Judith Ivory

by Black Silk

  “Yes, of course. You have my condolences, madam.” There was a pause before he added, “For losing him, that is.”

  She wasn’t very inclined to thank him. Submit could not remember when she had had a more difficult or perplexing conversation. She blundered along for a few phrases more, speaking of Henry briefly, formally, holding the man’s arm. Then she happened to catch a look at the box, still in her hand. It occurred to her suddenly that anyone this evasive, this desperate to get free, knew what the box contained. Her smile from a moment ago broke fully onto her face.

  Submit didn’t move, made no further offer of the case, asked no further questions. She let a silence grow between them, standing on the knowledge that Graham Wessit was acquainted with—had perhaps even enjoyed—a boxful of embarrassing pictures.

  Oddly, it was her silence that Graham finally heard. He was quietly stewing over Henry, looking for a way to dismiss the mention of him. In fact, he was looking about the room, looking for an excuse to dismiss this disappointing woman altogether, when out the corner of his eye he saw her smile. His inattention had cost him any hint as to why.

  But he could not have missed the effect. She had small teeth and, he noticed, a smaller jaw—two top front teeth overlapped in order to make room for the rest. Oddly, this parting and showing of teeth was so strongly feminine that he was brought up short. A knowing smile peered through a diffident complexion. Nothing totaled. The sum of her parts should have been unremarkable, vulnerable, almost childlike. Yet she demonstrated an elemental duplicity, the way street children can seem canny. Then another wrong adjective came to mind in describing her. Nubile. And Henry, old Henry, was not dismissed. Graham found himself trying to tally her approximate age twelve years ago. Fourteen? Fifteen? Sixteen at the outside. Henry would have been fifty-nine. Graham’s skin prickled.

  The widow let go of his arm as she picked up the conversation again with some stiff, conventional nonsense. But he was just as glad to let her talk; he didn’t know what to say, what to think.

  The dead guardian seemed to be lurking. Graham started to feel old sensations. His childhood and adolescence clung to the widow in wisps, as if she’d just climbed through an old trunk of his youth. Cobwebs seemed to dangle from her, more vital than the memory of specific events. She triggered the reliving with just a word, an intonation, of inchoate emotions he knew were familiar but couldn’t identify. He began to realize Henry Channing-Downes was in every sentence she uttered. Out of context. Out of time. Out of the grave. She had his vocabulary, his inflection, his favorite idioms. Only the peculiar femininity was hers, unshadowed. The shy, imbricate smile—no more than a social mechanism, but ticklishly pleasing, as if it ran lightly over his skin. Then gone.

  It dawned on him suddenly that he was staring. He quickly looked away. There was a sense of nothing being where he’d put it. He was lost in the conversation. It would have been difficult to explain that he was bored with it on one level and incapacitated by it on another.

  There was an intrusion of noise and rain and wind. Half a dozen people came in the front door, shaking, stomping, dripping. A nervous laugh echoed from their midst, more chatter of weather, exclamations of relief to be out of it. Servants came. The routine of arrival broke into the private conversation. The little catch of tension was allowed to dissipate into the noise of the others. With merry murmurs the newcomers shed their wet clothes and warmed to the atmosphere of the dry, bright house.

  Graham lowered his voice and came inches closer to her. “William and I speak regularly,” he said. “One hardly knows what to believe of all he says these days, but I know his suit was intended to put you out of a house.” He was so puzzled by this woman. He meant to make amends. “If you’re in need of a place to stay, I have a flat on Haymoore Street.”

  Her shoulders, face, and eyes all raised together a fraction, suggesting mild surprise.

  He pressed the matter. “If you’re in dire straits—”

  “Thank you, but I couldn’t even consider such an offer.”

  “I hope you are not refusing for fear of imposing—” It occurred to Graham to add, “I assure you I am not making a suggestive proposition.”

  He got a faint smile from her. A member of the other party had begun to sing a pub song. “The mucking rain, We may as well drink.” Trying to be serious in the midst of this was beginning to take on a furtive quality, becoming a collusion between himself and the widow.

