Lie With Me

by Patricia Spencer

  “Can we go too?” the children added.

  “He asks not at this time. With apologies. He misses all of you.”

  The little boost Maryam had felt for hearing of him sagged. “Oh.”

  “He has a favour to ask you, Lady Maryam. A big one.”

  “Yes, of course. I’m glad to help in whatever way I can.”

  “He needs you to prepare the end of quarter accounts. He says you have a ‘little handbook’?”

  “Yes.”

  “The financial settlements are due with the estate’s workers on the 29th. That means banking must be ready ahead of that. He said if you would calculate and prepare the drafts with the names of the recipients and the amounts filled in, he will sign them.”

  “Oh, my.” Maryam set down her fork, overwhelmed. “Will he be indisposed that long?”

  “Even if he improves, My Lady, the accounting takes time and must be started at once. He had hoped to do it with you this first time but he is too weak for a task so large.”

  “He is not in his room, is he?”

  Maman shook her head. “We have him near us.”

  Away from me, she thought irrationally. She covered her mouth with her hand, her eyes darting from place to place around the room. She had no claim on him such that they should be accommodating her wishes, only her hidden affection.

  “Are you alright, Mama?” Elizabeth asked.

  Maryam put her hand down and gave her daughter a half-smile. “I am.”

  “You look a little like Lord D’Av the night of the portrait. Do you have to walk out like he did?”

  Maryam closed her eyes and briefly rested her forehead on her fingertips before taking a steadying breath and lifting her head again. “No, my pet. No. I am not walking out.”

  Maman sat back, her relief visible. “Grâce à Dieu.”

  “Mama,” Edward said. “What are we doing for family fun tonight?”

  “Well,” Maryam said, pausing to collect her thoughts. “How about you get in your nightgowns early and we have a good long bedtime story?” Then I’ll go to the library and start to work.

  “Oh! Can we read Description of Three Hundred Animals?” Edward asked.

  “No,” Elizabeth moaned.“I’m tired of that one.”

  “Higgy Pop,” Megan said. Higglety Pigglety Pop was her favourite, a nightly read.

  “How about Higglety Pigglety Pop for Megan, then The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes after that?” Maryam said.

  “Yes! Yes!”

  At the end of dinner when Brigid came in to get the children, Maman rested her hand on Maryam’s to keep her from leaving with them.

  “I’ll be right along,” Maryam told Brigid and the children and she sat back down and turned to Maman.

  Maman reached beneath her shawl and pulled out a folded page. “He sends you a note. I was only to give it to you if you agreed to do the bookwork.”

  Maryam closed her fingers around it. “I fear he trusts me overmuch. But I shan’t leave Edgemere in the lurch.”

  “It is the one job that none of us can do. Thank you.”

  Maryam turned the paper in her hands. “What is the matter with him?”

  Maman rested her gnarled hand over hers and gave her a couple of comforting pats.

  “I feel a certain... tendresse... for him, Maman. Please don’t exclude me from news of him.” She looked into Maman’s eyes. “Is he drinking?”

  Maman considered her, then made a decision. “Not one drop. Ironically, that is part of the problem.”

  Maryam gave her head a small shake. “How do you mean?”

  “Chère,” Maman said, pausing to collect her thoughts. “Tonight it is ten years exactly since a mob stormed D’Avenant’s family estate in Cognac-Charente. He was there as his family and friend Emma were beaten and stabbed to death. He too was severely beaten, slashed across the face, and left for dead before the estate was set on fire. As you can imagine, this date is difficult every year. But this is the first year he tries to get past it without the help of alcohol.”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  “We are watching him around the clock.”

  “This is why everyone has disappeared.”

  “Exactement.”

  “I wish I could see him.”

  “Not yet. My Lady. He does not want to be seen so low. Allow him this point of pride.” She paused. “His pride will help him succeed too, ehn?”

