Лондон, весна 1817 года
9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡJYNIFL4zDj
Королевская академия искусств встретила Бенедикта Бриджертона ароматом льняного масла, скипидара и едва скрываемым триумфом амбиций других людей. Мраморные коридоры оставались прохладными даже в этот апрельский полдень, когда воск уже плавился на подоконниках особняков Мейфэра, а дамы в парках расправляли кружевные зонтики от солнца.
Бенедикт шел по галерее, сжимая в руках портфель и пытаясь успокоить дрожь в пальцах. Нелепо. Абсурдно. Ему было двадцать четыре года, он был вторым сыном виконта Бриджертона, выросшим в коридорах одного из самых влиятельных домов Англии. Ему нечего было бояться.
Но он им был.
Потому что это было важно. Важнее балов, важнее светских обязательств, важнее ожиданий матери увидеть его женатым к концу сезона. Живопись была единственным, что позволяло ему быть самим собой. Не вторым сыном. Не тенью старшего брата. Не еще одним Бриджертоном в бесконечной череде семейных портретов.
Здесь, перед холстом, он был просто Бенедиктом.
«Мистер Бриджертон?» — спросил смотритель Академии, сморщенный старик с лицом, похожим на выцветший пергамент. — «Комитет готов вас принять».
Комната оказалась меньше, чем представлял себе Бенедикт. За длинным столом из темного дуба сидели всего трое мужчин, погрязшие в эскизах, альбомах и скомканных листах, исписанных заметками. Свет падал сверху сквозь стеклянный купол, превращая пыль в золотистую дымку.
Сэр Томас Лоуренс, президент Академии, даже не поднимая глаз, пролистывал какие-то бумаги. Слева от него сидел г-н Фузели, швейцарский художник, известный одновременно как безумец и гений, чьи картины пугали почтенных дам своими кошмарными видениями. Справа — г-н Тёрнер, ещё молодой, но уже прославившийся своими морскими пейзажами, где вода и небо переплетались в мистической буре света.
«Итак, мистер Бриджертон». Лоуренс наконец поднял взгляд от бумаг, его взгляд был холодным и оценивающим. Он скользнул по Бенедикту, словно по неудачному эскизу. «Полагаю, вы принесли нам что-то, заслуживающее нашего внимания?»
Бенедикт кивнул, не доверяя своему голосу, и начал убирать свои работы. Пейзаж Обри-холла, залитый утренним светом. Портрет Дафны, его младшей сестры, в белом платье, с почти настоящей улыбкой. Натюрморт из книг, свечей и увядших роз на подоконнике его спальни.
Тишина затянулась. Тернер взял портрет, поднёс его к свету, прищурился. Фузели постукивал пальцами по столу, изучая пейзаж с выражением лица человека, которому предложили вчерашний хлеб.
«Технически безупречно», — наконец произнес Лоуренс. В его голосе не было ни капли одобрения. «Вы ведь учились у мистера Грэнвилла, не так ли?»
«Да, сэр».
"It shows." Lawrence leaned back in his chair, folding his arms across his chest. "Granville is an excellent craftsman. He taught you to see light, to understand composition, to handle a brush. But tell me, Mr. Bridgerton..." He tapped a finger on Daphne's portrait. "What did you feel when you painted this?"
Benedict blinked.
"I... she's my sister. I wanted to capture her as she is. Her grace, her..."
"Her grace." Fuseli snorted, and the sound rolled through the room like a spit into holy water. "Young man, you've painted a doll. A beautiful, perfectly colored doll. Where is her soul? Where is the fire? Where is the fear, the pain, the joy, anything that makes a person alive?"
"Look at this landscape," Turner interjected, his voice softer but no less merciless. "The light is beautiful. The detail in the foliage is impressive. But what were you trying to say with this work? What did you see there, in that moment, besides the view itself?"
