Beast (30 page)

Louise's parents parted from their newly married daughter in a flurry of emotion, hugging her. then patting her, then hugging her again. When Charles bent and kissed them both on the cheeks, calling them Mother and Father (it seemed a little ludicrous, but it was what they asked for), "Mother" burst into tears again, the tenor of her crying joyous, yet somehow also sad to Charles's way of thinking. As if she and her daughter would be separated for a long time, when in fact they would be reunited five days hence in Nice.

The Vandermeers had taken a house not far from Charles's own in Nice. They went off in that direction.

Uncle Tino and his son departed just down the street; they lived in Grasse. Charles and his new bride were left standing in the town square, before the cafe where they had all toasted the bride and groom for an hour.

"Are you all right?" he asked when Louise stared off in the direction of her parents' carriage for a full minute after it disappeared.

She jumped slightly, then glanced at him. "Yes. Certainly."

"Would you like to walk for a while? There is a little daylight left."

The square in which they stood was fronted by a pretty, shady street, wider than most and dotted with gray-green aromatic hedges, rosemary, that gave off a lush scent when one crushed their spiky leaves. At the end of this street—what would have been a fragrant meander through a residential neighborhood—was a view between butter-yellow houses and over rose-colored rooftops to a surprising glimpse of the cobalt blue Mediterranean, twenty kilometers away.

Louise didn't seem much interested or aware of anything around her. though. She seemed dazed or perhaps tired.

He asked, "Would you prefer to go home?"

Her eyes met his again, as if startled to hear the word
home
used in this context. She stared at him a moment. He could never figure out just what she was thinking when she did this. She looked at him directly, then looked away, her eyes acquiring a kind of wistful lack of focus.

She said finally, distractedly, "Yes, I should prefer to go back to the house, if you wouldn't mind." This, in her perfect, formal French, which was becoming, to Charles's mind, a palpable obstacle between him and the young woman he had just made his wife.

In public. Louise carried off the high elegance of her brand of the language as if born to it, with all the grace of a
grande duchesse
. French jaws dropped when Louise spoke. Charles himself could not help but stare and blush and puff at the posh clarity in each sentence she uttered. In private, however, this same manner of speech—her inability in fact to speak any other way—chilled the very air that fueled his lungs. His brain frosted. Every warm overture Charles made had to proceed against a blizzard of politeness and protocol. Trying to speak with her in a friendly manner while, say, the two of them rode along in a carriage or. God forbid, as he tried to court her under the olive trees, left him feeling like some long-ago, foolish footman trying to have a chummy conversation with the queen.

English, of course, was out of the question. He had attempted to teach her some crude French. She had been bewildered then serenely appalled, shaking him off rather as she would her puppy, should the little fellow stand on his hind legs and latch on in an unseemly manner to her knee. Charles had tried several other approaches to narrow the emotional distance between them, from offering confidences of his own (of youthful pranks when he was only a year younger than she, pranks at which she smiled sweetly yet he somehow thought she found childish) to joining her when she played with her dog, hoping to get her Bear to break the ice for him. something that had worked so well in the ship's kennels.

As a result, Charles and the dog were getting along nicely. The dog adored him. Louise, on the other hand, hardly seemed to know Charles was alive.

He knew he was stumbling with her, their exchanges always stilted or else filled with awkward silence.

He suspected he was coming across as inept and self-conscious. Yet he believed he would catch his stride eventually. If she would only give him half a chance, half a pleasant response—of which he knew her to be more than capable. He kept trying.

Charles escorted her across the square to their carriage, then helped her in.

Once inside, he opened all the curtains, partly because it was a fine afternoon, partly out of qualms for dark places, for possible detection in this charade he'd become determined to carry out. Anything was better than this high-toned creature realizing he'd played her for a fool all the way across an ocean. So he settled back. He watched dusk flit over her vague expression as they circled the square, then jostled up the hillside in the direction of their house in Grasse.

