The Pearl

by Reisz, Tiffany

  Regan really was going to have to get a new assistant soon, someone who knew how to take orders and keep her opinions to herself.

  Zoot kept on, “I know you’re miffed at him, Boss—Christ knows why, still think it’s your fault—but you’ve actually been something almost like happy the last two weeks, and it’s not because you’re one of those daft American bints who gets wet when the leaves change colors and Starbucks brings the pumpkin spice latte back.”

  “Didn’t I tell you that you could go? If not, I’m telling you now.”

  “He’s funny,” Zoot said. “And he’ll take the piss. He worries about you though, and I can tell he’s decent all the way down.”

  “Godwicks aren’t decent. They’re indecent.”

  “Right there, but it’s the best kind of indecent if you ask me.”

  “I didn’t—” Regan’s voice broke as tears suddenly filled her eyes and a knot formed in her throat. She forced herself past it. “—ask you.”

  Zoot was staring at her, wide-eyed with shock. “I didn’t know you had it in you,” Zoot said, laughing softly. “I saw you snap your ankle two years ago falling off your Jimmy Choo’s, and you didn’t shed one bloody tear. You better call the boy back.”

  “I believe I told you—”

  “Going. Have fun freezing your tits off out here, Boss.”

  Regan waited until she was inside to wipe her tears, but they were already dried on her cheeks. She opened the note to read whatever worthless message he’d left for her. Probably another I’m sorry that didn’t help anything or save anyone.

  It wasn’t an apology. It wasn’t worthless. It was, simply, three words.

  Judith Slaying Holofernes.

  She closed her eyes. Did he know about her dream? Impossible, and yet the impossible seemed to be happening more and more often these days. She felt something like relief, actually. Now she had an excuse to see him again.

  When she went inside, Zoot was putting on her red coat to leave.

  “Have my car brought round, please,” Regan said. “And I’ll need Arthur’s address.” Zoot opened her mouth, but Regan shushed her. “And not a word from you about it.”

  9

  The Wounded Dove

  The last of the evening light was fading as Regan walked slowly toward the Godwicks’ red brick townhouse. The facade was imposing—five or six stories, she couldn’t tell from the exterior. The street was quiet, exclusive. Old money and older titles lived here.

  The house was set back a few feet from the walk and she had to open a small iron gate to reach the front door. Her heart was in her throat when she rang the bell. She fully expected a servant to answer the door, but no, it was Arthur.

  “Regan,” he said. From the look in his dark eyes, she knew she was the last person he expected to see standing there and yet the person he was most glad to see.

  “I got your note and—”

  “Could you come with me to the garden, please? I need your help.”

  She was too surprised by his strange urgency to ask any questions. She followed him into the entryway and down a corridor toward the back of the house. He wore jeans and a white t-shirt with red specks on it that looked like blood.

  “Are you all right? Is that blood on your shirt?”

  “Just a scratch,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  Physically, maybe. But emotionally? She’d hurt him. She wanted to tell him she was sorry, but the words stuck in her throat.

  They passed a formal dining room, blue wallpaper and a grand oak table, and then into a gleaming white kitchen that looked like it hadn’t been updated since Queen Victoria’s reign.

  He opened the back door and led her into a dark garden overshadowed by a tall rowan tree, its crimson leaves raining down with every breeze. Arthur brought her to a shoebox sitting on top of an iron garden table. He opened it.

  “Oh no,” she said, peering inside. “Poor darling. What’s wrong?”

  A dove, pale grey feathers with a black band around its neck, rested in a nest of shredded newspaper.

  “He’s got something wrong with his foot,” Arthur said. “Saw something moving in the garden and saw him—her, maybe—hopping around. I caught him, but he nicked me on the arm.”

  Gingerly, Regan gathered the dove into her hands to examine it. She spotted the problem at once, a bit of wire around its leg, caught tight and cutting into the twig-like limb.

  “Just a case of string foot,” Regan said. “Can you go into the kitchen and fetch a bowl of water. He’ll need some food—grains, seeds, lettuce, carrots. Whatever you have. Antibiotic ointment if you have it, too.”

  Regan held the bird near her body to keep it calm while she gently eased the ragged bit of wire off the bird’s leg.

  Arthur returned quickly with a bowl of water, a bowl of sesame seeds and lettuce.

  “He’ll be fine,” Regan said as she placed the bird into the box with the food and water. She showed him the bit of shiny wire that had been caught on the dove’s leg. “Nesting birds sometimes confuse good nesting material with bad. Leave the box open, and he’ll probably fly off when he’s filled his belly.”

  Already the collared dove was dipping his beak into the water between taking bites out of the lettuce leaf.

  “When I saw the bird I wished you were here,” Arthur said. “Then you were. Magic.”

  Regan lightly stroked the back of the dove’s head before letting him alone to eat and drink his fill.

  “I got your note,” she said. “I’m curious to know why you sent me the name of that painting.”

  “Wild stab in the dark—no pun intended.” He looked toward the house. “My parents have a gallery near here, on Half Moon Street.”

  Regan knew of it—The Half Moon Arthouse. One of many galleries and museums owned or patronized by the Godwick Family Arts Trust.

