THE PROPOSITION

by Judith Ivory

  "Did your parents know?" he asked.

  "I think so."

  All Mick knew about boarding schools was that they turned out snobs. He hadn't known about their discipline habits, and certainly had had no idea about evil governesses, though he understood what caning was from stories of orphanages and poorhouses.

  "It wasn't really so—" She tried to shrug it off.

  He was too distressed on her behalf to let her. He said, "No, Win. English gentlemen and gentlewomen don't deserve the word gentle, to put such fear into their own children. Or to pay someone else to do it. The upper class is"—he looked for something to say that was sufficiently disgusting, then found it in his growing stockpile of words—"barbaric."

  "I was a frightened child before she ever—"

  "I'm sure. All the worse."

  She looked at him as it seemed to dawn on her. "It is horrid, isn't it, what she did?" She frowned at him. "Have I made you loathe me then?"

  "No!" He laughed, then slid her around and pulled her up against him. "Sh-h-h," he said. "Oh, Winnie."

  He felt homesick all at once, a sweet, sharp longing for rocky moors and jagged coastline, where a boy was never more than twenty miles from the sea no matter where he stood. And always on solid ground with his family.

  "Let me tell you about Cornwall," he said. He scooted her till she sat in the cove of his legs, nestled her into his arms, and kissed the top of her head.

  He did: He told her of playing in Celtic ruins, ducking through half-tumbled-down archways, unmindful of the hands that built them. His castles. He told her of running along the sea with several of his brothers, then sisters, too, as more children came along, until he was running in a pack of fourteen wild siblings, some of them barely nine months apart.

  "That's a lot of children," Winnie said.

  "Mum was Catholic. She didn't believe in preventing a child the Lord wanted her to have. She even took in one He didn't put on her. My brother Brad isn't even hers. His mother died, then his father beat him, so he came and lived with us, the wild Tremore brood. He fit right in."

  "If your mother couldn't manage you all, did your father do it?" Winnie wanted to know.

  "God, no. My father left after the fourth or fifth one, I think."

  She puzzled over the information. "Then how did the sixth one and the rest come about?"

  He got a good chuckle out of that. "God did it," he said. "That's what my mother would say. The rest were all immaculate conception. She was a crazy one, my mum. Or else she thought we were." He laughed again, fondly. "She did her best. She tried to put the fear of God in all of us, and always succeeded for a while with the littlest ones. But they'd come to me, crying, scared, you know, and I'd explain. 'No, God won't punish you. He loves you. And your mum does, too, only she's angry with you and can't give you the good swipe you deserve.'

  "Being the oldest, I thought it my duty to put them on to her, wise them up, you know? No use scaring little children with a lot of talk about damnation. Then I'd say, 'But see, I can take a swipe at you, so do as you're told. Your mum's too kindhearted to hit you. That's why she invents all these things.'" He laughed. "It worked. We all helped her."

  "You especially," Winnie said.

  He ran his mouth down an inch of her crown, feeling her hair against his lips. "Yes, me especially. I pretty much ruled the roost as the oldest. It was my job to use that the right way, to help the rest with it."

  She thought for a minute, then said, relaxed now, her body fitting sweetly against his chest, between his legs, "That explains why you act as if you're king sometimes then." She was teasing him.

  "I am king," he said. "King of the life of Mick Tremore. And you, my pretty thing, are queen. Queen of yourself."

  "Why did you leave if you liked Cornwall so much?"

  "To feed us. After my mother died, we about starved to death." He laughed. "I'll be honest, Win. I think some of my brothers and sisters were the result of my mother's enterprise." It was funny to him, sad, too; his mother struggling to feed her brood, but doing it in a way that only made her more children. "Anyway, with just myself and three brothers working in the mines, trying to feed fourteen, it wasn't enough. So I put my younger brothers and sisters with aunts and uncles then came to the city. I brought Freddie, a great ferret. You met her."

  "Yes, you said she's your best."

  "Was. I lied a little. She's old now." He paused, thinking. "Because of her, though, I sent home money my very first week, enough to buy food and a bit of clothes, something the younger ones sorely needed. We wouldn't have made it another winter. Freddie saved us. That's why I have to take good care of her, right to the end."

