by Black Silk
And pay they did. Mr. Pease got his price, for hardly more than titillation, allusion, and social gossip, supposedly made palatable by the moralistic outrage as each misconduct was delineated in scrupulous detail. The numbered episodes of The Rake of Ronmoor had become the essence of Pease’s Porridge. The magazine contained a few other bits of fiction, a few poems, some sheet music, and some hand-colored plates of men’s and women’s fashion. But the majority of the little publication’s pages were devoted to serializing Graham, his past, and what people apparently imagined to be his present. In the loose fictional guise of Wesley Grey, Graham’s history conspired with the current taste for a romantic villain people loved to hate once a week.
Graham had hoped that one good outcome of the death of Arabella Stratford would be that The Rake would falter, then stop. When it didn’t, Graham reasoned at first that publication might lag a bit behind the actual writing of the things; there would be printing schedules and distribution. When still they continued after two weeks, however, he began to worry the culprit was elsewhere than in the grave. In any event, the implications of the newest numbers, fourteen and fifteen, were positively frightening: The author, M. DuJauc, knew Netham well enough to walk its rooms, shoo its geese, fish its ponds. Graham was suspicious that his tormentor was, or at least had been in one summer or another, part of his hand-selected summer crowd.
“Rosalyn, have you any idea who is doing this?”
Rosalyn smiled, putting the back of her hand to her mouth, possibly to suppress a giggle. “No, dear. Not a clue.” They were in the upstairs parlor that connected to Graham’s rooms. Rosalyn picked up the thrown book and began leafing through the pages.
Graham paced. “Tilney. It’s Tilney, and you know it.”
“Hm?” She wasn’t listening. Absently, after a little delay, she answered, “No, honestly. I know nothing of the kind.”
Graham looked at her speculatively. She had an ear for gossip, could know much more about him than he himself might have told. Yet the rhythm of the pen was English. Despite Rosalyn’s ability to use phrases like “eh, what a fancy” and “by Jove,” he couldn’t imagine her carrying it off for pages and pages. And she spoke no French at all, a must for The Rake and anything else one wanted to sound a little risqué.
It might be Tilney, of course. But as much as Peter loved to torment Graham, he seemed still essentially too meek and cowardly to attack with such straightforward gall. Graham even considered Henry briefly, then had to laugh at the very thought of the stuffy old pundit jotting off anything so frothy. More to the point: Henry, like the mother of the twins, was dead, which left Graham with only about two or three dozen more friends to rule out. William couldn’t write a straight sentence. Tate was too busy by half. Graham thought of Submit—less because she was a very good candidate than because she stayed in his mind lately like a huge mystery herself. The more he knew about her, the more he wanted to find out. Whenever he thought of the serial and its carping tone, he thought of her and her quiet mitigating attitude of censure. She held almost the opposite view—the antidote to the fiction’s interpretation of him. Besides, knowing as little as she had of his history, she was of course out of the question. Who, then? Who?
“Look at this, Graham.” Rosalyn turned the book sideways and held it over her head to offer him a view. It was a drawing.
“Jesus Christ,” he breathed out. It was a wood engraving done for the purpose of illustrating the story. Though the artist’s name was different, Graham knew well the imitated style. The august Academician Alfred Pandetti was going to be less than pleased to be mimicked in subject matter as trivial as this. Graham frowned for a moment, thinking the new attack narrowed the field of prospective authors. It was someone who knew about the pictures, knew who the artist was. Then he realized that anyone who was associated with Cambridge at the time that he and Alfred were there might know.
Thus, whoever the person was, he or she was over thirty-five. No, he. A man, a man from Cambridge, because the details had been kept from the gentler sex. A Cambridge man, over thirty-five, who had been to Netham enough to know it inside and out.
“I find it offensive,” he told Rosalyn, taking the book away. “It uses mistakes I made a long time ago that are best forgotten—”
She laughed and got up. “Mistakes that are funny. And sometimes very exciting. Don’t take yourself so seriously, Graham.” She turned around, leaning a knee into the seat of the sofa, facing him over its back.
