The Rich Are with You Always (39 page)

  "John!" She kicked him in mock outrage.

  And that was the moment Nora chose to open the carriage door.

Nora had been prepared for almost any response from John, except the one she got—or thought she had got. She knew it would wound his dignity that he had been forced to skulk abroad while she had saved the firm—never mind that she had done so in the most unbusinesslike and outrageous manner. She had prepared so many ways of telling him how accidental it had been, how only the thought that he was safe in France had made her bold enough. She even thought up ways in which—had he been at home—he might have managed the rescue more easily and with far greater certainty. Even more, she had been quite ready to apologize for the public exhibition she had made of herself, and to ask his forgiveness.

  So to catch him taking advantage of Sarah's desperation like that shocked her far too deeply to allow her to tax him with it directly. It was not that she lacked sympathy for Sarah; she had made that plain in her letter to John. She knew, from John's frequent and long absences, what it was to yearn to lie entangled with a man again. She knew how unendurable the lack of that fulfilment, and the lack of any prospect of it, must seem to poor Sarah. But the last thing she had expected was that John would take advantage of it, especially after so long an absence from her, and even more especially after the crisis they had endured and survived together these months past.

  She did not blame Sarah in the least. Had she not heard Sarah's cry of outrage the moment before she opened the carriage door and caught John in that position?

  She had passed it off at the time, saying, "That's right, Sarah! Keep him in his place!" Which was not the welcome she had prepared and longed to give.

  And even when they reached home and she and John were at last alone together, she could not forgo the homecoming she had dreamed of for so many weeks. So she continued to make light of what had happened in York.

  "Couldn't wait, eh?" she asked, grinning as she began to undo his shirt buttons.

  His bewilderment looked very genuine.

  "Our Sarah's proving a bit of a hot lot," she went on, thinking that to blame Sarah might ease his guilt. "A bit of a Fulham virgin, eh?"

  "She will be, unless she finds…well,
someone
."

  Nora eased his shirt off and began on her own dress and stays. He watched her, frank in his longing. "For God's sake," he said. "Who are we talking about?"

  She grinned. Her eyes gleamed in the candlelight. "Mistress Sarah," she whispered.

  She kissed him. Only their lips were yet in contact.

  His hands went to the buttons of her dress. Lifting his lips a thousandth of an inch from hers, he said, "Forgotten her."

  He felt the blood hammering at the pit of her neck, and among the tendons at the back of his skull. "No sleep tonight," he said at the corner of his lips.

  She undid his trousers and let them fall. "You dare try!" she said.

  A month of unslaked lust bound them, racing their hearts and shivering their breath. Sarah was truly forgotten. When Nora's dress fell to her knees he pulled her swiftly to him, trying to lift her off the ground. But she turned a little to one side. "Don't be hasty now. Savour it." And she turned for him to unlace her corset. And she went on turning, pressed to him, after she stepped from its loosened clutch.

  Her slim, nude body, warm in the candlelight, warm by the fire, turning and turning, now this way, now that, against him…the curve of her back…the firmness of her hips…her soft breasts…the grace of her neck and the beauty of her and of her face and the dark, desperate eyes, begging now, and entranced—these were the images of her he had only half captured in his years of days away from this house.

  "Nora!" It was hardly his own voice.

  He fell to his knees and buried his face upon her belly, his tongue into her navel. "Oh, love!" Her voice shivered down through the magic air around them; her fingernails were a cap of spikes upon his head. His tongue and lips and breathing rose up her body to her breasts, her neck, her shoulders, her ears, her stifling hair. And his grip tightened as he rose, bearing her aloft, and then, with infinite gentleness, lowering her, lowering, lowering, upon him.

  As the cry of her throat tore the air, and the warmth of her closed around him, not death itself could have held him back. Then she fell upon him, leaning out and abandoning herself to his grip, throwing both legs up until she was rammed to the hilt of him, and feeling that marvellous pulse as he squandered his month of continence into her, spending on and on.

  When the crackle of the flames, the creak of the floorboard, and the weight of their bodies returned, he lowered her to the carpet before the fire and sat himself beside her, leaning so that his face was only inches above hers. His eyes smiled; hers responded. "I can face anything if you're with me," he said.

  She closed her eyes then. "Nothing could take you from me or put aught between us."

  Neither of them had said anything like that to the other for years. Or needed to.

  He still had said nothing directly about her rescue of their fortune. He had written, of course—quite warmly. But he had said nothing, and his silence was beginning to hurt her.

In the small hours he awoke, feeling ravenous; he slipped quietly from the bed, trying not to awaken her, and tiptoed from the room.

  
He's hungry,
she thought. It could hardly be…well, anything else. He often felt hungry when they had made such magnificent love. He often stole down to the kitchen when he felt like that.
Of course he's hungry.

  But for the first time in their life together she rose, slipped on a dressing gown, and went down to join him.

