Thurston House (1983)

by Steel, Danielle

  But at Christmastime, Jeremiah drew the line. Camille told him in November that she wanted to give a huge ball then, for six or seven hundred people, the biggest ball ever given in San Francisco, she cheerfully said, and he looked at her and shook his head.

  No.

  Why not? Fury walked slowly into her eyes. She was Mrs. Jeremiah Thurston, and she wanted everything that went with it.

  We're going to Napa for Christmas. Her mother wasn't better yet, and her father didn't think they should come to Atlanta. Camille didn't seem particularly concerned about her mother. It was no secret that she didn't like her. But she would have liked going to Atlanta to play the grand lady and thumb her nose in their faces.

  Napa? She shrieked. Napa? For Christmas? Over my dead body. There were those by then who would have thought that a pleasure, but Jeremiah was not yet among them.

  I have to be near the mines, there've been floods again ' Recently, John Harte had lost twenty-two out of the hundred and six men who worked for him, and Jeremiah had gone to help him. Harte, who had finally begun to mellow, was grateful.

  She cut him off. Then you go to Napa. I'll stay here.

  For Christmas? He was shocked. I want the three of us to be together.

  Who? You, me, and Hannah? Count me out, Jeremiah.

  I was referring to our daughter he grabbed her arm in an unfamiliar show of frustration or had you forgotten we have one?

  That's an unnecessary remark. I see her every day.

  When? On your way out the door as she comes in from the garden?

  I'm not a wet nurse, Jeremiah. She looked haughtily at him from her diminutive height, and for once the dam broke in Jeremiah.

  You're not a mother either. Or a wife, for that matter. Just exactly what are you? And with that she reached out and slapped him, and he stood watching her. Neither of them moved. It was the beginning of the end of their marriage and they both knew it. Camille was the first to speak, but not to apologize to her husband. Something in her had snapped months before, when she had the baby, or when she was trapped in Napa, as she saw it. In truth, she would never forgive him for making her have Sabrina. But there was more to it than that. She had wanted to share the excitement of his business life, only to discover that there was no room for her at the mines in Napa. It was an exclusively male world and he didn't even tell her about it. In exchange, she wanted his presence at her constant round of parties, and he failed her there, shying away from social life, as he always had, and refusing to show off with her. In truth, she had none of what she wanted, except the grandeur of Thurston House itself, and all it meant to her.

  I am not going to Napa, Jeremiah. If you spend Christmas there, you'll be alone. She'd had enough of the place to last a lifetime and it reminded her now of the worst moments of her life.

  No, I won't go alone. He smiled sadly at her. I'll be with my daughter. And he was as good as his word. On the eighteenth of December, he packed up Sabrina and her nurse, and they left for Napa. And in St. Helena, Hannah had a warm welcome for them. It took her two days to mention Camille's absence, and when she did, he made it clear that he didn't want to discuss it. He was hurting terribly over what she was doing, but had he known the rest, he would have hurt more. She had actually dared to go ahead and give the ball she had threatened to give. The invitations had gone out without his knowledge, and he read about it in the newspaper two days after the party. He correctly assumed that she had charged everything to him. And instead of spending Christmas with her husband and daughter, she had chosen to spend it surrounded by her friends, the elite and the grand, the nouveau riche and the showy. They were not a group that Jeremiah would have been happy with, but Camille was in ecstasy, playing the grande dame of Thurston House at the age of twenty, trying to forget that anyone had ever thought her less than aristocratic in Atlanta, or that she had been forced to have a baby she didn't want, or live in the Napa Valley, which she so desperately hated. She knew that if Jeremiah ever forced her to get pregnant again, she would kill herself rather than have the baby. And as far as she was concerned, he deserved everything he got now, for doing what he had done to her body. In her mind, pregnancy was the worst nightmare of all, and childbirth a torture that defied description. She remembered every agonizing moment each time she saw him, or if he even seemed about to approach her, and Sabrina was a living monument to nine months of hell. It was easier simply to avoid him. And she did, closing her heart to all she had once felt for Jeremiah, and whatever she might have learned to feel for her daughter.