  “I’d never think that.” Her voice was hushed.

  Except that was exactly what she was thinking, he was sure; that he wouldn’t offer a woman help honestly. He brushed the palm of his hand down his ornate vest. “You shouldn’t believe everything William tells you,” he said.

  Her smile broadened, as if she were easily smart enough to know this, and to know why he would suggest it. “He has a great deal of specific criticism for you, doesn’t he?”

  “You should hear what he calls you.”

  She paused to put the tip of her tongue against the compacted teeth. She eyed him for a moment, then looked away to watch the other group in the room. A laugh from that quarter punctuated their own silence.

  Graham spoke to the side of her face, the clean, juvenescent profile. “Stay in the flat. It’s staffed anyway. It’s nothing in the way of trouble to me.”

  “Why?”

  “Mud in William’s eye, if nothing else.”

  “I haven’t the time or patience to be vindictive,” she said, implying he shouldn’t, either.

  The implication, even the syntax, were Henry Channing-Downes’s. One of Henry’s little maxims—or a good imitation, since Graham had long forgotten the specifics—on Guarding Good Character. Again the hair on the back of his neck stood up. “There are many things,” he said, “I wish I could have done for your husband. But we were on such bad terms. Let this—”

  She interrupted. “If you really want to do something for me—or Henry—explain what you know about this box.”

  He stared at her, muzzled by his own sharp resentment that she had circled back in this direction. He couldn’t decide if he liked or hated this woman.

  Then he didn’t get a chance to decide. Rosalyn Schild glided into the room. She immediately became its center. She must have been summoned on behalf of the late guests, for she greeted them directly. Smiles. Good-evenings. Bussed cheeks. Squeezed hands. A beguiling enthusiasm that jumped social barriers.

  Between Graham and the widow, a tangible barrier materialized. The black lacquered box. “Here. Take it, or I’m leaving it.” She nodded her head to indicate a little table beside them as she held the box out. “It’s yours. You can burn it, toss it, whatever you’d like.”

  She went to set the box down. Instinctively he grabbed it, taking a firm hold.

  Wide, shallow, shiny. Raised brush strokes of white, pink, and rose on black. He nearly gagged at the concrete feel of this apparition. He pulled at the box. But oddly it stayed in the air. He felt the paper walls of it giving between his thumb and palm, collapsing. He realized two other hands had an untentative hold. The widow had not let go. And Rosalyn’s hand had a delicate but firm grasp of the other side—she was adjusting the box down an inch to see the other woman’s face.

  “Hello.” Rosalyn surveyed the widow a moment, then smiled. She began to provide introductions. Her hand fell away, then the widow’s. Graham put the box behind his back, into both his hands.

  The just-arrived group congregated around Rosalyn and himself. She introduced him to a Member of Parliament he already knew, saying every word of his own full title as if printing it on a formal announcement card. “And you know, of course, the Right Honorable the Earl of Netham.”

  Graham shifted his weight to his other foot as he fidgeted with the box behind his back. He was barely following the conversation when he saw Rosalyn duck around and between them, like a game of London Bridge. There was a tugging on the box at his back. His grip tightened.

  He whispered beneath the conversation
to her, “What are you doing?”

  Though the M.P. was expounding on something, the whispering and Rosalyn began to draw interest.

  She made a face and laughed. People turned. “What are you hiding?”

  Even the M.P. was willing to concede to her change of topic.

  “What is this?” Rosalyn had decided to make a show of it. “A present? Let me see.”

  She pulled at the case while Graham attempted to maintain it without appearing too interested in doing so. A minor tug-of-war ensued. The more he defended, the more certainly she would have it.

  “Rosalyn—” He tried to get a warning off to her as he gave up the box.

  But she only answered by glancing first at him, then—making sure he saw—at the widow. She connected them with a mischievous look of mock jealousy. Graham was silently appalled. He stared steadfastly back at Rosalyn Schild, admonishing her in all seriousness not to open the box. He threw a look to the widow; it was her fault, so she might at least help. Then worse. When he looked back at Rosalyn, her smile had become silly—half cross, half baffled, pasted onto her face as if she had suddenly taken her own teasing too seriously.

