The Proposition (24 page)

On them were written words in a tight scrawl—
cal
lipygian, Junoesque,
simpler words, too,
identity, banished,
more, pages of them—and marks. Beside each word, he wrote down the title of the book where he found it, sometimes abbreviating it, a page number, then how many lines from the top or bottom with an arrow pointing up or down, indicating the exact location in the book where the word occurred.

"I look them up at the end of the night, then I go back to the pages and read the words again when they mean something to me. I go over them the next nights. If I forget any, I look them up again." By way of apology, an excuse for such excessiveness, he shrugged again, helpless, and said, "I like words."

That, she knew. She smiled faintly. "Diabolical," she murmured.

"Felonious."

"Nefarious."

He blinked, smiling with wonder. He didn't know that one,
but
he liked it. He added, "Black-hearted."

She laughed. "All right. It's not that you don't know words, but you use them strangely."

"I like to play with them." From the beginning, he'd liked grand-sounding words that he could say majestically.

Or amusing words. Widge, she thought. "I know," she acknowledged. "But for the night of the ball you have to play with them less obviously. And you can't use certain ones."

His brow creased. A contemplation came over his face, a meditative look that would have suited a Cambridge don. His features, when still and serious, simply gave the impression of insight, judgment, sharp mental activity. It wasn't true necessarily, she told herself. His mind could be as blank as a stone at the moment, but the structure of his face—the way the ridge of his brow tended to knit, the clarity and focus of his eyes, the high forehead—lent itself to the notion that he was intelligent, possibly profound.

She stared at his handsome face. The word
astute
leaped to mind, and it was from more than just the look of him. Canny, street-smart, cunning. She held his eyes and knew he was a sharp customer.

And that he was sizing her up.

She broke her gaze away, turning her head. "We'll give you some expressions." She cleared her throat. "Things to say, to remember for that night." She looked down at the sheets of paper he'd handed her, paging through them for something to do. "Actually, as we continue to fix your grammar and pronunciation, the
way
you like to use words may not stand out so baldly."

When she glanced up, he was still watching her, a disturbingly secure look on his face, a look that wanted to bore into her. He didn't think he used words badly. Differently, he might have said. Cleverly. And he wouldn't have been wrong.

It was she who judged too harshly, who jumped to wrong conclusions about him. She hadn't taken his measure correctly, not from the first moment. With condescension, she'd occasionally told herself that Mick was smart, clever.

No. Mick was brilliant. She'd never had a student learn so much as fast as he did. His abilities were outright eerie at times. He was smarter than she was.

She handed back his papers, then snugged her dressing gown up tight around her throat, crossing her arms over herself.

As he stared at her—his keen eyes a green found in the sea, the color of grass-bottomed inlets—she actually felt her face warm. For no better reason than his looking at her. She could feel her skin heating. She turned away from him, putting her palm to her face. A casual way to hide from him. Her hand felt cool on her cheek. Blushing. She couldn't believe she was blushing. Again. For nothing. He'd done nothing to warrant it.

He just sat there in the light of the reading lamp, Mick lit up, the rest of the world dark, watching, silent, though out the side of her vision she saw him tilt his head. The way his dog Magic did when a human being baffled him by one behavior or another.

Well, good. She baffled herself. She might as well baffle him, too.

Chapter 16

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A
fter almost five weeks of instruction, Mr. Tremore had all but mastered the structure of proper English and was well on his way to reshaping his diction to an impressive degree. One lesson, though, Winnie delayed as long as possible. She might have avoided it completely, but since he was going to a ball, he had to learn to dance something beyond a jig around the kitchen.

She always taught her girls in the upstairs music room, a little room originally for the purpose of small gatherings of instruments and dinner guests that had occasionally, when her mother was alive and in the house, turned into extemporaneous dancing. Now it was a bare room, except for a big, black grand piano with a lot of broken strings and hardened pads. The bulky piano stood scooted back in a corner, unused and slowly falling apart. Other than this, the hardwood floor was wide-open and spacious, if a little dusty. All in all, though hardly the size of a ballroom, there was still plenty of area across which to move.

Dancing lessons were not usually a chore to Winnie. She loved to dance, and teaching foreign ladies or the gauche daughters of lawyers how to do it was her best opportunity to indulge herself in the entertainment. It was normally a favorite lesson. She brought in her gramophone, setting it on the closed piano lid, then cranked it up and ran full-volume the recordings she'd made of a trio playing Strauss.

With Mr. Tremore, she started the music, then went to position him. "Here now. You stand not exactly in front," she said, "but a little bit off, so our legs can go—" In between. She couldn't say it.

Then she didn't need to; he already knew. He took her hand into his and put himself automatically at the proper angle. She grasped the upper portion of his arm, the one he put round her waist. He knew to do that, too. She stood there for a moment in the marvel of it. The embrace of a dance—her own arm resting up his to the edge of his stone-hard shoulder, his palm flat to the small of her back.

She had to reverse her usual instructions. She told him, "You step forward, taking me with you to the count of three…
"

She had to step backward, the opposite direction she usually went, onto the opposite foot. He tightened his grip, moved her, and suddenly everything seemed upside down.
She
slipped, missed the step. She thought something rolled underfoot. Like a stone loose on the floor, though she couldn't imagine where that would come from. So perhaps it was simply that she was her usual off-kilter self with him.

Before she could put anything right, something more went wrong. On the piano beside them, the gramophone found a scratch, and the needle stuck. "Oh, bosh," she said.