"I..." Benedict faltered. The words stuck in his throat, heavy and useless. He didn't know. God help him, he didn't know what to answer.
"You paint with your eyes, Mr. Bridgerton, not with your heart," Lawrence pronounced, and his tone carried a verdict. "Your works are illustrations, not art. They would decorate a drawing room, please your relatives. But they won't make a viewer stop. They won't make anyone feel."
"There is no passion in them," Fuseli added, almost with regret. "And without passion, it's just beautiful emptiness."
Silence crashed over Benedict like an avalanche. He stood staring at his works spread across the table like corpses. Technically flawless. Devoid of life.
"The Academy cannot accept you this year," Lawrence concluded. "Perhaps you should consider, Mr. Bridgerton, whether painting truly is your calling. Or whether it's simply a pleasant pastime for a gentleman of good education."
Benedict didn't remember gathering his work. Didn't remember leaving the room, walking down the corridor, descending the marble staircase. The sun struck his eyes as he emerged onto Piccadilly, amid the rumble of carriages and the cries of street vendors.
A pleasant pastime.
Beautiful emptiness.
He walked without seeing where he was going, and only at Covent Garden did he stop, leaning against the theatre wall. The portfolio slipped from his hands, falling to the cobblestones. Benedict covered his face with his palms and tried to breathe through the rage, the shame, and something else. An emptiness where certainty used to be.
They were right. God help him, they were right.
***
The house on Grosvenor Square greeted him with its usual chaos. Gregory and Hyacinth were racing through the entrance hall, playing some game of their own that would inevitably end with a broken vase. Eloise sat in the library, buried in a book, her lips moving as she silently rehearsed some cutting remark she was saving for the next visitor.
"Benedict!" Violet Bridgerton appeared on the staircase, radiant in her lavender gown, with a smile that was always too perceptive. "How did it go? The Academy was delighted, weren't they? I just knew your work would..."
"They didn't accept me," he cut her off, and his voice came out flatter than he expected. Colorless. Without passion. "They said I should think about it."
His mother's smile wilted.
"Benedict..."
"It's fine." He raised a hand, stopping her. "Really. I just need to be alone."
He climbed to his room, locked the door, and sank onto the edge of his bed. The portfolio was still in his hands. Benedict opened it, pulled out Daphne's portrait. The graceful oval of her face. The soft smile. The flawless play of light on the silk of her dress.
A doll.
He tore the canvas in half.
Then he took the landscape. Tore that too. And the still life. Methodically, without anger, simply because they deserved it. Beautiful emptiness.
When he finished, a pile of scraps lay on the floor, and paint stains remained on his hands, ground beneath his nails.
***
For two days, he didn't leave his room. He missed the dinner at the Featheringtons that Violet had counted on dragging him to by force. He ignored Colin's invitation to go to the club. Eloise knocked on his door twice, demanding to be let in, but Benedict pretended to be asleep.
On the third day, he woke with a decision.
If the Academy thought his work lacked life, he would paint in solitude. He would find a place where no one would watch, judge, or pass sentence. Where he could make mistakes, break things, ruin canvases, and perhaps find what Fuseli had called passion.
Henry Granville helped him with a studio.
"Bloomsbury," he said when they met at his own studio the next day. "An old building, used to be a bookshop. The owner died, the heirs don't know what to do with it. For a few guineas a month, it's yours." Granville studied Benedict with a careful look. "Are you certain? Working in isolation isn't the same as..."
"I'm certain."
Granville nodded.
"Then take this." He held out a key, heavy and old, smelling of rust. "And Benedict? Don't listen to them. Lawrence is a great artist but a terrible teacher. Passion can't be summoned on command. It comes when you find something worth burning for."
The studio was exactly as Benedict had imagined: dusty, abandoned, reeking of old paper and damp. A narrow room on the second floor, with an enormous north-facing window. The perfect light for a painter. The floor was littered with scraps of newspaper; broken furniture was piled in the corner.
