Margarita and the Earl

by Joan Wolf

  The problem was that he did not feel at all brotherly toward her. They were sitting in the library one evening after dinner when he asked her to play for him. She fetched her guitar, strummed it softly, then asked, “What would you like to hear, my lord?”

  “Anything you like,” he said, stretching his long legs toward the fire. “Something in Spanish.” He loved to hear the soft liquid sounds of that language on her lips.

  She tilted her head a moment in thought. Then she said, “There is a poem by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz that I put to music for myself. The words are the words of a woman writing to her lover. ‘My love, my lord,’ she says, ‘listen to my weary plaints awhile.’ She misses him and longs to see him. All of nature, she says, is a reflection of her grief.” Her fingers moved over the strings and she began to sing:

  Amado dueño mio,

  Escucha un rato mis cansadas quijas…

  Nicholas sat very still, his eyes on his wife. She had a lovely voice, untrained but clear and true. The firelight cast a glow on her intent face. Nicholas looked from the profile of eyelid and lip down the shoulder and breast and bare arm. He watched the hand that was moving so expertly over the strings; the turn of wrist was so vulnerable in its white, veined fragility.

  She had come to the last plaintive line: “Regaré mi esperanza con mis ejos,” she sang softly. The last notes died away, then looking up at Nicholas, she smiled. “Is that not lovely, my lord?”

  A smile, reluctant and wry, flickered across his lips. “Very lovely, Margarita,” he answered, with just a hint of weariness in the tones of his voice.

  The next day he drove over to visit Catherine Alnwick who was once again in residence at Sothington.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “He looked at her, as a lover can;

  She looked at him, as one who awakes.”

  Robert Browning

  There was one aspect of Margarita’s character that Nicholas had not taken into consideration in his troubled state of mind. What he did not understand was her profound ignorance of anything sexual. She was a married woman. She had had a child. But when it came to passion, she was no more than a child herself.

  When she had first been married, all her senses were deadened, her emotions frozen. It had not been possible for her to respond to Nicholas as a lover. That situation no longer existed, but Nicholas, in his misguided consideration, made no effort to wake Margarita from her innocent aloofness.

  Nicholas, distressed by what he thought of as his wife’s frigidity, had no conception of the extent of her ignorance. English girls, though chaperoned and watched, had a freedom that was unheard of in South America. Margarita had never been to school. She had never giggled with her peers about beaux and love affairs. Until she married Nicholas she had never been alone with a man who was not closely related to her. She had never in her life even been to a dance. In most ways she was far older than girls her age, far more thoughtful and selfless and concerned. But sexually, she was still a child. She gave Nicholas no encouragement because she did not know how to. When he made no effort toward resuming marital relations, she thought it was because he did not want her to have another child too quickly and felt tenderly toward him for his consideration.

  She loved him. He was the sun around which her life revolved. But she never thought she could show him that with her body.

  *

  In February, the three members of this particular lover’s triangle were brought together for the first time in many months. The occasion was a dinner and dance given by Sir Henry Hopkins and his lady for a group of friends who had been visiting at Twinings. Margarita’s game of whist had improved considerably, but Nicholas told her she would be expected to dance and not to play cards, and she had to confess that she had never learned to dance.

  He was astonished. “Well, yes, I can see that the dances in Venezuela may have been somewhat different from ours, but surely you learned some dances.”

  Margarita shook her head. “You must remember, Nicholas, that I was fifteen when my mother and brother Antonio died in the earthquake. Caracas was virtually rubble; it was not a city inclined to hold dances. Then in July, Miranda surrendered Venezuela to Monteverde. My father and I went to San Pedro and my brothers left the country. They had been officers in the Republican army, and Monteverde would have had them executed. The next year the war began again. There was no time for me to learn how to dance.”

  He looked in silence at her earnest face. His mouth was hard and straight and unsmiling. “I see.”

  She looked a little anxious. “Perhaps I could learn in time for the party?”

  In response, he reached out and gathered her close to him for a minute. “Of course you can learn, little one,” he said over her head. “I’ll teach you.”

  She closed her eyes for a minute and rested her head against his shoulder, happy and safe in the warmth of his arms. With a slow and almost stealthy movement, his cheek came down against her hair. Then he straightened. Gently, but very decidedly, he put her away from him.

  *

  Margarita proved an apt pupil, and when they arrived at Twinings for dinner, she was secure in the knowledge that she would not disgrace Nicholas when it came to dancing.

  The houseparty consisted of Lord James Tyrrell, who took every opportunity he could to see Margarita, Colonel and Mrs. Leigh, Mr. and Mrs. Underwood and their seventeen-year-old daughter Louisa, and Lord and Lady Alvin and their son George. Lady Hopkins had invited the Winslows, Mr. Knight and Lady Anne, Catherine Alnwick, and Dr. Macrae and his wife to meet them.

