Black Silk (10 page)

The carriage jostled heavily as Rosalyn Schild got into it. It was loaded with boxes and trunks. From the outside, Graham closed the door. He watched Rosalyn arrange her skirts, then lean back toward him. Through the open window, she looked down at him.

“I will be much better company,” he said, “in Netham.”

He had intended this remark to be the end of a conversation, not the beginning of one. But Rosalyn raised her hand, fiddling with the pleats of her bonnet. “I’m jealous.” She delivered this non sequitur deadpan. “She’s had your quiet, attentive company every day for a week.”

She was speaking, he knew, of the courtroom girl, the woman who was taking up most of his time. “You could always come with me to court,” he said.

Rosalyn rested an arm, then her chin, on the open window’s edge. “No, thank you.” She left an irresolute pause, then seemed to make a decision: “I don’t like you much lately.”

Graham stared at her. “I don’t know what to say to that. I don’t either, I suppose.” He waited. “I shall miss you. I feel quite friendless at the thought of your going. To continue alone—”

“You’re hardly ever alone.” She pursed her lips. “Too many people.”

“With all the ‘good-natured’ elbows in the ribs? There is nothing like that sensation for feeling alone.”

“You’re too sensitive.”

“You keep saying.”

“Will you miss me really?”

“A solemn oath.”

“I could stay, tell Gerald I’ll be a day or two later.”

“I don’t think that would help.”

“In fact, you’re anxious to get rid of me.”

He made a sniff of protest. “Only when you make such shrewish statements.”

She hesitated. He could feel her looking for his face, which he patently avoided giving her. “I’m being honest,” she said, “despite how tasteless and colonial that is.” She left another pause, then said, “You are relieved to have me going.”

He made a louder protest,
pff,
and rolled his eyes at her. His American mistress was accusing him of being too English, too smooth and sophisticated to appreciate honesty. He mugged a face, wanting to show her this wasn’t true.

He got a weary laugh. “Perhaps not this minute,” she amended, “but in general.”

The carriage leaned abruptly away from him. Her driver had mounted from the other side. Springs and leather squeaked, then rocked back into place. The horses took on an awareness, an agitation.

He heard Rosalyn take a breath. “I’m going to leave Gerald. I’m going to tell him. I have already, haven’t I? Left him, I mean.”

He turned his head sharply. The expression on her face told him she had been waiting, poised to calculate his immediate reaction. He stared at her, not certain what she saw, then shrugged. “Do what pleases you.”

“And what pleases
you
?”

“You do. Just as you are.”

“Married.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I see.”

The carriage rocked once more. Graham stepped toward the driver, yelling at him—a guttural sound, less than a word, but expressive of his exasperation. As he turned back to Rosalyn, he had not quite calmed his voice. “You picked a fine time to tell me this. Can’t you wait to put me on trial till you come back? I had no idea—”

“A blind man could see—”

“Don’t make me justify myself. I’ve had enough of doing that lately.”

“Well, I’ve had too little explanation, justification, whatever you want to call it. I don’t know where I stand with you.”

“I love you.” He said this so aggressively that she started.

Then her eyes narrowed, and she said nothing. She only stared at him.

“Rosalyn, this is hardly the moment—” Hearing how peremptory he sounded, he reached for her, trying to give her a quick kiss good-bye.

But she pulled back. “On your dresser. I left you something. A little gift. Because it amused me, though I hardly think you will enjoy it now.” There was a crisp break, the back-and-forth movement of wheels and prancing horses. “I want you to read it anyway. Out of meanness now, I think.”

“All right.” He tried again for the kiss.

She jerked away into the shadows of the carriage. “You bloody hypocrite.” She was more put out than he could account for.

Her English expletive registered as odd. He had a second to wonder where an upper-class American woman had heard it. “Bloody” was not a word he himself used very much; he used milder ones or stronger ones. Then the carriage wheel at his elbow churned in the stones. He backed
up quickly. The vehicle seemed to wobble under her anger all the way out of sight.

