The Pearl

by Reisz, Tiffany

“Because you love him? You can’t love. You never could. You never could and you never will.”

  “I couldn’t love you, but I can love him. I do love him, you bastard. I love him, and I always will.”

  And with those words, the cords broke like tender vines and disappeared into dust. The specter of Sir Jack vanished as Regan cried out, her very being shaken by an orgasm so powerful everything faded to black.

  * * *

  When she came to, she was lying on her back with Arthur staring down at her. Her body was limp, listless, almost lifeless even as her interior muscles continued to give little gasps and shivers.

  She felt wetness, Arthur’s semen dripping onto the bed. When had he come?

  “Regan? Are you all right?” He stroked her face. “I think you came too hard. You passed out.”

  She sat up, held him by the shoulders. “Did you see him?”

  “Lord Malcolm was here?”

  She didn’t answer at first. Of course it was Lord Malcolm. He’d made her see Sir Jack, made her think she was tied to Arthur, trapped against him. He’d forced her to realize that…

  She loved him. She loved Arthur. She loved him and she’d said it out loud…except Arthur hadn’t heard her conversation, hadn’t seen Sir Jack.

  Relief rushed through her so fast and hard she was dizzy again. She lay naked on the bed, wet and well-used. It humiliated her how glad she was Arthur hadn’t heard her say she loved him. There was no chance they could stay together. Telling him she loved him would only make the inevitable end of them all the more agonizing.

  “Yes,” she said, lying to protect him. “Malcolm was here.”

  “What did he say?”

  Regan touched Arthur’s face. The face of the man she loved, the man she owned, and the man she couldn’t keep.

  “You were right,” she said. “He wants me to paint again.”

  “Told you so,” he said, smiling broadly. Arthur looked so terribly young with his raven-hair wild from the sex and his dark eyes gleaming like two priceless black pearls. “Let’s find a twenty-four-hour art store. Those are a thing, right?”

  “I think I can wait until morning. Until then…let’s get out of here, please.”

  When she left Ferry Hill that night, she took only one thing with her—her painting of Mars and Venus.

  12

  A Mother and Child

  Dawn was gently breaking as they drove back into London. Silver shoots of morning light pierced the grey November clouds like arrows. Regan fell asleep on Arthur’s shoulder and only woke up when he pulled into The Pearl’s underground parking garage.

  Arthur laughed softly at her. “Finally wake up?”

  “Sorry,” she said, sitting up straight. “I’m not used to getting up at three in the morning to visit haunted houses.”

  “Go up and get some sleep,” he said. “I’ll stop by later.”

  “You don’t want to come up and sleep with me?”

  “How much sleep do you think we’d actually get?”

  She smiled tiredly. “Fair point. See you soon.”

  When she started to leave the car, Arthur stopped her by putting his hand gently on her arm. “Will you promise me something?”

  “What is it?”

  “Whatever he’s doing…and for whatever reason, please don’t let it…”

  “Arthur…” She wanted to tell him everything would be all right no matter what occurred, and that they would be together and happy until the end of time.

  “I can’t make that promise,” she said. “You know I can’t make you any promises about the future.”

  “I know.” He nodded. “I know that.”

  Why must love be so impossibly difficult, she wondered? If she’d loved him less, she could have promised him more. When she looked at their future, all she saw was pain—his pain. He’d tire of her saying no to his marriage proposals. He’d resent her for not wanting to adopt children. He’d wonder why he wasted so many years on a woman doomed to an early death, when all that time he could have been finding love with a girl his own age who’d marry him in a heartbeat and give him a half-dozen bouncing Godwick babies.

  The heartbreak was that Regan knew he’d marry her tonight, even knowing all of that. Proof he was absolutely mad, which meant she had to be the sane one.

  “I can promise you right now,” she said. “How’s that?”

  “I’ll take what I can get.”

  She kissed him, then watched him drive off. How many more kisses were left to them—a thousand? A hundred? Ten?

