Black Silk (21 page)

This time, Graham was told accurately where she would be and what she’d be doing: at a clothesline in the sun, hanging her wash.

Behind the kitchen, some yards to the right and beyond the terrace wall, a line had been strung between roof corner and tree to accommodate the drying of laundry. Most of the articles on the line were obviously from the inn—table and bed linens, kitchen rags. But a small section seemed to have been given over to the use of the inn’s solitary guest.

As he came out onto the terrace, Graham spotted her immediately. She was solid against the white laundry. He stopped just under the terrace’s overhang. The day suddenly reminded him of the day he had followed her out into the field. The sun was bright. The nap of the grass separated and blew in the breeze, making a light, continuously shifting pattern as wide as the field itself. There was nothing anywhere, just the occasional and distant trees, the day, and this woman hanging her clothes. The only shade was the black waving patterns over her back as she bent. He watched her rise through these shadows as she stood, watched the clothes wrap around her and hit her in the face. Graham too felt wrapped—rapt. He was caught up instantly in the private watching of her, in the guilty pleasure of scrutiny without observation. He stood transfixed.

She was much less elegantly turned out today. Her dress was dark cotton, too faded to be called black. It was open at the throat. The small buttons up the wrists and forearm were undone, presumably for coolness or mobility or both. Her sleeves hung in flaps at her elbows. And another anomaly: no hoops. Her copious skirts had been pulled up and
back into two wads and tied in a knot over her derriere, an improvised solution to keep the unsupported fabric out of her way. What a sight.

Her back was to him, the sun in her eyes—if she had stood the other way, the breeze would have had her perpetually tangled in neighboring sheets. He watched her as she raised a hand to shield her face, looking up with a piece of laundry. Then she would avert her head and pin blind to the clothesline. Back to the ground, bending in half; a rounded swaddle of dark cotton, the bowed ears of her knotted skirts dominating the air for a moment, raised over thin, stockingless ankles. She bent and stretched, pins between her teeth, her hands shielding, smoothing, shaking, organizing, stringing up clothes. A blouson. A chemise. An untold mangle of more wet clothes rested at her feet in a small basket. He came slowly around the wall, but she didn’t notice him, so absorbed was she in her quotidian acrobatics. She made regular, rhythmic progress, nudging the basket with a foot or dragging it along, even as she retrieved a pin or a piece of clothing. She had a wonderful coordination, a loose-hipped limberness that allowed a foot to coax and an arm to reach without her having to watch either very closely. The ritual had for Graham all the perfect, unorchestrated balance of a bird with its jointed tail—life on a narrow limb, always a fractional adjustment available to accommodate wind, position, and view to the current task.

After a time, Graham began to feel awkward. He had been spying too long. He moved forward with no better introduction than to hand her a piece of laundry. She jumped—the startled bird—then laughed, seemingly delighted to have company and essentially unsurprised.

Yes, she was fine, she told him. Having to do a bit of her own work, but not minding it; having, after all, witnessed when she was very young the sight of her mother working. Before her father’s abattoir, when it was just a butcher shop
in London, her mother had done all the domestic work herself. It was only later that the troupe of servants arrived. Her father thought he was giving her mother a great gift—freedom from hard work. But her mother grew quiet and thin within the first year of this generosity. She died shortly after that, as if her purpose for living had somehow been undermined.

“I’m sorry,” he said. But Submit waved it off.

And here they were again, talking of private things as easily as most people discussed the weather. Graham loved the close feeling of talking to her, made even nicer by the physical closeness he was presently allowed—the absence of hoops let him get right up next to her as he handed over a pair of wet stockings. He could smell the soap on her hands and something else, something that smelled of herbs and grass, and lilies perhaps. The soft, feminine smell of a woman’s morning toilet. The idea of her owning fragrant soaps or perfumes, of her wanting to attract, unsettled him a little. He couldn’t align this with another notion of her, of the shy, elusive woman quick to point out her slightly overlapped teeth. He didn’t know how to take these contradictory indications of vanity. How did a man respond to a woman who knew she wasn’t beautiful yet who knew also, on some level, that perfume wasn’t wasted? It was as if the prim woman in black understood—and conspired with—her own enigmatic carnal appeal.

