by C F Dunn
“Tell you? I don’t need to; you were in my head.” Voices below echoed up the stairwell as people gathered.
“Not here,” I cautioned. She withdrew her arm and followed me into my room. My going-away outfit lay spread-eagled on my bed. I winced; Elena and Beth had left an additional item of clothing I hadn’t expected and didn’t want Maggie to see. I scooped it up and hid it under the jacket.
“You were in my head,” she repeated, as if I had committed a violation. “You had no right to be there. I won’t let you in again.”
“Then don’t give me a reason to,” I replied brusquely. “I have to get changed.” I started undoing the long row of silk-covered buttons that stretched like my spine all the way up my back, and hoped she would take the hint and leave. She didn’t.
“I was ill; I can see that now. Working with Staahl, seeing you with my grandfather, my grandmother’s death – pushed me too far. But I’m not ill now. I didn’t like you then; I don’t like you now.”
I gave up struggling with the buttons. “That’s fine by me, as long as you get one thing straight: granddaughter or not, if you do anything – anything – to harm Matthew or your family, you won’t have the protection of insanity to stop me next time, believe me.”
She drew herself up, adding inches to her height as she leered over me. “Oh, I do believe you. I wondered how long it would take for you to show your true colours. Do you really think he will believe you over his own granddaughter, his flesh and blood? You know nothing about us, nothing about what we have been through together. I only hope that one day he sees you for what you are – a jumped up gold-digger out for anything she can get. How long will you give it – six months, a year – before you file for divorce? I bet he didn’t get you to sign a pre-nup, did he? I told him he should. I said that he was bringing an unknown into the family, a Trojan Horse.” There was no confusion in the air around her. Even if I hadn’t been able to read the colours, I would have felt her hate as manifestly as flesh-eating ants. How could she do the job she did so effectively and yet get me so wrong?
This was getting tedious. I managed a button, then the next. “Believe me? Matthew doesn’t need to believe me. He knows me, Maggie, and he knows I will do nothing to hurt him and everything to protect him. Will you?”
She stepped forwards suddenly, catching me off balance against the side of the bed. I put out a hand to steady myself as she leaned towards me. “Will I what?” she all but spat.
I shoved past her. “Will you protect him, or is your spite so potent that it overrides all else, including his happiness? I don’t know what you think you’ll gain from all this, but Matthew and I are married now. It was what Ellen anticipated and accepted. There’s no point you holding this grudge any more; it’s too late.”
Giggly laughter and the sound of running feet reverberated down the corridor. Maggie brought her face close to mine until all I could see was her doll-smooth skin and the black pits of her eyes.
“It’s never too late,” she said and left in a hiss of silk as the twins flung into my room.
“Look what we have!” they shouted in unison, bouncing onto the bed and waving their presents for me to admire, but all I could see was the loathing in her face and hear the threat behind her words echoing in their laughter.
CHAPTER
19
Point of Fire
Many are the stars I see
But in my heart no star but thee.
From a seventeenth-century posy ring
“I could have taken you anywhere in the world,” Matthew stated, “and yet you wanted to come here.”
I joined him by the wall of glass that stretched across the entire side of the house. “Yes,” I said simply. He lifted his arm and I leant against him and together we watched the last of the sun illuminate the still-white shoulders of the highest peaks. “We can go anywhere we want to in the future, Matthew, but we needed to be here at the cabin today. You owe me,” I reminded him, bending my head back and looking at him upside down.
“Yes, I do,” he said softly, “in more ways than one.”
“How did you explain the broken window to Henry?”
“I didn’t need to. He didn’t ask and I didn’t explain. It cost me a small fortune to have replaced.” He smiled a little guiltily, but I thought it wasn’t so much at the memory of the shattered glass, but what had prompted him to smash his fist into it in the first place. The window wasn’t the only thing that needed mending the last time we had been at the cabin together. The revelation that he was still married almost caused a rift between us that nothing would have healed.
He rested his chin on the top of my head. “Talking of breakages, Maggie left in a foul mood. Whatever happened to the truce between you?”
“You did. It’s what results when a treaty is based on an unequal peace – it breaks.” It had been a perfect day which even Maggie hadn’t managed to spoil because the lines of demarcation had been made clear, and I found a strange security in that. I pushed back against him. “Maggie can wait. By the way, I have a wedding gift for you, but I’ve left it back home.”
“That’s a coincidence, because I have one for you.” I caressed the side of his face, and he nuzzled my palm, then kissed each fingertip in turn.
“It’s been a wonderful day, Matthew, thank you.”
