Black Silk (25 page)

Lord God
, Submit thought.

“Ronmoor sat his arm on the chair, setting his face into his palm, three fingers up his cheek, his little finger fitting into the deep groove of his well-defined chin….”

It was Graham Wessit. The fictional man she was moving around on paper was nothing but a loose fictional—haranguing—reflection of the man entertaining friends downstairs. Graham Wessit was the Rake of Ronmoor!

There was a rapping at Submit’s door. From the hall, a voice called urgently, quietly, “Wake up! You have to see this!”

She rolled to her elbow. It was still dark. She was in a valley of down pillows, in a thick fog of sleep.

The muffled voice called again. “Come on! Wake up! We have to hurry!”

She pushed a pillow aside, climbed over another. Slowly, she made her way up from the groggy stupor that comes of brief, heavy sleep. She had lain awake for hours before finally drifting off. “I’m coming.”

Her braid fell heavily onto her back as she flipped it out from where she’d trapped it in her dressing gown. The floor was cold under her bare feet. The mantel clock, as she passed, read four fifty-three. She cracked open her apartment door.

Graham Wessit was on the other side, fully dressed, in the same clothes she had seen him in last night. His neckcloth was undone and so were the top buttons of his shirt. His face, even in the demidark, was flushed.

“You’ve been drinking,” she said.

“Only all night. Come on—” He reached for her hand.

“Where is Mrs. Schild?”

“Asleep. Will you hurry? Put something on. You’ll miss it.”

“What?”

“Just hurry up.”

Three minutes later, he was pulling her along at a half-run with about a dozen other people, through the brambles, then across the grass of his back garden to the lake. There, a dozen people manned half a dozen boats, little rowboats by a dock. Everyone was slightly inebriated and
laughing. Submit meant to be irritated at the insanity she still didn’t understand. But the grass was cold on her dampening shoes. The morning air was crisp. And Graham Wessit’s hand was warm.

He lowered her, grabbing her under her arms, into a rowboat. It wobbled under her feet. She fell immediately to a crouch.

“You’re no sailor,” he said and laughed as he climbed in.

A minute later, all six little boats were cruising out silently into the middle of the lake.

Graham lifted one oar of their boat, dipping the other deeper into the water. He let the submerged oar and their momentum—he’d rowed like the devil—turn them around. “There,” he said with an air of great satisfaction.

It was the sun, rising over the silhouette of his house, casting a pink-gold haze over his wild, uncut garden.

“Oh, my.” It was spectacular.

Someone in another boat cheered. Graham passed her a bottle of champagne—no glass, just the bottle.

She laughed. “Where did this come from?”

“Had it in my other hand all along.” He looked down at his arm. “Spilled half of it all over my cuff.” His face had one of those magnificent expressions he could make, smiling and frowning at once: a man in love with fun who was not so unself-conscious as to miss, or not mind, what an idiot this could make of him at times. It was strange, but she really had begun to appreciate this peculiar-sad awareness of his—the way he just rolled right over it anyway when fun was at hand.

She took the bottle. When she hesitated, he motioned with a twist of his wrist, showing her to tip it up. A man’s voice, about twenty feet off, had begun to sing “Rule, Britannia,” a good seagoing song. Submit put the bottle to her lips. When she tilted it, nothing came and nothing came, then a whole slosh of it poured into her mouth, up her nose, and down her cheeks.

The boat rocked, and an oar clattered as Graham leaned to mop her up, putting a neat folded handkerchief at her chin. The handkerchief smelled of fresh starch and sweet bay. She drew back. Without seeming to notice, he shifted further forward an inch. His arm braced itself on the gunwale right by her waist. The boat leaned into the water at a slightly precarious angle. The lake lapped against its sides.

Beyond them, across the lake, the man singing of Britannia was truly getting into the spirit. He sang out the last stanza, “And manly heart to guard the fair.” He began on the refrain. “Rule, Britannia. Britannia rules the waves….”