Graham was left frowning in the dust of Rosalyn’s clean exit. The whole conversation seemed to have gone too perfectly her way. It had probably been rehearsed. Women did that. It had probably taken her a dozen practices to get that exit just right. Then he recognized that
he
was the actor. This affair was about to surpass any involvement he had had in recent years. It was becoming significant, and something in him shuddered at the prospect. A part of him had begun to reenact the familiar, unoriginal play:
How to Part Company
. Excuses had begun to occur to him.
I can’t. I’m sorry. Good-bye. Good luck. Break a leg.
Was it only the male of the species, Graham wondered, who was anxious about permanence, responsibility, growing up? Surely not. Then another good reason not to marry Rosalyn Schild occurred to him, though by this time he hardly knew whether to trust his own motives, since it was such an overly suspicious thought: Perhaps Rosalyn wanted to marry him so she could sleep with someone else. (He recalled that Tilney used the word “bloody” all the time.) Part of Rosalyn was happy and didn’t want to be anything but an unfaithful wife.

At home, Graham found three consecutive issues of
Porridge
, a popular weekly, on his dresser. He thumbed through them, unable to understand what more he was supposed to do with them.

It was more by accident that later in the evening, before going to bed, he came across a serialized novel in the magazine—episodes two, three, and four in these issues, by one Yves DuJauc. The French name implied the fiction would be a little racy. Graham began reading. The story was romantic, the sort of thing Rosalyn would like. Then he became slowly, lividly pale. With explicit, obvious allusion,
someone had decided to caricature the worst and most lurid aspects of his life. This was being done in public again, in fiction, in black and white. The hero of the episodes was Wesley Grey, the title,
The Rake of Ronmoor
, the subtitle, “The Villainous Exploits of an Earl’s Depraved Heir.”

A few nights later, Graham and some of his friends gathered at his club. It was a kind of last hurrah before they all, save Graham, left the city for the pleasures of the countryside. Over brandy, several of the men discussed a list.

As the idea unfolded, Graham was expected to be full of gratitude and smug camaraderie. They half joked, half offered to get up six signatures—the legal number required on an affidavit to declare a woman a prostitute and thus un-entitled to paternity compensation. There was something of the battle cry bursting through the men’s calm, though it was unclear whether they were plotting strategy in the sexual or class war. But in either case, even wishing he could be part of their solid front, even liking the brandy-sipping, hushed-voiced comfort of any solidarity, Graham refused to make the girl a whore. If she was so, she would be one in fact, not by fabrication. Such was the clarity of his vision, he told himself. He was not that sort of fellow; these jolly friends were drunk. He could smile it off.

“But it’s a capital idea,” one of them persisted. “Just in case.”

“I appreciate what you are trying to do. But I am defendable.” “Defendable” was the word Tate had used that morning when the judge had set the trial date, June fifteenth.

“A laundress, of all people. Why, if she’s allowed to make
hay of this, there is no telling for any of us. Whether you rogered her or not—”

“I didn’t,” Graham said tightly. “I am going to get a vindication. I deserve it.”

“Ah.” The others chuckled. One of them paraphrased
Hamlet
, “If we all got what we deserved…” He left this unfinished except for a knowing smile and a wiggle of his eyebrows.

Graham’s own smile left his face. He felt highly ethical in ignoring the advice of the list. He was right, and he was coming to understand that he
wanted
the trial. It was his chance to make everyone admit publicly that the seducing, irresponsible side of him had been overdrawn far too much, for far too long.

He wanted a larger vindication than he’d first realized, and he wanted it worse than he’d imagined.
I am an innocent man
, he told himself. It seemed imperative that someone recognize this, so imperative that he braced himself and marched into what he knew would be a harrowing process.

He could almost feel the gears of the legal system engage and begin to grind forward—that one evening’s brave optimism with his friends was the first thing to be ground to bits.

Tate became Graham’s main human contact. The counselor, it seemed, was going to prepare for trial with the same vigor with which he’d tried to prevent it. The next week, he called Graham into his office to coach him through “potentially dangerous questions,” beginning with, “What are the most horrible things you can imagine anyone asking you?”

Tate knew the answer to this one, to Graham’s breathless amazement. How often do you copulate? Do you use any means of “protection”? Have you even been tempted, just once, not to? For the first fifteen minutes of this, Graham could barely see in front of him. His vision kept shifting and
blurring. If Graham protested, the barrister pounded the desk and made fearsome predictions.

“I’m not asking this for my own titillation! The other side is going to be much less delicate. Answer the questions directly, yes or no. Leave me to do the objecting!”

Eventually, Graham was giving up information he’d never dreamed he’d be discussing. Whom he was sleeping with a year ago, their names, and their ages. Whether they would deny it or come forward as hostile, whether they might speak up for him, whether any had been or could be pregnant.