  "Fourteen," Win repeated. "That's a big family."

  "It is, but I managed and the older ones help now. Five brothers, eight sisters. My youngest sister is eleven. I support the ones who can't support themselves yet, with a bit left over for me after I give extra to the three aunts and an uncle who care for them. It works out. Don't know what I'd do without family."

  "Or them without you," she pointed out.

  He laughed. "I guess." Then he corrected himself. "I imagine." He refined it. "I rather imagine." He made a snort, a vocalized breath that heard—but wasn't certain it liked—how upper-class he sounded. "Anyway," he continued, "it wouldn't even have occurred to me to keep the money all to myself." He made indirect reference to her cousin. "I mean, how could I enjoy it, knowing I had so much when they had so little?"

  If she understood his expressed loyalty, she didn't acknowledge it.

  They sat on the floor there in the dancing room, saying nothing for several minutes, just sitting together. He liked it. He brushed his lips across the top of her hair again. It was silky. Like the rest of her. It smelled lemony.

  When he started wanting to eat it, to lick her neck, to pull her backward and down, roll on top of her … bloody hell, at that point, he slid away and stood up. "He doesn't sound pleasant, this cousin of yours." He was contradicting what she'd told him earlier, that he would like Xavier.

  On the floor, she spun around on her skirts, pulling her knees against her chest. She arched her long, pretty neck to look up at him directly and said, "He tells good jokes," then laughed, shaking her head.

  She bent it again, down till all he could see was the interesting way she held her hair up. With two sticks. It fascinated him. He couldn't understand how her hair didn't fall down. It looked heavy enough. It was abundant, shining; a light, coppery red. Lots and lots of colorful hair. Pretty.

  She continued, "Someone said recently that he's changed. Not so funny, more solemn. But he wasn't when I last knew him. The day he inherited every last bit of family land, he was jubilant, the most miserably happy eighty-some-year-old man I've ever seen. Shortly after, by the way, he married a woman who was about my age now, a woman whom he'd adored for a dozen years. Can you imagine? That would make Vivian, let's see, about forty now. And I wish I could say she was a conniving, spoiled shrew who was only after his money, but the woman I met a dozen years ago was quite sweet. Shy. Obedient. People tell me she still is. The daughter of a rich Italian family, oh, with some title or other. Something high-and-mighty, since Xavier wouldn't have anything less. Very beautiful. She's with him still. She'll be there beside him the day he dies."

  Mick sympathized. "That must annoy the hell out of you."

  She laughed again, squeezing her knees. "Sometimes it does. It's as if one person, always one person, is dealt all the aces."

  "It only looks like aces from here, Win. You don't know. You can't see—you can't play his hand, only yours."

  She nodded. She was lost a moment, then looked at him. "Mick," she said. It was the first time she had ever used his given name, and it made his chest expand to hear it. It made him warm. "You are the most generous man I have ever met."

  He liked that even better. He smiled widely. Then told her, "I'm not generous. It's just—" He shrugged. "Why blame people when they can't help their nature?"

>   She contemplated that a moment. Then she suddenly reached her arms out and lay straight back, all the way onto the floor.

  "The ceiling is peeling," she said, then let out a long, delighted bubble of laughter, the sound of genuine humor.

  Looking down at her, Mick thought: He'd stood too quickly. If he were down there now, he'd have stretched out beside her.

  Before he could think of a way down to her, though, she reached up, holding her hands toward him, asking to be pulled to her feet.

  He drew her up—and she made a little shriek. "Oh," she said, "my stomach lifts when you move me sometimes." Quickly, "So can you waltz, do you think?"

  "No," he said gravely. "Or not like someone who's been doing it all his life. I need more practice." Dishonest again. Though not quite in the same formal manner as her way, he waltzed all the time at the Bull and Tun. He'd pretended not to know, just to spend the afternoon dancing with her.

  And he wanted to "move" her some more. He held out his hand.

