Sleeping Beauty (38 page)
“Did you think she had done something like this?” Coco asked.
“No,” James admitted. “Though wait: we haven’t seen the inside. There may yet be a joke here.”
But it was no joke. Inside they lifted sheets and cover-clothes from highboys and velvet sofas and chests full of silver. All old and splendid, the accumulations of the very elegant old home of a favored earl, recently deceased with no issue, not a relative in sight: and the Home Office had searched for nigh onto twenty-eight years.
The old line had died out; long live the new.
Meeting up with James in the buttery after a quick look around, Coco asked, “How was the upstairs?”
“Old. And buried in an inch of dust.”
She laughed ironically. “Yes. On the main floor, too. Enough dust and cobwebs for the place to have been asleep for a century.” She wiped her hand along a shelf and came away with a powdery layer of grime.
Then felt arms come around her. James wrapped his arm round the front of her waist and pulled her
back into him. “At least you have your English castle for your next drawings. It is perfect.”
“Indeed.” Coco laughed in response, while he nuzzled her neck. “Well, she certainly must be pleased with you,” she said finally. “Secretly. She can’t be that angry.”
By
she
, Coco meant Victoria the Queen. Her “attached” had been letters of patent. She had bestowed upon James the Earldom of Bromwyck, complete with an entailment of the present, somewhat rundown estate. It was a solidly built stone castle that suffered mostly from decades of neglect, but the estate also included farmlands that, run properly, they were hoping, might finance repairs as well as remodeling or building into the main house a geology laboratory. If a university wouldn’t have him, James would simply branch out on his own. He would gather his own specimens, do his own work, and write about it wherever he could find print. And the English countryside seemed the perfect place for his pursuit—more space than in London, less criticism, less visibility.
Coco felt the hooks at the back of her dress yielding to her husband’s fingers. She turned in his arms. “Oh, you are wicked.”
“Yes. Whenever I get the chance. Where are the others?”
“Unloading the coach.”
“Good.” He tried to turn her around again.
But, brazen creature that she was, Coco pressed forward, settling her hands over James’s trousers, unavoidably rubbing a bit of dust there, over his fine, thick erection. He had the most perfect penis she had ever known, as Coco considered herself
something of a connoisseur. His was a cock if ever there was one. It grew straight and full, as hard as the rocks he explored. She explored him, up, then down, delicately tracing the tip through his trousers with her nail. She liked to push him to wits’ end. She liked him best absolutely wild.
Which he knew. He laughed, panting, letting himself go as he knocked the breath out of her, taking her backward into a tea cabinet. He was careful with her, yet not so careful that something, a glass, didn’t break inside the cupboard as he propped her buttocks on the ledge of the cabinet’s small counter. His hands went at the neckline and the hems of her dress at the same time. He touched her, making her head swim, her body hot at its core.
Yet she had wanted to tell him something. “James—”
He was beyond sense. He only wanted her mouth. He chased her face with his as she tried to speak, all the while sliding her drawers down over her hips. Coco would have waited till afterward, if it hadn’t mattered so much: she said, “Don’t pull out.” When he made love to her these days, he withdrew just before he climaxed. “Don’t leave me,” she said. Then so there could be no mistake, she took hold of his cheeks, made him look at her, the eyes inches away, and whispered quite distinctly, “Stay inside me. Leave yourself, leave parts of yourself in me.”
He pushed her legs up, while through his teeth he said, “I’ll leave a child in you, Coco.” They both jolted as he entered her in a strong thrust of that magnificent penis of his. He went deeply into her body, till his face before her dimmed. Dear
Lord, there was nothing like him.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes.” She closed her eyes. “I—I want—I want you to.” She laughed as they took up their rhythm. They were so good at this.
Each knew where the other wanted to be, where their own pleasure lay. They maximized both in angle and stroke. Till Coco was panting for air and laughing, a woman who laughed a lot—she could barely contain herself now, partly from joy, partly from the worried-amazed startlement she could sense in James. She explained in huffs, “I’m—I’m not feeling as—as old as I once did. Give me a child, James. Make a baby in me.”
He smiled then. Whenever she slit her eyes enough to see, he was watching her, smiling at her slyly, a small, relatively gentle expression, given that he roughly ploughed himself into her—in, then away, in, then away, elegantly smooth, broad, hard, lengthy, and as hot as an iron from a fire. Her last thought, before she herself went to cinders was, Make a baby, James.
And, bracing his hands on the cupboard doors that had begun to clank to their rhythm, James did just that.
Several months after he and Coco had moved in at Bromwyck, Oxford University (publicly appalled, but secretly delighted with the stink James had caused at Cambridge) offered the marginally respectable new earl a guest lectureship in geology. By the time the baby arrived—young Samuel, named after James’s father—James was happily arguing over whether Oxford could publish his papers on Africa and whether or not he’d speak of the con
tinent’s gold in his lecture Hilary term.
