Judith Ivory

by Black Silk

  She only nodded as she sectioned the orange.

  But other people had begun to understand his game. The lady with the fan grew silent. The man beside Submit turned in fascination, his ready attention waiting for someone’s discomfort—or better yet, an argument, a fight. Down the table, voices laughed, counterpointing the ugly little quiet that had settled between William and Submit.

  “Deadly,” William continued. “Tiny, delicate, yet it can kill you with one bite. Or certainly make you very sick.” He added gruesomely, “Though a bite would kill a child.” He turned fully to face Submit. “Is the jar still there on the shelf?”

  She looked up at him, wondering when someone would stop him. “So far as I know.”

  “They mate,” William said. He gestured with his knife. “Then they eat the male. That’s where they get their name. A regular femme fatale, don’t you think?”

  “I think,” Graham interrupted by stealing a piece of pheasant off William’s plate, “that you, like a great many people, are a little shortsighted when it comes to nature. The spider in the jar is dead. Whatever small poison she had was apparently inadequate in the overall scheme of things.”

  “Small poison,” William repeated, glaring at him. “Not so small, if it’s you writhing from the bite. Or,” he added, “dead or dying in her web—”

  Graham laughed. “Have some wine, William. It’ll ease the buzzing in your head.”

  Submit glanced at her rescuer. If one could call it a rescue to be labeled inadequate and compared to a dead spider in a jar. Graham had sat back into a kind of characteristic pose, his arm on the chair, his jaw balanced in three fingers and the heel of his palm. He was looking right at her with an interested stare. She minded this interest all at once, as if she were some specimen, some new species to watch. And she minded all over again that Graham didn’t take her side more strongly against William in other things, that he gave him a place to live in London, invited him to his table, then laughed when he attacked her over lunch.

  Rosalyn Schild was the one to break this up. She came through the doorless entryway, breathless, at somewhat more than a graceful walk. “Graham,” she said, “I think Charles has put Claire’s eye out.”

  Graham stood. “Excuse me.” He was out the door like a shot.

  Rosalyn didn’t follow but greeted everyone warmly. When she sat down beside Submit, however, she did a quick double take, then recovered with applaudable sangfroid. “Why, Submit, how nice to see you.” The gregarious woman rolled her eyes and leaned closer, as if she and Submit were old, confiding friends. “His children,” she whispered. Her eyes made another theatrical swing toward the ceiling. “Horrid, horrid, horrid,” she pronounced.

  Submit saw Graham only briefly again that day, just before she retired.

  He stopped her on the stairs. She was going up as he was coming down. “I’m so very glad you came,” he said. “I’d love for you to stay longer than just the weekend.”

  “I don’t think so.” To change the subject, she asked, “Is your daughter all right?”

  He shrugged. “The doctor put a patch on her eye. We have to wait.”

  “It’s very bad then?”

  “She’s very bad. She and Charles both. They were fighting. Every time they do something like this, I want to banish them to a boarding school, a foreign country, as far away as I can put them from me.”

  Submit would have imagined such, that he would be admittedly not very fond of children. “You don’t like them very much?”

  He laughed. “I adore them. You obviously haven’t been around children much. They’re all like that. Monsters. Till they get old enough to hide what they really feel and want and think.”

  She smiled a little at his cynicism. “How old are they?”

  “Thirteen.”

  She waited for another age, for numbers to fall into an order. Her anticipation must have shown.

  “And thirteen,” he added. “They’re twins.”

  She couldn’t keep the unpleasantness of this surprise from showing on her face. With distaste, the whole business at Scotland Yard came to mind, the poor girl with the twins.

  “Well, I’m not responsible for every pair, you know,” he said. “Just one set.”

  When she looked, she found him smiling, privately laughing at her reaction. She smiled, too. “No, of course not. But it’s an ugly coincidence.”

  “It’s no coincidence, I’m sure. The girl found herself with twins. It’s common knowledge I’d fathered twins once. Most everyone knows I have. I was sure you did, too.”

  “No.” She shook her head. Sincerely, she told him, “There are the hugest gaps in what I know about you.”

