Authors: J. Jay Kamp
Calm down
, she told herself,
this is postpartum depression and that’s all it is. Christian isn’t so bad as he seems
. Knowing it was true, having faith in the memory of Paul’s voice so clear in her mind, she relented and gave up her crying.
I’ll try
, she told Paul, spoke to the glass as if it were the veil that held him back in death.
And she went upstairs to soothe her crying baby.
Christian stood stiffly beside her. Even though she couldn’t look at him, Ravenna knew he gazed out the window the same as she, that he was playing with that hat again, for she could tell by the way he wiggled that he tapped it impatiently against his thigh.
“Heathens built this horrid house,” he was saying. “To locate it in such an exposed position next to the sea—you’ll have to forgive my ancestors, Sir. Like my wife, I’m afraid they didn’t know any better.”
“Yes, yes, I can see we’ll not finish today, either,” the painter replied. “You may move now, Lord Launceston, as it seems there’s no stopping you. We’ll try again tomorrow.”
Mr. Copley went on sketching even though Christian immediately took his arm out of Ravenna’s and, loosening his shoulders in obvious displeasure, turned his back on her. “Oh, incidentally, I won’t be here tomorrow,” Christian said. “I’ve been summoned to Launceston—what a pity.”
“And I’m just now finding out?” Ravenna asked.
“If it suits me, I needn’t tell you at all.” He tossed the hat on the painter’s table. “He has enough now to finish. Besides, I can’t imagine why you should care what I do. I know you and James will only rejoice in being rid of me.”
“With that attitude, maybe we will.”
“I’m certain you will,” Christian replied. “Perhaps in my absence you could reminisce about
him
. You could even set an extra place at table, lest his spirit be attracted by your gloom and wander in for supper. God might let him come, you never know.”
And seeing that Ravenna was already conjuring up images, Christian turned away in disgust. With wine bottle in hand, he made for the door. “Paint the dog as her husband, why don’t you. She loves him better.”
White, well-mannered, and with a ruff around his neck reminiscent of a collie, the dog he referred to was a wedding present from James. Ravenna called him Shasta. It amused her that Christian hated the dog; Shasta couldn’t get enough of his master, would often follow him room to room until finally Christian would relent and pet it. This, to Ravenna, was the best entertainment—watching her husband driven crazy by a pet.
And Ravenna loved to irritate Christian. Trailing him upstairs, she watched as he slopped down the bottle on the table, pulled off his jacket and, in a grand show of obvious distaste, threw it to the floor. Searching for another in the clothes-press—probably the coat with the diamond buttons—he said, “Must you trail me like a bitch in heat?”
She merely smiled. While he fiddled with his hair in the girandole mirror, put each strand in place so his full concentration was engaged in his appearance, she came up behind him. She knew how to get even with him. She knew what would put the fear in him, and leaning up against his back, setting her chin upon his shoulder, she slid her hands up his arms and waited for the expected response.
He froze, his fingers stilled in mid-preen.
“Don’t go with Richardson tonight,” she said.
He took in a deep breath. “Do you listen at all?” He pulled roughly out of her hands. “I’m going to Launceston, I told you as much. I’ve been sent for to offer my inspection of the roof, and if you’d for a moment put the Paddy out of your thoughts, you’d know that, Ravenna.”
“No, you’re going with Richardson.” She watched him straighten his starched cravat. “I know you, Christian. You’re going to the clubs. Haven’t you lost enough of my money?”
“There you have it wrong again—it’s
our
money, not yours.”
She shook her head. “James gave me that money for the roof, not for gambling. What will you pay those workmen with?”
“How unhealthy, this preoccupation you have with money. Why must the world—”
“I know, why must the world revolve around money? Just stop it. You’re going to end up in debtor’s prison and I’m warning you, I won’t bail you out.”
When his eyes met Ravenna’s in the girandole mirror, his brow wrinkled dangerously. “You’d leave me the way you did at Nootka, wouldn’t you? You’d let me die in prison, after sharing my company, my meals,
my bed?”
“You won’t die.”
He stifled a snicker. “I’ve heard that one before, Beloved.”
