A sweeping story of gay loss and love—set in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Bookended by encounters at the Ravens Roost Lookout on the Blue Ridge Parkway, suave and wealthy Virginia landowner Dabney Belcastle manipulates men to do his will until tragedy strikes and he turns to using his manipulation in atonement.
Having disrupted the lives of the young Italian-American landscape artist Lucio; the mixed-race workman Hank, who holds a dark secret of the Belcastle family past; and the two young University of Virginia English professors Paul and Stuart, Dabney does what he can to give these men their lives and freedom back in a bittersweet romance set in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah Valley, and hunt club Piedmont of Central Virginia.
“Yes,” I heard him speak softly from behind me in a well-modulated, educated voice—something foreign in Virginia anywhere but here at the western edge of the Piedmont, where the old families of Central Virginia still did the European tour and brought home British spouses.
I turned and raised my eyebrow. My paint brush, loaded with just the right mix of red and orange and yellow, hovered over the canvas.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you. But I stopped at the overlook because the way the sun hit the trees on the slope over there made them shimmer with fiery earth tones. And I see here that you have captured them perfectly on canvas.”
“Thank you,” I said and turned back to the canvas, trying to remember just where I had wanted to apply the paint. I wanted to be irritated by his snapping of my concentration, but I found that my mind was torn between capturing the perfect play of the light before it flitted away and wanting to concentrate on him. I would have thought that a man in a fur coat and a Bentley would be entirely out of his element up here at the top of the Blue Ridge, but he seemed in complete comfort and control, as if he was the proprietor and perhaps it was I who was the interloper. . . .
With a sigh, as a cloud floated across the sun, changing the light on the slope of the Torrey Ridge to something as interesting as what I was painting—but something far different from what I was painting—I lowered the paintbrush and covered the paint-loaded tip with an oil rag.
“I am mortified,” he said in a voice that sounded genuinely contrite. “I have ruined your painting. I see that the light has changed.”
“No matter,” I answered. “It’s in my memory. Some artists work from photographs. I find I need the dimensions of working from real life—and that I can retain that in my mind.”
I surprised myself. I normally would, in fact, have been quite angry with the interruption. I had purposely chosen my day for optimum landscape color and minimum interference. But he intrigued me. I liked men. And he was quite an engaging specimen. He was tall and thin and what anyone would call distinguished looking, patrician even. I may have been swayed toward that from the Bentley and the fur coat anyway, but I imagine he’d convey the same impression in a business suit—although even there I couldn’t think of anything less than Armani—or even jeans and a wool shirt. Ageless in appearance, he could be anything from his mid-to-late fifties, but would be described as very well preserved anywhere in this age range. If I had to peg a career, I’d guess men’s high-fashion clothes designer. It was possible he was from inherited wealth and hadn’t worked a day in his life, but there was something more substantial about his look that belied that assessment.
Then he was moving toward me, to position himself for a closer look at the painting, and the realization hit me by the way that he moved that he liked men. I don’t know why, but that sent a chill of interest up my spine.
“Are you sure you can capture the light still?” he asked. I was touched that he seemed to be worried about that.
“Yes, I’m sure,” I answered. . . .
He smiled. “Tell me, do you paint vineyards too—and large scenes on walls?”
“Yes, I can do that,” I answered.
“Perhaps you can visit me someday, then,” he said. He reached into the pocket of his fur coat and extracted a wallet. “I’ve put in a vineyard and am having a tasting room and event complex built. If you can capture the colors of that vineyard down there against the autumn trees on a large wall mural, I think I know just where that might fit. I’m sure we’d be able to come to an agreement.”
At the moment he said that, our finger met as he gave me a business card, and I knew that he was talking about far more than painting when he said we could come to an agreement.
