by Black Silk
Submit offered the drawing back. “You look cool enough here. Who is the woman? She looks familiar.”
Graham didn’t take the picture but stared steadfastly toward the shade of the trees.
“An actress,” he replied finally.
“Elizabeth Barrow?”
He nodded.
“She’s pretty.”
“She’s actually rather nice, too.”
“Yes. It looks as though you liked her quite well.”
“Like. Present tense.”
“Is that a fact? I don’t think Mrs. Schild is aware of this.”
“Mrs. Schild is unconcerned.”
Meaning, Submit took it, that it was none of Mrs. Schild’s business. She gave him a doubtful look.
He sent her a tired look back. “She knows,” he clarified. “She doesn’t worry about it.” He raised a brow. “She worries a little about you, in fact.”
Submit frowned and looked down. “I know. That’s very strange, isn’t it?” Mrs. Schild suddenly became a subject neither one of them wanted to discuss.
She followed Graham Wessit as he walked toward the stand of poplars.
When he spoke, he startled her by asking a question in her own mind. “How did Henry get these?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“I never knew he’d even seen them, let alone owned them. I assumed they’d been destroyed. Or gravitated into the private collection of some fondler of such things.”
The slight wind lifted again. She looked at him. Beneath the unbuttoned vest the wind showed one white trouser brace. It came down the front of his chest, thin and taut, a seeming contradiction to the loose shirt, the frivolous velvet. He was a confusion to her for a moment. Stiff tension, soft cambric, velvet and starch.
Submit glanced down. “Who did them?” she asked.
“What?”
“The pictures. Were they blackmail?”
She watched him sit down in the shade. He leaned his head against a tree trunk, resting his arms on his knees. He made a dry laugh. “No.” He closed his eyes. “It was no blackmail. A number of us did it together. Elizabeth. The artist. Some of her friends. Some of mine.”
“Why, for heaven’s sake?”
“It’s complicated. And stupid.” He shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Submit could not grasp this. She sat down. “You didn’t actually pose?”
He sighed. “We did. On numerous occasions.” He made a sound, disgust or simple lassitude, down his nose. “I won’t pretend to make it into anything very acceptable. All I can tell you is that we found it exciting. The actress in Elizabeth, I suppose; she loved an audience. And, at the time, I was in love with the profane, the idea of setting everyone, espe cially Henry, on their ears. Elizabeth and I used to get hot just knowing Pandetti was about to arrive.”
Submit felt her skin prickle. “Not Alfred Pandetti,” she said.
“The same.”
She felt warmed, alarmed, and curious in a way that made her stare at Graham Wessit, study him unreservedly while his eyes were closed. “That’s impossible,” she suggested. “He’s part of the Royal Academy, a leader of the group trying to put fig leaves on Greek statues—”
Graham Wessit opened his eyes to look at her. His eyes were more startlingly handsome than she’d been aware. For a second, they took her breath away. Beneath their deep brow, they were the color of India ink. Large, shadowed, downturned, these extraordinarily dramatic eyes fixed on her for several seconds, making her finally look away.
“My dear marchioness,” the man beside her said quietly, “Alfred Pandetti, like all of us, has inclinations that are private and inclinations that are public. Publicly, he’s simply what his ambition has made him, Victoria’s artist, a servant of Her Majesty the Queen.”
She shook her head. “You’re wrong. People would know. The Academy wouldn’t have let him in—”
He laughed softly. “My dear young woman, people don’t always tell.” He paused. “For instance, Henry didn’t. Henry knew perfectly well that Alfred had penned the drawings, but Henry had become some what Alfred’s patron. Henry had already made a huge to-do among his friends within the Academy over this bright new artist. Alfred Pandetti had a future. I, so far as Henry was concerned, did not. So Henry spared Pandetti—and himself—and threw me to the wolves.”
“If Henry did this”—Submit wasn’t certain she believed it—“you should have told.”