  He made one of his wide, fabulous smiles: white teeth, inch-long dimples down his cheeks, the dark, down-slanted eyes crinkled at the edges in friendly, warm regard. “Stay and find out.”

  That night, Submit was looking through a handful of Henry’s notes she had brought. Pease expected the next episode by the following Wednesday.

  Everything was always rushed with him. He was running a bare episode ahead and wanted her to give him more as quickly as she could, presumably to allow for her loss of interest, her loss of faculty, or her demise. Pease wanted the finished book in his hand. Submit obliged, but wished she had more time and leisure to go through everything more carefully.

  She read the words, “Ronmoor had inherited a folly. A real, literal, architectural folly on a lake….”

  She stared out into space for a moment, realizing suddenly why she had known the room downstairs vaguely and the little desk with its drawer particularly well. Ronmoor had given an upstairs maid money from that desk drawer—in Henry’s notes—last week. She began to leaf through Henry’s pages.

  “A tall, charming man with a predisposition for easy women, fast horses, and trouble…”

  “…in the center of a cliquish little group of the more extravagant and outrageous of London upper-class society…”

  “Rather surprisingly, Ronmoor had legitimate issue, whose birth was, like everything else in Ronmoor’s life, twice as difficult, twice as much as needed—the children were twins.”

  Lord God, Submit thought.

  “Ronmoor sat his arm on the chair, setting his face into his palm, three fingers up his cheek, his little finger fitting into the deep groove of his well-defined chin….”

  It was Graham Wessit. The fictional man she was moving around on paper was nothing but a loose fictional—haranguing—reflection of the man entertaining friends downstairs. Graham Wessit was the Rake of Ronmoor!

  Chapter 26

  There was a rapping at Submit’s door. From the hall, a voice called urgently, quietly, “Wake up! You have to see this!”

  She rolled to her elbow. It was still dark. She was in a valley of down pillows, in a thick fog of sleep.

  The muffled voice called again. “Come on! Wake up! We have to hurry!”

  She pushed a pillow aside, climbed over another. Slowly, she made her way up from the groggy stupor that comes of brief, heavy sleep. She had lain awake for hours before finally drifting off. “I’m coming.”

  Her braid fell heavily onto her back as she flipped it out from where she’d trapped it in her dressing gown. The floor was cold under her bare feet. The mantel clock, as she passed, read four fifty-three. She cracked open her apartment door.

  Graham Wessit was on the other side, fully dressed, in the same clothes she had seen him in last night. His neckcloth was undone and so were the top buttons of his shirt. His face, even in the demidark, was flushed.

  “You’ve been drinking,” she said.

  “Only all night. Come on—” He reached for her hand.

  “Where is Mrs. Schild?”

  “Asleep. Will you hurry? Put something on. You’ll miss it.”

  “What?”

  “Just hurry up.”

  Three minutes later, he was pulling her along at a half-run with about a dozen other people, through the brambles, then ac
ross the grass of his back garden to the lake. There, a dozen people manned half a dozen boats, little rowboats by a dock. Everyone was slightly inebriated and laughing. Submit meant to be irritated at the insanity she still didn’t understand. But the grass was cold on her dampening shoes. The morning air was crisp. And Graham Wessit’s hand was warm.

  He lowered her, grabbing her under her arms, into a rowboat. It wobbled under her feet. She fell immediately to a crouch.

  “You’re no sailor,” he said and laughed as he climbed in.

  A minute later, all six little boats were cruising out silently into the middle of the lake.

  Graham lifted one oar of their boat, dipping the other deeper into the water. He let the submerged oar and their momentum—he’d rowed like the devil—turn them around. “There,” he said with an air of great satisfaction.

  It was the sun, rising over the silhouette of his house, casting a pink-gold haze over his wild, uncut garden.

  “Oh, my.” It was spectacular.

  Someone in another boat cheered. Graham passed her a bottle of champagne—no glass, just the bottle.

  She laughed. “Where did this come from?”

