Everything I Ever Wanted (37 page)

"Then Lord Macquey-Howell acts as his countess's beard."

"Yes. He seemed to be" Her voice trailed off as she sought the right word. "Helpless. Mayhap resigned. His lordship has little influence over his wife. She is most certainly in command, and he can do naught but follow her lead."

"Most necessary if he is desirous of protecting his reputation." South did not return to the bed. He repositioned the wing chair so that it captured some of the heat from the fireplace but also allowed him to see India on the bed. She still lay with her head against her pillow, propped slightly by the arm she had slid beneath it. "You did not encourage her?" he asked as he stretched out in the chair. Even from the distance that separated them, South felt India stiffen as though affronted. "It was not my intention to insult you. I asked the question because I know you were keeping Mr. Kendall aware of the countess's affair with Senor Cruz." He paused, reconsidering what he'd said. "You knew from the beginning it was no simple affair, didn't you?"

"Yes. Of course I knew. But in answer to your other question, no, I did not encourage her. Mr. Kendall did not begin asking about Lady Macquey-Howell until some weeks after her last visit to the theater. When her letters began, there was little in them that provided information he would have found useful."

"Then she was not your source."

"Only rarely."

"Margrave?"

"Sometimes. More often it was Lady Margrave. She maintained a steady correspondence with me whether she was in town or at one of her country homes. Her letters were often filled the latest on dit . She kept me apprised of her coming and goings, the social events she attended, what occupied the thoughts of the privileged. There was always news of Marlhaven and Merrimont: the success or failure of the harvest; how the livestock and the tenants fared. None of it was primarily for my benefit, you understand, but for her son's. They had become estrangedthough that was more on his side than hersand she hoped rather desperately that he would someday pay more than the rare duty call on her."

Because of South's attention to the fire, India could feel the room was finally warming. She sat up, propped the pillow behind the small of her back, and neatly turned down the heavy blankets so they lay across her lap. "She knew he would read the letters she sent me. Even though he never responded to her, I think she imagined it kept them close."

"This estrangement," South said thoughtfully. "Did it begin when you left Marlhaven for employment with the Olmsteads or when you left the Olmstead home for London?"

"The latter. After Mr. Olmstead's accident, I would not with Margrave to his home. That was when he became furious. He had not given me any funds that I might use myself in London while I looked for employment, and he knew I could have saved very little during my stay with the Olmsteads. When I went on to London, he went back to Marlhaven and confronted his mother. I have never known the details of what happened between them; indeed, I have never cared enough to ask. I think it was then that Lady Margrave learned the limits of her influence. I know that soon after, her directive to me changed. I was no longer charged with keeping my distance, but keeping him safe."

"An odd request."

India nodded. "I found it so. I was prepared to refuse and accept the consequences of having no funds and no prospects; then Margrave arrived in London on my heels, and he has not been far from me since."

"He will not let you go?"

She hesitated. "It is not precisely that. You might not credit it, but I have made my intention to leave him clear on three separate occasions. I actually did go once. In Paris. Each time it ends in the same way. Margrave elicits my cooperation by trying to kill himself." She said this last without inflection. It was another circumstance of her life to which she had yielded. "Twice he tried to hang himself. In Paris he almost blew his brains out."

The pity of it, South thought, was that he had not succeeded. "You were the one who stopped him?"

"The hangings, yes. Because I had not yet left. Both times it was a narrow thing. In Paris I steeled myself to leave no matter what Margrave threatened. This time it was the concierge who found him. The pistol shot alerted the other tenants in our building. He was lying in a pool of his own blood. The pistol ball glanced off his skull. It was three days before I learned of it, and by then he was being cared for in a Paris asylum. I could not leave him there."

South did not imagine for a moment that India could have done anything else. He rubbed the underside of his chin with his knuckles, his look contemplative. "Lady Margrave's charge to you begins to make more sense. He may have made a similar threat to her, even attempted to carry it out."

"The same has occurred to me."

"So you became his protector."

"After a fashion."

"He's mad, India."

"Quite possibly."

South wondered that she could say it with such composure, but then he reminded himself that she had lived with the truth of it for a very long time. "Have you always known about him?"

"That he is not well?" she asked. Seeing South's nod, she went on. "No, not in the beginning. I was only a young girl when we first met. The visits to Merrimont, remember? I knew he had a particular interest in me that was more frightening than flattering, but I did not understand it then." Her short laugh was without humor. "I do not know if I understand it yet. The pictures he drew of me, even in those early days, were not complimentary. I went back each time I was invited, because I did not want to disappoint my parents. It was such an honor to be selected that I could not tell them how I much I hated it, or that I was sick each time the countess's carriage arrived to take me there. The other children had no complaints, so mine would have sounded very odd. I did not realize that Margrave never cornered them when we played hiding games, nor did they have to show their private parts to secure their release."

India saw South's eyes narrow a fraction, and for a moment his knuckles stopped rubbing the underside of his chin. She thought his mouth moved around an indecently vulgar curse, but he gave it no sound. What she did not observe was his pity, and for that she was glad. Pity would have weakened her somehow, weakened her resolve to tell him the whole of it. She did not need that, not if she was going to prove to herself that she had a measure of courage worthy of South when she wasn't onstage.

"You will have wondered about the paintings," India said with credible indifference. In contrast, there were her fingertips running along the neat fold of the blankets, creasing it carefully again and again where it crossed her lap. "All of the paintings are brilliantly executed. I can say that without fear of being contradicted, because I know something about Margrave's talent. All of them are disrobing, though that may be a point of debate. As one of the subjects in each of his works, I am understandably inclined to find them so.

