Bound by Your Touch (33 page)

Sophie lowered herself to the opposite side of the mattress. "It sounds very cruel," she admitted. "But it was not meant to be so! I was young, and afraid to tell you. And who was there to ask for advice? Aunt Augusta was dotty. Ana was in pigtails. It was too private to put to my friends."

It was the soundest explanation she'd ever offered. Lydia appreciated the effort. If only she could believe it. "We talked about him all the time. If you had screwed up your courage, I would have forgiven you. It would have hurt me terribly, but it would not have been
your
fault that Georges affections had shifted."

Sophie had gone very white.
"You
might have forgiven me," she said faintly. "But Papa would not have done. He never would have allowed it, Lydia."

She shook her head, her befuddlement slowly shifting to shocked comprehension. "You can't
seriously
mean that Papa would have stopped your marriage?"

Sophie gave her a disbelieving smile. "To the man his darling little Lydia had fallen in love with? Of course. I have no doubt whatsoever."

"My God." Lydia put her knuckles to her mouth. "How . . . horrible for you. He loves you. You're his
daughter.
You—"

"Oh, do not condescend to me!" Sophie leaped to her feet and strode around the bed. "What ofyo«? Running off the way you did before the wedding? Did Papa ever console me for the scandal
you
created? The stares and the snickers we received?"

"Who do you think endured the brunt of those stares? Idid!"

¹¹
You?
No one cared enough about you to bother looking! I was the one who suffered. It overshadowed the wedding entirely! Everyone asking where you were, where Papa was, and all the time with the most horrible, knowing smirks! Imagine that: having to explain your own father's absence, having to lie when everyone already knows the real story. Perhaps I
should
have told the truth: that as far as Papas concerned, he only has one daughter—Ana and I are orphans!"

There were advantages to height. As Lydia rose, Sophie had to look up to meet her
eyes.
"Is
that
the real reason you did it? You wanted revenge against me for being his favorite?" As Sophie rolled her eyes, another intuition struck. "Or you wanted his whole attention," she said more slowly.
"That's
it, isn't it? You'd be the first to marry, which makes you special. Better yet, you'd marry the man Papa knew I had hopes for. What better way to win his attention, than to show him that another man had judged you worthier? Oh," she said softly. "But it didn't turned out as you planned, did it? Papa was with me. He never witnessed your triumph."

Sophies
eyes
shifted beyond her, fixing on nothing as she sank back down to the bed. "No," she said, but she sounded uncertain.

There was little chanty left in Lydia. But this was only the truth. "Papa very much wanted to be at your wedding. He talked of nothing but you, that day." He had recounted endless stories of her and Sophie s childhood, of the time when Sophie had been her greatest friend and admirer.

"One
day?" Sophie gave a curt laugh. "My. How generous of him." And then she gave a small shake of her head, and her shoulders slumped. "Lydia—really. All of it was—it was not to
hurt
you, precisely. That is— sometimes I feel angry with you, but I know that makes no sense. What reason have I to envy you? None, really. I would hate to be alone—although I know you do not mind it," she added quickly, as Lydia bit down on an incredulous smile. "But I am different than you. I could never be content with books and studies. And I would care very much if gentlemen found me plain. I do not think myself shallow for it. It's not wrong to enjoy being well-liked." She hesitated, then shrugged. "So what care should I have for Papa? I have so much that you don't. Perhaps it's only fair that you have him."

Lydia rose and walked to the door. One hand on the knob, she spoke calmly. "Papa is not yours to give, Sophie. And if you feel that I'm in need of charity from
you,
then you have made a mistake in tallying our accounts. You do have a great deal, but like all spoiled children, you criticize and abuse every gift you receive. Only here's the rub: you aren't a child, and the gift you abused this weekend isn't a toy. It's your marriage. If you break it, it can't be replaced."

