by Aitana Moore
"I'm so sorry," Lee said.
"Come away from there. The wind can be very strong."
"I'm sorry," Lee said. "I didn't mean—"
"Come."
He helped her onto Marquise, mounted Hero and took her reins, perhaps fearing that she might still turn toward the cliffs. It started to rain as they rode to the house. Leaving her there, he rode on to the stables.
By the time Lee finished taking her shower, the rain had become a full storm. Bolts of lightning looked stark against the lawn outside, like white flashes from an old camera, but there was no sign of James.
The enormous house was quiet. It was Saturday night, and the staff had left in the afternoon. James had said they would have the place to themselves till Monday morning. He wanted it that way.
Thunder rumbled or cracked like gunshots, and the rain was thick. When Lee approached the window, there was a flickering light coming from a room below her. She descended the stone staircase and followed the light to the turquoise room. James was sitting by a fire. He was soaked, and the temperature had become chilly.
Mia — naked and beautiful — looked at them from her photograph on the wall. There was, again, a twitch of jealousy inside Lee, but she pushed it aside.
"I didn't mean to upset you," she said.
"You didn't upset me. You scared me."
"I wasn't going near the cliff.”
"You were going fast, you don’t ride well, and you don't know that side of the estate."
"Because you haven't wanted to walk there. I thought I'd look at the sea. We've been here as if it doesn't exist."
The rain dripped from his face to the floor, but he didn’t bother to wipe it.
"You have secrets, don't you, Vivien?" He threw her a look. She was taken aback as he continued, "You have 'Top Secret' written all over you. Have I asked you about anything?"
She shook her head.
"I think you have a right to your secrets, that's why," he said. "But sometimes I wonder what they are.”
"I don’t—"
“For example, you could be a mole. From one of the tabloids. Maybe they sent you to that rehab after me to get into my bed. Maybe your supposed frigidity was a ruse to get me interested, and all this sexual awakening keeps me hooked until I talk about murdering my wife."
"You're crazy. How can you say that?"
He had worked himself up into one of his rages, except this one was cold and mean. "And she's all elegant, doesn't ask questions, doesn't curse, sings like an angel. Shags like one, too.”
Lee couldn’t hear that word. She turned, ready to leave, but he reached her first.
"What is it you want to know? Ask me.”
She was also furious, and she didn't bother to hide it, “I don't care about any of your secrets. I don't think there is anything worth knowing."
"But you know what I want from you. What is it you want from me?”
"I don't think there is any secret here, except that you loved your wife, and you can't forget her,” Lee said, glad that she had managed to keep her voice from trembling. “You loved her so much you can’t even mention her. I'm not a spy, James, and I don’t know what you want with me. Let me by.”
This time he stepped aside. What was there that he could say, after all? He made no motion to follow her when she left the room.
TWENTY-ONE
It had been drilled into Lee for years that a girl must be immaculate. A girl must not throw her things every which way. She must never look disheveled or dirty. Her things reflected who she was, and a girl must be a lady.
There was a man downstairs who might be more dangerous than the black night and the storm outside, but Lee set her suitcase on the luggage rack in the dressing room and slowly packed.
Shirts and blouses must be folded. T-shirts folded and rolled up. Fill the nooks and crannies with socks, stockings, underwear. Lay trousers and jeans flat. Cardigans and silk items must not be stretched. Shoes on the side, inside cloth bags.
If she paid attention to what she was doing, if she did it with care, she wouldn’t think of James. She wouldn’t be afraid of him or want him, she wouldn’t be sorry that she was about to leave. She wouldn’t think — for a while — that she would never see him again.
The summer interlude had cost her dearly, but she kept taking clothes from hangers, folding, rolling and tucking.
Some thoughts seeped in, although she tried not to pay heed to them.
This is what happens when you let your guard down.
Lee closed the suitcase. Now she needed to call someone who could drive her to a train or all the way to London. She took her phone and sat on James’ bed. Perhaps there would be an Uber there, in the middle of nowhere. The idea of an Uber picking her up at Deerholt during a storm almost made her laugh. It would be a great ad.
When she heard James’ steps approaching, however, she waited. The evening was not over. There was a third act to be played.
He walked in holding a black velvet tray. A motion of his arm created a sparkle in the air, as if he were a magician performing a trick. Diamonds — many, many of them — landed on top of the bed cover, right in front of her.
There were necklaces, bracelets, earrings, all of them flashing. Lee held her breath, dazzled by their purity.
He knows. He knows that this is what I came for. He's caught me.
His voice cut through her fears. "Do you think a man gives diamonds like these to a woman because he loves her?"
When she managed to look at him, she hadn’t yet resumed breathing.
"He gives them because he cannot love her,” he said.
Something brushed by Lee like the flimsy edge of a dress, and she flinched. It was relief, immediately followed by guilt.
“My wife wanted me to say that I loved her, and I couldn’t,” James continued. "So the diamonds rose in value as time went by. The more expensive the stones got, the more clearly I was saying that I didn’t love her — until there was this one."
