Black Silk (30 page)

A shrill whistle heralded the first burst. The sky ex
ploded in light, a sunburst of fireworks sending out streamers of glitter. Submit’s breath caught in delight, as the streamers separated and fell to earth like so many millions of gold coins. This display was followed by another and another. Chrysanthemums of red and green and blue. Bright explosions erupting endlessly, dripping filaments of silver, ending in ear-splitting pops. Then spiraling, dragonlike arrays of light that sped across the lake. The air began to smell of smoke.

Submit drifted back down toward the group, watching from the bottom of the garden, her head tilted up. She followed the next rocket streak backward to earth, wanting to find the magician making this display. She saw Graham, playing with fire. She recognized his silhouette through a cloud of smoke on the dock. He was holding a cigar, puffing on it one moment, holding it down to a fuse the next. Rosalyn Schild and a few others were behind him. Gerald Schild was nowhere in sight.

Mrs. Schild was animated, gesticulating, talking to Graham’s back. His attention seemed focused more on the fire and fuses. A spattering catherine wheel started to spin on the dock, then a sparkling green tourbillion ascended in corkscrews.

A skyrocket went up, splitting into six, seven, a dozen loud pops then a thirteenth, fourteenth eruption, with sprays of silver stars. The sky was incredibly lovely. On the dock, over the water, Graham and Rosalyn had become eerie shadows, moving through the smoke. Mrs. Schild was growing more fierce, a pantomime of displeasure. The others hung back. Submit could hear the woman’s voice, not her words but her tone, traveling over the water, punctuated by pops and cracks in the sky. Graham seemed to feel the best policy was not to respond at all. He squatted, disappearing. Submit wondered if even Mrs. Schild could see
him. A spark sizzled. Then sudden light shooting over their heads revealed another act of the melodramatic argument on the dock. Their two shadows wavered, vivid and flashing on drifting smoke. Graham glanced over his shoulder once and made a sharp gesture, an arc of burning cigar ash. He turned his back.

Rosalyn Schild charged him. He was squatting. Just as another round of crackling light went up, she landed a blow on his back. Calm as you please, he stood through the smoke. She had just begun poking him in the chest, when he picked her up and threw her into the lake. A strange splash echoed flatly in the night.

Graham lit another round of fireworks before he squatted, speaking to or perhaps just contemplating the woman who floundered by the dock. After a moment he rose and pitched his cigar, a tiny rocket of miniature sparks, out into the lake, then called something to someone on the shore as he kicked off his shoes. The last Submit saw of him, he was struggling out of his vest. Another splash echoed as he jumped in. Other shadows danced out into the smoke. More splashes. With squeals of delight, the party took en masse to the lake.

At the dovecotes, Submit looked back again, listening to the birds’ evening cooing play over the general free-for-all beyond. As her eyes adjusted, moonlight revealed almost half the people around the lake had gone in, half remained on shore to watch (while two lovers on a picnic blanket nearby, Submit noticed, were doing neither).

She sighed. The cool smell of night blew over her. Gooseflesh ran down her arms. She had never seen, heard, imagined such a horrible, beautiful commotion as that insanity on the lake. As she walked up toward the house, she had to put her arms up over her breasts—the nipples stood on end. She could feel the cold of the water behind her, as if it lapped
against her waist, her ribs, her face, as if she were sinking through it.

“What an imagination,” she murmured.

Inside, she took herself and her imagination upstairs. Ronmoor, wonderful, awful Ronmoor, had a housemaid to seduce.

He pushed Peg against the desk, bending her backward over it, crushing his mouth to hers….

Submit scratched the sentence out.

Ronmoor danced Peg toward the desk, making a jigging waltz of her ungainly backward stride. She faltered. He caught her around the waist….

Submit put a huge
X
through the entire paragraph.

It felt wrong. Everything felt wrong tonight. He might steal hats and light fireworks and throw women into lakes, but she couldn’t make Graham insist or extort. He didn’t need to. Why would he want a plain, awkward girl?

