The Pearl

by Reisz, Tiffany

  “You were texting with Charlie?”

  “Yes. I wasn’t flipping through that book, planning to…” He lowered his voice to a whisper and leaned closer. “…violate you with your own pearl necklace and then—”

  “Give me one?”

  He saw a flash of light on the terrace, the guard David out there with his torch.

  “Show me your phone,” she said.

  “Regan, I would never—”

  “Just show me.”

  He’d left his jacket on the arm of the club chair. He found it and took his mobile out. She extended her hand and he gave her his phone, praying there was nothing too embarrassing on there. He told her his code and she read his messages with a blank expression on her face.

  Then she returned the phone to him.

  “Gloom was at the window at eight,” he said. “You said so yourself. You checked your watch and said, ‘eight on the dot.’ The messages were also at eight—”

  “Relax, Brat,” she said. She took another drink of her whisky. “I just wanted to make sure you were telling him good things about me.”

  The guards returned. David, the young guard, looked tense.

  “Nobody around,” he said. He spoke quickly in a strong Northern accent. “Didn’t find anything and we searched every inch. No one’s taken the lift up here but us in the past hour. Nobody on the cams in the halls either.”

  “No one on the cameras?” Regan repeated. “You’re absolutely certain?”

  “Not a soul,” David said. “It was just the book, right? Nothing taken?”

  “Not that I could tell,” she said, bunching her necklace nervously in her palm. “It’s only…it seemed like a threat or a message, you see. Arthur and I were discussing my pearl necklace in one room and in the other room, someone left a book open to a woman with a pearl necklace. It sounds mad when I say it out loud.” She gave a weak smile.

  “You sure you didn’t knock it off accidentally? Or maybe the walls were shaking? From the wind maybe?”

  It wasn’t windy and Arthur thought the guard deserved a raise for keeping a straight face when he asked that.

  “Well, there’s nobody here but us, ma’am,” the young guard continued. “So if there was someone here, they either jumped off the terrace, or you got a ghost.”

  Arthur glanced upstairs. Regan nodded, and dismissed the guards with thanks. They promised to check the perimeter and keep an eye on the cameras, even post a guard if she wanted. She didn’t want that. They left.

  When they were gone and Arthur and Regan were alone again, she looked and him and said, “Tell me everything about that painting of Lord Malcolm. Now.”

  * * *

  Back in her bedroom, Regan stood at the fireplace while Arthur sat on the edge of the bed facing her. She still held the book in her arms, clutching it to her chest like a child, one finger in the page as a bookmark.

  “I guess it starts twenty-five years ago, when my parents met,” he began. “My mother owned a gallery in New York in the nineties—The Red. The way she tells the story, she had a dream about a man with black hair and black eyes in a three-piece suit who told her to check the bed knobs in the brass bed in storage at the gallery. She did, and inside the bedposts were a few paintings. One Picasso, some sketches, but also Lord Malcolm’s official family portrait.”

  They both glanced toward the portrait on the wall.

  Arthur continued, “Finding a lost Picasso worth millions rolled up in the post of an old bed is the sort of thing that makes international news. My father saw the story in the paper. It included a photograph of Lord Malcolm’s portrait, too. Dad hopped on the first flight to New York. Mum refused to sell the painting to him. No matter how much he offered, she wouldn’t accept it. Said she’d never give the painting up. Where she went, it went—the end.

  “She was young and beautiful, and he was, well, my father. He picked Mum up, threw her over his shoulder, and carried both her and the painting out to his car. He said he intended to marry her, and that everything she owned—including the painting—would be his, and all that was his would be hers. They eloped. Nine months later my sister was born.”

  “What was Lord Malcolm to her?”

  “She said she’d dreamed about him.”

  Regan opened the book again to the page of the Cassatt pearl necklace painting. She shook her head, then slammed the book shut and tossed it onto the bed.

  “I dreamed about David Cameron giving me a haircut once,” she said. “If I had a painting of him, I’d give it away. Why was she so attached to a painting of a dead lord she’d never met?”

