The Portrait of Lady Ash

A Steamy Sapphic Gothic 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: Conservator × Witch, Trapped in a Painting, Immortal × Mortal, Age Gap (242 Years), Gothic, Haunted House, Island Forced Proximity, Tell Me First, Instruction Kink, Dream Sex, Scar Worship, Touch Starved, Standalone

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

Celeste Arden doesn’t believe in anything she can’t test. Fired by the woman she loved for refusing to sign a lie, the paintings conservator takes the only job left to her: six weeks on a tidal island, cleaning a filthy Victorian portrait before a private buyer collects it on the morning tide.

The commission comes with a dead restorer’s cardigan still hung on the stool, a cleaning recipe nobody should ever use, and a sitter whose painted hand drums on the marble when nobody’s looking.

Lady Vivienne Ash has been sealed inside her own portrait since 1867. She can’t feel. She can’t move. She can only speak when someone looks her in the face. Then Celeste’s first swab touches the hollow of her throat, and she feels every single stroke.

Every inch Celeste uncovers comes back to life. A throat. A pair of silver eyes. Hands that were painted over because they were used. A mouth painted small so it couldn’t say no. And every inch comes with a rule: Celeste tells her first, and waits for yes.

But the woman who painted Vivienne shut never stopped coming back for her. She has a buyer, a van, and a very good reason to want the conservator gone. And the tide is coming in.

The Portrait of Lady Ash is a high-heat sapphic gothic romance with a scrupulous conservator and the 276-year-old witch trapped in her painting, a decaying island house, restoration as seduction, consent as the method, dream visits, a door that opens for fifteen minutes at a time, a lot of on-page spice, and a guaranteed HEA. Standalone.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A buttoned-up paintings conservator who announces every stroke and waits for yes
✅ A 276-year-old witch with a filthy mouth, trapped in her own portrait since 1867
✅ Restoration as seduction: every inch of varnish lifted brings her a little more back to life
✅ A tidal island, a broken winter garden, a dead restorer’s journal, and a recipe nobody should use
✅ Dream visits with a safe word, a rebuilt door with fifteen minutes on the clock, and “tell me first”
✅ Real bodies: a scar, a crooked tooth, cracked paint, and “you’re shorter than you painted”
✅ A villain who calls it love, and a heroine who refuses to be retouched
✅ 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat, HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes, including masturbation under instruction, oral sex, face-sitting, light restraint and a strap-on), magical imprisonment, a former lover’s coercive control and manipulation, the death of a secondary character (in the past, by solvent asphyxiation), a character compelled to walk into the sea, burns, body horror (cracked paint, rapid aging and disintegration), references to a past controlling relationship and a career-ending firing, grief, and strong language. Intended for readers 18+.

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

Chapter One

The causeway to Ashcombe Court was open for four hours a day, and I had already wasted one of them arguing with a hire car.

By the time I coaxed it over the last rise of the mainland road, the tide had pulled back off the estuary like a sheet off a body. What it left behind was a mile of gray mud, a row of tar-black marker posts, and a single strip of concrete that looked narrower than my wheelbase. A sign at the edge carried a tide table and, beneath it in red capitals, DO NOT CROSS IF WATER IS ON THE ROAD. Someone had added or do, see if we care in marker pen.

I crossed with both hands locked on the wheel and my solvent case belted into the passenger seat like an anxious relative.

The house rose out of the flatness by degrees. Chimneys first, then a long roofline with a visible sag in it, then three stories of gray stone staring down the water as if it had been stood there as a punishment and was too proud to leave. At the back, something glittered: a glasshouse, big as a chapel, half its panes gone. Gulls went in and out through the gaps.

I parked on gravel that was mostly weeds and sat for a moment with the engine ticking.

Six weeks. One painting. A fee that would cover the rent on a studio I was two months behind on and, if I was careful, the insurance I’d let lapse in the spring. I had read the email offering it eleven times, hunting for the catch. I was aware this was not the behavior of a woman with options.

In the rearview mirror I looked like what I was: a conservator in the one good blazer she’d kept from her old life, with burnt umber under two fingernails that no amount of scrubbing had shifted. I turned my hands over on the wheel. Steady. They were always steady. It was the rest of me that had been unreliable lately.