Peg willingly gave herself
.

That made quite a bit more sense, but seemed ultimately as bad. It was pure deception for an earl to encourage a housemaid’s attachment. When he married, after all, he chose the daughter of a duchess. Submit was sure she could make Graham into a scoundrel with this. Yet try as she might, her imagination ran dry—or to the ridiculous.

He kissed her mouth, her cheeks, her eyes and eyelashes, showering her with words of passion, of love
.

She threw down her pen and scooted back from the writ
ing table. She wrapped her arms around herself at her bedroom window as she looked out into dark.

While Submit was upstairs, trying to make the fiction and reality of Graham Wessit meet in a way that put him beyond the pale and beyond her yearning, Graham was outside, pursuing a little continuity of his own.

He walked out into the dark, through the garden. He had been among the first to change his clothes. Everyone else was still inside. The house behind him was filled with light and voices, people still shrill from the excitement of an exhausting day, topped off with fireworks, then splashing around in a dark lake. The drier guests could be heard in the music recital room at the end of the north wing. Someone was playing the piano, a waltz. Graham had no desire to be part of any of it. He wondered where Submit had gone. She had been the nicest part of his day.

Rosalyn had been the lowest. The incident on the dock had thrilled everyone—Rosalyn had had her little play. She had asked Gerald for a divorce this afternoon, in the midst of a picnic. Graham hadn’t reacted to Rosalyn’s announcement with the appropriate joy. Their argument had proceeded from there. Graham was still angry. He would throw her in the lake again. Poor Schild had left—Rosalyn had sent him away, leaving Graham to wonder what he himself was doing in the middle of their marital strife. Several people had hinted at congratulations, as if he were about to begin a little marital strife of his own. He couldn’t imagine it. Yet he hated the alternatives as much.

Another affair ended pointlessly was something Graham shuddered to contemplate. He was frightened at the prospect of having failed again. He wanted a mate. Love, after all, was fairly rare and hardly required. (Did he need, he
asked himself, what made Gerald Schild nothing but a sad and miserable sight?) He was not eager to be alone, not eager to have to start with a new woman all over again. Perhaps Rosalyn was a kind of answer to his plight, with or without love. As so many people told him, she was perfect.

In the dark, Graham began to think of the serial. Affair after affair, all snide, all exaggerated, all true. And Margaret. His upstairs housemaid. Lord, he had forgotten about her. Which was a shame, because there seemed within Margaret a clue. Something about himself he had forgotten, lost sight of, something good….

Margaret, or Peg as everyone else called her, was an upperhouse servant. Graham could never bring himself to call her Peg. Margaret had a limp, and not everyone called her Peg in all innocence.

It had been midsummer. He had come home with the usual exhaustion from a season in London. He hadn’t been at Netham ten minutes when he noticed, on his bedroom dresser, the smallest crystal vase. At first he wondered where it had come from, whom it belonged to. Then he remembered it from one of his own cabinets downstairs. It was part of the clutter on a low shelf behind glass. Never had it held flowers until now. It looked different with all the color. The flowers, in order to be small enough to balance the few inches of vase, were semiweeds. Wild violets, Sweet Alison, Welsh poppies, others, a bit of green. One would have to walk a long way to make such a fine collection.

“Who did this?” he asked his man.

“I’ll have them removed immediately, sir.”

“No. Who did them?”

“The new girl, I expect, sir.”

“Her name?”

“Peg, they call her.”

“What does she do? Besides flowers?”

“A bit of everything, sir. At a clump. One leg bad, sir.”

Peg. It seemed a grotesque joke, a malignant prescience on the part of her parents. One of her legs had simply grown more slowly than the other. Peg rolled along like a one-legged sailor.

The flowers seemed all the more a miracle—a long walk, at a slow, difficult pace, to find flowers for a rescued vase.

The first night home almost always brought good dreams. That night he dreamed of young girls gathering flowers up and down the Hampshire hills, a slight, attractive hesitation in their steps. Skirts blowing in the breeze. Black-faced sheep watching this bucolic scene, chewing grass in their soft pink mouths.