“The mistakes were serious. And this—” He held the thing in his hand, bending it. “I hate the tone, all the shame and temptation of it. Every blessed misenterprise pronounced and moralized upon, like some middle-class—” The mores of the episodes, if one took them seriously, were very middle-class. He thought about this. A middle-class mind—or else a very prim one, much like the current royal manners—was writing these. This only left him more lost. “Rosalyn, how can you possibly not mind these?”
She laughed and leaned toward him. “I can hardly wait for it all to bend around to me. I am dying to see myself in print.”
He sighed in exasperation. “While I’m hoping you’re kept out of it. One more damned mistake—”
They both caught what he’d said at the same time. He looked at her abruptly—just in time to catch a pillow in the face. She’d thrown it at him as she’d backed off the sofa.
“Bloody hell,” she murmured. Refusing to look at him, she straightened her dress.
Anger gave inside Graham. She knew it was an accident; he hadn’t meant to say such a thing. He threw the pillow back hard, hitting her in the shoulder. She looked around sharply. “Bloody hell,” she said more emphatically.
Graham narrowed his eyes. “Where do you hear such words?”
“None of your business.”
He should have let it go, but at this point he wanted some conclusion reached, some sort of satisfaction. He grabbed her arm when she tried to turn and leave.
She looked him in the face, resisting just enough that he had to use both hands. When he had her by her shoulders, something softened in her, complying with his force. She went from an angry woman to one who was coquettish and cute, a child who wouldn’t answer. Her eyes became warm, doeish, inviting more roughness, more dominion. He realized she liked it, his mastering her like—like a bullying rake.
Graham let go. He ran one hand back through his hair, then put both hands into the pockets at the bottom of his vest.
Rosalyn liked this stance, too. She laughed, running her hands up her arms with a shiver, her eyes up and down his length. “Tilney,” she said in a throaty voice. “Tilney loves to tell me dirty words.” She was tormenting him. “I dare not even utter the worst.”
Graham turned away from her, not certain where to hide. “And you let him?”
“What? Say dirty words?”
“Say dirty words to you.”
She laughed. “How can I stop him? It isn’t rape, you know, Gray.”
“You could tell him off, send him away.”
She shrugged. “Why? He’s a duke’s son. I like him. So what if he swears like a lord. One day he’ll be one.”
“Peter has an older brother.”
“Who is aged and ill.”
He shook his head at this. “You don’t put up with it from me.”
“That’s different. You don’t need to say dirty words to me: I sleep with you.”
He frowned at the specious wisdom. Rosalyn wouldn’t put up with the butler swearing at her, and he didn’t sleep with her. Or at least Graham didn’t think he did.
“Do you sleep with other men?” he asked.
“Would it bother you if I did?”
“Yes.”
Surprisingly, there was a long, guilty pause. Graham turned around to see her face grown serious, blushing slightly. The little tramp, he thought. His fury rose; the cad having been outcadded. Then she said softly, “Only with Gerald, Gray. He’s my husband.” Softer still, she confessed, “I can’t
seem to figure out how to tell him no.”
Graham made a grim snort. “You could ask him if he’d like to whisper dirty words.”
She laughed, becoming flippant again when he wanted her to behave. As she turned, she lifted her shoulders to look over one of them at him. It was one of her more appealing and inviting poses. “That’s the worst of it.” She spoke in her deep, flirty voice. “I like Peter to tell me dirty words. He tortures himself with them, with the situation. And it thrills me.”
It didn’t thrill Graham. He said, stone-faced, “The situation could change.”
Rosalyn’s look over her shoulder grew mean. “Then I could sleep with Tilney. He’s everything you are. Except possibly he’s in love with me.”
“Gerald’s in love with you,” he corrected her.
She thought about it, then shrugged. “Maybe that’s why I sleep with him.” She paused. “Are you in love with me, Graham?”
He answered the question honestly. “I don’t know.”
