The Winter King

by Amanda Carpenter

  ‘Look at him!’ she shrieked, thrusting the paper shakily, furiously under Christopher’s nose. ‘Will you just look at the bastard?’

  Her father took a look, took a second, very hard look, and became extremely grave. Her mother looked as well. Then they looked at each other. Her brother didn’t even try to crowd in for a look, but disappeared as soon as he saw that she hadn’t had some debilitating accident.

  ‘Sweetheart, ’ said her father doubtfully, ‘I’m quite sure that it isn’t what it looks like. Adam must have a perfectly good explanation. Just because the Press has jumped to a few conclusions, it doesn’t mean that—’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish, Christopher!’ she snarled, and threw the paper at her father’s chest. ‘Of course it’s what it looks like! That isn’t some light-hearted, misunderstood embrace—that’s the woman he was involved with a couple of years ago! Damn it, damn the man to hell! Oh, for God’s sake, just go away—yes, I’m all right—what do you think I am, some shrinking violet or something?’

  Since she had been acting just like one for the last several days, her parents didn’t quite know what to say to her. They did as she asked; they did as they had always wisely done whenever she had been in a uncontainable rage: they left her alone to work her way out of it.

  She stood, utterly still, the beating in her blood like the sonorous clangs of a great bell tolling, like a judge’s gavel coming down in a ringing proclamation of a life sentence. Then she sprang on the newspaper which had fallen to the floor and lay submissive like the fluttered wings of a dirty, dying moth.

  She spread the paper out, with fingers gentle in extremity and desperation, and commenced upon the first stage of a path of destruction, as she tore out the photograph so carefully, as she held it in shaking hands, staring at what she could see of his face.

  Why, Adam? she asked the frozen visage in silence as she knelt on the floor. He had said that he wanted to mark her, and thus publicly proclaim her for his own. Well, he had marked her all right, indelibly, but the marks were invisible ones that she could hide forever if she so wanted; she could play-act for the rest of her life, pretend a recovery, and no one would ever know.

  She thought she had come to terms with the possibility of a temporary bonding, with the inevitable break, but she hadn’t. She hadn’t and she never would. He had said that he wanted to mark her; he had kissed her in front of so many witnesses, then whispered for her to remember it; he had come to see her for so brief a time on Friday because he could not stay away. Was its all a lie?

  No, it had been the truth; her barriers were too sophisticated, too seasoned to allow her to become the dupe to insincerity. And if there was one thing she would have said about Adam, it was that he was not the kind to be fickle; his surface coolness covered a wellspring of emotional intensity that ran too deep for fickleness. Oh, he was a deep one, was the winter king, deep in subtle mystery, a puzzle-box of unexplained, subterranean intent. He had meant what he’d said at the time he’d said it, and now he was in the arms of another woman, one beautiful like the coolness of an English garden. It was outrageous; it was unthinkable.

  She surged to her feet, sprang for the telephone on the bedside table. She made several phone calls: to her agent, to Montana, to the movie studio, to the airlines, to a taxi company. Everyone was so polite and obliging. It was all so ridiculously easy.

  Then she razed through the room, a falcon in soaring flight. Her preparations were completed within half an hour. She was packed in twenty minutes. She ran downstairs with her suitcase and went to talk to her father.

  Christopher was a calm, patient figure lounging outside by the pool. His eyes were dark with sympathy and pain for her as he watched her walk up to him. She said without preamble, ‘I need to get into the safe. I want my passport, and I have my credit cards, but I need some cash. Can I pay you back when I return?’

  ‘Don’t be offensive, Yvonne,’ he said as he rose to his feet immediately. And with deep, unreserved love, with generosity, without questions or demands for qualifications, he went into his study, opened the safe, and gave her several hundred dollars, and the passport that she’d left behind two years ago along with her former life. ‘I don’t like the thought of you carrying too much cash around. Is that enough, or do you think you need more?’

  ‘It’s more than enough,’ she whispered through a tightness in her throat, looking down at the notes in her hand. ‘It’s always been more than enough.’