  “You’d have to ask her that.”

  She pointed at him. “I’m asking you.”

  Arthur thought about what to tell her that wouldn’t sound completely mad.

  “Mum has nicknames for us all,” he said. “My father’s her Sun, my sister’s her Moon. That’s what she always called them, her Sun and her Moon. And me and Charlie are her Morning Star and Evening Star.”

  “Very sweet. What’s your point?”

  “I remember when I was little, and we were out star-gazing and she showed me the Evening Star. Then she showed me the North Star and I asked who that was? She said it was Lord Malcolm, but she didn’t say why.”

  “Malcolm?”

  He met her eyes, nodded. The whisky in her glass was shaking. “You’re scared,” he said.

  “Terrified. And you’re not, which scares me even more. There’s more, isn’t there? In your texts, you told Charlie that your parents joke about the painting being haunted. All because your mother had one dream about Lord Malcolm?”

  Arthur studied the floor. “No,” he finally said. “Not just that.”

  “Well?” She raised her hand, waiting not very patiently.

  “There’s an old family story about Lord Malcolm. His mother forced him into a marriage he didn’t want. The second his wife was gave him an heir, he ran off with some girl he was lusting after. Her father followed them and caught them in bed together—so he shot Malcolm.

  “That should be the end of the story, but it’s not. While he was dying, he allegedly sold his soul to the devil—not to avenge his own murder, but to get revenge on his family for forcing him to marry someone he despised. The other rumor is he sold his soul so he could keep on whoring after he was dead. Maybe both. Maybe neither. It’s all third- and fourth-hand gossip.

  “Anyway, the bed he died in was the bed my mother found the painting in. The bed she was sleeping in when she dreamed about him—supposedly.” Arthur sighed. “And…”

  “Go on. Tell me everything.”

  “You’ll think we’re all starkers.”

  “You’re a Godwick—I already do.”

  “He seems to interfere, for lack of a better word, with the family sometimes. For good. Only for good so far. My father didn’t know what to get Lia for a graduation present. He swears a wind blew through his office though all the doors were shut and all the windows down, and it opened a sales catalogue to a page for an Ancient Greek kylix. She loves Greek mythology, so he thought this would be perfect. He found one for Lia, and then a collector came and tried to buy it from her. Now she and that art collector are married.”

  “So Lord Malcolm plays matchmaker. Anything else?”

  “Mum’s not the only one who’s had dreams about him that have come true. Dad dreamed Lord Malcolm came to him and said, ‘Ditch that girl you’re after. She only wants you for your title.’ Turns out that was all she wanted. Then Dad met Mum. Like I said, Mum’s dreamed about him and…I’ve had my own encounter with him.”

  “You dreamed about him, too?”

  “When I was very little, about four or five, I think? My parents had a party and the house was full of people. I snuck out of the nursery and wandered to the landing on the stairs to watch what was happening. Just a load of people drinking and talking and laughing. This man saw me and walked up the stairs and asked if he could hide up there with me. I remember the two of us p
utting our faces up to the balusters, looking down at the people below.”

  Arthur put his hands to his face, miming a small boy’s face pressed between the spindles on the landing.

  “The man asked me questions about Mum and Dad and Lia and Charlie,” Arthur sad. “He asked if I liked Wingthorn and what I wanted to be when I grew up. The sort of questions any adult asks a child to get them talking.”

  Arthur took a breath. He didn’t want to tell the rest of this story or Regan might never speak to him again. She’d call the men in white coats to take him away.

  But he went on.

  “After a few minutes the man said he had to leave. At breakfast, I told Mum and Dad I’d met a nice man in a black suit called Malcolm, and I thought they should invite him back because I liked him so much. Mum dropped her coffee cup. It shattered everywhere. Dad didn’t hesitate. He took me immediately into the picture gallery and showed me the painting.” Arthur looked over his shoulder at Lord Malcolm. “I said that was him. Dad said I must have dreamed the whole thing since that man had been dead a long time.”

