Black Silk (28 page)

“Henry came on the scene somewhere after that. You know a lot in between. I married at twenty-five, had three children, one died. My wife died miscarrying our fourth. Let’s see—”

“Oh, stop—” She turned her back.

“No. I’m trying to tell you. I’m completely at your disposal. You don’t need to look around. Or read a bloody serial. I’ll tell you, show you anything you like.”

She looked at him. “Why?”

He gave the question more consideration than she expected. “Because, I suppose, I’d like a friend.” He left a pause. “And you need one.”

“No I don’t.”

“You do.”

Submit wet her lips and looked at the carpet, at the Persian patterns of red, indigo, and ivory. “I’m not sure of our friendship,” she said. “You shouldn’t trust me so much.”

“I see.” There was another long pause. “If you aren’t sure, then what were all those talks at Morrow Fields?”

She didn’t know what to answer. She remembered the talks as events that had oddly thrilled her. His arrival had always meant wonder, pleasure, a peak of interest that far outreached anything else happening to her there. Even Arnold’s visits, their discussions of the machinations of the courts that bore so directly on her future, were not so enthralling. Yet there had been a burr in every conversation. Their exchanges had often been trying, sometimes mean, once out-and-out bitter. Morrow Fields had been a funny world, an unnatural place where an impossible, overstimulating friendship had existed for a few weeks.

Something made her pursue what he offered. Curiosity.
Opportunism. The desire for accuracy, she thought perhaps, detail in the written text. She asked, “Why did you marry your wife? Were you in love?”

“No.” He shrugged. “I was exhausted. And tired to death of fighting all that was expected of me. It was a brilliant match. It meant money and prestige—her mother was a duchess in her own right.” He paused. “Even Henry couldn’t disapprove.”

Submit frowned as she thought for a moment. “She was the one in the serial a few weeks ago, wasn’t she?” she asked. “The society daughter of the old duchess?”

He sniffed but ended by giving her another wan, self-mocking smile. “I would protest, except the reality was not much better than the caricature.”

“What was the reality?”

Graham put his arm along the back of the couch. He crossed his legs and looked at her. He seemed to be further assessing her interest—assessing and finding it somehow all right.

“There’s not much to tell. Elyse—that was her name—had a pedigree that easily outreached the notoriety of a few ink drawings. Being sheltered from the specifics, she was deeply in love with the notion of winning a scandalous man. The duchess, at first, did not approve. In the end, I more or less courted the mother. I played a part, the engaging, raffish role associated with me since my theater days. It was a kind of bridge on which I walked back across into acceptance.”

He let this sink in before he went on. “Elyse and I were married. Henry was overjoyed. ‘Finally a worthy achievement,’ he said, though worthy of what, I was never sure. I had married a young girl I hardly knew. We were married just over two years when she died. Shall I go on?”

“No.” Submit turned around completely to look out the window at the garden, the distant pond and folly, the lake under a darkened sky.

She didn’t like this. She remembered other frank talks, when somehow things were more mutual, less imbued on her part with mixed emotions, ulterior intent.

Her own skirts moved gently behind her, a rustle, as her crinoline bowed, the structure of steel hoops quivering from side to side. He’d come up behind her. “I wanted to love her,” he said quietly. “There were things I liked about her. Her utter lack of censure. Her timid, gentle gusto—she was slight, shy, but eager to please.

“I can’t explain exactly,” he continued. “It was just—she never looked me in the eye. We both knew, somewhere, that we were not equals. I was always on my guard not to step all over her.”

He was quiet a moment. There was just the sound of his even breathing. Submit almost wished now that she could shut him up. He was saying too much, revealing himself in ways that seemed if not in poor taste at least in poor judgment.

This was too easy, Submit thought, so easy it felt unfair. But there it was: She realized some affinity made him confide. She could not only live in his house, gather all the physical details she wanted, she could also have his full cooperation, his verification on any fact or incident she wished.

After she left the room, Graham remained, looking out his library window. He considered it a somewhat puzzling but generally positive sign that Submit had begun to make references and ask questions about other women in his life. A woman interested in a man’s past was usually struggling with something presently on her mind.

