Black Silk (31 page)

“Never took much notice of all them little knickknacks she kept. Though I saved one or two real nice things to, you know, sort of remind me. A bear someone give her made out a’ real seashells. A real nice toy man what dances when you tap a stick.”

People missed things. People didn’t notice; people didn’t care. People’s own misperceptions made black into white, made grey into whatever they wanted it to be. Graham began to think it was all fiction. Life was much less fixed than people imagined it to be. Then the thought of Margaret brought him back. She was a fixed point, someone he felt he had known, though briefly, truly well.

Margaret wasn’t just a housemaid. And he wasn’t, Graham decided as he came up the terraced land into the apple orchard, just a rake. Not even if all the world pointed at him and said he was so. No one knew him as well as he knew himself. He had been tumbled a little by events. He had brought a lot of those events down upon himself. But he
was essentially lucky and happy and rich—in many more ways than in just money or status. There might not be a soul alive who cared or understood, but he knew—at least for a few moments in late evening on a warm summer night—and understood himself.

Graham heard an unfamiliar noise.
Chk, chk, chk.
He jumped at the sound, rolled, then hit something. Too warm for a pillow. A hip beneath covers.

“Roz?” he whispered, jostling the firm pile of bedclothes.

“Mmm,” came a sleepy acknowledgment.

The mountain of hips and comforters sank. The whole bed moved and creaked. A white arm stretched out from the covers. Then the room was thrown into abrupt darkness, as if heavy curtains had suddenly dropped at the window by the bed. In reality, dark, quick-traveling clouds crossed a three-quarter moon. For flickering instants, the bed was pitch black. Then the light started to break again, a livid ghost-imitation of dawn. Graham looked over Rosalyn’s hip.

Outside, silver trees bent. White-tipped grass ruffled in waves. The lake reflected choppy shadows, boats anchored in liquid, rolling moonlight. Everything rocked and swayed, strangely lit by a cloudy-bright moon in a starless sky. Graham stared out the window, listening for a few seconds to the windows in his bedroom vibrate in the gusts of wind. No, this was not the noise that had awakened him.

A complete pass of clouds opened the room up again to a lurid brightness. Under the canopy of the bed, the air felt stagnant. A dampness clung to the tangle of bedding: the
sour smell of animals, fornication, territorial rights, as if a cat had sprayed his sheets. An hour or so ago, Graham’s skin had become uncomfortably cool. He had pulled these sheets over him. Now, perspiring, his skin was crawling to be free of them. He flung off his covers, then tried to remove Rosalyn’s, pulling at them, pushing her.

“I thought you’d left, Roz. Go on. See yourself to your rooms.”

“What?” she said groggily.

“Go.” He shoved at a shoulder.

“Mm-m,” she groaned. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I just want to spread out. I can’t sleep.”

She grumped incoherently, then seemed to doze off again. He was about to shake her when he was distracted by the unidentifiable noise once more. Not a rattling, but a scritch-scratching, shooshing sound. Both gentle and explicitly crisp, like taffeta or organdy would rustle if one grasped a handful and shook it. He raised himself up on his elbows. It took a moment to realize it was a tree outside making the noise, an old oak up against the house at the far window. One of its leafy branches sporadically brushed and screeched on the glass.

He looked over at Rosalyn. Her face was a series of changing shadows, her hair a distinct spread of purple on the greyish sheets and pillows. With a prickly sensation, he realized a prehensile coil of hair was wrapped around his forearm. By rotating his hand, he held a shank of hair in his fist. For some reason, he wanted to give it a hard tug. Or—he wondered what she’d do—find scissors and cut it off.

He rearranged his covers until only a sheet was over him. He looked back at Rosalyn. She had retrieved one of her loose nightshifts. She was tucked into the voluminous folds of one that reminded him of a fully rigged sailing ship. Large-boned Rosalyn strung and tied into wide, flap
ping pieces of cloth. Furled and vacant in sleep now. His own nightshirt was nowhere to be found. He fidgeted some more, poking through the covers. Pulling himself all the way out of bed, he found his trousers and shirt on the floor.

As he stepped into his pants, he saw Rosalyn curl back into a ball of hips and rump. The leaves again shooshed, a strident voice for the resentment he felt looking at the woman still in his bed, more comfortable there than he had been. He sat down beside Rosalyn, nudging her with an elbow as he fastened the cuffs of his sleeves.

“Rosalyn, wake up. I want you to leave.”

“God, Graham,” she groaned and stretched. “What time is it?”

“I don’t know. Late. No, early. Morning, I suppose.” As she settled into stillness again, he shook her shoulder. “Rosalyn, wake up.”

