by Edith Layton
“You ought to be flattered,” Julia said lightly, although privately she was amazed at how he spoke to her as an equal and how readily she accepted that designation.
“Ought I?” he asked, giving her a bright and searching look before he answered just as lightly, “But there is no flattery in it, you see. There are so few healthy, mobile men left in this poor land, that the mere fact that I possess all my teeth, can walk unaided, and am above the age of fifteen and below the age of seventy makes me uncommonly attractive. Now were there a dozen hearty fellows within this inn tonight, and were Delphine to still accord me such outsize attentions, why then I would be delighted. But as it is, I fear it is the rarity of my appearance, rather than the glory of it, that inspires such admiration.”
Julia smiled at his comment, but could think of nothing to add to it. If she were to deny what he said, she would seem to be just as doting as Delphine. If she were to agree, it would seem as though she were not a very grateful guest. Then remembering her status as guest and seeing that there was nothing left to eat or drink upon the table save for a bowl of fruit, even if she should be glutton enough to want more, she brought her napkin up from her lap, placed it upon the table, and began to rise.
“No, don’t leave just yet. Please,” he said.
“I did want to speak with you,” he said as she sank back to her chair. “I had hoped that a pleasant dinner in a civilized atmosphere would help to erase some of the bad memories we share. We did start badly, Miss Hastings,” he said quietly, his eyes direct and sincere and his entire body seemingly rigid and poised as though he were prepared to react to any sort of response from her, from mere verbal insult to wild physical attack.
At her nod of agreement, for there was no rebuttal she knew, of course they had started badly, he went on.
“I misjudged you,” he said with utmost sincerity, as she searched his face for mockery and could find none, “and misled you, and misused you. Lord, I shouldn’t blame you if you refused me the time of day. But I would like to make amends. And this evening was my poor way of beginning an attempt in that direction. Do you think we might go further?”
Julia looked down at her hands and drew in a deep breath. She could scarcely believe the words she was hearing. As he said nothing further, she looked up to find him watching her quietly, awaiting her answer. His gaze was fixed upon her face, his eyes were clear and free of any inward look of deceit, and even in the softened late light of a summer’s evening, she could clearly see his expression was one of deep concern.
“Yes,” she breathed, “that would be good. After all,” she said in a rush, “it is not pleasant to be mistrusted, and I confess I have been careful of my speech in your presence, ever since you struck—” but here she left off speaking, for in truth, she still feared a sudden anger on his part and remembering the violence he had done her, suddenly wondered if bringing the subject up again would bring up his rage again.
His face grew very pale and he stood abruptly, seeming to loom over her. She gasped, wondering at how she could have been foolish enough to have been lulled by only a few kind words into endangering herself again.
But he only looked down at her, his hands closed into tight fists at his sides. Then he walked to the window and stared blindly out into the distance. “There is no way to undo what has been done,” he said in a tight voice. “You have said you will not accept my apology, and indeed, I can now understand that, for I find that I cannot accept my own. I wonder,” he said, his voice wavering a bit as he gazed toward her with a wrenched smile, “if you wouldn’t mind picking up some instrument, that fireplace poker over in the corner for instance, or that candlestick upon the table perhaps, and giving me a sharp rap upon the head with it? For I don’t know how else we can begin again with the score evened between us, and believe me, Miss Hastings, I very much wish to do that.”
He looked so very unhappy that Julia rose from her chair and went to him where he stood by the window.
“I will forget it,” she said softly, “if you will, and then we’ll both be done with it. But if you really wish to make amends, then why not call off this wild hunt and let me go home?”
“You know,” he said in a soft voice filled with regret, “I cannot, though believe me, I wish I could. But soon, soon the matter will be settled and you will be free to go anywhere you wish. In the meanwhile,” he said, his voice and face brightening, “there is no need for you to suffer. I promised a fine fee for your compliance, and so you shall have it. I don’t know where my head has been these past days. When we get to Paris tomorrow, I insist you take your Celeste and invade the finest couturiers. Buy bonnets, Miss Hastings, and frocks and slippers and gauderies and gauzies and thingamabobs for your hair and ribbons and bows. Buy trunkloads, my dear, I shall not begrudge you a groat for it. For I see how fine your hair looks, and how ill your garb befits you now. And please don’t mind my saying so,” he added quickly, “since such saying ensures an end to the problem. But within a day in Paris you can have frocks to match your face, have you all matching in fact, and all magnificent.”
He beamed at her, he made as if to take her hands in his, and then drew back a step and raised his hands in denial as though she threatened him with some weapon. “Ah no,” he said waggishly, “I remember, you do not care to be touched.” But there, for the first time, Julia detected mockery in his voice and his eyes, and finding it, suddenly doubted all that had gone before.
“No,” she said simply, “I don’t want fine clothes and gauderies, my lord, and never did. For they’d be of little use to a governess. And I do wish to be a governess. Don’t be fooled by Celeste’s expertise, it is her hand you see in my appearance, and not my own wish.”
“I see only you,” he said, stepping closer, his hands still raised as a barrier between them, “and nothing of Celeste, or any other woman.”
