Gossamer

by Rebecca Hagan Lee

  “You can’t be serious!” Randall Craig had blustered, knowing full well from the expression on his son’s face that James was completely serious.

  “Think, Jamie,” his mother, Julia, had pleaded, “I know you love Mei Ling. We love her as well, but you’re British and she’s Chinese. She’ll never be accepted by society here.”

  “She’s already accepted, Mother,” he had argued. “She’s lived with us for years. You’ve treated her as your daughter for years. Mei Ling and I simply want to make it official.”

  His mother’s face had hardened. “Mei Ling is accepted in society because she’s our ward, Jamie. But that’s the only reason she’s accepted. Don’t you understand? She’s accepted now because one of the wealthiest men in Hong Kong chose to do his Christian duty and offer a poor Chinese girl food, shelter, clothing, and a place to live. She’s treated like a member of the family now because everyone knows she isn’t.”

  “What does it matter?” Flush with the passion and idealism of youth, James hadn’t understood. “Once we’re married, she’ll be my wife. She’ll be part of the family.”

  “It may not seem like much to you now, Jamie, because you’ve always taken acceptance for granted. You’ve always had a place in society and understood where you belong and you couldn’t care less what society thinks of you. You’re a man. You have that luxury. But Mei Ling is different. She adores attention. She adores the parties and fetes and society gatherings. And she can have those things as long as she’s our ward. She may even be able to have them once your affaire d’amour has run its course and she’s safely married to some enlightened Chinese gentleman.”

  “Mei Ling isn’t some whore I picked up in a dockside brothel,” James said. “You know her. You know who she is and what she is. She’s lived in your house and been treated like your daughter for years. She’s a lady, for God’s sake. And she was a virgin until I took her maidenhead.”

  “Jamie!” His mother had gasped at the crudity.

  “Are you planning to marry her out of some sense of guilt or of responsibility because you took her maidenhead?” Randall asked.

  James shook his head. “I’m marrying Mei Ling, with or without your blessing, because I love her and she loves me. And I want you to understand that ours is not an affaire d’amour, but an affaire de coeur that isn’t going to run its course, Mother, simply because you feel it should. We’re in love. We have been for years! And we want to get married and have a family and we want your blessing.”

  “But, Jamie,” Julia had protested, “if you go through with this romantic and foolish marriage, Mei Ling will be snubbed by the same people who profess to adore her company now, and what’s worse is that she’ll be shunned by the Chinese as well. You both will. You’ll be excluded from polite circles and ostracized from society because you will have overstepped the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable. You may not care about that. You may think that those things don’t matter because you’re a man and able to do as you please. But Mei Ling will be trapped, Jamie. She’ll be caught between our two cultures as surely as a fish is caught in a net. She’ll be miserable and she’ll make you miserable because even though I’ve no doubt that she loves you with all her heart, she also wants to be somebody. She’s ambitious, Jamie. She wants to rise above her humble beginnings and be Mrs. James Cameron Craig.”

  “And she will be,” James asserted.

  But Julia sadly shook her head. “No, Jamie. She won’t be. Not here. Not in our lifetime. No matter how many times or how many ways you marry her, to the people here in Hong Kong, she will always be the little Celestial heathen, the little concubine that Randall Craig took in because she was given to his son as a birthday gift. And the fact that you love each other won’t matter at all to the people you’ve always thought of as friends, because they’re going to be horrified at the fact that James Cameron Craig married a girl he could have accommodated anytime he wanted without resorting to a ring and a license.”

  “Is that what you think?” James demanded.

  “No,” Julia replied honestly. “But it’s what all your friends will think. It’s what they’ll say.”

  “I don’t care what they say,” James announced. “I love Mei Ling and she loves me and that’s all that matters.”

  “I pray you’re right, son,” Julia said. “I pray with all my heart that you’re right.”

  He had naively thought that nothing mattered except the love he shared with Mei Ling, but he’d been wrong. Very wrong. His parents had known the lay of the land much better than he had. Although Julia did her best to open the doors of Hong Kong society to her new daughter-in-law, Mei Ling never received the acceptance she craved.

