In a Field of Blue

by Liviero, Gemma

  That night at dinner she seemed unaffected by our previous conversation and appeared happy to see me. She wore the sleeveless pink dress with its deeply curved neckline, which exposed her long neck, arms, and back. The fabric molded to the top of her body before draping slightly at the waist and tightening again at her narrow hips. But more notably she wore the earrings that complemented both the dress and her eyes, and I could not contain my smile.

  Mother joined us, and we made polite talk. But for some reason I found it difficult to talk, my mind on her. I think my mother could sense something also, and she became somewhat quiet and solemn. I then proceeded to try and engage Mother in conversation to no avail. She excused herself early with a headache.

  Mariette and I shared a sherry, but it seemed the awkwardness of our first encounter had returned, and the tension between us was thick. There was wanting on both sides. She finally stood up to excuse herself, but as she made to go, I held her arm and turned her gently toward me.

  “I’m sorry if I made you upset last night. And I’m sorry about this damned stutter—”

  She laughed softly, interrupting the continuing speech I had prepared about my anxiety-fueled condition as well as my carelessness toward her. “You worry about things you shouldn’t. You should not be ashamed of anything, Rudy.”

  She reached down then and cupped my face in her hands to kiss me. I was paralyzed with panic and wonder, unsure of what to do, what was expected, until finally she peeled away from me, her face flushed, and my fears then released too late.

  That night I did everything I could not to go to her room to kiss her again, to tell her my feelings. To hell with Mother! I told myself. I tossed and turned. Could I do it? Was it right? Would Mariette think me common or bold? Was she waiting for me? I yearned and pined and prayed also. It was torture. It was love, I was sure of it. But despite the yearning, my head won the moment. I could not be so presumptuous nor put her in such a position. There was of course the boy to think of.

  CHAPTER 9

  Sweeping across the palatial foyer, visitors were greeted by two imposing doors, behind which an elegant hall extended two floors high. The floor was Italian terrazzo patterned in geometric shapes in shades of red, gold, and black. This was where my father had met my mother. It was my paternal grandmother’s love of entertaining, with an invitation to my mother’s family to spend a weekend here, that brought my parents together. Father had watched Mother from the viewing balcony on the first floor and knew immediately she would become his wife. Finding her fair and slim and light on her feet, he was smitten, and she was equally enamored with the handsome heir to a grand estate. Such stories I could see in the photographs. Though knowing my parents as I did, it was difficult to perceive the silent, fractious people as the charming debutante and handsome country gentleman whispering coy words of love at brief private rendezvous. Both prior to inheriting the estate and afterward, my father had shown little interest in farming matters and had relied heavily on Mother and the staff he employed to manage the property.

  Half the top floor held a large suite that ran parallel to the lake. Edgar had claimed the space after inheriting the manor, and no one had rearranged the room since Edgar had left. Everything was preserved. Was it a little morbid? Perhaps, but it was the only thing linking us to him, and Peggy kept it as clean as the rest of the house, as if she were expecting him back. Mother used to visit the room often, but with her declining health, she more recently avoided the extra flight of stairs.

  I ignited the lantern beside my bed and took it with me along the oak hallways. Up a set of stairs, I reached the top floor and turned toward Edgar’s rooms. It wasn’t the first time I had sneaked up here to watch the lake and imagine Edgar sitting there also. When I opened the door, I heard a sharp intake of breath. In the corner sat Mariette with a lantern of her own. She was dressed only in her sheer nightgown. She appeared visibly shocked and guilty that I had found her there.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, standing up.

  “For what?”

  “I shouldn’t be here, but I had to see for myself where he lived, the room he had described. The striped gold wallpaper, the polished oak desk.” She rubbed her hand over its surface. “Look, you can even see an indent from the last time someone wrote here. I was imagining it was left by him.” She held up a piece of paper from a writing block, and I could see a faint etching. She studied my face as I did so.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “This must be hard for you.”

  “And you especially,” I said.

  She nodded, pensively considering the objects around the room.

  “I sense him here,” she said.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”

  “He was connected to this room. It must have been a special place.”

  “Do you mean you can feel his spirit?” I asked.

  “Not exactly. Just a shadow of him perhaps of how he was. I can see him sleeping in that bed, reading his books. My images of him are clearer here.”

  She ran her hand over a collection of books he had on the wall beside the window. She did not look sorrowful, rather curious and radiant in her ponderings.

  “I imagine him everywhere at Lakeland,” I said. “He was a big part of my life.”

  “I know,” she said. “But I can tell you have been torturing yourself about his death. There is nothing you could have done to change it. You have to let him go.”

  “It isn’t so easy.”

  She was watching me closely now, watching her.

  She walked toward me then and placed her hand on my arm. I put my lantern down on the trunk at the base of Edgar’s bed, and I took her in my arms, her head against my chest where my heart beat powerfully. I felt a strange mix of both passion and sorrow.

  This talk of Edgar felt wrong alongside this intimacy, but when she turned her face upward toward me, I felt compelled to act. We kissed gently. After several moments she pulled away.

