Claire

by A. S. Harrington

  “About what?” was that cool, self-possessed answer.

  “About why you hate me,” he said, and for the first time Varian saw an instant of feeling in that beautiful velvet face, in those azure eyes.

  It disappeared immediately. “No,” she said, and smiled again, completely calm, and completely unlike the forthright child whom he had married.

  “You did not hesitate to tell me the truth straight out when Claudia and Chloe were at stake; can you not explain, now that it is you and I instead?”

  “You don’t,” she said quietly, “want to hear it,” and buttered her toast, and took a small bite.

  “I want to hear it,” he replied, that square jaw suddenly grim. “Every bit of it. Is there someone else?”

  For Claire was in love with someone; he would swear to it. There had been passion in her that was neither cool nor calm, nor counterfeit. If it had not been for him, then there must be someone else. Not a lover; no. She had come to him last night as untouched as though it had been October 25, 1805; and he suspected that her own strict propriety would have prevented her carrying on an affair, no matter there had been five thousand miles between them. But she loved him, this phantom suitor of hers; she had given her heart, he thought, if not her body. He watched a slow staining of the soft skin of her neck, willing himself away from the thoughts that came unbidden into his mind, of the taste and touch of her. As Claire raised her blue eyes to his, he saw betrayal there.

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “That’s it. I have fallen in love with someone while I was in Portugal. I won’t lie to you. I have been desperately in love with him for a very long time, and it is impossible that we shall ever have any sort of happiness together, and that is all,” she finished pleasantly, “that I shall ever say on the matter.”

  “And,” he asked, “last night? You imagined that I was someone else?”

  Varian Drew was cauterizing his heart; here he was discussing his soul as though he were asking directions to the corner, and he felt nothing. Only this unbearable wishing that it could have been different, good god, that he at least could have been given a chance. That they could have had a week, a month together, before putting half a world between them, that he could have watched that plump, innocent child grow into this exquisite lady. No India; he would be a pauper, more or less, no Banningwood, no Banning House. Nothing; except perhaps her. If he could have changed it all in that instant by wishing it, he would have done so.

  “I imagined,” she said slowly, laying down her toast, and putting her hands in her lap, “that things might have been different. I’m sorry. They’re not.” She stood up. “Have you any plans today? I think I shall rest for a while and finish my unpacking, and perhaps write some letters.”

  “Will you drive out with me at ten in the Park? It is a lovely day,” he said.

  She regarded him for a moment. “Are you certain that you wish me to?”

  His laugh was rueful, almost painful. “Did you think I would give up, just like that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That I intend to take however much of you that you will allow me; if it is a ride in the Park at ten, and perhaps the Opera tonight after dinner, then I shall have it, and happily,” he said, without smiling.

  “There is nothing,” Claire said, “for us.”

  “There is,” he said evenly, watching her expressionless face, “somewhere, behind that cool mask that you have come home with, a delightful young woman chasing Sully through the flowers. I intend to find her. I intend to make her admit,” he added, “even if unwillingly, that she rather likes me. I intend to have some sort of friendship, at least, in this marriage.”

  “Very well; that is reasonable enough,” she nodded. “You shan’t come again to my chambers at night, though.”

  “No,” he said evenly, “I won’t. Not until you wish it.”

  Claire gave a small, helpless motion of acquiescence with her hand as she turned away. “I shall be ready at ten.”

  She unpacked the small, brown-wrapped package that morning, just to reinforce her will before she went downstairs. Claire had known there would be a confrontation, and she had needed to see it one more time, to strengthen her resolve.

  That she could have allowed herself— that she could have lost all reason last night, that all of her resolution, that all of her strength, so carefully husbanded against him in the last fifteen months since she had discovered the truth, had been nothing— nothing— against him, against her heart— She was surely the worst creature in the earth. She was surely as evil as he, to know all that she did, and still to love him, not be able to hold herself against him.