  Julia tried to assuage Mei Ling’s bitter disappointment and sense of isolation from the community that had once embraced her, by hosting all manner of parties and events at their Victoria home that most of the premier British and American families in Hong Kong felt obliged to attend. But it was to no avail. James and Mei Ling had broken the unwritten laws of the British Crown Colony and of its Colonists, and they had to be punished for doing so.

  James watched as the beautiful, witty, and vivacious young woman he married retreated further and further into the customs and the teachings of her childhood. It was as if Mei Ling had decided to reject everything British as the British had, ultimately, rejected her. She gave up Western dress and Western customs and transformed herself into a model of Chinese womanhood. When Julia refused to allow Mei Ling to extend her redecorating of the wing she and James occupied to the rest of the house, James had bought a house for himself and Mei Ling on the edge of the British community, in an area reserved almost exclusively for Chinese merchants. James allowed Mei Ling to decorate it as she pleased and to hire a completely Chinese staff.

  James was happy and content. And Mei Ling seemed equally happy and content with the life they’d built for themselves. They accepted invitations to events held at his parents’ home and invited the Craigs and Will Keegan and one or two other bachelor friends of James’s over for dinner on a regular basis. But none of James’s married associates or any of Mei Ling’s former friends or acquaintances ever accepted invitations to their house for dinner or for any reason. He and Mei Ling lived in relatively blissful isolation from the rest of the British community. James ignored the fact that his home reflected nothing of his Scots heritage, or contained any remnants of his Western culture except the clothes he wore to work. He ignored the fact that Mei Ling had retreated into the comforts of a thousand years of traditions. She was his wife and he loved her. He wanted her to be happy, and if shunning the Western world made her happy, he would gladly shun it and become as Chinese as he could possibly be. To please her, James adopted her customs and accepted her way—the Chinese way of life. And for nearly seven years, it worked, but then Mei Ling became pregnant and the world they had carefully constructed seemed to unravel like a paper lantern in the rain.

  Unable to sit still any longer, James carefully eased himself off Elizabeth’s bed and stood up. He slipped his feet out of his shoes so his footsteps wouldn’t wake her, then walked over to the French doors and quietly slipped the bolt back from the lock. James opened the doors and stepped out onto the balcony, where he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a slim cigar case. He walked to the wrought-iron railing of the balcony that overlooked the garden, removed a cigar from the case and lit it. He took a drag on his cigar and exhaled. His eyes stung and watered, but whether from the painful memories or from the first puff of cigar smoke, he couldn’t tell. The tip of his cigar burned red-orange in the night as James turned his back on the view of the garden and leaned against the railing, stretching his long legs out in front of him. Mei Ling was gone and he desperately wanted to be able to look back at their life together and remember the good times, but all he really remembered was the horror of their last months together and the overwhelming anger and loss.

  James stared at the soft glow of the lamp coming from Elizab
eth’s bedroom. Elizabeth Sadler was the second chance he’d been waiting for. The chance he needed to redeem himself from the netherworld of lost and lonely souls he’d called home for so many years. Perhaps Will was right. Perhaps it was time to learn to change. To learn to let go of the past. To finally forgive Mei Ling for her tragic mistake and for leaving him alone without saying good-bye.

  James took another puff on his cigar. He’d given his heart freely once. And he nearly hadn’t survived the breaking of it. And there was even more than his own heart at stake this time. He had the Treasures to think of. He might be ready to risk his heart again, but he couldn’t risk theirs.

  For now it was enough to know that he wasn’t entirely alone anymore. Elizabeth was waiting nearby.

  Twenty-four

  THE INSISTENT, ANGRY cries seemed to reach her from across a vast distance. Elizabeth opened her eyes. The faint aroma of an expensive cigar drifted in on the breeze from the balcony and the dim glow of the lamp on the dresser dispelled some of the darkness of the room. She stared up at the underside of the half-tester and waited for the sound that had awakened her. It came again. Stronger. More insistent; more urgent. Diamond. Elizabeth jackknifed into sitting position, swung her legs off the side of the bed and got to her feet. Something was wrong with Diamond. Bleary-eyed and half-asleep, she tripped over a pair of shoes lying by the side of her bed and stumbled out of her bedroom, heading down the short hall toward the nursery, guided by the sound of Diamond’s cries and the small gas night light that burned in the hallway at the entrance to the nursery.