Graham had no idea what his attorney would do with these facts in an open courtroom, but he handed himself over to the mercy of Tate. Or Fate. Or Whim. Or Life or God. Whatever lay beyond Understanding. Graham was confounded to remember Henry that week and his damned philosophical approach to life as he made what Henry would have called “Kierkegaard’s leap of faith.” To survive, all mortals had to trust in someone, something, Henry claimed. Though, unlike his friend Kierkegaard, Henry was not a God-trusting man; he made the leap of faith in himself—as if
he
were God. In any event, for Graham it was an unsettling leap. He didn’t truly trust Tate, or Fate or Life, or even Henry or himself, for that matter.

The day the trial began, he was relieved to be getting on with it. Reality could only be easier to face than all the worst-case practice for it.

“Be upstanding,” a clerk called as he pounded a long staff on the bare wood floor of the courtroom. The judge entered. He was a tall, gaunt man, his copious robe seeming all but empty as it swirled around him. His entrance silenced a noisy gallery of spectators and a bevy of lawyers. The courtroom was packed.

The morning paper had carried the details. It would be an open bench trial, meaning no jury. The presiding magis
trate would make all determinations. This magistrate, looking like God Himself from over the top of the high dais, banged his gavel, and everyone sat.

Graham spotted the girl as people shuffled into their seats. She was awkward, having to reach behind herself to find her chair then balance her way down into it. Any less caution and her belly would have sent her keeling over. Lord God, she was pregnant. Her belly was two or three times the size it had been the day she had climbed onto the billiard table at Freyer’s; she could not have gotten onto a billiard table now. Graham could only stare at her enormous proportions and wonder that mortals could accomplish—and be encumbered by—such monumental feats.

Happily, when the girl began to speak from the witness box, she no longer seemed so much a monument as a naughty, apprehended child. She was nervous. As she spoke, she began to suck on a strand of her hair, pulling this in and out of her mouth between words as she shifted her eyes from the judge to her lawyer. She was measuring her credibility as she went along, engaged in what appeared increasingly to be a poor job of lying. Graham sighed in relief. Her lawyer began to more or less testify for her, sprinkling his questions with such phrases as “a wicked man of superior age, wealth, privilege, and position…” His tone implied that these were other than laudable conditions. “A man who used the power of his class—”

Tate objected. “Did an entire class have its way with this young woman?”

“Oh, no, sir,” the girl volunteered. “It were just one man.”

The courtroom tittered.

“Counselor,” the magistrate told the opposing lawyer, “we mustn’t forget these serious charges are leveled against an individual man.”

“No, sir. And a blackguard of a man he is, if ever there was one.”

“Point taken.” The judge picked up a pen and made a note, as if jotting this down. Point one—earl of Netham, blackguard. This was the same judge, Graham realized, who had referred to him throughout the early hearings as the “Black Earl.”

Tate took exception. “The earl’s
reputation
is bad,” he said, as if the judge hadn’t heard quite right.

“The earl of Netham’s reputation is worlds beyond ‘bad,’ counselor.”

“But a reputation alone cannot make a woman pregnant.”

Spectators crowding at the back of the room laughed.

The judge pounded his gavel. “There will be no provocative tittling here,” he said without a trace of humor. He leaned forward across the dais and spoke to Tate. “A bad reputation, counselor, is usually earned by deeds accomplished by the man himself. Now, are you going to argue with me or with learned opposing counsel?”

Both
, Graham thought,
since the two of you seem to be in such bloody harmony
. But Tate only stood back and tented his fingertips, as if weighing the question like a serious interrogative.

“The point I wish to make,” he said finally, “is that even the worst, most licentious of men cannot produce every baby in town.”

The judge responded with surprise and benevolence. “Ah. Point taken.” He made another note.
Blackguard and villain might not make all babies,
Graham imagined and glared.
Thank you very much, Arnold Tate.

The situation did not improve from there. The girl claimed her current state was the result of a single evening. “Which a man who has had many such evenings,” her counselor was allowed to expand, “might easily forget.”

“But you, my dear,” Tate said on cross-examination, “would remember very specifically. Can you tell us when and where?”

“All Saints’ Day, backstage at the theater. The Royal Surrey.”

From depositions, Graham had known the date. His own memory—and witnesses—put him in the theater district that evening, but at the Prince Regent two blocks away.

“Two blocks.” Tate raised a finger, smiling. “That’s a very long way for a man to impregnate a woman, even for the very virile earl of Netham.”

The back of the courtroom erupted in sniggers. The judge himself seemed to be fighting a thin smile.

Graham began to realize he was not going to celebrate the vindication he’d planned.

