by Laura London
The distant couch was looking very good to Merry, but her legs were saying, Don’t even try. She sank where she stood, her knees on one of the lion-dogs that leered from the blue Chinese carpet beneath her. “Social ruin means nothing to me. I grew up in a farming village in Virginia where my aunt and I were as ostracized as was Christianly possible. I walked in the country, sketched, practiced on the pianoforte, and did embroidery on linen. Aunt April kept a list in the back of our everyday book, and I’ll have you know that in my lifetime I’ve made two small shawls in white work; a raised work panel of David and Bathsheba; a set of eight needlepoint chair covers in flame stitch; four full-sized bed covers—one in candlewick embroidery, one in looped wool, two in crewel; three cross-stitch hand screens with birds; and six pincushions in red furnishing silk embroidered with clear and gold beads—of honeysuckle among ripe corn.”
“God in heaven! And I took you away from all that?”
Resolutely ignoring the interruption, staring at the wandering hair strands that had crept forward over her shoulders, she said, “I promise you, Devon, I’ll adapt perfectly to an isolated spinsterhood.”
“I’m not so certain,” he said. “My dear, with a rearing like yours it surprises me that you didn’t bend to Mother Earth and kiss the feet of the first pirate who offered to abduct you.”
She brought her fingers up to her temples, as if trying to hold together her afflicted headworks. Desperately she said, sotto voce, “I’ll kiss any portion—within reason—of the first person of any persuasion who hands me to a nightgown and a real bed.” Through coma-edged nausea she saw Devon stand, walk toward her, and lower his body cross-legged to the carpet before her. His palm gently lifted her drooping chin; his head had to tilt a little to gather her attention.
“Merry Wilding, I’m going to give you everything in this world you’ll ever want,” he said in a very soft tone. “Along with maybe a thing or two you don’t want. And first, love, that means my name.”
And in the end she had said yes. Well, perhaps not yes precisely. What she had really said was (irritably), “Oh, do what you want. You will anyway. When have you ever shown the faintest consideration for my opinion?” It was not a blush and simper behind her hand, but, then, this was not an ordinary marriage. And even as things stood between them, there was a part of her that wanted as much as he did to marry quickly before one or the other of them had time to change his mind.
They were wed in the pink-washed country villa of Lord Cathcart’s older brother, an Anglican bishop, strong-boned and gentle with narrow pale eyes. Devon allowed Merry to sit down for the ceremony, which was a mistake, because she fell asleep immediately.
Devon’s lips roused her in a lightly teasing passage over the soft flesh below her ear.
“Darling,” he murmured beguilingly, “wake just for a moment. You must say ‘I will.’ That’s all. Come, love. Two words only.”
But in another minute there were more words to repeat, and she mumbled them in a state of semiconsciousness. She cried like an infant when he woke her one more time to sign a paper, and through a maze of tears she heard Lord Cathcart’s brother say grimly that for this night’s work unfrocking was no more than he deserved.
Morning was a bright obscenity when she was brought yet again from the carriage. She had a quick impression of a playfully gabled roof line and warm, stone-embellished brick before she was carried inside and transferred to the custody of cooing, excited strangers—thankfully female—in fine linen aprons who called her “Your Grace” in loving tones and led her up a creaking oak staircase to a comfortable and elegant bedchamber hung in mint-green satin damask. Here she was helped to bathe by Mrs. Bea, an elderly lady in gray-blue silk who had an immensely soothing way about her. She had been, so one of the younger maidservants whispered to Merry, a nursery helper in the days of the duke’s own father, and head nurse to the duke himself. Master Devon he was then (though he was born a marquess, his father didn’t hold with calling little children by high-sounding titles). It was Mrs. Bea who had heard his first words—only nine months he’d been, fancy that! Looked right at the lace cap Mrs. Bea was about to set upon his little head and said, “Silly hat!” Pulled it right off his head too, he did!