  Still trembling from the encounter with Varian at breakfast, Claire sat down at her dressing table and pulled the packet again from the bottom of her jewel box. Her father’s strong, slanting, rounded script stared up at her; surely that particular picture was memorized, so many times had she gazed at it.

  So many moments of her childhood happiness had revolved around seeing that bold hand arrive in the post. All of life had been organized according to Papa’s letters. It wasn’t that Clytie pinned her hair up the Christmas of 1799; it was that Clytie had pinned up her hair the week that Papa’s letter had arrived from Egypt. Not that Mama had died the spring of the next year, but that Mama had died just the day before Papa’s letter, posted from southern Italy, had arrived. That this last of his correspondence had been powerful enough to destroy the happy memories of twenty years of those eagerly-awaited letters was not how it should have been. Instead of this curving hand—

  Well, Banning, here’s another bit of lucre— hope it will prove as valuable as what you’ve made out of the rest of it. Just pay me in the usual way— We’re a sly pair, aren’t we, to have fooled them all?

  With that short missive had been pages and pages of careful, detailed, meticulous notes on the British positions in Spain and Portugal, on news of Napoleon’s army in Italy and Prussia, delicious tidbits of gossip that carried so much information if one knew how to use it from all the travelers who halted at Faro, who, as word spread, came to the pleasant pink house to spend a night or two, to view the oasis of English civilization that the three exquisite daughters of Sir Colbert Ffawlkes had made along the sandy shores of southern Portugal.

  Pages and pages and pages of notes; she had guessed since that somehow they must have had a regular correspondence, for there were references to other packets that would have been received before now. And then the firm hand had trailed off; she recalled the day she had found him, slumped over his writing table, breathing raggedly, the pen still in his hand, the packet carefully out of sight. She had gotten him to his bed, and that night he had lost consciousness, and three weeks later, without ever having opened his eyes again, he had died. Inflammation of the lungs; the shoulder wound had been massive, and even after they had cleaned it out the best they could, he had never been the same. Or blood poisoning. The doctor had told her when he died that she had given him at least another year.

  Two weeks later when she had taken the key from his strongbox and turned it in that small bronze lock in the wood, and had opened up that drawer in his writing table and had seen what was there, she had realized that in her giving her father another year of life, she had also given the French another year of his services.

  No letter to his dearest daughter; no last testimony of devotion to his youngest, who had, more than any of the others, loved her father, perhaps because she was the most like him, and who would have spent those last fourteen months with him in the bottom of the deepest dungeon on bread and water, had it been required. No sentence or two of his love for her; no simple gesture of affection.

  Only this. Only betrayal.

  She put it away quickly; she rang for Consuela and changed her gown, and then the large, matronly woman, after a look at her face, said, “Here, Doña, I will brush your hair. You have the headache,” in her lilting Portuguese.

  “You ought to learn English, Consuela
, now that you’re living in England,” replied her mistress, leaning back her head as the woman pulled the pins and allowed her long, straight hair to fall free. “I will teach you; you and Elena. You will like that?”

  “Perhaps,” nodded the woman. She had been born in Lisbon, married at sixteen to a sailor who had eventually been pressed into the English Navy in that system which the English did not care to discuss. Her husband had been on La Doña’s father’s ship, along with sixteen other Portuguese, four Valencians, two Neopolitans, and a Frenchman from Perpignan, who had fought against his own country at Trafalgar. Consuela’s husband had died, and she had buried him at Cádiz after the battle. Then she had come to the pleasant pink house on the hill over the ocean at Faro to nurse Sir Colbert, for she had seen him, white and weak at that mass funeral, and had seen those three small girls, hardly women, who had come to take care of him, and she had instantly taken up all of the direction of the household within ten minutes of her arrival. Once in her youth she had waited on one of the beautiful young women of Lisbon, and she knew well the arts of beauty, in spite of her own plainness. She had, more than any other force except nature, brought about that transformation in her mistress from child to woman; and she knew very well most of the secrets of her dear Doña’s heart. “You should bring it before him and allow him to defend himself!” she said firmly.

