“You are not going to leave me here!” she cried, as it dawned on her that he was about to do just that.
“Oh come, darling.” He winked at her—”We agreed!”
“No!” she pleaded, “We did not agree! Please! Henry! I can’t…”
“Oh yes you can!” he chuckled playfully, and turned to the Frenchman. “Women. They never know what they want, do they. This one just extracted a promise from me to marry her! To honor and obey!”
The assistant made a clucking noise. His prim little mouth pouted the barest of polite smiles as he watched the clownish antics the Englishman was putting on for his benefit. Henry’s hand was clasped above his head, as if holding a rope, head hung over to one side, tongue lolling, eyes popping out of his head. He straightened when he caught sight of Lucinda’s reddening eyes, and said, “All the same, sir, I advise you to keep an eye on her and not let her out of your sight.”
“Henry!” she shrieked. But he was gone.
Lucinda tried to size up Vauban’s assistant from beneath lowered lids. Jean Gonflé was a small, neatly muscled man with a sparse moustache and finely honed beard. His expression was not one of sympathy. It was more of a leer. She started sidling toward the tent opening. He clicked his tongue, leaned forward and grabbed her shoulder. Firmly, he led her to a chair and pushed her down into it. Then he walked to the table, picked up a goblet in one hand and a carafe in the other, and held them up at her questioningly. She shook her head and shrank back into her chair. They did not speak. He evidently thought she spoke no French, and she did not feel like disabusing him.
After a few minutes of staring at her derisively, the assistant remembered that he had other duties, and called for a guard, a burly fellow who breathed noisily through his mouth and smelled pungently of garlic.
A lifetime later—the assistant had come in a few times to check on her, Lucinda’s foot had fallen asleep, she had gone through her entire stock of favorite daydreams, as well as a number of plans for warding off Vauban (including falling into a dead faint, melting his heart with her imprecations, dazzling him with her beauty and her virtue, or escaping by butting him with her head and knocking him down) the man himself walked in. He glanced at Lucinda, shook his head disapprovingly, and sank into the campaign chair next to a brazier that had been lit for him.
He did not speak. He lowered his head into his hands, as if it was very heavy (and Lucinda, noting its size, imagined it must be heavier than your average head).
Lucinda stood up. She felt it was incumbent on her to say something.
“Monsieur?” she began.
He looked at her dully. She could now see that his eyes were bloodshot and teary.
“Que voulez-vous, madame!” he said disdainfully. “What do you want?”
“Please,” she said, uttering the words she had been rehearsing for the past two hours, “I—I believe there has been a misunderstanding …”
“My prize, eh!” he said bitterly. “My English prize. Yes indeed.” He sat up, and gave her a withering look-over. Then he turned, and spat onto the ground behind him. “The devil—it’s my prize from the devil. I sold the lives of my dearest comrades—for a piece of foreign tail! Well, madam, I have no appetite for you now. No appetite at all.”
“But…” Lucinda tried.
He stood up. His eyes were cold. “But? But? Madame! But God has punished me, don’t you see! What an idiot I was, trusting that English bastard fool who thinks only of his own glory! Who flaunts the rules, who could care less about carefully laid plans…” He was shouting at Lucinda now, and she was cowering guiltily. “What did you think we built those trenches for, eh? Did you think we did it just to give ourselves something to do? For a lark? No, madam, it was to save lives. To save French lives, I should say, because apparently you English don’t worry too much about that sort of thing. God directs us to spill as little blood as necessary, madame. I had it all planned. And then that fop Monmouth”—he spat the English name out so vehemently that his lips were flecked with foam—”he goes and wrecks everything, two thousand lost, including my own Paul and the greatest warrior of all, d’Artagnan…” He threw himself into his chair and began to moan, hunched over the table strewn with parchments, “Forgive me, nom de Dieu, name of God, sacred Mother of God, forgive me, forgive me…”
“Well…” said Lucinda hesitantly, looking over her shoulder. “In that case…” she whispered, and started backing toward the entrance.
