The Earl paused. "He died laughing in Mona Blessey’s arms.”
Mona turned her back on the Earl. She covered her face with her hands and breathed.
"Hounded by reporters and vilified in the papers, Mona Blessey left for America the very next week. She had the bed my grandfather died in shipped along with her things. I thought that sounded awfully sentimental for a teenage prostitute. I should have known she was using the bed to smuggle the artwork out of the country. Somehow that bed ended up in your possession.”
"My mother bought it nearly thirty years ago at an estate sale. She told me that’s where my name came from—Mona was the name of the woman who’d owned the bed. Mother said she’d been a courtesan in her youth, and I didn’t believe it. Mother could stretch the truth every now and then. But in this case she was right, wasn’t she?”
"She was,” the Earl said. "And now you know the story of the painting. It belongs to my family. I’ll have to ask you to return it.”
"No,” she said, facing him.
"No? No isn’t an option. It’s my family’s painting.”
"It’s my painting. Malcolm was the rightful owner and gave it to Mona Blessey. Mona put it in her bedpost for safe-keeping. My mother bought the bed. I was conceived in the bed your grandfather died in. The bed is legally mine. The painting was in the bed and therefore the painting is mine and always will be. No court of law in America or the United Kingdom would disagree. And you know it,” she said. "Otherwise you wouldn’t have asked me how much I was willing to sell it for.”
"I was hoping to avoid a legal battle.”
"I’ll allow a professional to make a copy of the painting, if you like. But the painting is mine.”
"He’s my grandfather, not yours. He’s nothing to you.”
"He’s not nothing to me, not by any stretch of the imagination. You’ve never met him.”
"Neither have you.”
"I know him,” she said. She walked to the painting of Malcolm and stood before it, staring into his gleaming dark eyes. He’d told her of a deathbed promise and that she was his way of fulfilling it. How could she have known it was his own deathbed promise he spoke of? Her mother had named her after Mona Blessey, the whore he’d loved. She’d been conceived in that bed, had slept in it all her life. She’d lost her virginity in that bed and had taken Ryan’s there years later. All the while Malcolm’s spirit or soul or whatever it was that survived his death, was tied to that bed or perhaps tied to the painting in the bed. When the time came when she was at her most desperate, her most vulnerable, her most willing to sell herself to save The Red, Malcolm came to her in the flesh even though he’d been dead for decades. He’d come to her in the flesh because he’d sold his soul to the devil to do it. And the devil had smirked, not smiled, because the devil does not smile.
"Malcolm…” she breathed.
The Earl came to stand behind her. She felt uncomfortably aware of his body so close to hers, the subtle heat of him, his looming height, the power of him barely restrained by a suit and good breeding.
"You know him,” he said. "You mean that, don’t you?”
"I do.”
"Dreams?”
She turned and faced him. "Something like that.”
He sighed, nodded. "I have them too. Sometimes I think I’m losing my mind, they’re so vivid, so powerful.”
"Malcolm comes to you in your dreams?”
"Once a year. At most twice a year. We talk. He…guides me, I suppose you could say. He says I take after him. I shouldn’t take that as a compliment but I do. Two years ago I almost married someone, and I had a dream that the old Earl told me not to do it. We broke up and later I found she had only pretended to be in love with me. She wanted the title, not me. He saved me from a bad marriage—all from within a dream.”
Mona remembered something Malcolm had told her, that he was fond only of his youngest offspring, the one who took after him. That had to be the Earl. Spencer Arthur Malcolm Fitzroy, the youngest child in his bloodline.
"Another time…” The Earl’s voice trailed off. "I can’t remember much of the dream. But there was a girl in it with hair as red as fire and apples. Like yours.”
So that was why he seemed so familiar. The Earl of Godwick—this arrogant man—was her dream lover, the man with the midnight eyes. He looked different without the beard, but it was him. Right here before her in the flesh, with blue eyes so dark and cold that she shivered as if submerged in the deepest coldest ocean.
"They’re only dreams,” he said, and it sounded as if he were telling that to himself, that he needed to believe they were only dreams when he knew otherwise.
"Not only,” Mona said. "Not only dreams.”
"Don’t say such things,” he snapped.
"If you insist.” She could have told him more. She could have recounted their "luncheon on the grass” together; she could have told him about her other nights with Malcolm, and the all too real stains on the sheets every morning after. But no. A serious, stern man like the Earl would probably go mad to know that life and death weren’t as absolute as they seemed.
"I have to have the painting,” he said. "I simply have to have it. There is a blank space on the wall that’s been waiting since 1938 for my grandfather to come home. I won’t leave here without him.”
"You’ll have to. The painting is mine. He wanted me to have it.”
"You say these dreams are more than dreams? Tell me then why in my last dream of him, he made me promise that I would do anything to bring it home? Anything.”
"I’m afraid Malcolm is playing one last little trick on us.” She sympathized with the Earl, but Malcolm had told her to keep the painting, no matter what.
"Any price.”
"I won’t sell it,” she said. "It’s mine. It goes where I go and that’s the end of it. I’m sorry, but my decision is final. If you want to sue me for the painting, you may. I’ll win, but if you feel you must, you must.”
"You have no idea how much money I could pay you for that painting.”
"This has nothing to do with money. I have a Picasso in my possession that’s been appraised for thirteen million dollars. And now that you’ve given me impeccable provenance, it will fetch even more.”
"I could give you more than thirteen million dollars for my grandfather’s painting.”
"I told you, it’s not about the money. No amount of money in the world would buy that painting from me. It’s not for sale. As we say in this country, sir, no means no.”
The Earl seemed to ponder that for a good long time. Mona meant every word. Had he pulled out his wallet and written her a check for one hundred billion dollars she would have torn it into pieces and scattered it on the floor like confetti.
"It goes where you go,” the Earl said.
"As I said, I won’t part with the painting as long as I live. And I plan on living a good long life.”
"I see.” He put his hand on his hip again, his other hand on his chin. He stared at Malcolm and Malcolm returned the gaze. "There’s a story they tell of him in the family, one we have never made public. Mona Blessey wasn’t a prostitute. She was the respectable daughter of the family steward—respectable until my grandfather took an interest in her, that was. One night her father lost everything at the card tables, ruining the family and Mona’s prospects for marriage. My grandfather offered to make her his mistress. She warned him her father would kill him if they were caught together. My grandfather kidnapped her anyway and spirited her off to Scotland.”
"Why do I think she didn’t put up much of a fight?”
"Because you know my grandfather. His ‘victim’ had her bags packed the night he stole her out of her bed. He did whatever he wanted and cared nothing for what anyone thought of him. He died laughing in his lover’s bed. He took what he wanted and asked no man’s permission. What a way to live. A better way to die. Wouldn’t you agree?”