Black Silk (20 page)

The twin babies. She was amazed to realize he had visited the babies at the hospital.

He drew another breath, letting it out quietly as he smoothed his vest and buttoned the middle button of his coat. “That’s all. I just wanted to tell someone—someone else who might mind. Well.” He looked around for several seconds. “I think I left my hat inside.”

Submit, with all the discomposure of reversed, contradictory feelings, watched the back of him disappear into the stone parlor.

In the common room, she found him putting his tangle of watches into the pocket of his coat. She didn’t know what else to say except, “I’m sorry.”

He looked at her. “It’s not exactly bad news, is it? At least, I think that’s what I’m supposed to feel: One less little bastard to impose on my charity.” He pocketed the rings as well, then added as if she still might not believe it, “They really aren’t mine.”

“I know.” She didn’t doubt him; his simple statement had the weight of pure fact. That was the strangest thing about him. He was honest. From the first moment with the horrid pictures to his last word on Henry, he let her know what he thought.

“And the other one?” she asked.

“He’s fine.” He looked at her with an ambivalent frown. “I can take him home next week, they think.”

She could hardly believe what she heard. “You’re taking him home?”

“I suppose I am. When the other one died, I just went over to the district court and signed the papers. It felt right.”

“Why? Why in the world would you take him home?”

He made another huge sigh. “Well, for one, I’m sick to death of going to court, and court seems to be the only way I can legally be rid of him.” Then he dismissed this explanation with a shrug. “Who knows why I’m doing it? God knows I don’t.”

For almost a full minute, they stood staring at each other, then Submit lowered her eyes from the gaze of a man who did things without knowing why.

He murmured finally, “You remind me so much of Henry.” He paused as if debating this change of topic, then continued. “Do you know how many houses I lived in between the ages of six and eleven? Nine. Nobody knew what to do with me when my parents died. I lived with my nanny at her sister’s for a while, then moved in with my estate agent’s family on the perimeter of my own property. I could see the house. I lived with a neighbor, a friend’s parents, a governess the court appointed temporarily who stripped the house of its silver, then the sister of my mother’s aunt. I can’t remember the rest.” Again he left a pause. “And, lately, I can’t forget the last person I lived with as a child.” He laughed. “Henry was by far the worst—I got along better with the governess who stole silver.” He picked up his hat casually, as if to make light of what he said next. “So how much bother can one sickly little baby be? I’ll stick him upstairs in the old nursery and hire a gaggle of attendants. I’ll hardly see him. It’s much cheaper than my arrangement with his mother, and he might be the better for it.”

Well, Submit thought. What a confusing and circuitous brand of compassion he possessed, and for a baby who wasn’t his, whose mother had sued him, clipped him for a good bit of money, then jumped out a window. She opened her mouth, thinking she could find words that would sort all this out and make logical sense.

Then he summed it up better than any logic could have. “What an unspeakable mess life can be,” he said.

On his way to the door, he ran his hand along the flat of the counter, his finger up the curve of a vase. He ran his hands up and down the leather spines of the books on a shelf by the counter. Then he set his top hat on his head, quite naturally at an angle that dipped down over one brow, at what could have been called a rakish slant.

“Well, I’m sorry,” he said, “for being such a bother.” He made a faint laugh. “All the way around.” At the door, he asked, “May I visit you Friday? The end of this week?”

“No—”

He went utterly still. Beneath the broad felt brim, his eyes went flat.

“I have to be in court,” she explained.

His shoulders relaxed. “Lord, I thought you were telling me not to come back.”

“No.” Submit frowned. “Come next week. I mean, if you can. I’ll be here most days after ten. I walk to the village in the morning.” She found herself smiling at him, a little sheepishly. “I buy myself a sweet bun.”

He stopped by briefly on Monday evening and again in the afternoon of the Thursday after that. Then on the Tuesday following, he showed up at eight in the morning with a dozen sweet buns, six oranges, and a bottle of champagne—all of which he described as his version of breakfast.