The front door opened before I reached it.

“Ms. Arden. You’ve beaten the water. Well done.”

Harriet Ashcombe was in her late fifties, tall, with iron-colored hair cut for convenience and a waxed jacket that had been expensive in a previous decade. She shook my hand the way people do when they’ve been raised to it and have never questioned the practice. Her eyes went to my car, my boots, my case, and came back to my face having filed all of it.

“It’s Celeste,” I said. “And it was close. Your causeway has opinions.”

“It drowns a delivery van every few years. Keeps the tourists down.” She stepped aside. “Come in. Mind the bucket.”

There was, in fact, a bucket. It sat in the middle of a hall the size of a tennis court, on a floor of black and white marble, catching a slow drip from somewhere very high up. Above it a staircase split in two and climbed past rectangles of darker wallpaper where pictures had hung until recently.

Harriet saw me looking. “The Dutch things went in March. The roof ate them.” Flat, no self-pity in it. “The roof is going to eat everything, Ms. Arden, unless I feed it something large. Which is why you’re here.”

“The portrait.”

“The portrait. I’ll be plain, since I gather you prefer it.” She set off across the hall at a pace that did not allow for admiring the plasterwork. “I have a private buyer. Serious, and not short of money. The offer is conditional on the picture being cleaned, made sound, and fit to hang six weeks from today. If it isn’t, the offer lapses, and I start selling the lead off the gutters.”

“Six weeks is tight for a canvas that size in unknown condition.”

“Is it impossible?”

“I haven’t seen it yet.”

“That isn’t a no.”

“It’s a conservator’s yes,” I said. “It comes with a report.”

That got the corner of her mouth, briefly.

We went down a corridor lined with dead Ashcombes in oil. I counted three in need of relining and one that somebody had cleaned with what I strongly suspected was a cut potato. Old habit. I can’t walk past a painting without taking its pulse.

“You’re doing sums,” Harriet said, without turning round.

“Triage. The gentleman in the red coat is about five years from losing his face.”

“He lost his fortune first. I shouldn’t think he’ll notice.”

We turned into a colder stretch of passage.

“There are two further conditions,” Harriet said. “The first is discretion. Total. No photographs leave this house without my say. No mention of the commission to colleagues, journals, or whatever it is you people post on. The buyer is particular.”

“Buyers who insist on silence usually have a reason.”

“I expect they do. I can’t afford to be curious about it.” She glanced back at me. “Can you?”

That was the question, wasn’t it.

“I document everything I do,” I said. “Every test, every swab, every decision. That record stays with the painting, and I won’t falsify it or leave holes in it. Not for a buyer and not for you. What I do with it outside this house is negotiable. What goes in it isn’t.”

Harriet stopped walking.

“I looked you up, of course. Before I wrote.” She turned to face me under a bewigged ancestor with a bad case of blanching. “Nine years at Voss and Partners. Senior conservator. Then last autumn you weren’t, and nobody in London would tell me why. Which told me a good deal.”

My pulse did something stupid. I kept my voice level.

“Marianne Voss asked me to sign a condition report supporting an attribution I knew was wrong. On a painting worth a little over three million pounds. I declined.”

“And she dismissed you.”

“On the Monday. She had also been my partner for six years, so by the Friday I had no job, no flat, and a remarkably short client list.” I adjusted my glasses, which did not need adjusting. “If you’re asking whether I can be trusted with something valuable, that’s my reference. It’s the only one I’ve got left.”

For a moment Harriet Ashcombe simply looked at me, and I had the unpleasant sensation of being appraised by someone who knew to the pound what distressed goods fetched.

“I wasn’t asking that,” she said. “I was working out why a woman with your publications quoted me half what the big studios did.” She started walking again. “I think we’ll suit, Ms. Arden. Neither of us is in a position to be grand.”

It shouldn’t have stung. It was merely accurate.

“And the second condition?” I asked her back.

“You’ll live in. The tide makes commuting absurd. There’s a bedroom made up above the orangery wing, the boiler works on that side, and I leave supper in the kitchen at seven. I am no cook. Adjust your hopes.”

