Authors: J. Jay Kamp
Suddenly, she felt him falter. Softening his kiss, he withdrew from her mouth. “Say it,” he whispered. “Say it the way you said it to him.”
Waiting for her to comply, he caressed her with a cold and hesitant hand. But even with the obvious effort he made to brave such things, to be kind to her, to be respectful and loving, still she couldn’t say it. “I know how hard this has been for you,” she told him, sliding her hands up his rain-drenched back, “but think how hard it’s been for me. Paul hasn’t even been gone a year, and no matter who I were with, you know my answer would be the same: I need more time.”
“But I don’t
have
more time.” His touch at her arm hardened a little. “Don’t you care for me at all? After all I’ve given to be with you?”
“Let go of me, Christian.”
“
No
,” he said, “not until you afford me that tone of voice.” His manicured nails gripped her tighter, bruising her as he stared her down. “Say you love me. Give me at least that.”
“You’re asking me to lie, and I don’t see why I should—”
“
There’s nothing left for me but lies!”
His eyes moved rapidly across her face. “Don’t you understand? He’s coming and I have nothing, only delusion and your words to foster it, and if you’ve an ounce of mercy, you’ll grant me relief before my time with you runs out!”
She stepped back from him. “If you don’t let go of me right now, it will be too late. Too late for everything, do you understand?
Let go of me
.” Wincing from his hold on her, she tugged at his hand, tried to loosen it.
He only stood more firmly against her. “I’ve given you everything, do you know that?”
And with a sudden, violent shove of his hand, he knocked her backwards.
She fell hard against the newel post, wrenched her arm as she landed on the risers. She must have cried out, for in the seconds that followed, she heard the echo of it diminish into the sound of the rain on the skylight, the ragged breaths Christian drew as he wobbled before her on whiskey legs. “Reputation, career, my immortal soul—,” he waved his arms, smacked his fist into the banister, “—God has taken it all in your name, and I’ll suffer eternally!
Forever
, Ravenna, without even so much as a kiss.”
“You threw it away,” she said, rubbing her arm.
“Only to protect
you
, to be with
you!”
“I didn’t ask you to do any of those things, you can’t—”
“
There has been no other path!
”
His breath hung in the air between them, a cloud of warmth in the chill of the staircase. Stupidly, Ravenna gazed at it, in shock at what was happening around her, and still he raged on. “Had I ever a choice but to love you? I love you by
God’s
design,
God’s
will. There’s no recourse with destiny, no appeal, no escape—I have only you, Ravenna! I’ve naught to breathe without you, and now I’ll die unmourned and godforsaken, he’s coming and I shall rot in hell!”
She glared up at him. “Keep pushing me around, and maybe you should.”
He lurched toward her then, his hand shooting down to encompass her wrist. He yanked her to her feet, and with the pain surging through her injured arm, she couldn’t stop him, couldn’t fight as he took her in a steeled embrace.
“You are my
life
,” he said to her evenly. “We’re connected at the soul’s very seams and should I wish it, I can repay my suffering for you in spades; shall I take you down with me? Is that how it ends?”
Under her hands, she felt his chest heave and his heart beat fast in holding her tighter, letting his strength bear down on her bones. “Say it, Beloved,” he whispered close. “Do me the kindness and I needn’t hurt you.”
“My name is
not
Beloved.”
“Beloved, Beloved, Beloved,” he hissed, “you’ll be so ’til the day I die—,” and with a harsh tug to the back of her neck, he kissed her again. By the time she screamed against his soft, hairless cheek, fighting him all the way, it was done. He released her so quickly she staggered backwards. “You know better than anyone what lies in wait for me. Hell has sent for me. You know that, and for us both, there can be no other way.”
Drunkenly, letting his devastation be known by the violence in his lingering stare, he backed away into the darkness.
The footmen came running.
* * *
She didn’t know where he spent that night. She didn’t much care. She sat in her bedroom with the door locked and the corridor patrolled by servants sworn to keep Christian away, but still she couldn’t sleep. His madness preyed on her mind.
