Judith Ivory

by Black Silk

  “William,” he said, “is an idiot, of course.” Submit gave a distrustful frown. “He is a silly, pompous, self-important fool. And I know enough not to believe everything he says.” A little softer, he added, “I know, for instance, that you are otherwise than he paints you.” He sighed. “But I also know he probably deserves better than Henry saw fit to give him.”

  Henry, their chief grievance with each other, materialized again.

  “Henry knew I wouldn’t neglect William,” she countered. “He just didn’t want William to have access to too much all at once. You ought to give Henry more credit.”

  “I give Henry credit.” He let go of her dress, brushing it down. “Credit for riling William into a tantrum. Credit for engineering my embarrassment—and yours—over the pictures. And credit for knowing everyone well enough to predict your homelessness right now.” He shook his head. “Do you honestly believe Henry didn’t realize how furious the will would make William?”

  She could only frown down at the saddle rack, at Graham’s bare, ringless fingers—neat, long, almost courtly in repose—where they lay on the saddlebow’s frayed edge.

  “It was Henry’s favorite game,” he continued. “Playing God. I even fancy he would like to have shown me his pretty, young wife. If he hadn’t been so damned worried I might like her a bit too much—”

  Submit’s speechless confusion rose up in a kind of heat behind her eyes. She stared at him from beneath a blush so deep it seemed to come from her bones. He was inviting her into rebellion against Henry. And against herself.

  Graham Wessit swung a leg off the back of the rack, then dusted off his pants. “William’s mother, I understand, was about sixteen when she gave birth. Henry would have been about thirty. Which brings me to another little thing I’ve been thinking about Henry. He had a rather embarrassing affinity for young girls.” He let his observation sink in before he went on to its inflammatory conclusion. “Which I suspect didn’t make him too comfortable with himself.” He laughed. “And which resulted in one shallow, literal-minded son, who, I know for a fact, made Henry pull his hair out. The thought of Henry producing a son like William, and knowing daily what he had produced, has always been one of the things that has endeared William to me most.”

  Submit found words. “You are a vindictive, irresponsible human being who makes unfounded accusations—”

  “Are they?”

  She turned and went briskly toward the door.

  “Don’t go—” she heard him say, but she pushed aside the dangling equestrian paraphernalia. Straps rattled and hit her shoulders. She shoved angrily at them, making them slither and clamor and drop into her face. Abruptly, she felt a drag on her dress again. She turned to upbraid him soundly this time.

  He was down on the floor on one knee, untangling her dress from a heavy tack hook that had been left on the ground.

  “Don’t go,” he repeated. “None of this—it isn’t what I meant to say at all.” He got up, dusting his knee, not looking at her. “Not that it matters much now, but what I wanted to tell you was—” There seemed to be real distress in his voice. “What I wanted to say was, well, it sounds rather stupid now—” He paused, throwing her a strangely wretched look. “It died,” he announced suddenly.

  “Died?” She frowned up at his inexplicably pained expression. “What are you talking about?”

  “The littler one. At the hospital. I went last night to see how he was.” He grimaced a kind of puzzled, unsorted expression of distraction. “His nose was running. His breathing sounded sloggy, like shoes walking in mud. He had a little face, all wrinkles, like some wizened old man, with a tiny little mouth that he didn’t dare close—he couldn’t eat and breathe at the same time.” Graham drew a deep breath. “Then, right as I was watching, he suddenly relaxed. At first I felt such relief, like watching someone put down a ridiculously heavy load. Then I realized what his lack of struggle meant. I started yelling for the doctors, calling for help—” He broke off.

  The twin babies. She was amazed to realize he had visited the babies at the hospital.

  He drew another breath, letting it out quietly as he smoothed his vest and buttoned the middle button of his coat. “That’s all. I just wanted to tell someone—someone else who might mind. Well.” He looked around for several seconds. “I think I left my hat inside.”

