Cynthia Bailey Pratt
Page 28
Simon tightened his hands on Julia’s hips, trying to slow her motions before they drove him completely over the edge. He’d already had to shut his eyes, for the sight of her, head thrown back, breasts forward, had pushed him to the verge of completion. He’d always heard that married men soon lost interest in making love to their wives. Simon counted a day as lost if he didn’t see Julia with just such an expression of ecstasy.
Her body had changed in the last eighteen months. Her arms and legs showed signs of the hard work she never shirked. Despite all precautions, her skin had toasted to a gleaming gold that reminded him of the small figures of goddesses they’d found that season. If her white hips and bosom were more generous than they’d been on their wedding night, he had no complaint to make, especially as the cause had been his doing.
Julia pushed up straight, her nails scraping lightly over his chest and stomach. “My beloved....”
He forced himself into a sitting position, drawing her knees closer to his waist. She gasped and broke into shudders, her body so tight around him, her face so astoundingly beautiful that she brought him into the maelstrom with her.
He was awakened by her pulling aside the mosquito netting to bring him a tray with coffee and sweet almond biscuits. She wore a long, loose caftan of sheer white, decorated with twining embroideries of green leaves. He tried to block out the knowledge that she was naked underneath.
“Write on my tombstone that I died a happy, exhausted man,” he said.
“Very well. I’ll leave instructions in my will to inscribe mine, ‘Here lies the woman who exhausted him, permitted to sleep at last.’ “
The room was filled with the soft colors of sunset and the yodeling cry that called the faithful to the fourth prayer of the day. He lay against the pillows, nibbling on the sweets, while she busied herself about the room with the task he’d interrupted. He never could watch her packing without remembering the first time they’d made love.
Since then, he’d learned the facilitating power of money. Once Mr. Hanson had been convinced that Simon did not love Julia for financial reasons, he was as open-handed as Father Christmas. If it had been left to him, his only child would have had a wedding to rival Victoria and Albert’s. But, with Ruth’s connivance, Simon and Julia were married six weeks after they met at a quiet church near Hampton Court. Done out of the wedding of his dreams, Mr. Hanson found other things to spend his money on.
Having adopted Simon as a son-in-law, he seemed to extend his benevolence to the Archer girls. He and the general drew lots for who would have the privilege of giving Lucy away. Military strategy won the day, but it was Mr. Hanson who gave the bride a rope of pearls almost as fine as Julia’s own. On the morning of the wedding, however, Julia lent Lucy her strand, saying, “I had great good fortune the last time I wore these.”
“The day you married Simon?”
“Then, too.”
Prince Albert found he could not part with his friend, the major. So though Robert’s information was valuable to Lord Dalhousie, who had just annexed all the Sikh territory, he himself never returned to the Punjab. The queen was quite taken with Lucy, since she was interested in just those domestic details that so entertained Her Majesty. Both Amanda and Jane were presented at court, an event entirely beyond their mother’s wildest dreams. But what quite put the lid on her friend Mrs. Pertwee’s insufferable boasting, Mrs. Archer wrote, was when she herself was invited to take tea at Buckingham Palace.
Mr. Hanson even had fortune enough to arrange a restful trip to New York for a would-be actor named Basil Mortimer. Mr. Mortimer’s nerves had been shattered by an experience that no one seemed able to describe. Before long, his acting career at a standstill, Mr. Mortimer turned his hand to writing. His blood-and-thunder epic, The Mummy’s Heart, played to sold-out houses through 1851 and did very well in the provinces after that. He’d been bold enough to send an inscribed copy to Julia who had read it before Simon could stop her.
“It’s a trumpery thing,” she said at the end. “But I could see how it well would play, especially with the right makeup and stage effects.” She laughed. “He’s a much better writer than he is a spiritualist, but then he’d almost have to be, wouldn’t you say?”
Simon himself had not read the former Dr. Mystery’s play. Those moments in the seance chamber were still too vivid to be considered lightly.
For several weeks, memories had disturbed him at odd times and places. Not all the memories were of the life he’d known thus far, the life of Simon Archer. Strange images would flash through his mind, set off by the taste of honey or the scent of balsam. He saw himself, a small boy, running naked beside a reed boat, begging to be taken along. He saw a strong man with a hawk-like profile who could deny him nothing. And his mother, dressed in her finest robes and jewels, going to the temple with her maids. Her long, tapering fingers touched his shaven head, and three thousand years later, Simon could still feel the great love in so incidental a caress.
The images themselves stopped the morning after he married Julia. The dreams stopped when he found himself waking two and three times a night to draw her close. The laughter and passion of their bed left no room for phantoms.
In a year, he’d grown far too busy to dwell on the residual memories. Mr. Hanson decided he was interested in Egyptology after all: “I thought it was just a whim of my girl’s, but if a man takes it seriously, there must be something in it, eh?”
So his expedition was funded on a more lavish scale than was usual and the results were also greater than usual, as though heaven beamed on him. Three golden goddesses on an empty chest, smiling at nothing, led him to a cache of papyrus in the desert, the largest yet discovered.
Mr. Keene was going quietly mad trying to find scholars to translate them. He estimated it might take thirty years to read them all. The newspapers called it the find of the century. Julia and Simon smiled at that. There was a lot of century left yet.
A cry from the adjoining room made Julia look up from her packing. “Dinnertime,” she said with a &mile at her husband.
She came back to sit beside him under the netting, the greatest discovery of their lives nestled to her bosom. Simon stroked his son’s sticky cheek. “He’s greedy.”
