The Portrait of Lady Ash

A Sapphic Gothic Witch Romance
by Maeve Hollow

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The Portrait of Lady Ash book cover by Maeve Hollow

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Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Witch × Conservator, Immortal × Mortal, Age Gap (242 Years), Portrait Curse, Gothic, Tidal Island, Haunted House, Ice Queen, Touch Starved, Forced Proximity, Ask Me First, Power Exchange, Voyeurism, Secret Identity, Found Family, Standalone

She’s been painted shut for 159 years. The woman who cleans her is the first to ask permission.

Celeste Ward is a paintings conservator who documents every decision and never touches a surface without knowing what lies beneath it. Hired to restore a Victorian portrait at Ashcombe, a decaying house cut off from the mainland by the tide, she finds a woman in black silk whose eyes follow the light.

Then the woman speaks.

Vivienne Ash was born in 1750 and painted into her own portrait in 1867. For a century and a half she has watched people handle her without asking, varnish her face, move her from room to room, and call her an object. Celeste is the first to stop, put down the swab, and say, May I?

Every layer Celeste removes gives Vivienne something back: warmth, breath, a hand that can reach past the frame. Every touch they negotiate becomes harder to call professional. But the portrait was made to hold a secret, the house has been keeping it for generations, and someone on the island wants the last layer left exactly where it is.

The Portrait of Lady Ash is a high-heat sapphic gothic romance with a scrupulous conservator, a 276-year-old witch trapped in a Victorian portrait, a tidal island house, a restoration that is also a rescue, consent spoken aloud, a lot of on-page spice, and a guaranteed HEA. Standalone.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A heroine who talks to paintings before she touches them, and the one who answers
✅ A 276-year-old witch who has spent 159 years being handled without permission
✅ “Tell me first.” Every touch named, every boundary kept
✅ A tidal causeway, a house with too many locked rooms, and a portrait that warms under the light
✅ Slow restoration, fast attraction, and a woman learning to be a body again
✅ Gloves, brushes, varnish, and the most intimate kind of looking
✅ A mystery under the paint, a family that calls captivity stewardship, and a rescue on the heroine’s own terms
✅ 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat, HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes, including oral sex, manual sex, mutual masturbation, voyeurism, light restraint and negotiated power exchange), magical imprisonment and objectification, a history of nonconsensual handling and control, family coercion, references to a past abusive relationship, the death of secondary characters in backstory, a life-threatening tidal crossing, grief, and strong language. All on-page sexual intimacy between the leads is consensual and explicitly negotiated. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read all of Chapter One right here.

Chapter One: Celeste

The causeway disappeared behind me at 4:17.

I know because I checked the time when the first tongue of seawater came over the stones, and because the woman who had hired me had said, very clearly, Be across by four.

In my defense, the train had been late. In the sea’s defense, it did not care.

I kept the car in second and followed the white posts toward the island, watching the road narrow under water on either side until it was less a road than a suggestion somebody had made to the tide. Beyond the windscreen Ashcombe rose out of the gray like a house that had been left too long in a developing tray: black roofs, pale walls, windows that gave back no light.

There was a chapel at the edge of the trees, a walled garden gone brown for winter, and a long glass gallery that joined the main house to a square tower. The gallery caught the last of the afternoon and held it, a thin strip of gold in all that weather.

That would be where the painting was. Paintings always got the best light in houses like this. People could make do.

I parked beside a stone trough full of rain and sat for a moment with both hands on the wheel.

Thirty-four years old. Eleven years in conservation. A fellowship, two publications, a small studio in York, and a reputation for saying no to clients who wanted an old thing made new. I had been hired to clean a portrait for a private family on an island that would be inaccessible for the next six hours. The fee was generous enough to make me suspicious and necessary enough to make me come anyway.

I took my case from the boot. It held a microscope, lamps, solvents in sealed containers, a camera, a field notebook, and more cotton swabs than anyone outside my profession would consider reasonable. The wind got under my coat before I had shut the boot and tried to take the whole arrangement into the sea.

“You’re late.”

A woman stood in the open front door. Tall, spare, silver hair cut at the jaw, a navy wool dress that looked as though it had been chosen once and repeated for twenty years.

“Seventeen minutes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“The tide is not.”

“I noticed.”

She looked past me at the water now covering the road. Then she stepped aside.

“Marion Vale. Come in before the house loses what heat it has.”

The hall smelled of beeswax, cold stone, and a fire burning somewhere too far away to be useful. Portraits lined the walls, generations of people who had been painted with the expectation that someone would keep looking at them. Most of them looked displeased by the arrangement.

Marion took my coat and hung it on a peg without asking whether I wanted to keep it. She had the manner of a woman who had been responsible for a place so long that other people’s preferences had become a form of weather.

“Your room is in the west wing. Dinner at seven. The kitchen is through the green door if you require tea. You may work in the gallery whenever you like, but the tower remains locked.”

“Is there a reason?”

“There are several. None of them is relevant to the portrait.”

That was the sort of answer that made a conservator write a question mark in a margin.

“And the family?”