  Submit, with all the discomposure of reversed, contradictory feelings, watched the back of him disappear into the stone parlor.

  In the common room, she found him putting his tangle of watches into the pocket of his coat. She didn’t know what else to say except, “I’m sorry.”

  He looked at her. “It’s not exactly bad news, is it? At least, I think that’s what I’m supposed to feel: One less little bastard to impose on my charity.” He pocketed the rings as well, then added as if she still might not believe it, “They really aren’t mine.”

  “I know.” She didn’t doubt him; his simple statement had the weight of pure fact. That was the strangest thing about him. He was honest. From the first moment with the horrid pictures to his last word on Henry, he let her know what he thought.

  “And the other one?” she asked.

  “He’s fine.” He looked at her with an ambivalent frown. “I can take him home next week, they think.”

  She could hardly believe what she heard. “You’re taking him home?”

  “I suppose I am. When the other one died, I just went over to the district court and signed the papers. It felt right.”

  “Why? Why in the world would you take him home?”

  He made another huge sigh. “Well, for one, I’m sick to death of going to court, and court seems to be the only way I can legally be rid of him.” Then he dismissed this explanation with a shrug. “Who knows why I’m doing it? God knows I don’t.”

  For almost a full minute, they stood staring at each other, then Submit lowered her eyes from the gaze of a man who did things without knowing why.

  He murmured finally, “You remind me so much of Henry.” He paused as if debating this change of topic, then continued. “Do you know how many houses I lived in between the ages of six and eleven? Nine. Nobody knew what to do with me when my parents died. I lived with my nanny at her sister’s for a while, then moved in with my estate agent’s family on the perimeter of my own property. I could see the house. I lived with a neighbor, a friend’s parents, a governess the court appointed temporarily who stripped the house of its silver, then the sister of my mother’s aunt. I can’t remember the rest.” Again he left a pause. “And, lately, I can’t forget the last person I lived with as a child.” He laughed. “Henry was by far the worst—I got along better with the governess who stole silver.” He picked up his hat casually, as if to make light of what he said next. “So how much bother can one sickly little baby be? I’ll stick him upstairs in the old nursery and hire a gaggle of attendants. I’ll hardly see him. It’s much cheaper than my arrangement with his mother, and he might be the better for it.”

  Well, Submit thought. What a confusing and circuitous brand of compassion he possessed, and for a baby who wasn’t his, whose mother had sued him, clipped him for a good bit of money, then jumped out a window. She opened her mouth, thinking she could find words that would sort all this out and make logical sense.

  Then he summed it up better than any logic could have. “What an unspeakable mess life can be,” he said.

  On his way to the door, he ran his hand along the flat of the counter, his finger up the curve of a vase. He ran his hands up and down the leather spines of the books on a shelf by the counter. Then he set his top hat on his head, quite naturally at an angle that dipped down over one brow, at what could have been called a rakish slant.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” he said, “for being such a bother.” He made a faint laugh. “All the way around.” At the door, he asked, “May I visit you Friday? The end of this week?”

  “No—”

  He went utterly still. Beneath the broad felt br
im, his eyes went flat.

  “I have to be in court,” she explained.

  His shoulders relaxed. “Lord, I thought you were telling me not to come back.”

  “No.” Submit frowned. “Come next week. I mean, if you can. I’ll be here most days after ten. I walk to the village in the morning.” She found herself smiling at him, a little sheepishly. “I buy myself a sweet bun.”

  He stopped by briefly on Monday evening and again in the afternoon of the Thursday after that. Then on the Tuesday following, he showed up at eight in the morning with a dozen sweet buns, six oranges, and a bottle of champagne—all of which he described as his version of breakfast.

  He had spent the weekend in London hiring a wet nurse and making arrangements for his surviving little ward. He was “on a dash” to Netham and could only stay an hour.

  He stayed two.

  “Champagne for breakfast?” She remembered the whiskey from the week or so before. The earl of Netham’s reputation included, she knew, occasional drunkenness.