  She drew her lips together, not very attractively, and began to fiddle with the case’s latch.

  He turned away and put his hands behind him again. He swallowed, took a breath, then took another. Breathing seemed to be something he had to do consciously or he was going to pass out. He became unsteady. Then he lost track of every idea, notion, and person around him: of all but the mortifying notion of being associated with this box, the disaster that was about to open in his face again.

  “Are you all right, Graham?” Rosalyn touched his arm.

  He turned partly around, like a man coming out of a stupor or coma. In the space of what seemed like seconds, something important had changed.

  Rosalyn was talking to the widow. “…you mustn’t,” she was saying, “muck out into the rain all the way to that godforsaken posting house. I have plenty of room.” She turned back to Graham. “Are you all right? You’re absolutely green.” In a softer voice, she added, “Lady Motmarche explained. I didn’t realize your guardian had died. I’m so sorry, dear.” She leaned closer to whisper, “I didn’t know it was his.”

  Graham was at a complete loss. He looked at Submit Channing-Downes. She was unmoving, expressionless, and inexplicably in possession of the papier-mâché case again. It was closed, safely latched tight.

  Rosalyn, he realized, had given up her pursuit of his hidden feelings, having settled on some others: shock and grief. She treaded lightly with him now, making herself a buffer again between him and everyone else. He could hear her, in hushed tones, quietly staking him out, hers to understand. “…since the loss of his cousin…has come so obviously close to the bone….”

  She was trundling everyone out of the room, while moving the widow into the house. “Fipps, see that Lady Motmarche’s things are unloaded from the carriage.”

  To this purpose, the double doors to the outside were swung open. A crisp gale swirled rain in, lifting all the ladies’ skirts about. Chaos. Submit Channing-Downes stood motionless in this, one hand held against her skirt, the other arm loosely wrapped around the retrieved box. She was faced away from Graham in profile, steady against the wind, the only fixed point in the commotion besides himself. It was at this moment that the night air suddenly braced him with clarity. He understood something, a small reason for the peculiar affinity he felt for the widow. She, as only himself, had no curiosity for the contents of the box: As sure as there were plagues and troubles in the world, she had already opened it.

  Chapter 7

  Submit awoke to the sound of laughter. Somewhere beyond her bed, a woman with a lovely voice was laughing uncontrollably. The sound was sweet and musical, like distant, pealing bells. She rolled over. The sheets felt coarse, stiff. They smelled like sun, the outdoors, flowers—lavender. She frowned and rose up on one elbow. She didn’t recognize the room.

  The laughter came again. “Oh, Graham,” someone said outside.

  Submit realized why her surroundings were unfamiliar. She had only seen this room by lamplight, when Mrs. Schild’s housekeeper had escorted her here. And she’d been so tired, she hadn’t seen the bed at all. Last night she had just shrugged out of her dress into her nightclothes, then climbed in.

  She tried to climb out now, but the bed was very high. She missed the stepstool as she slid down. Her nightgown rode all the way up the backs of her thighs. Her bare feet plunked onto a rough wood floor that hadn’t seen wax in an age. She padded across to her bag.

  The portmanteau she had grabbed in haste as she had raced from the boardinghouse last night was now under a bench by the window. She’d dragged it across London to the earl of Netham’s house, only to find his house—an ancient monster of a building—locked and dark. It was by chance that a servant had happened to come from around the side to tell her that if it was important she could find the earl at a party another cab ride away. She had lugged the bag back into the cab, then left the driver waiting with it for more than an hour while she’d waited to speak with a man who, it would eventually become clear, was not going to say anything of substance at all.

  So much for immediate remedy, for satisfying concern and horror and incredulous curiosity all at once. This cousin of Henry’s raised more questions than he answered, leaving her rainy, nocturnal sojourn to yield only two certainties: Graham Wessit knew unquestionably what was in the box, and what was there bothered him as much, or more, than it did her. Submit remained baffled by the box, the man it was intended for, and Henry’s connection to any of this.

