“Is it an apology?” I asked tartly. As far as I was concerned, Julia was a dangerous, deceitful harpy who ought to be walled up alive—though it was possible I was a bit biased.
In answer he simply held the envelope out to me and rose to pace the terrace while I read.
The handwriting was feminine but untidy, a bold hand that sprawled at a forward slant as if impatient to disclose its meaning. I removed the letter and unfolded it to read. My dearest Roderick, it began, and I gave an unladylike snort. The only thing dear to this woman, as I knew from all I had heard, was herself.
My dearest Roderick, I read aloud,
No doubt you are astonished to hear from me after the way we parted, and I only hope that enough remains of your devotion to me to claim your attention for the amount of time it takes to read these few lines.
Perhaps you are aware that after my husband’s death at your hands—
I broke off with a wordless sound of indignation, and a grim smile touched Roderick’s lips. “Oh, there is much worse to come,” he said.
Perhaps you are aware that after my husband’s death at your hands I had some difficulty fending off all the men who wished to give me their protection since my legal protector was dead and you had abandoned me. I rejected them all, of course, because it would have gone against all my impulses of decency to sell my honor in this way.
“Her honor!” Roderick gave a bark of a laugh. “As if Julia had not parted company with her honor years before I met her.”
At last now I have another chance at a life of independence, for the English impresario Kenton Ivey, of whom you have surely heard, has cast me in his upcoming production of a melodrama spectacular at the Théâtre Caprice in Paris. But one of my would-be protectors now threatens to overturn everything by making public certain letters that would ruin me and prevent my ever again being cast in an entertainment in Paris—or received in society. The blackguard says that he will release the letters to the press unless I become his mistress.
“There is her solution,” Roderick said. “I don’t know why she asks my help when she has the means of resolving the matter ready to hand.”
“Roderick!”
He smiled ruefully at the indignation in my voice. “I’m sorry to shock you, love. But believe me when I say it is a tactic she has not hesitated to employ in the past. Julia was never what she called sentimental about matters of the flesh.”
I wondered if I was understanding him correctly. “Do you mean... she was unfaithful to you?”
“I wouldn’t call it that, exactly. No vows bound us to each other, after all, and like many Frenchwomen she has a damnably pragmatic outlook. Which is why it is so absurd for her to appeal to me to protect her virtue.”
Despite the flippancy of his answer, I knew by his own account how fervently he had loved her. It would have cut him deeply if she had entertained other lovers during their affair. That could certainly have contributed to his bitterness toward her.
Thoughtful, I returned to the letter.
I know that your sense of honor will remind you that I would not be in these straits if not for your actions. But perhaps you are deaf to the urgings of your conscience and require additional enticements to impel you to come to my aid. If ties of sentiment carry any weight with you, remember how wildly happy we once were together—and can be again, if you will only come to Paris at once and extricate me from this terrible predicament.
Entreatingly,
Your Julia
“The woman is shameless.” Roderick plunged his hands through his hair, so that his mop of curls was wilder than ever. “One moment playing the injured party, the next offering to return to my bed. Astonishing. I could almost admire her sheer brazenness if she were not so contemptible.”
Except for the admiration, I agreed. The woman’s gall was outrageous. I could scarcely believe how she attempted to manipulate his emotions using any means, no matter how contradictory. Part of me wanted to set fire to the letter that very moment and be done with it.
But despite all I knew of Julia and how she had hurt him, the violence of his response disturbed me. Watching him now as he paced, muttering oaths to himself with a face like thunder, I was reminded of the first days of our acquaintance, when the bitterness and resentment he felt toward Julia had colored his response to me, causing him to dismiss me as another scheming minx of the same stripe as his former mistress. Could his reawakened disdain make him once more reject womankind as a whole?
Perhaps, too, his past with her was preventing him from seeing any truth there might be in the letter, just as my protectiveness toward Roderick might be blinding me. And I did not want that to come back to haunt him.
“Is there a chance that she really does need help?” I ventured.
He whirled to face me, but then the objection that seemed poised on his lips died. “There is,” he allowed in a more restrained tone. “That may be the worst of it—I can’t assume she has contrived the whole business. She was always too clever for that.”
“In that case, shouldn’t we at least make inquiries? Surely no woman deserves to be blackmailed into a man’s bed.”
“I suppose that’s true, even for her.” Dropping back into his chair, he heaved a sigh. The thunderclouds were passing. “And damn it all, I do feel responsible to some degree. She’s twisting the truth to suit her own ends, but the fact remains that I did kill her husband, even though it was a duel and a fair fight. If she has no one to protect her from blackguards, the blame is all mine.”