Rosalyn, by contrast, took a broad tack on such matters. She didn’t care for details, but inquired ruthlessly after a list. She pressed for names, titles, titillations. Rosalyn liked to believe in a mythical multitude. She liked to think that her
beloved was a prize. Fewer co-fornicators, or at least fewer contenders for this position, would reduce his value. It was like a list of invitation to a party. No matter how august the individuals, a few were just a gathering: It took a certain number to make it an affair. She grew positively sullen when he insisted he had been faithful to his wife.

Graham did not commend himself much on his marital fidelity, believing that he simply had not had enough time to rouse himself to a breach of faith. Besides, there were other kinds of infidelities. Elyse simply died before he could run through them all.

For the first time in a long time, that afternoon Graham’s mind dwelled on his dead wife. Submit had accepted what he’d told her so easily. There was that temptation with Submit, to tell her everything. Hearing his own recountings voiced, watching Submit accord his views the respect one gave the truth—no contradictions, reinterpretations, no panicking remonstrance—made him want to go on, made him willing to review.

He hadn’t told her the more harrowing parts. Childbirth had been hard on the delicate Elyse, the way bearing young can be hard on an overbred mare. She grew progressively more unhealthy with each gestation. Yet nothing seemed to keep her from pregnancy; one chance encounter, near unconscious in the night, would yield a child. Or two: Claire and Charles were born when he and Elyse had been married only nine months. A third child, Michael, who died when he was three, was born ten months after that.

My God
, people said when she was pregnant with their fourth child in two years,
someone ought to put you out to pasture for a while, Netham
. Their union was considered fair game for such jokes, the consequence of a storybook match between a very marriageable young woman and a notorious young man. All of this was so sadly in conflict with the truth, however. Graham was so depressed, he hardly touched
her. And Elyse was befuddled by the turnabout of her romantic illusions. She’d been married less than two years, had a husband who hardly looked her way and three children all under two years—and now she was pregnant again.

In miscarrying the fourth child, the mother miscarried also her own faint claim to life. She’d developed an unknown infection that brought on rapid deterioration, then death. All in less than two days, though she was given every attention: the best doctors, the best medicine, a husband’s night’s sleep. Graham couldn’t help believing that Elyse was ignored to death. Her real life faded out like a ghost in whom no one believed.

Shortly after this, Graham discovered “Malthusianism,” the creed of population control as expounded by Thomas Robert Malthus. This seemed like a very sane idea in light of the deadly consequence of unlimited pregnancy. For the next half dozen years, he practiced what the French called
la chamade
, the retreat. He became quite adept. Then he discovered that a very functional device, a sheath of lambskin, could be purchased at certain bookstores. The slightly odd outcome of this was that, as his sex life became less anxious and more satisfying, his library expanded, and he read more. He had a tendency to browse and select books while the bookseller discreetly wrapped his somewhat controversial purchase into a book-shaped little pack.

In the course of this portion of Graham’s education in bookstores, he learned to ask for “French letters” in England, “English hats” in France. It amused him, even now, thinking of the distinction. Aside from the national slur each country intended, these images also unintentionally revealed each country’s national character. No matter what they called it, the English envisioned the item neatly wrapped up, out of sight; the French envisioned it on, like a jaunty cap. There were other names besides “sheath.” If a gentleman bought these conveniences at a more sordid es
tablishment, he might have to use the dirty name, c——m; even the most salacious literature never wrote the word out. Graham wasn’t certain how to spell it.
Condim? Condom? Condum?
But he knew how to say it, in several languages, in a dozen euphemisms, up and down the class system, on and off the Continent.

The next morning, Submit left bright and early. Graham was surprised. And disappointed. He had expected her to stay the day. But she said she would come back the next weekend. If she didn’t come, he determined, he at least had an excuse to visit and inquire why.

And an excuse to continue to think, explain, revise. Graham had begun to remake himself slightly, not to mind some of his sillier, or meaner, attributes. He wanted to be more worthy, he realized, in his own eyes.