  Regan returned to the penthouse, doing her best to avoid the curious eyes of The Pearl’s staff who must have been wondering why the boss was dragging herself across the lobby at the crack of dawn. She found her bed waiting for her. She undressed and crawled under the sheets, and fell into a deep and lonely sleep.

  * * *

  When she woke up, it was raining again. Regan heard the endless drumming of an autumn shower on her windows and walls. Her bed felt enormous and empty without Arthur. How had she gotten used to him being there so quickly? After Sir Jack died, she’d sworn she’d never sleep in the same bed with another man as long as she lived. Now, barely seven months later, she was clutching Arthur’s pillow, searching out his scent.

  Hunger finally drove her from bed. She ordered room service—Cuban coffee, lobster ravioli in brown butter sauce, salted caramel ice cream—and ate every bite. After a long, hot shower, she dressed in a grey wool skirt and matching jacket. She went downstairs to the sitting room, where she froze. Someone had changed the painting above the fireplace.

  It was an original she’d picked up years ago at an auction—a haunting portrait by the American painter Elizabeth Nourse called A Mother and Child. Both the mother and the child wore somber expressions. Behind their heads were painted pale nimbuses like the icons of saints, though this mother was not the Virgin Mary, just an ordinary woman. The child wasn’t Jesus, but a normal baby boy.

  Zoot might have hung it, but she had never before changed the paintings out without Regan’s permission or at her request.

  Malcolm, then.

  What did he mean by hanging a portrait of a mother and child in her home? Was he taunting her?

  Regan took the painting down and might have thrown it into the fireplace if she hadn’t been such a fan of Nourse’s other work.

  She carried it into her office and hid it behind the desk, turning it to face the wall. She picked up the phone and called for Zoot.

  “I have a painting I want taken to Sotheby’s,” Regan told her. “You can bring up a replacement, too. Anything. Today, please.”

  She hung up before Zoot could ask what the great bloody rush was over one single painting. Regan was in no mood to argue.

  She stared at the back of the painting, which had opened all her wounds at once. Why didn’t she get to have a mother growing up? Why was her decision to have or not have children taken out of her hands by a set of bad genes? Why couldn’t she let herself be selfish enough to marry Arthur anyway, knowing she’d leave him childless and widowed when she died?

  “What do you want from me, Malcolm?” she asked through tears. “What are you trying to say? Why won’t you just say it and leave me alone?”

  “I’m trying to say…I’m very sorry, my darling girl. So very, very sorry.”

  Regan spun around, but there was no one there.

  Except someone had been there. She had heard a man’s voice—cultured, monied, but deeply contrite.

  And where before there had been nothing but the rug on the floor…Regan spotted a single brass key.

  Shaking, she picked it up. It was warm, like it had just come from a man’s pocket.

  “Regan?”

  Arthur’s voice, this time.

  “I’m in my office,” she called out to him.

  The key was in her palm. Arthur came in and saw her holding it like a bird in her hand.

  “He was here.” Regan met his eyes. “Malcolm. I didn’t see him,
but I heard him. When I turned around, this was on the rug.”

  Arthur gently extracted the key from her hand and examined it. “What did he say?”

  “He said…” She blinked and tears ran down her face. “He said he was sorry. He called me his ‘darling girl.’”

  “Sorry for what? Torturing you?”

  She had no answer.

  Arthur closed his fingers around the key and took her into his arms, held her head against his shoulder. “What’s wrong?” he said. “What is it?”

  Between soft sobs, she told him about the Elizabeth Nourse painting, how it had cut her so deeply to see it. Arthur pulled her toward her desk chair, sat down, and set her into his lap.

  “You know I want to be with you, don’t you?” she said. “You know I would if I could.”

  “You can though,” he whispered into her ear. His hand stroked her back and her hair.

  “If I still hated you, maybe I could do that to you.”

  “But you don’t hate me anymore?”