Once more he swung his arm. Something fell on the bed with a thud.
The ring. Lee had waited so long to see it, and there it was, thrown at her like a pebble. It lay smoldering with a deep blue light, and it was beyond magnificent.
"That's how much I didn't love her," James said. "That's what I couldn't talk about to anyone. Certainly not to a group of strangers. I couldn't even say it to you."
She shook her head, looking at the fortune before her: almost twenty million dollars in total. That was how much he hadn’t loved Mia.
"Why did you marry her?" Lee asked in a whisper.
It wasn’t easy for him to talk of feelings and not use irony; she knew that. He moved to the window as rain battered the glass while a fast wind howled through the trees outside. She could see his face reflected on the pane.
"When Mia said she loved me, I tried to break things up. She sobbed for hours, like a child.”
Lee didn't prompt him. She thought he might not say anything else — but after a moment, he went on, "I was touched by her sadness. And then I told myself it was high time I loved someone. I thought that I could try and make her happy, and that love would follow. She wanted to marry me, so I asked her. That was probably the most idiotic thing I’ve ever done.”
"What happened?”
“There was this look in her face as time went by … She was waiting for me to say I loved her, and I just couldn't do it. Three words, and I couldn’t for the life of me say them. So I started buying her jewels." He motioned toward the diamonds. "But they would only make her happy for a bit.”
Lee couldn’t speak, and James’ misery was an almost solid thing in the room.
“It just wasn’t any good, and I think she was so desperate that she began to play games to make me jealous. Flirting with my friends, with her friends, with strangers.”
His anger at the Sicilian dance place: He had asked her what game she was playing.
“After an episode like that, I told her it was over, and that my solic
itors would be in touch. The same night she swallowed a bunch of pills. It wasn’t a real attempt at suicide — it was just a threat. Her mother answered her distress call and they found me. They wanted it kept out of the press.”
“Mia was very unhappy, then,” Lee said.
“That, and she was trying to get what she wanted any way she knew how.” He moved away from the window and sat on the other side of the bed. “I would get these phone messages from her many times a day, little framed phrases saying what love was or how she felt about me. And this is the bad part, that I started to feel rage — not just irritation, but rage. My whole life I had rebelled against false feelings, and yet she expected me to live a lie.”
His eyes flashed with anger — at himself, at Mia. One tried to get away from a pattern, only to fall more deeply into it.
“It was going to be a matter of time before I said savage things to her.” James leaned his head against the bed poster. “I thought I had the obligation to be truthful, but maybe it was just pride. And on her side, the need to have the life she had imagined, the life the magazines were writing about, was greater than anything. Than reason. Than happiness.”
“But you don’t know how to lie,” Lee said.
He scoffed. “We all know how to do that. And, in any case, just before the accident she cut off my escape. She told me she was expecting a baby."
"What?”
Why had there not been any record of a baby? Wouldn’t the police have said something? Wouldn’t the tabloids have feasted on that detail? James St. Bryce, killer of his wife and unborn child?
He had managed to keep Mia’s false suicide attempt and her pregnancy out of the press. What else had he managed to do?
"She told me the week before she died,” he continued. “We had agreed we would wait, but she was seven weeks along. I ought to have noticed, don’t you think?”
“It would be hard for you to know, if she didn’t want you to,” Lee said through stiff lips.
“So there I was, connected to Mia for the rest of my life through a child.” He took a deep breath. “And I was the opposite of tender when she told me.”
“Did you ask her to—?”
“Have an abortion? No. I couldn’t do that.” For almost a minute he sat looking at his hands, until he went on, “All I know is that when I saw her dead, I thought of the waste. What a waste. She was so young! And our baby was inside her … If I had passed her by, even if I had left her, she would have lived. She might have been sad for a while, but she would have recovered. She would have married someone else, she would have had children.”
“None of what you did or said leads to a death, James. It was an accident, that’s all it was.”
“Don’t you see?” There was desolation on his face. “I wanted her to leave me so badly that when I saw her all broken in that morgue, I was sure I had made it happen. I would have taken her place on that slab, if I could. She wasn’t going to live, and our child wasn’t going to live because of me.”
“James—"
He interrupted her, “I’m telling you this because I don’t want you to go away. I couldn’t talk of this before, and I don’t know what to make of things — but I keep wanting you to stay.”
“I don’t know what to make of things either,” she said.
“Good.”
The diamonds lay between them, and he swept them aside with a motion of his arm as if they were nothing. They flew to the floor, the ring hitting the wall. But diamonds were the most indestructible material on earth, or nearly, and they wouldn't be damaged.
“Because then neither of us has to say a thing,” he added.
James pulled Lee to him by the arms again, and though they were sore, she didn't care. He kissed her hard, and she held on to him by the hair. It hurt, and neither minded.
They began tearing the clothes off each other, all teeth and nails, lips and hands. They made love until their bodies were raw. But it wasn’t enough. She wanted him as she had never wanted anything in her life. Lee sat up and made him stand before her. She looked up at him.