There were days at the inn when Submit felt herself leaning into a kind of frenzy. She couldn’t write enough. Writing about Graham, his slouching charm, his polite immorality—all his outrageous contradictions exaggerated into Satan personified in the form of Ronmoor—proved such a release she was sometimes compelled to go pages and pages beyond dinner and sleep.

Sometimes this left her feeling wonderful, exalted. She could become so besotted with something that was happening in the serial that she couldn’t go to sleep even after she’d gone to bed. She knew it was exciting. She knew it had a waiting, ready audience that was paying well for it. After a quick trip to London, Submit had realized that her efforts were worth a great deal more than Pease had originally let on. In this light, she had stopped by his office and held him up accordingly, insisting on a “fairer” fee, which, needless to say, Mr. Pease didn’t find fair at all. But Submit was beginning to hear a faint, implacable gripe in herself, one she
hated to hear in a woman since she had always felt it self-excusing and petty—the complaint of a conspiracy of men. Male courts were holding her inheritance in abeyance. A male heir was pressing the matter, abetted, she had begun to believe, by a male cousin. And Henry, dear, sweet, old Henry, a primogenitary male if ever there was one, had put her in this position. Even Arnold seemed in no hurry to gain her relief. She had taken Pease’s money and made arrangements to begin interviewing for a maid. She had ordered a new dress. She had even sent Mr. Tate and her solicitors healthy fees for services rendered to date.

At other times, however, this whole venture, as it propelled her forward, felt vaguely unhealthy. She spent more time writing
Ronmoor
than she did speaking to real people. Sometimes, when she stood up to stretch or finally to eat, she would look around her and feel a flatness in the reality about her. The atmosphere of her room, of the inn itself seemed dilute, thin. As if life itself were hardly more than a sketch, only gaining meaning and authenticity when she could insert it into the mazelike inventions of her own mind. The idea of needing to go back to Netham was perhaps born in these vague moments. At the inn, her heart beat madly over written pages. At Netham, reality and unreality seemed to mix together into experiences she had never had. Her heart thumped in gardens and follies and little boats.

Occasionally, by the light of morning over a poached egg, Submit would wonder just how treacherous and self-justifying she was letting herself become. It was Graham after all who was making the serial popular, much more so than Henry’s skills or her own. She wondered, for uncomfortable moments, if anything entitled her to use Graham, his past, his public persona, in a way that he found painful and loathed. Then she would spear her egg and run it onto her toast. If he could support William’s suit, he would
blessed well support hers. None of this would have dragged out so long if he had just let well enough alone.

Submit wrote all day, all week, most nights. She ran through Henry’s notes, then made notes of her own. Graham’s hospitality became a kind of road map; his confidences, a kind of fodder. The narrator of
Ronmoor
ranged the rooms at Netham with authority while everything Graham had ever told her began to flow and mix with Henry’s annotations; it all worked so well. Even Submit realized that Ronmoor was taking on new life, new vividness, under her pen.

She was only taken from the world of paper and words once in that week. It was with quite a start that she heard the innkeeper announce, “There is a gentleman downstairs to see you.”

Thinking it could only be Graham, Submit was suddenly flustered, almost afraid to go down.

But it was not Graham. It was Gerald Schild.

“Your coat.”

As she came to the base of the stairs, he held out her old black coat, the one she hadn’t seen since the beginning of the summer.

“You left it at our London house last May. My manservant found it and brought it along with the rest of my things. I’ve been meaning to return it to you for months.”

He paused, slid his fingers over the back of his head, combing, like an old habit he couldn’t break, nonexistent hair. He was not an unattractive man, Submit thought. He had nice features, softened a little by middle age, a pleasant good looks that, like the hair at the top of his head, had thinned out over the years. It seemed a shame he always looked so burdened and spent.

Submit took the coat, thanking him for his trouble.

Then he asked, “Have you got a few minutes to talk?” She didn’t really feel she had. But before she could say anything, he added, “My wife is leaving me, I think.”

“I want to do a play. It would be such fun.” Rosalyn had come out into the garden with a stack of possible productions. She sat down in the shade on the bench at the edge of the orchard, plopping a stack of possibilities—playbooks—onto her lap. “Why don’t you look through these with me?” She began to look by herself.

