Rapt, sweet—there was a word for this sort of regard, just as there was a color for every object to be rendered on canvas. Rothhaven’s gaze was respectful, also intimate. His eyes conveyed…She searched her mind for the term that applied, a sort of rosy, soft, deep word. A special word not often used out loud.

“So what if you are acting like a child?” he said. “You were never allowed to be a child, or not allowed to be enough of a child. I at least had ten years of genuine childhood, and they stood me in very good stead.”

Constance brushed plum blossoms from her sleeves. “Childishness stood you in good stead? In that place?”

He approached, a man who always moved quietly, who even thought quietly. How on earth should she paint him?

“Not childishness, though I indulged in much of that, particularly at first. Childlike-ness, perhaps. My saving grace became my mind, which is ironic when an illness of the mind landed me there in the first place.”

“Explain yourself.” The green of his eyes alone would take much consideration, much experimentation, though mixing pigments was not an enjoyable aspect of Constance’s art. Some of the colors were toxic, others volatile, and yet, from those dangerous concoctions could come great beauty.

“A child is curious,” Rothhaven replied, “to the point of folly sometimes. Because I was curious about Pierre’s accent, I learned French, albeit from a footman. I did not understand that it was a farmer’s version of the language, but I can read the proper kind now because I was curious then. I was curious about the stars—they were visible to me even in a walled garden, even through a locked window. I thus learned astronomy and how to navigate by the heavens. If and when I escaped that place, I would need that skill.”

His room had been filled with books, maps, and strange gadgets, becoming a sort of lending library for the other residents, not that anybody had let Soames know about that.

“You thought of escape?”

He came a few steps closer. “For about the first five years. I filled my head with fantasies. Perhaps Papa did not know that John Coachman had left me at the madhouse instead of at school. Papa would come fetch me when he realized the error. Papa had died and Mama was searching for me. I wrote letter after letter, which Soames dutifully sealed and addressed for me. He put them in the boot boy’s sack, and when my back was turned, took them out and tossed the lot of them into the fire—after he’d read them.”

Rothhaven regarded the rambling old pile at the end of the weedy drive. “I gave up on Nathaniel last, and that took more years.”

“How did you not go mad?”

He closed the distance between them, gazing down at her as if she were the subject to be painted.