Gerald Schild showed up at Netham several times more, with the same lack of warning or invitation—traveling ostensibly on his defunct marriage license. The other guests treated these larger exits and entrances of his with the same relative indifference as his smaller ones at breakfast or dinner. He blew into a room like a warm, uncomfortable air. People squirmed in their seats, got up to go for a drink, for a walk, never quite certain why, unaware of anything but a sudden change of climate.
As to the lover’s triangle, in which he figured a drafty, southerly vertex, he had no sense of how the whole thing should be acted out. He cast himself in no part—not the outraged husband, not the shrugging sophisticate, not even the wretched cuckold. And this threw the other players off as well. Rosalyn would be flustered—caught between differing quartos of her own script, making dutiful noises and pecks on her husband’s cheek while looking to Graham for direction. With Graham pulled back into the wings: A coward without some agreement on text, he had nothing to offer.
Schild didn’t stay long; he didn’t come often. But the fact that he came at all seemed the hugest breach of both protocol and good judgment. He barely spoke to anyone but his wife. And with her he was always too publicly intimate, no matter how formally he began. In the simplest greeting—“How are you?”—he sounded as if he asked a legitimate question. In “Is life treating you well?” life immediately read as “him, that Englishman,” the category itself implying the distinction of another species—cold-blooded, alien, as if she had somehow taken up, rather appallingly, with a beaded lizard.
There was no sympathy for the man or for the inept, mostly unspoken speeches that brooded behind his eyes. He was generally shunned, this awkward foreigner from a crude country who could not hold a wife and yet could not hold himself from her, despite the fact that he had to scale the obstacles of her lover and all his titled, condescending friends to be near her.
For Graham, there was so much to be pitied and loathed in Gerald Schild, it was overwhelming. There was also something strangely heroic to him, though Graham was reluctant to admit or analyze what that might be. But it had something to do with his capacity to bare—and bear, both senses—his unblenching misery.
Graham remembered the handshake of that first morning, the slight horror of taking Schild’s offered hand. It was small, fleshy—Graham thought of Rosalyn—a paw. Both Schild’s hands had small mutilations, which fixed him firmly in the middle class. The right had a gnarled thumb. It was missing the tip and had only a fraction of the remaining nail. (An accident of trade. “He worked in the mills when he was young,” Rosalyn explained.) The left hand, which so frequently petted the thinning spot of hair at the back of Schild’s head, was marred by a fat, heavy band. A wedding ring. There was not another male guest in the house who wore one, the custom being unaristocratic, if not un-English altogether: A gentleman did not need to be reminded that he was married.
One of Schild’s more memorable blunders was when he was in his cups late one night after dinner. He raised a fourth glass of gin and, from across a room, made a toast to his wife playing cards. He sat, one arm raised, one leg draped over the arm of a chair. Perhaps Rosalyn had a soft spot for drunks, for in this instance she seemed strangely affected by his inebriated gallantry. He spoke the toast aloud:
“It is no chaste love I bear my wife,” he said. Chaste love. Graham had to look away. “It is jealous and adulterated.” He added, “There are times when I would give it up. If I could.”
Rosalyn blanched. The room grew silent. Then the lovely Mrs. Schild left for parts of the house unknown. Graham didn’t find her till hours later. The event was embarrassing, but that didn’t explain the way it shook her. She seemed to suffer as from a revelation, as if her husband’s drunken, miserable love were somehow sobering. As if she were looking love in the face for the first time, caught unaware as she was by seeing it in all its intensity and flower in the most unlikely place, the ruddy, drunken face of her balding husband.
Chapter 23
This time, Graham was told accurately where she would be and what she’d be doing: at a clothesline in the sun, hanging her wash.
Behind the kitchen, some yards to the right and beyond the terrace wall, a line had been strung between roof corner and tree to accommodate the drying of laundry. Most of the articles on the line were obviously from the inn—table and bed linens, kitchen rags. But a small section seemed to have been given over to the use of the inn’s solitary guest.
