The Disenchanted Widow Read Free

a farmer and publican, had died ten years earlier, and she’d been depending on her only son to come home and continuewhere her husband had left off. But Lorcan had let it be known that he was interested in neither the land nor the pub business.
    “Mother, I’m not cut out for tramping fields and serving drunks.” He’d meant “drinks” but hadn’t bothered correcting himself. “I have an imagination.” The young, defiant artist was unrepentant.
    “Are you saying your poor father had no imagination?”
    “Strictly speaking, only artists have imagination, and I can’t afford to have mine stifled. This is not me .” He’d swept an arm majestically with that last remark, to encompass not only the Crowing Cock pub and their outlying farm but the entire population of Tailorstown and the mountains beyond.
    “I’m very disappointed in you, Lorcan. Just so long as you remember that your father’s pub and the people of this town put food on our table and clothes on your back and funded your education.”
    But he’d won the day nonetheless, had rented out the land to local farmers, employed a bartender to assist his mother, and returned to Belfast. After graduation, he’d pursued a career as a painter and printer before finally fetching up in the conservation room of the Ulster Museum.
    Now thirty-seven and considerably wiser, he winced at the arrogance of that younger self, turned away from the window, and sat down before the Countess once more. An act of justification, if nothing else.
    These days, instead of toiling over his own canvases, he bent over the work of others. Not that he was bitter, for he was, quite literally, having a hand in the work of the great innovators. The Turners, the Reynoldses, the Laverys: all were revivified under his expert hand. One week in the Barbizon, the next in the Rococo, Lorcan moved between schools and periods and styles with the ease of a quick-change artist. It was fulfilling—and lucrative—work.
    He considered the image on the canvas once again, flexed the fingers of his right hand several times, and took a deep breath. Sufficiently calmed to continue, he laid a speck of cadmium on a soupçon of white and blended the minute quantities to the required hue before taking the brush to the canvas again.
    The Countess was a plain woman whom Reynolds had flattered as far as he dared, his brush more forgiving than a camera lens could ever be. There was little the great painter could have done about that nose, though: much too long. Each time Lorcan contemplated it, the perfectionist in him wanted to shorten it, to make her perfect.
    That was his problem and he knew it: the quest for perfection, that unattainable moving target. But the chase brought excellence, and that realization was his prize.
    Thump! Thump! Thump! His reverie was broken by a boisterous knocking on the door.
    The insufferable Stanley from Fossils, no doubt.
    “Are ye not finished with that oul’ doll’s hooters yet?” Stanley shouted, peering through the glass door-panel and trying the handle.
    Lorcan did not flinch. Stanley was another good reason for keeping his door locked.
    “I’m goin’ for a drink. Wanna come?”
    “No, I’ve no time. Away—back to your old crustaceans.”
    “Och, away with you . Ye’re too involved with that woman. She’s only been dead two hundred years.”
    “And your fossils have been dead fifty million years. See you tomorrow, Stanley.”
    “Ye can have more fun with a pair of the real ones, ye know…down the Empire.”
    “ Bye , Stanley.”
    “Never know who ye’d meet…”
    “Good bye , Stanley.”
    “Ah, right. Suit yerself. See ye the marra. But if ye change yer mind, ye know where I’ll be.”
    “I won’t change my mind!” He heard Stanley’s footsteps retreating down the corridor, then hurrying back again.
    For heaven’s sake, what now?
    “Hi, I forgot. Catherine gave me a note for ye. Said somebody left it in for ye at reception.”
    Lorcan tensed.