  She was not talking about the paltry sum of money, and he knew it. He stroked her head and said quietly, ‘God bless, darling. In whatever you decide to do.’

  Betty came to the door with the news that her taxi had arrived. Yvonne looked up, her eyes far too bright, and said to her father, ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Please don’t stay away for so long,’ her father said carefully, standing very still. Not holding her, never that, for it didn’t work with her; just asking. “We miss you terribly when you’re gone.’

  ‘I’ll come back,’ she said fiercely, and hugged him tight. ‘I’ll always come back.’

  And then she was gone, brightly shot from the nest, and the grounded mortal who had fathered such a trial, such a triumph, watched her passage, with humble gratitude for the privilege of experiencing the miracle of his child, with a heart full of silent shining pride.

  She went to ground at Gatwick Airport on Monday morning, and took a taxi into a rain-drizzled London.

  She defeated herself, for she had been too wound up to sleep during the long flight, and jet-lag was always worse for an individual suffering from stress. She had to check into as hotel, and was raging at her own limitations even as a black weight descended on her, and she slept like a rock until evening.

  Then, vampire-like, her eyes opened in full, deadly alertness. She rose from her bed, calmly showered, and dialled the telephone number the movie studio had been so pleased to provide her with. It rang and rang, and was eventually answered by a British female voice that said politely, ‘Adam Ruarke’s residence.’

  The vitriol wished to spill out of her at the evidence of the woman; she would not let it, not yet. She said very softly, ‘Is Adam in?’

  ‘May It ask who’s calling?’ asked the woman pleasantly.

  She had no choice. She would get nowhere otherwise. She told the hated, faceless voice, ‘Yvonne Trent.’

  The woman warmed immediately, inexplicably. ‘Oh, Ms Trent—hello! I’m Adam’s housekeeper, Mrs McFaddan. I’m afraid you’ve just missed him—he’s gone out to dinner.’

  Go carefully now, carefully. It was easier to speak to the housekeeper with the hate suddenly gone, with a supreme absence of urgency, with precisely employed indifference, ‘Oh, he’s at dinner, is he? I’m sorry I missed him.’

  The housekeeper said quickly, ‘Would you care to leave a message where he can reach you?’

  ‘For him to call me back?’ she murmured, doubtfully lazy, wanting to scream. ‘But won’t he be out very late…?’

  ‘Oh, no, Ms Trent!’ the housekeeper assured her. ‘He’s only gone down the street to the Imperial Dragon for some Chinese. I’m sure he’ll return very shortly.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said with gentle satisfaction. ‘Well, thank you, but no, there’s no message.’

  ‘Oh, but Ms Trent—’ The housekeeper babbled then, in some urgency. The noise was distracting, so Yvonne hung up on her.

  She had all the necessary clues. She showered, considering. He liked a good restaurant. A three-course meal with a wine list, an exclusive clientele and a supercilious maître d’. Then she dressed, dragged her hair ruthlessly into a chignon, away from her predatory face, and rang down to the hotel lobby and ordered a taxi.

  She flowed into the muted, elegant restaurant, the Chanel dress a sleek black silk drape, and she ate the supercilious maître d’ in one delicate bite. He was overcome with the honour. She allowed him to lead her to a table, a slender feminine tower who was over six feet tall in her heeled pumps, the gracefull
y muscular legs going up to the sky, a timeless presence with an unforgettable face that left a wake of devastation wherever she passed.

  Then she saw them across the way. Adam and the whatsit, together at a candle-lit corner table for two. Yvonne didn’t waste more than a glance on the lovely woman. She sank without looking into the chair the maitre d’ held out for her. All of her, all the dark immensity of her eyes and soul, was focused on Adam.

  He was a stranger in his formality. He was frightening, in his black suit and white shirt, a stark statement of power like at declaration of mourning or of war. The golden approachable charm was terrible in its absence; his handsome face was harsh and severe and formidable, the grey eyes dull, unignited, transforming the fire in the auburn head from the warmth she remembered to a frostbitten chill. Winter solstice, the death of a year of seasons.