  The kitchen clock whirred and struck three—that is, its hammer flailed the air three times, having been bent by Mrs. Jordan, the cook, so that it would fail to strike the chimes. The sound of chimes, she said, made the air stifling.

  John was not there, but the light of her candle showed the signs of his visit: the cut pie, the crumbs on the table, the pickle barrel, and the sticky wooden ladle beside it.

  On her way up the west stair, which led, it so happened, past Sarah's rooms, she saw a light in the business room across the courtyard in the east wing. She took no pains to be silent as she turned back and went that way. She did not want to catch them unawares again.

  He was alone—or as alone as the owner of a large enterprise can be when he has a case full of unanswered letters, of contracts awaiting perusal or signature, of complaints, of surveys, of claims, of excuses and explanations, of alarms and false alarms.

  He grinned apologetically when he saw her. "Eay love, did I waken thee? I tried being quiet."

  Ashamed now of her suspicions, she could only smile shyly.

  He was eating the last of the pie with gusto. He pointed at the pile of documents spread before him. "I think we've accidentally hit on one of the cardinal principles of business," he said. "Look!" He passed her a letter. "Tucker to me; Exeter, 28 December: Come at once, the world's falling apart. In eight pages." He gave her another letter. Tucker again; Exeter, 4 January: Come if you can but it's not so bad as it seemed." Another. "Tucker; 9 January: Ignore all previous letters. All is well." He laughed.

  "What's this cardinal principle?" she asked.

  "In difficult times the chief's job is to vanish. There's half a dozen similar cases there." He waved his hand over the correspondence. "Half a dozen cries for help that would have had me losing sleep and tearing out my hair. All solved."

  His tone was self-dismissive, but to her he seemed, obliquely, to be minimizing all that she had done. "Perhaps I should have joined you," she said.

  He winked. "It's only because you stayed—and did what you did—that I can make light of it." He reached out and took her hand.

  Suddenly she felt herself close to tears.

  "I can't go on and on telling you," he said. "But you know it. I owe everything to you now."

  The tears came then. She could not stop them. But she did not want to withdraw behind them; feeling every inch a fool, she kept her eyes on his as well as she could and smiled.

  "Thou great softie!" he said, delighted; and he wiped her cheeks with the kerchief on which he had cleaned his fingers after eating the pie. She could smell the pork fat and pastry on her skin.

  "Anyway," he said, "the future's not holding back. Look at this." And he passed her the list he had been looking at when she entered.

  It was in his own hand and read:

"These will put up the value of my land," she said.

  And then it struck her: She had no land! The moment embarrassed them both to silence.

  "Or the bit of land where I was born," she added lamely.

  He did not look directly at her. "You realize there's the best part of four million pounds in those contracts—most of it still to be paid to us."

  "We'll certainly need it," she said.

  There was an odd, plaintive note in his voice.

  "Perhaps we'd have been all right anyway," he added. Again there was that note—defensive and hesitant.

  "Of course, darling!" She took his hand in both of hers. "Of course we would have! All I did was"—she thought hurriedly—"I merely made it possible for you to come back to me the sooner."

  Let him believe it if it helped. He must know it was not true. He must know it was not how much they earned that was important—not when they were insolvent—it was when they earned it that counted. Still, if it helped to restore his own estimation of himself, let him think otherwise.

  With a contented smile he fished deep among his papers, using his free hand. "You can have this now," he said. "It really won't bite."

  It was her power of attorney.

  She could not stifle a slight truculence as she took it. "And what may I practise on?" she asked.

  Now he looked at her steadily. "I'd like to treat the money you won from Wyatt as a loan to the firm," he said. "As all this money comes in"—he pointed to his list of contracts due for completion—"you could progressively withdraw that money and…er, 'practise' with it."

  She had actually thought of asking for no less than John now proposed; so why did it feel like a slap in the face? John was going to make his comforting fiction—that she had not really saved the firm, merely secured it a little earlier than the normal contracts would have saved it anyway—he was going to make it true, by (in effect) doctoring the books. In six months, her winnings, which had saved the firm, would have degenerated into a mere loan. That is what the books would show: "Per loan to Mrs. J. Stevenson—£100,000." In red ink.

  She realized that she had some confusions of her own that needed sorting out. Now that the single overriding goal had been removed from their lives, what did each of them really want? How close were they really, in matters other than their mutual love? Worst of all, would their money once more drive them into a tolerant and easy separation?

  He broke into these thoughts with a forgotten piece of news. "It's your brother Daniel," he began.

  "I know," she told him. "Sam wrote to me. He's to be pardoned."

  "He's
been
pardoned. I've heard he's already back in England." He could not read her face. "What'll you do, love?" he prompted.

  "If Daniel knocked on that door now, dying with the cold, I'd not so much as cross the room."

  The intensity of her hate made him quail. "By God!" he said. "I hope I may never make an enemy of thee!"