Bitter Eden (11 page)

"Oh, Peter—it's so late, and I've waited for you so long. You're not going to check the fields tonight, are you? Let them go this once." She pouted as he told her how necessary his nightly overseeing was; she smiled in resignation as she heard his familiar words. Her eyes sought Albert's.

As always Frank said he would join Peter. He kissed Anna on the cheek and sent her upstairs. Frank would do only as he said. He would look over the fields and return promptly to his wife's side. Rosalind knew Peter would go on, riding off into the night, not to return for several hours. She watched with detached interest as the two men put on their coats.

"Coming with us, Albert?" Peter asked. It was a taunt.

"Not tonight, old man. As you hoped your talk has worn me out I am going home and to bed, as I would advise you to do. One of these nights I'm going to catch you at your rabble-rousing, and there won't be any more jokes."

"Good night then, Albert Have a care on your way. Never know what you might run into."

James had already started up the stairs. "Will you be waiting for Peter, Rosalind?" he asked. "He may be a while."

"Then I shall wait-for a while."

When James's bedroom door closed, and Peter and Frank had left, Rosalind swung around on Albert. "You knew I would be waiting for you. Sometimes I think you deliberately prolong these conversations. You like to see me wait." She pouted. His hands encircled her waist.

He looked down at her, an amused expression on

his face. "Well now, Miss Rosalind, the next time the evening drags I shall excuse myself. 'A thousand pardons, Peter, old man, but I must break up this happy meeting so that I can go make love to your wife.' *

Rosalind laughed and leaned against him. "Can you think what his face would look like if you said that?"

"Not so well as I can imagine what mine would look like when he finished with me/'

Rosalind forced the merriment on longer and laughed harder. She liked to laugh with Albert. It always seemed in retrospect that when they laughed together the evening had so much more meaning.

Albert placed his hand over her mouth. "Shhh! You'll have James hobbling down the stairs to see what's going on."

She couldn't force the laugh out anymore. "Why is it that you would care more than I if James did find out? That's a curious thing, don't you think?"

He kissed the tip of her nose, indulgent and determinedly gentle. "Not at all. I have far more sense than you, dear one, and what's more I look to consequences that would never enter your pretty head."

"Natalie?"

"For one."

"Do you know how it makes me feel when I know Natalie is always lurking somewhere inside your head when you are with me? You kiss me and still she is there. She is some sort of untouchable little princess, while I am nothing."

"I am going to marry her. We won't change or be changed by that. It is something that exists. That's all."

"That's all! How you lie!"

"Do I? How willing are you to have Peter walk through the door now and see us?"

"He wont. Peter isn't going to find out anything.

He doesn't look for anything." She shrugged. "Anyway he's all agog over that simpering Callie. I hate her!"

"How venomous." He grasped her clenching hands, holding them until the jealous anger in her eyes cooled. "Calm down—remember it's Peter who's infatuated, not I." He really didn't like her when she was like this. She was put out over her long wait, discontent with things he didn't understand or want to understand. He looked down at her; the self-centered look of having been wronged was firmly etched on her mouth.

"You should have married me," she said. "We'd be happy now, and not having to be snatching moments in corners. And you would have done it if you ever truly loved me."

"But I did—and I do! It wasn't a lack of love that held me back. Be reasonable. You know there was nothing I could do."

"You could have married me. You could have defied your mother. You just didn't care. You know she wouldn't have really disinherited you. You're her only son. The truth is that you never did love me. Why don't you admit it?"

He felt cramped, hemmed in by her accusing tone. He wanted to leave her as he had so often wanted to leave the sound of his mother's harping voice. But he smiled reassuringly, caressing her neck and shoulders with his fingertips. "You're a witch, Rosalind. Why do you put me through this? You know I love you. Why else would I be here every day? Why would I risk Peter finding me and blowing the brains right out my head? Only because I love you."

"Make me believe you, Albert."

He pulled her close, caressing her and kissing her repeatedly, more warmly each time to prove that he meant it And he did in a way. "You know what you

do to me. Meet me tomorrow at the cottage. Say you will."

"Maybe. I can t just leave whenever I please, Albert. What shall I say I am doing? It is a little cold for a long walk."