  JEREMIAH did not return from Napa immediately after Christmas, as Camille suspected he was going to. He was calling her bluff, and he wasn't returning until the middle of the next month, a note to her read, but he would be happy to see her in Napa. Just reading his words annoyed her. She had no intention of going to Napa now, and missing all the balls and parties in the city. She explained his absence to her friends with casual ease, and she continued to attend every party in town, including one given by a couple Jeremiah particularly disliked, a nouveau riche pair who'd come out from the East the year before, and were known for their more than slightly improper parties. With Jeremiah in town she had never been allowed to go, so she seized this opportunity to attend a ball they gave on New Year's Eve and was pleasantly surprised by the people she met there. They were an amusing group, far more fun than the people she and Jeremiah usually saw, in particular a man who had just arrived in town. A French count named Thibaut du Pre who seemed to embody all that was decadent and European and aristocratic. He was exactly what she would have expected to meet, had she gone to Paris with her father. He was tall and handsome and blond with green eyes and fair skin, broad shoulders and slim hips, a delightful accent and a way with words, and he seemed to spend most of New Year's Eve kissing Camille's neck, which shocked no one at the party. He spoke English as well as French, and he had a chateau in the north of France, and another in Venice, or so he said, but he was noticeably vague about the details. He made his way over to Camille as the party began, and he remained at her side throughout most of the evening. He mentioned that he had heard she had a magnificent house, and he would be interested in seeing it, just to compare it to his own, of course, Americans had such different ideas about architecture, he insisted as he whirled her around the floor, his arm tight around her waist, his eyes locked on hers. He was a strikingly handsome man, with a great deal of charm, and open, ingenuous ways, and she couldn't see any harm in showing him the house the next day. She saw no harm in it at all, until he pressed his body against hers and kissed her in her boudoir as she showed him the painted French wallpaper there.

  But as he touched her, and her body began to blaze beneath his fingers, she realized how long it had been since she felt a man's touch on her body. And suddenly she was seized with a burst of passion for the languid French count, who played her body like a harp and had her almost begging within moments for him to take her. And then, coming to her senses, she begged him to stop, but her words were garbled by his lips, and he only kissed her again, certain that she had fully understood his intentions when he'd asked to see her home. He had understood the night before that her husband was away and almost always was. But she drew away from him now, and almost ordered him to come downstairs with her. She amused him with her fiery eyes, her pretty lips, her raven black hair, and in the ensuing weeks, he showered her with gifts and trinkets and bouquets, inviting her to lunch, taking her for drives, and all the while Jeremiah did not return from Napa. She insisted that du Pro's behavior was practically an affront, but she said it in her delectable Southern drawl, and he spoke to her in French, and offered her more fun than she'd had in months. Jeremiah was so serious, and she was so tired of hearing about floods in his mines. He had been delayed in Napa again, this time four men had died in yet another flood. Thibaut didn't talk about things like that to her. He just told her how beautiful she was, how remarkable that she'd ever had a child, and she told him how much she had hated that, and he won h
er heart by the fervor of his words.

  I think it is a cruelty to ask women to have babies. Barbaric! He looked outraged. I would never ask such a thing of a woman I loved.' He stared meaningfully at her and she blushed.

  I'd never do it again, she confessed. I would rather die. And then he pleased her by admitting that children had never appealed to him Appalling little brats ' and they smell! She laughed and he touched her lips with his own again, and she never quite understood how, but on the divan in her own dressing room, he made love to her after they had shared almost a full bottle of champagne from Jeremiah's cellars. She was just grateful that she was wearing a ring again. She had put it in after New Year's Eve, just to see if it fit, she told herself ' and she had left it in, in case Jeremiah came back, she pretended to herself. But it had nothing to do with Jeremiah at all. And it had everything to do with Thibaut du Pre now.

