Charity Begins at Home (24 page)

"But aren't you going to work?"

He shook his head. "I've been working all day. Now I want to have tea and talk about our future."

Our future. Those words he liked so well were fraught with tension, with promise, and yet he seemed not to notice. "But the future includes the Midsummer fair, you know. And that backdrop must be done very soon."

Impatiently he pulled her to the edge of the stage. So positioned, she could do nothing but step off into his arms. He let her slide down against his body and then gently set her on her feet. "It will be done soon, as long as you don't add in new features. Do you know how long it took Michelangelo to paint his picture of God?"

The contact with his hard lean form reassured her, and she even managed to answer practically, "You have only to paint the hand."

By the time they reached the Calder drawing room, she had pledged not to promise the children any additions to the great triptych, and her hand rested comfortably in his. But even as she teased him with her desire for an octopus hanging from the whale's tail, she realized she was putting on an act of sort. She was managing herself, creating from herself a more appropriate picture of the happily betrothed young lady.

And the worst of it was, she wanted more than anything to confess it to Tristan, to tell him how strange she felt in this new role, how inutterably stupid she was not to be happy in truth as well as in pose, and how she wished he would hold her and kiss away the doubts.

But what a greedy, grasping girl she would seem if she gave voice to such complaints! And yet, perhaps she was a greedy, grasping girl after all. All her life she had always wanted more—more praise, more gratitude, more acclaim, more love. All her good works couldn't conceal that selfish child in her who demanded what she couldn't get. And it was greedy to look across at a man who cared for her, who wanted her for his wife, and say, "I want more."

She poured him a cup of tea with a hand held rigid. As he took it with that sweet smile of thanks, she contemplated pouring out her absurd woe. But what would she say? That she longed for something more from him? Some great epic romance? Some gamble on passion?

But she couldn't gamble at all, couldn't risk the words she had framed in her mind. She imagined him drawing back, his dark eyes remote again, his response careful and appalled. That greedy Charity wasn't what he wanted, of course. He had proposed to another Charity entirely, a generous girl of good cheer, who wanted nothing more than to give him a home. Nothing more.

So she said nothing at all, except for assenting murmurs as he talked about that home, about the conservatory he intended to make into a studio, about the ruined square yard of stone wall Francis insisted was Roman and made Tristan promise not to replace.

"The village is just right for you to do your good works. Still we won't be so far that you can't keep up your activities here."

She couldn't help herself. "Just what I long for. His and hers villages to maintain." She dropped her gaze at his sharp look, and when he asked what she meant, she shook her head. "Nothing."

He frowned but apparently decided not to pursue the subject. "We'd best forego a wedding trip for the time being, by the way. I don't want to leave Anna alone just yet."

Charity's voice was as blithe as her thoughts were bitter. "But what about this winter when you leave for Italy?"

"She won't be alone then. She'll have you. And you'll have more outlet for that energy of yours." He pulled her hand away from her needlework. "I don't think I've ever seen you with idle hands. What are you working on there? Part of your trousseau?"

"We Kentish girls finish our trousseaus by our fifteenth birthdays." Charity gently detached tier hand from his to hold up her handiwork, a large white tube patched together from old shirts and pillowslips. "No, this is going to be the body of your dragon. It will be filled with paper, you see, and the neck will be of plaster of Paris, so you can easily slice it through with your sword."

From her pile of rags she pulled out another shirt to add to the tail. Yanking off the strip of lace down the front, she rolled it up and put it away in her sewing box. She held the shirt up to display the frayed elbows and torn sleeves and the stain on the back. "Charlie's rock-hunting shirt. Do you know, ten years ago it was Ned's best shirt. He wore it only to church. And then he outgrew it, and Barry inherited it. He sneaked out of Matins one morning to go fishing, and it was never the same again."

She tore the sleeves off and began to stitch the rest to the dragon, remembering all the times she had darned this particular shirt. "Charlie hasn't anyone to hand it down to anymore."

She looked up to his sympathetic gaze and, flushing, looked back down at her work. How self-pitying she must appear, almost in tears over an old shirt! Something about Tristan made her weak, that was all. Was it that she was not nearly as strong as he imagined?

Suddenly she asked, "If you were to paint my portrait—not from life, but from—from your mind, what would you paint?"

He was startled. "I told you, I don't do portraits."

She didn't know why, but she persisted. "If you did, what would my portrait show?"

He shook his head, then humored her. "Your portrait would show—oh, all your virtues, I suppose."

"But what would the scene be?"

He shrugged, still obviously puzzled by her insistence. "Well, I don't like posed portraits, with the subject gazing out. I think I'd have you engaged in some task, gardening, perhaps."

"You haven't ever seen me gardening."

"I told you." He was still polite, but his voice was edged with impatience. "I have a good imagination."

Not so good, if he only imagined her doing what she did every day of her life, weeding and pruning and clearing. "Why gardening?"

"Charity, gardening would be a—metaphor, do you see, for your virtues. Thrift and good sense, hard work and sunniness."

"Describe the picture."

He shook his head again, annoyed but unwilling to say so. "Describe. Well, I would paint you in that garden west of the house, the one with the sunflowers—"

He closed his eyes, and she saw his brow furrow as he concentrated, assembling in his mind the picture he would paint on canvas, were he the sort to paint his beloved. Then he opened his eyes and gazed at her, eyes narrowed. "I can't really picture you now. The garden, yes. But not you in it."

It seemed to trouble him as much as it troubled her, and instinctively she sought to soothe, to explain, to promise better later. "We could walk out there again, and then perhaps it will be clearer. I will be clearer."