She let herself out. In the hallway she took a deep, cleansing breath. The air in the little bedroom was stuffy, choked with perfume. How could Sophie stand to lie in there for hours at a time? No wonder she had headaches. Of her own accord, she made a prison for herself, and a punishment. She was blinding herself to any real possibilities; if she continued like this, she would never be happy.

I am so much luckier.

The thought seemed foreign and startling. But it was true: as she started for the stairs, she felt lucky. It seemed she was not done with dreaming, after all. The fears that had embarrassed her on Mrs. Ogilvie's rooftop seemed very dim to her now. And she did not feel too old or wizened to gamble with her heart. After all, what was dignity compared to
xhc
chance for happiness? It was only another sort of prison—respectable, sterile, and cowardly.

A smile came over her. She laughed out loud. So
this
was what it felt like when logic and instinct accorded. Ana was well set. There was nothing she could do for Papa at present. But with unshakable certainty, she knew what she must do for herself.

Dusk fell over London like cool, soft hands, cupping the city in blue darkness. He blinked up at the sky through the glass walls of his conservatory. The flowers were in bud on the acacia trees.
Did you know they smell sweet?
The clarity of their edges fascinated him. A drink would solve that, he supposed. He liked to be drunk by twilight. The evening they had come to tell him, it had been dusk A sky the shade of drowned, deadened lips. Elizabeth had been at the piano, playing some tinny tune—a sharp tinkling of notes, a cold melody on the high end of the scale. All the carpets taken up for beating. Beneath his feet the floorboards had squeaked, thick with new wax.

His father had not bothered to come. A piece of paper from the gloved hand of a man whose name he'd never learned: that was how he'd found out.

It had been unusually cold that spring, the branches still bare. They'd scratched at the glass, a complaining counterpoint to Elizabeth's tune. Black ink against cream linen, the seal not even fully dry yet. It split open beneath his fingers like rotten fruit, disgorging a stark, brief message. He'd read it four times, five. Still the essence eluded him. Printed, inarguable, baffling.

Stellas husband was dead by her hand. Stella herself was badly wounded—insensate—not expected to survive the night.

Amazing to think such horrors might occur so casually, on such a tedious evening. From one moment to the next, as he'd sat in the window and sipped his drink and watched the sun set over St. James's Park and all the black spiderlike trees blur and condense into a thicker line of darkness, she'd faced a horror. Lonely and terrified. Blood everywhere. Stairs rushing up, her own screams filling her ears.

Had she thought of him, in those moments? She had asked him to save her. Not a week before, in this very room.

And after the fall? As she lay in insensibility, had her spirit wandered past him? He'd been bored, sitting in the window, and a little fretful at Elizabeth's single-minded pursuit of the melody.
Pedestrian,
he'd thought.
Will you never learn to play with both hands?
Such selfish, petty, smug, arrogant thoughts.

For four years, he'd spent a great deal of time hoping she hadn't been aware. She had fallen down the stairs into soft black tranquillity, a holiday from life. She had not tried to cry out for him, only to find herself imprisoned in dumb, agonized flesh. So he told himself.

But he'd never dared ask. Not by letter, not during their one brief meeting at that hellhole she'd been in before Kenhurst. Regardless, he did not like to be sober at twilight.

He glanced down at the glass of water in his hand. Why should he be sober at such a time? There was nothing kind about the passing of the sun. A cold that leached the land of color. The immense, haunting sadness of twilight was not (he thought) only a product of his personal experience. It was simply an elemental truth—one that he had grown sensitized enough to perceive. Twilight was the hand of night, pressing onto earth a darkness that would eventually consume them all.

"You look unwell."

The flinch was full-bodied, but he did not turn. After all,
damn her,
there was no need for him to always look
well.
This was his home. He could do as he liked. "How did you slip past Gudge?"

"Your butler? He let me in."

"Remind me to fire him."

Lydia sighed. It was an unhappy sound, and a dim, silenced part of him stirred in discomfort.
A host is always gracious. A guest is always honored. Be kind to the ones you love.