He had spent the weekend in London hiring a wet nurse and making arrangements for his surviving little ward. He was “on a dash” to Netham and could only stay an hour.

He stayed two.

“Champagne for breakfast?” She remembered the whiskey from the week or so before. The earl of Netham’s reputation included, she knew, occasional drunkenness.

He was about to pollute the juice from the oranges with
the wine. She put her hand over her glass. They were sitting out on the stone-floored terrace. The sun was shining. Birds twittered overhead from a nest of swallows somewhere in the eave of the roof behind them.

“To summer.” He held up his glass. She toasted with her orange juice. It tasted acrid and sour after the sweet roll. She thought, for some reason, of the clever, ambitious boys of Cambridge celebrating May Week, the last time she’d known champagne to flow where it possibly should not. She realized that though Graham Wessit may not have been the scholarly model of a Cambridge student, he had probably fit in rather well with his gregarious charm and outlandish exploits.

“Were you a good student at Cambridge?” she asked.

He poured champagne into his own juice and shrugged.

“Which college did you attend?”

He slid his eyes toward her sarcastically. “Which else?”

“Really? St. John’s?” Submit put her glass down. Henry’s revered institution, along with King’s and Trinity, was one of the three biggest, richest of the twenty-six colleges that made up the University of Cambridge. These were well-off, landed schools that didn’t favor old men by taking in their wards and sons. “What did you read?”

He made a facetious smile and took a long draft of champagne direct from the bottle, apparently dispensing with his orange juice entirely. “L.M.B.C.”

Lady Margaret’s Boat Club. It was an athletic club, the only boat club to lambaste the Other University regularly. Yes, she could well see the natty Netham with his champagne and scarlet blazer, racing on water, carrying on on land.

“What did you
really
read?”

“I told you before, humility.”

“You’re evading.” She teased him with a sidelong smile. “I won’t think less of you for having a serious scholarly in
terest.” She realized she wanted him to have a hidden intellectual side. The actor, the exquisite, she had weeks ago discovered, was really quite bright, though no one seemed to notice. And no one, not even he, seemed to care. His intelligence was not the first trait he chose to bring forward. Still, he’d been raised by Henry. He almost had to have a predilection, she thought, for a science or modern languages or the classics.

He settled back into his chair, leaning on its arm, setting his jaw into his hand, one pensive finger up the side of his cheek. There was a trace of the actor in this; the handsome man who could strike a pose for effect. Despite herself, she was charmed.

“All right,” he said at length. “Don’t laugh.” She waited. He smiled. “Theology.”

They both laughed. “Theology! Not really.”

“Really.”

“As in wearing a white collar?”

His answer was to raise his glass and toast himself with a little poem:

“The Reverend Pimlico Poole was a saint
Who averted from sinners their doom,
By confessing the ladies until they felt faint,
All alone in a little, dark room.”

Submit laughed, despite the flush that rose in her face. The earl of Netham was too unabashedly bawdy; she enjoyed it too much. And his frank manner did something else. It encouraged her tongue to say what she should hardly have thought: “You would have certainly brought the ladies into the confessional, one way or another.”

They laughed, enjoying together the blasphemous notion for a moment. Then he said, “You have the nicest smile.”

Involuntarily, her hand went to her mouth. “My teeth are crooked.” She didn’t know where to look.

“Yes, I think that’s one of the things I like.” He went on, as if there were no reason for discomfort, “When I was seventeen, I was very serious about serving the Church.” He flashed a perfect, very unclerical smile. “I believed fervently in God, in people, and in the high theater of the Latin mass.”

“Not to mention actresses,” she offered cautiously, “and art.”