A theater doorman was produced who swore he’d seen Graham offer the girl a lift home. “’e says, ‘Eh, girlie, ya’ wants to ’ave a ride in me mighty fine carrich…’” And so it continued. What wasn’t ludicrous was either ugly or personal or scurrilous.

Graham jumped up once to utter an indignant protest. “Of all the stupid—”

The judge’s gavel clamored. “Sit down.”

“If you possibly can,” said opposing counsel.

“Please do,” Tate added wearily.

Someone in the gallery yelled, “Shove the bugger down!”

Graham spun around, ready to leap over benches, ready to take them all on. Two sergeants at arms grabbed him by the shoulders. He would have swung on them, too, if he hadn’t heard an echo in the gallery. “Styoopid.” This word, the pronunciation he’d given it, passed around the back benches like something wonderful to touch, as if he’d thrown them a shred of his clothing or tossed them a piece of his arm. Wonder, fear, and fury blurred into red before Graham’s eyes.

The opposition continued to argue, chiefly from the basis of a character smear. The magistrate listened to the slurs without disallowing so much as one. Graham sat there
seething with anger and self-pity. After a while even Tate stopped objecting, and this seemed to be the worst treachery of all. Graham’s own counsel began to phrase all his arguments in predefined terms, making no attempt to recast Graham as anything but the spoiled, aging lord of money, peerage, privilege, good fortune, and selfish temperament—someone essentially wicked. Neither Tate nor the court saw any irony in this. In fact, Tate’s version of Graham seemed, if anything, more extreme—an uncomfortable, unsympathetic parody of the scenario Graham had never been able to accommodate with any grace. A mockery. Graham was least discomfited when allowed to sit, criminally silent, and watch what he could only take less and less seriously.

By the end of the day, Graham had wrapped himself in what little dignity remained to him and had drawn back from the whole thing. He refused to see himself as the man they were painting, even when they occasionally did so with events and circumstances that were true and familiar to him as part of his own life.

The next morning, it seemed that nature herself was conspiring against him. In the intervening night, the girl had gone into early labor. By ten that morning, she still hadn’t given birth. The other side asked for and was granted a week’s recess.

Graham had ridden to the Royal Courts of Justice in a state of bristling rebellion. Now he rode home enveloped in gloom. He thought of the girl struggling, trying to give birth, then these thoughts turned selfishly, peevishly back toward himself. As he walked in his own side door, he was overtaken by a sense of exhaustion.

Waiting for him in the morning’s post was the last of Rosalyn’s letters. He shoved it aside, holding a vague grudge against her for simply not being here. In her absence, something seemed to be going wrong.

He didn’t want his mail, didn’t want to eat, didn’t want to deal with servants. He wanted to go somewhere and just lie still. As the morning wore on into afternoon, this mood bore down on him until he sat in a dark corner of his study feeling heavy and sluggish, as if something inside him couldn’t get air—as if his spirit itself were suffocating. He realized Rosalyn had somehow been carrying him, sharing with him her blasts of oxygenated energy and good temper.

And without her or the structure of the trial, the feeling only got worse: Moving through the next few days was like moving underwater.

Just getting up in the morning took incredible effort. Graham found himself dragging from bed to breakfast to teatime to dinner, trudging around chairs with sheets thrown over them, around cabinets being emptied of their finery. The last of the belongings he’d need at Netham were being crated and trunked and taken away. His servants were doing their level best to pack around him. His house was strewn with boxes.

“What’s in that?” On the third afternoon, Graham stopped a servant carrying a pasteboard box from his bedroom.

He made the man put the carton down and open it. It was full of shoes. Beige ankle boots with dark toe caps. Evening shoes of black patent leather. Graham picked up a pair of grey felt spats, handling them, trying to remember when he’d last worn them. Frowning, he threw them back in.

“No, go ahead. Take them.” But he prowled back into the bedroom, looking for more boxes.

In his dressing room, his valet was carefully going through his drawers.

On seeing Graham, he stopped. “May I do something for you, sir?”

“Yes, let me.” He pushed the man aside.

“This, these, and these,” Graham said as he handed him an unopened box of handkerchiefs, a pair of cuff buttons someone had given him, and a set of silver studs he’d never worn. “These shirts just came from the tailor. They may as well go, too.”

With a puzzled look, the man dumped the lot into a large empty trunk in the center of the floor.

“And these.” Graham handed him a fistful of neckcloths. “And these can go.” A handful of collar stays. Graham felt a surge of initiative.