Grahame, Lucia (9 page)

"Because he was kind enough to show me an aspect of his
talents that his other admirers have not yet seen," replied the stranger,
and I knew from the way he said it that he did not, in fact, number himself
among Frederick's admirers.

To hear Frederick referred to in slighting tones was unpleasant
but, alas, not outside the realm of my experience. During the last years of his
life, Frederick's lax attitude toward his financial obligations had given a
number of people good reason to speak unkindly of him. But those days were
over; he had paid every one of his debts before he'd drowned.

I started to move past the stranger.

"But soon all Paris will be talking of it," he said.

There was something ominous in his tone. I knew it was a threat. I
supposed it was an idle one. Nevertheless I could not let it pass.

I turned on him.

"I don't know who you are," I told him, almost in a
whisper. "Nor do I wish to. But I will tell you this: If you ever lift so
much as your little finger to smear the memory of my husband, I will find you, under
whatever rock you have crawled out from today, and I will cut out your
heart."

"I'll be waiting for you," said the stranger with a calm
smile, and moved on.

In May, toward the end of another brief visit to Paris, Sir
Anthony suddenly announced that he wished to visit the forest which had
provided so great an inspiration to the
en plein air
landscape painters
of the sixties and seventies. Would I care to accompany him to Fontainebleau?

I remember the start of our journey so well. He brought a picnic
lunch of cold chicken, a salad, and pears, and since we were rather late
setting out—the whole adventure having been undertaken on the spur of the
moment—we ate it on the train.

Our conversation was light and careless; we laughed at everything
and nothing. I had never seen Sir Anthony in so expansive and mellow a vein.
Perhaps he might have said the same of me.

When we arrived at Fontainebleau, we quickly agreed that we must
forgo the convenience of a hired carriage and explore the huge forest on foot.
I'd always loved long walks, and in Sir Anthony that day I noticed a new,
restless energy, which I supposed he wished to burn off. I imagined that it was
due to the effects of springtime on the masculine psyche; perhaps he had fallen
in love at last. Perhaps that explained why he had spent more time in England
lately.

But I was no longer inclined to speculate about the kind of woman
to whom Sir Anthony Camwell would be likely to give his heart; I did not like
the feelings those thoughts invariably engendered. Now I merely told myself
that I hoped she would be worthy of him.

It was so warm a day that I left my coat at the railway station,
along with our picnic basket, and set out into the forest dressed in only an
unseasonably light summer dress. It was almost threadbare in places, but really
very modest, for I had patched and mended it carefully.

It was one of the dullest of my gray ones—not alluring at all. The
costly gowns which had once filled my closets were gone now; I had sold them
long before Frederick's death to staunch the unending flow of bills. All my
vanities seemed to have died with my daughter; today I did not even carry a
parasol.

Sir Anthony, too, was dressed in summer clothing, although his
attire, despite its simplicity, was of a quality far more impressive than my
own. Perhaps it was these outward manifestations of the vast social gulf
between us, a gulf I took completely for granted, that made me so ill prepared
for what happened that afternoon.

We had been enjoying ourselves immensely, having ventured rather
deep into the fairy-tale forest with its magnificent old trees and fantastic
rock formations, when the weather changed.

The first sign was only a cloud passing over the sun, but a little
later the sky darkened alarmingly and large, slow raindrops began to splash
upon the leaves above us and spill down from them onto our heads. Then the
clouds burst open.

"Oh, Madame Brooks, you'll be soaked," said Sir Anthony.
He sounded chagrined, as if he blamed himself for having carelessly exposed me
to some dreadful peril. He stripped off his jacket and quickly placed it over
my head and shoulders.

"And now
you'll
be soaked!" I exclaimed and
lifted the jacket in a vain effort to shield him from the rain as well, as if
the garment could be miraculously transformed, like loaves and fishes, to meet
the present need.

In the next instant, as neither of us was willing to leave the
other unprotected, we found ourselves standing with our arms around each other,
his jacket only half covering us both.

I heard a muffled sound, as if a sigh, torn from his throat, had
been reined in before it could escape.

I could feel the beating of his heart, and through my thin
garment, I felt something else as well. Not being a maiden, I understood its
meaning and knew that I ought to pull away. But a flame had leapt up the full
length of my body and held me to him. My breasts were straining against the
light fabric of my gown so urgently that I feared the seams would not hold
them. I longed for his mouth; the hunger made me shiver.

All of my rigid notions about what was possible, about what was
permissible, about what I sought from him, about the potential of his heart and
that of my own—all these came tumbling down like rocks in a landslide. I was
too weak even to think of trying to reassemble them.

In that moment he might have done anything he liked with me.

Past and future, consequences and responsibilities, the rules of
conduct, all had been blasted into insignificance. I would have laid myself
open to him fully so that he might find and take from me anything and
everything he had ever desired in a woman. I would have withheld nothing. I
would have given myself to him for an hour—or for a lifetime.

Yet, to his credit, my companion, if he felt my heat, did not take
advantage of it. In the suspended seconds before I found the strength at last
to draw gently back, he did not move his lips to mine; he did not alter the
position of his hands to encompass my willing flesh more intimately; he did not
even tighten his embrace.

I disengaged myself and turned away.

"It's useless to fight nature," I said shakily, trying
to conceal my own embarrassment and to save him from feeling any. "We
might as well give in to it."

Of course I had said the wrong thing!