“I’m not wild for the idea of a play,” Graham said.

“Don’t be stuffy. It wouldn’t be anything elaborate. Just for fun. Let’s see. There are several Shakespeares. A Webster.
The Devil’s Law-Case.
Do you know that one? Gray, are you listening?”

He looked up from the cat he’d been wooing with a sausage he’d brought from breakfast. “Yes. It’s bloody serious.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

He quoted a passage. “‘Being heretofore drowned in security, You know not how to live, nor how to die: But I have an object that shall startle you, And make you know whither you are going.’”

“An object?”

“A shroud. Though in one production it was a severed hand.”

“Ooh.” She made a face. “For goodness’ sake, I don’t want anything gruesome.” She returned her attention to the pile on her lap. “What about this one:
All’s Well That Ends Well
?” She giggled. “You could play the unfaithful husband?”

He frowned. “Not a good choice, I think.”

As he stood, her eyes rose up with him. “You’re not going to do any of them, are you?”

“You’ve read the serial. You should know why I don’t fancy parading around in a play.”

“Maybe your interest in the theater was never for the stage.”

Graham looked at her. She was accusing him of something, though he wasn’t exactly sure of what.

She laid it out. “He says you have an actress.”

“He?”

“Peter.”

Tilney. Graham snorted, discounting the source.

She persisted. “Do you?”

“No.”

“Why would he say something so insupportable?”

“I have friends in the theater, among them an actress I used to see privately.”

She digested this. “The actress was just one fling?”

“A rather long fling.” Graham had had a tendency to fall back in with Elizabeth over the years, on his way back and forth between others, like a familiar pit in the road.

“How long?”

“I don’t inquire or complain about Gerald, you know.” Why was he doing this? Why not just tell her a soothing lie and let it go at that?

She took this as she was meant to. She stood up in a rush.

“For God’s sake, you’re not telling me you still see this—this—who? Who is it?”

He looked at Rosalyn, beautiful, porcelain-skinned, standing with her fists braced at the top of a mountain of aquamarine silk. Why? he asked himself again. She stood there in her colorful dress with her extraordinarily pretty features, a cultivated little jewel set off by the garden of wild, tangled weeds behind her—spurge and red poppies and purple honesty with their satiny pods. Surely, if he did not love this woman, what he felt for her was just as good, less vulnerable, full of pleasurable possibilities.

“I still see her,” he explained, “but I don’t sleep with her, which seems to be what you want me to believe about you and Gerald.”

“Who?” she insisted. “Does this actress live in London?”

“Sometimes. She also has a house near Weymouth. And a husband. And four children, now nearly grown. We are friends.”

“But different. You have shared all your other ‘friends’ with me. You don’t share her.” A pause. “Take me to meet her.”

Alarmed, he asked, “Why?”

“I don’t know. She frightens me. Her existence frightens me.” After a too long pause, she said, “She must be what I feel.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean, sometimes I sense a presence in you. Or perhaps it’s an absence.” She waved a hand in the distilling light of the morning sun. “Oh, I don’t know. You’re not entirely with me all the time.”

She went past him, as if she would leave, then she turned to face him from under the shade of the overhang. He could no longer see the details of her face.

“Last night, for instance,” she said. “You were all over me, like you haven’t been in months.” She drew a deep breath, a catch, then went on in an intimate, distressed whisper. “You put your weight on top of me and didn’t take me for the longest time. You called me loving names, more than I’d ever heard before. You moved on me and touched me to the point of my wanting to scream. It was so frustrating and so glorious. And so very, very premeditated. It seemed to have so little to do with me.

“A fantasy, I told myself. I should be flattered. But there was an element of reality, wasn’t there? How can I explain? As if I were standing in for someone real and unreachable?” She turned away. After a silence, she asked, “Do you wish you could sleep with her, Gray? Your actress? Do you love her?”

He shook his head immediately. “No.”

But he ran a hand over his forehead into his scalp. He re
membered last night well, had looked forward in fact, a little guiltily, to repeating it. “It
was
a fantasy, Rosalyn.” He added honestly, “It had nothing to do with Elizabeth.” Somewhat less honestly, he added, “No face, no name, not at all like her in fact.”