He buried his head in his hands, but this time the gesture was heartfelt. His right sleeve had pulled back to reveal the black silk bandage he had worn around his wrist for as long as I had known him. An ever-present reminder of the duel, it concealed a scar from the bullet wound his opponent had dealt him before Roderick dispatched him. It reminded me that the episode still festered in his memory, that the shame and guilt still tormented him.
“I disagree that you owe her anything,” I said gently, “but I understand why you would feel that you do, even though she doesn’t deserve it.”
“It isn’t about what she deserves,” he said. “It’s about what decision I can live with.”
Considering that he so bitterly regretted his last decision involving her, I realized that this was a matter of tremendous gravity for him. I waited in silence while he found his way through the dilemma.
“I don’t think I could forgive myself for turning my back on someone I once loved,” he said at length. “It would feel shameful to ignore her.”
Though my heart gave a little pang at this, I understood. Whatever action he took now was a response to the promptings of his conscience and sense of decency, not an indication that Julia held any legitimate claim over him. His lingering guilt might never be resolved if he refused to aid Julia now.
“I wouldn’t want you to have to bear that burden,” I said.
“Killing her husband is the thing in my life I most wish I could undo,” he said in a voice so low that I had to strain to hear him. “Since that is impossible, perhaps helping her now will make me feel a bit less wretched. It might be making amends in a way.”
I was heartened that he saw this as an opportunity to shut the door on his past with her and free himself from its influence. This could be just what he needed to liberate him to look ahead to our future together.
My heart swelled with love and pride. I leaned forward to rest a hand on his arm, and immediately he took it in both his hands and kissed it.
“Darling Sybil,” he said. “I know it’s asking a great deal, but would you mind terribly—that is, do you think you could bear it—”
“We must go to her,” I said. Though the prospect did bring me a twinge of unease, I knew this was our only possible course of action. “I’ll help you do whatever you need to do—whatever will make you feel that there is nothing keeping you mired in the past.”
And perhaps seeing this woman who had once been everything to my future husband
would help me expunge any lingering worries and doubts of my own. In person she might not be as seductive and glamorous as my imagination painted her.
I harbored no false modesty about my own charms, mind you. Though I was now thirty years old, I had the slender waist and energetic bearing of a younger woman, and my naturally golden ringlets still caused heads to turn. My blue eyes and brilliant complexion had evoked poetical compliments from admirers, and I would not have been bragging to point out that I naturally drew people to me with my vivacity. Some of my admirers had been known to call me a classic English rose. (Roderick’s compliments tended toward the less sentimental variety.)
But Julia was a different sort of woman. In the newspaper pictures I had seen of her, I had gathered that the brunette beauty carried a touch of the exotic. And from what I had gleaned from Roderick’s comments, I gathered that she was skilled in the amatory arts, in which I had no experience—not that I hadn’t received offers, of course, but I had always judged it risky to engage in such liaisons, and I was traditional enough to prefer waiting until marriage.
To be frank, however, waiting sometimes seemed quite the most difficult thing I had ever done. Not that I regretted this decision, but I was growing ever more impatient to test Roderick’s long-ago boast of being “a devilish fine bedfellow.” Gazing at him now in his well-fitted burgundy suit, which set off his strong shoulders and narrow waist, and which complemented his olive complexion, it was all too easy to be tempted to anticipate our vows. Since he never plastered his hair down with pomade or the like, his wild curls put me in mind of a young Dionysus with grapes wreathed in his hair. And I was just as susceptible as the wine god’s followers had been; when he kissed me I felt like flinging off the fetters of civilized behavior and following him into a mad dance, crushing grapes underfoot, staining my mouth with wine that was as intoxicating as his touch.
But it was time I brought my thoughts back to the matter at hand. “It’s the right course, I’m certain,” I said. “If we find that she has lured you to her on false pretenses, well, at least you’ll be rid of the uncertainty. And if she truly needs help, we shall give it—and that is bound to ease the terrible weight of responsibility you feel.”
His hands still holding mine, he nodded. His hazel eyes were far away. “I wonder what Paris will be like now, after the siege and the Bloody Week.”
I knew the War of 1870 must have begun when he was still in Paris, seeking oblivion in wine and laudanum from the heartache and remorse that bedeviled him. Horror stories about the siege of Paris from September 1870 through January of the following year had leaked out to the rest of the world in messages carried by pigeon and hot air balloon, terrible stories of starving citizens trapped without food or firewood during a winter so cold that the River Seine itself had frozen.
“You weren’t there during the siege, were you?” I exclaimed, my heart contracting at the thought of the suffering he would have undergone.