But Peg wasn’t what dreams were made of. In the flesh, she was short and rounded, with a definite waist but abundant in flesh. Her fleshiness was part of her appeal, as was, paradoxically, her very uneven gait. There was something feminine about her, of the earth, fertile. The limp gave her an unstable moment. One wanted to protect her somehow, though not for the sake of pity. She was too capable and self-sufficient for that. Perhaps that was it: She worked like an animal, dawn till dusk. She did unaccountable things, like deliver a calf once all alone and have to apologize for it, since the men around her told her what a fool she’d been, what a chance she’d taken: “I called. But no’un ’ud come, sir. An’ the mum was gettin’ fits at me yellin’, so what was I t’ do?” The limp put a vulnerable pause in an otherwise strong, progressive stride. When she smiled or when she shied because of sudden self-consciousness from dirt or flour perceived on her otherwise neat clothes or face, one wanted to scoop her up into one’s arms, carry her off. Graham was attracted to her long before he admitted it to himself so much as to touch her.

She came from a family that owned its own farm a bit farther south in the district. With six sisters and three broth
ers, her leaving the family enterprise was not looked on unkindly by her parents. They had enough to work the land and had worried, Graham suspected, that they were saddled with an unmarriageable cripple. He knew their letters were infrequent. He knew Peg sent money home regularly.

Any such fears, however, proved unfounded quickly enough. Peg had a beau in Netham the second month she was there. Jim owned the farm on the northwest periphery of Graham’s own land. He was a nice catch for her. They had been having breakfast together ever since he had delivered the milk one morning himself—his farm was almost exclusively dairy, odd bits for himself, a vegetable garden to put any in the district to shame. He was one of the more notable successes of the area. The general picture of Peg’s future should have pleased her.

But, to the point, it seemed flawed. Graham never knew the specifics of what bothered her. But the more serious things seemed to get with Jim, the more moody and quiet her presence got about the house.

The matter shouldn’t have disturbed Graham’s life more than passing notice. In September, he should have gone to London, but he was suddenly taken to bed. Something or other (the doctor’s diagnosis) had his nose running, his throat itching, and a cough sounding like a death rattle in his chest. He didn’t actually feel that bad, but a week in bed was a week less spent in the whirlwind of London. It didn’t sound so terrible. So Graham followed the doctor’s advice, and Margaret became more or less his self-appointed nursemaid.

At first it seemed she had taken on the extra duties for the benefit of having a polite, captive audience. She brought him breakfast, changed his sheets, administered some vile medicine, while she sketched vague outlines of her past and her future. “I certainly feel a very forchunt girl, marryin’ my Jim,” she said many mornings. But there was always some
thing reluctant and forced in this performance. Then little remarks started leaking into her monologues. “A girl ain’t always ready,” she said one morning, “to finish off like the world thinks she ought.”

Equating marriage to a “finish” was a notion that drew profound sympathy from Graham. “Are you thinking of not marrying him, Margaret?” he asked.

Her eyes came up wide from the bottom of the bed. She’d been tucking a sheet. “Oh, no, sir.” She frowned, then said very convincingly, “I’ll be marryin’ Jim, I’m sure.”

Graham sat in a chair near the head of the bed. Margaret came in and changed his sheets every day. (“The sickness sticks to ’em,” she explained.) She paused and took her time now, every corner of the bed just so. She was a bit of a tyrant in her perfection, running even the master out of a sickbed for the sake of order.

She didn’t speak for a time. She fussed and moved and smoothed the sheet, the blanket, the coverlet, making them as smooth as if an iron had been put to them. She came around and sat on her handiwork, a few feet from Graham. She stared out the window.

“I would like,” she said after a moment, “to have done somethin’ ’ceptional. Y’ know what I mean?” She looked over her shoulder at him, and he suddenly realized that something, however temporarily, had dissolved: She saw herself as his equal.