  He was about to pollute the juice from the oranges with the wine. She put her hand over her glass. They were sitting out on the stone-floored terrace. The sun was shining. Birds twittered overhead from a nest of swallows somewhere in the eave of the roof behind them.

  “To summer.” He held up his glass. She toasted with her orange juice. It tasted acrid and sour after the sweet roll. She thought, for some reason, of the clever, ambitious boys of Cambridge celebrating May Week, the last time she’d known champagne to flow where it possibly should not. She realized that though Graham Wessit may not have been the scholarly model of a Cambridge student, he had probably fit in rather well with his gregarious charm and outlandish exploits.

  “Were you a good student at Cambridge?” she asked.

  He poured champagne into his own juice and shrugged.

  “Which college did you attend?”

  He slid his eyes toward her sarcastically. “Which else?”

  “Really? St. John’s?” Submit put her glass down. Henry’s revered institution, along with King’s and Trinity, was one of the three biggest, richest of the twenty-six colleges that made up the University of Cambridge. These were well-off, landed schools that didn’t favor old men by taking in their wards and sons. “What did you read?”

  He made a facetious smile and took a long draft of champagne direct from the bottle, apparently dispensing with his orange juice entirely. “L.M.B.C.”

  Lady Margaret’s Boat Club. It was an athletic club, the only boat club to lambaste the Other University regularly. Yes, she could well see the natty Netham with his champagne and scarlet blazer, racing on water, carrying on on land.

  “What did you really read?”

  “I told you before, humility.”

  “You’re evading.” She teased him with a sidelong smile. “I won’t think less of you for having a serious scholarly interest.” She realized she wanted him to have a hidden intellectual side. The actor, the exquisite, she had weeks ago discovered, was really quite bright, though no one seemed to notice. And no one, not even he, seemed to care. His intelligence was not the first trait he chose to bring forward. Still, he’d been raised by Henry. He almost had to have a predilection, she thought, for a science or modern languages or the classics.

  He settled back into his chair, leaning on its arm, setting his jaw into his hand, one pensive finger up the side of his cheek. There was a trace of the actor in this; the handsome man who could strike a pose for effect. Despite herself, she was charmed.

  “All right,” he said at length. “Don’t laugh.” She waited. He smiled. “Theology.”

  They both laughed. “Theology! Not really.”

  “Really.”

  “As in wearing a white collar?”

  His answer was to raise his glass and toast himself with a little poem:

  “The Reverend Pimlico Poole was a saint

  Who averted from sinners their doom,

  By confessing the ladies until they felt faint,

  All alone in a little, dark room.”

  Submit laughed, despite the flush that rose in her face. The earl of Netham was too unabashedly bawdy; she enjoyed it too much. And his frank manner did something else. It encouraged her tongue to say what she should hardly have thought: “You would have certainly brought the ladies into the confessional, one way or another.”

  They laughed, enjoying together the blasphemous notion for a moment. Then he said, “You have the nicest smile.”

  Involuntarily, her hand went to her mouth. “My teeth are crooked.” She didn’t know where to look.

  “Yes, I think that’s one of the things I like.” He went on, as if there were no reason for discomfort, “When I was seventeen, I was very serious about serving the Church.” He flashed a perfect, very unclerical smile. “I believed fervently in God, in people, and in the high theater of the Latin mass.”

  “Not to mention actresses,” she offered cautiously, “and art.”

