Dark Season

by Joanna Lowell

  “He was born in the eighteenth century,” said Ella, and suddenly, a brightness came over her, and she giggled. “The earlier part of that century, I’d guess.”

  Giggling. She did this even more rarely than she laughed. Isidore stared at her, at the curve of her lips, at the sudden flush that highlighted her cheekbones. More of this was definitely in order. Tickling would help.

  “But Mr. Penn … ” She was somber again. “It is inheritable?” She looked down fiercely at the bed. “If I were to have children, they too … ”

  Isidore gritted his teeth. Penn was a prince among men, but sometimes a month of Sundays went by between a question and an answer. Spit it out, damn it.

  “They might be epileptic, yes,” said Penn. Another pause. During which Isidore’s thoughts were not charitable.

  “Then again,” Penn said. “They might not be.”

  “What would you do?” Ella looked at him intently. “If you suffered from this condition, knowing the risks, what would you do?”

  This was the moment Isidore had imagined. He longed more than anything to ventriloquize the good doctor. If only he could cast his voice.

  Why, I would marry Viscount Blackwood!

  Penn took a measured breath. And let it out. He took another breath.

  “I would live my life,” he said. “I would remember that I am a person and not a pathology.” He glanced from Ella to Isidore and back at Ella. “And that every life has risks.”

  “Phillipa was incandescent with health.” Isidore spoke quietly. He wondered—now that the seals were broken—if every time he spoke of Phillipa the tears would come. But he didn’t embarrass himself. His eyes were dry. “Her life was a white-hot flame, and it snuffed out, just like that. None of us can predict the future. Even the brilliant Mr. Penn is not an oracle.”

  “I can give you bromide,” said Penn. “And recommend you try to put yourself in situations conducive to calmness rather than irritation.”

  “Live your life,” said Isidore, circling round the bed to stand beside Penn’s chair. Ella was holding the coverlet tightly now, gripping it with both hands. Her eyes were glowing brighter and brighter. Marriage. Children. He could see the ideas taking hold. Yes, you can have that. We can take the risk together. We can try.

  “Don’t fear what comes next. Live now.” He smiled slightly. “Or, as the poet once said … ” He leaned closer to the bed. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.” Her eyes opened wide. Now his smile was wicked. “Old Time is still a-flying.”

  Did Penn wonder why Ella had turned red as a beet? He shot her a brief, curious look and raised his eyebrows. It was an alarming shade. Luckily, he decided against a professional intervention. Instead, he turned to Isidore. “That’s a verse with a familiar ring.”

  “And this same flower that smiles today,” said Isidore, nodding. “Tomorrow will be dying.”

  “Who wrote it?” asked Penn.

  “It’s on the tip of my tongue,” said Isidore, staring at Ella.

  “Herrick,” she said in a strangled voice. “Robert Herrick.”

  “Of course.” Isidore slapped his forehead. “Herrick. Wonderful poet. Doesn’t he also have one called ‘The Vine?’”

  Ella’s face turned even redder, a feat, which, a moment ago, he would have declared impossible. She looked as though she might pass out. He didn’t want Penn to be the one to resuscitate her.

  Thirty thousand years later, when the doctor finally left them, he fell onto his knees beside the bed.

  “Marry me, Ella,” he said. She let him take her hand in his. She looked down at him from the bed. Her face was lovely with that waxing brightness. She was so fully everything. He was already reaching up to take her face in his hands when she spoke.

  “No,” she said.

  He stuttered, fell back, the world closing in on him. Still dark. Still no. Then he noticed her lips twitching. There was a sparkle in her dark eyes. That mischievous gleam that appeared when he least expected it.

  “Won’t it be fun,” she asked, “to try to convince me?”

  With a moan that was anything but sweet, he threw himself onto the bed and kissed her until they were both breathless, and then they were laughing between kisses, which made the breathlessness worse, and they clung to each other, not kissing, not laughing, just trying to breathe, dying like all mortals, but living, really living, while they died.