Hour after hour she wrangled with herself, with her common sense and her fears. One thing was certain. That letter he’d received had driven him to drink. Whatever horrors its words contained had deepened the desperation he’d hurled at her…but was that an excuse for what he’d done? Was that justification to threaten her?
He’d threatened her before. He’d never meant it. But then, he’d never actually laid a hand on her, either, much less kissed her. Vile, to think of enduring that again, and yet, in his mind, it was his right, wasn’t it? They were married.
He was her husband
. And should he come home in such a state the next night, and the next, drunk and pushed to his limits by the unknowable, mysterious death-wish he had…or perhaps receive another such letter…
Next time he might not disappear. She might not even get the chance to scream.
By the time dawn had lightened her room to gray, she’d set a candle on the hearth. She knelt before the single flame, wrapped in a blanket, and closing her eyes, she said Paul’s name. “My love, can you hear me?” she asked the silence. “Does Christian really mean what he says? Or does he need me more than ever? My love, what should I do?”
She waited in the chill to hear Paul’s whisper, for his answer to fill her like the yellow sunshine streaming over the soot-streaked rooftops.
As ever, there was no reply.
* * *
It was early when the baby woke up the wet nurse where she slept in the adjoining room. Having been sent out beyond the footman barricade to fetch Ravenna’s breakfast, the girl soon came back with the food and a frightened face: She’d seen Christian in the passageway. He’d yelled at her, Megan said. He’d demanded the countess be ready for the opera by eight that night, and should Megan fail to dress her mistress on time and in the appropriate manner, the girl would be fired, wet nurse or no.
Ravenna spent the rest of the day reassuring Megan she’d never be dismissed, no matter what Christian said. Megan loved the baby to pieces, Ravenna knew that, and what would she do without the girl’s help?
It wasn’t until five o’clock when they both finally calmed and Ravenna began to brace herself for Christian’s presence. She put on the Emma Hamilton dress. She styled her hair in the Emma Hamilton fashion, and making sure the baby was well and settled in the kitchen with Megan, she went down to the carriage at five minutes to eight. She had Paul’s watch in her hand, and damned if she cared what Christian thought about it. If he wanted her ready by eight, she’d be ready—and ready to do battle, if necessary.
* * *
She sat in the carriage, listening to the jingle of the harnesses as the horses fidgeted, for twelve whole minutes.
When Christian finally sauntered down the courtyard steps, Ravenna held her breath at the sight of him. What would she see when he turned his eyes to hers? The remnants of his abysmal need, his compulsion of the night before?
Pain, that’s what she saw, and it showed itself in a thousand different ways, in his bitter glances, the way his thin hands hesitated at the carriage door before he stepped inside. His double-breasted frock coat, royal blue with silver buttons, looked rich and vibrant in the evening light as he took his seat stiffly beside her. The air sweetened with the scent of his perfume. The sunshine reflected off his cut-steel shoe buckles and scattered across the leather walls, but no matter how gorgeous he looked, however dignified he presented himself, he was still a mess. Nothing had changed from the night before. He was better dressed, yes, but the madness hadn’t faded from his eyes in the least.
As their carriage rolled out into the thick of Charing Cross, Christian said nothing. Nor did Ravenna. Hackney coaches, sedan chairs, arrogant gentlemen on well-bred ponies, the clatter of it all would have drowned their uncomfortable words anyway. Not that they had the time to speak, because in two or three minutes they arrived at the theater.
Even before their man had opened the carriage door, Ravenna heard music. The opera had begun. It made her numb to hear that orchestra, and as Christian stepped down and held out his hand for her, she reeled from the sound of a soprano drifting through the theater doors. Ignoring Christian’s sharp orders to the coachman, she squinted her eyes. She tried to read the last remaining bill posted near the corner of the building, barely noticing how Christian still held her hand, for the one thing on her mind was the lettering on that bill; faded by yesterday’s rain, she could just make it out in the seconds before the workman tore it down.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
, it read.
Just like that, the pain that waited always in her buried heart fought its way quickly to the surface. Christian led her brusquely toward the theater doors, and all through the muslin-wrapped, aristocratic women, all through the fops, her melancholy blossomed with the thought—
Mozart! Why must it be Mozart?