The soft night-robe with blue satin ties and diamond shapes quilted into the sleeves was Merry’s own, a stranger since the night she had been dragged unconscious from the Guinevere. Reeling from the magic of that, she asked Mrs. Bea with some bemusement where Aunt April could be found and learned that she was spending this week in the London house with Devon’s mother, but without a doubt they would rush back to the country when they heard! Giddy, competing imaginings attacked her mind, demanding attention and interpretation as her head nested at last on her pillow. But the sweet scent of vanilla grass rose from the bed linen, and her senses flowed into one another slowly until no sensation was separate or comprehensible. And then, gratefully, she slept.
Merry woke to strong afternoon sunlight that made a bright, bold outline of the mullioned window upon the Hollie point curtains. The bed was still dressed in light summer hangings. Beyond the satinwood bedposts her drifting gaze picked out velvet flowers—blue, salmon, white, and pink—in a porcelain jug; muted sunbeams were glowing wetly in its underglaze-blue decoration. The furnishings were graceful of line and prettily inlaid with stained tulipwood, ivory, and ebony to form floral patterns as lustrous as lantern glass under the many coats of polished lacquer.
A serving maid appeared soon, her manner friendly, perhaps a little awed, but practical rather than servile as she showed Merry to the adjoining dressing room, where Merry’s own clothing from the Guinevere was clean and waiting. She ate rice soup on a tray, and a delicious turbot à la crème, with dressed cucumbers, stewed chestnuts, and a poor author’s pudding, which the maid told her laughingly was “a much lighter version of the publisher’s pudding—which could scarcely be made too rich!”
Merry dressed in a cameo-pink satin dress, never worn, that Aunt April had bought for her in New York. Crystal beads glimmered in the slashes of the Spanish sleeves. The full-length glass showed her that the reeded back of the gown swayed interestingly over her hips as she moved, though it seemed like the sort of thing there was hardly any point of making note of on a day like today. Watching her hair being dressed in pink ribbands, the vacant shock of the last two days began to recede like mist fading from a water meadow. The first real emotion she could isolate and label was guilt. It seemed grossly negligent not to be having hysterics. There were a thousand reasons to be furious with Devon; probability contended that he had married her only to further another scheme against Michael Granville—whose name she had come to hate like poison. She was an American patriot. What was she doing married to a British duke who spent the better part of his time on a pirate ship? Logic rebelled. But then logic had been rebelling since the moment Michael Granville had told her in New York that she was to sail to England. Obviously her logic could rebel until two Sundays came together for all anyone seemed to care.
All that seemed sure was that the trapped feeling that came from loving Devon had vanished. She felt a change in her body, a weightlessness; an almost chirrupy frivolity that belied her uncertain situation. The buoyant joy of her body belonged to an enchanted bride on her wedding morning; all it wanted was to go into Devon’s arms. What a poor helpless thing was her heart, captured in spite of all her effort to the contrary by this one man. She felt a jittery shyness about facing him. At the same time each moment that delayed her going to him was excruciatingly long.
By the time the last satin ribband was plaited into her curls, the back of her nose ached from the clustering pressure of suppressed tears, but her eyes looked splendidly stern and rather purposeful. No doubt that illusion owed itself to the expensive New York modiste and the maid’s clever hands. The mind behind the firm gaze was remarkable for nothing so much as its total want of purpose. Determined to face Devon with the brave mask intact, she asked directions of the maid, wh
o was touchingly misguided enough to smile thrillingly, as though there were some magical element of romance in a newlywed wife’s searching out her handsome, noble husband.
The corridors were long and twisted like the arteries in a badger’s lair. Golden-brown floors hummed an old wood melody under her feet, and their subtly warped surfaces didn’t seem to belong in a duke’s palace. There was nothing of a palace here, beyond what was certainly a priceless collection of European masterpieces grouped with uncalculated abandon on walls hung in buffed-yellow tabby. This was an old and well-loved home; the owner had spent lavishly and cleverly on charming decoration and informal comfort and not a halfpenny on pomp. If the house were not Devon’s, she would have been entranced. Exquisite ornaments begged for her study, faces gazed warmly at her from their gilt frames, and passing windows revealed a waltz of flashing color from the gardens. Happiness, Merry decided, could dwell here. It was a melancholy thought.