“Why, in heaven’s name?”

“I want you to get out of here.”

“No you don’t.” She put her face in the pillow. “You’re still angry with me for this evening. But I’m better now.” The pillow slightly muffled her laugh. “Honestly.” She added, “It’s just that she’s such a tiny crow of a woman.”

He was silent a moment. “Come on, it has nothing to do with that. I want you to go.”

“Why?” She turned toward him.

“It’s my bed. I can ask you to get out of it if I want to.”

“They’re all your beds in this house. Are you going to assign someone else this one?”

He sighed loudly, air coming from between compressed lips. “In the middle of the night? Don’t start this again.”

“You’re starting it. Leave me alone.” She rolled back.

“Rosalyn, I want you to go to your own bed.”

In a vehement whisper, she said, “This is my bed, damn
you. And after this afternoon, I’m guarding it. No less than five people told me you went running over to that woman the moment she appeared. And lay with her. Up toward the orchard where no one could see very well—”

“It seems five people managed to see—”

“You visited her at that bloody inn. Everyone knows that. And for a while, after everyone came in, no one could find either one of you. Where were you? Are you rogering that little goat?”

“A minute ago, she was a crow.”

“I just remembered the hair under her chin. An undernourished little goat who….” She went on.

Graham smiled faintly at Rosalyn, always carefully observant of other women. He thought of the widow, of the fine golden-white down that ran along her neck, across her cheeks, then blinked in her thick-tufted lashes. He had a sudden curiosity for more golden hair. Was it on her arms? Across her belly? Lower? Would the mound between her legs be—as Rosalyn never meant to suggest, but had—pale fur, like the cream-colored, bony butt of a kid-goat? The golden fleece.

Angrier still, Rosalyn grabbed his arm. “Graham, damn you—”

He gave an exasperated sigh. “For your information, I have never so much as kissed Submit Channing-Downes.”

She was silent. He turned back to the buttons on his sleeve. In speaking the name, he had somehow made the widow materialize almost tangibly between them. She hung in the conversationless space, her importance implied in a curious elliptical manner, as with the tiny black asterisks that marked an omission in a novel, indicating the good parts were being left out to keep it clean.

A convention Rosalyn was not about to observe. She was crisply awake, bearing down in a cogent whisper. “You
did
lie with her. I saw—”

He laughed. “I drank some of her champagne. We talked.”

“I know about your kind of conversation. I remember our first talk, in a dismal little carriage.”

“Different.”

“Was it? You suggested we go there to talk, remember?”

“I was drunk.”

“I was married.”

“You still are,” he said. “Besides, I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t care.”

“Not caring is the whole point of being drunk, Rosalyn. Come on, go to your own bed. No remonstrations so long after the fact.”

“I remember you only cared about one thing in that damned carriage. You didn’t speak three words. And all your huffing and panting—”

“Rosalyn. You don’t need to be told how pretty you are. And I don’t need to be reminded. I’ve huffed and panted for you regularly since then. But right now I’m thinking of sleep.”

“I’m prettier by a gross than that milk-faced, stiff-backed crow.”

“For Christ’s sake, a crow again. Rosalyn—”

“And she’s older than I am, I’m sure of it.”

“Stop it. It is pure self-deception to call her old or ugly. But if it will help matters, I don’t think, even if I did offer to ‘talk’ to her, that she would succumb. Least of all on the floor of a carriage.”

She made a tight little sound of indignity. “You gave me precious little choice on that carriage floor.”

“That seems like a pretty poor place to be making one—” Catching himself, he said, “This is not our best reminiscence. Why dwell on it? I simply want the privacy of my own bed. Get up—”

“And there was no yelling for your mouth. And your hands and body—God, you were hungry and frightening.”
Her mood changed. Plausibly, this was one of
her
better reminiscences. A small laugh rolled from her dark pillow.

Graham got up from the bed. “I never had the impression that you were about to call for help.”

“Don’t be wounded.”

“I’m anything but wounded. I don’t like it when you get coy.”

“I’m just playing with you and your lovely male ego.” She
tsk
ed. “So sensitive.”

He shook his head silently. “Have you seen my shoes?”

The bed swayed and creaked behind him. “This damn bed,” she mumbled. “It makes me seasick.”

“A tribute to you, I keep saying. Sprung like a carriage. My shoes, have you seen them?”

“It’s not sprung like a damned carriage. It moves everywhere.” She sighed. “Come back. I think you are just about irritated enough for me to want to love you.” He turned, saw her arms reaching out to him from the bed. “Come take me, Gray. Like you did in the carriage. Throw me off balance on this stupid contraption and play drunk and unruly.”