For Coco, an English countess with suddenly a proper English home, complete with a proper little English earl to raise, it was all a strange and wondrous second life. She wrote to David, “Please come. I know you are annoyed with James, but my life is so happy: I would have been embarrassed to ask for so much in my fondest prayers.”
David did finally visit, though he reserved judgment. James was able to woo him slightly, but not much. David sided to a degree with those from Cambridge who were put out with Coco’s husband. Neither did David like that James hadn’t treated his mother perfectly at every turn; and he hated what had befallen his father at what he saw partially as James’s hands. Still he arrived and was pleasant for the gathering James arranged in honor of the two joint events that autumn, Samuel’s baptism and the publication of Coco’s drawings in
The Sleeping Beauty
.
To celebrate, the Stokers opened Bromwyck Castle up to their new neighbors—and, surprisingly, a great many who were invited actually came. It amused Coco in particular that the vicar and his wife of the nearby village of Wyckerley arrived with flowers for her and a toy, a lovely little duck on a push stick, for Samuel. A country vicar, of all things, sat down comfortably and amiably in her parlor. Coco couldn’t decide if he and his wife were simply too remote out here to know who she was and of James’s scandal, or just too naive to appreciate it. Or—a distinct possibility—too generous to mention any awareness they had. In all events, that afternoon, a vicar, his wife, and a host of new
neighbors seemed astonishingly willing to be friendly, possibly even supportive.
The only blemish was that David left immediately after, a day earlier than planned. He didn’t explain. Coco supposed he was jealous. She reminded herself to visit him soon in Cambridge. She could see how the sudden new direction her life had taken could be shocking, difficult for him to embrace. She must make sure he saw a place in it for himself.
James, on the other hand, had not a complaint in the world. Lying in bed the night of their successful party, he read his wife’s book for the first of many times to his son, who promptly fell asleep nestled into the folds of his father’s nightshirt. Then, before James could carry the little fellow to his cradle, Papa himself dozed off, Coco’s book collapsing open onto his chest.
Coco discovered her husband and son just so, asleep together. Never, she thought, were there two more lovely sleeping beauties, not in all the kingdoms of the earth. She was so taken by the sight, she flipped open her sketch pad and began to draw them.
After she had finished, looking at her work, she thought, Well, yes, there had been another little sleeping prince in a kingdom long ago. She took her pencil and wrote across her drawing:
David
,
Samuel so reminds me of you. How I wish you had had a father like James. Though fathers, mothers, we can all be so obtuse. Perhaps what a child really needs is a brother. Please come see us often. When it comes to chemistry, cricket, and bees, Samuel will be relying on you
.
A thousand kisses,
Coco
While James dreamed of stars.
Star maps…black African skies twinkling with patterns of light…a celestial landscape so precise…as clear in his mind as the position of trees or bends in the road on the way home from London. He dreamed of Mtzuba playing his nose flute and having a son or daughter as fine as Samuel. In James’s dream he told Mtzuba, I am happy. I am not where I thought I was going, but I like it here. I have found my way home.
T
he literary convention of “Oxbridge” is usually used to fictionalize the atmosphere of England’s two most prestigious institutions of higher learning, Oxford and Cambridge. I have used here a different convention, however. All Souls College does not exist at Cambridge; there is a college, though, at Oxford by this name. For the purposes of this book, I combined the two universities in this manner a great deal, marrying elements of Oxford and Cambridge into one fictional “Cambridge” within these pages that does not exist in reality. As to the nastier elements of embezzlement and personal betrayal, the reader will please realize that I made them up entirely. Though I don’t doubt that anywhere there are human beings one can find larceny and misuse, my impression after one blissful summer at the University of Cambridge was that less of these vices thrived there than usual, not more.
As to the town itself, many may recognize it as Cambridge with not a trace of Oxford and only the smallest degree of fictionalization. I allowed myself to use the real town strictly for the selfish pleasures of walking to Grantchester again and punting the Cam and smelling the lavender by King’s and the honeysuckle just after Clare Bridge.
On her way to becoming a novelist, JUDITH IVORY “accidentally” acquired two degrees in mathematics. “It seemed practical. Math was easy. I just kept taking math courses, while I invested all my energy in English electives. I graduated, taught, and got another degree in math, before in occurred to me that to be happy—never mind being practical—I had to try being a writer. Once I started, there was no doubt that writing was what I was going to do: just an abiding fear that no one would pay me to do it.” In 1987, she sold her first novel. “I closed my math books, upgraded my computer, found a literary agent, and the rest is history.” That history includes six romances, a RITA nomination, and universal acclaim for BEAST, Ms. Ivory’s version of the classic Beauty and the Beast fairy tale. Judith Ivory lives in Miami, Florida, with her two children, two cats, and a dog. She also writes under the name of Judy Cuevas.
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