The Proposition (12 page)

Here was as far as she ever went aloud. Her history
embarrassed her. She murmured, "Please give that to me." She held out her hand for the tuning fork.

Mr. Tremore watched her a moment, then struck the tines on his palm as she'd done. He held it to his ear,
listened, then handed it back, tines first. When she
grasped it, her fingers vibrated.

Within the hour, they finished up the last of the initial record-keeping and testing and began in earnest on articulation. Which left Mr. Tremore really at sea. They'd hardly started when he wanted to quit.

"I ain't used to bein' wrong at anything so much as you say I be here."

She could have countered that she wasn't used to a lot of what was happening either. A man in her house. Tuning forks handed back to her, humming. A student who leaned back on the rear legs of his chair and twitched a big, bristly mustache at her every time she said something he didn't want to hear.

She told him anyway, "It's to be expected that you'll say everything wrong at first. We're
looking
for what you say wrong. You just have to keep at it." She explained, "To learn a new sound, we'll steep your ears in it. You listen and listen, then try it. I observe the movement of your lips and jaw, infer the position of your tongue and palate, the openness of your throat passage. By watching, I can often tell you what you're doing wrong, then help you get your organs of speech into the right position to produce the desired sound."

He smiled slightly at the term
organs of speech.
It was a game to him. He was bored.

She felt lost, a woman swimming in knowledge she didn't know how to get into him. She continued, "Occasionally I won't be able to tell by simply looking why your pronunciation is off. But there are other means of determining the problem. For throat sounds, for instance, there's
the
laryngoscope." She opened the table drawer and produced a small mirror fixed obliquely to a handle.

He glanced at it, and his smile became unsure, a half-smile of misgiving.

"You see, I hold this inside your mouth at the back and reflect a ray of light down your throat. This way, I can see in the mirror just how your throat is opening and closing."

He laughed uncomfortably, but kept listening.

"I can also objectively tell the positions of your tongue by exploring your mouth with my fingers—"

"Wait." He held up his hand, chortling now. "You gonna be puttin' your fingers in me mouth?"

"Perhaps. Most likely, just my little finger against your gum so I can feel the position of your tongue."

His eyebrows drew up at that. He leaned back in his chair, folding his arms across his chest, smiling, shaking his head. "Well, this be gettin' good."

"Is,"
she said. "This
is
getting good."

"Bloody right, it is."

She squinted.
Is.
He used it correctly. But he had the wrong idea. "We'll see if you still feel that way after the palatagraphic."

"That'd be what?"

"What is that?"
she advised.

"All right, what is that?"

"A thin artificial palate that goes into your mouth with some chalk dust on it. You say a sound, then I infer the position of your tongue on your palate from the contact marks."

"So you're gonna be in my mouth a lot tonight? Do I got that right?"

Impatiently, she told him, "Mr. Tremore, I'm not used to your bawdy suggestions with regard to what is my job and a serious business—"

"Bawdy?"

"Vulgar. Indecent."

"I know what
bawdy
means," he said. "I just be surprised you find me enjoyin' your finger in me mouth vulgar. You be the one puttin' it there." He shook his
head, laughing at her. "You know, loovey, what men and women get up to ain't indecent. It's about the most decent thing on the English island. Even the good Queen went at it. The whole world knows she was keen for Albert, and she got nine children, so that many times at least."

Edwina was unable to say anything for a moment. Nothing seemed more inappropriate than his implicating the Queen in one of his ribald digressions. "Sir," she said, "I don't know where to begin in telling you that what m-men"—she actually stammered—"men and women g-get up to—"

"Easy, loov. You be a virgin, I know that." He said it without batting an eyelash, as if this presumption of his, all the more annoying for being accurate, were supposed to console her.

Edwina opened her mouth, shut it, didn't know what to say for a good half a minute. Finally, she told him, "Gentlemen, sir, don't speak of such things."

He looked at her, tilting his head. With his arms crossed, his vest pulled across the back of his shoulders. Then he raised one arm off the vest and stroked his mustache, once, twice, with the back of his knuckle. "That be a fact?"

"Yes," she insisted.

"I bet gentlemen know the word
virgin."

"Well, yes"—she struggled a moment—"I'm sure they do. But they don't say it."

He leaned toward her a little. "Then how to do they learn it? Someone says it."

Edwina pressed her lips together, a little annoyed, a little turned-around. "Well, they probably say it among other gentlemen—"

"This mornin' you told me you didn't know what gentlemen talked about when they be alone."

"I don't." She couldn't find her bearings in the stupid conversation. "So this must be one of the topics," she said quickly, "since they certainly don't speak of
it around ladies. May we get back to the lesson now?"

"Suit yourself." He shrugged. "Looks like we got
somethin' for me to say at least in a few weeks, when the ladies leave after dinner. I'll just open the conversation up with virgins."

She stared at him. A second later—one heart-stopping second later—she realized he was having her on, teasing her. His mouth drew up in that lopsided way it had, a full, toothsome smile that dimpled only one cheek.

Edwina didn't know whether to be offended or not. She could hardly credit it. Normally, she hated to be tormented. Yet she didn't feel hurt now. It made her feel … warm … foolish but not unpleasant. He'd somehow managed the miracle of turning her upside down, just for fun, without making her feel bad about
it.

He grinned wider, then took her deeper into confusion. "You ain't never known a man, I know that. Not even kissed many."

What an outrageous— "One," she said, "you," then wished she hadn't. It called attention to the fact that no one else had ever wanted to, not even for the silliest, most lighthearted of reasons.