  Maryam took a steadying breath. “Very well, then. Let me help as he asks. And pray I don’t egregiously misplace any decimal points and run us all into the poor house.”

  Maman smiled. “He knows where to place his trust.”

  Maryam caught Maman’s hands in her own now. “You look as if you are in pain. Are you sitting up with him a great deal?”

  “Oui. But only a little while longer, ehn? Then we turn the corner,” she said.

  Maryam heard the sound of running feet and giggles coming down the stairs, across the entry hall and toward the dining room.

  “Mama!” Edward shouted, appearing in the doorway ahead of Elizabeth, breathless and bright-eyed. They were both in their nightgowns. “We’re ready!”

  She exchanged a smile with Maman. “I’m ready too, my bandits!” She got up, and leaned down impulsively to hug Maman. “May God be with us all,” she whispered.

  On the way out of the room, she tucked D’Avenant’s note into her bodice. She would read it later.

  She worked until midnight, following the little handbook that he had known back then was ‘expedient’ to create. Let us begin with wages, he had said. And that was how she commenced.

  At the strike of twelve, she marked her spot in the account book, took the lamp, and went to her room. She had to pace herself. There was an enormous amount of work to do and few days left in which to do it. And she still had to factor in family time with the children every day.

  Undressing, she drew his note from her bodice. She sat on the edge of her bed, leaned into the lamplight, and unfolded the paper. D’Avenant’s distinctive writing cut across the page unevenly, the baseline not rooted, the letters unbalanced.

  My Dear Lady Maryam,

  It grieves me to leave you with such heavy work, and unaccompanied in its first execution. I ask only that you do your best. Follow our little handbook. If you make errors, we can adjust for them later.

  I am turning to face the wild thing that wishes me dead, as you once suggested. I confess I am not confident as to which of us shall prevail.

  Would you pray that it be me?

  Your humble and grateful,

  J. D’Avenant

  She got into the bed wearing a gown. Summer was past and leaving the window open a crack for fresh air brought more chill into her chambers. She turned down the lamp, closed her eyes, prayed for her family and D’Avenant and the women caring for him, and fell asleep.

  Hours later, she was dragged up from the abysm of sleep by the sound of screaming. She sat bolt upright in bed, her heart beating wildly, listening for her children. She flung back the covers, plucked the lamp from her bedside, turned up the wick and ran toward the nursery in her bare feet, not even stopping for a dressing gown.

  Not halfway there, she heard the scream again and knew it was not coming from her children.

  She raced to the hallway door and threw it open. Full-throated screams were coming from the back end of the house. She turned right and fled down the hallway, racing toward the servants’ wing of the house. On the back staircase, she took the steps two at a time. The further down she went, the more shrill the shrieks.

  Down two flights of stairs in the basement, she pushed open the staircase door. It opened onto a long narrow hallway, brightly lit with wall candles despite the late hour. She saw Sarena, in her nightgown, lurch out of a room on the right and cross the hall. Sophie came out of the room on the left and, glancing right, saw Maryam standing there.

  She turned, rushing towar
d her, waving her away. “You must go, Milady. Go! Please! Leave us care for him!”

  “Let me help.”

  “No, Milady. He needs to let this terror out. If you enter you will soothe him and he will swallow his pain again instead of letting it go. We must bear witness, not prevent his pain, Milady. I beg of you, let us tend him.”

  Maryam nodded, backing up, returning to the staircase, the wailing assailing her ears, her heart, her soul. If the screams were agonizing to hear, what must that horrifying night been like? She closed the hallway door and slid down against the landing wall, praying for mercy on D’Avenant.

  I’m here, she wanted him to know. I’m here.

  The crying erupted and subsided, erupted and subsided all night long. Once she heard a woman’s voice urging him: “Tell me what you saw. Describe it. Say it in words.” Once her ears deceived her and the screams sounded like those of a woman.

  Maryam stayed on the steps, her knees drawn up to her chest, praying, terrified by the intensity of the pure animal anguish swirling around her in the dim stairwell.