“Why? Henry and I both knew I would protect my friends—that’s one of the reasons why I had no future.”
“I still can’t understand why, if you knew this, you didn’t say.” Then a very good reason suddenly occurred to her. She could hardly believe it, even as she pronounced the possibility: “You protected Henry.”
The shadowed eyes clouded further. “I most definitely did not. I would have given Henry over to the Academy, St. John’s, Cambridge, every blessed temple he worshiped at, if only I could have. I just had no desire to ruin the career of so talented a man as Alfred Pandetti.”
“Then you shouldn’t have done the pictures. Someone could still speak up. People become jealous, gain enemies. Anyone who knows might suddenly tell.”
“And I’d defend him.”
She gave him a dubious look. “By lying?” she asked.
“By focusing on a broader truth.”
“Which is?”
“His art: It’s beautiful.”
Submit was a little uncomfortable with this. She frowned and leaned back onto her hands. A feeling had come over her, a feeling related to the one she’d had when he’d blurted out his involvement with the pictures in order to spare her memory of Henry—the contradictory sensations of disapproval, admiration, and gratitude. She felt confused again now. Graham Wessit flirted with the dark side of human nature and, in an upside-down way, this seemed honest and brave.
After perhaps a minute, Graham glanced again at her to confirm what seemed very unlikely to him—after all these revelations, Henry’s widow remained beside him. Mountains of skirts and crinolines were folded and spread, her copious dress encroaching upon his buttocks and shoe. He looked at her black-stockinged ankles peeking out of all this propriety. Irreverently, his mind suddenly called up other images. In all the pictures, Elizabeth had worn black stockings. Black stockings and garters and nothing else. “Aren’t you frightened to be out here alone with me?” he asked.
“Should I be?”
“I don’t know. Do you pose for sketches?”
Submit made a nervous laugh and rolled her eyes. “My gracious.” She addressed the inn on the horizon.
He smiled at the expletive and its underlining remove from such things as dirty pictures. It dawned on him that this woman knew how to keep him at bay—leaving him no sexual opening—while she probed him from one end of his privacy to the other. Like a doctor—this will only be mildly uncomfortable….
She glanced at him and asked, “Miss Barrow. What has become of her?”
“Still in London. I don’t really see her much anymore. And I am ever so private about it now if I do. If that redeems anything.”
“Have you more elsewhere?”
“More what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Sketches, actresses.” She paused. “Twins.”
He glanced at her sideways, muzzling a meaner response. “Oh, dozens,” he replied. “I thought you might be more skeptical than that, might not be taken in by everything you hear.” He snorted: “Rumor.”
Submit floated the paper between his feet. “Fact.”
Graham didn’t answer, though neither did he see the picture. He stared blankly into it.
“I could start a new rumor,” she said after a time.
He made a sarcastic pull of his mouth as he picked up the picture, rolling it. He used it to dig absently in the grass between his legs.
“In a way, the earl of Netham is very like the marquess of Motmarche.” He looked over his shoulder at her. “Henry
,” she continued, “was susceptible to moodiness, melancholia—almost as if he had an aesthetic preference for discontent. Whenever he would discover himself to be accidentally happy for even a moment, he grew suddenly disgusted, revolted by the ugly simplicity of it. Angst, unhappiness seemed somehow to him more worthy, more complex. I would tease him. ‘Don’t try to be morose,’ I’d say.” She paused. “‘You can smile if you’d like.’”
Graham stared at Henry’s widow. She was still looking off, wearing a smile he liked very much. It was faintly crooked and richly feminine, the unique little line her mouth could draw. He wanted to be angry at her for her mildly gleeful and wholly unsympathetic speech, but he couldn’t. She cocked her head a few degrees, looking straight ahead as she leaned back on her narrow little arms. Her posture made her breasts pull taut against the front of her dress. They were plump little mounds. Sitting there smiling, she was naturally, horribly seductive, it occurred to him. Dressed in her widowhood, from her throat to her knuckles to the tips of her toes, she was a little piece of black silk erotica sitting beside him.