But that wasn't how he took it.

Mr. Tremor's expression changed. It became genuinely taken aback. He dropped his teasing mien and looked straight at her. Very seriously, he said with amazement in his voice, "Well, beggar me. That be just plain sweet, Miss Bollash. I feel right proud you let me."

She was too surprised to give his words the horselaugh they deserved. She sat there for several stupefied seconds before she found the refuge she knew best: speech. "Now, you see, Mr. Tremore," she said, "it would be better if you didn't say
beggar me
anymore."

He tilted his head, frowning slightly. "Wha'd'you want me to say?"

"Try: 'I'm astonished.'"

He laughed, though at the end, still smiling, he raised one brow—a look that certainly could have
passed for ironic amusement—and said, "All right: I'm astonished."

He repeated the words exactly as she'd said them, so naturally and perfectly she was without response for a second. "Yes." She blinked and looked down. "Yes, that's right."

Then he really took her breath away. He murmured,
"You
astonish me."

Edwina looked up, frowning, squinting like a woman trying to understand the mechanism of a trick, a sleight of hand. Well-dressed, sitting there with his
white-sleeved arm folded across his dark-vested chest,
Mick Tremore looked so much the part: the English lord. With his sounding the part, too, well—he stopped
her in her tracks. As if all this talk about catching rats
and Cornwall were the false part, the real part being what sat before her: a confident, well-dressed fellow whom she'd managed to astonish.

Oh, this was awful. It was painful. She couldn't keep
doing it. And it was only the beginning. She had to
find a way to make him stay who he was, for herself to see him properly and stop catching glimpses of this other man, this ghostly … what? viscount? who could inhabit his skin.

Her mouth went dry. Her skin grew hot. For several
seconds Edwina looked at an English lord with grace
ful hands, one finger of which he used to stroke an
unusually thick mustache in what was coming to be a
characteristic gesture. Sometimes he did it with the back of his knuckle, sometimes with the inside of his finger as now. In either event, it always made him look pensive. Pensive and faintly wicked. She remembered how surprising it felt, soft and coarse, both, when it touched her mouth.

Oh, dear. Edwina lowered her eyes and put her hand to her throat, her palm circling her own neck, her collar, where her fingers found tiny steel beads on tulle over silk. An old dress. A dress made as stylish as
possible again. A dress bought when the idea of court
ing was still a ridiculous possibility. When she'd had
money and consequently had the interest of suitors.

What had she been saying? She couldn't remember. It was no use. There was no getting back to what they'd been talking about before all this, no getting back to whatever it was she'd been trying to accomplish. She sat there staring at
a tuning fork on the table. Inside, she felt like that, as
if someone had lightly
struck her and now she resonated from the contact, vibrating with something she didn't understand, that wasn't visible, yet that worked on her from the inside out while she fiddled with the beads on her collar.

Beyond the windows of the room, it had grown quite dark. The night, opaque at the glass, reflected the room back on itself. Only a distant street lamp indicated anything existed outside her laboratory. It was late. She didn't usually work so long. A bad idea. Time to call an end to it. They'd do better tomorrow.

"Well," she said. "That's enough, I think." She stood shakily. Her knees felt weak. "I think we should go to bed now."

As the words left her mouth, and Edwina heard them, she thought, No, I didn't say that. Not aloud. Mr. Tremore lowered his eyes. Or she thought he did; his eyes fell into the shadow of his deep, jutting brow. "I think we should go to bed, too," he said.

She blinked, frowned, swallowed. She wanted to snap at him, chastise him—for what? For saying exactly what she had just said. Only he didn't mean it as she had. He was being—

What?

She'd assume he wasn't. Pretend he wasn't. Excuse yourself, Winnie. Go to bed.

Only, for the life of her, she couldn't. Her arms, her legs wouldn't move. Instead, heat rose up into her face as if the door to a furnace had opened. Her cheeks, neck, shoulders grew hot from an embarrassment she couldn't contain. She'd said something risqué. Accidentally.

Mr. Tremore said nothing. He remained quiet. She
was now, presumably, supposed to be grateful for his silence.

Fine. She attempted to speak. "W-well, yes, we may, um, could—" She swallowed wrong,
choked.
Her eyes teared instantly. Edwina found herself caught
in mortified coughs and stammers, then was further
obliged to feel, grudgingly, out-and-out indebted as
Mr. Tremore took over, making excuses for her.

"A slip of the tongue, loov. It can embarrass the best of us. It's all right. I know what you meant."

Their eyes met, held. How odd. His angular brow or perhaps her own discomfort in meeting his eyes for very long had kept the color of his eyes a secret till this moment. She'd known they were fair, but they were more than fair. They were green. Not a hazel, but a true, fair beryllium green, steel-gray green around a
black pupil, the iris ringed in a thin line of dark, vivid mossy green. Stunning eyes. Another detail she would just as soon not be aware of.

She was developing
a schoolgirl infatuation for a
ratcatcher.

Well, she simply wouldn't allow it. Though her body demonstrated that some things could not be controlled: The bright embarrassment in her face spread down her arms, her body. Everywhere. She must have looked apoplectic, because the object of her
discomposure reached across the table and patted her hand, then gently squeezed the backs of her fingers—his were strong and warm, sure of themselves.

He said, "Go on to bed now, loovey. I won't even walk up with you. You be doin' all right, Winnie. A good girl. Just a little shook up. It'll be okay in the mornin'. When you come down, I'll be sittin' at breakfast nice as you please—no dancin' with Molly Reed this time."