"You know that I have posed for him without benefit of any clothes. He insists upon it. I have not always done so willingly, but there are opiates, and he uses them without compunction. I have found it is far safer for me to comply than to resist."

Now South did swear loud enough for her to hear it. She blinked at his choice, but he seemed totally unaware of having spoken. India went on. "I do not mean to give you the impression that his collection of paintings is large. He does not work at it every day. A humor takes him and he will paint for a week, almost without rest, then not again for months. It has always been thus."

Quite suddenly, she fell silent and remained that way for some time. South had little choice but to eventually prompt her. "Tell me about the paintings, India."

Her entire body jerked as she came out of her reverie. She forced herself to face South, though she was no longer certain she saw him clearly. Darkness was encroaching at the periphery of her vision. The deep breath she took was only marginally helpful."Sometimes I am bound. Shackled. He has painted me on a cross." She held up her hands, palms out. "Nailed to it as our Lord was. No, do not look away. It is not at all helpful if you look away."

South nodded and raised his eyes to hers again. There were no scars on her palms or evidence of old abrasions on her wrists. Margrave did not work from reality but from some image that existed only in his mind's distorted eye.

Still, South wondered, what was it like for India to see herself nailed to a cross or shackled in irons?

"He paints me with scars across my back. Whipped. Beaten. On my knees. He makes my hair like a flame as though I am set afire. My body is made into a trellis for delicate climbing roses. The petals blush with the palest of pink hues, and they become my flesh and my flesh becomes them. But the thorns are sharp and they cut my breasts and my belly and my thighs, and my skin weeps bloody teardrops. He covers me with jewels and puts men at my feet, and they worship me and curse me and then they take me. You can smell the lust and feel the terror, the depiction is that true. There is nothing that has not been done to me in Margrave's paintings. There is nothing that can be thought of that I have not been made to do."

India drew another shallow breath. "I told you I had knowledge but no experience. Now you know the why of it."

South was leaning forward in his chair, his gaze set on India, his complexion almost the same gray shade as his eyes. He started to speak, but she held out her hand, cutting him off.

"There is one painting I would have you see." She said it quickly before her courage was lost. Throwing back the blankets, India extended her legs toward the edge of the bed and slid off the side. She walked toward him, drawing close enough that South was forced back in the chair; then she stepped closer still, coming to stand between his splayed legs. Her fingers tugged on the light fabric of her nightgown until it was bunched at the level of her thighs.

South's head was tipped back, his eyes still directed upward to her face. India shook her head slowly. Her hair swung in the same rhythm over her shoulders before it lay still."Here," she said, drawing his attention lower, to where her fists were closed around her gown. "I am the canvas."

South's glance fell as India drew the nightshift over her head. He did not follow its path to the ground. He looked instead at where she had directed his gaze, and once there, could not look away.

In the seconds between India's announcement and her removal of the gown, South had had a premonition of what she meant to show him. The reality was shocking. It was also beautiful and erotic.

Margrave had indeed made India's slender torso the trellis for his pale pink roses. The thorny vine climbed from between the shadowed juncture of her thighs, across her groin and left hip, then delicately upward along the inner curve of her waist until it ended at the underside of her breast. Each small leaf along the path was like an emerald embedded in her flesh. So perfectly realized were they that they seemed to flutter as if caught in a light breeze.

Belatedly South understood it was the trembling of India's body that made them move.

The fire lent its light to the pale blush of the rose petals, tipping them with gold. There were three exquisitely imagined roses along the vine, and a half-dozen more buds. The arrangement was an impossibility in nature, but the form here, as Margrave had laid it across India's skin, was nothing save perfection. It was just as India described: the fine pink petals had become her flesh, and her flesh had become them.

South raised one hand toward her, then hesitated only inches from her flat belly. He glanced upward, catching her darkly intense eyes, asking for permission before his fingertips grazed her skin. She nodded once, faintly, and still he hesitated. He had meant to press his thumb against one of the blood red tears dripping from the point of a thorn; then his attention was caught by the diamondlike sparkle of the one that lay on the fan of India's lower lashes. South's hand ceased to hover above her belly, but was lifted higher until it was level with her face. He cupped her cheek, and his thumb took the tear from her lash. When it was replaced by another, he took that, too.

South stood and shed his dressing gown, laying it across India's shoulders. A pair of his trousers was folded across the back of a chair, and he picked them up and stepped into them. India had not moved by the time he returned to her. He helped her into his robe and belted it loosely around her waist before he drew her into the wing chair with him. She sat across his lap, her head against his shoulder. There were no more tears, but she could not still her body's trembling.

"It does not repulse me, India," he said quietly. The effect was just the opposite. South found what Margrave had done to her as arousing as it was unsettling. She must know it was so. He might be able to school his features, moderate his voice, but there were certain responses his body made that he could not control or hide."Did you think it would? Or is it that you are ashamed by what has been done to you?"

"Yes," she whispered. "To both those things."

"It was done against your will."

The flat intonation of South's voice did not make it a question, but India answered anyway, her voice small and choked. "Yes."

"Oh, India." Feeling as if his heart were being squeezed, South turned his head so his lips touched her forehead. "I am sorry for that. I am sorry that you suffered for it then and suffer for it yet." His fingers sifted idly through her hair and grazed the nape of her neck. "Margrave used the opiates you spoke of to make you compliant?"