Laura Kinsale (39 page)

“Died of what?” he shouted. “Mud and a dirty diaper?”

Beth began to cry in earnest. Mrs. Lamb hurried up, prying her from Zenia’s arms. “Let me get her into a hot bath, ma’am.”

“You should never have let him take her!” Zenia cried angrily. “You were to keep her with you every moment! You may pack your things tonight!”

“Just so, ma’am. I am entirely to blame. Just let me get her into some clean clothes, and dry, and then I shall do as you say.”

“Don’t pack your things too hastily, Mrs. Lamb,” Arden said in a cold voice.

Zenia whirled on him as the nurse carried Beth away. “What have you to say to it? It isn’t her fault; it’s yours! You have no sense; you don’t know the meaning of it! You are mad! Can you imagine what I felt, when they told me—when I thought—you and Elizabeth—the lake—” She sat down hard, her face in her hands, her elegant, grass-stained gray skirts billowing around her.

“Zenia,” he said in a cracked voice, looking down on the frail nape of her neck. “I would never let anything happen to her.”

“I could not live without my baby,” she said on that high frantic note, rocking her body back and forth. “I could not!”

“I would never hurt her. I had her safe.”

“I go away for one day—for one day!” she said into her hands. Her body shuddered. “I should never have left her with you. Never!”

She began to cry, shaking with huge tearing sobs. Arden stood beside her, damning his father, watching his parents turn and walk toward the house with Mrs. Lamb while Beth wailed in a small, lost voice. He stood as if he were unable to move while the boats and nets were hauled in and the lake slowly cleared. And all the time Zenia huddled at his feet, racked with anguished sobs.

“You will make yourself ill,” he said. “Don’t weep like this.”

She lifted her ravaged face. “You frighten me so! Why do you always frighten me?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to frighten you.”

“They called and called for you, and you never answered.”

He stared at the lake. He knew that he could have been back before this happened. He could have answered the urgent hails. He could have given himself and Beth up to the well-meaning, strangling grip of Swanmere.

“You heard them, didn’t you?” Her voice was high and trembling.

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t answer?”
 

“No,” he said.

“Why?” She swallowed a hiccuping sob.
“Why?”

He sat down on the hill, staring at a swan that emerged tentatively from the reeds at the low end of the lake.

“You should have answered!” she cried.
 

He tore up a clump of grass, shredding it in his fingers. “We drained the carp pond,” he said. “She liked that. And then I took her to my tree. We were both wet, and I knew that you—we were trying to dry off before you caught us.” He flicked a lump of dirt down the hill and added sardonically, “You frighten me a little too, you know, Mama.”

“I could not possibly frighten you.”

He made a slit in a stem of grass with his thumbnail. “Could you not?”

“No.”

He tore the grass down its length, gazing at the two pieces.

“Not even demons frighten you,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything frighten you.”

He tried to tie the split stem together, but the pieces broke in his fingers. “Perhaps you have not seen every part of me there is to see.”

“You even stayed behind when they came after us out of Hayil.” She made it sound an accusation. “You stayed, when you knew they would take you.”

“I would do it again. I would—” He shook his head. “There is no end to what I would do for you and Beth.”

“I don’t believe you. You will not stay here.”

“I’m trying. Give me a chance.”

“You cannot do it. You said so. And if you do, you’ll become—” She made a small sound of despair. “Like my mother, or yours. Your spirit will not bear it.”

“Then come with me—”

“There!” She turned on him, her eyes dark and passionate, the color rising in her cheeks. ‘That is what will happen! ‘Come with me!’ Come with me, you said, and took us into the red sands and into the guns of the Wahhabis and into the hellfire itself. I cannot come; I will not, and I won’t let you have Elizabeth!”

He watched the black swan sail slowly along the shore, dipping its bill with graceful moves. “Perhaps it is impossible for us to understand one another,” he said dully.

He felt her look at him. She looked so straight and long that he was afraid to turn and see what was in her face.

“I don’t understand how I can love you and hate you at once,” she said.

The grass stems fluttered from his hands. “Now,” he said, “I am terrified.”

“Of what?” she demanded with a haughty and disbelieving lift of her chin.

“Nothing, nothing,” he said with false lightness. “Recall that I am impossible to frighten. I meant to make a joke. It’s all so vastly humorous.” He began to pull another stem of grass into rags. “You make it evident enough why you— dislike me. One is left to ponder—” He shrugged. “About the other thing. Why, that is. If you do. Why?”

She stared straight ahead. “Why do I love you, do you mean?”

“Yes.” He rolled the grass tightly between his fingers, crushing it. “That’s what I mean.”

“Because you gave me Elizabeth.”

“Ah,” he said. He scowled at the swan as it drifted placidly toward the far bank. “How amazingly inventive of me. A feat hardly paralleled in the annals of the human race. I shouldn’t suppose above two or three hundred millions of fellows alive have ever fathered a child.” He flicked the ball of grass into oblivion. “Indeed, I seem to be at a singular loss for an equally obliging encore. Since you didn’t come back last night.”

She lowered her eyes. He did not look directly at her; only just enough to see her profile, pure and familiar, her skin golden in the late-angled sun. Her bonnet was gone and her hair had come loose in her frenzy: it fell down now in a rough cascade on her shoulders, a disheveled dark tangle.