  “Shh, shh.”

  The sound of the low voice stopped Elizabeth in her tracks.

  “Shh,” James repeated, bottle in hand, as he carried Diamond from her bedroom and into the main room of the nursery. He set the bottle on the Treasures’ little table, then disappeared into the nursery bedroom for a moment. He reappeared with Diamond cradled in his left arm, the big wooden rocking chair beneath the other arm. He carried the chair into the main room and positioned it between the warming stove and the little round table. A fire burned low in the grate, casting flickering shadows against the wall.

  James bent down and picked up the infant bottle. “I know you’re hungry, but we mustn’t cry so loud. We’ll wake up Elizabeth and we don’t want to do that. She’s had a long hard day and she needs her sleep. Please, sweetheart, try to be patient for a few more seconds.” Settling down onto the rocker, James hooked one stockinged foot under the rung of one of the small chairs that matched the round table and pulled it forward to use as a footstool. He rocked back and forth as he brought the rubber nipple of the feeding bottle to Diamond’s mouth. “There. There it is. That’s my girl,” he soothed as Diamond latched on to the bottle and began to suck.

  He leaned his head back against the chair and closed his eyes as he rocked.

  Elizabeth paused in the doorway, watching. Her breath seemed to catch in her throat. Still dressed in evening clothes, James sat on the rocking chair holding Diamond in his arms. Sometime during the evening, he’d yanked the tail of his starched white dress shirt free of his trousers and unbuttoned it. His shirt hung open all the way down the front, the black onyx studs still precariously balanced in the buttonholes. His black satin tie was untied and the ends of it dangled from beneath his collar points. Elizabeth stared in fascination at the pattern of dark curly hair visible though the opening in his shirt. Her pulse quickened and her heart seemed to swell in her chest at the sight of James cradling his infant daughter against his starched shirt front while he fed her a bottle. Watching him, Elizabeth felt the full force of desire. All at once she was bombarded by feelings she’d read about, but never experienced. Suddenly she understood the passion that had driven Tristan and Iseult, Heloise and Abelard, Romeo and Juliet. Suddenly she understood how it felt to look at a man and want him as a lover.

  Diamond squirmed in James’s embrace and he opened his eyes and looked down at her. “Are you uncomfortable, sweetheart? I don’t blame you,” he told her, “I don’t like the feel of it, either.” James shifted her slight weight higher in his arm and balanced the bottle against his stomach for a moment as he nudged his shirt out of the way. His stomach muscles rippled in reaction as the smooth glass bottle came in contact with his skin while he repositioned Diamond in his arm so that her tiny face rested against his warm flesh instead of the stiff and scratchy fabric of his shirt.

  Elizabeth felt as if her heart was bumping against her rib cage. Her mouth went dry and she seemed to have trouble regulating her breathing. Her flesh began to tingle in anticipation and her body grew warm and moist and uncomfortable in the most intimate of places. She didn’t think she’d made a sound, but she must have, because James suddenly looked up and saw her. “Good evening,” he said softly. “Or good morning.” He stared at Elizabeth for what seemed like an eternity before he asked, “Did she wake you?”

  There seemed no point in politely pretending she hadn’t. Elizabeth nodded.

  “I heard her crying.”

  James frowned. “I was afraid of that.”

  “What was wrong with her?”

  “She was hungry.” He shrugged his shoulders. “That’s the way it is with babies,” he said. “There’s no warning. One minute they’re sleeping soundly and the next minute they’re crying loud enough to wake the neighborhood. By the time I got from the balcony to the nursery and got her bottle warmed, she was really frustrated and upset.”

  “What were you doing on the balcony?”

  Watching over you, James almost said as he mentally cursed his slip of the tongue. “I sit on the balcony to smoke,” he said.

  “This late at night?” Elizabeth pushed her hair out of her eyes. “When do you sleep?” Then before he could answer, she asked, “What time is it anyway?”