  “But you didn’t dream it.”

  Arthur shrugged. “Maybe I did. More likely than I had a nice long talk with a man who’s been dead since 1939.”

  “When that young man from security joked we had a ghost in the suite, your eyes flicked upstairs.”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” Arthur said. “Do you?”

  “No, but you still looked.”

  “I looked,” Arthur admitted. “And you’re still shaking.”

  She lifted her whisky to her lips but didn’t drink. She turned, set the glass on the mantel, didn’t turn back.

  “You told Charlie you dreamed about him, too,” Arthur said.

  She sighed, but didn’t turn around. “It was the night after Sir Jack’s funeral. Soon as he died, I moved into the hotel. Couldn’t stand to spend another night in our house at Ferry Hill. This suite, Lord Malcolm’s old flat. Supposedly it looked just like this when he lived here.”

  She gestured with her hand at the fireplace, the bed, the wingback chair.

  “In the dream, I was in a beautifully decorated room,” she continued. “Like a lady’s morning salon. There was a breakfast table with a pink and white chintz tea set on it and a…”

  She shook her head, as if trying to dislodge her memories.

  “A small roll top desk, antique. A red sofa and a fireplace with a white mantel. Lord Malcolm was there, and I knew him. I knew who he was the way you know who people are in dreams. He was standing in front of the fireplace looking up at something. When he saw me in the doorway, he smiled and invited me in. I went to stand beside him and there was an empty frame on the wall, a large gilt frame, right above the mantel. Like this.”

  She waved her hand to show the painting of The Psyche Mirror still hanging over her bedroom fireplace.

  “That’s what we were looking at, this empty frame,” she said. “I asked him whose painting was going into the frame. He smiled and said, ‘Yours.’ Then I woke up.”

  “‘Yours’? So a painting of you?” Arthur asked.

  She nodded. “I think. Or a painting I’d painted. But I hadn’t painted in years.”

  “What color were the walls?”

  “White,” she said. “White…wallpaper, I think. Green vines and red and pink roses. Why?”

  Traditionally, the Earl of Godwicks’ portraits hung over the fireplace in the sitting room, while the Countesses’ portraits hung over the fireplace in the morning room. His mother’s portrait was there now, but…no. There’d never been white wallpaper there. He knew that for a fact. His mother was always complaining about the ancient red wallpaper and how shabby it looked, how it had been there since King Edward’s reign.

  “My mother has a roll top desk in the morning room and a chintz tea set,” Arthur said. “But the walls are some sort of red damask wallpaper.”

  “It was only a dream,” Regan said, trying to sound dismissive and failing. “But it’s stayed with me like no other dream ever has. And when Charlie brought me Malcolm’s portrait and I saw it the first time, I was shocked his suit matched what I’d seen in my dream. Like he’d stepped right out of the frame.”

  “Let’s say it was real,” Arthur said. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, my great-grandfather did sell his soul and now it’s bound to his painting á la Dorian Gray. Why would he come to you in a dream?”

  “He lived here at The Pearl, in this suite. I’m sleeping in his bed. Maybe he’s taken a liking to me.” She was mocking him again. “And, if you think about it, Lord Malcolm and I are on the same side,” she said. “He wanted revenge against the Godwicks, too.”

  Was that all their arrangement was, atonement for some perceived slight? Now wasn’t the time nor the place to pry it out of her, but the acrimony she felt for the Godwicks was fueled by more than a single unpaid hotel bill.

  He decided to keep things light for the moment. “You weren’t complaining about the Godwicks when you were coming on my tongue an hour ago.”

  She smiled. He was relieved to see it. “What are we going to tell ourselves?” Regan asked. “Shall we start believing in haunted paintings that can throw scarves across rooms and knock books off shelves? Or are we going to tell ourselves a book just fell of its own accord and landed on this painting, that it’s all a big coincidence?”

  “I think we’re better off sticking to your original theory—that someone was in the suite. Someone saw us together, saw the necklace. Someone who’s trying to scare us.”

