26th June 1891 — Echelon Home, Somewhere in England

Bellamy had been nearly bouncing on his feet all morning as he waited for Alistair Darrow to show up. For some reason, he'd suspected that perhaps he wouldn't — hence sending the second letter in the first place, where he'd made concessions towards English sensibilities (which he might have forgotten about entirely if Hermia Bonaccord hadn't mentioned them at that party last month). The fact that he'd agreed so readily, and that he was available so soon, was such a pleasant surprise that Bellamy had entirely forgotten to ask what time he was coming. He thought afternoon was more likely, but that was probably just because it had been afternoon on both of the other occasions when they'd met. He'd gotten his studio arranged just the way he wanted it in the morning, just in case, then spent the day lazing around the house. He wandered through the garden and practiced obscure spells he'd probably never need to use, but which were rather visually appealing, then he'd gone swimming in the lake behind the house, then he'd eaten lunch in about four different parts between distractions from his siblings and his father.

He had greatly over-estimated his ability to stay still in one place for an entire day, even if the Echelon house was generally more full of amusements than the rest of England was, and by the time lunch was over he was convinced he was dying of boredom. He wasn't going to leave and risk missing Alistair Darrow, though, so instead he lay languishing on a sofa in the room with the fireplace until finally it lit up green. He was on his feet and halfway across the room before the flames had even died down, reaching for the man's hand.

"Oh good, you're here. I was going crazy, honestly, because there's nothing left to work on with the portrait except the things I need you for. Come on, then," he said, tugging him in the direction of the studio. "But don't look at it when we go in. It's not finished yet. And I don't want you to see what a mess I've made of your nose, honestly. It's embarrassing."

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Alistair Darrow Roberto Devine

  

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Alistair had not known how to respond to Mister Echelons last message to him. He was beginning to think that he just might end up developing a complex about his appearance. Alistair really did think he looked quite ordinary though he would allow that his curls were a bit unique. Not so much though since they were a familial sort of trait. He wondered what Mister Echelon would think of his cousin Alfreds hair.

He didn't typically arrange to meet people so it had slipped his mind to declare a time of when he could be expected. It was a little after lunch when he had made his way to the fireplace. Alistair arrived at the Echelon home, blushing as his hand was grabbed. He didn't typically have people grabbing at his hands, not even within his family.

"I don't think I am ready to see myself immortalized on canvas anyway," Alistair assured softly when the man asked that he not look at the painting. He was a little awestruck by the house. A redheaded man winked at him before going into one of the rooms up ahead. "Was that a monkey?" He found himself asking. Surely, that had not been what he had just seen perched on the redheads shoulder?

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Bellamy wasn't paying much attention to their surroundings as he dragged Alistair Darrow along (why would he? he lived here), so he hadn't actually noticed Val or William Shakespeare. "Oh, probably," he said with a shrug. "We've got a leopard, too. But he doesn't get to wander around the house," he explained casually. They had reached the door of his studio and he went in, first bringing his guest to the proper place and gesturing for him to sit. The studio wasn't a large room, but it was spacious for Bellamy's purposes, and the small raised dais on which he'd placed a chair for Alistair Darrow to sit was located more or less in the center of the room. One wall was composed of floor to ceiling windows in dozens of small panes, and it was near the corner of this wall that he'd set up his easel and canvas, so that the natural light would illuminate both his painting and his subject. They wouldn't get the sunlight at the same angle as it had been in Padmore Park in this studio, but it would be more than sufficient to finish what little was left to do.

"We were going to start a proper menagerie, but apparently some of the things we wanted aren't legal to import to Britain, and it's frightfully hard to get exotic fruit here in the winter, so it's difficult to feed them what they're used to," he explained as he went to take his place behind the easel. "So we gave up on it and we got rid of a few of the animals we'd started with, but the leopard's still here. Shakespeare's a little different, though. He wasn't ever part of the menagerie."

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A leopard? At the mention of the large cat, Alistair inched a little closer to Mister Echelon. Did leopards eat people? He didn't think his family would be very pleased if he ended up being eaten by a leopard. Not even Alfred had gotten eaten by a leopard and he had been places that had several more dangerous animals.

He sat where Mister Echelon indicated, keeping an eye out for the leopard. Not that he knew what he would do even if it did appear. It seemed to be in the center of the room but he was too preoccupied with the idea of wild cat roaming about that he didn't think much of it for once.

Wow. Were these the sorts of problems rich people had? He was kind of awed. "Shakespeare is the monkey?" He deduced. What kind of name was that for a monkey?

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"He's my brother's monkey," Bellamy said in response, as though this was an answer. In fairness, if Bellamy had a pet monkey he probably wouldn't have named him William Shakespeare. He didn't know what he would have named a monkey (and he had no particular desire to own a monkey, anyway), but probably not Shakespeare. Maybe Oscar Wilde or Dorian Grey, he thought, but he immediately discarded the idea. For one thing, he hadn't known anything about Oscar Wilde's work before he'd come back to England, so it wasn't as though he could have named a monkey after him two years earlier (assuming he obtained a monkey at the same time Val had). Secondly, it seemed mildly irreverent to use the names of people — er, one person and one fictional character — he actually liked and respected to refer to a monkey. Not that he didn't like William Shakespeare, but — he was a monkey. And this train of thought was getting away from him.

"Hold your head a little higher," Bellamy instructed as he slid in behind the canvas. "The light's better that way."

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"Ah," Alistair said, feeling rather awkward. Then again, when didn't he? Alistair wasn't a stranger to going to the homes of friends but Bellamy Echelon wasn't exactly someone he considered a friend. Not yet, anyway. He wasn't sure what he considered him. One thing was for sure, Alistair had never met anyone quite like the other man.