He watched her, her weight resting back on her arms, her legs stretched out before her on the ground. He noticed her black shoes tapping together, making a little squeak of soft leather as they stuck momentarily with each tap. When she caught sight of her own movement, her smile broadened. As if to counteract this betrayal of seriousness, she tilted her head down until he could see only her smooth, pale crown. Then she made a quick, unself-monitored gesture. She pressed her dress between her breasts—the black dress looked finally hot. Perspiration showed wet under her arms, ran a path down the bodice. Graham felt sexual interest ripple over him warmly to settle in his groin. He felt the first mild lift.
He stretched his own legs out and rolled to an elbow, noticing her retraction from him. She changed to a more upright position, contriving to put another inch or two between them. But his hand caught her chin. He stopped the retreat and forced her to look him in the face.
“I’m not like Henry,” he said. “I am not so attached to words and theories that I can’t give way to something that feels stronger.”
Her mouth pursed. She was glaring at him. Her eyes looked dark and bright against their peculiar little feathering of short lashes. For a moment, these eyes stared over his hand, in open rebellion against attempted mastery, even this small one over a jawbone. She abruptly made a high arch, a display of long, white throat; she took her chin away.
“You are so—” He was going to say “pretty” or “beautiful” or—what?—“winsome”? Did a man tell a woman she was winsome? This woman was, but it didn’t matter. He suspected that if he told her there were some universally pleasing quality to her looks, she would only deny it outright. And not without grounds. He stared at her, as if to anatomize his own attraction to her. Her eyes were too large for her face. Her nose was narrow, her chin pointed. Her skin was washed out except for its smattering of pale freckles. He found himself staring at her mouth, her lips as plump and pink and soft as a baby’s. She wet them and looked down.
He watched the color rise in her cheeks. Her skin was ivory, he decided, not washed out. And her eyes, behind their canopy of thick lashes, were a changeable, mysterious blue. She was plain one moment, pretty the next. He couldn’t figure her out.
“You are devastating,” he said honestly. Her skin, he realized, was flawlessly smooth, something a man wanted to touch. What she was was tactile. She had a fine, gold down along her cheek. He watched her mouth, waiting for it to open, thinking of the teeth that overlapped in front. He ran his tongue along the back of his own.
“Don’t do this,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Don’t pretend I’m your sort.” Her eyes slid to him rather meanly. “Or you mine.”
“I don’t have a sort.”
“Of course you do.”
“Which is?”
“Laughing, pretty women.” A pause. “Mrs. Schild.”
He made a disgusted sound. “So I am a dark, morose fellow with a penchant for trivial women.”
“Mrs. Schild is not trivial.”
He made a glum twist to his mouth. “You were meant to deny the whole description.”
He rolled out flat on his back.
There he sank into wounded silence. Why do this? he thought. Why march in where there were already any number of clues that his forwardness was not welcome? He was rebuking himself silently, indulging in a particularly male groan—sexual overture gone awry—when he felt a touch at his hand. He started and caught her light, cool fingers in his own. It was her turn to look surprised.
“Graham—” she said softly. She tried to politely retrieve her hand.
With her use of his first name, Graham’s mouth went dry. He held onto her fingers as he opened his mouth, thinking to respond gently, seductively, Submit. But mysteriously he couldn’t. The stupid given name, so much a crude command for exactly what he wanted of her suddenly, could not be coaxed beyond the tip of his tongue. The name sat there in his mouth, unspoken. He found himself suddenly with no handle, nothing by which to take hold of even the smallest intimacy, whatever the touch or the name was meant to imply.
He took hold of what advantage he had: He pulled firmly on her hand.
There was a small battle for possession. She leaned away, pulling equally hard. They were immediately at cross-purposes again. His mind was snagged on French hooks, naked sketches, the perspired dampness of the slopes and crooks of her body. His wanting her was all of a sudden much stronger. He dragged on her fingers until she was pulled over, catching herself with a hand on his chest. She righted herself to her knees, looking much like an animal trying to back out of a hole.