He laughed at that. “Oh, I never thought to be a celibate monk or even a preaching Anglican, but rather a discreet single cleric until a wife came along. I fancied becoming a canon or prebendary attached to a grand cathedral somewhere that would stand as huge witness to my good, Godly intent.” He began to play with a fork they had used to spear buns, rolling the instrument on end by its tines. “I wasn’t completely insincere, I suppose. But I suspect now that my chief calling was to give old atheistic Henry seizures. Anyway, at the time it seemed right. I was being Good. I knew clerics had to be human, after all, so I didn’t ask too much of myself.” He glanced at her, as if trying to see how much of this she believed, how much he might risk by saying more. He put his finger in the sticky sugar on his plate then put the finger into his mouth. “Youthful delusions.” He laughed. “My scholarship, now that you ask, was impeccable; my spiritual life, however, was a mess—and that, of course, is the substance of the Church. It doesn’t take grand scholarship to have a pure soul. Or vice versa.” He paused. “What did you read?”

“Pardon?”

“At Cambridge. What did you study?”

She was taken aback. “Why, nothing. I was just a distinguished lecturer’s wife.”

He seemed intent on watching her, as she immersed her
self in the dissection of the remains of a pastry on her plate. “You loved it, didn’t you? The academic world. You would have liked to have been part of it.”

“I
was
part of it.” But she knew what he meant. She would have liked to have attended lectures, read in the library, eaten in the dining halls, been privy to the whole. “There were evening discussions and afternoon guests. Henry’s house was a very stimulating environment.”

“Yes. And there you were, sixteen, seventeen, just the age a lot of boys come up to Cambridge. And you were bright—brighter than most of them, am I right?” He gave her no chance to answer. “And married to a man older than most of their grandfathers. Didn’t you just once want to go with them, read their books—”

“I did read their books. Henry brought them to me.”

“I’m surprised one of the boys didn’t bring them to you, once they discovered that was what you wanted.”

She looked down. “This is mean. Why are you doing it?”

“To try and get you to see—”

“I was
happy
with Henry. He gave me more than any callow young man could have given.”

He laughed and stood up. “Don’t bet on it.” He took the bottle by the neck. At the break in the stone wall, he looked back. “Would you like to go for a walk?”

She shook her head no.

As she watched him do her own circuit to the poplars, she wondered about his motives for telling her these things, his motives for coming here at all. She looked toward the handsome, athletic, reckless, fearless, shameless man walking along the greensward, drinking champagne from the bottle at ten in the morning—so much the antithesis of Henry, the embodiment of all Henry wasn’t and could never be.

My God, she thought, there must have been days when Graham Wessit’s merely drawing breath was enough to make Henry weep.

Graham became a regular visitor that July. Sometimes they planned his next visit, sometimes he showed up without warning. In either case, he always talked a great deal, as if he were laying his life out for her inspection. She tried to speak to this, as if she could comment from an objective distance. The inn out in the middle of nowhere became a strangely conducive place for such talks.

Submit was less comfortable when the omniscient inquiry pried into her life. She tried to keep Graham’s curiosity at bay, but he had a way of stopping, leaving long, interested silences that made her want to fill them in with honest, meaningful words. By the end of July, she’d told him of her father, her schooling, her marriage; she’d discussed the death of her mother. The inn at Morrow Fields seemed to be a private world where one could share such things.

Evil villain that he was, the rakehell pursued the young woman into the back stable.

“No!” she told him once, twice, thrice, as he tossed her backward into the straw.

Her skirts flew up, offering a glimpse of white cambric drawers, plump calf, and fine, dainty ankle. It was not until he was trying to lift her linen petticoats trimmed with French broadlace, however, that she rallied the courage to say what needed to be said:

“I will not submit to any man’s unbounded lechery, except for the procreation of legitimate issue.”

Graham threw the rolled magazine across the room. The force of its flight made the crystal pieces in the chandelier sing. “What absolute twaddle!”

The more unwholesome passages of
The Rake of Ronmoor
read like a combination of church dicta and ladies’ garment advertisements. For this, Pease charged an extravagant two shillings a magazine—twenty times the cost of a usual weekly and twice what an episode of the good Mr. Dickens brought. If people wanted a vaguely naughty little story feathered with celebrity innuendo, the publisher was making them pay.

