Regency Pleasures and Sins Part 1. Louise Allen

       February 1816

      Miss Talitha Grey shivered delicately and risked a glance downwards. A single length of sheer white linen draped across her shoulder and fell to the floor at front and back: beneath it her naked skin had a faintly blue tinge. Tallie strongly suspected that it was marred by goose bumps.

      With a resigned sigh she flexed her fingers on the gilded bow in her left hand and fixed her gaze once again on the screen of moth-eaten blue brocade that was doing duty for the skies of Classical Greece. Perhaps if she thought hard enough about it she could imagine that she was bathed in the heat of that ancient sun, her skin caressed by the lightest of warm zephyrs and not by the whistling draughts that entered the attic studio by every door and ill-fitting window frame.

      Tallie exerted her vivid imagination and summoned up the distant sound of shepherds’ pan pipes floating over olive groves to drown out the noise of arguing carters from Panton Square far below. She was concentrating on conjuring up the scent of wood smoke and pine woods to counteract the distressing smells of poor drainage and coal fires when a voice behind her said peevishly, ‘Miss Grey! You have moved!’

      Taking care to hold her pose and not turn her head Tallie said, ‘I assure you I have not, Mr Harland.’

      ‘Something has changed,’ the speaker asserted. Tallie could hear the creak of the wooden platform on which Mr Frederick Harland had perched himself to reach the top of the vast canvas. On it he was depicting an epic scene of ancient Greece with the figure of the goddess Diana in the foreground, her back turned to the onlooker, her gaze sweeping the wooded hillsides and distant temples until it reached the wine-dark Aegean sea.

      There was more creaking, the muttering that was the normal counterpart to Mr Harland’s mental processes and then the floorboards protested as he walked towards her. ‘Your skin colour has changed,’ he announced with a faint air of accusation.

      ‘I am cold,’ Tallie responded placatingly without turning her head. Frederick Harland, she had discovered, took no more and no less interest in her naked form than he did in the colour, form and texture of a bowl of fruit, an antique urn or a length of drapery. When in the grip of his muse he was vague, inconsiderate and sometimes testy, but he was also kindly, paid her very well and was reassuringly safe to be alone with—whatever her state of undress.

      ‘Cold? Has the fire gone out?’

      ‘I believe it has not been lit today, Mr Harland.’ Tallie wished she had thought to insist on a taper being set to the fire before they had started

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