“I want…” she stopped.
“What do you want?” he asked, a hand caressing her upturned, naked face.
“I want you in my mouth.”
She pulled him to her by the hips. James held his breath, his fingers in her hair.
TWENTY-TWO
On Sunday, the storm hadn’t abated. It was as if they were the last survivors in the world after a flood or an apocalypse, locked in a stone house that would withstand anything — even if the windows shook and the wind screeched through long chimneys.
“Was there a wolf howling or was it me?” James wondered.
It was morning, and it looked as if the gale had blown through their room. The diamonds were still strewn on the ground, under the bed cover they had thrown aside. Lee had even forgotten them for a while.
James had brought her breakfast, and it was past one o’clock when they decided to eat again. Dressed in sweat suit bottoms and T-shirts, they moved like zombies in the kitchen, taking things out of the fridge and drinking wine from the same glass.
“I don’t think it will stop raining today,” Lee said.
They ended up walking around the ground floor, where there were fifty rooms — including a state dining room, a music hall with an original minstrel gallery and a large corridor that once served as the servants’ access to the upper floors.
The corridor was now full of paintings of bewigged ladies and gentlemen.
“Your people?” Lee asked.
“Handsome, ain’t they?”
Lee studied the pale faces, small eyes and pinched lips of James’ ancestors. “You don’t look like you belong.”
He leaned against the wall next to an unprepossessing forefather. “No resemblance? I’ve actually always hoped that some of the Italians who came over to paint used this very passage to crawl into the beds of the women in my family.”
“Did you have that fantasy?” Lee asked as they strolled into the armory.
“Of crawling into women’s beds?”
“Of having been switched at birth?”
“Every hour. I was fascinated by very small houses, like the one that was a shoe in the story.”
“That wasn’t particularly small.”
He twirled a finger in the air. “Cozier than this.”
Taking a broadsword from the wall, he handed the grip to her. The tip fell to the ground with a clang and Lee laughed. “I can’t lift it!”
James winked at her. “See why you need a man?”
“To fight with medieval swords?”
“You never know.”
They ended up in the turquoise room, watching old films on the couch. In the middle of Lawrence of Arabia, they fell asleep face to face. Lee awoke with a gasp, and James held her closer.
"What is it?"
Her eyes moved around the room. "I had a bad dream."
"You were with one of the ugly St. Bryces?”
“No ...” She frowned. "I was in a mist, and it was cold, very cold. I knew you were looking for me. I could hear you calling, but you couldn't find me. I had no voice, so I couldn't shout to you.”
He smiled. "That teaches you not to run off.”
She waited for the bad feeling to dispel. “Tell me travel stories. You promised.” Running her fingers over the tattoo on his shoulders, she asked, “Where did you get this, for example?”
“That was a reckless evening in Ethiopia.”
“Did it hurt?”
“The ink stung a lot.”
She touched the scar on his left shoulder. “This?”
“Big thorn tree in Africa. Bled like a pig.”
“This?” She touched a jagged line on his side.
“Got stabbed.”
“Are you pulling my leg?”
“No, my hands are on your arse.”
“How did you get stabbed?”
“Stupid story,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me something ab
out you now?”
She was silent.
“Yesterday I told you things I haven’t told anyone,” he pointed out. “Tit for tat, come on.”
Her lips seemed glued together, but she managed to part them. “What do you want to know?”
His words were like a blow. “Were you molested as a child?”
Well, he knew how to get to the point. Lee could feel her body begin to lock, and he could feel it too, as he tightened his grip around her. But it wasn’t a brutal grip — it was a tender one.
“Yes,” she finally said.
“How old?”
“Fourteen.”
Now the silence was his. The heat from his body seemed to increase, and it occurred to her that he might be angry.
“Was it a relative?” he asked in a low voice.
Lee turned to face the couch, but she kept hold of his hand, now around her waist. She had never thought she would say a word about this, and she had never rehearsed the speech.
“My mother was a beautiful woman. Very beautiful. She couldn’t stand not being the center of attention, and not having a man near her…
“When I was fourteen, she was still young — but she had let herself go. Her body was shapeless after giving birth twice, her skin was lined, her hair was frazzled.
“At first she was jealous of me. I grew tall from one day to the next, and my breasts came out. She would have me wear those cheap training bras to flatten them, and she would cut my hair.
“All of a sudden, though, she started to do all the opposite. Made me wear her old push-up bras, cut-off tops and little shorts. She’d put lipstick on me — I can still remember the smell and the taste of that lipstick. Cheap. Fruity. She would keep refreshing it, and I smelled it all day.
“She’d take me to the café in town, and sometimes to the bar during the day. She’d tell me, ‘Go to the counter,’ although I didn’t need to get up.
“When men started coming to the table, I began to realize what she was doing. Using me as bait.
“Some of the men would come home with us or visit later. Then she’d scrub my face till it hurt and make me wear dungarees or something. When they saw that I was a child, a lot of the men would leave and not return. Some would stay for her anyway.”