Rearming her nerves, she stepped into a wide, sunny apartment to find Devon alone, seated at a rosewood writing table, dumping blotting grit from a fresh letter back into an ornate silver sandbox. Rested, combed, and clean, his complexion fresh as this morning’s biscuit, wearing the intricate white cravat and meticulously tailored trousers that were the costume of men of his class, he still looked to her like a pirate, and it amazed her that his cheerfully doting servants could see him only as a tot in a cap, though older.
“I don’t know why I married you,” she said aloud, from the doorway. “It’s been nothing but ho-hum since.”
His glowing gaze swung quickly to her. After a pause in which he seemed to examine her face, and then the skillful allurements of her gown and elaborate hair arrangement, he said pleasantly, “I don’t know why you married me either. Why did you?”
Because I love you. “Because there didn’t seem to be any other way to get some sleep.” Merry stepped into the room. Her new perspective softened the flare of backlight from the windows, and she could see his face in better detail. Rested he was, but not relaxed and not manufacturing any defenses to hide it either.
He set down the paper; his fingers formed a long curve beside the sheet. “If the reason you married me was to protect your brother, I want you to know that it wasn’t necessary. I wouldn’t have hurt him.”
“Heavens, I realized that last night the moment I learned you were a gentleman.” The emphasis on the last word was soft and bitter, more bitter, perhaps, than she intended. He sat as he was, not moving, and she was not sure how she knew—though perhaps it was by some change in his expression perceptible only to a sense keener than eyesight—but she realized her words had stung him. Such a thing had never happened before. Or at least if it had, he had never allowed her to detect it. The other possibility was that it was not her words that had hurt, but her tone. How much remorse did he bear (if any) for abuses past? Plenty, she hoped, and that was the bitterness speaking again. There were two ways of handling this. The first was for her to figure out in some rational, organized fashion just what it was that she wished from him. The second was for her to stop thinking and obey each passing emotion until she had openly displayed every feeling to him.
She wandered farther into the room, trying to overcome the silence by seeming to study her surroundings, which made it particularly fortunate that this was an interesting room to study. Otherwise she might have looked a little foolish.
The apartment had an air about it of a hundred projects left uncompleted. A dissecting puzzle that was a map of England lay on a center table with the southern counties missing. Upon a canvas cloth on the window bench someone had begun transplanting pink and crimson geraniums from individual terra cotta pots to three glazed earthenware tubs; only one lovely arrangement was finished, and on the heap of rich earth tiny weeds were beginning to sprout like trees on some miniature hillock. Unclipped threads dangled from a stand of tambourwork. Periodicals were jumbled with books on a side table, and a scattering of handwritten recipes sat atop a commonplace book with a paste pot.
Without really deciding to she seemed to have stopped evolving plans. Plan A, Plan B, Subplan B in case Plan B went out the window, Alternate Plan C if Plans A and B failed… Why had she married him? Her first refusal had been so resolute; it was hard to understand why her resolution had wilted miserably. At the very least she wished she’d held out for a day or two.
Her back was to him as she uncorked the paste pot, opened the commonplace book to the oval of painted fabric that was a page marker, and began to daub paste on the back of a recipe with her ring finger. The recipe was for common Flemish tarts, and that made her smile. Close acquaintance with Raven and Will Saunders had permanently altered the tone of her mind.
“Will my aunt come today?” she asked, flipping the recipe on its back and pressing it onto an empty page.
“Tomorrow.”
“And your mother also?”
“Also.”
Merry drew from the basket a small scissors with brass blades shaped like a stork’s bill and began to trim the ragged edge of another recipe. “What sort of a person is she?”
“My mother? A grubby urchin. She spends most of her time pulling roots and earth from one pot and squashing them into another. When I was a child and wanted to find her, I went through the house following the trail of humus.”
Surprised by the image, she pasted in that recipe and had started to trim a third when his voice came to her again.