  “Not here,” she whispered, with no explanation necessary.

  She collected her lantern, then clutched my hand with her other to lead me toward the annex nearby. I suspected that she had investigated Edgar’s rooms previously. Once inside the annex she closed the door and placed her lantern on the floor. She removed her nightgown to let me see her briefly before stepping forward to reach her arms around my neck. We kissed slowly at first, my hands tenderly exploring until I could no longer contain my longing and I clung to her fiercely. Her hair, free and long around her shoulders, fell across my face as I pulled her gently down onto the single bed near the window.

  I wasted no time to fuse our bodies, my arms around her narrow back, and she breathed my name several times, rising to meet me until our passions were spent and I collapsed to the side of her. When I raised my head to view her expression, our faces close, she smiled up at me, victorious in a way, before easing away from me and rising to sit at the edge of the narrow bed. From the window she gazed dreamily toward the lake and to the deep-blue hills beyond.

  “This is paradise,” she said. “No. This is heaven. There is nowhere on earth quite like it.”

  She was naked, and still, like a marble sculpture, one arm behind supporting her, the other resting on her lap, and her hair spilling down her back. I had moments to compare her to the same wanton pose I’d seen in museums before she stood up to leave. I reached for her wrist to pull her back down to me, but she resisted this time. She put on her nightgown and disappeared into the night without a word. And I wondered then what world she came from that she could slip in and out of my life and, with her gone, leave nothing but a gaping, empty wound.

  I stood to dress before the rooster crowed and announced everyone to task. I went back to Edgar’s room to see if there was any evidence of us. As I was leaving, I saw that a drawer was partially open. Inside, there were several papers left disorderly from whoever had searched through it.

  I closed the drawer and wondered what they were searching for. And whether it
was she. But only briefly, distracted as I was by blissful thoughts, and thoughts of purely her.

  CHAPTER 10

  The morning was dull, with a shower, and I wore the same clothes that smelled of Mariette. I yearned to find her. I had to see in her eyes whether last night had meant something or whether perhaps I was naive and amusing, or an object of pity. But in any case, I had to see her. A piece of me wanted to apologize, to tell her that it couldn’t happen again until our relationship was officially sealed with an engagement. I was part ashamed and part excited, and I wasn’t sure if, alone again with her, the first would override the other.

  Samuel was in the kitchen and, Peggy reported, Mother and Mariette had already breakfasted and returned to their rooms. She said that Bert was visiting the farms today on the trap and said the boy could accompany him. He would be gone for hours, and she was making them lunch for the trip. Mariette had agreed that Samuel could go.

  It was still quite early, and I hoped that the sunny days of autumn would not leave so quickly. The place, though beautiful when surrounded by snow and with wood fires burning inside, was limiting, and in years gone by, I would wait for months for the snow to melt, for the first new growth on the trees, so I was once again free.

  I found excuses to idle around the kitchen a little longer until it became too obvious and Peggy was giving me knowing glances to suggest she saw through me. With breakfast passed, I decided to saddle Sheriff and ride out toward the fields and down the narrow track to the woods, where I let the horse roam in a grassy glade. Sheriff was rarely spooked, and trustworthy. There was no way I could sell him, and it was doubtful just how much I would get for him anyway. Chess, our youngest mare, would easily be sold for a fair price. But she had been Edgar’s new foal only weeks before he left for France, and for this reason we could not part with her.

  The sweet melodies of the starlings and the light breeze that rattled the leaves on the giant oaks brought some much-needed peace and composure to the exaltation and expectation I had woken to. I was determined to remain like this and not give myself away to Mother before she discovered the truth for herself, and to court Mariette in ways more befitting than with uncustomary nightly rendezvous. My resolution and the peace of the moment did not last long, broken by the sound of hoofbeats and the ground beneath trembling as another horse approached. At the edge of the small wood, Mariette brought Chess to an abrupt halt and threw herself off. Mariette wore a boy’s riding pants, shirt, and boots that she had found in one of the trunks of clothes in storage. She rushed toward me, her hair free and framing her sweet face, as she wrapped her arms around my neck to kiss me.

  She had a hunger, overwhelming and impossible to resist, that conflicted with her graceful feline appearance. While still panting from the fast ride and between her own breaths, she greedily consumed my own. She wanted me, and I could not contain myself any longer. She could have me.

  She was dear to me and someone I must protect and respect, and these thoughts screamed at me to stop, to dignify her with chastity, to wait, but every inch of my body ached for her. Convention in that moment existed in some other time and place. She undid my shirt buttons and I hers, and I pulled her down into the dry leaves, our hearts beating against one another. She exposed a demanding and unapologetic ferocity that broke apart the confines of decorum; instead she seemed to extract from the wildness around us, as if she were an extension of it. We were unaware of sound or light, and in those most intimate euphoric moments, the world seemed to fade and recede respectfully.