  She raised her head. “No. I don’t hate you at all.”

  He wiped her face gently with his hands. “What would it take to convince you it’s all right to let yourself have a life with me?”

  “A miracle,” she said, then laughed pitifully at herself.

  “A ghost just brought you a magic key. Isn’t that enough of a miracle for you?”

  “Depends on what the key’s for.”

  “It’s small,” he said, holding up the key. “Not a door key then.”

  Regan took it from him. Yes, a very small brass key for a lockbox or a small safe. Or…

  “The desk drawer,” she said, meeting Arthur’s eyes. She slid off his lap at once and kneeling, pushed the key into the lock of the drawer that had been shut up for years.

  The key turned. “It worked,” she breathed.

  “Let me,” Arthur said. “God knows what’s in there.”

  She moved out of the way as he pulled the drawer all the way open. Peering past him, she saw ledger books, a bundle of letters, a small picture frame turned facedown.

  He turned the frame over. It was a photograph, yellowed and aged, of a woman with a baby. The pose was remarkably like that of the painting leaning against her office wall. The faces were too grainy to make out clear features but there was something about the woman…something familiar.

  Arthur squinted. “That’s not my grandmother. Or my great-grandmother.” He flipped it over and undid the clasps to remove the photo.

  Regan took the ledger from the drawer. These were Lord Malcolm’s accounts. What he owed his tailor. What he owed The Pearl. What he owed his art dealer, his mistresses, his whores.

  “Hannah Howell,” Arthur said.

  Regan stopped perusing the ledger and looked up at him. “What about my mother?”

  “The photo,” he said, passing it to her. “Her name’s on the back, but it’s dated 1938.”

  Hannah Howell and Angus, Age 1. August 1938. Regan turned it back over and examined the faces. “It’s not your great-grandmother,” she said. “It’s mine. My mother was named after her. And Angus was my grandfather…”

  She’d seen something in the ledger, something that made no sense.

  “H.H.,” she said, reading a set of initials aloud. “Malcolm was paying her. A whole series of monthly payments, beginning in June 1937.”

  “Paying her? For what?”

  Regan raised an eyebrow at him. “The obvious, obviously.”

  “Would he pay her directly? Or the hotel? Never paid for it before. How does it work?”

  “Not like this,” she said. The payments had begun when her great-grandmother was heavily pregnant with Angus. “Pay for play, not one payment a month. It’s more like…”

  Child maintenance payments.

  Regan knew what she would find in the letters, and yet she read them one by one in order, passing them to Arthur when she was finished. First were the letters from Regan’s great-grandmother Hannah. Then there were letters from Lord Malcolm’s mother, the Dowager Countess of Godwick. Together, they told the story of a brief, torrid affair that ended as all brief, torrid affairs did. This one, however, had unintended consequences.

  “Lord Malcolm was your great-grandfather,” Arthur said finally, having reached the same conclusion she had, the conclusion she couldn’t bring herself to say out loud. “Regan…we’re second cousins.”

  She nodded slowly. “It seems we are.”

  “Good thing you don’t hate us wicked Godwicks anymore,” he said with a laugh. “You’re one of us.”

  13

  The Prisoner

  “My God,” Regan said, closing her eyes. She leaned forward, head in her hands.

  “Regan. Regan?” Arthur’s voice pushed past her defenses. “You can’t believe for one second that matters to me or anyone.”

  Of course it didn’t matter. Not that. First cousins could marry in Europe and did. Even if they were brother and sister it wouldn’t matter because she couldn’t have children.

  It would never be that. It was this:

  “Your grandfather turned away his own niece.”

  “He did,” Arthur said.

  “His own niece. His own family. He must have known…”

  “I’m certain he did.” Arthur sat back on the floor. “How could he do that? What was he afraid of?”

  “A legitimate claim on the family fortune?”

  “Probably, yes. Especially since Malcolm gave your great-grandmother financial support for their son.”