“That’s right, garbage, out, out! Oui, c’est ça, va-t’en—putain, espèce d’ordure, you English whore!” he screeched after her.
John was staring at her with a strange look on his face as she finished telling them of Henry’s betrayal and Vauban’s humiliating (although welcome) rejection. “So you see,” she finished lamely, “nothing really happened, in the end…” and felt the tears well up in her aching eyes again.
“Oh, pet,” said Bessie. “Pet, pet, pet, when will you ever learn…”
John cleared his throat. The women both looked up at him. He paused a few long moments, his eyes closed, before speaking. “I am to blame, madam,” he finally said quietly. “Once again in my unforgivable doltishness I have done you an injustice. You see, your reaction to my warning led me to believe that this—danger was of no concern to you, that you were willing…”
“That I was willing…!”
John hung his head. “I do not mean it as a reproach, madam. I see now that I was mistaken. I only mean—I only meant to explain to you why I was remiss in shielding you from this great insult. Knowing what I know now, I cannot forgive myself. My failure to protect you—it is unpardonable.”
“No, no!” whispered Lucinda, her voice cracking. “You mustn’t blame yourself! You tried to warn me, but I would not listen!”
He was looking at her cautiously. There was a disconcerting silence. She realized that perhaps she hadn’t said enough. She started babbling. “I was a fool, and I believed Captain Beaupree—I mean, I wanted to believe him. I…I kept hoping…but I see now that I cannot. I was wrong about him. He is a scoundrel, a villain. I’ll never believe anything he says again. I know that now—” Her sentence was left dangling dangerously in mid-air.
Their eyes locked for a few moments until suddenly they realized they were gazing unguardedly. Both looked away, embarrassed.
“Well. What I believe,” Bessie jumped in brightly, “is that it is late, and you are very upset, pet, and very tired, and you probably haven’t eaten a thing.” She turned to the surgeon. “I think it would be best if you took her back to our tent, sir. I mean, if you wouldn’t mind. I’ll sit up with these poor souls tonight. You need your rest.”
“Oh, but I cannot let you…” he began half-heartedly.
“I assure you. An old woman needs less sleep than you young people.” She beamed at them. “Go on, now, dears. There’s that suet pudding I made yesterday, lamb, it’s in the box under our shifts, and half a ham.”
“Ah, a suet pudding!” said John. “It does sound appealing…”
“Go. You deserve it,” she ordered.
Overcome by Bessie’s determination, the reluctant pair shuffled out of the tent.
They walked silently side by side down to the water and across the pontoon bridge. On the other side, Lucinda stopped him.
“I can find my way to the tent from here,” she said shyly, “thank you. I do not need an escort. You needn’t bother…”
“I won’t hear of it! No, no, I promised mother Goose.”
“But I tell you it isn’t necessary.” Her heart was heavy as lead. She was sure he had seen through Bessie’s little ploy to throw them together, and braced herself for yet another rejection.
Instead, she felt the warmth of a hand groping for hers.
“Madam…”
“Lucinda.”
“Lucinda.” He breathed it like a sigh of relief. He held her hand gingerly. She held her arm out stiffly, trying to control the trembling, her muscles immediately aching wit
h this attempt at nonchalance. “I—I was looking forward to some of that suet pudding, actually.”
“Oh!” she said. “Well, in that case…”
He kept her hand in his all the way up the hill, neither of them acknowledging the electrifying intimacy of it.
She finally disengaged herself awkwardly when they arrived at the tent. “Let me find some light…” she said, her voice sounding like a foghorn in the blackness. She stumbled about, not quite knowing what she was doing. In the end it was he who found the tinderbox, and lit a candle.
“You are trembling!” he said. “Here, let me light the brazier for you.” She stared at the back of his head, amazed at his practicality. “Now come and sit down here,” he said. He shook out one of the blankets and folded it around her shoulders. Instead of withdrawing, his arm remained where it was, gentle on her back. She shuddered violently, and he drew her closer to him.
That was how they sat for a long time, she shuddering occasionally and he pulling her closer every time.