  An eternity later, dawn knifed through a small window on the staircase and a sliver of intense light fell across her closed eyelids. She had drifted to sleep, head back against the cold wall, for how long, she didn’t know. The stairwell and the hall beyond it were blessedly silent.

  She stood up slowly, painfully unfolding her cramped body, supporting herself against the masonry wall. She cracked the hallway door open. There was no one in sight. It was quiet. She had this momentary notion of finding him, slipping into his bed beside him and enfolding him with her body. Sophie was right. Maryam would comfort him when perhaps what he needed most was to eject the poison and get it over with.

  Tonight had given her new respect for the women of Edgemere. She, Maryam, had felt such grief just listening from the staircase. How must it have been for them, in the same room with him, where they not only heard him but saw how it wrenched him?

  She took the stairs stiffly, reached the upstairs floor where her rooms were located and returned to her chamber. A broad ribbon of golden sunshine lay across the foot of her bed.

  Time to get up. She had a day’s worth of work to do, and children to mother.

  12. The Tide

  Lady Maryam fell into a feverish work pattern, pushed by the calendar and her inexperience to burning midnight oil and starting at daybreak every day. But she made steady progress. Maman gave her daily reports. D’Avenant was settling, each day a little more himself.

  The tension in the house eased. Sophie reappeared, and Sarena, and Romelle. At first they looked haggard, their faces slack with exhaustion, but day by day their faces relaxed and they looked gradually more rested. Village women and girls descended on the gardens for harvest and food preparation and the kitchen hummed with activity. The smell of apples and peaches and cinnamon wafted through the house as the workers made applesauce and other preserves.

  Closing in on the end of the month, Maryam told Maman at breakfast that she felt the bank drafts would be ready for D’Avenant’s signatures by late that night or early the next day. “Shall I just give them to you to give to him, or—”

  “I shall ask him,” Maman replied.

  Late that night in the library, sitting in her circle of lamplight, Maryam closed the little handbook. The bank drafts were filled out and stacked beside her ready for signatures. She had done it. She rubbed her closed eyelids with her fingertips, exhausted, relieved to have completed the work. It had been gruelling, and until now, when it was finally over, she had not realized the toll that the long hours of intense concentration had taken on her.

  She heard a rustle, and looked up.

  D’Avenant.

  Standing in front of her. Thin. Somber. His head was tipped, studying her with a look so compassionate it cut her open.

  She covered her mouth with her hand, caught a deep breath, and started crying. All the pressure, the worry, the fear for him, fell in on her.

  He came around the desk and sat on the edge of it, one leg hitched up on the edge, the other on the floor. He placed his hand on her head. “Thank you, Maryam.” His voice was husky, rough, recovering from hoarseness.

  His injured voice made her cry harder, remembering that night she had spent in the stairwell, hearing his anguish but unable to go to him.

  He brought his hand down to the nape of her neck and caressed her gently, allowing her to cry.

  “I was so afraid for you,” she whispered.

  “It appears I prevailed,” he replied softly, bending forward over her.

  She lifted her head and turned to look into his beautiful eyes. They were soft, unguarded. A swell of love for him rose in her and she realized it was the tide of him washing over her, and it was engulfing her. “I missed you.”

  His fingertips drew whorls on her skin in the gap between her neck and the fabric of her dress. “I missed you, too.”

  “D’Avenant.” She stood up impulsively and turned into him, her face just above the level of his now. “My self-control fails me.” She took his face between her hands, looked into his eyes, looked down at his mouth, and brought her own slowly toward his.

  Oh, Maryam, D’Avenant thought. I was counting on your self-control, not mine. Parting his lips, he gently met hers. He closed his eyes and let her kiss him as she would, responding to her as she gave to him, softly, gently, without hurry, deepening the sensation incrementally as she led him down her path and he followed. Down she went, deeper and deeper into the abysm, little by little choosing to trust him and to hide less of her desire behind restraint.