  “And they, what? Jumped off the terrace?”

  He could think of a half dozen different scenarios, none of which would comfort her. None of which he himself believed.

  “God,” she said, exhaling hard. She stared at Lord Malcolm. “When I was talking to the painting, I was only joking. Never thought for one second...I was only trying to goad you.”

  “Whatever’s going on,” he said, “I don’t want you to sleep here tonight. Not alone, anyway. I’ll stay if you won’t go.”

  “You’re not in charge.”

  “I am if and when you put yourself in danger.”

  A small smile flitted across her mouth. “You can stay,” she said softly. “But you’ll sleep on the floor. You’re still a Godwick, after all.”

  * * *

  Arthur made one more sweep of the suite, kitchen knife in hand, and found no one. Then again, he didn’t know all the hiding places in the penthouse. Ceiling tiles? False fronts? Bookcases that spun to reveal secret rooms? Highly doubtful. This wasn’t a hotel in a horror film.

  He returned to the bedroom and Regan gave him one blanket but no pillow. Fine. He didn’t need a pillow. He lay the blanket down and folded it in half, making a pseudo-sleeping bag. He took off his jeans but kept on his pants and t-shirt. Regan locked the bedroom door, and Arthur lodged a chair in front of it.

  She set the book on the mantel. “There,” she said. “If it falls off, it’ll fall on you. You can wake up and fight the ghost. Let me sleep through it.”

  The carpet was soft and plush but a floor was a floor. Arthur turned onto his side toward the fire which was still burning low and let the heat settle into him. He ignored the sounds of Regan moving in her bed, getting comfortable, ignored the image of her in her black silk slip and nothing else pulling back the covers and sliding into the bed.

  The room was dark but for the firelight dancing. Regan was quiet and her breathing steady, but he sensed her alertness. She was as awake as he.

  “If you tell me what my family did to you,” Arthur said, “I’ll do anything I can to make it right.”

  “Only a time machine could make it right,” she said. “Why would you help me anyway? I’ve already put you and your brother through hell.”

  “Charlie puts himself through hell. And if this is Hell, sign me up for eternity.”

  “I’m going to have to hurt you more so you’ll stop liking this so much.”

  “Do your wors
t,” he said.

  A joke, but he heard her toss the covers off and leave her bed. He rolled onto his back and she stood before him in her black kimono. Regan sat at his hip, and threw the blanket off of him. The silk of her robe tickled him as it brushed his thigh.

  “Why are you wearing clothes?” she demanded.

  “I didn’t want to have to fight off an intruder naked.”

  “You should be more worried about me than him.”

  Message received. He stripped bare.

  She took his cock in her hand at the base, fingers wrapped firmly around it. He’d been half-hard until she touched him, but he stiffened and lengthened at once when he was in her hand.

  She brought the head to her mouth and licked a white pearl of come off the slit at the tip. The pleasure of the little lick shot up his spine. His hips and stomach tensed. She drew the head into her mouth, all the way in and she sucked him, her pale peach lips stroking his burning red flesh.

  Watching his cock disappear into her mouth was a fantasy come to life. She’d bought him to service her. Never had he dreamed that she’d reciprocate. The urge to thrust up and into her mouth was powerful, but he forced his hips to lie still on the floor, though his thighs contracted hard as if they wanted to move on their own.

  She nestled between his legs and forced them wider. She pulled up for a moment and he saw in the firelight she had a small bottle of lubricant in her hand.

  She poured it onto her fingertips. “If I were really cruel,” she said, “I would do this without the lube.”

  “Do what?” he asked, but got no answer.

  He lay his head back onto the rug and tried not to tense as Regan began to slowly, painstakingly work her wet fingers over and into him, opening him slightly though not going in very deep, not as deeply as he craved, but he didn’t say that, afraid she’d stop. As it was, the massage on that tender private part of his body felt incredibly good. Intimate. He thought he’d feel shame or embarrassment and he waited for those feelings to come but they never did.