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Months after the events in the Canvas, evenings remained the most difficult.
Winter was further behind them and the days were longer, but she found it made little difference. The manor always had an air of darkness, even with the prevalence of artificial light. During the day, sunbeams would filter down from the glasshouse, or in through the atelier’s bay windows, alleviating the issue somewhat. When the sun set, the main hall was oppressive.
They’d beat it back with music before. If she closed her eyes and focused, the Paintress could still hear the ghosts of those melodies—Verso at his piano, Alicia sitting beside him as Clea played her harp. She swallowed against the force of those memories.
Aline hugged her robe tighter around herself, working her way toward Renoir’s atelier. She was strong enough to make the journey without feeling winded these days. A minor victory, but she took no small pride in standing on her own two feet again. By the summer, she might be able to venture as far as the gardens without assistance.
It was humbling to have fallen so far. For those first weeks after the Canvas, it felt like all she'd done was sleep. The nausea had made her bouts of morning sickness seem pale by comparison. Aline paused, leaning on one of the chairs at the grand table. She’d managed. Time had a way of healing physical wounds, even in one’s old age. The deeper hurts—emotional, spiritual, whatever you wanted to call them—mended more slowly. Like the manor’s darkness, they were easier to stomach during the day. When she slept, she dreamt, and her dreams were—
—difficult. She’d awoke in a cold sweat, still caught in those days immediately following the fire, Verso’s agonized howls still ringing in her ears and the sight of Alicia, so frail in her bandages, her face weeping blood or plasma. And the smell—burnt hair, burnt flesh.
The clock in their bedroom read just after three. Renoir's half of the bed was cold, the sheets turned down. Some part of her realized the hypocrisy of her desires. After abandoning their family, abandoning him, she could hardly begrudge his absence. It did not lessen the ache. Or the wanting. After decades, it felt strange to wake without him there.
So, here she was. Wandering the manor in the dead of night. Either searching for Renoir or meaning to exhaust herself into another uneasy bout of sleep. She descended those final few steps, heading down the long corridor to her husband’s atelier. Music drifted towards her. She didn’t recognize the composer. Not piano, but a clarinet. It was jauntier than she might have liked at this hour, but warm and not unpleasant.
Renoir sat at the table, the bottle of whiskey pulled nearer, fingers curled around his glass. He tipped his head back, eyes closed as he listened. His hair remained wild from sleep, still too long, his nightshirt open midway down his chest. A sudden need to settle in his lap, to lean her head against his shoulder and listen to the steady beat of his heart, seized her. Aline managed to catch it, folding her hands over her stomach, clearing her throat.
He cracked one eye to look at her. “Am I dreaming?”
“I’d be dressed more flatteringly in your imagination,” Aline said, settling into the second chair without invitation. “Or wearing less.”
“I’ll leave you to decide which,” Renoir replied. He leaned forward to offer the whiskey. It burned on her tongue and down her throat. “It’s late to be out wandering.”
“Pot-kettle.” Aline dragged the tips of her fingers across the glass. “I don’t recognize the song—one of Verso’s records?”
“They’re not always to my taste, but they make him feel…less far away.”
Her husband turned his head, staring across the atelier towards the old piano. It’d been hers once. Not the grand instrument in the main hall, but a more…common find. Something she could use to instruct their children without fear. She’d spent hours at that old thing, sometimes instructing their little ones, sometimes only playing as the others painted. Or she’d return from a Canvas to find Verso plunking at the keys, face rapturous and a little infatuated. He’d look so small sitting on that ancient piano bench. Until one day, seemingly overnight, she’d woken up, and he’d been taller than her, and he’d no longer fit the old piano.
Aline looked away, heart aching. Renoir held out his hand. She took a long drink from his whiskey, the liquid burning down her throat, before threading their fingers together. He offered her a melancholy smile in return, pressing a kiss to the back of her knuckles. She stroked his cheek, an absent touch born of years of familiarity, his beard tickling her skin. The physicality was easy enough, even if their conversations remained stilted and strange.
He wanted to say something. It would be so simple to ask. Aline felt the words ball up at the top of her throat, coagulating there, choking, suffocating. Anything would work—a simple “how are you?” But it wouldn’t come. She dropped her gaze with a sigh.
“It’s still poisoning us, isn’t it?”
“The fire? Or the Canvas?”
“Both,” he answered, chuckling dryly. “I should have taken you all away from this place—somewhere quiet, where we could grieve without…Paris looking over our shoulders.”
“Taken me away,” she repeated, snorting. “I’d have fought you tooth and nail.”
“Of that I have no doubt.” He scrubbed a hand over his face, eyeing the whiskey. Renoir took another drink, then poured three fingers into the glass. He offered it to her. Aline accepted. “But if we were to fight one way or another, perhaps we could have bled out somewhere more exotic than the atelier.”
The comment made her laugh. Renoir smiled.
“May I say something?”
Aline took another drink, shrugging and settling back in her seat. “It seems redundant to ask permission thirty years into our marriage—but if it eases your mind: yes. Speak freely.”
“I’ve missed your laugh.” The frankness of the declaration left her shifting, almost squirming under the weight of his stare. That naked honesty was something she’d always admired and feared about her husband. He knew the bent of his own mind and the workings of his heart. His love was fact, an ineffable and infallible truth. In the earliest stretch of their relationship, she’d called him a romantic; Renoir had nodded. They were both romantics, in their way. The difference was…she didn’t know. It was difficult to put into words. He was stone, she supposed. Renoir was the earth, and as deeply as she loved the earth and all its offerings, Aline was the sky.