  “Had it in my other hand all along.” He looked down at his arm. “Spilled half of it all over my cuff.” His face had one of those magnificent expressions he could make, smiling and frowning at once: a man in love with fun who was not so unself-conscious as to miss, or not mind, what an idiot this could make of him at times. It was strange, but she really had begun to appreciate this peculiar-sad awareness of his—the way he just rolled right over it anyway when fun was at hand.

  She took the bottle. When she hesitated, he motioned with a twist of his wrist, showing her to tip it up. A man’s voice, about twenty feet off, had begun to sing “Rule, Britannia,” a good seagoing song. Submit put the bottle to her lips. When she tilted it, nothing came and nothing came, then a whole slosh of it poured into her mouth, up her nose, and down her cheeks.

  The boat rocked, and an oar clattered as Graham leaned to mop her up, putting a neat folded handkerchief at her chin. The handkerchief smelled of fresh starch and sweet bay. She drew back. Without seeming to notice, he shifted further forward an inch. His arm braced itself on the gunwale right by her waist. The boat leaned into the water at a slightly precarious angle. The lake lapped against its sides.

  Beyond them, across the lake, the man singing of Britannia was truly getting into the spirit. He sang out the last stanza, “And manly heart to guard the fair.” He began on the refrain. “Rule, Britannia. Britannia rules the waves….”

  Counterpoint to this silliness, Submit’s heart began to jolt in her chest. Graham’s handkerchief blotted her chin, her cheek. He took it back for a second, looking for a dry spot as he folded it. His fingers were dark against the white linen; long, graceful, perfectly rounded at a clean, short nail. They were hands that didn’t do much, except maybe wipe up champagne. Submit could feel the coldness of her spill running down her neck. He seemed about to dab this up too when he stopped. They stared at each other in the rising light of dawn, his weight on one knee between her legs. There was no crinoline, nothing again to hold him back. Submit’s heart felt as if it were going to pound right up her throat. Then he seemed suddenly to realize she had backed up, all but ready to arch out into the water away from him. He took the bottle from her hand. In something of a huff, he sat back.

  “Lord, you spook easily,” he said, “like some virgin housemaid with the bloody lord of the manor she’s afraid to offend.” He stretched out, with an exaggerated obligingness, his elbows back on the transom as far away from her as he could get. He planted his feet under the rowing thwart, his legs sprawled open.

  Her next remark just came out. “As in the serial?” Ronmoor, these days, was chasing a housemaid who didn’t run very fast—she had a limp.

  Submit was suddenly keen to hear how he would respond. She wanted to hear that none of it was true, that all the insane adventures weren’t really his. Or perhaps that he didn’t mind—what a good joke it all was.

  Or better still, she wanted to hear him say he didn’t know what in the world she was talking about.

  “Jesus Christ,” he whispered, then took a long drink from the bottle. “Who would have thought that bloody thing would have such a broad readership.”

  “It is you?” When he only took another draught from the champagne bottle, she asked again, “All those awful, exaggerated things? They are true?”

  “In a less exaggerated form.”

  She bowed her head. “How terrible. And how very, very mean.” A sharp, undiluted anger at Henry rose up. He had laid out in print a real man’s debacles and peccadilloes, laid them out in infinite, ludicrous, embarrassing detail. Henry had made a pillory of print—then handed her the key. All at once, sitting there in the rocking boat, she wanted to cry. Shame and regret overwhelmed her for a second. Lord, how she needed this money—and how she had enjoyed the writing when it had seemed innocent. And, Lord, how she was going to hate giving it up.

  “Yes,” he snorted, “someone is having a lot of fun.”

  “Hey, Netham!” A young man in a far boat was standing, waving for his attention. “Fifty pounds says I can beat you in.”

  Graham yelled back, laughing as if everything were fine. “You’re fifty feet closer to shore!”

  “Give you a thirty-second lead,” the man called.

  “Thirty big seconds?” He laughed, suddenly getting up. “All right. Fifty pounds says you’re on.” He began stripping off clothes. His coat and vest went. He worked his shoes off as he began undoing his trousers.

  Several ladies squealed. Submit backed into the corner of the prow, not quite able to believe….

  “Egad, man, your boat!” the other man called. “I meant rowing in!”

