Becoming Miss Lee

Chapter 19 - The Reasons for Sighs

"I am surprised that Major Tallmadge saw fit to allow you to come within miles of me, let alone into my tent." The musing tone in André's voice made me raise my eyes from the sketchbook he had proffered up to me rather proudly and I quickly dropped my eyes back to the dazzling rough lines that made up the landscape he had drawn.

"Major Tallmadge does not know that I am here." If he had, I probably would have been shoved in the back of a cart bound for Virginia come hell or high water. I slid the sketchbook back to him with a smile, not feeling the courage to continue on looking at his drawings.

He pulled it back to him with the tips of his fingers and picked up his pencil and eyed me with a sly smile, "Then Colonel Hamilton?" I knew that I had smiled back and looked away from him as he chuckled and began rapidly sketching something in the book. "Why is it that you have such trouble hiding things from me now, Miss Fish- Lee, sorry- Miss Lee?"

"Perhaps I have a soft spot for dashing spies?" I inquired as I sat back in the chair and watched the rapidly sketched lines become the outlines of a face and beginnings of eyes.

André chuckled again and glanced up at me without a single word. It did not take me long to realize that he was sketching me and I shifted nervously in my seat, glancing down at the picture occasionally, the lines looking as foreign to me as if the face was not my own being drawn. He made me seem to smooth, too perfectly soft, and he must have seen the look of disconcertion on my face because he stopped and looked up at me for a moment until my mind registered that he had stopped. "I am not flattering your image, Miss Lee. Do not even believe for a moment that I would do that." Without another word, he resumed his work. I realized after a beat that he was sketching me from the night that we first met. I remembered my hair, relatively unadorned save for some feathers, and that dress. The room had smelled of candles and wine and for a long while it had just been the two of us... "I initially thought that I might make a game of you, Miss Lee, to be perfectly frank." I started at the sound of his voice that was almost as low as the scratching of his pencil on the paper.

"Did you, now?" He rarely spoke of when we first met. It seemed as though his fondest memories were of the two of us after he decided that I was not to be some plaything.

He nodded and furrowed his brow. "Yes, yes, I did. Pretty young girls always flocked about me like cats to a milk pail. I was under the impression that you were going to be the same. Pretty, young, clinging to Clinton like any of those girls did to me, yet when I approached you, you seemed far more interested in getting back to him then you ever did with me. You scoffed at my seduction, you knew the game, and you wounded my pride." He said that last part with a pitiful sigh and I smiled in spite of myself. "Knowing that you come from the land where officers boast of finding sophistication and all of the comforts of England, I am not at all surprised, but then... God, was I ever perplexed. I could not fathom what you saw in Clinton over me, frankly. Thus, I surrendered to your simple charm and gave up on trying to make a game out of you." He kept flicking his eyes up as he spoke, his pencil never leaving the paper for an instant. "You infuriated me for a time with that mask of yours. I only saw it falter when you would daydream, gazing off into the distance like your mind travelled away to times that left you alone, and your eyes would be so sad. Any other time, reading you was like attempting to read some foreign tongue unknown to all civilized men." He stopped and blew the stray specks from the paper and turned it towards me with a sad smile.

I slid the paper towards me and stared down at the colorless picture before me. With the way my hair was styled and the gentle way my head was turned ever so slightly, it looked as though I had been posing. I looked beautiful. All of my life I had looked upon myself in mirrors before parties and scoffed at myself, but here, immortalized upon paper, I thought, for the first time in my life, that I was beautiful. I saw for the first time the remarked upon shape of my nose from a stranger's perspective, the roundness of my face, arms and bust, the plumpness of my lips, and gentle curls in my hair that I so despised when they would be combed and pulled up in the mornings. Little things I had not noticed came to my attention, little things that André noted and saw fit to add, and he made me so lovely. After eleven long years of being told that I was an ugly, useless girl before being whisked away to Virginia, after hearing half-heard whispers of my features behind my back, I was shown myself from someone else's eyes for the first time. I let my fingers trace the small line of my jaw and trail down the slope of my neck and over the messy ruffles of the fabric of my dress upon the paper. Words half-formed caught in my throat and I met André's eyes wordlessly, helplessly, only mustering a meek, "Thank you, Major." when it was all said and done. He smiled at me again and watched my face carefully.