“My nephew arrives tomorrow. He represents the trust. I live here.”

“Alone?”

She turned her head just enough to look at me. “Does that concern your work?”

“Only if there are people I should avoid photographing in the background.”

“There are not.”

We passed a dining room laid for two, a library with its shutters half closed, and a door whose brass handle had been polished bright around a keyhole black with age. Marion did not slow at any of them.

“The portrait has been in the family since 1867,” she said. “It has never left the island. The varnish has become opaque in places. There is some cracking, and a small area of damage near the sitter’s left hand. We require stabilization and cleaning. Nothing more.”

“I’ll need to examine it before I can agree to a treatment plan.”

“Naturally.”

She said it as if she had expected me to say exactly that and had already decided how far she would permit it to go.

The gallery doors were glass in dark wood, tall enough that opening them changed the sound of the house. Beyond them the room ran the length of the garden, windows on one side, paintings on the other, a black-and-white stone floor carrying the last of the daylight toward the tower door.

And halfway down the long wall, beneath a lamp that was not switched on, was Lady Ash.

I stopped walking.

It was not the size. I have worked on canvases larger than doors. It was not the frame, though that was extraordinary, carved black wood with a pattern of ash leaves and thorns so fine I could not see where one ended and the other began.

It was the woman.

She sat in a high-backed chair, turned slightly toward the viewer, one hand resting on its arm and the other in her lap. Black silk. An open throat. Dark hair pinned low, with silver at both temples that the painter had rendered in strokes so fine they seemed to catch light the room did not possess. Her face was pale, long-boned, and unsmiling. Her eyes were gray.

Not the flat gray of pigment under varnish. The difficult gray of weather over water, the kind that refuses to stay one color while you look at it.

I had seen photographs. Marion had sent twelve, all badly lit, and in every one the face had looked impressive and remote. In person it looked like somebody had interrupted her and she was deciding whether to forgive them.

“Vivienne Ash,” Marion said. “Painted by Rosamund Vale. A family connection.”

“What sort of connection?”

“A complicated one.”

“Most family connections are.”

She did not answer.

I set my case on the floor and stepped closer. The varnish was worse than the photographs suggested: a dark amber layer, unevenly applied, with at least two later coatings visible under raking light. The black gown had lost its folds. The background had become a single brown plane. There were hairline cracks around the mouth and throat, and the left hand had been retouched by somebody with more confidence than skill.

But the face.

“Hello,” I said softly.

Marion looked at me.

“Habit,” I explained. “I talk to them before I touch them.”

“They do not answer.”

“Not usually.”

Something in the room seemed to settle. I could not have said what. The air, perhaps. The house making one of the small sounds old houses make when the temperature changes.

Marion folded her hands in front of her.

“No work after midnight.”

I looked back at her. “You said whenever I liked.”

“I am amending it.”

“Is there a problem with the electricity?”

“There is a problem with tired people making mistakes.”

That was reasonable. It was also, I suspected, not the reason.

“I don’t do treatment when I’m tired,” I said. “Documentation, sometimes. Never treatment.”

“Then we understand each other.”

She left me with the portrait, the fading light, and a very distinct feeling that we did not.

I unpacked in the order I always did. Notebook first. Camera. Scale. Color chart. Lamps. Nothing wet, nothing sharp, nothing that could alter the surface until I had recorded what the surface was.

It is not glamorous work. Most of conservation is looking, writing down what you see, and resisting the urge to improve anything. You spend years learning how little you know, and then a client asks whether you can make the colors pop.

I took the overall photographs, then the frame, then details of the face and hands. I measured the canvas. I noted the weave, the stretcher, the old keys wedged into the corners, the label on the reverse that read V. ASH. 1867. NOT TO BE REMOVED.

Not not to be sold. Not not to leave the house.

Not to be removed.

I wrote that down exactly.

Then I set the lamp low and angled it across the surface.

Raking light is rude. It shows every raised edge, every old repair, every place somebody has tried to persuade a painting to be younger than it is. Under it the varnish became a landscape of ridges and pooled brushstrokes. Whoever had applied the last coat had worked fast. Too fast. Around the mouth, especially, there were thick overlapping strokes that looked almost like somebody had been trying to cover a sound.

I frowned.

That was not a professional description. I crossed it out in the notebook and wrote localized excess varnish, mouth and lower face.

The eyes appeared to follow the lamp.

They did not, of course. Portraits do that. A painter who knows how to place the pupils can produce the illusion from almost any angle. I had explained it to museum visitors often enough to be bored by my own voice.

I moved the lamp to the left.

The eyes were still on me.

I moved it to the right.

Still on me.

“Very good,” I told Rosamund Vale, who was presumably beyond appreciating the compliment.

The woman in the painting looked as if she disagreed.

I sat on the stool I had brought and studied the left hand.

It was long-fingered, with a small ring on the middle finger and a pale line across the base of the thumb. The repair lay over the knuckles, a muddy little patch that did not match the surrounding paint. Under magnification I could see that it was not simply an old fill. Someone had painted over a detail. Something in the hand, perhaps, or the position of a finger.

