***
Claire, for all her weariness, wished to get out of the house. The day was splendid and warm, and a hearty walk might allow her the opportunity to sort out everything she saw and heard since last night’s ball. Camille seemed utterly unlike the quiet, reclusive girl she was charged to tutor; she was confident and clever, and perfectly pleased to display her talents at her brother’s expense.
And then there was that brother, with talents of his own. Without a word, or scarcely a touch, he managed to let Claire know he desired her as much as she desired him and it was only left to wonder what he intended to do about it. Did she not already disgrace herself by reaching out to him as Camille had, exploring his face and hair without any thought to propriety? Did she not already dare to waltz with him, before their provincial audience? And how could she justify her continued presence in his home? When she arrived as a friend of his sister, it was quite respectable. Now it seemed somewhat injudicious.
Instead of wandering down to the brook, as was her habit, Claire looked up the rise towards the ruins of Brook Hall and recalled the evening when she thought it all aflame. That night, when she wished to keep a stranger far from the cottage, she sent him up this way and only now appreciated that he would not have gone far. His surprise and dismay this morning, over his sister’s familiarity with the lake, made it quite clear he did not venture to this place at all.
It seemed rather strange. Claire knew something about bad memories and had long ago resolved that they are best banished by revisiting the scene and rewriting it to one’s advantage, rather than remaining fearful of what they might conjure. And Lord Wentworth still lived in the shadow of his family’s vast home, purposely ignoring it as if he could erase all that happened there—good and bad.
But Claire did not share that history and was curious about this, as she was with all things. If she went to the site she would have an additional advantage in her quest for solitude, for she knew Lord Wentworth would never follow her there.
The hill was fairly steep and the walk more arduous in the warm sun. But as she had just proclaimed herself a lady who desired exercise, stubborn resolution urged her forward, until the towers of the great house came into view. She did not know what she expected, but it most certainly was not this scene of grace and beauty.
The house had not been completely destroyed, contrary to what she had heard, and some parts of it remained intact. Twenty years ago, the task of rebuilding might not have been so onerous, but now birds and small animals had found shelter here, and seasons of rain and sun damaged the proud, still-standing walls. Ivy grew all over, softening blunt surfaces, and moss found anchorage, as it was wont to do in graveyards and abandoned ruins. As for that, the site was suitably solemn, for more people than Lord and Lady Wentworth had lost their lives in the fire. If John Mandeville and others did not lose their lives, they certainly lost their livelihood and would look elsewhere for employment.
As Claire came closer, she realized someone still cared for this place, for nature had not entirely usurped the property. The hedge looked recently clipped and a tree had been sectioned for firewood. Flowers bloomed in riotous disarray but were in fact planted in neat rows. A row of quince, the acid of which was necessary for preserving fruits through the winter, had been trimmed back and a wooden ladder leaned against one gnarled trunk. Claire thought about the excellent preserves she enjoyed for breakfast and tea at Brookside Cottage, and wondered if the gardeners came here at Mrs. Clark’s bidding, and brought her orchard fruit from what would otherwise be a wilderness.
Beyond the house, between a pair of pillars, sunlight shimmered across the placid surface of a lake. As Claire approached, several turtles ducked into the water and ducks called out their dismay at her intrusion. A squirrel dashed out of an overturned rowboat, between oars that were safely tucked beneath it.
Here is where Camille came with her lover, unknown to her brother. Like Claire, she could safely guess that Wentworth would never discover them here. And as all the staff seemed to adore her, Claire doubted they would reveal her secret to her protective brother. Camille would not have revealed the secret to Claire, either, but Claire accepted that. A lady need never reveal her hand, no matter the possibilities that lay within the cards.
For all the beauty and bounty of the land, there was great sadness here—not only for the tragedy of nearly twenty years before, but for a home in which no one would ever live and lawns on which no children would ever run with their hoops. Lord Wentworth had abandoned this place, preferring to linger on the past than hope for the future.
Claire settled herself on the grass, spread her skirts around her, and closed her eyes, endeavoring to see the world as Camille did. And it was still a fine world, full of sound and sensation, perceived with a heightened sensitivity. Thus it was that Claire sensed Wentworth’s footsteps, though they were nothing more than gentle vibrations on the fertile earth. She waited to speak until his shadow fell on her back and shoulders.
“I thought you never came to this place, my lord,” she said, her eyes still shuttered. The scent of bay rum wafted on the slight breeze and made her think of far, exotic places.
“I rarely have, Lady Claire. There is nothing but bad memories here and the sense of greatest loss,” he said. His voice came closer and since she did not hear additional footsteps, she knew he crouched beside her. Then she heard a thump on the ground and knew he sat at her level, very close by.
“But they are not all bad memories, surely? Your family has lived here for generations, and much joy could cast out the greatest pain.”
“You speak knowingly, Claire. But you will admit my experience is far more damning, the pain more enduring.”
She opened her eyes and was startled to see his face directly in her sight, and very close. He did not look very righteous, for all his apparent pride in enduring the greater grief, and this was good. For she was already bored with this business.
