“Rosalyn, you can’t be asking me to condone such a thing.” He was looking for a weapon against this. “Why make things appear what they aren’t? Why make things appear at all? When in reality—”
She cut him off with a snort. “Don’t lecture me on reality. What most people think is true is reality enough for me.”
“Well, I’ve become slightly less democratic.” Graham cleared his throat. “For God’s sake, if it only took group agreement to make something true, then you would be no more than a wicked adulteress and I some—some prodigal rake.”
Her silence was deafening.
“Rosalyn,” he reprimanded-pleaded.
There was a long pause. In the darkness, she seemed to forge—in the sense of shaping something by blows that was too hot to touch—a bravery. She came out with, “I
am
a wicked adulteress.”
He breathed out his displeasure and disgust. “Well, I refuse to accept the implication of that for myself.”
“You hold yourself in very high esteem.”
“I’m the only self I’ve got.” He stood to go. “Do you want some brandy?”
She wouldn’t give up. “And the crow? I suppose you like her reality, her definition of you?”
“Not particularly. And you’re wrong about her anyway. By several counts.”
“Less than you think. You’re taken with her unapproachability, Gray. One good go at her would drastically alter your perception.”
He laughed and turned toward her, a little shocked. “I can’t even imagine—”
“Not much, you can’t.” Then there was a sudden catch in her voice again. She went from angry to disconsolate in one swoop. Sobs clattered out in a catenation, as if something had broken loose deep in her chest. It was a surprising, complete breakdown. She scooted and sniffled. Graham found himself holding her hesitantly, one arm over her shoulder and around the curve of her back, her head on his chest.
They sat for a while. Then he leaped to a subject that had always been paradoxically safe. Had Gerald gone to London?
No, Kent.
What would she feel good about doing? Would she go to him or their house in London—he had just rented a new place in East Kensington. Or would she prefer to go all the way home to Philadelphia?
She didn’t know.
Graham leaned forward, patting her foot, while slowly swelling with humble self-congratulations. It was over.
“No scenes. Neat, clean. I don’t see why we can’t both keep our dignity,” he said.
“No open season on crows?”
He shook his head. “A crow. Jesus. I should tell her.”
“Don’t bother. I will. I’m thinking of taking her aside, giving her a few pointers.”
“She’d think you were certifiable.”
A throaty giggle erupted through her sniffles, somewhat affected but not unappealing. The raciness intrinsic to Rosalyn’s laugh was one of her best features, Graham thought. “You’ve tried, haven’t you?” she said. “And been flatly refused.”
“No to both.”
“Then you have some immediate plans. That’s why you’re in such a hurry to have me out.”
“What has come to a blind alley with you is not going to suddenly open up with someone else.”
She laughed. “Well, we can eliminate celibacy, I think. So if not that and not an all-out rogering, then—God, you’re not thinking of marrying her, are you?”
“You are a lewd and incurable romantic.”
“Is there some other way to make this fresh beginning you seem to want?”
He kissed her forehead, then pulled his arm and shoulder, now numb, out from behind her. He got up from the bed. “I think I must have already been making one, when I so perceptively chose to pin you to the floor of a carriage. You are one of the nicest women I have attacked in ages.”
“You’ll let me know,” she said, “if you find out I’m
the
nicest? Or maybe you’d like to do a running comparison? Just to check in now and then and be sure of exactly what you’ve given up.”
He tried to laugh this off. “Too easy.”
“But you’ll think about it?”
“That’s very bad of you to put such temptation in my path. No. I won’t leave things as muddy as that.”
“I would take muddy, if that were the only choice I had. And I’m doing my best to make things difficult, not easy.” In the softest whisper, she said, “Graham, I love you.”
He frowned, blinked, didn’t know what to say. “I’m going downstairs. Do you want some brandy?”
There was a long pause in the dark. “And I’m getting the divorce. No matter what. Gerald says he’ll give it to me, if that’s what I want.”
“With me as co-respondent?”
“You’re the obvious grounds.”
Graham’s frown deepened. “He can ask me for damages, you realize.”
“Don’t worry. It will be straightforward, no fuss.” She quoted him from a moment ago. “‘Neat, clean.’”
He didn’t know if he said the next for Gerald Schild or for himself. Or, as he pretended, for Rosalyn’s own sake: “You’re throwing away a good life, a good man.”