  He fell in after her, answering her with his hands, exploring her hips her back the weight and roundness of her breasts, circling her nipples with his thumbs, cherishing her with his hands his mouth his breath. She set her hands on his shoulders and began sliding them down his chest. No, no, no. He caught them and brought them up to his shoulders. “Hold on to me,” he whispered, kissing her deeply, taking the lead now in the seduction.

  She surrendered with a moan so visceral, so abandoned, he slid his hands down the curve of her back to her buttocks. He intensified his kisses, using his tongue now to explore her parted lips, drawing her forward against him each time he penetrated her with his tongue, then released her. He set up a rising sensual rhythm, matching advance and retreat with his hands his hips his mouth his breath entangled with hers so that her entire body would match his and pulse to the same pattern. He moved without haste, drawing them both deeper and deeper into the current.

  Maryam paired her movements with his, hanging onto his shoulders as her passion and her voice rose and rose and rose and caught at the pinnacle, teetering at the edge of it until he brought his fingers to her nipples and released her, gasping, shaking, knees buckling beneath her. He caught her, the length of her pressed against the length of him, her ragged breath at his ear, and gave her a moment to catch her breath before he moved once more and brought her—and now himself—to another full climax.

  “Ohh,” she exhaled shakily, whispering in his ear. “What have you done to me?”

  “My Lady,” he chuckled. “I just came in to sign bank drafts.”

  * * *

  Life swept D’Avenant ahead of it faster than he was ready to meet it. He had emerged unsteadily from three weeks in the inner chambers of hell, walked straight into the arms of heaven, Lady Maryam, and then been spit out again into the public world of the estate to collect rents and pay labourers—all as if the previous weeks had not shaken the very earth beneath his feet.

  Too rapidly, he had moved from horrific emotional exposure, into romantic and physical intimacy, then back into concealment. He was a bird in a maelstrom.

  He knew Maman had figured out that Maryam and he had been intimate the very next morning. She’d seen him ever-so-briefly rest his fingertips on the nape of Maryam’s neck as he passed her chair at breakfast. Maman’s eyebrows rose and her gaze penetrated him as he sat down in
his usual place. Then she looked back at Maryam, who was looking at the napkin in her lap, blushing.

  In Maman’s room that night, after he had spent the day on estate rounds, she asked him directly. “You were intimate with her.”

  He nodded.

  “You told her you are a woman.”

  He shook his head.

  “Howev—?” Maman waved her hand, dismissing her own question. “Never mind. You are French.”

  “It just… happened.”

  “You are not an adolescent any more.”

  “That I made it this long under such great temptation is evidence of that, non?” he said, untucking his shirt. “It was a little difficult getting my breath, though, with this damned corset squeezing me.”

  Maman reached under it and untied the undergarment. Instead of leaving it to him to withdraw she pulled it out herself. “Turn around.”

  D’Avenant rotated and faced her.

  Maman lifted her arthritic hands and placed them on his—her—breasts. “You are a woman, Julianne. You are not Julien, your brother. You are Julianne. I don’t know how to get you back home to Julianne, because the world won’t let you direct your own life as who you truly are. But you cannot build a castle with Lady Maryam on a foundation of lies. You have taken this step in the wrong order.”

  “She kissed me.”

  “She did not know what you have not told her. It is unfair to her,” Maman said. “Do not lead her blindly down a road she may not be prepared to travel. No good can come from it.”

  The morning light in the drawing room was pallid. Cold air was seeping into the room through the cracks between the French doors to the terrace. October had arrived with bitter cold, the severest onset of winter in decades.

  Lady Maryam’s mood reflected the grey day beyond the doors. Since the night in the library with D’Avenant two weeks before, he had become uneasy around her. He’d told her to take time off with the children, to not worry about desk work—to stay out of the library altogether, in fact, and not even think about Skylark.