Counterpoint to this silliness, Submit’s heart began to jolt in her chest. Graham’s handkerchief blotted her chin, her cheek. He took it back for a second, looking for a dry spot as he folded it. His fingers were dark against the white linen; long, graceful, perfectly rounded at a clean, short nail. They were hands that didn’t do much, except maybe wipe up champagne. Submit could feel the coldness of her spill running down her neck. He seemed about to dab this up too when he stopped. They stared at each other in the rising light of dawn, his weight on one knee between her legs. There was no crinoline, nothing again to hold him back. Submit’s heart felt as if it were going to pound right up her throat. Then he seemed suddenly to realize she had backed up, all but ready to arch out into the water away from him. He took the bottle from her hand. In something of a huff, he sat back.

“Lord, you spook easily,” he said, “like some virgin housemaid with the bloody lord of the manor she’s afraid to offend.” He stretched out, with an exaggerated obligingness, his elbows back on the transom as far away from her as he could get. He planted his feet under the rowing thwart, his legs sprawled open.

Her next remark just came out. “As in the serial?” Ron
moor, these days, was chasing a housemaid who didn’t run very fast—she had a limp.

Submit was suddenly keen to hear how he would respond. She wanted to hear that none of it was true, that all the insane adventures weren’t really his. Or perhaps that he didn’t mind—what a good joke it all was.

Or better still, she wanted to hear him say he didn’t know what in the world she was talking about.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered, then took a long drink from the bottle. “Who would have thought that bloody thing would have such a broad readership.”

“It
is
you?” When he only took another draught from the champagne bottle, she asked again, “All those awful, exaggerated things? They are true?”

“In a less exaggerated form.”

She bowed her head. “How terrible. And how very, very mean.” A sharp, undiluted anger at Henry rose up. He had laid out in print a real man’s debacles and peccadilloes, laid them out in infinite, ludicrous, embarrassing detail. Henry had made a pillory of print—then handed her the key. All at once, sitting there in the rocking boat, she wanted to cry. Shame and regret overwhelmed her for a second. Lord, how she needed this money—and how she had enjoyed the writing when it had seemed innocent. And, Lord, how she was going to hate giving it up.

“Yes,” he snorted, “someone is having a lot of fun.”

“Hey, Netham!” A young man in a far boat was standing, waving for his attention. “Fifty pounds says I can beat you in.”

Graham yelled back, laughing as if everything were fine. “You’re fifty feet closer to shore!”

“Give you a thirty-second lead,” the man called.

“Thirty big seconds?” He laughed, suddenly getting up. “All right. Fifty pounds says you’re on.” He began stripping
off clothes. His coat and vest went. He worked his shoes off as he began undoing his trousers.

Several ladies squealed. Submit backed into the corner of the prow, not quite able to believe….

“Egad, man, your boat!” the other man called. “I meant rowing in!”

“You said you’d beat
me.
Now either jump in the water or start rowing. I’m a bloody fish once I start.”

“I can’t swim!”

Graham laughed heartily, his shirttails flapping in the lake’s gentle breeze. “And someone here needs to tow Lady Motmarche in.” He nodded toward Submit, then the shirt came off. Down to his undervest and drawers, he dove in.

He was on the shore before the other man even had his boat turned around. Submit watched as he rose up and walked out of the lake, framed by the columns of his Roman folly. Like a god, Neptune, in the morning sun. He was backlit, a silhouette. In this hazy nimbus, he ran his hands through his hair, shook water out. His underclothes clung. She watched him walk up into the folly and out, into the brambles of his garden. His shoulders were wide, his back broad and muscular, his buttocks strong. His long, sinewy legs moved with a graceful, purposeful stride. Modesty said she should look away. She stared. He was the most beautiful, most perfectly proportioned man she had ever laid eyes on.

An awkward young fellow with a heavy public-school vocabulary (
egad, jolly good, by Jove
) rowed up. There was a young woman already in his boat. He was diffident, polite, respectful almost to the point of reverence, as he tied Submit’s boat up. He began to row, Submit trailing along behind. It was slow progress after the near race to get out into the middle of the lake. Theirs were the last boats coming in. As they glided along, Submit sloughed off her damp shoes onto the wooden bottom. She let her bare feet slide under
Graham’s abandoned clothes. His vest was satin, blue satin with a black velvet reverse. It was incredibly smooth and cool against her instep and along her arch. By the time they approached shore, her toes had felt their way along the pleats of his shirt; her ankles were loosely tangled in the braces of his trousers and in a skein of watch chains that lay hidden on the bottom of the boat.