  Margarita went in to dinner with Sir Henry and conversed with him and with Lord Alvin, who was on her other side, with a sweet gravity they both found most beguiling. Sir Henry had become very fond of young Lady Winslow and had expressed himself with unaccustomed force to his wife about Nicholas’s notoriously discreet affair with Catherine Alnwick. The whole neighborhood wondered if Margarita knew about it. No one, of course, would ever be crass enough to question her, and no sign of trouble had ever creased her serene oval brow at the sight of her rival. What Margarita knew and what she thought remained a mystery.

  After dinner they went into the drawing room, where the furniture had been pushed back and a small orchestra installed. About twenty other people from the area arrived, and the dance began.

  Margarita danced the first dance with Nicholas. As he stood beside her waiting for the music to begin, he glanced down, his eyes resting on the smooth curve of her cheek. She turned a little and smiled, looking up at him with brown eyes full of innocence and trust. The dark storms rose within him. He did not want it from her, that childlike innocence. But he was afraid to puncture it, perhaps only to replace it with fear. It defeated him, that look. The music started and he led her into the dance.

  The crisis for Margarita happened about halfway through the evening. There was a break in the music as they were waiting for the next set to be formed. Margarita was standing with Lord James Tyrrell, who had claimed her hand. She glanced around, instinctively, to locate Nicholas and saw him standing by the chimney piece, his posture casual, almost disdainful. Her eyes traveled past him and lit on Catherine Alnwick. Catherine, too, was watching Nicholas. Her eyes were slightly narrowed, and there was an expression on her face that caught and held Margarita’s attention. As she watched, Catherine crossed the space that separated her from Nicholas. He saw her coming, leaned his shoulders back against the mantel, and waited. She put a light hand on his arm and said something. He looked down at her, his eyes hooded, the ghost of a smile on his lips. Then he took her elbow in his hand, and they moved together toward the supper room.

  There was an air of unconscious intimacy about them that hit Margarita like a blow. She stared after the brown and blonde heads that were disappearing toward the supper room, and as she watched, Catherine slipped her hand through the crook of Nicholas’s arm.

  “Lady Winslow?” said Lord James Tyrrell.

  “Yes?” she replied, as if accosted by
a stranger.

  “The music is starting,” he pointed out, and blinking as if she had just awakened, she gave him her hand.

  After the dance, Lord James took her in to supper. Nicholas and Catherine were still there, and Margarita moved to join them. Her husband instantly arose when he saw her, and Catherine smiled a perfectly natural welcome, but nothing in the subsequent half-hour of general conversation could dispel the impression Margarita had received earlier. The image of Mrs. Alnwick and her husband, associated in unconscious familiarity, stayed with her, like something detected, a scene illuminated by a sudden flash of lightning.

  *

  In the days immediately following the party at Twinings, Nicholas noticed a change in Margarita. Once again she seemed to have retreated from him. She did not physically withdraw her presence; rather it was as if she had gone away within herself. He asked her two or three times if anything was the matter, but she always replied in the negative.

  In fact, Margarita was struggling with unfamiliar and frightening thoughts. For the first time in her life, she was jealous. She thought back over the past year with Nicholas and began to realize that what Nicholas did not get from his wife he most likely got somewhere else. Catherine Alnwick’s tall slender figure, her blue eyes and patrician face, were constantly before Margarita’s eyes. She saw again and again those eyes, narrowed with possessive desire, looking at Nicholas.

  Four days after the dance, Margarita came into the library to retrieve her needlework, which she had left on the worn leather chair that stood in front of the fire. Nicholas was there, lounging comfortably in the other leather chair, his eyes on a book that was propped on his knee. He did not hear the door open, and for perhaps half a minute she stood in the doorway, studying his half-averted face. It was a face as familiar to her as her own, yet now she looked at it as if for the first time, seeing the gray-green, long-lashed eyes, the flat, finely shaped ears, the thick brown hair that looked so boyish above the strong column of his neck. The faint hollow under the cheekbones. The arrogant nose and straight, firm mouth.

  She had married Nicholas at a time when every physical feeling had been battered out of her. She had seen him first as an enemy and later as a friend; never had she seen him primarily as a man. He looked up and she was struck, blindingly, by the vivid male force of that suddenly, strangely unfamiliar face. She flushed.

  He rose from his chair. “Were you looking for me?”

  She went straight to her needlework. “I only came for this.” She refused to look at him, her eyes resolutely downcast.

  He looked with puzzlement at the profile of privacy he had not seen on her for almost a year. A sense of déjà vu came over him as he remembered a similar scene in this same library about a year ago. Something had happened; he knew it, but he didn’t know what it was. “Margarita?” he asked.

  She turned to him, her dark brown eyes withdrawn and guarded. She could find nothing to say. He took a step nearer. “Has something happened?”

  She shook her head. “Of course not. I must feed the baby, Nicholas. He has been cutting a tooth, I think.” She seized on the excuse. “I am just a little tired, I suppose. Nicky hasn’t been very happy these last few days.” She stepped backward. “I will see you at dinner.” With a relief she carefully tried to conceal, she turned and left the room.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “O that ‘twere possible

  After long grief and pain

  To find the arms of my true love

  Round me once again!”