Benedict spent the whole day setting it to rights. He washed the window, hauled out the rubbish, set up the easel he'd bought on Tottenham Court Road. By evening, the studio smelled of turpentine and fresh paint, and three candles burned on the windowsill, casting long shadows across the walls.
He stretched a canvas, picked up a brush. Froze.
What to paint? What to feel?
The brush hovered in the air. One minute. Two. Five.
Nothing.
Benedict lowered his hand, staring at the empty canvas. The white surface stared back, mocking and indifferent.
Beautiful emptiness.
***
Two weeks gave way to a third. Benedict came to the studio every night, after the household was asleep. He slipped out through the back door, hired a cab at the corner of the square. He returned at dawn, when the sky over London turned from black to grey and the street lamps flickered out one by one.
He tried. God, how he tried.
He painted landscapes from memory. Portraits of imaginary faces. Abstractions of light and shadow. But every time he stepped back from the canvas, he saw the same thing: lifeless technique. Correct brushstrokes. Beautiful emptiness.
He started drinking. Cheap wine from the tavern on the corner, bitter and sour. Perhaps alcohol would wake something. Perhaps he was simply thinking too much.
But the wine only gave him headaches and blurred lines on the canvas.
One of those nights, long past midnight, the candles guttering, wax pooling on the floor, he hurled his brush at the wall and slumped to the ground, his back against the easel.
"What's wrong with me?" he muttered into the emptiness. "Why can't I..."
The silence didn't answer.
Benedict closed his eyes, and in the darkness, Lawrence's face rose before him. Where is the passion, Mr. Bridgerton? Where is the fire?
He didn't know. He didn't know how to find it. He didn't know what he was supposed to feel, apart from this gnawing emptiness.
And in that moment, sitting on the dirty floor of an abandoned studio in Bloomsbury, surrounded by failed canvases and the wreckage of his own confidence, Benedict Bridgerton thought for the first time in his life: perhaps they were right. Perhaps this wasn't meant for him.
The candle burned out, and the studio plunged into darkness.
Outside the window, London slept on, indifferent to the small tragedies of a viscount's second son who was searching for passion in empty canvases and finding nothing but silence.
***
Henry Granville organized his evenings with the same precision other gentlemen brought to military campaigns. His house on Soho Square transformed on Tuesdays into something between an Enlightenment salon and a Babylonian temple. Poets smoked opium here, philosophers argued about Kant, and in the corner of the drawing room, someone was invariably playing compositions on the cello that no respectable concert hall would dare perform in public.
Benedict hadn't wanted to come. He had spent three weeks in voluntary confinement between the studio and the Bridgerton house, avoiding society like the plague. Violet was already hinting that she was worried. Eloise said he'd become boring. Colin wrote from Paris, asking whether his brother had contracted some melancholic fever.
But Granville was persistent.
"You're rotting alive," he said when he appeared at the studio a week ago and found Benedict staring at yet another ruined canvas. "Isolation is fine for monks and madmen. You're neither, yet. Come on Tuesday. There will be people you should meet."
"Henry, I don't..."
"This isn't a request, Benedict." Granville put a hand on his shoulder, and something serious flickered in his gaze, stripped of its usual playfulness. "You're looking for passion? It won't come to you within four walls. Passion is collision. A spark is struck by impact."
And so now Benedict stood in the entrance hall of Granville's house, removing his coat as a whirlwind of voices, laughter, tobacco, and perfume swirled around him. The drawing room was filled with people he partly knew, partly recognized by reputation.
Miss Granville, the host's sister, wearing a turban of Indian silk, was conversing with some bearded German about Hegel. By the fireplace, a young man in an unbuttoned waistcoat was reading French obscene poetry, judging by the listeners' snickers. In the corner, two men played chess with such concentration as if the fate of kingdoms depended on the outcome.