“He takes after his father.”
Simon gazed in wonder at a sight he’d never grown tired of witnessing. Everyone had said Julia was mad to take a sickly, wheezing infant into Egypt, where infection rode the air like an evil witch. Mr. Hanson, who was not a religious man, had taken to quoting vast chunks of Exodus. But she had, perhaps foolishly, decreed that nothing in Egypt would harm her or her son. Adam had begun to thrive from the moment their boat docked and now, at nearly eight months, was as rosy and plump as a baby in a Pond’s advertisement.
“Julia?”
She stopped humming to the baby. “Yes, darling?”
“Do you think it’s safe to take him home?”
“I think so. And we’ll bring him back with us in the autumn. Just imagine how much he’ll enjoy it! He’ll be digging his own excavations by then.” She cooed down at the oblivious infant. “You’ll find a better mummy than your daddy did, won’t you?”
“He couldn’t possibly,” Simon said gallantly. Then he asked, hesitantly, “Julia? About An-ket...”
“Yes?” Her eyes showed no consciousness that the name was anything to her beyond a well-known discovery of her husband’s. She began rocking and singing again, an Arabic lullaby about roses and rabbits.
“Keene writes that the mold degeneration is slowly but surely destroying the remains. I wondered what you would think if we brought her back here next season.”
“Yes, if you think that’s best. The climate at the museum is not all I could wish.” Julia began to discuss the various steps that might be taken to improve the dampness, short of moving the entire foundation to some more salubrious spot, like Spain.
Simon only half listened. For here, in a nutshell, was what puzzled him most. None of the women
whom An-ket “visited,” whether for a few minutes as she had Julia or for the better part of a week like Lucy, remembered her. Julia knew, of course, all that had happened to her— her arrival in London, the dangerous appearance of Billy the Wall, her pursuit by Dr. Mystery. But all was as though An-ket had never come forth, had never been the motivating factor in all these events. And all the women were better off now than they had been before An-ket’s advent.
Mrs. Pierce’s employment bureau was singlehandedly rescuing the reputation of such firms. Her budding business had been given a boost, admittedly, when the new wife of the Yorkshire millionaire had gone to Mrs. Pierce’s for her entire staff. But not even that would have helped her were it not for a growing recognition of Mrs. Pierce’s probity and good common sense. Her daughters were now partners in the firm rather than employees, though they still worked by special arrangement when extra staff was required.
Lucy had Robert and seemed happy, running between Osborne House on the Isle of Wight and her own home. With all the activity in his house, the general had quite rejuvenated and expected to see the completion and publication of his memoirs sometime in the next ten or fifteen years. Even the cat had her own cushion by the fire, all the milk and fish a feline could desire, and the satisfaction (presumably) of having a human at her beck and meow.
Simon looked at Julia, now with his child against her shoulder, and asked, “Are you happy?”
He could tell that she intended to return a light answer, hut then she paused and, meeting his eyes fully, said, “There is no happier woman in the world—no, in the history of the world—than I at this moment. Does that satisfy you?”
“Satisfy me?”
“You have been worried ever since we married. I have never spoken of it, but I have known it. Can’t you tell me why?”
He shook his head. “There’s too much to tell. And I don’t know the full tale, anyway. Perhaps it’s just that there are so many questions....”
“Questions?” She laughed softly, patting her child’s back. “Why are we here? Where are we going? What about life, death, love, art?”
“Yes. I wouldn’t have thought that you ...”
“I’m not a philistine, Simon. I may seem only to be interested in three things, but I do occasionally stop to ponder the eternal questions of the universe. And what I think is ...”
“What three things?”
Her smile held a trace of familiar tenderness as she moved her sleeping child into her arms. “Him, you, and Egypt. And I hope you don’t mind that ordering.”
“No. At least I come before Egypt.”
Now her smile was wicked, with a sideways glance that sent a thrill straight to his loins. “Perhaps the ordering changes depending on circumstances. But as for the other things you mention, they have been taking care of themselves for millions of years. So long as we love each other, they can go right on taking care of themselves.”
Before he could argue that this was a narrow-minded view, she carried Adam back to his cradle, where the nurse waited for him. On her return, Julia closed the bedroom door.
Watching her walk toward him, bare feet lending a kind of hunting quality to her steps, Simon knew that he’d still have questions should he wake in the middle of the night. But as he folded Julia once more into his arms, feeling his passions warm to her again, he knew that the only important magic was the one they made together.
To my friends in the Delaware Chapter of Romance Writers of America
Judith E. French, Colleen Faulkner, Linda Windsor,
Candace McCarthy, Donna Clayton, Angelica Hart,
Gaby Pratt, and Janet Cooper
with many thanks.
Copyright © 2000 by Cynthia Bailey-Pratt
Originally published by Jove (ISBN 0515128686)
Electronically published in 2012 by Belgrave House
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No portion of this book may be reprinted in whole or in part, by printing, faxing, E-mail, copying electronically or by any other means without permission of the publisher. For more
information, contact Belgrave House, 190 Belgrave Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94117-4228
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This is a work of fiction. All names in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to any person living or dead is oincidental.
Table of Contents
SPLENDID YOU
Cynthia Bailey Pratt
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Epilogue
To my friends in the Delaware Chapter of Romance Writers of America
Judith E. French, Colleen Faulkner, Linda Windsor,
Candace McCarthy, Donna Clayton, Angelica Hart,
Gaby Pratt, and Janet Cooper
with many thanks.