“Merry… I love you.”
One of the scissor blades sliced into her finger. She released the finger grips in a sudden movement, and the scissors fell, clanging and open-spread on the table. Dark scarlet drops from her bleeding finger spattered the white pages like red petals strewn on virgin snow.
“Fiddlesticks!” Her heartbeat was heady, the rhythm of a folk drum. “You didn’t love me yesterday, when you thought I was connected to—you know who. Then you tied me up.”
There was a faintly apologetic pause. Then he said, “Being angry at someone isn’t the same thing as not loving them.”
The wounded finger curled tightly into her fist. “You’re trivializing what you did to me. People in love don’t mistreat each other.”
His voice, coming to her over her shoulder, was webbed with strain. “You have a few things to learn about love if that’s what you believe. It’s a saber with two edges, Merry. I could have borne your being Granville’s mistress. What I couldn’t stand was the thought that while you were in my arms you might have been acting.”
In a way, albeit unwillingly, that was something she could understand. Cat’s kiss, with its careful ambiguities, had taught her that much. “Why would you rather trust in dockside gossip than me?”
“Damnation, Merry, can’t you see you were the last person I had any motivation to believe in? I wanted to believe you were guilty, so I’d have an excuse not to let you go. Though there was part of me that always knew you were the person you seemed.” Then, quietly, “I was almost able to let you go once, after you were sick on St. Elise, because I had so much saved-over guilt.”
“By then I wanted to stay,” she said, staring down at her fists.
“I know. But why? You were isolated, dependent, stripped of everything familiar…” The brittle voice stopped, as though dissatisfied with its own urgency. When he began to speak again, his voice was calmer. “You knew I wanted you. How much of your response to me was because you were afraid of what might become of you if you refused to indulge me?”
She would have spoken then, but he intercepted the words by saying gently, “No, love, you don’t know, and neither do I. There isn’t any way to be sure. For that, at the very least, I had to set you free. As restitution it wasn’t too impressive, I know—I was trying to listen to some remnant sense of justice.”
“Some remnant sense of justice,” she repeated, as though it were worthy of being mulled over. “That phrase has a certain something. And it’s particularly eloquent when applied to you.” She turned and found he was s
tanding beside the desk, his expression open as she had never seen it before in the soft interior shadows. “A remnant sense of justice. It lies there withered like a Montgolfier balloon. If only we could inflate it or something, so you could have a real conscience instead of a useless scrap to toy with when it suits you.”
Just outside the window a breeze tossed the crown leaves of a walnut tree, and their shadows drifted over his face. “You don’t have to retreat into symbolism; I’m not Rand Morgan. You want me to understand that you find my apologies vacuous and self-serving.”
“I find your apologies thinner than skimmed whey!” she said hotly. “That night in my bedroom you attacked me.”
He wondered how many years would pass before he could call up that memory without being sick at heart from it. Very gently he said, “I can only hope that with time I’ll be able to fill you so totally with my love that you will be able to shed the sting of my abuses.”
“And?”
“And I’d see my hands cut off before I’d hurt you again. Ever.” The corners of his eyes began to play with a smile. “Love, have a care. You’re coming close to listening to an apology.”
If a hundred men were to smile at her, not one could affect her as deeply as the barest glimmer of suppressed mirth-light in Devon’s eyes. The muscles around her mouth begged her to respond. Thank heavens her wrists remembered the rope he had put around them yesterday.
“Listening to isn’t the same as accepting.” Once the words were out, they sounded childish, which was a disappointment. One always kept hoping one would be able to outgrow the occasional clumsy remark. Especially at moments like these. Gathering back her retreating dignity, she said, “You seem to be thinking far ahead of me, so I have a question. Just what is it you want?”
Leaves rippled beyond the muting window glass; as gentle was his gaze, holding her as he said, “I want to wake each morning with your breath on my shoulder. I want to sit talking to you before the fire on rainy days.” Softly, “I want to sleep with your back curled into me, and your breasts under my palm.”