“If you don’t like the bed…” He lost track. His shoes weren’t anywhere on the floor. He tried to pick up what he’d been saying as he got down on his hands and knees. “And I won’t take you. In fact, I want to send you back.”

To your own bed, is what he’d meant. But as he was feeling under the bedstead, he realized she’d taken it more broadly. The conversation had become chopped off.

He peered up over the bed. The only trace that Rosalyn was alive was the rise and fall of breathing covers. For an instant, these became violet-hued in the drifting light from the window.

Her voice sounded empty and far away. “Well. I asked to be ravished, didn’t I?” She paused, then in a tighter voice said, “You really need to work on when to sound sin
cere and when not to, Gray. Some anger in your voice would have helped immensely just now.” She took another breath. “Oh, God.” A moment later, she added, “It
is
her, isn’t it?”

It was a relative certainty, from the little pauses and wavers, that she was crying. Still barefoot, Graham pulled himself up to sit on the bed. He seemed to have stumbled into an untimely and inappropriate discussion of their relationship. Silently, he vacillated as to which way to go, whether to try to call back his words or launch further into the troubled waters of disentanglement: He felt ankle-deep in mismanagement.

“You’re taking me very seriously tonight,” he observed.

“Well, you are, aren’t you?”

“What? Serious?”

“Finished with me—” There was a weepy catch at the end.

“That’s a nice thing to say.” A pause. “No. I’m not entirely sure this is anything more than petty bickering. Why are you so sure?”

“I don’t know.” He could barely hear her. She was speaking, muffled, into the covers. “It’s just a sense I have lately. As if I were talking to—sleeping with—a wall. Or a cloud of smoke. Everything I say or do seems to pass right through you. Like tonight on the dock.”

“During the fireworks?”

Mimicking his innocent tone, she repeated, “Yes, ‘during the fireworks.’ When I asked for some answers about your little picnic up in the garden.”

“Your questions were stupid.”

“You could have ended the stupidity with just a word of denial, some reassurance.”

“Why? You were so enjoying going on and on. For God’s sake, Rosalyn, what could I say? You weren’t rational. Fuming and crying over nothing.”

“It wasn’t over nothing—”

“It was. You had it in your mind to spin some excitement into an otherwise easy night, a prodigious quarrel meant mainly for an audience. It was premeditated melodrama. I simply refused to play the part assigned.”

“Damn it, Graham—”

“And neither will I do so now, so don’t raise your voice.”

Very quietly, with each phrase punctuated by a little squeak and bounce of the bed, she said, “You stupid. Sodding. Son of a bitch.”

Then inexplicably, she deteriorated. He had to wait some minutes to be able to talk over the hiccoughing and sobbing and sniffing.

The crying, the defenselessness of it, scattered his senses and left him feeling unfairly debilitated. “Rosalyn, I’m not prepared for this sort of discussion. We need to talk, but I haven’t thought it out—”

“I have.”

She moved violently, a cyclonic whirl of bedding. Something hit him. His shoe. He stared, amazed at the sudden appearance of the lost item.

“Where did this come from?”

The other one hit him, thumping on his collarbone.

Bewildered, he asked, “What? Are you sleeping with my shoes?”

“They were here on the chair. I put them in bed with me a moment ago.”

“In bed with you?”

“Never mind. You can have them now,” she answered in a taut, sharp whisper.

The exchange made no sense to him. He felt exposed suddenly, as the strange night brightness flushed the room again. Rosalyn was hunkered down in the covers, her figure so etiolated by light, shadow, and bedding that the woman had all but disappeared. Then, even that much of her vanished. The clouds moved, and the room, like a run of ink, seeped black.
A draft blew through. In his lap, Graham’s shoes were still warm from their cozy stay beneath the covers.

Gratuitously, her disembodied voice offered, “I hate you.”

“No you don’t.”

“No, I don’t, but I’d like to.” The smallest bit of light from the window showed she was again, for no discernible reason, composed. Something to do with the shoes, he thought. He fiddled with the top flap on one.

“So,” she continued, “what will you do once I’ve made my final scene?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, will you go after what’s-her-name, the crow?”

“I meant, what do you mean by ‘final scene’?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Just one last little melodrama.” He heard a catch in her voice, a betraying throwback to her crying several moments before. “Won’t you cooperate with me this once? I know I can’t, for my life, pretend to be calm. Can you see me sweetly waiting for my carriage beside all my trunks? I’d be shaking and weeping if—” More softly, she said, “Please. Let’s make one last, great, tumultuous scene—”