Black Silk (9 page)

He sat her into a chair, then did a double take. “Lady Motmarche.” He was surprised to find her sitting suddenly in the midst of his picture. He recovered smoothly. “How nice. You have to sit
very
still.”

She got up immediately. “I would like to talk to you.”

“Talk,” he said.

She followed him over to the camera, which stood on stilts. By now he had the photographer posing in the picture. He was operating the camera himself. He ducked under its black cloth. Submit was left talking to a hooded head and left hand. As the hand offered her a box of matches, she noticed it had three rings on it.

“Here. You know what you’re doing. Step back when you light that stuff on the tray.”

His right hand moved a tray toward her. This hand wore two more rings, one an arabesque of rubies that wrapped around like a red snake.

Submit’s eyes dropped down to the red vest hanging out so brilliantly from beneath the camera’s black cloth. His vest, like the one last night, was dripping with gold watch chains.

“I would like,” she said, “to look into your face when I speak to you.”

He laughed. “Fine. Come under here.”

Everyone in the room laughed.

Submit drew back. She spoke more softly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Can you see me later?”

Graham Wessit lowered his voice as well. “Where would you like to meet?”

Her skin prickled. “I—um—” For a moment, she couldn’t speak.

Behind her, the photographer’s helper took the matches
from her hand and whistled loudly. “Ay! She’s after your cockles, ya’ know. Ain’t she a funny one to flock after yooo—”

The room exploded in light. Submit saw spots. She breathed in a smell of burnt chemicals—magnesium. It was foul. The air was thick with smoke. When she focused on Graham Wessit again, he had pulled his head out from under the cloth. He threw her a brief, puzzled frown.

Submit’s patience left. “Maybe I should go—”

“Don’t be sensitive. He was just having fun.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

His frown darkened. “Then maybe you should.”

“Should what?”

“Go.” He added, “And take everything you brought with you.”

The box. She’d wanted to ask about the box. But she said instead, “Fine. Maybe I should. Since I truly don’t know how to talk to a man who, on ten fingers, can wear five rings. You are absurd, do you know that?”

She didn’t even wait for his reaction. She walked out.

Graham was more wary of Submit Channing-Downes after that. Though she didn’t bother him anymore, neither did she leave as he’d suggested. Henry’s wife became Rosalyn’s houseguest, and not just for the night. The day after the incident over the camera, a load of trunks arrived—all Submit’s worldly, or at least undisputed, goods. It looked as though the widow were here to stay, and Graham could make neither heads nor tails of how this had come about.

Henry’s abrasive, enigmatic, strangely appealing little wife took up residence under the same roof as his own mistress. This seemed incredible to Graham, a situation too prickly, too strangely interesting, for him to do anything but circle. Then, as the real and bland events of day-to-day life made their inroads, the widow’s presence became almost theoretical. Only once, after the day of the camera, did Graham actually see her in the house, and then only from the back. He didn’t even realize who it was until she was quite well past—he recognized her by a distinctively brisk churning of taffeta. This characteristic sound was apparently something others noticed as well. The Black Fairy, Rosalyn called her. “An eerie one, that one,” she would say as Submit fluttered overhead on a staircase, disappearing with all the rustle and flurry of great, substantial dragonfly wings.

Henry’s widow was not just odd, Graham decided, she was otherworldly. Everyone in the house agreed. He was glad he had a more fun-loving and down-to-earth woman for his own.

A few days later, he was buttoning his pants, watching his fun-loving, down-to-earth woman fight her way through a
huge tangle of striped Indian muslin. Rosalyn had put the bottom of her dress over her head a moment ago. Now, from the inside, she was trying to find her way to the top. An arm poked through one sleeve. Still no head. Beyond the parlor door, Graham could hear an annoying racket. Carpenters were dismantling the façade in the ballroom that had been erected for Rosalyn’s gala party last week. Decorators were coming in today to paint over the walls. Her house was in a state. It had taken an act of premeditation for Graham to enter it this morning.

All for naught, so far as Graham was concerned. He was going to be late for an appointment with his lawyers. He had come here with the express intention of making himself and Rosalyn blissfully content for a few minutes. Instead, he and Rosalyn had fallen into what had amounted to little more than animal copulation. The rhythm and aesthetics of the whole thing had been roughly as pleasant as the saws and hammers grinding away in the background. Graham couldn’t imagine what had gone wrong.

Rosalyn’s head popped through her dress. Muslin dropped as far as her crinoline. It sat awkwardly in a bunch around her waist for a moment, then she shook the skirt down. Her dress was rumpled, but muslin was supposed to look that way. Graham glanced down at himself. The knees of his trousers were covered in red lint—bits of wool from her new carpet.

“My man is in the kitchen,” he said. “When you are presentable, I’ll call him. My trousers are a mess.”

She shrugged. “Whatever you wish.”