And pay they did. Mr. Pease got his price, for hardly more than titillation, allusion, and social gossip, supposedly made palatable by the moralistic outrage as each misconduct was delineated in scrupulous detail. The numbered episodes of
The Rake of Ronmoor
had become the essence of Pease’s
Porridge
. The magazine contained a few other bits of fiction, a few poems, some sheet music, and some hand-
colored plates of men’s and women’s fashion. But the majority of the little publication’s pages were devoted to serializing Graham, his past, and what people apparently imagined to be his present. In the loose fictional guise of Wesley Grey, Graham’s history conspired with the current taste for a romantic villain people loved to hate once a week.

Graham had hoped that one good outcome of the death of Arabella Stratford would be that
The Rake
would falter, then stop. When it didn’t, Graham reasoned at first that publication might lag a bit behind the actual writing of the things; there would be printing schedules and distribution. When still they continued after two weeks, however, he began to worry the culprit was elsewhere than in the grave. In any event, the implications of the newest numbers, fourteen and fifteen, were positively frightening: The author, M. DuJauc, knew Netham well enough to walk its rooms, shoo its geese, fish its ponds. Graham was suspicious that his tormentor was, or at least had been in one summer or another, part of his hand-selected summer crowd.

“Rosalyn, have you any idea who is doing this?”

Rosalyn smiled, putting the back of her hand to her mouth, possibly to suppress a giggle. “No, dear. Not a clue.” They were in the upstairs parlor that connected to Graham’s rooms. Rosalyn picked up the thrown book and began leafing through the pages.

Graham paced. “Tilney. It’s Tilney, and you know it.”

“Hm?” She wasn’t listening. Absently, after a little delay, she answered, “No, honestly. I know nothing of the kind.”

Graham looked at her speculatively. She had an ear for gossip, could know much more about him than he himself might have told. Yet the rhythm of the pen was English. Despite Rosalyn’s ability to use phrases like “eh, what a fancy” and “by Jove,” he couldn’t imagine her carrying it off for pages and pages. And she spoke no French at all, a must for
The Rake
and anything else one wanted to sound a little risqué.

It might be Tilney, of course. But as much as Peter loved to torment Graham, he seemed still essentially too meek and cowardly to attack with such straightforward gall. Graham even considered Henry briefly, then had to laugh at the very thought of the stuffy old pundit jotting off anything so frothy. More to the point: Henry, like the mother of the twins, was dead, which left Graham with only about two or three dozen more friends to rule out. William couldn’t write a straight sentence. Tate was too busy by half. Graham thought of Submit—less because she was a very good candidate than because she stayed in his mind lately like a huge mystery herself. The more he knew about her, the more he wanted to find out. Whenever he thought of the serial and its carping tone, he thought of her and her quiet mitigating attitude of censure. She held almost the opposite view—the antidote to the fiction’s interpretation of him. Besides, knowing as little as she had of his history, she was of course out of the question. Who, then? Who?

“Look at this, Graham.” Rosalyn turned the book sideways and held it over her head to offer him a view. It was a drawing.

“Jesus Christ,” he breathed out. It was a wood engraving done for the purpose of illustrating the story. Though the artist’s name was different, Graham knew well the imitated style. The august Academician Alfred Pandetti was going to be less than pleased to be mimicked in subject matter as trivial as this. Graham frowned for a moment, thinking the new attack narrowed the field of prospective authors. It was someone who knew about the pictures, knew who the artist was. Then he realized that anyone who was associated with Cambridge at the time that he and Alfred were there might know.

Thus, whoever the person was, he or she was over thirty-five. No,
he.
A man, a man from Cambridge, because the details had been kept from the gentler sex. A Cambridge man, over thirty-five, who had been to Netham enough to know it inside and out.