“And if I need something from the mainland?”

“High water’s at twenty to six tonight. After that, nobody comes or goes until morning.” A dry glance. “So you’ll need it tomorrow. One gets used to wanting things at the wrong time of day out here.” She took a ring of keys from her pocket and worked one loose. “You’ll be in the old conservation room. It hasn’t been used in some time.”

“How much time?”

Harriet fitted the key into a door at the end of the corridor.

“Thirty-two years,” she said, and turned it.

The room had been somebody’s.

That was the first thing. Not the size of it, though it was large, a long white space built onto the orangery with a wall of tall north windows letting in the kind of flat, honest light I would have committed minor crimes for in London. Not the smell either, though under the dust I caught linseed and white spirit and something floral gone faint.

It was the bench. A conservator’s workbench ran half the length of the room, and nothing on it had been put away. Cotton wool in a glass jar, browned with age. A row of bamboo sticks for rolling swabs, one with the cotton still wound on its tip. Brown glass solvent bottles with hand-lettered labels, their contents long since dried to a varnish of their own. A scalpel. A head-loupe folded on a blotter. A mug with a tide-line of tea inside it. A cardigan, moss green, hung on the back of the stool with its elbows still bent.

On the wall, a pigment supplier’s calendar showed March 1994.

“Miss Fenwick,” Harriet said from the doorway. She had not come in. “Ada Fenwick. My father engaged her. She was here most of that winter.”

“She left her loupe.”

You don’t leave your loupe. I’d have gone back into a burning building for mine.

“She left the work unfinished.” Harriet’s hand rested on the door frame. “Father had the room shut up afterward and nobody saw a reason to open it. I ought to have had it cleared for you. I found I didn’t like to.”

I looked at the bent elbows of the cardigan and didn’t push. There would be an estate file. There is always a file.

“I’ll work around her things. I’d rather not move them until I’ve recorded how they were left.”

“Recorded,” Harriet said, as if confirming a private bet. “Yes. I imagine you would.” She tipped her head toward the far end of the room. “She’s under the sheet. I’ll leave you to get acquainted.”

Her footsteps went away down the corridor. A door closed. Then there was only the light, and the dust turning in it, and at the end of the room a studio easel as tall as a doorway with a white shape on it.

I put my case down. I pulled on nitrile gloves, because whatever else had happened to my life I was not going to handle a nineteenth-century canvas bare-handed, and I took the dust sheet by its corners and lifted it away.

Oh.

I’m not proud of that. Nine years at one of the best studios in Europe, several hundred portraits across my easel, and my entire professional response was one unvoiced syllable.

She was nearly life-size. A woman standing beside a tall conservatory window, three-quarter length, one hand resting on the corner of a marble table. Dark hair dressed high. A gown that had been some shade of purple once and now read as brown, cut low and square across the chest. Behind her, the iron ribs of a glasshouse and the smeared green of things growing.

And over all of it, a varnish so discolored it was like looking at her through a jar of old honey.

I made myself do it properly. Start at the edges, work in.

Natural resin varnish, thick, applied more than once, oxidized to deep amber and gone cloudy in patches where damp had got at it. A century and a half of coal smoke and candle soot on top. Flaking along the bottom edge. An old tear, lower left, mended from behind by someone competent. Fine cracks across the lights, as there should be. A brass plate on the frame: Lady Ash in the Winter Garden, 1867. No artist named.

Under the filth, the painting was extraordinary.

Whoever made it could draw like a surgeon. The drag of heavy silk. The cold bounce of light off marble. The tendon standing in the wrist. This was no provincial likeness of a squire’s wife. Someone had looked at this woman for a very long time and got all of it down, and they had enjoyed themselves doing it. The shadow where the neckline met her skin had been laid in with a tenderness that was frankly not decent. You can always tell when a painter wanted the sitter. It’s in where the small brushes come out.

The hand on the table bothered me. It sat flatter than the rest, a fraction dead, as though a different and lesser brush had been at it afterward. I made a note. So did the dark muddle of shadow beneath the table, which had no business being that opaque. Another note.

