate, Your Grace. I have had fourteen-year-old girts with more hair than wit learn to do this. Certainly a gentleman of your supposed intelligence can accomplish as much.”
    Put that way, as an affront to his understanding, Kasey set his mind to watching the needles and not Miss Bannister. The needle went in, the yarn got turned, the needle went over. Simple. In no time at all, not halfway through Sir Osgood’s sermon, Kasey had almost an inch of loops and knots, of which he was inordinately proud. Ah, if his friends could only see him now. Kasey wanted to laugh, but laughing seemed frowned upon here, too. Miss Bannister did smile at his success, though, the first smile he had won from the woman. Upturned lips and crinkles at her eyes changed Osgood’s niece from schoolmistress to sylph, and oh, those eyes.
    “Yes, you seem to have the basic stitch in hand. Now unravel it and start over, this time trying to keep the stitches the same length.”
    “What, I should destroy this masterpiece? Don’t you have a needy