“It still feels strange—wrong,” she murmured, closing her eyes. It was easier to speak without looking at him, without enduring the agony and longing in his eyes. “I know Verso would want us to find happiness again, but it feels selfish.”
“Our son would chastise you for that.”
“Oh, yes. ‘You missed your calling, maman—all these theatrics.’”
“He was a good boy.”
Aline drew in a hiccuping little breath, nodding. She turned her face away, scrubbing one hand violently across her face. “Yes.”
“Aline—” Renoir grunted, face twisting in pain and discomfort as he knelt before her. She reached out to take his arm without thinking.
“Stop.” Aline touched his cheek. “You won't be able to get on your feet again.”
“It's a risk we'll have to take.” He turned his face into her palm and kissed her lifeline.
“Have to take,” she parroted back, shaking her head. “There's nothing you couldn't have said standing.”
“Perhaps—something about the principle of it all, I suppose.” He bowed his head, a grey-streaked tendril of hair falling in front of his eyes. “Forgive an old romantic for wishing to be closer to you.”
She stared into his face—older now, but still as familiar as breathing. Decades on and she knew all its lines. Aline swallowed against the lump in her throat. The words sounded throaty and raw, her voice almost unrecognizable. “May I say something?”
“There’s no need to ask.” He smiled. If she hung that smile in a gallery, Paris would remark upon it: call it tired, call it solemn, call it sad. The resigned old lion. They would never call it joy.
Aline traced his lips, and he kissed the pads of her fingers, still looking grim.
The Council called him her shadow. Apt enough, she supposed. An omnipresent companion, a compliment that moved in lockstep—an extension of herself. It was a reduction of what they were to one another—even at their worst, they flowed in each other's veins—but it served.
She was tired of jumping at her own shadow. She was tired of fearing her friend.
“I've missed you,” Aline murmured. It was such a little confession in the grand scheme of things—the three words caught in her throat, low and vulnerable in a way she disliked. The Paintress took a breath, worrying her thumb near the corner of his mouth. “I miss you.”
“Aline—” For all her talents as a Paintress, she’d never managed to replicate the way he spoke her name. Her Renoir had always been a touch off, too authoritative. Her husband's voice caressed the syllables, spoken near the back of his throat, as if he wanted to swallow the sound and keep it rather than breathe it out. He kissed her palm. Renoir spoke gently. “ —dear one, I never left.”
“You didn’t.” She sighed. Aline brushed hair out of her eyes. “You still haven’t lorded that over me.”
Renoir huffed. For the first time, his smile looked more genuine. “I’m biding my time.”
“Liar.”
He paused. A long moment passed before he spoke again, slower, more carefully. “There’s been enough bitterness between us. You’re here now. That’s enough.”
The apology she so badly needed to offer kept sticking in her throat. It was her pride—her arrogance. She’d been called stiff-necked and inflexible as a child; she’d never changed. Something in her bristled at the perceived vulnerability even now. She leaned forward instead, turning his face up towards her. Beneath the layers of exhaustion, she saw a more timid emotion: hope, a little sprout peeking its head up from the ashes.
Aline pressed her lips to his. They were drier than she remembered, but no worse for it. He drew in a surprised breath, his right hand settling over her ribs, thumb absently tracing the underside of her breast. An odd habit he’d fallen into not long after they married, touching her purely for the sake of it, revelling in the warmth of that patch of skin and the feel of her heartbeat beneath his palm.
Aline feathered the tips of her fingers over his cheek, along that sharp sweep of bone and up. Renoir closed his eyes, trusting her even now, as she glided across the lids.
“You were right,” she finally said, pressing her forehead to his. “Galling as that is to admit. We should take the girls. Leave Paris for a while. I had hoped that…being surrounded by him would be a comfort.” Aline clutched him nearer, letting her husband’s warmth wash over her. “There were good memories, too.”
He stroked her hair, pulling her nearer, down to sit with him on the floor. They huddled together like children, knowing they would ache later and not caring at all. “Our best days are so polite,” Renoir grumbled. “It’s as if they fear they’ll inconvenience us, and so they stay away. Our worst days lack such compulsion.”
She nodded, laughing bitterly, turning her face into his chest. “Where would you have taken us?”
“Athens, again? Rome?” Renoir paused. He pressed at her shoulders, creating enough distance to stare down into her face. “New Orleans.”
It’d been the family trip they never quite managed, too late in life for all their schedules to arrange. There’d always been a Council meeting, a Salon, a society function. Verso had all but begged them, but—
—what was the excuse? There’d always be time later.
Aline curled against him. “I’ve heard it’s miserable in the summer.”
“Autumn, then.” He smoothed a hand over her hair, kissing her temple. “Perhaps our daughters have a better idea.” God only knew Clea had earned something for her dedication.
In the morning, they would go to their girls. Alicia’s eagerness to see distant shores, to travel in a world that did not know her, would override her other hesitancies. Clea remained more bloodyminded, but even she softened a little at the suggestion.
“Good,” she’d said, stiff. “Staying here clearly isn’t helping.”
Come autumn, they would travel.
With any luck, they’d find their way back to themselves again.