Beast (29 page)

It was her mother who wanted the big wedding, of course. Louise didn't care. Yet she felt horrible to have deprived her mother of what had been a subject of conversation since Louise was old enough to understand what the words
huge society wedding
meant. A marriage "to some prince or other" had been a kind of joke when Louise was younger, an exaggeration of all her mother's hopes come oddly to fruition. Attending such a triumphant and happy event was something Isabel Vandermeer had spoken of with relish for as long as Louise could remember.

Her mother proceeded. "If you are willing, that is. If you agree. Do you?"

It seemed pointless not to. Louise nodded. She met her mother's eyes then and managed words finally:

"Mama, I am sorry for any worry or pain I have caused you."

Her mother took her hand and began walking again. "I know, dear. Don't worry." She pulled Louise into a slow stroll across the wet, shifting stones. "Everything is going to be fine. Your father and I are going to take a house here for a while, just to be sure you settle in and are happy."

Louise bit her lip, then said, "Mama, I want to take care of myself."

Her mother only glanced at her sideways and kept going. "Of course, you do, darling."

Louise halted and pulled her mother around by the hand. "No, you don't understand. You and Papa can go back when you chose to. I'm sorry if I've hurt or disappointed you, but it's my life. I can manage it myself."

Her mother gazed directly into her face for a few seconds, smiling her cool, unflappable smile. Then, with this smile still intact, her eyes glassed. Tears. Two small drops materialized at the corners of her eyes, then overran to become two neat parallel trails flanking her nose down her cheeks. "Oh, my sweet darling," she said. "Let me be your mother for a while longer, please. I'm not ready to part with you." She sniffled once, then asked with rather poignant sincerity, "Do you so long to leave us as much as all this?"

"No," Louise said. She reached, embracing this woman who had held her more times than she could count. "No, of course not." She patted her mother's head. "I only want you to stop worrying or doing anything more." She felt a faint brush with sadness herself, a kind of nostalgia for what was not yet gone, if such a thing were possible. '"Just let me be. I can lake care of myself. And I don't think I shall make myself all that unhappy or make anyone too ashamed. I am not so stupid, you know."

As they came back up the stone steps and walked up the lawn again, Isabel Vandermeer grew bright once more. "Yours, darling," she said, "all yours." She indicated the new house before them, a wide rise of white stone, three stories, forty-five rooms, built only four years ago, with every modern convenience, on three seaside acres of what was becoming the most expensive property on the continent.

Yet Louise already owned things she liked. She didn't long materially for more. But there was something else here, she sensed, that she wanted: As she came up from the morass of emotion on the beach, she could smell freedom, as pungent and fragrant as the herbs growing in the hills, like the mingled whiff of thyme and rosemary and wild lavender. She felt her skin itself become prickly with knowledge, with the incipient freedom of a married woman who had an indulgent husband. And the prince would be indulgent.

She had thought so within the first hours of meeting him. But now, with his knowing "everything" and still choosing to marry her, with hardly more than a graceful, flourishing nod toward her indiscretion, she was absolutely sure.

The next two weeks went by quickly. The prince was busy with his concerns in Grasse. He was gone for three days, then came back with more work. Yet he found time for a steady, public sort of courtship.

They went sailing once. They went riding on the beach at Antibes. He took her to the gambling palace in Nice, then to Monte Carlo, where he introduced her to the big gaming tables—to test her attraction to them, she suspected. She was not much of a casino gambler, though. The games took little or no skill, and the odds, all stacked heavily in the house's favor, weren't interesting. She won a little money. He seemed quite content with this. They went to his sister's for dinner.

Louise and the prince, by all early evidence, appeared to get along well. He was most agreeable. He was, as her parents had assured her, intelligent and well educated. He seemed quite the perfect match, exactly as they had said. Every moment between them, in fact, went flawlessly in these weeks, except for one misstep during a carriage ride into the countryside.

Out in the surrounds of Nice, he pulled their little two-wheel calèche into an olive grove, where he attempted to kiss her—and where Louise nearly fell from the carriage in her mad haste to be back from him. After a particularly awkward moment, they laughed about it. Louise had been disappointed in herself, though, for she had been coaching herself for two weeks for just such a moment. Yet how to prepare for the sight of his lopsided face bearing down on her all at once? While his thick arm coiled round her back? She had managed till his mouth was right up to hers, then botched it, shying and bolting like a stupid horse missing a jump. It would be different once they were married, she assured him. Once she was used to the whole idea of physical intimacy. (Which was not the problem, of course, for she had swum in physical intimacy for an entire Atlantic Ocean crossing.) In any event, he was quite tolerant, most patient. Of course. He would wait, he said.