  They carried on their clandestine affair for six weeks until Jeremiah returned. Du Pro came to Thurston House, and she went to his hotel, which she knew full well was a shocking thing to do, but it was less dangerous than letting him into her home, which she did late at night, and then they would both giggle and tiptoe upstairs, hiding in her rooms, and drinking champagne and making love until dawn. With him she found the passion she had known before Sabrina's birth, and for some reason, she found him more exciting than even Jeremiah had been. He was tall and thin and exotic and he spoke to her in French, and he was wicked and erotic, and he was only thirty-two, but most of the time he seemed even younger than that, younger even than she at twenty. He wanted to frolic and play all the time, and make love from morning till night, and he didn't want her to have a baby. He was delighted with her ring and he even told her of other more exotic methods they had in France. And he began talking to her of going back to Europe with him.

  You could come with me to the south of France ' and we could visit my friends ' parties that last all night' and he almost seared her ears by telling her the kinds of things they liked to do. Better still, he showed her, and as the days wore on, she felt something peculiar happening to her, as though she had discovered a drug, and could no longer live without him. She almost felt as though she were addicted to him, and night and day she longed for his touch, ached for his limbs, needed him to fill her very soul. It was almost painful to peel her flesh from his as she left his bed, and she needed his body on hers, his hands, his lips, his tongue ' there was a heady perfume about everything he did, and she found herself constantly needing and wanting more of him. She began to feel desperate about Jeremiah coming home. And when he did, she scarcely got du Pre+! out in time, and when Jeremiah was upstairs seeing to the child, she found an empty bottle of champagne under the bed, and hid it quickly in her boudoir. She felt disheveled and indiscreet, tainted and confused, and when she saw Jeremiah, she began to cry, and he mistook it for relief to see him. But she cried because she was so desperately confused. And for an instant, just an instant, as she held her child for the first time in six weeks, she caught a glimpse of what life might still have been but in truth no longer was. It could have been just Jeremiah and Sabrina and herself, and suddenly she regretted not going to Napa with him. She would have been safe there, and instead, she had cast herself adrift. She had strolled into the Garden of Eden, and she no longer remembered the way home, or even wanted to find it. She lay beside Jeremiah that night, hopelessly still, tortured with her own thoughts, and when at last he put a hand on her thigh, she trembled. The most terrible part of it was that she no longer wanted him. And she was already longing for Thibaut by the next morning. They met secretly in his hotel room, and when she returned home that afternoon, she felt as though her mind and soul were possessed by him, almost in a demonic way. She couldn't even imagine what her father would think of him, and for once in her life, she cared nothing for her father's opinion, or Jeremiah's, or anyone else's.

  He planned to stay in San Francisco for a few months, and she knew that by the end of that time she would be half mad from the confusion of it all, if it even took that long. Already she didn't know what to say to Jeremiah at night, and she had moved back into her dressing room. She never had time to see Sabrina now, and when she and Jeremiah went out, she looked everywhere for a glimpse of the count, who stood staring hungrily at her, and once dared to caress her breast as she walked past him on the way into a restaurant, and she had felt her whole body shiver with lust for him. Jeremiah had thought she was cold, and for an instant she felt sick with guilt.

  And still, Thibaut talked of taking her back to France with him.

  But I can't! Don't you understand! He made her feel crazed with his wild eyes and dancing tongue. I'm married! I have a little girl! And there was more to it than that, a whole way of life, security, Thurston House. She was someone important here. She couldn't just run out on that.

  You have a husband who bores you to tears, and you don't care two pins about the child. So what else is there, my love? Do you not wish to be my countess in a chateau in France?