He held his head a little higher, his eyes darting around the room briefly as he took in his surroundings before landing back on the artist. He didn't think he had ever been in such a luxurious house.

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Bellamy grunted in approval as Alistair raised his head to the right height, the set about his work as quickly as he could. He recalled from their previously interactions in the park that the other young man could get fidgety as time went on (and had assumed this was an immutable character trait of Mr. Darrow and not a function of his being caught off guard in a public park). Bell was almost done with the portrait, anyway. It would be no lengthy work to fix the nose, now that he had a model to look at.

It occurred to him for the first time that perhaps it was mildly inconvenient to ask the other man over for a mere ten minutes of posing. After painting him in the park, Bellamy had treated him to dinner — ought he to offer the same here? He furrowed his brow in Darrow's direction, as though he had presented Bell with a puzzle, though he hadn't said a word. "What do you want to do after this?" he asked after a moment.

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Alistair did his best to keep at the position the man had grunted in approval about. It was mildly more comfortable to be painted in the privacy of the artists home. He was not comfortable being in such a extravagant home but at least there weren't other people gaping at them like there had been in the park.

Do after this? Alistair was not sure how to answer. What he wanted to do was go home but he had a feeling that wasn't the sort of thing that Mister Echelon meant. "Perhaps you could give me a tour of the house and have a light supper before I heard home?" Mostly because he was genuinely curious about the house. But then he remembered the leopard. "The leopard doesn't eat... people, does it?"

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Bellamy had no idea why anyone would want a tour of the house, since to him it had long since lost the novelty of a new place and he found it incredibly boring. It was a simple enough request, though, so there was no reason to deny it. Alistair Darrow was an odd fellow, Bell reflected. He seemed preoccupied with strange things, like whether or not people were staring at him in a park, and he was fixating on things Bell thought were rather dull. Like the leopard. It was really little more than an overgrown housecat in Bellamy's opinion, and here the other man was asking about it eating people, as though the Echelons would have wanted to keep it in the house if it did.

"He hasn't yet," Bell said with a shrug, as he continued to paint. "I think you're thinking of tigers. Tigers are much bigger, and they get into tussles with little rural villages in Asian all the time, from what I understand. I don't think a leopard even could eat a person. But I don't know, I haven't looked into it," he continued in an offhand air. "But anyway, just don't climb into his cage and I don't think it'll be much of a problem."

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Yet. That was a statistic that Alistair did not want changed. Especially if it was changed because he was the eaten human. He rather liked being alive, he had grown attached to the concept in his nineteen years of life.

"Oh, perhaps," Alistair said despite thinking that they were pretty much the same thing: big, dangerous wild cats that rich people seemed to want to have as pets. "What? You don't think a human in a cage would be artistic?" He smiled to show he was just teasing.

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Bellamy poked his head around the corner of the canvas so that he could raise an eyebrow at Alistair. Was that a joke? He hadn't heard the other man make a joke yet. Bell hadn't known that jokes were something he did. The tone was unmistakable, however, and he'd smiled. Well, then.

Joke though it might have been, Bellamy considered the question rather seriously. He even paused his painting for a moment to idly chew the wooden end of his brush while he thought it over. "Maybe if the lighting's right," he concluded. "As far as allegories go it's a little on the nose, but you can get away with a lot when it's got the right composition and dramatic shadow, I think." He dropped the brush he was using in a cup of water at the base of his easel and fished out another, narrower brush. "Only a few more minutes," he announced, his attention on mixing a slightly darker shade of Darrow's skin tone against his palette.

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Alistair felt a peculiar sense of accomplishment at making the other man smile. He buried it down and did his best to suppress it because why should he feel any sort of pride in making a man smile? That was weird, right?

Alistair watched as the man chewed on the end of his paintbrush. He didn't really know anything about compositions and dramatic shadows but he nodded as if he understood anyway. He was relieved to hear that he would soon be done. How did the painting look like? He couldn't imagine seeing himself in a painting.

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Bell focused on his work for a few more minutes. The nose was finished now, but he needed to cut the bridge down just a bit by filling in some of the background color. Doing that didn't require him to check his model very often, so he leaned in close to the canvas while he continued. Afterwards, he stepped back and considered the canvas. He chewed the end of his paintbrush again, then finally nodded.

"Alright, it's done," he declared. "You want to see?"

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Alistair waited a bit longer and breathed out a sigh of relief when Bellamy Echelon announced that he was done. He wasn't quite sure that he did want to see but curiosity propelled him to go over and see what work the man had done.

"You're a very talented artist," Alistair murmured, not quite able to believe that was him on the canvas. And yet, at the same time he recognized himself. "So this is what I look like to you." It felt odd to have a painting of himself staring back at him. How did people manage to have whole portraits of themselves plastered all over their homes?

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Bellamy was rather satisfied with the painting as he stood back looking at it, but he frowned faintly at Alistair's comment. Not the first half of it — Bell wasn't terribly modest, and certainly not enough that he would feel uncomfortable being complimented for his art. The second bit, though: this is what I look like to you. It was just so small compared to what Bellamy was trying to do with his art. He wanted what he painted to be expansive; he wanted the picture to come alive. He wanted what he put on canvas to be Alistair Darrow, not just an offhand impression.

"It's more than that," he muttered, agitated.

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The agitation from the other man had Alistair worried he had offended him somehow. He shyly put a hand on the other mans shoulder in some sort of attempt to soothe. "I know that it is - it's just that... it is me and I tend to have a hard time about my own appearance even when I'm not immortalized in paint." He moved closer to the painting to try for a more objective look at the work of art. "What do you plan to do with it?"

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