The house was simple. It was not a primary residence, but merely a place to live when Charles was working in his laboratory or overseeing his factory. Grasse was the figurative capital of perfume manufacture in France (and thus the world, he might have argued); it was home to his perfume enterprise, both his and his French competitors. Though there was nothing uncomfortable about his house here, it had simply never been the object of much attention. It was in fact quite lovely, though, in the way of old things that had been lovely and functional for a hundred years. It was unimposing. There was no room for entertaining, barely room for a tea in the afternoon, should Louise choose to invite some ladies from the town. And tonight it would be particularly quiet, since he had sent every servant, save the kitchen staff, off, so the newlyweds could be alone.

For here was Charles's next attempt: a private, elaborate dinner out on the terrace overlooking the descending countryside with the sea in the distance. A gift of black pearls for the bride. He knew she was fond of them; he knew hers were broken. Wine. Local delicacies. Charming talk. She would surely
have
to say something personal if they were sitting alone across from each other for several hours. There was wine with dinner and peach brandy for afterward. He would loosen her up with alcohol if need be; all was fair in love et cetera, he thought. Anything to get beyond this damned Society Louise from New York, with her courtly French that abetted the highest, most impregnable wall of reserve Charles had ever encountered. Then up to bed. where he would suavely make love to her in all the ways he knew she liked, which happened also to be the means of his own entrance into paradise. He had far too sharp a recollection of Louise naked, Louise warm and liquid beneath him. Just thinking about tonight made his mouth dry. his eyes hot.

While it also made him ever so slightly anxious.

He'd made a mess of Charles Harcourt's first attempt to kiss the lovely Louise in the olive grove, coming at her apparently out of the blue. That's what he told himself. The surprise of his advance had taken her unaware; she hadn't been expecting it. Or perhaps he'd been clumsy; he certainly wasn't himself these days in the face of her royal deportment and speech. Whatever the reason, if he hadn't caught her arm, she'd have fallen out of the carriage as a result of her backward leap away from him.

He intended to be much more deliberate tonight.

At the front door to the house, she walked in ahead of him. He closed the door. By the time he had turned around, she was across the vestibule and halfway up the staircase.

"Where are you going?" he called.

"To dress for dinner."

He blinked. She meant tiaras and tails. Her family, as good-hearted as its members were, was full of mannered behavior he found pretentious. "I thought we might be a little less formal," he suggested.

She looked down at him over the stairwell balustrade. "We always dress for dinner. I
always
have."

"You look lovely as you are."

"It's a day dress," she said as if he were blind in both eyes.

Charles made a pull of his mouth, depositing his cane in the umbrella stand by the door—perhaps he shouldn't have, but he wanted the damn thing out of sight tonight, this emblem of his affliction. He hung his hat, then limped as gamely as possibly to the foot of the stairs, where, flustered but determined, he confessed, "You are going to have trouble dressing for dinner, Madame." Madame. No, he should have used her name. Yet he went on quickly, "I sent your maid away."

"You did what?" From the middle of the staircase, she turned around then took a step down.

He found himself stepping back. "I sent all the servants away except the kitchen help, who will leave immediately after dessert. I want to be alone with you."

This was apparently a very un-suave admission. Her face in the shadows of the upstairs soffit looked as if he had just said,
I want to stick my head under your skirt
. She paled slightly and pressed her lips together. As she came back down the stairs, her heavy-lidded eyes passed a single glance at him—a stunning gaze in every sense. He was rooted to the spot by the beauty of these eyes, the dark, limpid blue of them, like deep water off the North Pole, as sparkling and bright—and as chilly and distant—as melting ice under an arctic sun.

Her eyes looked briefly at him then right past him as she walked by. She said, "Well, what is done is done. Hereafter, I would like to dress for dinner, if you do not mind."

Actually he was beginning to mind her dismissive manner, and the hash he continually made of trying to get around it, a great deal. Cool, snotty witch; gorgeous brat.