  Afterward we lay in the leaves, covered only by a blanketing beam of sunshine that had found its way through the clouds and the tops of the trees. She put her hand flat on my chest as I lay on my back. It was so fast, this relationship, yet her sudden appearance less than two weeks earlier seemed years away. “I think I love you,” I said, barely able to catch my breath.

  She rose up on one elbow, her chin cupped in the palm of her hand.

  “Is that what you think, or is it that you are in love with how I made you feel?” she asked.

  Her face was flushed and golden in the light, her hair so bright and wild around her face.

  “It is love,” I said too seriously. “And most certainly love for you. That you must know.”

  She sat up suddenly to climb into her shirt.

  “Come!” she said. “Let’s not waste any part of this day! Let’s ride.”

  We dressed quickly, her enthusiasm infectious, then galloped through winding wooded pathways, across gently rolling pastures, and clattered dangerously over crags. She was an accomplished equestrian, and we rode without concept of time before stopping briefly on a heathery fell to glimpse the steely blue bay in the distance.

  “I will race you there,” she said, thundering Chess down the hillside.

  “We should probably turn back soon,” I called after her unconvincingly, but she chose not to listen. Sheriff sped after her, giddy, like me, from the excitement and spontaneity that trailed in her wake.

  She touched the grassy slopes above the water moments before I did, but I caught her by the time we reached the shoreline, breathless and high from the chase. Our horses were frisky as their hooves pummeled and sprayed the sand, and Chess whickered at the salty air.

  Mariette slid down to the sand and kissed and stroked the mare’s face, and Chess returned with a nuzzling of her rider’s shoulder. That moment captured in my heart forever, for it was beautiful, this love affair she had with horses. She had made it clear that she was a child of the outside, and I had vowed to know everything about her then, to understand what it was that made her different from any other woman.

  “You are an accomplished rider,” I said.

  “My father taught me.”

  “And your mother?”

  “I never knew her.”

  It was the first time she had presented me with something deeper about her past. Until that point, I knew only of her in the present, some of her time in war, and some of her time with Edgar. I felt certain then she had a past before Edgar that was thick with stories also, and I wanted to hear all of them.

  “Did she die?”

  “No, she left,” she said. “But I don’t want to talk about it. There really isn’t much to say.”

  We sat on the sand, and I put my arm around her. From the hurt I was certain I heard between those words and the losses I knew about, I believed that she was in much need of nurture. That perhaps she was frailer than she portrayed. But I also had the sense that she could take care of herself when needed. I wanted to learn more of her time with Edgar, yet I feared that to raise his name might turn the conversation and undo what we’d begun together. I was so desperate to understand how she felt about us, and I wondered briefly if I was simply filling the void that had been left by Edgar. My self-doubt led me to also think that I was a poorer version of him in her eyes.

  She had an uncanny ability to read my thoughts.

  “I know that you are probably thinking about Edgar right now. That you are wondering if you are doing the right thing and why it is that I am with you and not still grieving. The point is, it has been some years, and I need to move on for the sake of myself and for Samuel. I do not want to grow bitter wondering what might have been, wishing for the past to come back so that I can finish it properly. I want to live, and I want to grow old with someone, and from the first moment I saw you enter the drawing room, I saw you not as his brother but as a man who is not like any other. I know a lot about you, Rudy. From everything Edgar told me, you are a good person, and he admired you.”

  I forced a laugh at that, though the words did not necessarily give me any security. The fact that she had said she wanted to grow old with “someone” still left me to wonder if it was really me she was referring to. The word felt disconnected from me somehow.

  “I’m not sure that there is much to admire,” I said to the sea.

  “Well, he did. He said you were as honest as a man can be and you have only the best intenti
ons for all. I know, Rudy, that you do not have the money to run the estate. I knew that before I came. But the boy must be with his family. That much I have always known. What I didn’t know was how quickly I could fall for someone. That was never part of my plan.”

  She snuggled into me, and that “someone” that I was speculating about could only have been me. I felt better, and she pulled me down on the sand to lie beside her. We were alone here from the rest of the world, and under a faint shower of rain, we held tight to one another, fearful of our time here ending. I vowed then that I would marry her soon, and in that moment, it seemed unquestionable that it should be otherwise.

  It was afternoon when we rode the horses back and took them to the stable. We were thirsty and hungry, and I knew that Mother would want us dressed and on time for dinner, if she turned up herself.

  As we walked around from the stable, I saw a familiar car parked in front of the manor, and my heart sank. Laurence’s shiny green convertible sat ominously like a spider waiting for its prey.

  How to explain my brother leniently and without words like “selfish” and “vain” was difficult.

  On the one hand Laurence was like my mother in his slightly cold and officious manner at times, but he did not have her head or heart when it came to other people’s welfare. He also did not have her empathy, as selective as Mother’s could be at times. Like my father he spent more than he owned, borrowed, then repaid late. But the difference was that where my father had no head for business, Laurence knew exactly what he was doing. He knew enough about law to know his rights, to delay creditors, and to find reasons not to pay; delaying tactics and cultivating relationships were the ways he always had the money to spend.