  The closed eyes and smooth face did not flicker. “No.”

  “There is no justice that way, Doña Claire. And you do not love him if you refuse him his say,” she said quietly.

  “Then,” said her mistress, ending the conversation instantly, “I do not love him.”

  The brush pulled gently as the woman drew it slowly from her head to the ends of her hair. “He has a servant from the East,” Consuela said suddenly. “I am afraid of him,” she added. “He stares at me, and at Elena. And he does not speak.”

  “Perhaps he knows no Portuguese,” Claire offered, allowing herself to relax.

  “He understands; he has betrayed himself when Elena whispers to me that she is frightened of him. The English do not like him, either.”

  “It’s an odd household, isn’t it?” Claire opened her eyes and regarded the older woman in her looking glass with a tiny smile. “Perhaps we had ought to sleep with our knives beneath our pillows as when the Moroccans came to Faro, Consuela; surely after a dozen of them you are not intimidated by a single manservant from India?”

  Consuela smiled her wide, beneficent smile. “They were vanquished with your anger, Doña, before you showed your knife.”

  “I still have not learned to hold my tongue when I ought, Consuela,” she said slowly, closing her eyes once again.

  “You have learned,” returned the woman, faintly chiding, “too well. You must speak to him.”

  Claire sat up and opened her eyes, hard and blue, on her servant’s face reflected behind her. “I don’t wish to discuss it any longer. Do you hear?”

  “Yes, of course, Doña Belliza,” said the woman, and subsided into silence.

  They tooled around the Park in the clear, bright sunshine, in Varian’s very handsome curricle, silently, without conversation. Tony Merrill stopped to greet them; he rode a handsome chestnut that bore his giant form grandly. Lord Banning was stopped by a number of his friends; he took great pleasure in introducing them to his wife, in watching their eyes open slightly in that first instant of admiration, and then flicker to his face with the faintest tinge of jealousy. He did not care; he smiled and bowed, and Claire played the game with an elegant courtliness that fascinated him in its reserve.

  “Claire, what do you say we invite Claudia down to visit for a month or two?” he asked, suddenly, just after Tony Merrill had said good day to them. “Isn’t she at Finchingfield?”

  “Claudia?” she repeated, her eyes wide.

  He had surprised her into a moment of openness; for just an instant she had been Claire again. “Well, yes. Wouldn’t you like some company during the Season?”

  “Claudia is much more fond of her books than of dancing and parties,” replied her younger sister, turning away from him to gaze at the multitude of flowers along Ring Road.

  He followed her gaze and saw the iris and tulips and lilies and smiled to himself. “Well, we’ve the theatre and a few good museums and bookshops here; why don’t you ask her?”

  Claire hesitated. “I don’t know; I— ”

  “It’s not fair that she should be left in Finchingfield to play auntie to your sisters’ broods, you know,” he said.

  And since this matched her own opinion rather more than she cared to admit, she smiled a little unwillingly and nodded her head. “I don’t suppose there would be any harm in asking,” Claire agreed. “And— And I would like to have her here.”

  “I thought you might,” Varian nodded, and drove her home.

  He seemed to take for granted that she would join him at luncheon, and she could not think of an excuse not to do so, so it was nearly two when she finally escaped upstairs. This chamber was fast becoming a refuge; she was discovering that he had a certain insidious power over her that gradually teased her into a dimple when he didn’t seem to notice, and only by closing herself in could she rebuild that shield around herself.

  She lay down across her bed, thinking for a moment of— and then forcing all thought of it out of her mind; she listened intently to the sounds of the house, of the servants below, of doors opening and closing.

  When she heard him go out around three, Claire went downstairs and rang for Stiles.

  “Have we a housekeeper, Stiles?” she asked, when he had met her in the breakfast room.