As he came out onto the terrace, Graham spotted her immediately. She was solid against the white laundry. He stopped just under the terrace’s overhang. The day suddenly reminded him of the day he had followed her out into the field. The sun was bright. The nap of the grass separated and blew in the breeze, making a light, continuously shifting pattern as wide as the field itself. There was nothing anywhere, just the occasional and distant trees, the day, and this woman hanging her clothes. The only shade was the black waving patterns over her back as she bent. He watched her rise through these shadows as she stood, watched the clothes wrap around her and hit her in the face. Graham too felt wrapped—rapt. He was caught up instantly in the private watching of her, in the guilty pleasure of scrutiny without observation. He stood transfixed.
She was much less elegantly turned out today. Her dress was dark cotton, too faded to be called black. It was open at the throat. The small buttons up the wrists and forearm were undone, presumably for coolness or mobility or both. Her sleeves hung in flaps at her elbows. And another anomaly: no hoops. Her copious skirts had been pulled up and back into two wads and tied in a knot over her derriere, an improvised solution to keep the unsupported fabric out of her way. What a sight.
Her back was to him, the sun in her eyes—if she had stood the other way, the breeze would have had her perpetually tangled in neighboring sheets. He watched her as she raised a hand to shield her face, looking up with a piece of laundry. Then she would avert her head and pin blind to the clothesline. Back to the ground, bending in half; a rounded swaddle of dark cotton, the bowed ears of her knotted skirts dominating the air for a moment, raised over thin, stockingless ankles. She bent and stretched, pins between her teeth, her hands shielding, smoothing, shaking, organizing, stringing up clothes. A blouson. A chemise. An untold mangle of more wet clothes rested at her feet in a small basket. He came slowly around the wall, but she didn’t notice him, so absorbed was she in her quotidian acrobatics. She made regular, rhythmic progress, nudging the basket with a foot or dragging it along, even as she retrieved a pin or a piece of clothing. She had a wonderful coordination, a loose-hipped limberness that allowed a foot to coax and an arm to reach without her having to watch either very closely. The ritual had for Graham all the perfect, unorchestrated balance of a bird with its jointed tail—life on a narrow limb, always a fractional adjustment available to accommodate wind, position, and view to the current task.
After a time, Graham began to feel awkward. He had been spying too long. He moved forward with n
o better introduction than to hand her a piece of laundry. She jumped—the startled bird—then laughed, seemingly delighted to have company and essentially unsurprised.
Yes, she was fine, she told him. Having to do a bit of her own work, but not minding it; having, after all, witnessed when she was very young the sight of her mother working. Before her father’s abattoir, when it was just a butcher shop in London, her mother had done all the domestic work herself. It was only later that the troupe of servants arrived. Her father thought he was giving her mother a great gift—freedom from hard work. But her mother grew quiet and thin within the first year of this generosity. She died shortly after that, as if her purpose for living had somehow been undermined.
“I’m sorry,” he said. But Submit waved it off.
And here they were again, talking of private things as easily as most people discussed the weather. Graham loved the close feeling of talking to her, made even nicer by the physical closeness he was presently allowed—the absence of hoops let him get right up next to her as he handed over a pair of wet stockings. He could smell the soap on her hands and something else, something that smelled of herbs and grass, and lilies perhaps. The soft, feminine smell of a woman’s morning toilet. The idea of her owning fragrant soaps or perfumes, of her wanting to attract, unsettled him a little. He couldn’t align this with another notion of her, of the shy, elusive woman quick to point out her slightly overlapped teeth. He didn’t know how to take these contradictory indications of vanity. How did a man respond to a woman who knew she wasn’t beautiful yet who knew also, on some level, that perfume wasn’t wasted? It was as if the prim woman in black understood—and conspired with—her own enigmatic carnal appeal.
He continued to hand her pieces of wet laundry, careful not to touch her. The memory of the physical rebuff the day in the field was suddenly keen again. Of course, that was before they knew each other as they did now….