He continued to hand her pieces of wet laundry, careful not to touch her. The memory of the physical rebuff the day in the field was suddenly keen again. Of course, that was before they knew each other as they did now….

“It’s beautiful weather,” she said. “I’ve never seen such a summer as this.”

He agreed.

“Look up there. In the eaves over my room.” He looked where she pointed, not at the eaves but at the window of her
room. It would be up the stairs inside, then all the way to the back. “Swallows, I thought—their tails are split—but now I’m not sure. I’m terrible with species.”

He smiled. “Other people’s categories simply do not interest you, do they?” When she looked at him, a little puzzled, he answered, “A swift. The bird up there is a swift, which is unusual. They generally travel in great screaming packs.”

The bird took off. They watched it fly out of sight. No need to make further conversation. Then he did something unlikely. He threw his coat over the line, rolled back his sleeves, and pinned up a pillow casing himself. Watching, she laughed.

“How very”—she couldn’t find the word for a moment, then settled on—“
common
of you.” It was a gibe, but also a compliment. He could take being called common by her and knew there were good things to being labeled so.

“Once,” he said, “after the pictures, the pillory, the whole thing, after I was home on Henry’s hands, I couldn’t sleep one night. Henry was up, in the front portico, seeing a friend out. We were at war by then, Henry and I. Horrible. Both suppurating wounded for having torn into each other too many times. I’m not sure if I got up to fire off more cannon or to effect some midnight truce. But I could hear the friend leaving and wanted simply to face Henry again. When I got near the door, I heard them talking. Henry said, ‘I can’t help feeling there is no hope. He won’t come into line.’ He sighed a huge sigh then added, ‘To do something so vulgar, so common. I shall never be able to get over it. I am so ashamed of him.’”

Graham paused, caught suddenly by the oddity of his telling her yet more, dwelling on his old problems, while he tried to minimize the accidental mention of a subject—a person—never too far from their conversational reach: and never within their agreement. “What I did was not very gen
teel, of course. But…” He let the thought trail off. There was nowhere to go with it. The memory wasn’t flattering; not for Henry, even less for himself. Its only significance was that it marked the final realization that the approval and affection he had always imagined he could win were not forthcoming: destinations on Henry’s map he would never reach.

Submit held a clothes peg over the folded edge of a shift, then wedged it down. “Under the circumstances,” she said, “one would expect him to feel let down. People say things.”

“That wasn’t it. He made a third person party to his worst feelings toward me. My dirty linen.” He smiled at the parallel, her clean wash in the sun, then looked at the ground.

“Yes,” she agreed finally, “it wasn’t very good of him.” But her voice withheld judgment. For all concerned.

“You really must come to Netham,” he found himself saying. “You would like it. If only for a holiday.”

This won him only a funny smile, as if her taking a holiday at Netham were the silliest notion she had ever heard. But she thanked him. And bowed out: “I am closer to London here.”

There was nothing more to say. They were at the end of an empty laundry basket, the conversation.

He carried her things in for her, his arm brushing against her breast for one tantalizing moment as he reached ahead to open the door. They came into the common room, the strange gaping dining hall of the posting house, full of its ready, empty tables. Graham set the basket down on one of these, then looked up to find Submit staring at him. She was frowning slightly as she did up the buttons at her neckline, where they ran from her collarbone by quarter inches up the full length of her throat. Graham began unrolling his own sleeves, thinking he might offer to help with the buttons as he had helped with the wash. He could imagine her
raising her chin, allowing him access, while he worked at the slow, meticulous task of the tiny fastens.

He titillated himself with the thought as he watched her own fingers do the job. She patted the collar in place, then began at the run of buttons down her left arm. The two of them stood there, buttoning, unrolling, putting aright, quietly fixing their clothes as in the strange transitional silence of postcoitus.

“Well, thank you again,” she said. Her coordination wasn’t as good with her left hand. At her right sleeve, she had hold of a button, then lost the edge of the cuff. She had to start over, bringing the two pieces together awkwardly with the one hand.