The Lady Claire Wessit was thirteen, pushing with all her might at twenty-five. She played precociously and adeptly at being older, and Graham allowed it. She wore a bit of color on her cheeks and mouth, did her hair up on her head, wore low décolletages over her small bosom, and wore her mother’s dangling pearls, all with the practice of one who had dressed up, pretended, for many years. Her childish imitation of adulthood did occasionally capture a refined, uncharacteristically mature style. The effect was portentous of the great beauty she would one day become; then the next moment, in one nauseatingly apt word, it was cute in the way little girls can make horrible, bumbling asses of themselves. When Graham looked at her, he always felt at once both a magnificent success and utter failure as a father. She was lovely, full of grace, feminine down to every aspect of that word’s ineffable charm. She was also fainthearted and headlong by turns, never at the right moment, and prone to tears, tirades, and conniving. So far as Graham could remember, she was nothing like her mother. And not very much like her father—primarily, Graham thought, from lack of exposure. He saw her only irregularly, on holidays and such. The looks and much of the temperament, God help her, were his, but she handled them with a completely different tack. Graham considered himself particularly ill-suited to deal with her and generally shrank from confrontation whenever she gave him the opportunity.

Charles was another matter. Though twins, they hardly
looked related at all. Charles was gracelessly accommodating an ever-increasing height. His body had taken on, with a sudden vengeful will of its own, the idea to mature at a pace he could neither intellectually nor emotionally match. He stood only slightly shorter than Graham, with all the wrong proportions. He had a thin, boyish slouch. He was sullen, brutish, and dealt Claire possibly the only thing that saved her: occasional blows of undeserved meanness that stunned her, at least for moments, into puzzled humility. The two were close despite this, with a genuine affection for one another. They bickered. Charles sulked. Claire was kind to him, cheering him on occasion as no one else could do—and as she did for no one else. Charles kicked her for her trouble, insulted her, tormented her, then wanted her to talk to, gave her “lends” from his allowance that he neither saw returned nor asked for back. They each loved to be the center of attention, orchestrated the other’s downfall for the purpose of looking good by comparison, and were happy if the other didn’t show at all. Then, an hour after, one was asking for the other,
When will Claire, Will Charles come—not that I care, mind you, the fart ass.
They could also be extremely foulmouthed, though here they walked a delicate line with their father and knew it.

They didn’t invite his temper, but Graham did lose it on occasion, for which he always felt the worse. They could become so frightened, so cowed. They didn’t see him often enough to know he was hardly worth being afraid of. Graham knew he intimidated his children, but he was loath to give this up, since it seemed to be the one weapon he had over them. Claire in particular dissolved into a snotty, childish mess should he firmly voice his opposition to her. So for the most part, he didn’t—thus his actions devastated all the more when he did.

Graham considered his relationship with his offspring certainly less than ideal. Fatherhood was a disappointment,
a proposition on which he had, by now, all but given up. He performed the role mostly by long-distance fiat and delegation. And he dealt from a position of strength—long experience at moving subservient adults to his will—with tutors, governesses, and headmasters. He was the bane of several school committees, which he thought (an hypocrisy he was not about to let them understand) were not living up to the responsibilities of their task, i.e., to educate and train his offspring. Like many parents, he never let his hypocrisy get in the way of his children obtaining somewhere else what he himself could not give. The odd thing was that he loved them so much—and was so frustrated at the poverty of that one single emotion with no other skills or abilities attached to it—that he willingly gave them up to the nurture of others. This brought to Graham’s mind the other remaining little twin, not doing terribly well in the nursery upstairs.

Graham had brought his new ward to Netham at the end of August. He had reopened the nursery on the uppermost floor, hired a nanny and wet nurse, then abandoned the situation in hope of hearing no more than a whimper now and then from the little fellow’s life. On a whim, Graham had named him Harold Henry, to be called Harry; Harry Stratford sounded like a good, sturdy name. But Harry wasn’t a sturdy creature, and “Harry” was too close to “Henry”; he almost always referred to him by the wrong name. Harry-Henry went from runny nose to runny nose; he had never breathed a clear day in his life. Presently, he had diarrhea. He cried incessantly, long into the night. The nanny said he wouldn’t live the summer and that the nurse’s milk was poisoning his blood. The wet nurse, a heavy woman one didn’t cross lightly, said he’d be fine if she could take him to her bed and nurse him around the clock.