“I find it offensive,” he told Rosalyn, taking the book away. “It uses mistakes I made a long time ago that are best forgotten—”

She laughed and got up. “Mistakes that are funny. And sometimes very exciting. Don’t take yourself so seriously, Graham.” She turned around, leaning a knee into the seat of the sofa, facing him over its back.

“The mistakes were serious. And this—” He held the thing in his hand, bending it. “I hate the tone, all the shame and temptation of it. Every blessed misenterprise pronounced and moralized upon, like some middle-class—” The mores of the episodes, if one took them seriously, were very middle-class. He thought about this. A middle-class mind—or else a very prim one, much like the current royal manners—was writing these. This only left him more lost. “Rosalyn, how can you possibly not mind these?”

She laughed and leaned toward him. “I can hardly wait for it all to bend around to me. I am dying to see myself in print.”

He sighed in exasperation. “While I’m hoping you’re kept out of it. One more damned mistake—”

They both caught what he’d said at the same time. He looked at her abruptly—just in time to catch a pillow in the face. She’d thrown it at him as she’d backed off the sofa.

“Bloody hell,” she murmured. Refusing to look at him, she straightened her dress.

Anger gave inside Graham. She knew it was an accident; he hadn’t
meant
to say such a thing. He threw the pillow back hard, hitting her in the shoulder. She looked around sharply. “Bloody hell,” she said more emphatically.

Graham narrowed his eyes. “Where do you hear such words?”

“None of your business.”

He should have let it go, but at this point he wanted some conclusion reached, some sort of satisfaction. He grabbed her arm when she tried to turn and leave.

She looked him in the face, resisting just enough that he had to use both hands. When he had her by her shoulders, something softened in her, complying with his force. She went from an angry woman to one who was coquettish and cute, a child who wouldn’t answer. Her eyes became warm, doeish, inviting more roughness, more dominion. He realized she liked it, his mastering her like—like a bullying rake.

Graham let go. He ran one hand back through his hair, then put both hands into the pockets at the bottom of his vest.

Rosalyn liked this stance, too. She laughed, running her hands up her arms with a shiver, her eyes up and down his length. “Tilney,” she said in a throaty voice. “Tilney loves to tell me dirty words.” She was tormenting him. “I dare not even utter the worst.”

Graham turned away from her, not certain where to hide. “And you let him?”

“What? Say dirty words?”

“Say dirty words to
you
.”

She laughed. “How can I stop him? It isn’t rape, you know, Gray.”

“You could tell him off, send him away.”

She shrugged. “Why? He’s a duke’s son. I like him. So what if he swears like a lord. One day he’ll be one.”

“Peter has an older brother.”

“Who is aged and ill.”

He shook his head at this. “You don’t put up with it from me.”

“That’s different. You don’t need to say dirty words to me: I sleep with you.”

He frowned at the specious wisdom. Rosalyn wouldn’t put up with the butler swearing at her, and
he
didn’t sleep with her. Or at least Graham didn’t think he did.

“Do you sleep with other men?” he asked.

“Would it bother you if I did?”

“Yes.”

Surprisingly, there was a long, guilty pause. Graham turned around to see her face grown serious, blushing slightly. The little tramp, he thought. His fury rose; the cad having been outcadded. Then she said softly, “Only with Gerald, Gray. He’s my husband.” Softer still, she confessed, “I can’t seem to figure out how to tell him no.”

Graham made a grim snort. “You could ask him if he’d like to whisper dirty words.”

She laughed, becoming flippant again when he wanted her to behave. As she turned, she lifted her shoulders to look over one of them at him. It was one of her more appealing and inviting poses. “That’s the worst of it.” She spoke in her deep, flirty voice. “I like Peter to tell me dirty words. He tortures himself with them, with the situation. And it thrills me.”

It didn’t thrill Graham. He said, stone-faced, “The situation could change.”