“How dare you presume to measure the grief of others, Lord Wentworth?” Her voice was firm, though she spoke in barely more than a whisper. “I have also endured great sadness and disappointment in my life, and it remains with me every day I continue to live while others do not. And yet, I have nothing near your excuse.”
“I make no excuses,” he frowned.
“And that is precisely the problem. One ought to make excuses when a child is at fault. And why was it your responsibility to see to the grates, like some paid servant? I am not above taking care of the chores, but your task that night could not have been something to which you were accustomed. And you were a child,” she said, realizing she repeated herself.
He realized it as well. “So you have said.”
She nodded, hoping to make it entirely clear that was the essential point.
But he didn’t seem convinced of it, and she knew at once the fault in reason was her own. Or perhaps, more accurately, reason had nothing to do with it. She leaned over the very small distance that still separated them, and kissed him.
The kiss was even better than the one they shared by the brook. For not only did they know each other longer, but Claire already lived this moment in her dreams and knew she would welcome it when it came in her waking hours.
It was quite as she hoped it would be.
Their bodies still apart, only their lips touched, and savored the other with a hunger one usually reserved for rare treats. That is, while one was tempted to consume one’s fill, one knew the moment of pleasure might be fleeting. To go slower was to prolong the delights of the senses.
Claire understood this but tried not to think too hard about what was happening. Thus, she uttered a little cry of surprise when Wentworth pulled her onto his lap and his arms went around her body. She had wondered before about his experience, but he seemed to know precisely what to do. This, too, was as she hoped it would be.
“My lord,” she
sighed, giving herself up to mindless pleasure.
“Max. You must call me Max,” he murmured between kisses. One of his hands cupped her breast and he bowed his head to caress the warm skin at her neckline with his tongue.
Claire was impatient for more, and not just to satisfy her own desire. With one trembling hand, she tugged at his cravat, and loosened it enough to finger the buttons on his shirt. She felt him stiffen and shift beneath her.
“No, Claire. I do not think this is what you want, not in the light of day,” he said, and she heard the anxiety in his voice.
“I have spent many years telling myself I did not want this again, that I would never be with another man after my husband. But here we are, quite unaccountably, and I find there is nothing I desire more, and no one I desire more than you.”
Max dropped his arms and braced himself on the grass. “You loved him very much, of course.” He spoke as one who is long accustomed to defeat.
Claire also knew something of defeat, of being brutalized both physically and emotionally. Max, in his doubts about himself, unintentionally reminded her of the doubts she long harbored about herself and would have preferred to forget. Glastonbury disparaged her inexperienced attempts at lovemaking, her slender body, her every bruise and blemish.
“I thought I did,” she said, as her finger traced the fine line of his collarbone. “But how quickly love can turn to fear and even to contempt. My husband was considered an ideal match, a handsome man respected for his intelligence and wealth, who had everything to offer a young wife who wished to take her place in society. A lady of good family—a girl, really—who was admired for her passing good looks and agreeable character, would be obedient enough to be molded into a perfect Lady Glastonbury. No one doubted the brilliance of this match.”
“But yourself,” Max murmured.
“If only I had. But I was that girl of agreeable character, who saw nothing but good in Glastonbury, and was perhaps overly swayed by some lovely jewels and the grandeur of Glaston House.” Claire paused as he glanced up towards his great ruin of a home. “The diamonds and the house were real enough, but everything else proved to be an illusion. I realized that on the night we married.”
Max returned his gaze to her and she felt his body tense. “You need not tell me this, Claire. What goes on in a man’s bedroom is no business of . . .”
She put a finger to his lips, preventing him from saying something he might later regret. His wife’s next lover, perhaps? Her next husband? Claire could not yet bring herself to hope.
“It is your business, Max,” she insisted, “because it is part of what I am. I am a woman scorned by her husband, taunted for being untutored in the arts of lovemaking, and beaten for being unable to bring him to satisfaction.”
He said nothing, but she felt his hand fall away from her and the earthy vibration when his fist hit the ground. Max was a man of strong passions, too, she realized, but knew his strength would never be used against her.
“I would kill him,” he said tightly.
“He is dead, my dear,” Claire said. “And I am a wiser woman for the experience. When I was married to Glastonbury, I was told by everyone that I made a good match, and so I no longer trusted myself. But in time I came to see that there is no one I can trust but myself.”
For several moments they sat in silence, with nothing but the cry of a distant peacock to pierce the still air. But then, equally startling, came the sound of Max’s laughter.
“And so you are willing to risk everything on a man about whom no one will say that you have made a good match?” he asked. She said nothing, realizing the truth of it, and finding nothing amusing in the admission. “There are many who say I am a murderer. But I am somehow less troubled by that than my fear that once you see the pathetic scarred body before you, you will hold me in contempt and revulsion.”
Claire leaned slightly away from him, feeling nothing of what he feared, but only pain for what he continued to endure. Max mistook her withdrawal and quickly retraced his words.