Graham suddenly felt a keen letdown. Rosalyn was absolutely the best woman he was ever going to possess. He didn’t understand why he should have fantasies of Submit. She wasn’t as pretty. She’d made it absolutely clear how likely he was to ever get close to her. She was probably right—part of wanting her was wanting to shag Henry’s wife. The sheer intensity of the fantasy itself should have alerted him: It couldn’t be healthy for a mature man to be that absorbed, like an adolescent in the first throes of discovery, that hot. It seemed hardly the reaction of a man of experience, approaching forty years of age.

He touched Rosalyn’s shoulder, took hold of her round, perfect arm through the lace and silk of her sleeve, as if he could recapture something and hold on.

“Perhaps it was you,” he murmured. “If not you, who else?”

Rosalyn was apparently not convinced, but she didn’t give up. That night, she came straight to his rooms. No sneaking in the dark, no subterfuge. She just waltzed right in behind him when the card games downstairs dispersed. They had, for seven months, put up at least a sham of sleeping in separate rooms.

“Have we given up even the veneer of discretion?” he asked.

She closed the door. When he didn’t move, she came forward and began kissing his shirt studs as she unbuttoned his vest. She dropped his trouser braces, untucked his shirt. Graham stood perversely still; faintly resistant, faintly curious for what came next.

Perhaps she’d been inspired by a boxful of adventurous
pictures; she liked to go through his things. Or perhaps Tilney had finally gotten to the Latin words. In either event, shyly, then more forthrightly, then with full robust enthusiasm, Rosalyn bent to her new task. She leaned and undid the buttons of his trouser front, opening them, pushing up his shirt. As she bared his chest, his abdomen, she wet her lips. She kissed his ribs, then his belly, eventually covering his navel with her mouth to work her tongue into it. Almost objectively, Graham felt himself becoming aroused. He stared down at her pile of fair curls, brushing against his waist, then felt her cool, smooth hands slide into his trousers around his buttocks. She began to knead the muscles. He closed his eyes. Her tongue traced the swirl of hair down his belly, while her hands worked his trousers down. Worsted wool crumpled to an angle, caught only by his slightly spread-legged stance. His erection hit her under the chin. Graham grabbed hold of a chair back. She didn’t even hesitate: He caught his breath, then all but lost his balance as he was literally swallowed up.

Graham held on to the chair, some remote part of himself watching in disbelief. He was being ravished. Rosalyn’s yellow head bobbed at an even stroke, her lips and tongue sucking him in. He groaned, called out something under his breath, almost a curse. She stimulated him so persistently, it was faintly unpleasant—while being overpoweringly irresistible. He couldn’t have drawn away if he’d tried.

Just where she’d learned this, he didn’t know. It certainly hadn’t been in her repertoire a week ago. Nonetheless, the lady certainly understood the principle. She rocked him to her slightly, pushed him away in rhythm, digging her fingers into the ridge of his tightened backside—every muscle in his body seemed to want to contract. He clamped hold of the chair back, took hold of her shoulder. Her mouth was drawing on him so hard he could feel the bite of her teeth. He pinched his eyes closed. His head dropped back. A groan
came out of him, a sound he hardly recognized. He began to ejaculate.

It went on and on. By the end, he’d looked down, his eyes narrowly open. Rosalyn was on her knees, making a neat catch of things in a handkerchief she just happened to have on hand. Wipe, wipe, pat, pat. He didn’t have the impression so much that she’d enjoyed it as she’d been called upon, like a fine surgeon, to perform a delicate feat she knew she did with supreme competence. A moment later, she was removing her clothes.

Graham knew perfectly well what Rosalyn was about, but after the first shock, he became a willing coconspirator in his own seduction. While Rosalyn demonstrated heretofore unknown natural talent, or else enormously more experience than he had ever realized.

It was the dawn of a new dimension to their relationship. He took her naked to the bed and went after her with all the sexual tact of a satyr. Rosalyn was taken aback for a moment here or there, but never for long. If there was something she didn’t like, she didn’t say. There was nary a complaint.