She took herself out of his arms to hunt through her stack of cylinders for a better recording. Oddly, a sound intruded into the silence of the room, and she looked up
…

As Mr. Tremore waited, he made a faint jingle. A light, metallic
clink.
She stared at him a moment. He stood with one hand in the pocket of his trousers, the other tapping his leg.

Tap-clink-tap.
How annoying.

He dressed the part of gentleman; no more ratting clothes, now that her carriage house was "better" than before. Today, green tweedy trousers, neat, worsted wool, lightweight in anticipation of summer, creased with a turnup. His vest, a light, muted brownish gray, fit snugly, it, too, cut for a warmer season. Low, it showed two studs, his cravat, which he had finally learned to tie, parted, folded, and tucked to expose the starched front of his shirt.

No, he appeared perfectly the gentleman. He had pulled together every last thread and seam of the look of an upper-class Englishman. He understood the style of one.
But
—clink, clink, clink—
she
frowned down the length of him again. What made that irritating sound?

Though in concept, Mr. Tremore was coming along nicely, in the flesh, she found more and more he galled her these days. His perfections disturbed her. His silence exasperated. She especially took exception to the way he faced her now and then with regard to some of her improvements that he didn't seem to value as improvements: with an insolent self-assurance, as if he knew something she didn't. Worse, she resented her own horrible fascination with him at moments—the fact that, without his saying a word or lifting a finger, he could taunt and attract and make the hair on her arms lift.

Today the tension in him was palpable. It needed to tap.

Her temper was short. "Stop it," she said.

He looked right at her and continued,
jing jing jing.
In fact, if she weren't mistaken, he did it a little harder.

It didn't matter, she told herself. She went back to her cylinders, lifting one then another to read the scrawl on her own recordings—all the while thinking that the jingle was something in his pocket. What was in there? What did men usually keep in their pockets?

She remembered all the "usual" things Mr. Tremore possessed. Long, slinky animals that became fierce and dived into dark places. Coshes and bells. Bells? Would he keep bells in his pockets? She wanted suddenly to go through his trousers—go over to him and turn his pockets inside out, to be sure he didn't have anything, she told herself, that would give them both away later. And she'd like to reach into his vest where a chain indicated she'd find, held by a vest pocket firmly against his abdomen, the chiming watch he so liked—

That was the sound. His watch chain clinking against the stone button of his vest as he moved his arm a fraction, whapping his hand on the side of his thigh. The sound and movement momentarily arrested her, captivated by his tapping his leg in idle impatience.

She shook her head free of it, then found another Strauss she liked that was slow enough for a beginner. She put it on, went back to stand before her student, then was unsettled again when he took hold of her as if he knew what he were doing.

He didn't exactly. It took them four attempts till they were finally moving. Or moving of sorts. He knew how to lead, yet still he and she weren't graceful. He didn't know the rhythm. He was used to dancing differently. He kept wanting her to put her arm all the way onto his shoulder so her hand would be at the back of his neck—till she finally told him, as inoffensively as possible, that his way of dancing was indecent. It put the couple too close.

He snorted and glanced her over, as if she invented the criterion. But he kept at the lesson, waltzing her way. While, every time the music and the room grew quiet, as if to punctuate their dance's ceasing, she could hear the faint chime of him clink to a stop.

When she went over to crank the gramophone for perhaps the sixth or seventh time, he followed her, poking through the cylinders himself. She doubted he could read her handwriting or, if he could, that he would be familiar enough to make sense of the names of composers or musical compositions. But he pulled one out after a moment and said, "This."

She looked at what he handed her. No, he didn't know the piece; he only liked the name. The "Thunder and Lightning Polka." Typical.

"It's not a waltz." She went to set it back into the box.

He caught her wrist. "I know that. But I know how to dance it better than a waltz, and you, I'd bet, don't. It might get us over your trying to steer me."

She looked at him, raising one eyebrow. "I don't steer you—"

"You do. Like a pushcart."

"I don't steer you like a pushcart!" Did she? She was both offended and taken aback.

"It's a damn wrestling match we're doing here, Winnie. Your wanting to lead is why we're having so much trouble."

"No, it's not. It's your inexperience—"

"My experience with a woman who's afraid to let me control her, who wants to mop the floor with me." Then with barely a breath between, he said, "All right, a waltz, but take off your shoes."

"Pardon?" She drew back. "I won't."

"Take off your shoes. You'll slide better. I can move you easier. It'll help."

It also made her shorter. Her head came to just under his nose when she stepped forward in her stockinged feet to take his hand again. He pushed his advantage of her having less traction, her barely being able to keep her balance at places as he turned her on the smooth floor. It made her more fidgety still that she'd let him talk her into taking off her shoes. It didn't seem smart all at once.

Though he was right, it was good for their dancing.

No, it was wonderful for it. It put her somehow in a different state of mind. Eventually she followed, letting him find the movement he needed. Then, once he had the basic feel of the waltz, it was a fight to keep him from doing it double-time, spinning her—partly from delight (he was pleased to learn that some waltzes had a fast, spinning finish), though partly, she suspected, from his liking that he could make her body move with his, make her physically follow his will.

He was better at the spins than the slower movements. There, he needed practice. Practice with the slight bend in the knees, the left and right swooping turns of an English waltz. It was practice that seduced them both. He liked to dance. She loved to. He became increasingly good at waltzing, taking her round and round the room, moving her with a growing confidence she could feel in him, a masculine confidence that danced her backward into a state of breathless appreciation of it. She waltzed in the large, dark shadow of her own awareness of him, a shadow so large she quaked to think of the dread attraction that cast it.