Rosalyn’s look over her shoulder grew mean. “Then I could sleep with Tilney. He’s everything you are. Except possibly
he’s
in love with me.”

“
Gerald’s
in love with you,” he corrected her.

She thought about it, then shrugged. “Maybe that’s why I sleep with him.” She paused. “Are you in love with me, Graham?”

He answered the question honestly. “I don’t know.”

Gerald Schild showed up at Netham several times more, with the same lack of warning or invitation—traveling ostensibly on his defunct marriage license. The other guests treated these larger exits and entrances of his with the same relative indifference as his smaller ones at breakfast or dinner. He blew into a room like a warm, uncomfortable air. People squirmed in their seats, got up to go for a drink, for a walk, never quite certain why, unaware of anything but a sudden change of climate.

As to the lover’s triangle, in which he figured a drafty, southerly vertex, he had no sense of how the whole thing should be acted out. He cast himself in no part—not the outraged husband, not the shrugging sophisticate, not even the wretched cuckold. And this threw the other players off as well. Rosalyn would be flustered—caught between differing quartos of her own script, making dutiful noises and pecks on her husband’s cheek while looking to Graham for direction. With Graham pulled back into the wings: A coward without some agreement on text, he had nothing to offer.

Schild didn’t stay long; he didn’t come often. But the fact that he came at all seemed the hugest breach of both protocol and good judgment. He barely spoke to anyone but his wife. And with her he was always too publicly intimate, no matter how formally he began. In the simplest greeting—“How are you?”—he sounded as if he asked a legitimate question. In “Is life treating you well?”
life
immediately read as “him, that Englishman,” the category itself implying the distinction of another species—cold-blooded, alien, as if she had somehow taken up, rather appallingly, with a beaded lizard.

There was no sympathy for the man or for the inept, mostly unspoken speeches that brooded behind his eyes. He was generally shunned, this awkward foreigner from a
crude country who could not hold a wife and yet could not hold himself from her, despite the fact that he had to scale the obstacles of her lover and all his titled, condescending friends to be near her.

For Graham, there was so much to be pitied and loathed in Gerald Schild, it was overwhelming. There was also something strangely heroic to him, though Graham was reluctant to admit or analyze what that might be. But it had something to do with his capacity to bare—and bear, both senses—his unblenching misery.

Graham remembered the handshake of that first morning, the slight horror of taking Schild’s offered hand. It was small, fleshy—Graham thought of Rosalyn—a paw. Both Schild’s hands had small mutilations, which fixed him firmly in the middle class. The right had a gnarled thumb. It was missing the tip and had only a fraction of the remaining nail. (An accident of trade. “He worked in the mills when he was young,” Rosalyn explained.) The left hand, which so frequently petted the thinning spot of hair at the back of Schild’s head, was marred by a fat, heavy band. A wedding ring. There was not another male guest in the house who wore one, the custom being unaristocratic, if not un-English altogether: A gentleman did not need to be reminded that he was married.

One of Schild’s more memorable blunders was when he was in his cups late one night after dinner. He raised a fourth glass of gin and, from across a room, made a toast to his wife playing cards. He sat, one arm raised, one leg draped over the arm of a chair. Perhaps Rosalyn had a soft spot for drunks, for in this instance she seemed strangely affected by his inebriated gallantry. He spoke the toast aloud:

“It is no chaste love I bear my wife,” he said. Chaste love. Graham had to look away. “It is jealous and adulterated.” He added, “There are times when I would give it up. If I could.”

Rosalyn blanched. The room grew silent. Then the lovely Mrs. Schild left for parts of the house unknown. Graham didn’t find her till hours later. The event was embarrassing, but that didn’t explain the way it shook her. She seemed to suffer as from a revelation, as if her husband’s drunken, miserable love were somehow sobering. As if she were looking love in the face for the first time, caught unaware as she was by seeing it in all its intensity and flower in the most unlikely place, the ruddy, drunken face of her balding husband.