  —Tennyson

  For the first time since her marriage, Margarita began to consider the nature of her relationship with Nicholas. Like an animal awakening from a long winter’s hibernation, she looked with newly opened eyes at the scene that surrounded her, and for the first time she found it strange.

  Why did Nicholas never make love to her? It was the question that plagued her night and day. He had come to her often enough in the first weeks of their marriage. It was only after she became pregnant that he had ceased visiting her room, and since the birth of Nicky he had not returned.

  She did not please him. He did not find her attractive. This was the only conclusion she could come to. He had done his duty until she had conceived. Now that he had an heir he did not need to approach her again. He could continue his affair with Catherine Alnwick: tall, cool, blonde, English Catherine. Margarita hated her with a primitive jealousy she had not thought it was possible to feel. She wanted to fight Catherine for Nicholas, but she did not know how to do it. She did not know what to do to attract him. The thought crossed her mind that perhaps she could make him jealous of her, but it was a shortlived idea. Margarita had never resorted to cunning in her life; it had never been necessary to be anything other than what she was. She didn’t know how to begin to change.

  *

  It was a bitterly cold day at the end of February. Margarita was undressing for bed. It was late, after midnight. Nicky had been fretful with the tooth he was cutting, and she had spent the evening rocking and singing to him. Finally he had gone to sleep, and she had come into her own room to undress. Her maid, Chute, was waiting for her. Margarita smiled at the woman absently and cast a glance at the door that connected her room to Nicholas’s. The crack of light under the door told her he was still up.

  Chute began to unbutton Margarita’s gown, turning away once or twice to sneeze. “Are you getting a cold, Chute?” Margarita asked. “You needn’t have waited up for me, you know.”

  “I am all right, my lady,” Chute answered somewhat nasally, holding out Margarita’s nightgown. When the nightgown was on and the dressing gown over it, Margarita sat at the dressing table and Chute brushed out her hair.

  “That will be enough,” Margarita said when it was falling free and shining to her shoulders. “Go to bed, Chute. And stay there tomorrow if you feel unwell.”

  “Yes, my lady,” the dresser said thankfully. She put the brush down on the table, and as she did so her body was seized by a violent sneeze. Her hand jerked and the brush crashed against a bottle of perfume, knocking it over and breaking it. Margarita jumped up in haste and Chute cried out.

  Nicholas was standing in front of his bedroom window, looking out at the frozen night, when he heard Chute’s cry and the sound of something breaking. He belted his dressing gown and went into Margarita’s room. The first thing that hit him was the overpowering scent of perfume. Chute was babbling hysterically and trying to mop up the dressing table, while Margarita spoke soothingly, saying everything would be all right.

  “What a reek!” Nicholas said humorously, and both women started at the deep sound of his voice.

  Margarita met his eyes and her dimples flickered. “Isn’t it dreadful? I never liked that perfume, even in small amounts, but now….” The heavy, sweet odor was overpowering. Chute repeated apologies.

  “Never mind it now,” Nicholas said authoritatively. “The room will have to be aired, and it can’t be done tonight. You can sleep in my room tonight, Margarita. The fire is blazing and it’s nice and warm.” She came slowly across the room toward him, wrapped in a rich velvet robe, her hair hanging loose down her back. He frowned. “Is there glass on the floor? Watch out you don’t cut your feet.” She looked down and trod carefully.

  “Go to bed, Chute,” she said over her shoulder. “The maids will attend to it in the morning.”

  “Yes, my lady,” the woman replied faintly. She sneezed. “Good night, my lady, my lord.”

  “Good night,” Margarita said firmly and closed the door behind them.

  Nicholas’s room was warm, although not as warm as hers. “Get under the covers and I’ll put another log on the fire,” he told her. She obeyed him, taking off her robe and climbing into the huge four-poster. When he turned around she was sitting up, straight-backed and still, her huge brown eyes watching him warily. He thought he knew what that look meant.

  “You should be comfortable enough here,” he said a little wearily. “I’ll get one
of the maids to make up another room for me.”

  Margarita felt as if he had struck her. He couldn’t even bear to be in the same room with her. With her breath almost a sob in her throat, she scrambled out of the bed and stood barefoot on the cold floor. “Nonsense. If you don’t want to share a room with me, then I shall be the one to leave. There is no point in both of us being put out of our beds.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said sharply. “There is no fire in any other room. You’d freeze.”

  She shook her head, wordless, and went back to the bed to get her robe. Nicholas, finally, understood that he had hurt her. He hesitated, then went to stand next to her, feeling huge, his eyes on her averted face. He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her to face him. “I am not going to sleep here tonight because I couldn’t share a bed with you and trust myself to keep my hands off you. It is as simple as that.”

  His hands were hard on her shoulders, biting with unconscious strength into the soft flesh. Margarita felt her heart begin to thud as his words registered in her mind. He seemed to be saying that he did want her. She took an uneven breath, looked fixedly at the lapel of his dressing gown, and spoke in a low voice. “I thought you did not find me pleasing.”