But she felt the chill well up inside her. This mythical portrait that he would never paint had already accomplished one purpose: She knew what she had suspected all along. He didn't know her, not as she really was. And he couldn't even imagine her.

She knotted her thread and broke it, then hid her fists in the sleeves of the shirt. She had decided, she realized, sometime during his flattering catalogue of her virtues.

"There will be time for that when we are married." He reached across to touch her cheek. His caress still thrilled her, more now, when it was so agonizingly clear she would know it no longer.

Hidden in the shirt, her hands began to shake, and she gripped the dangling sleeves to still the tremors. She couldn't bear it. She jerked away from his hand as if his touch burned her.

"No. I can't marry you after all."

As if she had broken loose, she felt free, disengaged from whatever followed. It was a liberating feeling, to be outside of this experience, but odd, too. She had become alien to herself.

Her hands bad stopped trembling, so she started ripping the seam from the arms of the shirt. She spoke her thoughts into the utter silence. "That didn't hurt nearly as much as I thought it would! I think that must mean it is the right thing to do, don't you?"

Very evenly, Tristan said, "I'm afraid I didn't quite get your meaning there. Perhaps you could repeat it. One of your few faults is a tendency to speak too quickly."

Carefully, as if she were addressing a foreigner, Charity said, "I don't think I would make a good wife for you after all."

"Are you trying to tell me you wish to call off our wedding?"

"Not our wedding, for we've not even set the date, so how can we call it off? No, only our betrothal. I've forgot how one conducts such matters. Well, I daresay I haven't forgot, as I've never broken off a betrothal before. But I have an etiquette book in the library, and I'm sure that will tell which of us should send the notice into the
Gazette
. The fair thing, it would seem, would be for me to do so, if you have already sent in the betrothal announcement."

"Why?" She started to reply, but he stopped her with an abrupt gesture. "No, don't tell me why you should send in the notice. I don't give a tinker's damn about that. Why do you want to call off our marriage?"

She dropped her eyes to her needlework to escape the force of his black scowl. "Because it's clear I will not suit you."

"Don't give me that etiquette prattle." He rose and came to stand towering over her. "It's not clear at all that we should not suit. All along I've said what an excellent wife you will make."

His very height was a threat, and she didn't like being threatened. She found anger easier than regret, and besides, she hated that term. "An excellent wife. Well, I don't think I would make you an excellent wife. And you think so only because you don't know me."

"I know you perfectly well."

"No. Or you wouldn't think I would make you an excellent wife. I won't, because I'm not the person you think I am."

It made perfect sense to Charity, even as it broke her heart to say it, but Tristan didn't understand. He moved back a step to a less intimidating stance and shook his head. "Come, Charity, you are having a joke with me. Or bridal nerves, or some such. You can't confess you have some secret vice, for I know you haven't."

"It's not a vice. It's only—oh, just accept this, Tristan. I won't make a very good wife for you, and you won't be happy."

Some of the tension left his face as his hands, which had been clenched, opened in a resigned gesture. "I'll take the chance. In fifty years, if I am not happy, I will admit you were right."

Charity wasn't in the habit of acting impulsively, without thinking through the actions and goals and consequences. She was at a loss, unsure herself why she had to do this. She only knew she didn't want him to stand there looking hopeful and defiant and a little hurt. She couldn't look at his face and gazed instead at his hands, open in welcome, in supplication. That was no better. She stared down at her needlework.

"I am sorry. I know it isn't fair, but I couldn't abide it any longer. I've made an absolute mash of this. I just can't be what you want me to be or only what you want me to be. I thought perhaps I could, I hoped I could. I realized just now that if I couldn't keep it up for a week, I would spend my life struggling to hide."

"To hide what? You aren't making any sense!"

She pulled the seam ripper all the way around the arm and let the sleeve fall to her lap before she could gather the words to answer. "Oh, that, for example. That I'm inconsistent. That I don't make sense. That I'm not sensible, at least not without trying very hard."

He closed his eyes as if to block out a vision he didn't want to remember. "I think you are just anxious about the marriage. All brides are, or so I hear."

"I am not just anxious. I am trying to tell you that you don't want to marry me."

He opened his eyes then and regarded her narrowly until she dropped her gaze back to her needle. "What do you want?"

It was a new question, one she never expected to have to answer. Her words came slowly. "I want—" How selfish he must think her, assembling a shopping list of desires and whining when it wasn't filled. "Oh, I just want more, you see. And you don't. I mean, you don't want a wife who wants more. What an awful life that would be. But—but we could remain friends. Then I wouldn't want any more." This last thought cheered her. They needn't after all lose that connection they shared. "I do make an excellent friend, I think, and without trying very hard at all."

Tristan put his hand on the back of a chair as if to give himself some support. "I don't understand you."

"I know. That is what I have been trying to tell you."

His supporting hand curled into a fist on the upholstery. "I knew you would say that. I knew it. And if I tell you that I don't worry about all your worries, that I will marry you nonetheless, you will tell me that if I understood you I would feel differently."

She didn't answer, for that was indeed what she would have said.

"That I am lucky to be allowed my escape. That someday—soon, if I've any claim on sense—I shall thank you for this."

"You will," she agreed, though the bleakness of his expression gave her pause. Gratefully she recalled the etiquette of the situation. She laid her needlework on the end table and pulled off the sapphire ring. With a gentle finger, she traced the golden circle, then held it out to him.

He looked at the token and finally took it. "You are determined to do this, then? And you won't tell me why?"