He said nothing further but looked at her so steadily that she could not pretend to be unaware of the question in his searching gaze. She hastily lowered her lashes over the secrets she knew must lie in her eyes, as though she feared he could read them there by the sheer force of his regard.
She sought a glib comment to end the unnerving silence, but when she opened her eyes again it was to discover him still looking at her. But now his eyes held such a sparkling, knowing look of amusement that she caught up her breath. Then smiling, still without a wont, he reached out a hand and smoothed one wayward curl back from her forehead. No more than that. But as she felt his fingertips briefly, barely skim against her skin, she found herself realizing that she had far more to fear than his anger.
“Don’t,” she said, and he stopped immediately, but drew no further back. His gaze left her hair and brow, which still tingled from his imperceptible touch. They stood so close she could feel his warm breath and he could see the tiny blue traces of veins that lent an azure hue to the pink of her lowered eyelids.
“What happened between you that last night?” he asked softly, his breath stirring the light tendrils of hair at her brow.
She did not have to ask him which night, she would not pretend she did not understand. She knew the question very well, for she had asked herself the same on a thousand nights of her life since that night.
“I don’t know,” she said, to herself, to him, with the same pain that she always felt when she asked and answered that question.
And as they stood as close as lovers, she was not surprised when he asked, “Were you lovers?” although he was so near to her she could see that he seemed to be as startled at his own words as though someone else had spoken them.
“No,” she said, shaking her head again and again in denial, closing her eyes so she could not see his look when the motion sent some strands of her scented flaxen hair sweeping lightly across his face, “no. Never. He never ... we never ... it was not that sort of love. No.”
He stopped the sidewise motion of her head with one hand. Then he took his hand away, bent his own head, and kissed her lips lightl
y, as feather-lightly as her hair had touched him. Then he drew back and gazed at her curiously. And in a moment she found her lips beneath his again, and he kissed her longer, and more longingly, although he in no other way touched her. He stepped away then as she caught her breath and sought a thing to say to explain lightly why she had not torn away from him, why she had not resisted him, why she had lost track of everything but him in those odd moments.
But he only looked at her lips even as she gazed at his and then he said in wonderment, “No. You were not lovers. There’s truth in that, at least,” and he seemed as amazed as she was at his words. With an effort, he left off looking at her lips, and asked again, “What happened that night? Now I understand even less.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I never knew.” And because she wanted him to look at her with desire again instead of standing and staring at her as though she were some weird creature, and because she knew that in some wise, she was, and that even if she weren’t she could not bear to be so close to him again, she said wildly, “And don’t kiss me again. If you want that sort of thing, there is Delphine. And don’t offer me friendship when you only want information. And don’t make me trust you, when you know I cannot.”
Celeste Vitry was a woman of the world. She did not comment when Julia came rushing back to her room, wild-eyed and shaken. She did not say a word when she watched her mistress wash her face in the basin of warm water and then scrub it with a damp cloth and then wash it again with cold water, although she knew that to be unusual, not to mention being potentially ruinous to a fine complexion. And she had the grace to say nothing but good night when she left her mistress alone at last in her room.
Julia scarcely noted her maid’s departure, she was so meshed in her own thoughts. She had thought the same things before, she had been over the same ground again and again, but the touch of his lips had not only brought it all back to her, it had added more. The leaping of her senses was new, although the pain of the memory was old. What had happened that night? She had not lied to him. She did not know.
He had never kissed her like that, Robin had never kissed her at all save for the chance dry peck upon the cheek, or the little warm salute upon the back of her hand, except for that once, the night they had parted. But then, she could not count that once, that had not been Robin at all. For it had never been that way between them before. In fact, she often was to think later, if he had covered her with kisses as he made his offer, she would have been too frightened to make any reply, instead of laughing as she had, and saying, “Oh Robin, me for your lady? Oh Robin, do not jest so.”
Even in the coach, on the long ride to the inn, they had done no more than hold hands, like the happy children they were. But she hadn’t worried over it. She knew what gentlemen and their ladies must do when they were wed, for her mother had taken great pains to educate her girls early on. She told them she did not want them to end as a famous local girl in her own youth had: with a pair of twins at her breast and the vague notion that they had come to her because she had shared a peach with her lover, and somehow swallowed the pit.
No, Julia had known what to eventually expect. But it did not sound very comfortable or very easy, so she decided not to think about it until she had to do so. She nourished the vague hope that people often cherish about their own mortality: that in their case, what was inevitable might prove to be avoidable.
Then they got to the inn. And he had bade her rest and then change to her best gown for the ceremony, for his friend was coming to meet her and he wanted her-in her highest looks for the grand occasion. He had left her alone in the room. And after a space she had begun to do as he asked. And then he had come back in again unexpectedly. And, Julia decided, rising from her bed, she did not wish to go over it again. A thousand times in one lifetime, she swore as she paced to her window, was quite enough.