He looked at her, annoyed that she took a distant tone with him. The ungrateful creature. When he had just braved an army of servants and carpenters to make love—

No, he had just
nailed
Rosalyn, twice for good measure, in her front parlor. Conceivably, neither of them felt very satisfied. Not only had the outside world been a rattling nui
sance, the room inside had been no great help. Among tiny tables, stiff-backed chairs, and a skirted piano, there had been no place to do the deed properly. They had ended up on the floor. He’d taken his coat off to be comfortable, then Rosalyn had wanted his vest and shirt off as well. Her hands had a generally wonderful and unholy interest in the muscles of his belly. But now his elbows and forearms itched from rubbing on the thick, cut wool of the rug. Rosalyn couldn’t be much better off. He would not have traded the irritating itch on his arms for the same feel on his bare ass.

Graham fastened his collar with one hand, while digging down a chair cushion with the other for his bow tie. “I shouldn’t have come,” he said.

“You should have come yesterday.”

“With your servants getting into every room, cleaning every damned possession?”

“They weren’t cleaning every damned possession.”

Graham frowned at her, then asked, “Do all American women curse?”

“I was under the impression English gentlemen did not.”

“They restrain themselves. In front of ladies.”

“Damn your English snot!” She threw a cushion at him. “The only time I’m not a lady is in here, and you love it!”

That wasn’t quite true—at the moment he hated it. But she had made her point. He grew sullen.

Her voice broke. “You could have come the day before.”

“I was here, but I ended up playing croquet with Tilney. You were indisposed, as I recall. Feeding the cats, all ten million of them—you and the Black Fairy.” Graham was a little shocked to hear this mean name come out his own mouth.

“You
wanted
to play—beat—Tilney.”

“I didn’t.” He did. It was always hard not to clobber Tilney when he made some foolish challenge. Graham had been trouncing Tilney at nearly everything since he was ten years old.

“You did!”

“Maybe I did.” Some of Graham’s anger abated. “Why does Lady Motmarche feed your cats?”

Rosalyn was taken aback at this change of subject. “Out of gratitude, I suppose.”

“For what?”

“Well for—I don’t know. She needed a place to stay. I convinced her I didn’t mind her being here. It seemed the right thing to do.”

Graham was taken aback himself for several seconds. Then he gave a short laugh. “Yes.” He was humbled once more by Rosalyn’s directness. She was both mean and kind without worry for subtlety, unlike the widow who was so subtle and aloof that she was entirely undecipherable. “Well, I’m glad she’s finally let someone get in close enough to help.”

“I thought if I didn’t, you might.” Rosalyn paused. “Did you offer her the flat?”

Graham turned his back. He began to tie his tie as he faced a wall mirror. “Why would you even ask?”

“She inquired about it yesterday, asking Tilney if it were a proper flat, one you actually rented.”

It was, though Graham had occasionally been generous with the flat on Haymoore Street. He had allowed “close friends” to stay in it if they needed to. Several of those close friends, women, had stayed for extended periods of time.

“I mentioned it to her,” he said, after what was becoming an awkward pause. He gave the tie a sharp twist and pulled it through. “I don’t have a tenant for it right now, you know.”

In the mirror, she raised one eyebrow at him. “I know. Just see that you don’t.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “What? I’m not allowed to sleep with anyone else?” A little more harshly than he’d intended, he said, “And what about your damned husband? It
seems to me you might just crawl into bed with him every fortnight or so.”

Rosalyn’s look softened, as did her tone. “Do you want me to stop sleeping with my husband, Gray? I can, you know.”

Graham could think of only one way she might put her husband off. Only one legal way—and it was extremely legal. He had a quick, horrible presentiment of himself in court again, this time as co-respondent, the adulterous earl. He sighed and let the whole thing drop.

What hypocrisy, he thought. He wasn’t even sure he minded that she slept with her husband. He only minded that she should try to dictate to him how he use his own flat. Lord, they were both frazzled. Too busy. Too deprived. Both his life and hers had conspired against the physical side of their relationship for more than ten days—Graham had counted backward in surprise just this morning. This was why he had roared into the house, found Rosalyn, then dragged her into the first free room he could find. But now that they were finished, he was feeling more unsettled than before.

He picked up his vest and walked over to the cord by the wall. “Can I summon my manservant now?”

“You are always in a rush.”

“I’m going to be late to Temple Inn.”

Without a trace of a smile, she folded her arms. “You should have summoned your man half an hour ago,” she said. “Just think of the time you’d have saved.”

It occurred to Graham, as his carriage pulled away that day, that he and Rosalyn were not getting on as well as they should.

In fact, his remaining week in London seemed to be characterized by all that didn’t happen, didn’t work, that didn’t go as well as he’d planned. For one, Rosalyn wasn’t
staying in London. After cleaning up, there was the great, wonderful dither of closing up. The season was over. Rosalyn was to spend a fortnight with her husband in Kent before retiring for the summer to Graham and Nethamshire. Cleaning quickly gave way to the process of storing and throwing covers over everything. More and more Graham began to avoid Rosalyn’s house. It too closely paralleled the uproar in his own.