  She had discovered, and raged, and come to do battle, pulled by a psychic sorcery, as it were, over thousands of miles. Now that she was here, however, her unquiet spirit come to the audience hall of the winter king, she was faced with his vast enigma and was silenced.

  She did nothing. She didn’t know what else to do. She crossed her long legs and looked her fill on the intimate scene of the two talking together, and accepted the dagger-thrust, experiencing the killing pain with something almost like serenity.

  She didn’t have to do anything. The wake of devastation as she had passed through the restaurant was a slow, murmurous time-bomb that did it all for her. The change in atmosphere, the brief quiet of conversation at her entrance; she watched the tidal wave reach the pair, who looked around at the disturbance. The dead of winter looked upon her, and flared to life.

  Flared, blazed, roared out of grey eyes made brilliant by the profligacy of emotion. He made a sudden movement, and whitened, and she heard the tiny sharp tinkle of glass as his wine spilled on to the table and stained the heavy white cloth.

  She knew the answer to the enigma then, for the photograph in the newspaper had been true; it was her understanding of it that changed irrevocably.

  Her gaze widened with awareness of what he had done, and what she had revealed, with the shielded voltage of communication that ran back and forth along the bond between them, growing exponentially, intensifying in strength, until she sprang from her table with an electrified cry and turned to run from it. He’d given her fair warning that he was a manipulator.

  The man she had left behind snapped a few words to his companion, who smiled and nodded in understanding. Then, released, he lunged in an athletic dance through the pattern of tables, so very quick, so precise, that he never touched a stick of furniture or another person.

  All Yvonne could think of was escape. She was awfully good at it. She was out of the restaurant, down the dark and yellow-lit street, and around a corner before she even knew it. Gut instinct, knee-jerk reaction. She was panting with the force of her flight and still moving fast, but she couldn’t escape the knowledge in her head.

  It had all been a set-up. He had set her up. The delicate, far-reaching complexity of it overwhelmed her. The look in the whatsit’s eyes: warm, kind, friendly and unsurprised. The ridiculous ease with which she had obtained his London address and phone number from the movie studio. The unexplicable urgency of his housekeeper, who had been all too eager to supply her with information. The photograph published with such alacrity in the Los Angeles newspaper. It had all been patiently choreographed, expertly primed, all with a master touch. It had all led in a tangled weave back to him.

  He had tried to speak of future things in Arizona, and she had denied him. She had made herself into an unassailable fortress, and he had set himself out to conquer her. He had not made the futile attempt to storm her unscaleable barriers, but in the classic move-of an ingenious strategist had induced her to open the gates and come out. Stunned, reeling, laid irretrievably bare, she covered her shaking mouth and sobbed.

  Racing footsteps sounded behind her and came to a precipitate halt. Adam called her name in his fierce hawk’s cry, and the exultancy in it, the tortured impending loss, the terror and the ecstasy cut off her escape and bound her to the earth.

  She halted, quivering, her back to him, and shouted at her shadow, ‘What you did!’

  ‘Oh, God, don’t leave.’ The raw, hoarse plea broke from him with a power that nearly sent her to her knees. ‘I die when you leave. I don’t know how many more times I can resurrect myself. Yvonne, what do you know? What do you know now?’

  ‘I won’t!’ she cried, arms at her sides, hands fisted. I won’t bend, I will stand straight, I will break. See how I’m breaking?’

  ‘You won’t, but you did,’ he said, desperate in his ruthlessness. ‘You did every time. I compelled, and you fought. I asked, and you gave. I invited, and you came. I left, and you followed. I loved—I love. I love you, Yvonne. I will love you, Yvonne. I will always, always love you; don’t kill me with it.’

  ‘You manipulated,’ she sobbed, tears streaming from her face, and then her bewildered, proud head lowered. She whispered, ‘You won.’

  He must have been so close to her, for she heard the harsh struggle of his breathing, the dreadful evidence of a man in mortal danger. He must have been so close as to touch her quaking shoulders, and yet he did not.