  She had never witnessed a house so bright and full of people as this house last night. It was a planet away from the sedate gatherings in Cambridgeshire. People had carried on till well past two in the morning, the real diehards taking over then. Party Charlies. Ineffectual young upper-class men who distinguished themselves chiefly by being fashionably extroverted, exceedingly foolish, and generally loud. Several such young men had thrown two young women—equally enthusiastic, it seemed—into the fountain out back at about two-thirty this morning; she had heard them outside. Such high-toned friends Graham Wessit had.

  Submit shoved the black lacquered case aside as she slid her bag out. She opened it and rummaged through, retrieving her hairbrush. After unweaving her hair from its haphazard braid, she rose and began walking around the room again, vigorously brushing thick hair that ran a foot past her waist.

  The room, though small, was quite satisfactory. Submit knew from her climb up the stairs last night that it was near the attic, the last guest room before a ladder of stairs that led to the servants’ quarters. She looked around. There was a single bed, a narrow wardrobe, and a small table barely large enough to accommodate a chipped pitcher and basin. Save the bench under the window, these were the room’s only furnishings. It didn’t surprise or disappoint her, however, that her accommodations were a little less than what she was used to. What surprised her was that she should have accommodations at all.

  Submit bent over at the waist to brush her hair from the back. Its ends touched her toes. Each day it took half an hour to get a brush through this hair, to make it smooth enough to fix into a chignon. Her hair was not unattractive; it was thick and curly. But it had too much thickness and the wrong kind of curl for her tastes—she unleashed every morning an avalanche of wild springs. Relatively satisfied with her brushing, Submit threw her head back. She was standing, trying to tame her hair into a mass she could grasp with both hands, when another sound, one she couldn’t identify, came from outside.

  The room had a single window over the bench. It was small and round and open a crack. Through this opening, she heard a crisp, irregular click. She listened for a moment, her hands in the air.

  She wandered toward the window, then leaned on the bench with one knee as she looked out, nudging the window sash out with her elbow while she twisted her hair. The window let in bright sun, about n
ine inches in diameter of it, and a clear view. On a terrace, about forty feet below, Graham Wessit was having his hair cut.

  She could only see the back of his head, but there was no mistaking who it was. The earl’s barber was trimming around the earl’s ears, trimming dark hair as glossy as lute-string silk—she owned ribbons that shiny. Submit managed to fix her own hair into a wad at the nape of her neck, then realized she had no pins.

  She found new ones in her bag. The light, feminine laughter came through the window again. It belonged to Rosalyn Schild, who was also on the terrace below. Submit rose, sticking pins in her hair, and looked out the window. Mrs. Schild was eating at a table set with what looked like cakes, sausage, and fruit. Another man sat with her, someone Submit didn’t know. He watched the lovely Mrs. Schild, while the woman didn’t give him so much as a glance.

  Submit watched the stranger steal a piece of muffin; Mrs. Schild didn’t notice. This man, like the hostess and earl, was very well dressed. He was fair, a perfect example of Anglo-Saxon good looks. There these three beautiful people sat, a huge tree overhead waving spots of sunlight over them, the terrace, and the lawn. It was hard to have eyes and not enjoy them from a distance. Though judging by the glances and postures and stolen looks, not to mention the stolen bits of food—Rosalyn Schild poked the man’s hand with her fork when he went after another piece of cake—Submit was just as glad not to enjoy them up close. London society, with its pecking and pinching, just wasn’t her sort.

  Submit bent to put her brush back, then a sound drew her up again. Graham Wessit was laughing. He had a deep, genuine laugh, the sort that made a person stand still and look at him. He lifted a plate she hadn’t seen and braced it on his knee. The other two smiled. Even the barber laughed at whatever Netham was saying, his scissors in the air, while the earl leaned forward to take a bite of something. Toast and jam. Uck. Submit made a face. How did he keep the cut bits of hair off the jam? She shook her head, smiling.