She marched over to the mirror that hung above the entry-room sideboard, ignoring his edgy silence. In front of the mirror, she raised her arms and reached back, her hands trying to find the hat pin in among the plumes at her crown. Charles came up behind her, watching her both in the flesh and in the mirror, front and back, almost three hundred sixty degrees of Louise. He found the hat pin for her. She jumped when he moved her fingers to it, then she latched hold of the pin.

Her smallest movement captivated… her posture, her slim arms, elbows in the air as she withdrew the pin, then lifted netting, beige felt, and a concoction of white ostrich feathers backward off her neat hair, twisting, shaking her head slightly in a gesture as graceful as any prima ballerina. Charles couldn't resist reaching out, touching her where the bodice of her dress clung snugly to her ribs—

Louise bent immediately and automatically, so that his fingers barely grazed the taffeta of her dress. She curved away from his hand. "Charles. Please. I'm trying to put the pin through my hat. You'll make me stick myself."

"Sorry." he murmured.

He apologized. He stood there listening to himself. He'd just apologized for touching his own wife, his bride of two hours, a woman he had not touched or kissed in two long weeks, except today at the end of a wedding mass. He had to be insane.

She had to be a sadist. She could be making this so much easier for him.

By the time they actually moved out onto the terrace, Charles was up in arms, furious with himself, aggravated with Louise.

The table on the small balcony beyond the dining room was just large enough for two: two potted palms at the side, two chairs in the center at a table with two candles and a shallow bowl that held two floating roses; two china plates on top of two larger ones, two sets of sterling, and half a dozen wine glasses, in pairs of varying sizes, for aperitif, dinner, and after. On top of the china plates sat small bowls of caviar in ice surrounded by round little toasts browned and yellowed with saffron. Charles held Louise's chair.

She sat. "Oh, this is lovely," she said, almost grudgingly. Her head swiveled. She stared around her, then smiled up at him, one long, glowing look of surprise and pleasure. She added, "Really lovely."

He settled opposite her, instantly more content.

She dove in demurely, mounding dark gray caviar onto a toast, then closing her lips over it. crunching.

She sighed and giggled with delight (perhaps just a little too enthusiastically—she was as nervous as he was, he decided, which was only natural and somewhat reassuring). "Ooh, beluga. My favorite," she said.

It would be, of course. It was expensive.

She added, "From the Caspian."

Trust her to know the specific geography of the taste. The most difficult to come by. It didn't matter.

Charles smiled and stared at this wonder child of eighteen with the sophistication of a rich woman of forty.

In the candlelight, she looked ageless. Simply, ethereally as beautiful as an archangel. Charles ploughed some caviar onto a toast, then ended up handing it to her (with a mouth-watering brush of fingers). He couldn't eat. He wasn't even vaguely interested in food. Every slight from earlier, imagined and otherwise, he forgave in a blink. All he wanted to do was feast on the sight of her… the sound of her… the odor that was particularly Louise, mingling with the ambiance of his own back garden and an evening delicately gilded in scent… a whiff of herbs growing wild nearby… the immediacy of cultivated roses growing just beyond the terrace… Louise, like some species of flower all her own, tenacious and spiky like a weed, as sweet and heady as a mythic lotus.

"It's so nice here." she commented.

"Yes." If one looked over the terrace balcony, one would find a sunken garden that began with a small fountain, then became a long, tunneling arbor of climbing roses between parallel rows of cypress, leading the eye to rooftops and a hillside that descended all the way to the coast far, far in the distance.

With the invisible sun setting at the side of the house, this garden, fading into long slanting shadows, was picturesque, to say the least. Charles's favorite view from this house. Or he had thought so, at least, until he had sat across from Louise. He failed to look at it tonight; he failed even to point it out. He just sat there staring, smiling the faint, smug smile of a man who had everything he wanted sitting before him.

The woman across from him, on the other hand, felt like a creature coming to consciousness in a stew pot stirred by a cannibal: all but devoured. As if she were more a course of the meal than the soup that came next. The prince stared; he'd stared all day. He touched her in grazes and grasps of the elbow. He cornered her. Louise read clearly that she was sitting across from a man who had big honeymoon plans, the salaciousness of them written all over his ghastly face.