Cupids (15 page)

“Only one,” I tell her. The blood rushing in my ears feels like a river about to burst its banks. “And I wonder if I may crave your aunt's indulgence for a moment and ask for a brief private interview with you.”

For the first time I turn to Mrs. Egret. The kiss of hot shame upon my face tells me it is more out of fear of looking directly at Eliza than in courtesy to the old woman that I have switched my gaze. Mrs. Egret does not look up, nor does her posture alter save for a slight bending of the shoulders and rising of the needles and wool as though in extra attention to the task.

“You may not crave my aunt's indulgence,” says Eliza with entrail-withering decisiveness. Do I see a slight frown come into and then pass from Mrs. Egret's expression?

I turn to Eliza. A faint yellow star appears and disappears in the line of my eyes. My vision of Eliza tilts and then corrects. “My aunt, dear sir, is now my closest legal confidant and counsel. I cannot discuss matters of great importance without her wise advice.”

I steady myself quickly, rooting my feet upon the floor.
Great importance
, she said. Her gaze in my direction is earnest, direct and intelligent. Is this not the very manner in which a sensible woman would wish to receive a proposal of marriage — especially one she means to seriously entertain? Would she also not need the company of the one who would be first from whom the couple must seek consent — particularly if the answer is yes?

The urge to kneel returns and this time I find my legs obeying. Eliza's eyes widen as I descend and draw closer.
Widen
, I note; the very word signifies an opening and an acceptance.

“Dearest Eliza,” I begin, thankful of the clearness and the confidence in my voice. Mrs. Egret's needles beat a steady and somewhat comforting rhythm, and I wonder if it's possible that the old lady has spoken to her niece in my favour already. “For ‘dearest Eliza' is how I intend to address you for evermore if you should look favourably upon my most humble and sincere of suits.” I meet the unmoving clearness of her gaze with my own. The blue in her eyes contracts and expands in wave-like motions at the expense of the black within, and there is something fine and delicious in her inscrutability, something delightful in the maturity that does not giggle or run in triumph to a gaggle of friends but listens as one adult to another. “I ask you, dear Eliza, to do me the very great honour of becoming my wife.”

The words are swallowed by silence, save for the clink of Mrs. Egret's knitting. Eliza's bottom lip twitches slightly. I wonder if my speech was perhaps rather too short, but gathering the strands and finding a way back in after such an obvious climax seems beyond me, at least for the moment. Then something takes me by surprise, something so swift, so unaccountable that at first I imagine a dove has scooped in through the window and flown wing-first into my left ear and cheek. It is only when I notice that the blow was undeniably connected to a movement of Eliza's right arm, when my ear sings in a manner that recalls punishment in the schoolroom, and when I look to see that no dove lies stricken at my knees, that I realize the true explanation. No sooner has my brain begun to absorb this than the same thing occurs a second time, this time slowly enough to appreciate and follow the event as it unfolds. Her arm is raised. Her hand sweeps through the air and smacks hard against the left side of my head. My ear sings another, slightly higher note, and the two remain in harmony as one rises and another fades.

One hope stirs, feeble at first like a dying leaf in winter, but gaining strength already from the rich nutrients of my imagination. I have heard it said that in women anger and love are close in kinship, and that violence cannot exist in the bosom of woman without the presence of other passions. For the moment, though, silence reigns. One of my knees scrapes against the floor in preparation for rising. Words once more begin to tumble before I can stop and weigh them.

“I feel I must crave your forgiveness, my Lady. I had no intention of offending.” My body rises like some dead thing animated by an unnatural far-off force, shoulders sloping, hands like numb claws.

“How could you do anything but offend?” Her voice, though quiet enough, carries the strength of venom. “You, who try to make love when the whole city is in mourning, you, with hands soiled with the grime of work, you who presume so far above your station merely because you have the good fortune to administer the funds of your superiors. How could you be so deceived to think the daughter of the gentleman who has supped with the traders of Venice and Tuscany could even look upon one who commands only a few dozen men and toils with pigs and goats?”

