With her mother dead of the plague, and her beloved brother newly married and moved away, Cornelia van Rijn finds herself without a friend or confidante--save her difficult father. Out of favor with Amsterdam's elite, and considered brash and unreasonable by his patrons, Rembrandt van Rijn, once ...
From wielding his sculptor's chisel with Michelangelo, they are roped with veins and as hard as the stone he hews. Just the memory of their feel stirs me. But as firm and thrilling as are his arms, it is the skin on the Undersides of them that I most crave to touch. It is as soft and smooth as an...
Poe SixteenIt was a sunny day, rich with the promise of spring, but little of the fine day penetrated the gloomy hackney in which I rode down Broadway. With my gloved hands folded upon my reticule like a trussed bird, I breathed in the odor of cigar smoke and sweat—a souvenir from previous passen...
The brisk mountain air smelled of cool stone, pine, and the moss that furred the ground: health-giving air, mindclearing air. Surely it would cure me. Four months after giving birth to little Fernando, and still I was subject to the black clouds that floated through my head, blurring my thoughts ...
June 1904 Villa di Quarto, Florence, Italy OLIVIA CLEMENS SAT IN her chair, listening to crickets. It was her least favorite part of the day, when the light dissolved into darkness. The gloaming. Eventide. Twilight. Dusk. For this hour to have so many names, it must have troubled the ancients. As...