  “You said you’d beat me. Now either jump in the water or start rowing. I’m a bloody fish once I start.”

  “I can’t swim!”

  Graham laughed heartily, his shirttails flapping in the lake’s gentle breeze. “And someone here needs to tow Lady Motmarche in.” He nodded toward Submit, then the shirt came off. Down to his undervest and drawers, he dove in.

  He was on the shore before the other man even had his boat turned around. Submit watched as he rose up and walked out of the lake, framed by the columns of his Roman folly. Like a god, Neptune, in the morning sun. He was backlit, a silhouette. In this hazy nimbus, he ran his hands through his hair, shook water out. His underclothes clung. She watched him walk up into the folly and out, into the brambles of his garden. His shoulders were wide, his back broad and muscular, his buttocks strong. His long, sinewy legs moved with a graceful, purposeful stride. Modesty said she should look away. She stared. He was the most beautiful, most perfectly proportioned man she had ever laid eyes on.

  An awkward young fellow with a heavy public-school vocabulary (egad, jolly good, by Jove) rowed up. There was a young woman already in his boat. He was diffident, polite, respectful almost to the point of reverence, as he tied Submit’s boat up. He began to row, Submit trailing along behind. It was slow progress after the near race to get out into the middle of the lake. Theirs were the last boats coming in. As they glided along, Submit sloughed off her damp shoes onto the wooden bottom. She let her bare feet slide under Graham’s abandoned clothes. His vest was satin, blue satin with a black velvet reverse. It was incredibly smooth and cool against her instep and along her arch. By the time they approached shore, her toes had felt their way along the pleats of his shirt; her ankles were loosely tangled in the braces of his trousers and in a skein of watch chains that lay hidden on the bottom of the boat.

  The Lady Claire Wessit was thirteen, pushing with all her might at twenty-five. She played precociously and adeptly at being older, and Graham allowed it. She wore a bit of color on her cheeks and mouth, did her hair up on her head, wore low décolletages over her small bosom, and wore her mother’s dangling pearls, all with the practice of one who had dressed up, pretend
ed, for many years. Her childish imitation of adulthood did occasionally capture a refined, uncharacteristically mature style. The effect was portentous of the great beauty she would one day become; then the next moment, in one nauseatingly apt word, it was cute in the way little girls can make horrible, bumbling asses of themselves. When Graham looked at her, he always felt at once both a magnificent success and utter failure as a father. She was lovely, full of grace, feminine down to every aspect of that word’s ineffable charm. She was also fainthearted and headlong by turns, never at the right moment, and prone to tears, tirades, and conniving. So far as Graham could remember, she was nothing like her mother. And not very much like her father—primarily, Graham thought, from lack of exposure. He saw her only irregularly, on holidays and such. The looks and much of the temperament, God help her, were his, but she handled them with a completely different tack. Graham considered himself particularly ill-suited to deal with her and generally shrank from confrontation whenever she gave him the opportunity.

  Charles was another matter. Though twins, they hardly looked related at all. Charles was gracelessly accommodating an ever-increasing height. His body had taken on, with a sudden vengeful will of its own, the idea to mature at a pace he could neither intellectually nor emotionally match. He stood only slightly shorter than Graham, with all the wrong proportions. He had a thin, boyish slouch. He was sullen, brutish, and dealt Claire possibly the only thing that saved her: occasional blows of undeserved meanness that stunned her, at least for moments, into puzzled humility. The two were close despite this, with a genuine affection for one another. They bickered. Charles sulked. Claire was kind to him, cheering him on occasion as no one else could do—and as she did for no one else. Charles kicked her for her trouble, insulted her, tormented her, then wanted her to talk to, gave her “lends” from his allowance that he neither saw returned nor asked for back. They each loved to be the center of attention, orchestrated the other’s downfall for the purpose of looking good by comparison, and were happy if the other didn’t show at all. Then, an hour after, one was asking for the other, When will Claire, Will Charles come—not that I care, mind you, the fart ass. They could also be extremely foulmouthed, though here they walked a delicate line with their father and knew it.