"Benedict!" Granville materialized beside him with a glass of red wine in each hand. "At last! I thought you'd run off. Here." He handed over one glass. "Drink. Tonight it's forbidden to be both sober and miserable."
Benedict smirked, accepting the wine. It was dry, almost bitter. Italian, he decided.
"Who are all these people?"
"Artists, writers, philosophers, a few lucky adventurers, and one countess who fled her husband and now writes pamphlets about women's freedom." Granville swept a hand across the room. "In other words, everyone who wouldn't be admitted to Almack's but who makes London interesting. Come, let me introduce you to..."
"Henry, your Byron is drunk again and pestering the violinist," Miss Granville interrupted, appearing from somewhere in the depths of the drawing room. "Do something before he challenges someone to a duel."
Granville sighed.
"That's not Byron, dear, that's Mr. Shelley, and he's simply very emotional. Benedict, forgive me, I'll be back in a moment. Look around, meet someone. Just not the countess. She'll convert you to her cause and your mother will kill me."
He vanished into the crowd, leaving Benedict alone with a glass of wine and the vague feeling that he didn't belong here. These people burned. They argued, laughed, created. They were alive in a way that made him feel like a ghost.
Benedict retreated to the bookshelves along the far wall, intending to wait out a decent interval before leaving, claiming a headache. He was examining the spines: Dante, Homer, some French treatise on the nature of beauty, when he heard a voice.
"'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,'" someone said nearby. "Though with Granville, it's more like: 'Abandon all propriety, ye who enter here.'"
Benedict turned.
A young man stood by the neighboring shelf, holding a worn volume of the *Divine Comedy*. He was tall, lean, with dark hair carelessly swept back and a face that would have been too sharp for classical beauty: high cheekbones, a pronounced jaw, a nose with a barely visible bump, as if once broken and improperly set. But his eyes... God, his eyes were grey-blue, the color of the sea on an overcast day, and they looked as though they saw right through you: mysterious, impenetrable, keeping secrets he had no intention of sharing.
He wore a plain dark coat and white shirt without adornment, nothing like what Granville's guests wore, who reveled in eccentricity. And yet there was something about him that commanded attention. A certain composure, a wariness, like a predator pretending to be tame.
"You're quoting Dante at a party," Benedict observed, sipping his wine to hide a sudden nervousness. "That's a bold way to start a conversation."
"Bold or desperate," the stranger replied with a faint smirk. "Depends on the company." He closed the book but didn't return it to the shelf, holding it like a talisman. "You look like someone who's uncomfortable here. Let me guess: a friend dragged you by force, promised 'interesting company,' and now you're counting the minutes until you can decently escape?"
Benedict blinked, struck by the accuracy of the observation.
"Is it that obvious?"
"You're standing by the bookshelf as if it were a shield. And you're holding your glass like a weapon." Grey-blue eyes slid over him, appraising but without judgment. "I recognize the escaped. I'm one of them myself."
"And yet here you are."
"Granville is persuasive. Besides, his library is better than most clubs." The stranger turned the book in his hands. "And here one can talk about Dante without being thought a pompous pedant."
"Do you often talk about Dante?"
"More often than about the weather or horse racing, which makes me a poor conversationalist for most gentlemen." He extended his hand. "Caspian Blackwood."
Benedict shook it, noting the cool fingers, the firm grip.
"Benedict Bridgerton."
Something flickered in Caspian's eyes. Recognition? Or surprise? But it vanished so quickly that Benedict might have blamed the candlelight.
"Bridgerton," Caspian repeated thoughtfully. "The same family Lady Whistledown writes about with such regularity?"
"Unfortunately, yes."
"You don't like the attention?"
"I don't like my life becoming the morning reading of bored matrons."
Caspian smirked, and the smile transformed his face, softening the sharp angles.
"Fair enough. Though, as I understand it, your family gives Lady Whistledown rich material. Elder brother married a beauty from India, sister became a duchess, younger brother wed Lady Whistledown herself... Hard to compete with such headlines."
