Free The Disenchanted Widow by Christina McKenna

are you with me?”
    “Yes, yes indeed, sir! Of course, sir.”
    “You seemed a little distant there. Now, what I’m saying is: Proponents of the Grand Style are not to be meddled with.”
    “Oh, yes, I couldn’t agree more. The Grand Style…is what Reynolds is—I mean was—all about.”
    “Exactly! He made his sitters, the ladies especially, more elegant than they actually were. Hence his popularity. I dare say most of them looked like pigs’ bladders, given what we know. Now you, my dear fellow, would appear to be ‘improving’ on his hard work.”
    “Well, thank—”
    “It is meant,” said Sir Edward, holding up a hand, “in the pejorative sense, my boy.”
    He donned his spectacles and checked his timepiece, an ornate fob watch, passed down the generations by his great-great-grandfather, who’d been an equerry to William IV.
    “Almost time for my glass of claret. Will you join me?”
    Never having shared such an intimacy with his employer, Lorcan assented with alacrity. He was still smarting from Sir Edward’s phrase “the pejorative sense”; it had a nasty edge to it. Could the claret, he wondered, be a way of easing the pain for what was in store?
    There was a tense little silence as Sir Edward moved to a side table and applied himself to the decanting process.
    “Thank you, sir,” Lorcan said, accepting a glass, “but I don’t understand.”
    The curator harrumphed. “No, I dare say you don’t.” He raised his own glass briefly. “Chin-chin!” He resumed his seat.
    “You’re not pleased with my work, sir?”
    “Mmmm…Château Tour du Videau. Splendid! I have it on good authority, my boy, that the uplift brassiere was not an undergarment with which ladies in the eighteenth century would have been acquainted. Lady Fielding-Payne knows about such things. We popped into your studio the other evening and she was most displeased by what she saw.”
    “But it’s still a work in progress. I—”
    “And progressing entirely in the wrong direction, it would seem.”
    He consulted his desk diary. “You need a holiday, my dear fellow. I see you haven’t taken one in two years. The work becomes stale if you don’t take a break from it now and then. Recharge the old batteries. Let the wind blow about your vitals.”
    “But I don’t want a holiday. I don’t need a—”
    “Nonsense! Everybody needs a break. What d’you think you’re made of, man? Galvanized tin? Pig iron?” He chortled at his little witticism.
    “Well, no, but—”
    “There’ll be no well-no-buts about it. You’ll take time off when I say so.” He stabbed the diary with a finger. “And I say the dayafter tomorrow: the first of May. Is that understood? Back here at the end. Hopefully those wretched hunger strikers will start kicking the bucket any day now. And you can be sure that when they do, their Fenian supporters will run riot. You’re best out of it. They tell me that Sands chappie is on his last legs, thank goodness.” He raised his hands. “Imagine electing a ruffian like that to sit in the English Parliament! Worse than Caligula appointing his horse to the Senate of Rome. At least the blessed horse had breeding.” He shook his head and fixed an eye on Lorcan. “So, are we agreed on the first of May? A little leave of absence?”
    Lorcan found himself being bundled off on vacation without having much choice in the matter. He was reflecting on a rumor that was doing the rounds of the museum. Word had gone out that the curator’s niece had just graduated from Cambridge, in archaeology and restoration. It didn’t take an Einstein to figure out what was afoot.
    “Yes sir,” was all Lorcan could say. He was in no position to argue with his supervisor. He thought of his mother and the pub in Tailorstown, and of his dreaded appointment the following evening. Perhaps a month at home was what he needed. Perhaps the gods were trying to tell him something. “If you insist, sir.”
    “I jolly well do