She stared down at the same courtyard she had gazed at during her dinner with the baron. It was too bad, she thought, that they always came to blows or to words or to—and here she hedged even with herself for she did not wish to remember his kisses—or to physical contact of some sort, she temporized, for she had enjoyed his company. She had thought that such a fine-looking fellow would have had nothing on his mind but horses and wagers and fashions and gossip, as so many of London’s leading gentlemen supposedly did. But he had a firm grasp of current events, he was lettered, and he could make such a merry jest that one could forget that one had to dine with a long spoon when one supped with the devil.
Julia stared out into the warm, blurred darkness of a summer’s night. The moon was haze-covered but bright, and aided enough by midsummer’s long twilight to yet show shape and shadow below. She could pick out the forms of the trellis of roses, and the well and the grape arbor. There were some other points she could not identify, but then she was not really trying, she was too busy trying not to think of where the baron was now. She had told him to seek out Delphine, and doubtless, he had done so. But the thought of Delphine and the baron enwrapped in that complex set of contortions she had been told of all those years before gave her an unexpected jolt of dismay. Worse, it made her remember how queer it had been to feel so completely enfolded and immersed in his regard even when all that he had done was simply to briefly touch her brow. And the memory of what had transpired after that set her to wondering at exactly how he would enact that heretofore unimaginable set of exercises, and how gracefully he might accomplish that which she had always thought to be essentially awkward.
She passed her hand over her face in an angry gesture, and tried to put such uncomfortable thoughts from her mind. For no matter how she envisioned the baron at that elaborate task, she could envision Delphine being ecstatic at his endeavors. But then, a lighted window near the kitchens drew her attention. As she was on the second floor she could see down into the window below very well, and was very unwell at what she saw. For it was Delphine. No doubt, she thought, it must be Delphine, those lush configurations could not be mistaken even at a distance. No one else surely had such a light blue blouse which would not stay anchored to her shoulders, or such a welter of long black hair to cover the absence of blouse upon those white shoulders. Delphine, Julia knew it could be no other, also stood at her window looking out into the courtyard this soft summer’s night. Then a larger, darker, unrecognizable but plainly masculine shape appeared behind Delphine. A shape which sprouted a shadowy arm to circle Delphine’s waist and draw her back from the window into her room again. And then the curtains swung closed.
It is what gentlemen do, Julia told herself as she stood by the window and sought to see behind closed curtains, and sought at the same time to drag herself away from the window. It must have been the ridiculous tear that splashed against her arm even as she leaned on the windowsill which called her attention to the movement of the rose trellis in the garden below. But it hadn’t been part of the trellis at all, it had been, she saw now, as he stepped out of the shadows, the white of his neckcloth. And it hadn’t been the last red glow of the roses she had seen as she watched Delphine, it had been the small red glow of his cigarillo. This she knew now as a certainty, as he looked up at her and she saw his pale face clear in the moonlight despite the blurring in her tear-drenched eyes, and she saw him bow, making a great circle with his cigarillo as he did so, making a deep and mocking bow to her there in the blameless moonlight.
10
A The servant left the room with the last of the dinner’s crumbs safely collected within the discarded napery he bore away. He had been so thorough in his cleaning that all he left behind him in the dining room was a deep and unbroken silence, and the two former diners, who sat and glowered at each other across the now empty table. It was the gentleman who spoke first, as the door nicked slowly closed upon the heels of the departing waiter.
“Three days, I believe,” he said, as though he were replying to some question, although his companion at the table had not addressed anything but a singularly mistrustful look t
o him for some moments. “Yes, three days, I am sure of it. It was the very first night we arrived here in Paris. I asked you if your room was comfortable, I inquired as to whether the dinner had suited you, and then, just before I bade you a good night, I told you, no, I recall,” the baron said with some show of discovery, “I suggested, I strongly suggested,” he amended, “that you visit a dressmaker and have some new garments made. I believe I even suggested that since we were now in Paris you employ the services of Louis Hippolyte Leroy. As he was good enough for the Empress Josephine, I thought you might find him adequate. I left a purse upon the table to that purpose, I am sure of it,” he said with a bit more force, “for though I might forget a great many things, I always remember both promises and payments. It makes me a better landlord, and a better friend as well, I believe, for close accounting is important to both purposes. I’m not clutch-fisted, Miss Hastings, but neither am I quite blind. It is not the money I inquire about, it is the use it was put to. The purse is gone and so far as I can see, that garment you are wearing now, that grayish-brownish colored frock,” he gestured toward her with a dismissive wave of his hand as he spoke, “is the self-same one that you wore three days ago, or as near to it as to be its twin. I can see that it is not soiled, I am aware that it is fresh as a dew-washed daisy, but I am also acutely aware that it is not, I repeat, not, a new frock. And unless the French have gone mad with grief over losing the war, I doubt that they have begun to style such garments for foreign trade, so I take leave to doubt that it is one of the Parisian creations that you ordered and purchased as I requested you to do those three nights ago.”
The young woman looked unperturbed. Her expression did not change and she did not shrink back as the gentleman leaned forward with his chin upon his hand, his elbow upon the table, as he awaited his reply . Her pale face was composed, her chin was lifted, and her hands remained folded in her lap. It was well that they were, for that way the gentleman could not see how much they would have trembled had she not held them so closely together.