"I don't try," Benedict replied, and bitterness leaked into his voice. "I'm just the second son. My job is to stay out of the way and not disgrace the name."
"Sounds dreadfully dull."
"It is."
Caspian tilted his head, studying him.
"But you're here. In Granville's house. Where dull people don't last." A pause. "What do you do, Mr. Bridgerton? Aside from avoiding social obligations?"
Benedict froze. The question caught him off guard: simple, direct, and therefore almost indecent. People asked about his family, his connections, his marriage prospects. But no one ever asked what he himself lived for.
"I paint," he answered at last, and the words came out like a confession. "I try to. Not very successfully."
"An artist." There was no mockery in Caspian's voice, only interest. "What do you paint?"
"Before, everything. Portraits, landscapes, still lifes." Benedict took a sip of wine, gazing into the glass. "Now... mostly empty canvases. A talent for creating emptiness."
Why am I telling this to a stranger? flickered somewhere at the edge of his mind. But something about this man, his directness, the way he looked without judgment, made honesty feel inevitable.
"Emptiness is underrated," Caspian remarked. "Dante began his journey in a dark wood, where the straight path was lost. Sometimes you need to get lost to find something real."
Benedict raised his eyes, meeting those strange grey-blue ones, which seemed to hold all the untold stories of the world.
"Are you a philosopher?"
"No. I simply read a great deal." Caspian turned to the shelf, running a finger along the spines. "When life doesn't give answers, you have to look for them in books."
"And did you find them?"
"I found better questions." He pulled out another volume: Plato's *Symposium*. "For instance: what makes art alive? Technique? Or something else?"
Benedict flinched as though struck. The same words. The same question that had haunted him since the Academy.
"Passion," he breathed. "I was told I lack passion."
"And you're trying to find it?"
"Trying. Without success."
Caspian looked at him with a long, measuring gaze.
"Perhaps you're looking in the wrong place."
"Where should I look?"
"Not in solitude." Caspian stepped closer, and Benedict caught a scent: old books, tobacco, and something subtler, perhaps rain on stone. "Passion is collision. Reflection. You can't light a fire in a vacuum. You need a spark. Flint striking flint."
Benedict's heart beat faster. He didn't know why. Perhaps the wine. Perhaps the stranger's nearness. Perhaps the way Caspian looked at him, not as the second son of a viscount, but as... someone worth seeing.
"Are you offering yourself as the flint?" Benedict asked, and his voice came out lower than he intended.
Caspian smirked.
"I'm offering a conversation. Perhaps a debate. Dante versus Caravaggio. Light versus darkness. Let's see if it strikes a spark."
"Here? Now?"
"Why wait?" Caspian nodded toward a sofa in the corner, away from the crowd. "Or are you in a hurry to return to your empty canvases?"
Benedict should have refused. Should have said he had to go, that his mother would worry, that it was unwise to sit in the corner of a stranger's house with a strange man who quoted Dante and looked as if he saw everything Benedict tried to hide.
But he didn't refuse.
"All right," he said. "Let's talk."
They sat on the sofa, screened from the main crowd of guests by the high back of an armchair and a potted palm. Caspian set Dante on the armrest, crossed his legs, and Benedict noticed that his boots were worn, scuffed, not what a gentleman of his circle would wear.
"Caravaggio," Caspian began without preamble, "painted darkness. Not as background, but as an actor. The darkness in his work isn't the absence of light. It's the presence of something else. Danger. Mystery. Sin."
"Have you seen his work?" Benedict asked, intrigued.
"In Rome. Three years ago." Something flickered in Caspian's grey-blue eyes, memory or regret. "I stood before The Calling of Saint Matthew for an hour. Maybe longer. Do you know that painting? A dark room, sinners at a table counting money. And suddenly, a beam of light, bursting in from nowhere. Christ stands in shadow, barely visible, pointing at Matthew. And Matthew looks up with an expression of disbelief: 'Me? You truly chose me?'"