  He laughed at that. “Oh, I never thought to be a celibate monk or even a preaching Anglican, but rather a discreet single cleric until a wife came along. I fancied becoming a canon or prebendary attached to a grand cathedral somewhere that would stand as huge witness to my good, Godly intent.” He began to play with a fork they had used to spear buns, rolling the instrument on end by its tines. “I wasn’t completely insincere, I suppose. But I suspect now that my chief calling was to give old atheistic Henry seizures. Anyway, at the time it seemed right. I was being Good. I knew clerics had to be human, after all, so I didn’t ask too much of myself.” He glanced at her, as if trying to see how much of this she believed, how much he might risk by saying more. He put his finger in the sticky sugar on his plate then put the finger into his mouth. “Youthful delusions.” He laughed. “My scholarship, now that you ask, was impeccable; my spiritual life, however, was a mess—and that, of course, is the substance of the Church. It doesn’t take grand scholarship to have a pure soul. Or vice versa.” He paused. “What did you read?”

  “Pardon?”

  “At Cambridge. What did you study?”

  She was taken aback. “Why, nothing. I was just a distinguished lecturer’s wife.”

  He seemed intent on watching her, as she immersed herself in the dissection of the remains of a pastry on her plate. “You loved it, didn’t you? The academic world. You would have liked to have been part of it.”

  “I was part of it.” But she knew what he meant. She would have liked to have attended lectures, read in the library, eaten in the dining halls, been privy to the whole. “There were evening discussions and afternoon guests. Henry’s house was a very stimulating environment.”

  “Yes. And there you were, sixteen, seventeen, just the age a lot of boys come up to Cambridge. And you were bright—brighter than most of them, am I right?” He gave her no chance to answer. “And married to a man older than most of their grandfathers. Didn’t you just once want to go with them, read their books—”

  “I did read their books. Henry brought them to me.”

  “I’m surprised one of the boys didn’t bring them to you, once they discovered that was what you wanted.”

  She looked down. “This is mean. Why are you doing it?”

  “To try and get you to see—”

  “I was happy with Henry. He gave me more than any callow young man could have given.”

  He laughed and stood up. “Don’t bet on it.” He took the bottle by the neck. At the break in the stone wall, he looked back. “Would you like to go for a walk?”

  She shook her head no.

  As she watched him do her own circuit to the poplars, she wondered about his motives for telling her these things, his motives for coming here at all. She looked toward the handsome, athletic, reckless, fearless, shameless man walking along the greensward, drinking champagne from the bottle at ten in the morning—so much the antithesis of Henry, the embodiment of all Henry wasn’t and could never be.

  My God, she tho
ught, there must have been days when Graham Wessit’s merely drawing breath was enough to make Henry weep.

  Graham became a regular visitor that July. Sometimes they planned his next visit, sometimes he showed up without warning. In either case, he always talked a great deal, as if he were laying his life out for her inspection. She tried to speak to this, as if she could comment from an objective distance. The inn out in the middle of nowhere became a strangely conducive place for such talks.

  Submit was less comfortable when the omniscient inquiry pried into her life. She tried to keep Graham’s curiosity at bay, but he had a way of stopping, leaving long, interested silences that made her want to fill them in with honest, meaningful words. By the end of July, she’d told him of her father, her schooling, her marriage; she’d discussed the death of her mother. The inn at Morrow Fields seemed to be a private world where one could share such things.

  Chapter 22

  Evil villain that he was, the rakehell pursued the young woman into the back stable.

  “No!” she told him once, twice, thrice, as he tossed her backward into the straw.

  Her skirts flew up, offering a glimpse of white cambric drawers, plump calf, and fine, dainty ankle. It was not until he was trying to lift her linen petticoats trimmed with French broadlace, however, that she rallied the courage to say what needed to be said:

  “I will not submit to any man’s unbounded lechery, except for the procreation of legitimate issue.”

  Graham threw the rolled magazine across the room. The force of its flight made the crystal pieces in the chandelier sing. “What absolute twaddle!”

  The more unwholesome passages of The Rake of Ronmoor read like a combination of church dicta and ladies’ garment advertisements. For this, Pease charged an extravagant two shillings a magazine—twenty times the cost of a usual weekly and twice what an episode of the good Mr. Dickens brought. If people wanted a vaguely naughty little story feathered with celebrity innuendo, the publisher was making them pay.