Then I looked up at the face, which I’d been saving, and stopped making notes.

She wasn’t pretty. Pretty is the wrong word, and the painter had known it. A strong nose. A wide, clever forehead. A mouth painted small and sweet in a way that didn’t seem to belong to the jaw beneath it. And eyes that even through the amber were pale. Gray, I thought, or silver, set under straight black brows and aimed directly out of the canvas at the spot where I happened to be standing.

All frontal portraits do this. It’s geometry. The gaze is painted square to the picture plane, so it appears to follow a viewer around the room. I have explained this to nervous owners more times than I can count.

So I knew precisely why I felt looked at. What I could not account for was feeling looked over.

It was the expression. The sitters of 1867 stare out with duty, or piety, or the glazed endurance of someone three hours into holding a pose. This woman looked amused. She looked like someone at the far end of a crowded party who has just watched you walk in and has decided, without consulting you, how the evening is going to go.

Heat climbed the back of my neck. Actual heat, the kind you get from being caught.

This does not happen to me. I have had my nose six inches from some of the most deliberately erotic pictures in Western art. Reclining Venuses. A Boucher that should have come with a warning label. I measured their flake losses and went to lunch. Not one of them ever made me aware of the collar of my own shirt.

I leaned in. I told myself it was to check the paint at her throat, where the varnish had pooled thickest in the hollow between her collarbones. The floral note was stronger here. Violets. Faint and sweet and entirely wrong, because nothing in a hundred-and-fifty-nine-year-old oil film smells of violets, and because it came and went like something breathed.

The painter had put a pulse there. Not literally. One warm stroke laid against a cool one in the hollow of her throat, so the eye read it as movement. It’s an old trick, and I had seen it done well perhaps twice in my life. I caught myself waiting to see if it would do it again.

I had taken my glasses off.

I didn’t remember doing it. I do it when I concentrate, I always have, but they were folded in my gloved hand and I was standing much nearer than I’d meant to, near enough to see the weave of the canvas under her skin. Near enough that if she had been a woman and not a film of dried oil, I’d have felt the warmth coming off her.

Something in my stomach turned over, slow and low, and it was not professional curiosity.

“Right,” I said aloud, to nobody. My voice came out strange in the long room. “No.”

I put the glasses back on. I retreated to a respectable distance. Eleven months since anyone had looked at me like that, and the last one had been lying, and I was apparently so hard up that lead white and vermilion could make me blush.

“You’re a condition report,” I told her. “That’s all you are.”

The painted mouth stayed small and sweet and said nothing. Obviously.

I set up the tripod and got to work. Overall shots first, color card in frame. Then raking light from the left to map the surface. Then details, a grid of them, top to bottom: the face, the throat, the neckline, the window, that dense shadow under the table. I gave the wrong-looking hand a dozen frames to itself.

The whole time I could feel her watching me do it, patient as a cat at a mousehole. I kept my eye to the viewfinder and told myself it was geometry.

Supper was a shepherd’s pie of real structural integrity. I ate it standing at the kitchen counter, carried a mug of tea back down the corridor of dead Ashcombes, and by nine I was at a trestle table in the workroom with my laptop open and the day’s photographs loading.

I could have done it upstairs. The bedroom over the orangery was clean and plain, with a radiator that clanked like a ghost holding a grudge. But I’ve never liked reviewing images away from the object. You want to be able to look up and check.

Outside, the tide had come in. I could hear it through the old glass, not waves exactly, more a long continuous hush, a held breath let out slowly. Somewhere under it the causeway had gone, and the house was an island until morning. I found I didn’t mind. There was nobody on the mainland I was in a hurry to get back to.

I thought about ringing Imogen, the one person from Voss who still answered when I called. Then I remembered I had promised a stranger total discretion five hours ago, and I drank my tea instead.

One lamp on. The rest of the room had folded itself into shadow, Ada Fenwick’s bench a dim line of bottles, her cardigan a slumped shape on the stool. At the far end the portrait stood uncovered on its easel, catching just enough light to show as an amber rectangle with a paler smudge where the face was.

I had meant to put the sheet back. I hadn’t. I didn’t examine that.