  “I couldn’t sleep.” James smiled at her and Elizabeth noticed the network of fine lines at the corners of his blue eyes. “That’s why I was still out on the balcony. And it’s a little after three. I heard the clock downstairs chime a little while ago.”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Elizabeth admitted. “I was dead to the world until Diamond started crying.”

  “Uh-oh.” James clucked his tongue against his teeth and shook his head as if to he meant to commiserate with her. “That’s a bad sign. It means you’ve got it.”

  “Got what?” She thought he was teasing her, but she couldn’t be sure.

  “Maternal instinct,” he answered in a solemn tone of voice.

  “That’s bad?” Now she knew he was teasing. No one would ever think having a governess with maternal instinct was bad.

  “It depends on how you look at it,” James explained. “It’s good for me because as your employer, I’m delighted to know I won’t have to worry any longer about your not hearing the baby cry or the other girls call out should they need you at night. But it may not be so good for you.” He shook his head as if he fully understood her new dilemma. “Because once you have children and discover you have maternal instinct, you never quite sleep as soundly again. You never quite feel you can relax your guard until the children are grown and able to take care of themselves.”

  Elizabeth shivered at the daunting prospect of never having another moment’s peace where your children were concerned. “Is that how you feel?”

  He nodded. “Every day of my life.”

  She smiled at him. The responsibility she’d accepted as governess was an awesome one, but somehow the idea of caring for the Treasures didn’t seem quite as daunting knowing that James was equally committed to sharing the responsibility with her. Parenting didn’t seem quite so overwhelming when two people were committed to the task. “You know,” she said softly, “I should be doing that.”

  “Doing what?” He looked up at her, genuinely surprised.

  “Feeding the baby.”

  Her quiet words evoked an image in his mind that rocked James to the core. Elizabeth feeding the baby—their baby. Elizabeth lying propped upon a mound
of pillows in the center of his bed with him beside her watching as she opened her nightgown to share a plump breast with a beautiful dark-haired infant. He envisioned her lovely pear-shaped breast so engorged with milk that the aureole surrounding her pink nipple was twice its normal size. As he listened to the sucking sounds Diamond made as she pulled on the nipple of her bottle, James imagined her tiny bow-shaped mouth greedily suckling Elizabeth’s lovely full breasts instead. And he vividly imagined himself sucking them long after the baby was satisfied. “Yes, you probably should be,” he agreed at last. “But I don’t mind.”

  “I really should be doing it,” Elizabeth insisted. “It’s what you’re paying me for.”

  James grinned. “I haven’t paid you yet. Besides,” he said, pulling the empty bottle from the baby’s mouth and setting it on the floor beside the rocking chair. “She’s already finished her bottle and I’m too comfortable to move.” He gently turned Diamond onto her stomach, across his knees, and began to pat her back. He wasn’t too comfortable to move. He was too uncomfortable to move. He was rock hard behind the front of his trousers and not about to stand up in front of Elizabeth and reveal the results of his erotic imagination. “You look tired. Why don’t you go back to bed?”

  “I was tired,” Elizabeth told him. “So tired that the last thing I remember is Pasamonte throwing stones at the don and Sancho Panza.”

  James raised a questioning eyebrow in her direction.

  “I was listening to you read Don Quixote to the Treasures while I was dressing for dinner.” She stopped abruptly and widened her eyes in horror as she remembered. “Dinner.” Elizabeth stared at James, willing him to understand. “I’m terribly sorry. I don’t know what else to say. I forgot about our dinner.” She moved farther into the room. “How was it?”

  “Lonely.”

  The atmosphere seemed to thicken around them. Finding it hard to breathe normally or to think rationally when she was standing in front of the half-dressed man of her dreams wearing only a satin dressing gown, Elizabeth glanced down at her waist, then picked at a loose thread on the sash that encircled it. She pulled at the thread until it came away in her hands, unraveling the hem at the end of her dressing gown sash. Realizing what she’d done, Elizabeth tried to cover her attack of nervous energy and repair the damage done to her clothing by twisting the end of the sash into a tight little roll. “I meant the food,” she whispered.