  “Of course, Your Ladyship,” he nodded pleasantly. “Mrs Hooks; she has been at Banning House very nearly as long as I. Shall I call her for you?”

  “Yes. I should like to see the rest of the house, and perhaps discuss a few things with her,” said Lady Banning politely.

  “I believe that Lord Banning has told her to expect that you would do so,” he nodded, smiling again, and went away.

  She did not allow that last comment to affect her; she followed the pleasant, competent Mrs Hooks around the house, attending her quiet comments with a few questions and a great deal of concentration that occasionally brought those straight brows together. They began upstairs with a quick discussion of the servants’ quarters in the gables, and a brief look inside the spacious nursery rooms, draped in Holland covers, which Mrs Hooks said, with a small smile, that she had meant to air sometime this month, and which did not draw comment from Lady Banning. Below were spacious bedchambers and a parlor or two, and six or eight magnificent rooms; Mrs Hooks pointed out here and there where repairs and refurbishing were needed. The house had been let for the last four years, she said negligently, until Lord Banning had repurchased it last month, and she was certain that Her Ladyship would desire to have new hangings in most of the guest chambers.

  Downstairs, of course, she had seen the most of; the well-stocked library inhabited by that dreadful dead tiger, and two grand salons that could be opened into one, and the dark-paneled dining chamber, the smaller breakfast parlor in one corner, and then a pleasant private parlor that opened out onto a stone terrace and a narrow, delightfully shaded garden, which, unfortunately, had been let to rack and ruin in the last few years. Mrs Hooks was quick to say that His Lordship had hired a gardener last week and had sent up to Banningwood for two or three under-gardeners to post down to help him, as his lordship intended to have it all to rights before the autumn.

  “Does he?” inquired Lady Banning. She stood for a moment beside the double doors in the small parlor staring out at the overgrown garden, and then suddenly she pulled the doors open and walked out onto the terrace, part of which was shaded from the sun by the overhang of the house. There was a long, low wall of white stone, and at each end was a short fluted column covered with vine, and then a curved, shallow sweep of steps out onto the brick walk that ran all around the garden. “Perhaps a housemaid might sweep
the stone today? Have we a few chairs that might be brought outside in the mornings? My Portuguese women and I will sit here in the shade after breakfast tomorrow.”

  “Yes, Your Ladyship,” nodded Mrs Hooks, and they made up an arrangement for Mrs Hooks to see Lady Banning each morning at eight for her orders. Claire strolled through the downstairs again, and finally, around four, went back upstairs until the tea bell.

  She opened her chamber doors and gasped; there was a basket of red tulips on her dressing table, and another on her writing desk, and two more sitting in the windowsills over looking the street, and another on the floor beside her bed. In a sudden delightful moment of forgetfulness Claire laughed; she came inside and saw a closed hamper sitting on her bed, and the note attached. There was a sudden rustle from the hamper that made her draw back; then a soft “Mew?” Claire peeped inside the raised corner to find two slanted blue orbs peeping back, and then a small white ball of fluff shot from the basket and off her bed and out the open door before she could stop him.

  “Oh, dear!” she gasped, picking up her skirts and chasing him down the hallway; she glimpsed a streak of white just as he escaped down the stairs. “Stiles! Stiles!”

  “Your Ladyship!” He came hastily into the hall downstairs and watched her hurried descent in consternation. “Is anything amiss?”

  “Lord Banning’s put a kitten in my room, and I’ve just let him out! I see,” she said, laughing out loud suddenly, “that he certainly ought to be named Sully!” Just as the front door opened, she saw him disappear from behind the potted palm by the hall table and into the drawing room.

  Claire hardly even noticed her husband as he came inside, his golden head gleaming as he threw off his hat, a blaze of surprise in his face as his wife, laughing, raced past him into the drawing room.

  “Claire!”

  “Oh, Varian!” She narrowly escaped tipping a Sevrés vase to disaster as she rounded a white brocade chair. “You’ve brought me a cat!”