Portrait of My Heart Read Free Page A

look completely different. As it is, she looks too sweet by far—”

    “What do you mean, too sweet?” Pegeen lifted the canvas, which was only six inches by another six, and held it out at arm’s length, still so entranced by it that she could not look away. “Lizzie looks perfectly, adorable. John, too. Oh, and look at Mary’s little pout! And Alistair’s chin. You’ve captured it exactly! I’ve overheard some people calling Alistair’s chin stubborn, you know, but it’s just firm, that’s all.”
    Maggie lifted her gaze and fastened it upon the face of her mother, who sat in a wrought-iron lawn chair opposite Pegeen’s. The smile Lady Herbert returned was every bit as knowing as Maggie’s. All of the Rawlings children’s chins were inevitably thrust out stubbornly in unconscious imitation of their mother’s expression when she was at her most intractable, and the fact that Pegeen refused to recognize this was the source of some amusement among her friends and neighbors.
    “Oh, Maggie,” Pegeen sighed, still unable to take her eyes off the portrait. “It’s just beautiful. I don’t know how you do it.”
    “I don’t know how she does it, either.” Lady Herbert leaned forward to pour out another cup of tea from the silver service on the small folding table that had been set up between the lawn chairs. Since Pegeen was expecting—though not as soon as Maggie’s elder sister, Anne, who sat opposite Lady Herbert, her teacup and saucer balanced on the generous swell of her stomach—the older woman had automatically taken on the duties of hostess, though in fact both she and her daughters were Pegeen’s guests at the manor house where Sir Arthur, Maggie’s father, worked as solicitor to the young duke’s estate. The Herberts spent so much time at Rawlings Manor that Maggie had long come to consider it her second home, and tended to treat it as such, a fact that did not sit particularly well with the very ladylike Anne, particularly when she found her youngest sister sliding down banisters, which up until a year or two ago had occurred all too frequently.
    “She certainly didn’t inherit the talent from me,” Maggie’s
mother declared, stirring sugar into her tea. “It must come from her father’s side of the family.”
    “Papa?” Anne looked uncomfortable, as she always did whenever her youngest sister’s talent with a paintbrush was mentioned. “Certainly not! No one on Papa’s side of the family ever took up painting. Goodness, Mamma. How could you make such a suggestion?”
    Maggie, turning her gaze back down to the little portrait she’d rendered, shook her head. “No, Lizzie’s smile isn’t right,” she murmured to herself. “Not nearly wicked enough.”
    Unfortunately, Lizzie’s mother overheard.
    “Wicked!” Pegeen cried, snatching the painting to her chest, as if she feared Maggie might try to take it away to make adjustments. “Nonsense. There isn’t a wicked bone in my daughter’s body. She’s a little angel. They’re all little angels.” Seeing that Maggie had no intention of retrieving her gift, Pegeen snuck another peek, and immediately launched into further raptures. “Oh, Anne, look at the way she’s done John’s eyes. Have you ever seen anything so uncanny?”
    Maggie, still unconvinced, looked away from the painting and toward the rest of the garden, where Pegeen’s “little angels” were currently engaged in tearing up one of the rose beds. They were joined in their efforts by Anne’s children, though Maggie’s well-behaved nieces and nephew were considerably less boisterous than the Rawlings brood, and by approximately fifteen orphans from the Rawlings Foundling Home, whom Lady Pegeen was entertaining to a May Day picnic on the manor house grounds. A single glance at Pegeen and Edward’s eldest child told Maggie that she had, indeed, erred on the side of sweetness. Elizabeth Rawlings was a pretty girl, but obviously as headstrong as both of her