  • • •

  The sky was a deep blue, light pouring between clouds that cast moving shadows on the meadow. Ella and Isidore walked on the dirt road to the market town. They visited the graveyard by the little stone church. On the way back to Castle Blackwood, Isidore tugged her hand and led her into the beech wood. She couldn’t look down from the canopy of leaves, their green so bright and new and tender, warming the light, exhaling the very scent of sunshine.

  “You’ll trip,” warned Isidore at the moment her foot hit a root and she stumbled.

  “I’m not a very good fairy,” she said, somewhat crossly. Clumsy, Ella. Always so clumsy. Toes could hurt overmuch for what they were worth.

  “You’re the best fairy,” said Isidore, tucking her arm more firmly in his. “Crashing about to let all your sylvan friends know you’re coming.”

  She laughed, leaning into him. For all his solidity and warmth, she still couldn’t believe he was there, by her side, that he would be there, day after day, night after night. When her mourning was over, they would be married. She would be the mistress of Castle Blackwood, a building so vast and gloomy she had quailed when they arrived by coach last evening and she first saw its towers rising above her. There were ghosts in the castle. It wasn’t the Scotch woman she sensed, but something amorphous. The loneliness, the sadness, of the generations of women who had lived there. Blackwood brides. The spell of sorrow wouldn’t be dispelled in an instant. She and Isidore would have to work their own magic, charm by charm, until the moldering house became a home to them. There was much to be done, to the manor and to its lands. They would do it together.

  “Do you miss your sylvan friends?” Isidore asked as they walked on, weaving between the smooth trunks of the trees. “The ones you left behind in Exmoor forest?”

  He was still teasing, but the intensity of his expression belied his tone.

  “I will go with you to Somerset,” he said, very low. The wood held a kind of hush that made whispers seem natural. “You don’t have anything to fear from Alfred.”

  It was true. She had nothing to fear. Except perhaps her hatred. She could still feel it, leaping in her blood. She wouldn’t call it a taint. She was done with Mr. Norton’s vocabulary. But it was something to be wary of.

  “If I can’t persuade him to make you a gift of your harpsichord and your mother’s sheet music and your father’s books … ” His voice told her that he found this very doubtful. She knew he would relish the confrontation. “Then I’ll buy them,” he said. “I’ll buy the whole estate.”

  The green-gold light played across his bold features. The tenderness she saw in his face made her heart catch.

  “Someday,” she said, “we’ll go there. Not yet.” Someday she would walk with him in the forests of Somerset and even along the beaches, so austere and terrible in their beauty. For now, though, she wanted to grow into her new life, her new self. She didn’t think it would be possible in Somerset or, for that matter, London. Following the séance, she’d been bombarded by written invitations from spiritualist organizations, society ladies, even a duchess; it seemed that half the city was trying to engage her services. Dozens of mediums were claiming close acquaintanceship, supplying sensational details of mystical Miss Reed’s mediumistic biography to gossipmongers and paper-sellers. She’d weathered the worst of the storm indoors, with Mrs. Trombly on Mount Street, refusing to go out or receive visitors, hoping that the fervor would die down and Miss Reed would be forgotten. She wanted to shed “Miss Reed,” had shed her, with Isidore, with Mrs. Trombly and Lord St. Aubyn, but to step out of that identity
with the ton more generally, to meet people again as Mrs. Eleanor Blackwood, that would take courage. She would have to figure out what to explain to whom, how to make her way in the open, after so many deceptions, without secrecy or lies.

  It would be good to spend time away, good for her, and good for Isidore, too. Mrs. Bennington had left London—“to visit a cousin in Newport for the summer” was what St. Aubyn had heard—but Bennington himself remained. He had tried to speak with Isidore and St. Aubyn both, showed up at each of their houses, in broad daylight and at night, but they’d refused to see him. Ella knew they still considered beating him bloody. On evenings they’d spent together, she, Isidore, and St. Aubyn, in St. Aubyn’s library or in Isidore’s warm, cluttered study in Pimlico, the two old friends had spoken frankly in front of her, admitting her into their friendship with a naturalness that made her heart swell. Isidore loved her, and that was enough for St. Aubyn. She liked to watch the two men deep in conversation, animated, easy with each other, so different in appearance and bearing, yet so clearly aligned. They didn’t only speak of the past, recalling faults and failures, weighing revenge against forgiveness; they spoke of painting and poetry, and of the future, and Ella joined her voice to theirs, debating, sharing, teasing, reveling in the little circle of intimacy they created. Before the end of the month, St. Aubyn was to visit Castle Blackwood with his easel to do some landscape scenes.