“Here, may I?”

She contemplated his offer. Then, drawing a slow, even breath, she extended her arm.

He gripped the back of it firmly, beginning at the buttons with his other hand. He could feel a tension in her, a kind of reluctant willingness at her elbow and in her wrist. Under the tips of his fingers, the inside of her forearm felt cool, as smooth as the skin of a peach. He stared down, presumably to watch what he was doing. But in fact he was almost blinded by the simple enterprise. He could feel her pulse beating through her arm, beneath his hand. His own heart began to thud. He wanted to bring her arm up around his neck, bend his nose to it, feel the skin against his mouth, breathe in its smell, kiss it, lick it, bite it—

The sleeve flapped loose as he slid his hand up her arm, inside her sleeve to the bend of her elbow. He fit his hand flush into this bend—it was damp. He pulled her toward him. His mouth came against hers just in time for her lips, warm and dry, to brush his as she turned her face away.

“No.”

He was left with her cheek, the edge of her hairline.
Against his mouth, she was velvety, covered in pale, fine hair, a peachlike down. She pushed him back.

“Why ‘no’?” he asked.

She took his hand out of her sleeve and began to fumble at the buttons herself, leaning back against a table. She threw him a nervous half-smile. “That is strictly the response of a man who has not accepted ‘no.’”

“Why?” he repeated.

“I don’t owe you explanations.” The rebuke was quiet, final.

He had to work at making himself smile. “I think, after hanging laundry together all morning, you do.”

“You wouldn’t like it.”

“I don’t much like not being allowed to kiss you.”

She sent up a plea, a serious glance, but made not the first offer to explain. She was having no better luck with the sleeve on the second try. He took hold of her wrist. She tried to jerk it back.

“Be still. I’m only going to do the buttons.”

In the most businesslike fashion he could, he pulled a chair around and put his foot on it. He laid her elbow on his knee. She balked when he stretched her arm out, laying it up his thigh, then warily allowed him to begin the tight, cinching motion of pressing buttons into loops.

A full minute later, he was only halfway done. They stood among the tables in this awkward, protracted silence; fastening, fastening. There were twenty-three buttons down her arm; he’d counted them twice. Then Graham saw, in his peripheral sight, an odd, unexplained motion. Submit bent her head slightly, bringing the back of her other hand to her mouth. He paused, reached up and took the hand away. And there it was: a faint smile. She tried to turn her head so he couldn’t see, but there was nowhere to hide. He held both her arms, with only the mildest resistance. For several seconds, she tried to look at him but couldn’t meet his eye. She
fought her own odd, smiling expression as it broke over her face. Then shyly, self-consciously—beautifully, seductively—embarrassed, she bowed her head.

Graham was completely at sea. The bent posture, along with the feminine smiling and hiding, put such a contradiction to what had gone before that his mouth went dry. It was as if she were saying to pay no mind to any protests and…

As a way of undercutting it, she quickly owned up to her apparent ambivalence. “No matter what you’re reading from me in one way, never think I don’t have a strong sense of what is right. For me.” She withdrew her arms. “I like you.” She raised a brow, putting a demur—a disjunctive
but
—into her smile. “I won’t tangle with you. Not in that way.” In a softer tone, she added, “Still, thank you. You’ve no idea what self-justification you’ve just given me. To be able to tell myself the choice really did exist, not just sour grapes.”

“That doesn’t leave much for me, does it?”

“Don’t be offended. No one is completely irresistible.”

That subdued him. And incensed him.

“Don’t,” she said again, meaning he mustn’t be angry.

“It’s not you caught with your pants down.”

“For pity’s sake—”

“I’ll get my hat.”

He started to move past her, but she was closer to the hat. It hung at a jaunty angle on top of the newel post at the base of the stairs.

Submit wove her way between tables, straight to it, lifting it free. It seemed a bad joke to her suddenly, the familiarity of her knowing immediately where he would put his hat: on her stair post. Then she picked up his gloves from the crevice between post and banister. Without waiting, she walked toward the stone parlor beyond the entryway, toward the stables.