The final word is spat out with more contempt than I would have thought possible for such an innocent and nondescript animal. The burgeoning hope about anger and passion which had begun to twitch into new life is suddenly limp and dead. As I turn to leave, one ear still singing, Mrs. Egret's needles still clicking quietly in the other, I realize that I myself now drag a mountain of thwarted passion and there is nowhere in the world where I may place it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Bartholomew

S
PRING IS PALPABLE NOW
. Ghostly fingers of mist rise on the road beyond Guy's home. I'm not sure why I should feel so responsible, but deep inside me is some fretting parent awaiting the return of a foolish child.

Helen draws to the window beside me.

“We should get ready to leave,” I tell her. My breath fogs the pane.

“We're almost packed,” she replies, and I can sense a question hovering in the air between us like a cloud of mosquitoes. It is
the
question, perhaps, the one I have somehow managed to evade for six days. “I wanted to thank you,” she says, and momentarily I'm wrong-footed.

“Thank me?” I whisper. She draws closer to my shoulder and I feel my body half turn in response. “What for?”

“I've been afraid to talk about it before, afraid of giving any voice to the deed.”

“You are right to leave the deed in silence.”

“Then I will talk only of its prelude: the slates — your method of drawing lots.”

I was right. It is
the
question. I am fastened to the spot and the dust of my evasion swirls in vain searching for an escape.

“I remember your trick with the pendant, and with the sovereign.”

“Yes?”

“You could easily have dictated who received the slate marked ‘M.'”

I pause, reluctant to give voice to the admission.

“I want to thank you for not choosing me.”

A small, involuntary laugh of reprieve bounces from me. This is not quite the question I was dreading, but it's close enough. “You are more than welcome, Helen,” I say, hoping to distract her with the ardour in my voice. “I would hardly foist such a task upon my own future wife.”

“I knew it was deliberate, of course,” she says, “and this is what makes it so puzzling.” I see her breath also mist the glass as she draws even closer and looks upon the road. Guy is making his way along the street, a small, wounded bull with uncertain gait and startled eyes. His shoulders dip menacingly at those who pass by him. He appears to ignore acquaintances who touch their hats in salute.

“Puzzling?” I ask, but I know she needs no encouragement. Even with the distraction of Guy, she will not be shaken from this quest.

“That Mr. Guy's slate was also clean.”

Now she turns to me and I feel her warm breath upon my cheek. My eyes remain on Guy who turns, blundering, into the pathway toward the house.

“I can't explain.” My voice — thin and curiously detached from the mouth that hosts it — gives me the odd notion that it is not only Helen who is owed this missing explanation, but also myself.

The first wisp of an answer comes not in words but in a sensation: a man's hot gasp on my neck, the bristling of my own hairs. Then I hear that voice —
you think you're better
than us?
— and the weight of a trembling hand upon my arm. The queasy memory tumbles into the glitter of ambition in Guy's face at the Crossroads Tavern, and his question posed with equal parts timidity and excitement:
If you yourself
were in my position, how would you proceed
?

“I knew Guy couldn't handle it.”

“Handle what?”

“The memory of a crime committed by his own hand.”

I weigh the explanation while Guy's footsteps scuff upon the gravel before the house. It is perhaps a half-truth. The rest is murkier, a sense that I am already covered in the grime of other men's desires, that I am, and always will be, the natural receptacle of sin. “It's fate, that's all,” I add feebly as the thud of the slamming front door vibrates through the house.

“It's my crime, not yours,” she says, and I feel the warmth of her hand upon my arm. I can't disentangle any meaning from her words, but the implied union of souls and her touch recalls me to the promise between us, a vow unforced and unsullied, and soon to go before a priest. Uneasiness itches like ten dozen grubs crawling upon my flesh. The upcoming ceremony feels like the laying of finest silk upon carrion. I remember how my fingers puckered up folds of Helen's nightdress at the Crossroads Tavern, only to be distracted by . . . what? The business at hand? Or something else? It was surely my own unfitting which intervened when my longings came close to reaching their goal. A sullied cloak of other men's desires lies between Helen and I.