  “Clouds and trees and maybe a gorse mill,” he’d said. “That sort of thing.”

  “Sounds dull,” Isidore had responded. “What would Goya say?”

  “Exactly,” said St. Aubyn, and both men had laughed.

  She heard a rustle and glanced at the tree branches overhead, and in that moment, she tripped again. Isidore let her arm go, and she tumbled onto her knees. Stunned, she looked up at him. He grinned and stubbed his toe into the earth, pitching over, his arms windmilling in an exaggeratedly graceless display. He caught himself, of course, with his hands, when his face was a few inches from the ground, lowering himself soundlessly to the damp ground. The man couldn’t even playact clumsy.

  “We fell down,” he whispered, crawling over to her. He rose to his knees and pressed against her, his mouth moving over hers, hot and slow. Ah, this kiss, with the scent of the woods all around them, newborn shoots, decaying leaves, rich and dark with life and death, this kiss was everything.

  “Fall down then,” she whispered against his mouth and pushed him, hard, on the chest. He obliged her by tipping over, landing flat on his back in the moss. She sat astride him, skirts bunching, staring down at his broad body pinned beneath her. Mine, she thought. And then, as he wiggled suggestively beneath her, situating himself more firmly between her thighs, so that the heat flickered between them: Ours. She leaned over to devour him, but he devoured her, sucking in her tongue, taking her lips between his teeth, until she gasped and rocked on his lean hips. The wind blew lightly through the trees, and the whole world seemed to stir. She had to straighten, to stretch into it, the shifting light, the cool air growing even more fragrant. His hips were still between her thighs, but he lifted his torso, curled himself up so he could unbutton the bodice of her black day dress, pushing it down from her shoulders, sliding the laces from her linens beneath, baring her. His roughened hands closed on her breasts, making her arch, making her want to roll backwards and pull him on top of her, opening her legs so he could plunge between them, driving her into the ground. But there was something so delicious about the idea of remaining upright, as though she sprouted from him and from the earth beneath him. She slapped his hands away.

  “Fall. Down,” she said and threw her weight against him, driving him into the ground, dragging her breasts up his chest, the buttons on his shirt catching at her nipples. Oh God, she loved the way it stung, the half notes of pain that made the pleasure sing. She reached for his face, but he caught her wrists and pulled her forward, so her breasts hung above his mouth. She shuddered, twisting her spine as his tongue laved her, gravity and his suckling working together to torture her. The pulling ache was beyond her capacity for endurance. She had to press her breasts against his mouth. She jerked her wrists free and worked herself down his body, ripping the buttons from his shirt.

  “Ella,” he said, lifting his head. She kept prowling down and down. She yanked the shirt from the waistband of his trousers and reached for the buttons of his trousers. She could feel him straining beneath the fabric, his cock hard and thick, humped like a tree root, and she tugged at the buttons, reaching through the flap. She pulled it out, roughly, with her hand. His eyes were glazed, stunned. She moved her hand along the length of him, looking at his face, her lip caught between her teeth. His chin jerked up; his throat tensed. The crown of his head pressed into the leaves. She leaned to kiss the flat of his lower belly, felt the muscles clenching against her lips. His cock stood up from his trousers, and she brushed it with her lips, licking the salty skin, and he bucked with his hips, groaning, and then his hands were fumbling in her skirts, pushing them up her legs. He tore at the ribbons that laced the slit in her undergarment, his fingers finding her slick flesh, sliding into her, pressing deep up inside her, and now she groaned, pulsing around him, and her need condensed, became the hot, wet energy that bursts the green shoot through the seed. A germinating violence. She reared, lifting herself, and he slid his fingers free and took himself in his hand, guiding his cock into her folds as she worked her hips down. She gasped as she sank onto him, lowering until he filled her completely, a hot, hard core around which she shivered, quaked.