Graham was closing the living quarters of his London house as well. Like most with financial wherewithal to do so, he intended to spend the summer in the country. He was opening his house southwest of London in the rather amorphous region known as Nethamshire or Netham. There he would be entertaining a number of friends.

Once, as recently as eighty years ago, Netham had been a real place, a county in the southwest of England; the earldom had had its geographic corollary. During some political redivisioning, however, the land had lost its official designation. It now sat astride two counties, the name retaining meaning only for locals and certain Londoners who associated it with the earl. It was his territory, his domain, relegated to a kind of fictitious standing as a place to live, though he did in earnest own most of what had made up the county.

Somehow, all the places where Graham lived seemed to have this “other” dimension: “I live in a museum,” he told Rosalyn once, referring to his house in London. But he got no sympathy there. Rosalyn, in fact, loved to ride over at dusk, when all the tourists and guides had left, so she could step over the velvet cords. Her favorite naughtiness was to step up onto the platforms and invite him to make love on the exhibited beds. Daring romance, she called it; delusion, Graham complained to himself. He resented that she should be so thrilled with something about him that had nothing to do with him himself.

“On these stupid, musty platforms,” he accused her once, “you are making love to a myth, the English upper-class rake, as if I were a kind of obscene tourist attraction.”

At such comparisons, Rosalyn’s eyes only widened. “Oh, yes!” She stepped happily over the boundary line into the areas of his house he didn’t live in, into a public pretense he didn’t inhabit, leaving him on the other side of the ropes, feeling damned if he refused—alone—and damned if he did not. When he stepped over and made love to her, it was always with the growing unease that his whole life was somehow becoming roped off.

Or roped in. By the end of the month, it was clear that Graham was stuck in London, at least through June. The mess with the billiard table girl dragged on. Not only would he not be able to break for Netham early, as was his custom, but he was going to arrive late. All his guests would be there before him, which sent him into a sulk.

Normally he left before the end of the season to prepare for his summer guests. This was a trick he had learned. He’d found he could gracefully bow out of the last exhausting weeks of London social life by being fastidiously gracious himself. For the last three or four years, he’d been leaving early for Netham. This year, he had to make all the arrangements by messenger—which he found truly annoying—and which led to another grievance for his growing list: He couldn’t keep a full staff in London. It had always been convenient and more economical to keep a skeleton staff at Netham or in London and have the full retinue attached to himself and whichever house he was using at the moment. In this case, his regular household staff had to be broken down a little at a time and transferred ahead of him to Netham to prepare for his guests.

His cooks were the first to go, needing time for the planning and procuring of food in large quantities. The guests who would be joining him would initially number about
thirty, plus families. It was a gathering of a wholly different nature than anyone would find in London. Children, dogs, nannies. The thirty or so adults who brought these families with them were hand selected. Over the years, the group had been culled down to about two dozen friends Graham genuinely enjoyed and who seemed to enjoy his company in return. Besides these people, there were also a few who, whether they liked him or not, openly and unctuously courted his good graces. Graham’s summers were as blatantly weighted in his favor as his good conscience and self-respect would allow. He structured them purposely as a kind of antidote to the rigors and protocol of the London season. No testy dinner parties. No operas that put him to sleep. No dancing and talking in circles of etiquette. His summers were informal, he enjoyed them, he was himself—and he sent anyone packing who gave him a hard time over any of this.

The business with Tate and the paternity suit was at the top of Graham’s list of problems during those last weeks in London, though the words “top” and “list” were misleading. They implied an order, something the lawyer and his tactics defied. It was this that held Graham in the city and this that ultimately made him wild to leave. While he tried to organize the Netham house from eighty miles away, tried to close and yet live in an only marginally functioning household, and tried to see the bounding, romping Rosalyn off on not such a bad note that they couldn’t manage a better footing later, Mr. Tate, Esquire, shot through his every day with either worry for or the actuality of one of his legal machinations.

Though a trial had yet to commence, Tate had everyone marching into court for what seemed like endless technicalities. Each day seemed to bring a new hearing. Tate made a motion to dismiss, a motion for summary judgment, then various motions to strike for redundant then immaterial
then impertinent matter. In short, he convinced both sides, Graham included, that on a sheer procedural basis alone going to trial with him would be ghastly. Graham’s pugnacious new barrister intended to fight every inch of the way and on every level, it seemed—from procedure to rules of evidence to the merits, if they ever got to them. As if this weren’t enough, Tate had begun to interview Graham privately for details. “Why would she accuse you?” “How does she know you?” “Have you ever slept with any very young girls?” Graham hoped fervently that the other side was as intimidated and appalled by all this as he was.