I looked at the right hand in her lap. It was half hidden in black silk, the fingers curled loosely against the fabric. Beautifully painted. The sort of hand that makes you understand why people spend years learning anatomy and then years learning how to forget they learned it.

I have always liked hands. They are honest in ways faces learn not to be.

These looked held still.

Not resting. Held.

I looked back at the face. At the mouth, pressed into a line that might have been dignity or fury or a painter’s preference. At the exposed throat above the black silk. At the silver in her hair, which should have made her look older and instead made her look as though time had tried something and failed.

“What did she do to you?” I asked.

The words were out before I could make them sensible.

A drop of water struck the gallery floor behind me.

I turned. A leak, somewhere high in the glass roof. The wind had picked up. Beyond the windows the garden was gone, swallowed by dusk, and the sea had become a sound rather than a view.

When I turned back, the left hand seemed different.

I leaned closer. The little finger, which I had thought was resting on the chair arm, looked as if it had lifted.

I checked the photograph on the camera.

Resting.

I looked at the painting.

Resting.

“You are tired,” I told myself. “And you had a sandwich for lunch that was mostly packaging.”

I packed away the solvents I had not opened and went to dinner.

Marion served fish pie in a room built for twenty.

She sat at one end of the table and put me at the other, a distance that required both of us to speak a little more loudly than the conversation deserved. There were candles in silver holders and a clock on the mantel that had stopped at 11:43.

“The clock doesn’t run?” I asked.

“No.”

“Do you keep it for sentimental reasons?”

“I keep it because it belongs there.”

I ate some fish pie.

“The portrait has had several later coatings,” I said. “The most recent one is relatively modern. Do you know who did it?”

“My father arranged it.”

“When?”

“In the seventies.”

“Was there a treatment report?”

“Not that I have found.”

“And before that?”

She put down her fork. “The family has always maintained it.”

“Maintained is a broad word.”

“It is the word I have.”

I let that go for the moment. There are clients who become more useful if you give them a night to get used to being questioned.

“Who was Vivienne Ash?”

Marion’s eyes moved to the stopped clock and back.

“A woman Rosamund knew.”

“Well enough to paint.”

“Apparently.”

“She has an unusual face.”

“People have always thought so.”

“Beautiful,” I said, because I was tired of walking around the obvious.

Marion looked at me for a long time.

“Yes,” she said at last. “That was part of the trouble.”

She took the plates before I could ask what the rest of the trouble had been.

At ten-thirty I was back in the gallery.

Documentation, not treatment. I had told Marion exactly that, and she had nodded in a way that made clear she would remember the distinction if anything went wrong.

The house was quiet behind me. Beyond the windows the sea moved in the dark with the heavy, patient sound of something that did not need to hurry. I had one lamp on and the camera fixed to its tripod, and Lady Ash sat in its circle of light like the only person in the room who had dressed properly.

“Just photographs,” I told her. “Nothing to worry about.”

I adjusted the focus on her mouth.

There was a crack at the corner I had not seen in daylight. Fine as a hair. Under the lamp it looked less like damage than a line someone had drawn around a door.

I leaned in, keeping my hands behind my back.

The air in front of the canvas was warm.

Not lamp-warm. The lamp was LED, low heat, positioned well away from the surface. This was body-warm, a small pocket of it between the portrait and my face.

I straightened. Checked the lamp. Checked the radiator, which was cold.

“All right,” I said.

The left hand moved.

Not a trick of the light. Not the camera. The little finger lifted from the chair arm and pressed against something I could not see, and the varnish over it flexed like skin under a sheet of glass.

I stopped breathing.

The eyes came to mine.

They had been looking slightly past me before. I knew that now with the absolute certainty of a woman who had spent five hours measuring their position. They came to mine, and held.

My first thought was not impossible.

My first thought was she’s frightened.

The mouth opened a fraction. The thick varnish at its edges stretched, dark and glossy. A sound came through, so faint I might have mistaken it for the sea if I had not been watching her make it.

“Don’t.”

I put the brush I had picked up without realizing it back on the table.

“I won’t.”

Her eyes closed. Opened again.

“Not,” she said, with what looked like enormous effort, “without telling me.”

I stood there with my hands empty at my sides, my heart making a terrible job of being useful, and looked at a woman who had been painted in 1867.

“My name is Celeste,” I said. “I’m here to clean the painting. I haven’t done anything yet. I won’t do anything without telling you first.”

The gray eyes stayed on me. There was nothing remote in them now. There was exhaustion, and suspicion, and a hunger so old I did not know what it was hungry for.

“You asked,” she said.

“What?”

“This afternoon. You asked what she did to me.”

“Yes.”

A pause. The sea struck the wall below the gallery, and the glass shivered in its frames.

“Nobody,” Vivienne Ash said, “has ever asked that before.”

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The Second Sitting — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

Back at Ashcombe, Vivienne carries Rosamund’s sitter’s chair down from the attic and places it in the north light. Then she asks Celeste to tie her into it. This time the sitter writes the terms, the artist asks before every touch, and nothing about the woman in the chair is still.

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