Elizabeth Kidd by My Lady Mischief Read Free Book Online Page A

shocked—but vastly entertained—by the figures’ lack of decency, to young ladies who contrive to find their beaux’ features in the faces.”
    Antonia giggled. “Do they then speculate on what other features might resemble those of their swains?”
    “Lady Kedrington!” Mr. Campbell exclaimed, pretending shock. “How unworthy of you!”
    “Oh, Duncan will tell you I have a wayward imagination,” she said, laughing. “But no—perhaps you had better not ask him. He will think I am trying to corrupt you.”
    “Please feel free to try,” he urged her, and Antonia was pleased to see that the smile in Mr. Campbell’s eyes was freer now, and the lines around them had softened just a touch. He could not be more than thirty, she thought, but old enough to believe he might never make any mark with his life—perhaps even to wonder if he should have left it in Spain.
    They walked down the long side of the building, where the remains of the famed East Pediment figures were arranged in all the glory of their original positioning on the Parthenon. Mr. Campbell waved his arm grandly at the display, but then spoiled the effect by saying that there were more pieces in another shed attached to the larger one, including some dozen sculptures and slightly more metopes, which he explained were marble squares which formerly separated the parts of a frieze.
    As they walked, Mr. Campbell kept up his learned commentary, which Antonia reflected she would have been grateful for on the occasion of her first look at the sculptures, when they all looked so much alike that she was unable to appreciate their variety. Mr. Campbell also offered his personal opinions of the various pieces, and Antonia was most interested in those, for he had apparently studied them in detail and offered a perspective she had not considered previously.
    “Notice, for example the naturalness of the figure’s position here,” he pointed out at one point. “The muscles of the shoulder work just as they do when a man puts his arm to work in that fashion. You may know that a boxer was brought in once to compare his anatomy to those depicted here, but while the sculptures proved anatomically accurate, they were at the same time strangely more graceful than nature. That, I believe, is what defines them as art.”
    Kedrington rejoined them at that point and listened with interest, interrupting only with occasional questions, while Carey and Elena drifted off toward the other side of the room, abandoning their interest in ancient art for absorption in each other. After a short time, however, an exclamation from Elena attracted Antonia’s notice, and she turned to see that another man had entered the building, apparently by a side door. Elena walked swiftly toward him and kissed his cheek; Carey, coming up behind her, bowed politely and shook the man’s hand.
    “Who is that?” she whispered to Kedrington, who responded, “Her guardian, one would assume.”
    This proved to be the case, as Elena immediately brought Arthur Melville over to them to be introduced. He was a tall, severely handsome man with graying hair and an air of being not altogether at home in his clothes, which were nonetheless complete to a shade, as Carey would have put it. His posture and manners were overly formal, and Antonia thought he would be difficult to put at his ease, if indeed he ever was at ease in company. A man more different from her last new acquaintance, the personable Mr. Campbell, she could not imagine.
    “I am pleased to meet you, sir,” she said nonetheless, shaking his hand. “We have become quite fond of Elena already, and it is more than time that we met the rest of her family.”
    “Her family…? Of course, you speak figuratively,” Mr. Melville replied, smiling indulgently at his ward and confirming Antonia in her impression that Mr. Melville was not a kindred spirit. “I do see myself as in some sort an uncle to Elena—a kindly one, I trust. But I wanted to