“If you’d just stay home and stop gambling, stop drinking and try to do something constructive with your life—”
“Why? So I may live in celibacy beside you, sober enough to hear your every prayer to
him?
I’ll have the money through you or through James, but either way, I will have it.”
“I don’t believe you anymore.”
He picked the dog hair off his sleeve. “Believe what?”
“That you’d challenge James’s inheritance just to have money to gamble with.”
“Oh, but I would,” he said, and slipping off his shoes—the ones he’d gotten in Barbados for the wedding—he put on his favorites with the pointed toes. “After all, what else do I possess that fulfills me as much as spending money? Whores in Covent Garden come very dear these days, especially when they know I’m Lord Launceston.”
“I’m paying for whores now?”
“Should there be a reason for me to stay home, perhaps a wife who kept her word and performed her
wifely duties
, then I’d not find so much to interest me beyond the bedchamber door, would I?”
“If I had a husband who respected me,” she said, “then I might be more interested.”
“I do nothing but respect you! If you can’t appreciate the self-discipline I’ve shown in your bed, when you dress, even in the face of your advances when you’ve no intention of according me satisfaction, then perhaps my generosity is wasted upon you.”
“I don’t think it’s generosity, Christian. I think you’ve spared me because you’re afraid.”
“There you go again. How many times must I tell you, only women are capable of fearing copulation. It’s the size, you see. But then, with the Paddy, you wouldn’t understand about size, would you? Perhaps I should educate you. Perhaps then you’d forget about
him
.”
“If you were going to force me, you’d have done it long ago.”
“Maybe I’ve only just determined that my services are called for, to eradicate
his
memory and make you understand that what you need is not kindness or respect, but a good—”
“You won’t do it.”
“I won’t?”
“You know if you do any of the things you threaten, there’s no chance at all that I’ll ever love you.”
“If I had James’s fortune at my disposal and my sex between your legs, perhaps I wouldn’t care so much you didn’t love me.”
Ravenna met his cold stare. “You can threaten all you want, but I don’t believe you’d really hurt me.”
“And what about your Celtic runt? Do you trust me with him?” Christian stepped nearer, regarded her carefully. “Perhaps he’d like to visit the Foundling Hospital? I hear they give their orphans the very best in musical education.”
“You wouldn’t hurt the baby, Christian. You wouldn’t do it, I know you too well.”
“Do you think so?” The cast of desperation to his gray eyes then, the strength of his intended threat, it made Ravenna think she didn’t know him. “You’ve no idea what I’m capable of,” he snarled in a low voice, “the horrors I’ve committed in your name.”
Turning away, he tugged on the rope that would ring for the servants. He went to the clothes-press, and she glowered while he gathered his breeches, his shirts, his strong perfume. When a footman appeared, he ordered the carriage readied for London, and without so much as glancing at Ravenna, he went to the window and looked out over the lawn.
Rain pooled on the window casement. A strong wind blew off the ocean swells, and the sky was so dark that the clouds and the sea seemed to have melted into one. With his back to her, Christian continued to stand in front of that window. She knew the weather didn’t concern him. He was avoiding her. He’d insulted and threatened, and next he would leave.
“Oh, don’t look at me so,” he said at last. He still hadn’t turned around. “You know I wish the baby no harm.”
“I know you love me,” she whispered. “No matter what you say or threaten, I know inside you do love me.”
Where he stood before the window, Christian’s blond head inclined slightly toward the glass. He cleared his throat, and it was a moment before Ravenna heard his reply, gentler this time. “Then let me spend the money. Give me at least that.”
* * *
In the lonely days following his departure, Ravenna was by herself most of the time. James was busy, for the Royal Society’s president, Sir Joseph Banks, was eager to visit him at Wolvesfield to discuss Vancouver’s voyage at length.
Thus James spent every available moment in preparation for Banks’s arrival. He had the servants take down the huge bed in Paul’s old room. The tapestries were removed and a desk brought in, which James sat behind for hours at a stretch in pouring over the data he’d collected on the voyage. Quiet was the rule of the house. The only sound breaking the stillness without reprimand was the crying of Ravenna’s son.