  She put hers into it, and he took her into his arms in the proper manner, in the way she allowed. He began counting. "One, two, three. One, two, three." No music. Or just the music of the two them together, his whispering in her ear as he spun her around.

  She felt so loose in his arms, warm and smiling. Oh, he liked her like this: waltzing in the byways of one of life's finer moments, in one of its little contentments.

  They danced through supper, till their feet hurt. Sometimes they used her gramophone, but often, when it grogged slowly to silence, he took over. He made up waltzes, humming to her, loving the feel of her in his arms, her laughing and dancing with him.

  At the end, he made a ballocks of it, of course. Somehow their mouths got close. When he drew closer, her eyes widened. They filled with wonder—she was perpetually amazed by his interest. And confused by it: Her eyes filled with that funny fear of hers, too. She braced herself, ready for him to push her into it, but not ready to invite him in. Her posture shot a jab of frustration through him, with enough pinch to it to make him wince. Damn her anyway.

  "Winnie," he said. "I want to kiss you. I want to do a lot of things, and I've been about as forthright as a man gets about it. But it can't be all me every time. Me pushing, me seducing, me making you do what we both know you want to do anyway. I can't keep chasing you and chasing you, even if you like it, without your giving back, letting me know you want me. Own up to it."

  Her expression wouldn't. Her mouth grew into that tight pucker she could make. She didn't offer a word.

  "Do you or not?"

  "Do I what?"

  He'd start at the most basic. "Want me to kiss you," he said.

  She frowned down. She wanted him to.

  "Say it," he said. "Say, 'Kiss me.'"

  She opened her mouth, then closed it, shaking her head as if he'd asked her to fly up to the ceiling.

  He continued, torturing them both. "Say, 'Touch me, Mick.' Oh, God, Win, I'd like to hear you say it. Say, 'Hold me, undress me, touch me, come inside me—'"

  He had to look away. His mouth went dry saying the words. To the piano, he muttered a string of epithets under his breath, cursing himself, but her, too.

  It rallied her sizeable frustration and rage. Starchy again, she said, "Most gentlemen don't swear as you do in front of a lady."

  "Most gentlemen don't go through what I go through with you."

  "You go through nothing—"

  "I go through your tying my privates in knots, with you wanting to lather them up, me dodging, so as to keep you from shaving them off in a pique, trying to make me tame enough to get near." What a speech. He was half-sorry he said it.

  Then sorrier it hadn't been worse, when she said with sarcastic wonder, "Oh! Oh, yes!" With emphasis, "That was splendid! You are quite getting the hang of being a gentleman. Why don't you just stick your hand between my legs?"

  That did it. He leaned toward her. "Well, you'd never have gotten any part of man stuck there otherwise. You're terrified of sexual relations. Hell, you're foking terrified of life. Whatever brought you to this place, Miss Bollash," he said, "it killed off every speck of spontaneity and adventure in you, if you ever had any to begin with."

  She blinked, and the fight in her rose up. She came back with, "Spontaneity and adventure? What big words, Mr. Tremore, for randy. For being a rat who wants to climb up into the flounce and froufrou of every silk petticoat."

  He saw red. He wanted blood. "Not yours," he said. "I'd rather be gnawed to death, thank you, than have to deal with what's under your petticoat. Every bloody moment'd be anxious. I'd be ready to shoot myself, trying to tow a line you'd snap in my face every ten seconds."

  He'd gotten her, a direct hit. He wasn't proud of it the second it happened. Her face fell. He'd confirmed to sweet Winnie, who thought no man wanted her, that he didn't either.

  He took a breath, then said quickly, "That's a lie. Winnie Bollash, I want you so badly, you're making me say things I don't mean." Then that was wrong, too. "No, you aren't making me do anything. I'm wagging my own tongue. Winnie, I'm sensitive about the fancy ladies I've slept with. Oh, they all wanted me. For the day. I'm a good time, but nothing more. I'm tired of it." He took a breath, looked around, then stepped back and shoved his hands in his pockets. "You're right, I'm wrong. I wouldn't enjoy being a good time to you either in pretty short order. It would make me feel terrible." He shook his head, then looked at her.