This staggered him at first. Then it strangely relaxed him. She played servant the same way he played master, with an underlying fear that someone should discover how foolish he found it all. It was not anything they ever spoke of, but the dropped roles happened then and more often later.

“Yes,” he answered, “I know what you mean.”

She waited another space of time, then she turned more toward him. “Why do you call me ‘Margaret,’ not ‘Peg’ like the rest?”

He was brought up short. “Would you prefer the other?”

She thought, though less about the question it seemed than, shyly, if she should continue. “I like real well you call me Margaret. I told Jim he calls me Margaret, too. It’s got”—she looked down into her dress—“more dig-inty, y’ know?” Suddenly bright, she offered, “The housekeeper, Mrs. Fallows, been teaching me readin’. I learned ‘dig-inty.’ I like them words.” She looked serious for a moment, then suddenly flushed and turned away.

She let her embarrassment fade into silence. She swung her uneven legs against the bedstead, bouncing her calves off the frame for a few light taps of perfect, even rhythm. “I love Jim,” she said, as if asked. “Ain’t none better.” A pause. “I really do love Jim.”

She saw to Graham till the end of the week, through his sickness. They had one or two more such short conversations. Graham was left puzzled by them, caught in an impossible abyss between classes. He liked her very much. He was attracted to her. Yet, for these very reasons, he didn’t want to encourage any illusions about what the world, himself a part of it, saw as their inevitable relationship.

In a vague sort of way, Graham began to prepare for London. He figured he would get another week out of “convalescence.” A few days before his actual departure, Margaret was helping clear out his upstairs sitting room, draping furniture while he was supervising the packing over a newspaper and cream tea.

“London, coo.” She shook her head cheerfully.

“Have you ever been to London?” he inquired over the page.

She smiled. “Might someday.” A sheet gave a sharp snap, then floated out, suspended, to settle over a sofa as gently as snow.

On impulse, he made a decision—one of the best, though it would be viewed by friends in London as one of
the worst, he ever made. “Then come with the others”—the usual staff—“just for a while.”

She stared at him.

He smiled. “It’s something ‘exceptional,’ like you said you wanted. You could return in three months when I go to Bath. There would still be plenty of time to make a wedding for you and Jim.”

It was another week before the “something exceptional” included sleeping in the master’s bed. It was not love in any romantic sense of the word. But he found himself caring about her, and she in her odd way watched out for him. Now and then, she preferred her own company for a night, and said so. Frequently, he came in late and didn’t disturb the sleeping body, already in his bed. Once he told her a lady might come home with him, a prediction that proved true—and also proved, for the sheer complications it brought by comparison, to be the last of his philandering among his own class for a long while. Margaret replied that she’d been needing a night to her own again anyway. They had a happy domestic affair. By day, she made the beds; by night, she added to their muss. The strange light and dark roles they played seemed to make her content. And the double life Graham led suited him perfectly. No one understood why he had such a “dull-witted country bumpkin” in his fashionable home, “such a graceless, loping woman.” And the secrets of her voluptuous body and sweet temper were enough to arm him through any social mayhem when he was without her.

He really quite missed her when he moved to Bath and she back to Netham. He found a rather fine crystal punch bowl and cups, which he sent as a wedding gift. Then—a stroke of genius—much later he sent the little vase she had rescued from the parlor cabinet. For the punch bowl, he received a sincere and formal letter of thanks, dictated then
signed by Margaret with her mark, a perfect
M
. He saw her one more time alone. She was by then a married woman, poised and confident, the wife of a successful farmer come to call on the local lord to thank him personally for such a “’ceptional gift”: the small vase with its Etruscan lines. Simple, but pure and beautiful at heart.

As an odd postscript, the same little vase had recently made its way back into Graham’s possession. Jim had given over the lot of Margaret’s things to the local church when she’d died (of unknown causes, in her sleep) just the previous year. The vase had been among these articles when the church had had its annual fair. Graham had purchased it for a third its value. He was rather touched to find it was among her “personal things.” Her husband Jim did not remember where it had come from.