The smell of violets had followed me to the table. Or I’d carried it there on my sleeves, which I liked even less.

The overall shots were fine. Sharp, evenly lit, the color card reading true. The raking-light set showed me what I expected: old canvas weave, a ridge where the tear had been mended, the paint cupping in the darks. I flagged a few, renamed the files, and opened the details of the hand.

Twelve frames. I clicked through them fast to pick the sharpest.

Then I clicked back through them slowly.

In the first, the hand lay as I had seen it: flat on the marble, fingers together, pointing toward the window. A resting hand. A hand that had been told to keep still.

In the fourth, the forefinger had lifted. Not by much. A sliver of shadow under it that had not been there before.

In the seventh, all four fingers were curled, tips against the stone, the way you hold your hand when you’re drumming it. When you are bored, and waiting for someone to get on with things.

In the last frame the fingers had spread wide and the thumb had come away from the palm.

I sat back.

Then I sat forward again and did what I do. I checked the metadata: same lens, same focal length, the same forty minutes of the afternoon. The tripod hadn’t shifted. The edge of the marble table fell on the identical row of pixels in every shot, and so did each glazing bar of the window behind her. I laid four frames side by side and zoomed until the image broke into squares. I dropped a measuring overlay on the forefinger. Between the first frame and the fourth it had risen through eleven degrees.

Then I did the thing I shouldn’t have. I set all twelve to play in order, half a second each.

The hand lifted. Curled. Drummed once against the marble, a ripple of four fingertips, and opened.

It was the most natural gesture I had ever seen in a painting. It was also, unmistakably, impatient. I watched it loop six times with my own fingers flat on the trestle, pressing down, as if mine might start answering.

Parallax can’t do that. Raking light can make flat paint look like relief, can conjure a ridge out of nothing, but it cannot bend a knuckle. Lens distortion works on the whole field, not on one finger. A corrupted file gives you banding and blocks of magenta. It does not give you a clean, well-drawn, anatomically convincing hand in a new position.

I went through every explanation I owned. It took a while. I had a great many, and I wanted one of them very badly.

“You’re tired,” I said. “You drove five hours and had a frank conversation with a stranger about Marianne. You shot these handheld and forgot.”

I had not shot them handheld. I have never in my life shot a detail handheld.

The tea had gone cold. The tide breathed against the windows. And down the length of the room I had it again, between my shoulder blades and low in my belly both at once, the warm, specific, unmistakable pressure of somebody’s attention.

Of being waited for.

I knew that feeling. It’s what you get from a woman across a room who has stopped listening to whoever is talking to her. Marianne used to do it to me at private views in the first year, before I turned into something she managed. I had forgotten what it did. My body, it seemed, kept better records than I did.

“If this is somebody’s idea of a joke,” I said to the dark, “it’s an expensive one.”

Nothing. The lamp hummed. Somewhere over my head a pipe knocked twice and gave up.

Don’t look up, I thought, which was absurd. Looking up was the entire method. You compare the image to the object. That is the job.

My mouth had gone dry. Under the table my knees were pressed together, and I became aware of that, and of my own pulse in places a painting had no right to reach, and I was honestly more offended by this than frightened. I was thirty-four. I had a master’s degree and a reputation for being difficult. I did not get flustered by pictures.

I certainly did not sit in a dead woman’s workroom at nine at night with my thighs clamped together, slick and aching over a rectangle of linen and linseed oil, wondering what a voice would sound like coming out of that small, sweet, unconvincing mouth.

I took my glasses off and pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes until I saw sparks. I put the glasses back on.

I looked up.

At the end of the room, in her amber dark, Lady Ash stood exactly where she had been painted. The window. The gown. The pale, steady, entertained eyes.

Her hand was no longer on the table.

It had turned over. It hung just above the marble with the palm up and the fingers softly curled, held out into the room the way you hold a hand out to someone you would very much like to come closer.

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The Second Sitting — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

Back at Ashcombe, with a marble bust singing Puccini in the cellar, Vivienne carries the sitter’s chair she once sat in for Rosamund down from the attic and asks for one more sitting. Cotton twill tape. A condition report read aloud. And nothing, this time, taken away.

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