  “Look at me,” he demanded, the cords in his neck standing out as he held himself up to watch her, the muscles bunching in his arms as his hands gripped her, jerking her hips, forcing her to roll her pelvis against him.

  “Moan,” he said, the musculature in his abdomen gleaming, each tiny muscle standing out, limned with shadow. He thrust upward, and she moaned, the moan issuing from the plucked center of her being, vibrating out of her throat and into the wind that surged again through the trees, stroking against her fevered skin. Her head fell forward, torso curving over him, until her lips were on his, their moans mingling, tongues twined together, and the heat at the base of her belly flowed up through her, filling her everywhere. The fullness expanded until she was too full, and as he pushed up from the forest floor, she went rigid over him, fused with him, stock-still and then shuddering, a thousand tendrils tickling through her, flickering into her fingers, her toes, lifting through the top her skull. He surged a final time, the flats of his hands pushing the moss as he lifted his buttocks off the ground, crying aloud as he dropped back, arms closing around her shoulders, pulling her down with him.

  She lay against his chest, breathing into his neck, and finally, she unfitted her body from his, sliding off to curl up against him on her side. Her dress was twisted around her waist; her bare upper body absorbed the soft, prickling damp of the earth. She slid her arm across his chest, and he pulled up her leg so it rested on his thighs.

  She heard a rustle again, above them, and gazed sleepily into the treetops.

  “It’s an eagle,” she whispered. “Do you think? An eagle flying to the pharaoh to tell him that his love is waiting by the river.”

  His voice was deep, rumbling with a note of suppressed laughter. “I kept your boots,” he said, almost guiltily. A sheepish confession. “I made sure they weren’t thrown away.”

  “The ones with the laces you cut?” She pressed her face into his shoulder to keep her smile from flying off into the clouds. “The ruined boots?”

  Dark, whimsical Isidore. Her Isidore.

  “Wouldn’t one suffice?” She laughed, imagining it, Isidore stowing her fouled, stinking leather boots in his study among his carvings and violins. As though they were precious. Fairy slippers. Her smile was too big. Her cheeks hurt.

  “I didn’t want to take any chances,” he whispered. “What if you disappeared one midnight and I needed to find you?”

  It was ridiculous, a
nd she laughed again, rolling onto her knees and standing. The light fell all around, and she tipped her head up and lifted her arms, relishing her nakedness in the hidden glade. Then she sighed, buttoning her dress. It would be teatime soon, and Isidore had meetings with tenants and farm specialists, and she had promised Mrs. Trombly that she would write and tell her if the woodbine was flowering and if the graveyard wanted roses and whether the brook beneath the stone bridge was full or dry. She would tell her too how Castle Blackwood struck her and what songs Isidore had played their first night, standing on the terrace under the moon with the violin pressed to his shoulder. She would tell her that she’d heard eerie sounds in the dead of night but that she’d fallen back asleep and dreamed the sweetest dreams.

  She looked down at herself. One of the buttons on her dress had popped off. The skirt was stained and wrinkled about the knees. It would take considerable imagination to suppose that she hadn’t just tumbled Isidore in the moss.

  “Oh dear,” she said. “Does Castle Blackwood have a secret entrance?” Mrs. Potts had come with them from London to oversee the newly hired staff. There wouldn’t be much dignity in scurrying past them all holding together her gaping bodice.

  “If you wait in the trees, I’ll dig a tunnel.” Isidore grinned his crooked grin as he offered his arm. She supposed then that dignity was a small price to pay for delight. They meandered on, their footfalls swallowed by the forgiving ground.

  Suddenly a flutter of black and white broke from the green canopy and settled before them. Hopped. A black eye fixed them with a beady stare.

  “A magpie,” said Ella. She tried to smile. “Not an eagle after all.” She glanced at Isidore, disheveled as a satyr, twigs in his hair. “You know the nursery rhyme about magpies.”

  Silly superstition. Silly to let it bother her. But her heart knocked queerly against her ribs.

  “One for sorrow,” she whispered.