“The pudding!” she exclaimed at one point.
“The pudding can wait,” he said.
41
POT OF GOLD
The sensation is that of falling, falling, plummeting, the bowels leapfrogging over the bursting heart as the body plunges down, down, into thin air.
This, by the way, is why it is called “Falling in love”.
Hold me, hold me,” she whispered into John’s shoulder. She caught herself, and pressed her lips together. She hoped that he hadn’t heard her. At the same time she hoped that he had.
He leaned back on the pile of blankets, pulling her with him so that they were now lying stretched out on the floor. This allowed her to nestle even closer to him, her forehead touching his chin, her profile pressed into his neck.
“Hush, try to sleep now, you must rest,” he murmured. But he betrayed the sentiment by shifting again and holding her even more tightly than before. She wriggled closer too—she could not get enough of this thawing warmth. Her skin tingled, needing touch, more touch. Her heart was beating with hard knocks in her chest. She felt his chest contracting and expanding, expanding and contracting, and she heard and felt his breath, heavy now, in and on her ear.
He disengaged his hand from her elbow, slid it up along her upper arm toward her armpit, then slowly squeezed it tight again. Both paid rapt attention for a few moments to that large hand spanning her arm. It seemed a symbol of a new reality, a reality that involved nothing but just the two of them.
She could no longer ignore the hardness pointing through the layers of skirts against her thighs. A little flutter of fear gripped her heart—no, not fear. It was joy, it was excitement. Her legs relaxed a little. The hardness responded, pressing closer.
“John,” she groaned, “we mustn’t…”
But she belied her words by burying her head even deeper into the hollow of his neck, gulping in the humid air hovering there.
“No, we mustn’t,” he agreed, and, exhaling heavily through his nose, started stroking her back.
She could not help giving in to the melting feeling. Just a minute or so more of this, she promised herself. Then she would push him away. Gradually, every tense muscle in her body relaxed; the more relaxed, the more pliable her body, increasing the surface area available for closeness. Bit by bit, he gathered her up.
Lucinda, panting now, had to come up for fresh air. She lifted her face from his neck and found his nose, his eyes, his mouth, waiting. Their noses touched, rubbed, slid past each other as their mouths connected. Hesitantly at first, each took, then gave a kiss in turn, back and forth, forth and back. It is hard to say which of them first broke this courteous reciprocation, but all at once—and, it seemed, simultaneously—all restraint was thrown to the wind, and her lips and tongue, engorged with warm blood, were swept up in a rollicking dance with his.
Again she had a guilty impulse to stop before it was too late.
“John,” she broke off, sighing, “John! We are forgetting ourselves. This was not the idea…”
But he did not, he could not, relax his hold on her. His mouth was set in a slack expression incapable, at this moment, of human utterance. His wide, faraway pupils and flat glassy stare betrayed his absolute, determined desire. That look sent a shudder of ecstasy shooting through her vessels and she gave herself up to the same overpowering, helpless sense of urgency.
They did not undress; there was nothing so deliberate about what was happening to them. Their clothes somehow got pushed aside in the places that mattered as their damp bodies adjusted to each other involuntarily.
And so it was that the delirious, the wonderful, the inevitable came to pass. Like two magnets drawn together across an invisible force field, with shifts of position almost imperceptible, these two could not help, in the end, slipping smoothly, oh so smoothly—comfortably, oh so comfortably!—into an interlocking hold, home at last.
“Oh,” she gasped. Her face was no longer turned up to his but buried once more in his clavicle. How to describe the feeling? She was not, as when she lay with Henry, attacked, invaded, importuned: she was, of her own volition, clutching at him, drawing him deep, deeper into the very core of her being. Her other senses—sight, smell, sound—were rendered void and it was touch, only burning, glowing touch, that mattered. He moved—just once—and “Oh!” she gasped again.