“But, if nothing else, you can trust me,” he promised. “I would not hurt you for all the world. You must know that.”
And somehow she did. She accepted his vow as sacred, uttered in a field of wildflowers, beneath the eye of the bright sun.
Claire did not answer, at least not in words. She shifted her legs so that they straddled him, and the only way he could continue to balance them both was to remain braced on his hands. Claire claimed her advantage and worked on his shirt until she could see what he so reluctantly revealed.
“Claire,” he protested one last time. And then she put a finger on his lips, and opened her eyes.
She felt pity, to be sure, but it was nothing to the searing pain in her heart, now knowing what he had endured as a child. She blinked back tears, and tried to look dispassionately at the scars that puckered small patches of skin on his chest and left faint white lines like a careless spider’s web. One nipple was nearly gone and a small rectangular area over his heart still looked raw and shiny, even after all these years. Here, in contrast to the sprinkling of dark hair that grew across his torso, the skin was naked and probably would always be so.
“Now your eyes see what can never be healed,” he said slowly, and his eyes were closed as if he would not bear the sight himself.
Claire was not a surgeon, but she knew something of healing. She pulled his shirt down his arms to where his hands were pressed into the grass and, while doing so, brought her lips to his wounded flesh.
“Claire,” he protested again, but she knew there was little he could or would do about it. His hands were tangled in the white linen, nearly tied to each other.
His skin was warm and tasted of salt and his bay rum soap. Her tongue felt the contours her fingers had not, and lingered on every slight ridge of skin and whorl of hair. One hand, running a separate course, ran over the muscles he managed to hide so well, but which revealed dedication to sport and physical activity. He was a man who did not spend as much time in his library as he professed.
“You can open your eyes now, my lord,” she said.
He said nothing for what seemed like an eternity. And then he surprised her with his words. “I am afraid that if I do, I will discover I am dreaming.”
“Does this truly feel like a dream?” Claire asked, and kissed him on the lips. His burned with the heat of his body.
“It cannot be anything else,” he said.
“I am sorry I have not been able to convince you of the fact that this is all real. That I am here, with you, on your beautiful lawn, on your even more beautiful body.”
He laughed, and she heard no humor in it.
“Oh, yes. As beautiful as a parched patch of earth, disfigured and unnatural, and defining no one’s vision of what is desirable.”
“You insult me, then,” Claire said, frustrated. She did not know what else she could do to seduce this man who wrongly overlooked his own assets. “Do you think me an innocent, who takes pleasure in what she sees because she has not seen anything else?”
“You are thinking of my sister, then,” he said, opening his eyes.
“No, I am thinking of no one but you and me, sitting alone in the grass while you are half undressed and I am sitting on your lap, quite aware that you are not indifferent to that fact.” She shifted, for emphasis, and got the response she desired. “This has only to do with us.”
He made a noise low in his throat and pushed her down into the grass. He ripped off his shirt and was on her in a moment, pulling up her grass-stained skirts and kissing her until she no longer could speak any words of reason. But then, she had no desire to do so.
***
Max lay on the soft, gentle earth, where he had once played with his toys and learned to ride his pony, Rembrandt. His father presented him with the pony one fine day, but
his mother named the little fellow, reflecting how the animal’s dark shades reminded her of the Dutch master. Later that day, she showed him several of the painter’s works in Brook Hall, including one of a very common-looking man who was Rembrandt himself. Max did not truly see the connection between his brown and black pony and a portrait of a man in an odd cap, but he understood that his mother appreciated beautiful things.
She thought her paintings and china clocks quite beautiful, and by the way she looked at Max’s father, he knew she thought him beautiful as well. She called Camille her beautiful, fair girl, and laughed at Max when he asked if he was beautiful, too.
“Of course you are,” she said as she hugged him. “Those we love are most beautiful in our eyes.”
Now Max looked down at the woman who slept against his bare chest, one of her hands cupped over his damaged nipple. He pulled his shirt over her pink shoulder, guessing she did not know what it was like to be burned by the sun, and feeling a need to protect her from all harm. It was, quite unexpectedly, a feeling so different from what he felt towards his sister, that he was nearly crushed by the enormity of it.
She told him he was beautiful. It was truly absurd, for he knew beauty when he saw it.
And here she was, with her glorious hair tangled all around her head, and her dark eyelashes casting crescent shadows on her cheeks. Her nose did not have the pertness of other women he had known, but was one of distinction, a little long and slightly off-centered. Perhaps she had had an accident. Or perhaps that bastard Glastonbury flattened it for her.
Whatever else went on between them—and it pained him to think of it—he now knew she never pleased Glastonbury as a wife might be tempted to do. For, though Claire initially startled him with her brazenness, when it came to what truly mattered, she responded to him with a sweet sense of discovery. It was no wonder she slept beside him, utterly spent. For, having made that discovery, she was quite willing to continue her journey of exploration.
Sharon Sobel Page 11