"The rain, I mean!" I added with one quick glance back at
him to make sure he had not misunderstood me.

But a veil had fallen away from his gray eyes. For one blinding
moment they were the windows to his heart: They told me that he loved me, that
he had always loved me, and that he always would.

It was too much. I felt as undone as the mythical Semele, who'd
bound her lover Zeus to a promise to appear before her in all his Olympian
splendor. She could not endure the blaze, and died.

But I still lived and breathed and heard Sir Anthony say, "I
suppose you're right," in the most ordinary of tones, and when I dared to
look at him again, it was as if nothing at all had happened.

After that, however, things were not quite so easy between us.

The storm was brief, the sun returned, our light clothing did not
take long to dry, but we were bedraggled in appearance and chastened in manner
as we climbed aboard the train back to Paris. Whenever I tried to speak during
the two-hour ride, my voice sounded strained and artificial. I was glad that
Sir Anthony seemed disinclined to conversation.

The next day he returned to England.

My belated recognition of the true nature of Sir Anthony's
feelings struck me with the force of a blow.

How well he had hidden them. Never could I have guessed, during
all the hours he had devoted to me, that he had borne the weight of an unspoken
desire as strong—no, stronger—than that which had flared up so suddenly in me.

Or could I have?

Yes. As I reviewed the entire course of our friendship from this
new point of view, I was forced to acknowledge, with wonder and humility, that
almost from the beginning every action of his had bespoken a generous and
loving heart.

His plans to spend the previous summer in Paris, of course, had
been made before he knew me, but he must have been taken with me immediately.
That
was why he had pried me out of seclusion—at least as much seclusion as a
woman who has to earn her living may allow herself—and drawn me back into the
very heart of life. And not into the hectic and superficial life of
pleasure-loving society, where so many people hide their private
disappointments. No, those leisurely afternoons in the Louvre had drawn me out
of the isolation of my purely personal regrets back into the whole tender and
terrible drama of human existence to which art bears witness.

What a context in which to be gently guided toward an acceptance
of my own losses!

My imaginary rivals—at last I could admit that this
was
how
I regarded them—the shrill, horsey English girls, the satin-gowned, high-bred,
ivory-skinned little angels of the Faubourg St.-Germain—they had never existed.

The hours Sir Anthony had spent with me were not those he could
spare from his pursuit of a suitable bride, but those he knew
I
could
spare, given the demands of my work.

I had become his reason for loving Paris.
I
was the piece
of Paris that he longed to possess.

I thought of the showing he had arranged for Caylat and of my
obstinate blindness to the full significance of the event. I was the woman he'd
worn upon his arm; he had made a public demonstration that day not only of his
regard for the painter but of his regard for me.

Yet his deep, innate courtesy which had endowed him with so much
tact and sensitivity, not to mention that severe, Roman sense of honor, had
kept him silent, and still did.

Humbled as I was, I was very far from elated to discover that I
was loved by the man who had so captured my imagination.

I knew what his silence meant.

We had both been playing with fire. He knew it as well as I did,
and he knew that nothing could come of it.

His respect for me was almost palpable. Even now I was still
convinced that he would never insult me by making me his mistress; it would
have cost me my livelihood and my independence. I might have lived in less grim
surroundings and worn prettier clothes, but after his desire had been satiated,
what would become of me? I could never return to my life of modest
respectability. I would have to find another protector or be dependent upon him
for the rest of my life, like an aging nanny whose services were no longer
needed but who was kept on a pension out of consideration for all she had done
in the past.

No. He would never put me in that position.

And marriage was out of the question.

I could not forget his vague allusions to his
"responsibilities" in England.

Surely he had some kind of family there, although I knew none of
its members, beyond Lord Marsden. But inevitably there would be the usual
ancient traditions to carry on.

When he married, he would be obligated to select his bride from
the same proud caste: a lady who could be presented at Court, who would do him
credit in the ballrooms of Mayfair, in the drawing rooms of Belgravia, and on
the hunting field, a lady who could never attract malicious gossip about her
dubious lineage or her raffish friends, a lady who could give him the requisite
son—the most compelling reason for an English landowner to take a wife.

Anything less would be a slap in the face not only to the society
from which he had sprung but to his family.

And Sir Anthony, I was sure, placed a very high value on ties of
blood and familial affection—his comments about the Salomons were proof of
that.

Under the weight of all this knowledge, I felt my heart would
break. Not for myself, of course. I had come to terms long ago with the
impossibility of it all.

No, I assured myself, it was for Sir Anthony, bound as he was by
his own strict code, that my heart ached.

I knew that it was far more difficult for a man, with passions so
much wilder and harder to bridle than anything a woman could feel, to refrain
from acting on his hungers. This imbalance of nature was something my
grandmother had impressed upon me; she'd said it was woman's only real source
of power.

And yet he had refrained.

What was I to do with all this new and daunting knowledge?

If I had subscribed to the same principles that Sir Anthony seemed
to embody, perhaps I would have found a way to end our friendship. I might have
claimed that I had taken on more students and that they left me no hours of leisure
at all. I might have pretended, improbably, that I had been censured by my
friends and Frederick's for having flouted the etiquette of mourning and had
been brought to realize the error of my ways. It would be awkward but not
impossible to break the connection completely. Even if Sir Anthony suspected
that the reasons I gave were specious, he would understand and respect the
impulse behind them.