“You made it so,” he said, and what I had taken to be a reflection against his dark pupils was nothing of the sort, his eyes alight with an inner fire. He leaned close, a smile touching his lips, his dulcet voice low. “Come lie with me, and be my love, and I forever thine…”
It was as if I looked at him properly for the very first time. Not the surreptitious, furtive glances I gave him when we first met, nor the remorse-tinged looks when I learned of his wife. Now when I saw him the veil of guilt had been replaced by unadorned love and desire, no longer fettered by the assumptions and preconceptions we placed upon ourselves. The effect of his closeness raised a storm in my blood that I wanted him to tame. Flecks of radiating light appeared to move and dance within the intense indigo of his eyes that had fascinated me from the moment I met him – an ocean of blue circled with black. Through them, I could watch his changing moods as clearly as I could read the colours of his heart and, when he looked at me in the way he did now, I became lost as I charted the tiny flames. And it seemed to me that they were real, not an illusion, but infinitesimal lights, the spark of flint striking stone. I felt their pull, compelling as the silken thread that bound us soul by soul, as strong as steel and incorruptible as gold. Had I wanted to, I could not have resisted him. I leaned against his strength, smelling the mountains in the scent of his skin, saying his name, feeling the shape of it on my lips, barely able to breathe. Heat swelled and his eyes flared bright for the briefest moment and then the lightest touch, a sable brush across the surface of my skin. His lips traced the line of my neck to the dip at the base of my throat, slow kisses, a lingering warmth where his mouth touched. Fingers echoed, pushing back the silk of my top, feeling it slide from my arms, leaving me exposed to his gaze.
He pulled his shirt over his head, leaving his hair in soft sheaves I smoothed with my fingers. His skin on mine, my breath came quicker now, little breaths as hands skimmed, negotiating curves, and I found the silvered scar on his shoulder, feeding tiny butterfly kisses with my lips, feeling him shudder. Mapping his chest over taut muscles until his hand joined mine and lifted it to his mouth, kissing deep into the palm, inhaling – his eyes closed – a moment in time before he found my lips and drew their softness into his own. There was no Guy and I had no past, but the present only, and my future that lay in him. For a moment his eyes held me with soft fire and I felt it within me, beyond describing, beyond this frail body of mine – honeyed heat and flames – and any moment without him would be too long. It was not in the mere act, but in the oneness we made together, flowing between us in sinuous waves lapping and undulating in time with our bodies, fluid until we were one movement, one entity, on
e whole.
At last we were still and at peace. We lay very close facing each other, his hand resting on my waist and mine lightly against his chest, binding us, the fulfilment of our hope more than the realization of desire. Gradually, as my breathing eased and my body cooled, I became aware that he smiled at me. “I’ve never felt anything like that before,” I confessed, feeling a little self-conscious.
He drew me to him and I warmed immediately at his touch. “Neither have I,” he sighed, in a mixture of contentment and release.
Throughout the night he made love to me with tenderness and care – long and slow and sensual, leaving my languid body liquid to his touch, and each touch a point of fire. By dawn I could no longer resist sleep and he sang softly as he held me, a sweet song of love and longing from his youth.
I woke when a sharp shaft of sunlight stung my eyelids. I mumbled recriminations and turned my head before I remembered where we were. Matthew lifted a hand to shade my face and I curled closer to him, his heart beating steadily beneath me.
“‘Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?’”
He chided the sun and kissed my eyelids awake.
I smiled, sleepily content. “It’s odd to think Donne did this all that time ago.” I turned in his arms so that I could look at him.
“Surprisingly little has changed, or perhaps it’s not so surprising – people are fundamentally the same, aren’t they?”
“I suppose they are. On which note, don’t you get bored waiting for me to wake up?”
“How could I after years of being alone? I like to watch you, and besides, I have plenty to think about.”
I smoothed the fair hair on his arm and he tightened his hold on me. “Don’t you miss being able to sleep?”
“Not now, no. I did at first, I have to admit; it’s such a basic part of humanity, and not sleeping or talking in terms of sleep – ‘I’m exhausted’, ‘time to hit the sack’, ‘I’m sick and tired’, you know the sort of thing – was strange. I had to be careful to begin with, when it began to be noticed and commented on, but then I learned to imitate it, and now I can appear asleep, even if I’m not.”
I thought of all the times we had spent in the same bed, together yet worlds apart. “I’ve never seen you do that.”
“No, there’s been no reason, but I can put myself into a sort of torpor which is quite convincing. I just have to remember to close my eyes or it gives the game away.”
I imagined him asleep, waking with me, so normal as to be almost mundane, yet wholly beyond our reach. It didn’t matter any more. What I had was more than I could have hoped for, and what we had was as near normality as we could get, and that was close enough for me.
“I always wanted to fall asleep with someone and to wake by them. There’s that sense of security in it – permanency, almost.”
A fleeting sadness escaped from him before he could disguise it. “I’m sorry; I could have pretended to be asleep for you, but now that you know…”
I put my finger against his lips. “I didn’t mean you.”
“Guy?”
I pulled a face. “Yes,” I said shortly, but I didn’t want him in bed with us, and even the mention of his name made me feel dirty. I unwrapped Matthew’s arms from around me and sat up. “I’m going to have a bath.”
The bath took an age to fill. I let it run as I did my teeth, and didn’t hear him over the flowing water, until he gathered my hair and kissed my neck. “Would you mind if I join you?” I felt myself blush unnecessarily. His brow gathered into a frown. “If you would prefer to be alone…” He looked so serious over something so trivial that I had to laugh.
“No, of course not,” I said and held out my hand to him.
At first I thought nothing of it, but as he dried me with intense focus, I saw he did so with more than a lover’s consideration. “Matthew, you haven’t hurt me.”