But—old lessons, old manners, which he'd shelved along with all the rest. The lies he'd liked to believe; the memories that no longer made sense: Stella's happy laughter, her hand curving trustingly over his arm. Or the scent of his fathers chest, pressed to his nose so long ago: cigar smoke, starch, vetiver water. Astonishing to think that those smells had once comforted him.

She still stood there. Her silence was like the hand of twilight: it pressed on him more loudly than her words had done. "Be gone," he said.

"No. I must speak with you."

"Must you?" Something ugly and malicious entered his voice. "I wonder. Do you actually know how to speak your thoughts?"

After a moment, she said, "I don't follow you."

Yes, of course she didn't. She required logic, rules, huge crimson arrows. Feeling had no part in her brain's operation. She had no ability to chart the wide spaces that might open between two people who shared a history—or, for that matter, the dark terrains inside herself. He took a sip of the water. Thin, dull stuff.
^
Well, he would spell it out for her. "You're angry," he said. "You're starting to realize I'm right. Your father had a hand in this. But you still can't bring yourself to believe it."

"I'm not angry at all, James." But her voice trembled. "I am . .. hopeful."

"Oh? So then you've come in the hopes that I'll retract my decision." He made his voice hard. She would hear the words: he could make her do that much. "You see that I was a help to you. So you
hope
I might help you again. Of course, you know I probably won't. You've realized, for all my faults, that I say what I mean. So you've come prepared to bargain. With your body, I assume? What a sacrifice, Miss Boyce. This time your gamble might bear consequences."

"You have it wrong."

"Then damn me to hell for accusing you. Curse me to Hades—that is the way you would phrase it, I expect. Or tell me I'm a sodding bastard, if you've got the vocabulary. But I beg you, do not scrape and bow to me. If you put your head down by my feet, I'm as likely to kick it as thank you for the courtesy."

Her inhalation was audible. "What a low opinion you have—"

"On the contrary," he said, and his laughter stirred the water as he lifted it again. "I consider you the epitome of good
ton.
Posturing and all."

"A low opinion of
yourself,"
she finished. "And to imagine I would let you kick me! Really, James—and you call
rne
foolish."

He considered again the glass in his hand. A very fine piece of crystal, straight from Waterford—the product of England's finest cruelties against the Irish. This was the sort of thing his father fought for, in his endless crusade to crush Home Rule. But its beveled edges were not so fine. They grated, suddenly, against the oversensitized pads of his fingers, as if all the blood in his body were pooling in his hands, stretching the skin out past the flesh's endurance. He had felt this as a boy, in the north country. It had snowed, and he and Stella had raced about, tunneling into their very own igloos, building snowmen to keep the devil away. How cold they had been. How rosy, how deliciously amused by themselves.

That little girl lived now in a prison, behind locks whose keys she did not possess, watched and fed and tended to like a pet mouse.

"I need you," she said. "Not for him. For—myself."

"How unfortunate," he said quietly.

Now there was the rusding of skirts, and it kicked up her smell, that distinctive blend of vanilla and violets, lavender and roses—an entire moving garden with a kitchen thrown in for good measure, and God save the allergic. "I am willing to bargain," she said.

The liquid sloshed onto his knuckles. "Large of you. But I advise you to trade elsewhere."

"Oh." The soft word held a queer hitch. He looked up. And saw, in the next moment, that she had been crying.

Her face arrested him. An invisible fist punched between his ribs to take hold of his heart. It held him in place as he stared at her. Her dark hair a nimbus around her pale face, the violet sky behind her a flag that signaled every horrid memory he sought to disown. "God," he said, and only became aware when the word reached his ear that his lips had moved at all. "Lydia— for God's sake. Cry elsewhere. Cry for someone who wants to be swayed."

"I can't help it." Her head lowered. And there was the part of her hair, straight and fine and white and bold against the dark waves, cutting through them like a flag of truce. His breath went from him as her forehead settled against his knee. "I can't let either of you go," she said, her voice low and miserable. "And I don't know how to help you."