  Regan stared at Arthur, still in shock. “If Malcolm can do all this—move paintings, give people dreams and nightmares and throw keys at them…why didn’t he try to save my mother?”

  “Maybe he did try,” Arthur said. “You don’t know that he didn’t. Good chance my grandfather just ignored all the signs and warnings. Now Malcolm’s trying again.”

  “Too late now.”

  “Not for you. You said it would take a miracle to convince you to have a life with me. You got your miracle, didn’t you?”

  “Arthur…” She shook her head.

  It wasn’t that simple. It was never that simple.

  A knock surprised them both. A knock and a door opening.

  “Boss?”

  It was Zoot. She didn’t wait for an answer but marched straight into the office holding a wrapped painting.

  “Boss? What’re you two doing on the floor?”

  “Oh, just going through some old papers,” Regan said. She quickly stood up and gathered herself. Arthur went to the window that looked out onto the city.

  “You wanted me to take something to the auction house, right?” Zoot asked.

  “Yes, this one.” Regan passed her the Nourse painting. “And you can hang the other painting over the fireplace.”

  “I’ll do it,” Arthur said. He took the wrapped painting into the sitting room, Zoot following.

  “Regan?” Arthur’s voice came from the other room. Something in his tone made her run to him straight away.

  “What is it—” Then she saw.

  “What’s wrong, Boss?” Zoot asked. “You want something else? Thought Evelyn de Morgan was your girl crush.”

  She’d told Zoot to bring up another painting, any painting. The painting Arthur had unwrapped was by Evelyn de Morgan—indeed her favorite. And she knew this painting well. It was of a woman wearing a blue gown, adorned with a peacock feather, a net of pearls in her hair, and manacles on her wrists—one cuff made of iron, one made of gold.

  The Prisoner.

  “No,” Regan said. “It’s fine. You can go.”

  Zoot gave her a long look, and Arthur, too. Perhaps sensing the tension, she made no other comment and simply left with the Nourse painting.

  They stood alone, side by side, she and Arthur, the painting slightly trembling in his hands.

  “The Prisoner? What do you think it means?” Arthur said. “Am I supposed to chain you up? I wouldn’t mind it. Regan?”


  She stared at the painting without speaking.

  Something stirred in her. She’d looked at this very painting a thousand times without feeling anything but admiration for the technique, the colors, the details on the woman’s gown and hair.

  Now Regan saw something else in the painting.

  Herself.

  “She has your eyes,” Arthur said. “Pale grey. A little scared, a little trapped.”

  Regan was the prisoner, trapped by bands of iron and gold in a luxurious prison. Those links on the manacles on her wrist looked flimsy as paperclips. The woman in the painting had only to pull her hands apart and they would snap off. And once she did that, she would be free. She was already free. She just didn’t know it yet.

  Regan glanced around the penthouse of The Pearl, a hotel girded with iron and steel and decorated with dazzling gilt and gold.

  She turned to Arthur and kissed him. A soft kiss. A tender kiss. A goodbye kiss.

  “Do me a favor,” she said.

  “Anything.”

  “When you start your tour of duty, don’t get yourself killed, please.”

  He stared at her, eyes narrowed in confusion. “Wasn’t planning to. Why?”

  She smiled, but didn’t answer. “I need to get to work,” she said. “I’ll…I’ll see you later.”

  “Later tonight?”

  “I have to do a few things first.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Soon,” she said. She touched his face and kissed him one more time. His handsome face, those eyes so dark there was no telling the pupil from the iris. Her lover. Her protector. Her family.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I will be.”

  He nodded. “I’ll see you tomorrow then, or whenever you’re ready.”

  He took his coat off the back of the chaise, went to the door. There he stopped and turned back.

  “I know you can’t make me any promises,” he said, “but I can make you this promise. I will love you forever, and you can’t stop me so don’t bother trying. I’ll love you and I’ll wait for you, but if you run from me, I’ll find you.”