  She was wide-eyed.

  "I'm going back downstairs now," he said. "Bloody hell," he muttered, exasperated. "If you need me, pull the bell cord. It'll ring below stairs, and I'll hear it. Me and your butler. Other than that, I'm staying away from you. That should suit everyone. Even me," he added.

  * * *

  Chapter 18

  « ^ »

  Edwina, Mick, Jeremy, and Emile Lamont awaited tea in her father's upstairs study. On the rare occasions when gentlemen called, she always felt it more gracious to speak to them in the room where her father had conferred with his colleagues. A room of large, heavy chairs and dark wood, of bookcases full of philology and linguistics as well as a bit of poetry and fiction that, she presumed, appealed to men. Moby-Dick. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Richard Burton's Arabian Nights. The most delicate accouterment of the room was a cut-crystal brandy decanter that sat in a polished niche with two matching snifters set upside down.

  Jeremy and Emile Lamont had arrived at a propitious time. She and Mick had been arguing over a bill that had come in the morning's post. It was from the tailor, for every piece of clothing Mick owned at present, and the bill was addressed to Miss Edwina Bollash.

  Mick, of course, had rolled his eyes. "I think we should take as much back as the tailor will allow. Those two fellows—" He referred to the Lamonts, and, though he left the thought unfinished, there was no doubt about his feelings for them. "We could end up having to pay for all this. They're up to something, Win."

  She only shook her head. "You can't take anything back," she told him. "It's all custom-made. Besides, the bill is a mistake, a simple mistake."

  And, of course, it was. These things happened.

  Though Winnie realized how much Mick's suspicions were coloring her own thinking by the magnitude of her relief when Jeremy Lamont said, "Dear, dear!" He turned the envelope over, frowning down at her address on it. "They confused the address to which they shipped the parcels with the address where they were to send the bill." He looked at her with what seemed genuine regret. "I am so sorry. What an embarrassing confusion. Here."

  He reached into his ever-deep pocket and took out the ever-full notecase. It was, as before, packed with bills.

  He counted out several, then looked up at Winnie. "And how much do we owe you, Miss Bollash, to date?"

  She glanced at Mick. Emile sat off to the side, Mick stood by the window, his hostility so dense in the air, it all but left a haze.

  He had greeted them at the door a few minutes before like an ogre guarding its lai
r, then had been actually offended by their astoundment.

  They kept looking at him now, then passing looks between each other. There was no doubt that Jeremy in particular was thrilled by Mick's sound and appearance.

  Winnie's own accounts were prepared. It was a matter of retrieving them from her sitting room, which she did. She hurried. Leaving the three of them alone in the study together felt chancy somehow.

  When she returned, all three men were exactly as she'd left them, as if in her absence they had not moved or spoken, but only glared at each other. Oh, dear, oh, dear. She presented the list of her fees and expenses. She'd computed them carefully, hour by hour, and was prepared to go over them. She'd been generous, if anything.

  Jeremy glanced at them, then, without question, counted out more crisp notes of British pounds sterling. He set a stack on them on the mantel, saying, "I've put in twenty pounds extra to cover anything that might come up till we're back. Emile and I are going to the coast for a few days, but we'll return the day before the ball. We'll bring the invitation then."

  He looked at Mick over his shoulder, then, putting a monocle to his eye, he studied the man in the center of the room, up then down, walking around him. To which Mick responded by folding his arms over his chest and looking faintly truculent.

  "I must say," Jeremy told her, "Emile's money is extremely well spent." He chuckled and glanced at his brother, a goad referring to the fact that the loser was to reimburse the winner of their bet.

  Emile remained in the far chair, though he studied Mick with no less interest, only less kindness. He said, "He hasn't done it yet, you know. Though I admit," he said grudgingly, "Miss Bollash has wrought a miracle. If I didn't know those clothes and that face, I'd say it was a different man."

  It. "He," she corrected. "He's in the clothes you picked for him. They're excellent—"

  "No, no," Jeremy insisted, "he greeted me at the door. His manner is completely different, and what I've heard him say sounds marvelous. You're brilliant, Miss Bollash."