An animal yell, mighty and terrifying, comes from the hallway. Only as it dies away do I recognize the sound of my own name.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Guy

M
Y HEAD IS BURSTING
, and I scarce know what words will come. Bartholomew follows me obediently enough into my study. The soft metred creak of his footfalls, the implied innocence of that smooth yet worried face, enrages me even more.

I make my way around the desk and stand behind it, stooping toward him, knuckles upon its surface. “So, I will be the very wellspring of pleasure to Eliza? True affection is sure to follow comfort?”

“Sir?” His eyes search me like a young deer sniffing a fern.

“Your words!” I yell, leaning harder upon my fists to prevent the tremble of rage.

“Things did not go well with Miss Eliza?”

“The sting of her hand is upon my face.”

He tilts his head regretfully and sighs.

“You don't seem surprised.”

He shrugs. “She is her father's daughter.”

“Meaning?”

He gives an embarrassed smile. “She means to secure the best and most comfortable of everything for herself with the least effort.”

The earnestness of his expression, his wide blue eyes, his hands outstretched, all begin to drain my moral outrage. I have to remind myself of his duplicity. He seemed absolutely certain of my success with Eliza before the act was committed; now he is far too quickly resigned to my failure, so quickly resigned indeed that it is impossible to believe he was ever as confident as he pretended. “You told me that the young do not look beyond the season they are in.”

The reproach seems childlike upon my lips. The stoop in my shoulders that felt like an animal preparing to charge seems now like a self-pitying cringe. How many times has this young rogue seen the soft flesh quivering behind my shell of authority? How many times has anger and sternness melted to give way to the most abject of pleas? Whether it's because he knows of the cowardice underlying my ambition or because I have stooped to take from him the comforts of the seabound, Bartholomew unmans me by his presence.

“So I hoped,” he says, looking genuinely bewildered. “But, in any case, you have control of her estates.” He approaches the opposite side of the desk, almost within arm's reach. “This was your real motivation, after all: Cupers Cove. For the next eighteen months you can equip your expeditions as you see fit without scrimping or reference to a higher authority.”

“Do you think I have involved myself in the foulest of all crimes for eighteen months' worth of pennies?” My lips tremble, and a sudden grief ushers forth a glimpse of one of my dreams: Eliza with her moist scales and her soft lips under my covers, the sweetest kernel of devotion aching and expanding into unspeakable bliss. This is my Eliza, pure spirit and unspoiled by the original from whom my imagination conjured her.

“Why don't you try again in a few weeks? She is still in deep mourning now.”

“Eliza Egret is worthless!” The words surprise me. Am I really so unchivalrous? I feel the sudden need to explain myself. “She is not the woman I believed her to be. That's all. Cupers Cove is merely a trap.”

“How so?”

This question, like all others from Bartholomew, sounds like pure innocence. But I've been here before and I feel the subtle, well-oiled machinery of persuasion sliding into motion.

“I may grow the colony, farm the land, explore the interior, and harvest the fish. But after eighteen months any expansion will be curtailed, as Eliza is sure to cut me off, and the venture will be sure to crumble.” Through the rushing in my ears I hear the tramp of many feet through the brush; see the pick and the shovel, the yell of
eureka
! Such an untrodden expanse so far from the society of men is bound to hold mysteries under its rough soil. It is exactly where the gods of nature would keep their private hoard, daring only the valiant and the noble. “I need eighteen years and not eighteen months,” I find myself murmuring. “The whole plan banked upon Mrs. Egret's estate in perpetuity.” The rush in my ears has grown to a rumble. I'm suddenly aware that each hoop I go through to attain an increase in support for Cupers Cove merely opens up a hunger for more. Didn't I know this before? I remember Bartholomew's talk of ladders. The rungs, he told me, are climbed not in foreknowledge of all consequences but one at a time, and in ever-increasing hope.