“It’s a boring life, when you’ve lived all the excitements that were planned for you. Your first ball. Beaux. Marriage. Children.” She’d left three back in Philadelphia. “What am I supposed to do now? Some sort of endless charity work? Well, charity begins at home, Graham.” Her voice had grown fervent. “I want my life to be rich again. I want to be having an affair with the most notorious man in London. Or marry him and be the most glamorous pair on and off the Continent. The countess of Ronmoor.”
Graham felt his jaw clench, his face grow warm. In his vanity, he had imagined that, mixed with her fascination for notoriety, title, prestige, Englishness itself, she was still primarily motivated by a love for him. For him personally.
“I will help you gather your things together when I come back up,” he said. “I really need a brandy.”
The doorknob felt cool in his hand. As he opened the door wide, diffuse light from down the hallway came in. A draft—more welcome coolness—blew across him. Behind him, he heard Rosalyn take a sharp breath, as if struck literally by some force in the corridor, then he heard the telltale jerking of breath. She was crying again. “But I love you,” she said.
“You love my shoes,” he told her. “You may have them. They’re yours.”
Of one thing he was certain as he began along the walkway: The farther he got from the room, the more he hated the idea of going back as he’d said he would.
If she really loved him, he pleaded fervently, she would leave while he was downstairs.
As he came around the walkway toward the stairs, the slight illumination became more pronounced. Light was coming from under a door. One step past it, Graham stopped. He paused to verify. It was—by a coincidence that gave a pang over his inability to control such things—the room occupied tonight by Submit Channing-Downes. She was up at this hour. He could knock and ask,
Is everything all right? Why are you up?
Then again, perhaps she had fallen asleep with the light on. There was not a sound.
As he began down the stairs, he felt frustrated and baffled by women, but paradoxically filled with an optimism for Graham Wessit. He was shedding Rosalyn—if not in the kindest manner, at least he’d given a thought to kindness. And he had just now walked past any immediate involvement with the lunatic widow. All of this, it seemed to him, was evidence that he was not who he had been ten years ago, ten months ago, ten minutes ago. It was proof of what he’d been trying to explain to Rosalyn tonight: A man by his own
actions determines who he is and what he’ll become. He took the last steps on the balls of his feet, feeling himself separate from Rosalyn’s, everyone’s, anyone’s, concepts of him. He was his own creation. And not only was the end product more promising, but the process of rethinking himself sat pleasantly on him. He was
real
walking down the stairs that instant, or his own figment, which at least was better than being someone else’s.
Instead of going for the brandy in the library, he took a very private delight in changing his mind. He headed for the kitchen. He intended to find something to eat, something sweet. He remembered a tray of honey tarts at breakfast. He imagined himself all alone, sitting on the cook’s worktable, licking honey off his fingers, his bare legs and feet swinging in the night air.
From the dining room, he saw the light. A servant, he thought. Someone was awake in the servants’ hall downstairs. From the top of the stairwell, he could see a light was burning in the kitchen. Then, midway down, as he bent to look under the soffit, he nearly lost his balance. He had to put his hand out on the wall.
Submit Channing-Downes was sitting in profile at the kitchen worktable, an oil lamp lighting her face. She was writing, bent over papers and pen. Graham stared. Something about her was very different.
A breeze blew, though not as forcefully as half an hour ago. The wind had been relieved to an extent by a light rain falling outside. Oblivious to the weather, Submit sat with her back to an open window. Wisps of hair blew into her face. She kept pushing and holding her hair back with one hand as she wrote with the other, not seeming to notice the inconvenience of the fine spray of rain that must have been hitting her though the ladder-back of her chair.
Quietly, Graham descended another few stairs. He watched her concentration, the steady crown of her head,
her hand capturing hair, the other moving fluently over the desk’s surface. She sat back suddenly, paused, and put the tip of the pen in her mouth. Graham backed into the dark, against the far wall, just as Submit tossed her pen down and stood. She turned to face the open window. As she reached to close it, he realized what was so unusual about her tonight: Her nightshift was white—plain, gauzy, narrow. Her arms shimmered, sleeveless; the nightshift was such a plain little thing. Her hair was in a loose braid, coming out in bits, making a nimbus of fine, unruly, wild curls. The effect would have been unpretentiously pious and virginal, a saintly air, except for the dampness on her back. The shift clung across the valley of her spine. He could see the distinct movement and fleshy color of her shoulder blades as she latched the window then flexed her back in a leisurely stretch.