This awkward moment held, balanced delicately between his concerns for how far to push it and how very much he wanted to push it further and further. He wanted to pull her down onto him then roll her over and cover her with his body.
He tried to tease her out of her reluctant mood. “If only he were in a pillory now,” he said. He offered a quizzical smile.
She looked baffled, then solicitous for an instant. “You were actually pilloried for them?”
When he didn’t answer, or only answered by pulling on her all the harder, her sympathetic interest waned. A small, uncertain fear crept into her expression.
For several seconds more, the palm of her hand held the distance. Its pressure seemed to give his heart something to thump against. He could feel every beat traveling into her arm. He could sense her warmth, smell the perfume of the soap she used on her hair. He couldn’t recall any recent longing stronger than this. He wanted to penetrate Submit Channing-Downes—physically, but also metaphorically. At that moment, he wanted all of her female mysteries to open up to him, her complexities to unravel right there in his hands, her privacy to yield to raised skirts, parted thighs, deep, wet acquiescence.
While he hadn’t so much as kissed the woman.
And neither did it look as though he were going to. She took a worried breath, a frisson. She remained on alert. He could feel her reluctance digging, finger by finger, into the muscles of his chest. There was nothing else for it. He let her go—with a show of upheld, innocent hands.
He was sure he had shaken her confidence, that she was preparing to fly, for she was getting to her feet and brushing herself off. But she didn’t leave immediately. She picked up the picture and looked at its grass-stained edges, studied its center of historic bad taste. Then she tore it, neatly at first, in half. Then she tore those halves, then those and more, until the entire picture rested in uneven bits in her cupped palm. She looked at him as she let her hand flatten, her fingers spread. The slight breeze spun and separated the confetti over a wide area.
He watched her walk all the way back to the inn, wondering what in the world it was that she had just said to him.
Chapter 15
Old boy! Sentiment and passion at your time of life, hey! A pretty how to do, upon my word! You’re a man of the w
orld, I should think. Because you met a pair of pretty eyes and a bright smile, and a peachy cheek, you thought they were for you, hey?
Mrs. Steven’s New Monthly
“The Shady Side,” page 33
Philadelphia, July 1856
The innkeeper brought slices of cold jellied chicken and a bowl of hot peas. It was a meal to which Submit would normally have sat down with appetite. As the daughter of an abattoir owner, she had developed an aversion to red meat. In her house there had always been an obscenely large supply, every muscle and organ sliced and gravied and stewed in cooked blood. Since she was twelve or thirteen, much to her father’s consternation, Submit had lived off chicken and cheese, with the occasional variation of fish with chips and vinegar. Above all, she preferred fruit.
She pushed the dinner away now, only half eaten. She felt oddly lonely tonight. It was the sort of feeling that simply knowing Henry was reading in another room would have relieved, she thought. Or inviting Graham Wessit to dinner. It surprised her to think this, but then the whole afternoon had been rather unpredicted, except the advance out on the grass; she should have expected that.
Submit tried to decide what she thought of a man who made advances toward women he hardly knew, toward gentlewomen, widows, widows of cousins—a man who involved himself with actresses and public orgy and pornographic art. She knew what she was supposed to think, of course, fully as much as she knew that on some honest and inquisitive level she was not nearly so appalled as she ought to be. Just as there was something rather horribly fascinating about the pictures he’d taken away with him, there was something perversely interesting about Graham Wessit himself. Submit frowned. This was the trapfall of a handsome man, she supposed. His beauty and charm obscured objectivity. Here was a man, she told herself, nearing middle age, who, it would seem, had yet to have had a meaningful, marriageable relationship with a woman—and a man who had had what sounded like a truly horrible, wrongheaded relationship with perhaps the wisest, kindest man who had ever walked the earth.