"Say you're going shopping. Say you have to see a dressmaker. I don't know what you should say—think of something. You can if you want. Be there, Rosalind. We'll have the whole afternoon, sweetheart. Think of it—no moments in corners—the whole afternoon." He buried his face in her shoulder. "Say yes. Say you'll come. I can't stand being without you. You know that. I need you."

"I'll be there," she whispered breathlessly. "I always come, don't I? You've only to beckon and I follow. Oh, Albert, I am a fool. I should make you suffer as you have made me."

"I have ... I have. Every time I think of you with Peter . . . oh, God, I hate to think of his hands touching you . . . knowing what I know . . . wondering if you ... I dream about it, am tormented by it. But we can make it up to each other, can't we? Tomorrow? Tomorrow there'll only be us."

At a sound in the upper hall, Albert glanced toward the staircase, momentarily frozen, expecting to see James—or worse, Natalie standing there viewing his guilty love. "I must leave. Frank is sure to be coming in soon. Till tomorrow, my love. Till tomorrow." He kissed her hard and hungrily, then forced himself to draw away from her warm, inviting body.

Rosalind watched from the window as he mounted his horse; then she turned down the lamps, leaving one to light the way for Frank and Peter. She went to her bedroom determined to be asleep when Peter came in. Peter could do nothing but make cow-eyes at Callie, and she hated him for it, and Albert had some-

how managed to leave her feeling used and dirty, a tavern girl once more.

"Well, what's wrong with being a tavern girl? It was good enough to make you look twice, Mr. Foxe," she fumed as she fished through a pile of rumpled bedclothes for her robe. Her activity made her feel warmer but no calmer, for she knew there was nothing wrong with being a tavern girl.

It was being Rufus Hawkes's daughter that was wrong; it was marrying the wrong man to keep a worse fate from befalling her. She was guilty of both.

She had been born Rufus Hawkes's daughter and couldn't help that, but she had been coldly calculating when she had married Peter Berean without loving him. Had she not, she would have ended up the wife of one of the men who frequented her father's tavern. She had sought any means of escape.

She was very young when she had learned that the men who gathered in her father's tavern weren't nice. At thirteen she had been embarrassed and humiliated when they had smashed their wet, liquor-soaked mouths against her still virginal lips. She had been terrified as they forced their soot-stained hands down the front of her bodice, pinching and hurting her, their hard fingers and dirty nails digging deep into the soft dark tips of her breasts. And she had felt defiled the first time one of those dirty hands found its way up inside her full skirts to the tender moist parts of her that her mother had said were for privacy and love. But Rosalind, through her tears and the ragged remains of her female pride, could look at these men with their yellowed teeth showing like dog fangs and know that though they had done evil things to her, she herself was clean and good. She was only the victim, sharing in no way their lust and hatred—until one

night after the tavern closed, and Rufus came to her room.

Rosalind had started at his entrance, quickly grabbing her discarded petticoat and pressing it against her naked breasts. Rufus laughed softly, proudly. He took the petticoat from her. Without lust, his hands fondled her, not so roughly as the filthy tavern patrons', but thoroughly, with the prodding curiosity of an entrepreneur evaluating the quality of his goods. Rufus pinched and teased her nipples to hardness, then studied his daughter's face for signs of response. Satisfied, he smiled and ran his hand through her hair as he had when she was small and believed a father's love must always be kind.

"Ye're a witch born, Rosie—the devil's own. Ye'll make us a merry music with ye're band o' creakin' bedsprings and the clinkin' o' change in me till."

Rosalind had cried herself to sleep that night and many thereafter. Nightmare chasing nightmare banished her purity. The men had done dirty things to her, but she wasn't dirtied inside. Her father, however, had made her suspect that the clean soul she had been taught to nurture in church was merely a stone on which the devil had not yet carved his story. But he had begun. Rosalind couldn't forget the hot watery feeling her father's hands on her body had produced deep inside her. Nor could she forget lying that night in her bed restless and confused and wanting. Then she felt the ultimate shame when she reached beneath the sheet with her own hand to complete what her father had begun. Rosalind never again felt pure or whole or worthy. She lived with an insatiable hunger for release from the demons of doubt and desire and longing.