Graham held his breath. If he so much as cleared his throat, they would be in conversation. In damp, sleeveless, open-shirted, barefooted conversation.
She picked something up from the table—a dressing gown. It was dark purple, heavy. It looked like satin he color of plums. She slipped her arms into it, lifted her braid out. Then she sat at the table again and began to write once more.
He ought to leave, Graham thought, but his feet carried him down another step, then another. Something about her absorbed expression, her bent, diminutive grace, her rapidly moving hand compelled curiosity. The last step creaked.
With a start, she looked up, covering what she was writing as if it were her naked body, as if what she wrote on the page were as private as pink-tipped breasts, white belly, and gold-fleeced pudenda.
“Who’s that?” she said, her face white with shock and fright.
Graham came out of the dark. He smiled. “What are you doing?” he asked.
He came forward, buttoning his shirt. The sight of him coming out of the dark made a lasting impression, as if Ronmoor had stepped out of the shadows, disheveled, half dressed. His skin was dark, his chest and belly plated with muscle, covered with a fine smattering of coffee-black hair. The hair, straight, smooth, soft-looking, ran into a deep channel down the muscles of his chest, converging into a neat, almost delicate line that ran straight toward his groin. Graham. Looking as though he’d come after the housemaid, down into the nether reaches, into her part of the house.
Submit felt her face grow cold, hot, cold again. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t cover up fast enough the pages she’d been writing. Her hands simply weren’t big enough. She turned the pages over, pulled her dressing gown around her, pressing her palm up her dressing gown to her throat. She shoved herself away from the table, the first movement of flight.
“Don’t get up.” Graham Wessit held out his hand.
Submit was so guilt-stricken, she couldn’t decide if he were genuinely trying to allay her fear or playing with her, commanding her presence. She felt caught, like an animal in the dark immobilized by a sudden bright light. She stared at him from her chair.
“Take it easy.” Graham laughed at her. “I’m sorry I frightened you—you really gave me a start. I was so surprised to find you down here.” He glanced at the papers on the table. Conversationally, as if they were going to talk about these, he said, “Henry was a great one for letters. He wrote volumes and kept all the letters he received in a
trunk.” He reached his arms wide, demonstrating size. The top of his shirt gaped open. She got another glimpse of shadowy hair, the recesses and ridges of chest, the topography of an athletic man. He sat on the edge of the table, innocence personified, looking down. He asked, “Whom are you writing to?”
She slid the inverted pages toward her, laying her arms over them. “No one.” She picked up the pen, turning it in her fingers. It amazed her to hear her own voice.
“What are you doing down here?” he asked.
God, she didn’t even know. When she had come down an hour or so ago, she had thought she did. This was the housemaid’s kitchen, the housemaid’s world. Only there was no housemaid here. Just the regular underworkings of a house. A pantry. A buttery. A butler’s cupboard. A servants’ hall. Service bells along one wall. Plain, solid wood furniture. Neat, tidy, clean. And empty. Except now for the master of the house.
Submit’s throat had gone tight. She couldn’t meet his eyes. She was caught again in a strange corner of his house, this time in the middle of the night.
Graham watched her very nervous reaction to him. He would have liked to put his hands over the ones playing with the pen, but he didn’t dare for fear the rattled woman would leap up and run.
He glanced again at the pages she guarded. “Henry’s women,” he said, “were frequently ugly and always letter-writers, trying to make up for their plainness with beautiful prose.”
She glanced up quickly, a half-angry, half-wounded look on her face.
“Not you.” Graham laughed, amazed. He was so surprised that she could imagine he found her ugly. “You are the contradiction, I meant. The contradiction to everything I know about Henry.”
“Not very much of a contradiction, I’m afraid.” Submit shook her head and tapped the pages. “It’s poetry.”
“Is it?” He reached.
She pulled the papers to her and sat back into the chair, finally meeting his eyes.
He smiled. “Well, you don’t write fancy prose, at least.”
Almost inaudibly, she agreed, “No.”
“You are not, as I said, very typical of Henry’s tastes.”
Submit tilted her head in frank curiosity. “I can’t believe you find me pretty.”
“You are stunning.”
“Not very many people would agree with you.”
“Perhaps not that you are pretty, but anyone would agree that you are stunning.”
For a moment, she puzzled over this.