Something about the clear winter light and the deep ruddiness of the setting sun tinted everything with crimson and vermilion, like a twilight in the red sands-—it brought the desert back vividly—just so she had sat, just so, in silence, looking a little down, singing softly in the vast emptiness... and strangely, as if the light revealed some lost aspect of reality or memory or vision—he saw her fully, for the first time, as the same companion who had sat beside him there. The same face, the same person, the same heart.

All his memories conformed at last—the free-striding youth had not vanished, had not died, but been different all along. It was not a boy; it had never been: it was this woman beside him who had mounted a camel by a graceful athletic swing upon its neck, who had slept close at his back; who had let him braid turquoise and pearl into her hair; it was this sober, beautiful, pensive young woman who had rationed his water and food for him in the sands and labored up the endless dunes and wept as he lifted her up onto a camel’s back, so thin and light she was nothing.

He had regretted, infinitely regretted what he had done to her by taking her with him—and yet it seemed to him now that in the pitiless struggle and silent, certain friendship, it had been the happiest time in his life.

“I wish we were back in the desert again,” he whispered.

He said it before he thought: out of the crimson light, the clear air, the discovery of the moment—and instantly, the moment the words left his tongue, he knew he had committed a fatal error.

“I don’t mean—” he began hastily.

“Of course you do,” she said in a voice that seemed unnaturally calm. She gathered her skirts about her and rose. Without another word she turned away from him and walked down the hill.

He was at a comprehensive disadvantage when his father intercepted him shortly after sunrise in the passage outside Beth’s playroom. Arden was unshaven and hungry and muddy and tired, having spent the night under his tree after a brief supper at the Swan—where it was abundantly clear that his presence was not pleasing to Mr. Harvey Herring, however Mrs. Herring and her daughter might feel. Arden had found the old elm as welcoming a home as any, and not as uncomfortable as a number of places he’d slept—but not a bed, for all that.

“Where have you been?” the earl asked.

“Out,” Arden said.

“Are you drunk?”

“I am not,” he said curtly, turning away toward his room. “Good morning to you, sir.”

“Lady Winter has gone up to town,” the earl said. The door to the playroom was open. Arden could see the neat emptiness of it from where he stood just outside. He walked through and stood in the middle. The toy wardrobe stood ajar, cleared of its bright amusements.

“Of course,” Arden said. “Having been persuaded that her daughter might at any moment be found at the bottom of the lake, she would think it well to remove her from the imminent peril.”

His father followed him in, closing the door. “Yesterday was a rather trying day for all of us.”

Arden pulled the jack out from under the cot with his toe and dragged off his boots.

“Perhaps I—” The earl hesitated. “My actions were overly precipitous. Perhaps I owe you an apology.”

Not more than three times in his life that Arden could remember had his father offered him any regret or apology for anything. And every time, it cut all the ground from beneath Arden’s feet. He generally wanted to hang himself when his father apologized to him, and this time was no different. He stood in his stocking feet, feeling disarmed and vaguely manipulated, and said, “No—it was my fault. I should have brought her back sooner. When I heard the calls “

“Still, I feel I should—”

“It was my fault,” Arden said aggressively.

The earl locked his hands behind his back. “Well, I am sorry that it happened.”

“What’s one wife, more or less?” Arden stripped off his coat. “They seem to be the devil.” He unbuttoned his mud-streaked waistcoat and the heavier flannel undercoat beneath.

“They do have their moments,” his father said, with a touch of mordant humor.

In his shirtsleeves, Arden sat down on the cot. He looked at his hands.

“Arden,” the earl said, “if the woman is entirely impossible for you to live with, we will buy her off and send her to the Continent. There’s nothing she can hold you with. No witness, no certificate. Your mother has suggested to me a house for her in Switzerland.”

“I want Beth,” Arden said to his hands.

“That would be part of the arrangement. We will simply admit that we were falsely practiced upon by her claim to be Lady Winter, and now that you have returned, we find the truth to be otherwise. In return for a generous settlement and our pledge not to prosecute her for the deception, she must give you the right to see the child whenever you wish, and documents attesting that there was never a marriage, nor will she ever make any such claims upon you. Really, she has brought it upon herself by this obstinate and ludicrous delay.” He shrugged. “But any repudiation must be done immediately. It will no doubt be a moderately unpleasant scandal, and I shall look a great doting fool for having taken her in—but as soon as she is out of sight it will blow over.”

“For the love of God—the last I knew, you were inciting me to marry her out of hand.”

“I had hoped—I thought perhaps you had some affection for her, given your—” His father looked uncomfortable. “The circumstances of your union. But however that may be—neither of you seems to care much for the other now. And the connection was always, I may say, beyond the pale. A gross
mesalliance.
Her sordid birth, her deplorable upbringing—I do not mention her destitution; I have never wished you to hang out for a rich wife. But I had supposed it a love match. I am not as proud as I once was. I should not have objected to a love match, provided there was some modicum of good breeding in the lady of your choice. And her blood is well enough, even if she was born on the wrong side of the blanket. But it is not a love match. And your mother is wretchedly unhappy about it. Women suffer these social calamities rather more acutely, you know.”

“Ah,” Arden said. “I am enlightened. Social calamities!”