  “We’re opening a new exhibit next week, female artists of the Baroque period. The Gentileschi is the star of the show. My parents asked me to stop by, to make sure everything was up to snuff. I was looking right at the painting when it just…fell off the wall.”

  “A priceless Renaissance masterpiece fell off your wall.”

  “Our paintings don’t fall. They wouldn’t fall if there was an earthquake. But this one fell as if it jumped off its hook. If you’re worried, the painting is fine. The frame, too, but…it wasn’t like the hooks fell out of the plaster. It shouldn’t have fallen. It felt like a sign or a…”

  “A message?”

  He nodded. Another breeze blew and more red rowan leaves fell into the darkening garden.

  “I had a dream,” she said, “yesterday afternoon, after you left.”

  “After you sent me packing.”

  She shrugged, looked at the dove rooting around in the box. “I dreamed I was Judith and I was in the tent of Holofernes. And right before I was about to cut his head off, he turned into you.”

  “Me?”

  She smiled, met his searching gaze. “Then I cut his head off.”

  They looked at each other as the last of the evening light faded to grey and the lamps along the garden paths turned themselves on. The collared dove hopped once, twice, then out of the box. With another hop, he spread his wings and flew up into the rowan tree. The temperature seemed to plummet all at once.

  Regan shivered, but it wasn’t from the autumn breeze. This was a winter wind and it came from inside of her.

  “Let’s go in,” she said. “I want to look at that bite on your arm.”

  He lifted his left arm, glanced at the wound. “It’s only a scratch.”

  “Doves can carry disease,” she said.

  He looked at her, then gave her a slight smile. “Anything you say.”

  He led her back into the house, and she gave up her coat to him. He hung it on the hook by the back-garden door, next to his. It gave her a strange feeling of déjà vu as if this had happened before—their coats hanging here side-by-side like they lived together in this house, which made
no sense unless, maybe, it was déjà vu for a time yet to come.

  “You look beautiful,” Arthur said, staring at her.

  She had dressed as nicely as she could without being too obvious about it—a fashionable grey shirt dress and black boots, all very smart and expensive. This was one of the finest townhouses in all of London, however. She felt like a street urchin playing posh.

  “Thank you,” she said simply, as he led her into the kitchen.

  They went to the sink and Arthur held out his arm with obvious reluctance. Clearly he was the sort of man who didn’t like being fussed over. The cut—and it was a cut, not a scratch—was fairly deep. If he behaved, though, it would heal quickly.

  “Just a flesh wound,” she taunted. He smiled. As Zoot liked to say, a Monty Python reference never went amiss.

  She washed the bite out with soap and warm water and felt Arthur’s eyes on her the entire time.

  “Why are you being so nice to me?” he asked.

  “I should have been nicer before.”

  “Why start now?”

  Two days ago she would have shot him a dirty look. Now she laughed at herself softly. “I have some bad news,” she said. “Or depending on how much you hate me, it’ll be good news. Do you hate me?”

  “No.”

  He said it softly, and she felt the word as much as heard it, felt it like a stroking of fingers across her cheek or the gentle press of a kiss on the top of her foot.

  Behind the sink was a window that looked out onto the back garden. The trees and plants were listing sideways. The wind was picking up. The house was eerily quiet and the tile floor of the kitchen and the cold porcelain sink echoed the quiet. She could hear her own heart beating.

  “Regan? What’s the bad news?”

  She dried his arm, put on the plaster, and met his eyes. “I think we both could use a drink, don’t you?”

  “Definitely,” he said. “If you’ll go down the hall to the front room, I’ll bring wine. Or would you like something stronger?”

  “Wine will do. Red if you have it.”

  Regan dried her hands and walked down the hall to the front sitting room where a fire burned behind the grate. The walls were white, the trim black and the furniture Hepplewhite and Chippendale. On either side of the fireplace stood floor-to-ceiling bookcases. She had been prepared for the Godwicks’ shelves to be filled with antiques and bric-a-brac, something she could sneer at, but no, they were stuffed solid to bursting with books. Books about art, and nothing but. Many of the same books she had in her office.

  Was Arthur right? Was she just like them?

  Or were they just like her?

  Arthur entered wearing a clean grey t-shirt, V-neck, and holding two glasses—a glass of red wine and a glass of whisky, neat.

  “The whisky’s for me,” he said, handing her the wine. “I have a bad feeling I’m going to need it.”

  “And maybe you should sit down, too,” she said.

  Arthur sat on the black-and-white striped sofa. A gust of wind blew loudly outside the house. Regan went to the front bow window and looked out just in time to see a newspaper cartwheeling down the street like a tumbleweed out of a Western.

  “It’s strange being here,” she said, “at your house.”

  Strange and nice, too nice. That same sense of déjà vu returned. A cruel tease. There was a world where she didn’t hold back, where she let her feelings for him take root. A world where she and Arthur fell madly in love and lived together in this stunning London townhouse full of art and books and good wine and soft chairs. Marriage to Arthur would be passionate and private, just the two of them, sitting here in this room talking or not talking, up in their bedroom, making love or sleeping. Art galleries, art shows, art auctions… She could have a studio upstairs in a room with north-facing light. They could start a charity, free art lessons for children whose poorly-funded state schools didn’t have art classes. And in the evenings, dinners out, the theater, home again, laughing, a little drunk but only on each other.