He walked around her to a cupboard. After half a dozen doors were opened and banged shut, he brought forth an empty tray, empty but for one well-done little pie. He made a sound, his tongue against his teeth, in dismay. He set the pie on the worktable and went to the cold larder.
“Milk?” he asked over his shoulder.
“No, thank you.” She already knew there was none.
“Good thing,” he said as he came to the table. “We’re an hour or two away from having any, again.” He put the pie on a plate. “Would you like some?”
Submit quickly shook her head. “Oh, no—” She couldn’t quite look away from the tart. It was crispy brown, shining with an overflow of syrupy filling.
Despite her answer, he found another plate and cut the sweet in half, depositing her portion in front of her. She stared at the offering. Another picnic. She wasn’t sure what to make of it.
After a rather long search, Graham produced a single fork and a kitchen towel—he could find nothing in his own
kitchen. “Here.” He let her use the fork. They shared the towel as he used his fingers.
He watched her. After several bites, Submit looked up with a smile. “Thank you,” she said. “It’s delicious.”
Graham took her in. Her thanks. Her smile he liked so well, warm and alive. The very appealing display of the many small teeth. He returned the smile wryly. “You’re welcome. It’s a little talent I have, knowing when ‘no’ means ‘yes.’”
She didn’t like this at all, suddenly frowning and returning to the tart. She took a fierce bite, then pushed the rest away. “Well, thank you very much.” She yawned and pushed her chair back.
She stood. He stood, his reflexes making him a gentleman in bare feet. “I haven’t finished mine.” He gestured to his own half-eaten pie, as if some etiquette applied at four in the morning.
Submit was confused, marginally apologetic. She stood until she realized he would too unless she sat down. She plopped into the chair, setting her stack of pages on the table.
He sat down and took them.
She reacted immediately, reaching across the table. Her chair scraped. “No!”
He held the papers away from her.
She came around the table. “Give those to me!”
He stood up, easily holding them above the length of her arm.
As they jockeyed for position, Graham caught a glimpse of the first page, and for one brief, defensive moment, he imagined something impossible. A nasty little serial with him at its center. Not very plausible, he thought. There were a hundred, a thousand, people who knew more about him than she. Still, the way she defended the handful of pages, even risking brushing up against his back, reaching around
his chest. She stopped suddenly, both of them aware of her breasts, unbound beneath the dressing gown, jostling against him. For a few seconds, the rise and fall of their breathing made a soft rhythm, bosom to solar plexus. Then Submit retreated, not only physically but into a superior tone.
“This is a rude game, Lord Netham. Those are private.”
“Lord Netham,” Graham repeated. He wanted to plunder her suddenly, knock her down. He had to fight the urge to do something masculine and dramatic, to set the papers aside and leap the chairs and table she was now putting between them as she wandered away to a corner of the room. Somewhat maliciously, he lowered the papers to eye level.
“Go ahead. If it’s going to give you so much bloody pleasure—”
A Rosalynism, whether she’d meant it to be or not. He made a pull of his mouth and began to page through what were actually a collection of handwritten poems. Although the bully’s pleasure was dulled now by her indifference.
When he set the collection down, she shoved it across the table at him. “No, read them. Every bloody one.” She was adamant.
And had somehow turned the tables. There was a vulnerable bravado to her, a fear associated with the poetry that she threw at him. It was something he could understand. He picked them up again and sat with one hip on the worktable. Again he looked at the sheets of paper.
After a moment, he looked up. “The meter is off.” He could have said worse. The first was a perfectly morbid little sonnet.
She was watching him, waiting for something, but not criticism.
“Do you write much poetry?” he asked.
“A little.” Her head bent down and admitted, “A lot. I have boxes of it.”
There was a long, awkward silence. He set down the pages. “I should have to read more, and my opinion matters very little, but it seems a little constrained.” Quickly, he amended, “But interesting, nice.”
She took this as criticism. “I know.” She sighed. “They’re all like that.”
He offered the rather hollow consolation, “One does not become a poet overnight.”
She shrugged and pushed her hands deep into the pockets of her dressing gown. “I suspect one does not
become
a poet. It is something one simply is or is not.”
“The language is learned.”
“If it were only language.”
“I don’t doubt you have the soul for it, if that’s what you mean.”
Submit gave him a rueful smile for his chivalry. “Henry loathed them.”
She began to straighten her papers, gathering them up. She put them together, then dumped them into the garbage bin at the end of the table.