Denim eyes met mine. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, positive. No bruises – nothing for which to reproach yourself.”
He touched the tips of his fingers to the rise of my breast. “It’s just that it can be difficult to judge, especially when it’s been a long time…” He wasn’t usually this tongue-tied, but as he stood there in front of me, he was young again, and unsure, and the years fell away from him like the mercurial drops of water from his skin. I wondered if he had been like this with Ellen on their wedding night and found myself swimming with a mixture of curiosity and jealousy.
“Did you ever hurt Ellen?”
At the mention of her name, he blinked once, as if retrieving a memory. “No, not that I’m aware of, never.”
“Then why do you think you might have hurt me now?” I shivered as my skin cooled, and he whipped a soft, dry towel from where it hung warming and wound it around my shoulders. He hadn’t answered me. “Well?”
He rubbed my arms briskly through the towel. “There, you’re dry now, let’s get you warm.”
When he saw that I wanted an answer, he shook his head in resignation. “I was different with Ellen. I really don’t want to talk about it; please, don’t ask me.”
That did it. Don’t give a historian a tantalizing snippet of information and tell her to forget it. Like any unanswered question, I found the ambiguity both intriguing and disquieting. What did he mean he was different with her: different good, bad – what? I let my silence do the talking and walked through to the bedroom. He followed, uncertainty seeping in an amber vapour. “It’s history now, Emma. All that matters is what we have – our present, our future.”
From the chest of drawers in the bedroom, I rummaged for matching underwear. “You say you don’t want to tell me, yet you keep letting little morsels slip, which is as good as a flashing neon sign saying, ‘ask me’.”
“I don’t!” he objected. “Do I?”
“In so many words, or in what you don’t say or in how you don’t say it, yes, you do. I wouldn’t mind so much but it’s obviously something that’s bothering you and it’s niggling away like mad at me.”
He ran his hand through his drying hair, giving it a tousled, just-out-of-bed look. “You must be hungry…”
“Not that hungry.”
I struggled with unfamiliar hooks on my clothes and he came over to help me, letting his hands rest briefly on my shoulders. “Before we married, Ellen and I never discussed sex and had done nothing more than kiss and hold hands – all very tame by today’s standards. It didn’t surprise me; that level of restraint was more acceptable then. Now I think that it would appear unusual – odd even – not to show more interest. I accepted her moderation as modesty and, of course, I would never have expected her to sleep with me before we married. When we did marry, I thought that she just needed time to get used to the idea of lovemaking, and then, when I returned from the war, that she needed time to adjust to me being home and unchanged. But, as the years went on and our marriage survived, I began to wonder if it was me and I was the problem.”
I twisted to look at him. “In what way?”
“I thought I might be too much for her; too – oh, I don’t know, energetic I suppose you could say – although I did restrain myself as far as I could. Then I thought that perhaps it was because I was different, and that she saw something I didn’t, something that frightened her.”
I detected decades of anxiety in the note of self-doubt, the strain in his eyes, and the way he didn’t meet mine, and I thought my heart would break for him because in that one relationship he had forged, a brittle fissure of doubt ran.
“My darling, it wasn’t you; there is nothing wrong with you.”
“There must have been…”
“No, I promise you, Ellen didn’t see you as a monster. She didn’t think you were wrong. She told me that she had never been that interested in sex and always thought that she must have been a disappointment. It seems that you both believed you had failed each other in th
at respect.”
He laughed hoarsely. “A little honesty might have gone a long way to healing those wounds. I didn’t want to put her in a difficult position by talking about it and…”
“… she wouldn’t have known where to start,” I finished.
He sucked in his cheeks. “Apparently not.”
“Anyway, as you said, that’s history and I think that you’re neither a monster nor… how did you put it? Oh yes, nor are you too energetic, though I have to say that last night was a bit of an eye-opener.”
His guarded look crept back again. “In what way?”
“I’m not sure if I can say…”
“Emma! Don’t be coy now – what happened to honesty?”
“All right.” I thought about how I was going to phrase the next bit. “Let’s just say that I have never experienced anything like it before.”
“Oh, I see. I think.” He looked away, chewing his lip, then back at me, with an anxious frown. “Is that a problem?”
“No, not at all; it was just a surprise. But a very pleasant one,” I made certain to add.
He relaxed into a grin, his eyes warming. “I’m relieved to hear it.” He cradled my face in his hands, searching. “I’ve waited a lifetime to find you.”
I turned my head to kiss his palm, and held it with my own against my cheek. “And now you’ve found me.”
“And now I’ve found you,” he echoed, voice softening until it became no more than a whisper. “My beloved, my wife.”
“That’s better.” Matthew stretched out in the sun, not bothering to shade his eyes against the glare. “We both needed some of this.” We had found a warm spot sheltered from the mountain breezes. Colder by degrees than by the sea, the clear air tingled up here among the pines and hardier trees, and I relished each breath I drew.
“You needed to recharge your batteries,” I agreed. “At least you don’t get freckles.” I held up my arms, ruefully noting that, despite the layers of sun cream he had helped me to apply, my freckles were beginning to join up as their fainter little cousins came to join the party.