Her easiest outlet was her imagination. She saw beautifully coiffed women in splendid gowns riding

Bitter Eden HI

through town in their elegant carriages. They lived in a fairy-tale world of courtesies and gallant men who adored them. Enviously Rosalind watched these women until each of them bore her own features. With all her being Rosalind longed to be a lady. She knew deep in her heart that had fate not chosen her as a devil's child, she might have been the most glamorous, most sought after of all those enchanted ladies. Her childlike dreaming led her to her second hard lesson.

Occasionally, by mistake, ignorance, or misdirection, a nicer sort of man found himself in Hawkes's Tavern. Rosalind sensed these men liked her, that some even desired her. Bravely, and with all her dreams of grandeur her only armor, she gave them what they wanted. Rufus smiled. The bedsprings creaked, and the cashbox rang. The devil's music played.

But Rosalind's hopes and dreams withered. She was someone the "nice" men wanted to fondle. Someone they wanted to bed discreetly. But no more. Even when a man thought he loved her and was willing to marry her, as Albert Foxe had been, the families of these "nice" men were not willing to allow it. No, girls like Rosalind were to be used for young men to sow their wild oats, providing, of course, the girl was "clean and of good nature," as the saying went.

Her first few lessons in this attitude were devastating. But she hardened and learned to recognize when she had the advantage and when she did not. Her dream was tarnished, but she held on to it. She could no longer enter Albert's world as the innocent she might have, but Rosalind was now equipped to enter it shrewdly and calculatingly and desperately.

She remembered clearly her one and only conversation with Albert's mother.

"The difficulty with you, Rosalind, fortunately is not characteristic of your class. You've no idea of your place. What you aspire to, by enticing my son, is a way of life for which you have no talent nor comprehension of its meaning or ways. You'll not marry my son, and you will see that it is to your benefit as well as his.

"Though you do not realize it, I am doing you a service by forbidding this marriage. You would not be happy. You'd not fit in, nor would you be able to entertain or mingle with the sort of people with whom Albert will spend his life. Find yourself a suitable man and end these yearnings after a station for which you are so totally unsuited." Mrs. Foxe had dabbed a lacy, perfumed handkerchief under her nose. Ostentatiously she had straightened her already straight back, as though rising above the atmosphere she found herself in. Her tailored mauve silk afternoon gown rustled richly at her every move. The woman's skin was •milky white, her hair freshly and expertly coiffed.

Rosalind had stared at her, unwittingly rude. It was difficult to acknowledge that this woman was real. She seemed more like a character from a story book, come to life to sit and talk to Rosalind. It was several seconds before the meaning of Mrs. Foxe's words had penetrated Rosalind's consciousness, and when they did she had felt belittled. Her coarse wool dress—that fit too tightly across her bosom and pinched her already tiny waist so tightly she'd have red marks on her skin when she removed it—seemed to grow tighter and tighter, more and more obviously a garment designed to incite men's lusts. Unable to defend herself with language to match Mrs. Foxe's, and not ever thinking that she might use her father's ruthless abuse of her to gain sympathy, Rosalind had reacted in the only way she knew to defend herself against the truth.

She became hostile, her resentment coated by a sweet coyness in her speech.

"What if Albert disa'grees with you, Mrs. Foxe? Suppose he sees me as suitable? Suppose he'd like his friends to see me at his table? I am not so bad to look at, you know. Suppose Albert defies you?"

"He won't," Mrs. Foxe had said with firm resolution. Her face wore an unyielding expression of self-assurance.

Rosalind's hurt had flared into hot anger. "You're so bloody sure of yourself! You don't know everything about Albert! I could tell you a thing or two!"

Mrs. Foxe's head had gone back, retreating in disgust as she looked at Rosalind through lowered lids. The lacy handkerchief slowly wafted scent as she moved it under her aristocratic nose. "I am sure you could, but it wouldn't be worth hearing, nor would it be anything the downstairs maid couldn't tell me. Let me ask you about some of the things that do count. When did you last dine out with Albert? When did you last go to the theater? What was the last party you attended together? Have you ever received so much as one invitation to any of the better houses in the parish ... or even in London? Shall I answer for you? Shall I tell you of the invitations Albert has received, or the parties he has attended and with whom? No, I shouldn't wish to humiliate you. You see, Rosalind, you are the love of Albert's life—behind doors. That is all it is now, and all it ever could be."