  God, she wanted it so badly she could taste it. But it could never be. She drank her wine instead.

  “Not really my house,” he said. “It’s my parents’.”

  She turned around to face him though she stayed at the window, holding the wine glass in her hand. “It will be yours. You’re the heir. The townhouse. Wingthorn. The paintings.”

  “Not the paintings. They belong to the trust, which belongs to everyone in the family. But you’re right. I do inherit the bulk of everything, which I know is massively unfair. You don’t have to tell me. Dad would have left everything to Lia if he could have.”

  “How does Charlie feel about that, being the spare?”

  “He’s never said anything.”

  “Are you sure? He did sleep with your girlfriend the day you broke up with her. Sounds like he was trying to tell you something.”

  Arthur exhaled loudly. “Maybe. He had to know I’d give him anything he wants or needs. Except Wingthorn,” he said with a tight smile. “It’s mine.”

  “Why are you here if you prefer it there?”

  “Renovations. We’ve all had to clear out. Charlie and I were staying here until he got sick of me and moved in with a friend. Mum and Dad are in New York on an art shopping expedition.”

  “So we’re completely alone here?”

  “Yes,” he said, “and I have to confess something incredibly stupid.”

  “What?”

  “I like hearing you say ‘we.’”

  To hide her smile she raised her wine glass but didn’t drink. She lowered it and held it with two hands, staring into the crimson liquid as if trying to divine from it what the future held.

  “Are you all right?” he asked her.

  The answer was no. She wasn’t all right and hadn’t been for possibly her entire life. Certainly not since her mother died.

  “In the dream,” she said, “right before I cut your head off…you looked at me and said, ‘I’m not your enemy.’”

  “I’m not your enemy.”

  Hearing him say those words sent a shiver through her entire body. That uncanny feeling of a dream being real and the real world being a dream.

  “I wish you were,” she said. “I don’t want to think I wasted all these years hating your family for nothing.”

  “What my grandfather did to your mother was unconscionable. If he had some obligation to her and he refused…God, even if she were a total stranger…” He met her eyes. “We can still be enemies if you prefer.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Friends, then?”

  “You know we could never be friends.”

  It was becoming almost painful, the space between them. She wanted to sit on the sofa at his side, to pull his head into her lap and stroke his hair, black as a raven’s wing. His dark eyes studied her. He seemed to intuit what she was feeling, or perhaps he simply felt the same, just as strongly, this aching need to touch each other.

  He said, “You banished me, remember? I can’t come to you. You have to come to me. Or make me come to you.”

  It was true. This was how it had to be if she was to be his master and he was to be her servant. She had to make the first move. She had to open the door. She had to tap the first domino. She had to say the magic word.

  “I need a little time.”

  “Take all the time you need,” he said.

  Outside another wind blew hard against the house, rattling the old windows. The evening darkened deeper. The air was electric with waiting, heavy with possibilities. She’d broken their deal by sending him away, and if things were to continue with them, the rules would be different…and so would be the prize.

  But the stakes were much higher now. Someone else was playing the game with them.

  “I’m terrified,” she said. A sinister November wind crept in under a door. She shivered.

  “If it is him—if it’s Lord Malcolm knocking paintings and books onto the floor, to get our attention—I don’t
think he’d hurt you.”

  “It’s not him who terrifies me.”

  “What then? Who?”

  “You know. You know perfectly well.”

  He did know. She saw it in his eyes as he stared at her. He knew she was afraid of him, of them.

  “When you’ve been ice all your life,” she said, “nothing is more terrifying than seeing yourself start to melt.”

  “Ice doesn’t die when it melts. It just gets wet.”

  She smiled. “I know, but I’m still afraid.”

  “I’ll protect you.”

  Had he slapped her in the face it would have hurt less than hearing those three words. It hurt the way mercy hurts when you know you don’t deserve it. Regan turned back to the bow window, to the streets going wild with wind. Any moment now, rain would explode from the sky.

  With her back to him she said, “Don’t say that to a woman like me if you don’t mean it.” A woman like her…a woman who’s had to protect herself her entire life.

  “I’ll protect you,” he said again.

  “I won’t protect you.”

  “I’ll protect you,” he said a third time and with finality.

  She turned back around. The fire behind the grate danced as fresh air fed it. It feasted on the wind in the room. Where was it coming from?

  Regan walked toward Arthur but at the last moment, forced herself to sit in the armchair opposite him by the fire. She sipped her wine and set the glass on the table.

  “I’ve had to be cold for so long,” she said, “I don’t know if I can remember how to be warm.”

  “November is cold,” he said, “And wet and brutal. It’s my favorite month of the year.”

  “Mine, too.”

  The wind gusted louder. A siren sounded in the distance. A storm was rising.

  “Are you falling in love with me?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She nodded, wishing she could celebrate that. Instead she was like someone who’d won the lottery but was forbidden from spending a single penny.