  ‘I have not won,’ he said. ‘I have lost everything to you. You don’t even understand how complete your victory is. Oh, you could rival the original doubting Thomas, you could. I don’t know how to give you what I need to give you, because you refuse to take it.’

  She wrapped her arms around her torso, rocking herself a little in absent solace. ‘If I turn around,’ she mused, terrified with need, ‘if I turn around, you’ll vanish. If I reach for you, you’ll go away again.’

  The silence was grim, dangerous, then he said in shattering warning, ‘If you don’t turn around, I will vanish. If you don’t reach for me, I’ll go away. I’m not made out of stone. I have simply not got an inexhaustible supply of endurance. You extend me beyond my furthest reach, and I am tied to you, and I adore you, and, if you misuse me, I could learn to hate you.’

  ‘We would be parting, always parting—you with your films to make and homes in different countries, I—I with this great big hole inside me that I keep falling into,—Oh, God!’ she moaned keeningly.

  ‘Have you forgotten so soon the art of compromise?’ he murmured in pain. ‘I’m going soon. You have to give up your never-never land and make your choice.’ She closed her eyes. She could hear the fissure begin in her, the crack running right through the heart.

  The gentle, inexorable voice behind her said, ‘I’m going now. Goodbye, Yvonne.’

  And then the most amazing thing: she screamed his name in agony and despair from the bottom of her soul, and lost her heart forever, and did not break. She bent at the middle and would have fallen to the ground, would have gone to the lowest point she could possibly go in utter, complete supplication to the winter king, except that he had warned, but he had lied, and he had not moved one single step away from her.

  And he caught her before she could tumble too far. He was the safety net over the gaping hole. The impact of his hard arms closing around her body made her shudder and gasp, and twist around to cling to his neck.

  He cradled her as close to his long body as he could, and it was not close enough. He jerked back, not gently, and unbuttoned his suit jacket and pulled her into the gap, and that was better. It was better for now; it was enough to hear both their hearts racing in united concert, to stroke the dampened hair at her temple, to know a secretive triumph at the trembling of her body, and the fierce-exultation at how she had reduced herself to such a point, which only he could save her from.

  ‘Woman, you’re a hard learner,’ he growled, nuzzling her face.

  ‘I’m a hard learner, because it’s forever when I learn it,’ she groaned, pushing him back with her nose, urging him to something. ‘Adam, I love you. There I’ve said it now, and I’ll not say it again.’


  He hesitated. ‘You’ll not?’

  He’d stolen away every gauntlet she had ever thrown down, and she had cast down so many that she was in danger of running out of them. A hard learner could also be a quick study. She said very fast, ‘I’ll say it every day, thousands of times a day. You’ll get sick of hearing it, I’ll say it so much, and then you’ll tell me to shut up. I just know you will.’

  He convulsed against her, laughing so hard he had to lay his head on her shoulder; at least she thought he was laughing, hoped he was. She was worried, in fact, that he might not be, for the racking. shudders were an awful struggle. She pulled back to search his face, poised to soothe, to castigate herself for driving them both to such a level, and saw that his lovely grey eyes were filled with tears and dancing with merriment.

  He was so vividly alive with expression and emotion, such a startling and complete contrast to the deadened winter from before that the last of her lingering fear blew away, never to return again, for the learner gained a new lesson as she realised that if she had reduced him she had exalted him as well. She brought him beyond his limits, she extended his endurance, and she made him more of as man than he was before.

  It was a glorious power she held. She tested it, whispering, ‘I love you.’

  She watched him ignite with sheerest joy. He whispered back, ‘Every time you tell me will be a priceless gift. Every time I hear it will be like new. I will never tire of hearing it, and never stop telling you how much I love you.’

  ‘You’d better not,’ she told him with a new-found composure that disintegrated as his face flushed dark, and he ran his hands down the length of her back to grasp at her hips and pull her tight to his. ‘Feel what you do to me when you say that you love me,’ he said hoarsely, his eyes glittering with fever. ‘Be niggardly with your trust, my love, put me to the test, Say it, and reach out with your beautiful hands and feel me.