Impulsively, Graham tried to save them. But the bin was wet and faintly septic. The ink was running already with an unpleasant odor by the time he had lifted the first sheet.
“I wasn’t suggesting—”
She cut him off abruptly. “It’s no loss. I have tons of it. Much of it unwritten yet, I suspect.”
He dropped the damp pages back into the bin and looked at her, a strange young woman huddling into a slightly faded dressing gown. She began to pick at the remains of her half of the honey tart.
“You mustn’t mind me,” he said.
He felt as if he had squashed something in her. Something nice, yet inchoate. It was nothing he could put his finger on so easily as her being a budding poet, which he felt perhaps she was not. But he sensed a struggle in her, not un
like a birth. A desperate effort at trying to draw breath as a separate being. It was an empathetic note, more intimate than anything they had yet shared. A common experience was at last forming. It lay between them. Vulnerable. Strange. Lonely. It involved Henry. Graham had already gone through this peculiar process, separating himself from a brilliant, enigmatic, highly opinionated man.
“Get rid of him,” he said out loud. “He was just a vain old man.”
She shivered and gave him a startled, peculiar look, as if he had touched too close, as if he had indeed read her mind.
She closed her eyes and bent her head. When she spoke, it was from an unexpected direction. “Did you know there were irregularities in the will?” she asked.
“No, but I suspected. What with all the difficulty.”
“At the end, he was obsessed with time. Time and the idea that he was not leaving me enough.
“It was so absurd,” she continued. “I had no idea he had taken a new will to Arnold. He wrote it himself, without a solicitor’s help. So ridiculous. It was both overgenerous and uncharacteristically careless—even Henry should have known here was not something a layman should do himself. His estate is enormously complex.” She paused. “I have tried so hard not to wonder about that.” Submit pulled out her chair and settled into it, wrapping her arms about herself, looking down at a table leg. “Arnold says it was because he began to feel rushed, that time was running out, that it was not uncharacteristic of the end of a life. But I don’t know.” She shook her head. “Sometimes I think Henry put obscure sentences and double meanings into the will on purpose, then sent me to you with those miserable pictures. I worry he didn’t intend to make things easy for me, but rather set me up to flounder like this, one of his Socratic lessons of discovery.” Submit smiled wanly up at Graham. He
was attentive, his face drawn into a look of concern. She made a feeble effort at trying to lighten what she was saying. “A variation of your own suspicions, which you should approve of.”
She went on quickly before he could say anything. “I wish I could convey to you—At the end—Henry kept telling me he had to pack several more years into whatever time he had left. Even—” She halted, pressed her lips together. She wanted to tell Graham something, something about Henry, herself, without laying either of them open to quick judgment. She tried to pick up a new thread, a more presentable brightness. She made a slight smile. “Henry rose up in bed one day. ‘I’m not finished!’ he shouted. ‘I’m not ready!’ Then he leaned back and said he had made a deathbed discovery. It was not, he said, that he didn’t believe in God, as he had professed for some forty years, but that he had simply become furious with Him. He wanted to snub God, give Him the most frigid cold shoulder, ‘for having created anything as frustrating and unsatisfying as this.’
“I was his dutiful student, quoting his own lessons at him. ‘God,’ I said, ‘is our own creation, born of fear of the unknown.’ But he would not be pried from his new position of self-doubt.
“‘It was not I,’ he said, ‘who made the earth spin round the sun fifty-seven times before I ever met you. Nor I who now insists that I have had my ride and must get off.’
“‘Don’t anthropomorphize,’ I said. More from the gospel according to St. Henry. I wanted him to stop it, be himself again.
“But he only stared at me, his old scholarly stare, as if I had answered a conundrum thoughtfully but wrong. I was expected to come up with a better answer.
“When I got up from the bed, he grabbed my arm. His hand was so cold. It shocked me. He could hardly move it
from arthritis. But he used this infirmity, like the strength he’d once had. He had a hundred ways to arrest me.
“‘Don’t,’ he said, ‘believe everything I have ever said to you religiously. You must question everything. Even me, which has never been a problem for you, so long as I have been standing next to you in my full and rebarbative flesh. But be careful, Submit, when I am gone. We have loved each other in a peculiarly close and unorthodox manner. Don’t build a shrine to that.’”
She couldn’t go on for a moment. Then, “He died that night while I slept in a chair by his bed.”