  I do ' I do ' she sobbed, and he was driving her mad by tempting her. She was so confused. She didn't know what to do. And within a month or two, Jeremiah had noticed how pale and wan she looked. He thought she was still recovering from Sabrina's birth, and urged her to see the doctor again. But she put him off every day. She had other things to do. She had to meet du Pr+! in his hotel room ' where he talked of his chateaux ' his father ' his friends ' all marquis and counts, princes and dukes. It turned her head as she listened to him speak and dreamt of the balls in his friends' chateaux all over France. It was all like the dream her father had promised her before Jeremiah came along. She could be a countess now, if she wanted, all she had to do was give up her life here, as Thibaut whispered into her thighs and she thought she would go mad. I can't bear it anymore! she told him once. 'I'm too confused. But he didn't care. Like her with him, he was addicted to her flesh, and he wanted more of her, he wanted her for his own, and he wouldn't relent until she gave in. He wanted her to come back to France with him, and he assumed somehow that at least some of the fortune she evidenced was her own.

  And day by day, Jeremiah saw her slip away, he knew not to where, until at last in April, a friend told him what he had seen. Camille coming out of the Palace Hotel with a tall blond man, and they had kissed before he hailed a carriage for her. Jeremiah felt his heart sink like a stone as he listened to the man's words and he wanted to believe him wrong, but as he watched her day by day, he began to suspect that his friend was right. There was something distant in her eyes every time he spoke to her, and she insisted that they go out every night. She seemed relieved when he left her to visit his mines, and he could never get her to sleep with him again.

  He sank deeper into depression as the spring wore on, and feared what would happen when he tried to move her to Napa again in June. He didn't want to confront her for fear she'd snap, and then, as it turned out, Fate handled things for him. He was leaving his banker's club late one afternoon, after discussing some business matters with him, when a carriage rolled slowly by and he saw Camille locked in the arms of a blond man, and Jeremiah stood there on the corner for half an hour, feeling as though his world had shattered around him. He confronted her that night, quietly, in her dressing room.

  I don't know how it began, Camille. There were unshed tears in his voice, but he held them back now. And I don't want to know. Someone saw you a while back, and I wanted to think it wasn't true, but I suppose it was. The tears stood out in his eyes as he looked at her. He loved her so much, and he wondered if he'd lose her to the man he'd seen kissing her in the carriage. He didn't care what she had done, as long as she stopped now. They could still salvage what they'd had, if she was willing to. It depended on her, more than on him. He was willing to forgive and carry on with her. But he didn't realize the confused state of mind she was in.

  How do you know it was I? She looked sadly at him, bereft of her usual fight, and they both knew it had been she.

  There's
no point arguing over that. The point is that I want you to stop. His voice was as gentle as his love for her. It has to stop now, Camille. I'd like for us to leave for Napa next week, and maybe we can put the pieces together there, with Sabrina. His eyes were damp now and she squeezed her eyes closed. If he had offered to drown her, it would have upset her less than moving to Napa the following week. She couldn't bear the thought, and she couldn't give up Thibaut yet. Not yet. She needed him. Jeremiah's next word was only a whisper, but it was heartfelt. Please. '

  She opened her eyes again. I'll see' . But it was as though she felt a hand at her throat, and she snuck out again that night, just to meet him on the street for a kiss and a few words. Jeremiah thought that she was downstairs, speaking to the cook, and he never knew the truth, as she stood desperately on the street, beyond the gardens, whispering to du Pr+! while he begged her to join him at his hotel. He was a totally decadent man, with no conscience at all, and he would do everything he could to take her away with him. After all, why not? She was beautiful, sensual, almost as debauched as he by now, an expert in the art of love, although she was only twenty years old, and he knew from what everyone said, she was a very rich girl, and du Pr+! needed that. He'd heard that she had money of her own, and of course there was whatever Thurston had given her, presumably quite a lot, from the look of her jewels and furs.

  But the following day she met Thibaut in his hotel room, and sobbing as she spoke, she told him that their affair had come to an end. She had reasoned it out. She wasn't willing to give up what she had for him.

  Have I done something wrong? He looked shocked, the immorality of it had never troubled him at all. It was something he had been playing at for years, other men's wives, they were good sport and this one was the best he'd had by far. And he had no intention of letting her go, not this one. She was too juicy, too sweet. And now she was his. He sensed it.