But Christian hauled her into the theater’s darkness as if he were on a mission from God and the louder the music swelled, the more Ravenna resisted his strength. Her feet dragged. Her free hand trailed against walls, against banister posts, and still Christian lunged on, calling for an usher to lead them to their seats while a perfect tenor voice pursued them through the corridor.
When the usher turned at the curtained door and pressed a copy of the libretto into Christian’s hand, her suspicions were confirmed.
Don Giovanni
, that’s what it was.
Grand and unbearable, Mozart’s opera had the effect of a bludgeoning on Ravenna’s senses. Christian pushed her into the box, and she lost all notion of what was expected of her. A thin, golden light fell from the chandeliers. An ocean of silks and powdered hair lay below. Every English face was turned toward the set, a backdrop of
trompe l’
oei
l
imitating a lush garden courtyard, while on the stage stood Doña Anna and Don Ottavio lamenting the murder of Anna’s father. Stricken with shock, Anna wanted only to die with her father. As she lifted her voice in grief, Don Ottavio matched her every note, as if he’d follow her willingly to prove his love,
even if her only wish were death
.
Overwhelmed by it, Ravenna was startled when Christian yanked her backwards, forced her down into a chair. Their eyes met for an instant. His were every bit as black as last night’s kiss, and when he sat down beside her, draped his arm across her shoulder, it was a statement of ownership, both to her and to the world.
She held perfectly still beneath it. She didn’t squirm, didn’t struggle. She didn’t even resist when he eventually worked up the nerve to let his finger travel up the nape of her neck.
Listen to the music
, she told herself, and with some effort, she focused instead on Don Giovanni’s baritone notes. He sang in Italian, but she understood his story. Giovanni had been the one to murder Anna’s father; having first seduced Anna in a cloaked disguise, Giovanni had then killed her father, the Don’s identity protected by his mask.
Next to Ravenna, Christian was busy. While the opera went on, he explained loudly to a crude-looking youth that he hadn’t been well since Vancouver’s voyage, that the American climate had ruined his health. The youth was quick to shake his head in pity, but Ravenna ignored them, concentrated instead on Anna’s plight as she sang with Don Giovanni—how could Anna guess that her father’s cloaked attacker had been the cavalier Giovanni himself?
For in her presence, Giovanni showed no remorse for the murder. Nothing about him betrayed the pain he’d caused Anna or the life he’d taken. Thus Anna ignorantly begged Giovanni for help in tracing her father’s killer. Unshaken, sure of himself to a fault, Giovanni sang but Ravenna couldn’t hear his words; that ugly young man was talking about billiards.
Go away
, she thought.
Take Christian with you and leave me to my music, this awful, stirring music
. And Anna, not knowing the snake Giovanni was, declared him a noble and gallant man.
Giovanni didn’t argue. He swore his blood, his sword and wealth in support of her efforts to avenge her father. He never let on that he himself had delivered the fatal wound, that he’d murdered the object of her measureless grief and watched the body grow cold,
the way Paul’s had grown cold, the way Paul had died on that distant river
.
By the end of the first act, the intricacies of this plot didn’t matter to Ravenna any more, only the music, this powerful music. She let her mind wander, let that aching run rampant as she gazed bleary-eyed at the women in the floor seats. From behind their flippant fans they pointed up at Christian. It made Ravenna sick, to see these women shun the attentions of the men already at their sides, wasting what love they already possessed…and for what?
Christian
, for God’s sake. In a blaze of chorus the scene finished with Anna realizing the truth, that Don Giovanni had deceived her and had been her father’s killer all along, but Ravenna was busy staring at those women. Here they were, sitting at the opera with their husbands, rich and healthy and basking in adoration, and what did they do with such good fortune? Could they even imagine how it felt to lose such love as they obviously took for granted?
Without even trying, she saw Paul’s face, saw his eyes narrowed with love in a theater like this.
I’ve wasted so much
, she thought, remembering that other, long ago opera.
If only I’d kissed you that night in the theater, how much more time we would have had
.