And when the baby cried, when his little face looked too much like Paul to bear, she usually went down to the converted library to offer James any help she could. It was the only way she could spend time with him. By sorting his notes and helping him organize the artistic traditions he’d observed among the Indians, Ravenna hoped to distract herself from her ever-present death and gloom.
Yet whenever James paused to jot down a note, in the absence of his questions, Ravenna found herself drifting right back to Paul.
Did you really die on that riverbank?
she wondered.
Or did you live long enough to suffer, as Christian said his friends did?
For if he’d managed to survive, if his attackers had captured him solely for the purpose of fixing their guns, Paul might have been taken to their summer village. With Paul’s strong arms and streetwise ways, he might have eventually overpowered his captors. He might have escaped.
So rather than suffer a hideous death during the festivities of a potlatch, Paul might have wandered the forest for months through the ceaseless, biting rain of autumn, hungry and cold and fast losing strength, hoping to find Nootka before the bears found him. He might have trudged along the coastal cliffs until sickness took him, desperate to catch sight of a fur-trading ship. He might have huddled between the dry roots of a cedar, watching the rain drip from the branches as the light left his eyes and the ravens closed in.
She shivered as she pictured such things, and James always noticed. Soon he began asking her to take a break, to go for a ride on Killiney’s stallion or pick out some furniture from the order book left by the local cabinetmaker—anything to alleviate the woeful look James said was on her face.
So after two years of being confined to a ship, always within arm’s reach of someone, now Ravenna spent her days in loneliness. She took to leaving her son with the nurse, setting out along the cliffs with Khali, letting him run until he himself chose to stop. Losing her macabre thoughts in the wind, she sometimes stayed out until long after dark. She knew the wet nurse would care for the baby. She knew that Sarah, having hired herself a tutor to give her the manners of a marchioness, would be as engrossed in her studies as James was in his. She knew it would be just Khali and herself, day after day after miserable day.
By the time Christian came home, she was close to drowning. She was desperate for a change of some kind, the company of another tortured soul, anything other than the endless hours she’d suffered and shared with no one; the sight of Christian, after so much useless whispering to the dark, seemed a comfort somehow.
When he stalked into the bedroom and slammed the door, Ravenna was fascinated. Something about him had changed. He was scolding her about the fact she hadn’t heard his carriage pull up, that he’d had to ask Scott if his countess were at home, but there was an anxiety beneath his angry words she hadn’t heard before, at least not since Nootka.
“And where were you?” he asked, removing his gloves with a series of sudden, brutal movements. “Daydreaming, I expect? I hope you’ve gorged yourself, because you shan’t have time for
him
in London, at least not while I’m with you.”
“London?” The movement of his hands distracted her, too quick and graceless for Christian Hallett. His sullen eyes, his jealous reference to Paul as he tossed down his gloves, these things stirred something in her as she watched him stupidly.
He’s desperate
, she realized,
but desperate about what?
“You will go to London,” he continued haughtily, “and you’ll wear the diamond ring I bought you and smile prettily at Lady Salisbury’s assembly next week out of gratitude for my understanding and my boundless self-control. You’ll do as I kindly ask because I miss your company, and as the truth, that should be enough to persuade you in leaving
him
behind.”
“But the wedding, I can’t leave until—”
“I can’t wait until
June
, he might…I might grow impatient with you by then. You wouldn’t want to suffer a lapse in my chastity? Now pack,” and taking her roughly by the arm, he dragged her toward the clothes-press, “or my good nature may fail me here and now.”
Yet even under his forceful grip, she didn’t believe his threats. When he opened the cabinet door, she managed to pull out of his hands, realizing as she did that somehow she didn’t mind his roughness. He hadn’t hurt her. And she had only to look into that well of needing in the gray of his eyes to know he wouldn’t.
She couldn’t pin it down, this blunt, familiar feeling. The idea made her sick, and yet as Christian stood there, she knew it was true: She’d missed him. Within those few moments he’d been in the room, her bereavement had lifted. Not entirely, but enough to find interest in what he’d say next, what manner of manipulation he’d attempt in getting her to do as he wished. She could tell just by looking at him, by the way he’d forced her toward the clothes-press, that she had the upper hand now.