In truth, though, her bungle worried her more than she wished to admit. As to the prince's looks, she truly believed she would get used to them. But for one split second there in the carriage, as her future husband tried to kiss her, a far larger deterrent materialized than merely his looks.

Her pasha had loomed up quite suddenly, in smell and feel and substance somehow, and she had felt…

odd, confused.

Unfaithful
was the word. It had seemed a kind of betrayal, she supposed, of what she had had with him for another man to take hold of her so familiarly. It had seemed strange to see a man's face up against hers. Never mind what his face looked like; it was a face other than the one she imagined as her lover's. She had been angry to find the wrong one there, to breathe a breath that smelled of ripe olives instead of champagne. Her anger had been followed swiftly by a sense of revolt. Only God knew where exactly this feeling came from, whether from watching the prince's sightless eye squint in momentary offense, then turn away in timid retreat (oh, how unlike the forward, confident man she was used to). Or perhaps his eye didn't matter. Perhaps the most self-assured man in the world, any other than her midnight lover, would have been found lacking. She didn't know. She only knew that she was repelled.

Then embarrassed by her entirely inappropriate response.

She had brought him a glass of brandy after dinner that night, out onto his back lawn where he was sitting dismally all by himself. He was tetchy about his looks, she realized. Oh, wonderful, she thought with a deep, inward groan. His ego had been dented. She tried to apologize, make amends, but he waved these away:
No, don't be silly. We have a lifetime, you know
…

This left the two of them to sit there silently together, the prince generous and mature, Louise feeling like a skittish, selfish shrew. She hated herself and her inability to explain her own behavior satisfactorily or make up for it—and she hated him for leaving her to languish in guilt.

For Louise knew when a man wanted sexual contact with her, the way a bee knows its way unerringly back to the hive. And, mistress or no mistress, it became clear over these two weeks that the prince was not entirely altruistic in his willingness to marry her. She had caught his eye, so to speak. In a very large way. There was something about him, suppressed, restrained, but obvious to her at least: He was just plain itching to get her into bed. Which made her a little annoyed with him. The nerve. She barely knew

him.

Then it made her contrite: No, no, she tried to tell herself, he was reasonable in his thinking. He intended their marriage to be a perfectly normal one. Which of course it had to be, if there were to be children.

Which of course Louise wanted.

She just wasn't sure how to get herself up and into bed with
him
without her stomach pitching. When she thought about this odd, limping fellow lying naked and panting on top of her—Lord, all she could do was cringe. She feared her own disgust. She had to find a way to contain the fact that, when she found herself looking at him, spellbound, her hypnotic stare had more to do with aversion than attraction.

How? She didn't know. And the question itself inevitably collapsed into a longing for her Ocean Charles.

Was this what fidelity felt like? she wondered. Like a kind of tantrum one couldn't stop? A revolt at the thought of any but one and only one lover? How amazing. She had always imagined faithfulness had something to do with curtailing one's own pleasure for the sake of not hurting the feelings of a beloved.

Yet this feeling was nothing of the sort. It was selfish, pigheaded. Like wanting strawberries, tasting only the pleasure in strawberries, and preferring to starve rather than have to choke down an apple while wondering, What on God's earth did this prince, this suspiciously magnanimous resident of Eden, expect of her?

What did Charles expect? Pretty much everything that had happened to date. The bride was shy of him.

Most women were at first. The bride was smart enough, however, to know where her best interests lay.

The wedding took place in a tiny chapel in Grasse. In the end, Louise's parents couldn't stand the idea of not attending their daughter's nuptials, so it was they who sneaked away in a kind of clandestine manner.

The bride and groom merely drove to Charles's house in Grasse, arriving late in the morning, then slipped over to the little church after lunch. Uncle Tino was there. Other than he and the Vandermeers, no one else was in attendance except for a priest and one of Tino's youngest, who served as an altar boy. Isabel Vandermeer sobbed quietly at the back of the chapel as the vows were exchanged. Her husband was stoic. Louise was predictably alert and breathtaking-prettier than pretty in a simple beige dress and a fine feathered hat with net that covered her face.

When Charles lifted this netting and kissed her at the altar—a direct hit of lips with no avoidance—he was beside himself with all that his future promised. Afterward, as a photographer exploded trayfuls of blinding magnesium, Charles smiled till his cheeks hurt. The six of them went to the magistrate's office, where they signed all the civil documents.
Fini
. Monsieur and Madame Charles Harcourt, the Prince and Princess d'Harcourt. Princess Lulu Louise.

His Louise. For better. For worse. Forever.

The sperm whale is found in temperate and tropical waters throughout the world, usually in herds
of about fifteen to twenty
—
though solitary males wander into colder regions
.

Charles Harcourt, Prince d'Harcourt

On the Nature and Uses of Ambergris