Benedict listened, holding his breath.<br />
"And here's what's remarkable," Caspian continued, lowering his voice. "I looked at that painting and thought not about Matthew. I thought about myself. About moments when life pointed at me, and I didn't believe I was worthy." He turned to Benedict. "That's what makes art alive. Not skill. Not technique. But that the viewer looks at the canvas and sees his own soul. Recognizes himself in someone else's story."
Benedict sat captivated, forgetting the wine, the guests, the time. They talked about Caravaggio and Rembrandt, about how Renaissance artists used religion to paint the human, about the difference between beauty and truth.
Caspian spoke as if words pained him, yet he couldn't stop. Passionately, sharply, leaping from topic to topic, circling back, going deeper. He didn't just talk; he argued, provoked, made Benedict think, defend, attack.
He didn't notice when it happened. At some point, he simply caught himself smiling, not that polite society smile, but a real one, the kind that makes your cheeks ache. For the first time in weeks, he felt alive.
"You disagree," Caspian observed, tilting his head. "I can see it in your eyes."
"I just think beauty and truth don't have to be mutually exclusive."
"They don't. But beauty can be a lie. A cover. A way to avoid truth."
"And truth without beauty is just cruelty."
"Sometimes cruelty is needed," Caspian said quietly. "To awaken."
Their eyes met, and Benedict felt it again: an electric charge, a spark. Something unspoken hung in the air between them, heavy and dangerous.
"Benedict!" Granville's voice shattered the moment. "There you are! I thought you'd escaped through the window."
Caspian pulled back first, his face becoming unreadable again. Benedict blinked, returning to reality: the drawing room, the people, the smell of tobacco.
"I see you've met," Granville continued, looking between them with a satisfied smile. "Caspian is the best conversationalist in London, if you don't mind that he's cleverer than you."
"Henry flatters me," Caspian said dryly, rising. "I must go. Thank you for your hospitality."
"Already? The night's just beginning!"
"I have business in the morning." Caspian nodded to Granville, then turned to Benedict. "It was... interesting, Mr. Bridgerton."
"For me as well," Benedict replied, also rising. "Perhaps... perhaps we could continue sometime? The conversation, I mean."
Caspian paused, and for an instant, just an instant, something like hope flickered in his gaze. But it faded as quickly as it had appeared.
"Perhaps," he said evasively. "If fate sees fit."
And he was gone, dissolving into the crowd before Benedict could add another word.
«Интересный человек», — заметил Грэнвилл, наблюдая за удаляющейся спиной. «Однако загадочный. Никто толком не знает, кто он. Появляется, исчезает. Читает всё подряд. О себе почти ничего не говорит».
«Откуда вы его знаете?»
«Иногда он работает библиотекарем у графа Уортингтона. Каталогизирует книги, переводит латынь. Я встретил его там несколько месяцев назад, когда искал редкое издание Овидия. Он наизусть прочитал «Метаморфозы». Все до единой». Грэнвилл похлопал Бенедикта по плечу. «Похоже, он вам понравился».
«Он... интересный собеседник».
«Ага. Как интересно, что ты на целый час забыл о своих пустых холстах. Вот это прогресс, мой друг».
Бенедикт не ответил, его взгляд был прикован к двери, через которую вышел Каспиан. Его голос все еще эхом звучал в голове Бенедикта, слова о тьме Караваджо, об узнавании, об искре.
Кремень, удар по кремню.
И впервые за несколько недель Бенедикту захотелось вернуться в студию. Не для того, чтобы смотреть на пустой холст, а чтобы попытаться запечатлеть то, что он чувствовал сегодня вечером. Это жжение под кожей. Эта внезапная, необъяснимая жажда большего.
Он не знал, что это было. Но, возможно, это была страсть.
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