A rhythm started. They began, in unison, to move, tentatively at first, gently, hesitantly, bashfully, even. But after only a little of this—it can’t have been more than, say, a minute—a groan escaped him, and, as if goaded by some new demonic force, he had to pause, to gather up some pent-up force. With a shudder of anticipation, she felt him brace his feet deliberately against the floor. And now the rhythm started again, but bolder this time—syncopated—wilder…
She stopped. “Stop!” she said, “Stop, please, we can’t…”
But the words came out sounding like sobs of gladness stuck in her throat, and almost immediately, by mutual consent, they took up again where they’d left off, too far gone now to think of the consequences.
When it was over, they lay immobile for a long time.
It was John who moved first. He needed to shift his arm, which was beginning to fall asleep under the weight of her head. “Mmmm,” he murmured.
She turned her head and looked up at him. Tears were drying on her cheeks.
“John John John oh John,” she said, pointlessly but poetically.
His hand was immersed in the hair above her neck. He twisted his fingers into the tangle, and gave it a proprietary tug.
“Ouch,” she laughed. And the next instant, remembering the gravity of their situation, “Now what are we to do?” she demanded, her nose pressed to his nose, her eyes flashing mockingly.
It was clear to them that the act that had just been completed had been committed not in the name of ordinary lust. No, it had been, in all its glory, that elusive goal each of us hopes to find one day: the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the taste of heaven, the absolute-ultimate merger; in other words, true, reciprocal love. At the magic moment, despite everything else they had to pay attention to, they found the strength to gaze deeply into each other’s eyes, and call out the other’s name, brokenly. That, as everyone knows, is the stamp, the seal, the prearranged signal that love, true love, is at work, not to be confused with that other, less noble sport.
“Now what?” she repeated, nudging his chin with her nose.
He moaned. It was hard for him to break the perfect silence; to surrender to the foolishness of words.
“Now what?” he finally grunted, blissfully. “Us. We two. You. Me. You and me. For ever.”
Even though they resonated warmly in her ear, the cryptic words seemed to come from very far away. With her eyelids half-closed, it was exactly like floating in one of her dreams. Ah, but she was awake, and the words were real! There was more: “I have loved you—from the moment I first laid eyes on you. I have hated Beaupree since the mo
ment I understood you were his.”
The mention of Henry made her sit up in alarm. “Henry! If he finds out—he’ll kill you! A—a duel! Won’t he? Oh please, I don’t want you to, to—”
“No, no,” he soothed her. “There will be no duel. After what he did to you…And we are brothers, comrades-at-arms. There is a code of honor. His Majesty has strictly forbidden any duels among the officers. I am certain we can come to an understanding…”
To himself, he was grimly going over the numbers required to buy Beaupree off. The rogue always needed money. Surely his proprietary interest in the woman he considered his mistress—the thought made John grit his teeth with fury—could be snuffed with an adequate bribe. John had ten thousand pistoles stashed away in his tent; and if that wouldn’t do it, he could always cash some bills being held for him in Paris.
John’s confidence filtered through to Lucinda. She could trust him, he was not just placating her. He could make everything come out all right. She was so happy. So very, very happy. And John. It was John. It had been John all along, the hero of her dreams. How astonishing. How perfect. She dozed off in his arms, exhaustion winning the day.
She did not sleep for long, however, for John could not resist stroking her, exploring intimately those aspects of her that were now his to discover, and his ruminations soon woke her up.
“Hello,” she said shyly.
“Well hello to you,” he smiled, and went back to his grazing.
It wasn’t long before he took her again; and she partook of him, equally.
And that, in a nutshell, says it all.
42
THE PUMPKIN
A beautiful coach, all made of the purest Venetian glass, a lovely crystal bubble of a thing, starts to roll downhill, slowly at first. Somewhere close by a loud clock begins to strike: ONE—TWO—THREE! Inside, the two passengers, with a thrill, realize what that sound means—FIVE—SIX—SEVEN!—as they are swept away in the runaway carriage, faster, faster, knowing full well what is about to happen, but powerless to stop it—NINE!—TEN!—ELEVEN! They look at each other in horror, amazement and rapture—
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