But he shook his head. “The professor found me and got me out of the city to convalesce in a country château before Paris was besieged. I shall never be able to thank him enough for that.”
“Nor shall I,” I said fervently. “You might have died.”
He brought my hand to his lips again. “Had I known you would be awaiting me, I’d have been able to live through anything.”
His calmness was encouraging, and when he spoke in this low and intimate way, his husky voice sounded like velvet. I felt I could sink into its deep, soft pile forever. Ruffling the curly hair at his crown, I asked, “Are you worried about what you will find when you return?”
For a moment he did not respond. Then he reached out and drew me onto his lap, holding me close to him. “I am,” he said at length. “Not just seeing Julia again, although I fear I won’t be able to keep my temper with her, and you know how ugly my temper can be. But returning to the place where I spent the worst time of my life...” He buried his face in my hair and sighed.
Then I realized that something even worse than mental torment might lie in wait for him there. “The duel,” I exclaimed. “Even now you could be arrested for that, couldn’t you? That isn’t a risk worth taking for her, surely.”
To my surprise, however, he seemed unconcerned about that. “As much as has happened since then, I doubt anyone even remembers—or cares.”
I realized that I actually knew very little about how the incident had played out. “How did you manage not to be charged at the time?”
“My second kept everything quiet and greased official palms to encourage them to turn a blind eye. As a foreigner and something of a celebrity, I suspect I wasn’t greatly at risk for prosecution for killing an obscure bourgeois, unfair as that may be. And France had just declared war on Prussia, which meant that arresting duelists was not foremost in anyone’s thoughts. Afterward I went to earth so quickly that it would have taken strenuous work to find me—to determine that one of the scruffy, bearded drunkards lying unconscious in a garret was the famous violinist.” He winced. “It sounds more shameful the more I speak of it.”
I took his right hand in mine and touched his black bandage on the place that covered his scar. “If you’re certain you’ll be safe there, I think it is the best course for you to return. You may even find expiation.” From himself, if not from anyone else.
He did not dismiss the idea outright. “I never thought I’d see the day that I’d return to Paris,” he said. “It is the last place on earth I want to be.”
“But I shall be with you this time,” I reminded him.
The laugh that greeted these words was warm and relaxed, no longer the humorless sound of his disillusionment. His eyes gazed into mine with undisguised affection. “So you shall,” he said, “and that makes all the difference. Paris with my Sybil—perhaps I can even learn to love the city again.”
Chapter Three
Days later, we were in Paris.
Professor Hartmann had been quick to give us his blessing. After Roderick had announced our plans and gone to make travel arrangements, the professor turned to me with a look of relief.
“My dear Sybil,” he said, “this is the best thing that could have happened. Now Roderick can finally close the book on the worst episode in his past—and just in time to begin a new chapter of his life when the two of you marry.”
“I hope you’re right, professor. Now that I have had time to reflect, I confess I have some misgivings.” What if he found that his love for her was not entirely dead?
The professor held Julia’s letter, and he glanced at it with a shake of his head. “Misgivings are entirely reasonable, liebchen, considering the kind of woman Julia is. But one must also consider the kind of man Roderick is—and his character is as true as steel.”
“Did you know Julia, Professor?”
He removed his pince-nez and polished them with his handkerchief as he considered his reply. “I met her only once,” he said at length.
“And what was she like?”
Before replying, he tucked his handkerchief back in his breast pocket and positioned his pince-nez once more on the bridge of his nose. I had the strangest impression that they helped his inner vision as he gazed into the past.
“She was one of the most exquisite beauties I have ever seen,” he said slowly, “and it is true that she inspired him.”
Rather disappointed, for I had hoped to hear him condemn her outright, I admitted, “I know they inspired each other as artists—that his playing was enhanced by his partnership with her.”
“That is quite true. But I am certain, all the same, that he would have been far better off had he never met her. It was the saving of him when he met you.” For a moment he was lost in thought, but then he seemed to shake off his pensive air and gave me a smile. “This little trip may be useful to you as well,” he said. “Have you considered that the famous medium La Clarté lives in Paris?”
So absorbed had I been in considering what Roderick stood to gain from the journey that I
had not thought about any prospects that attracted me. “Do you think she would meet with me?” I exclaimed. All I had heard of La Clarté, or Clarity, made me hopeful that she was a genuine spirit medium, and that meant she might be a great help with my education in that vocation. “Perhaps she can teach me more about communicating with spirits... and how to cope with frightening incidents like the one last night.”
“Exactly my thought, my dear. You may benefit from her knowledge. At the very least, it may prove comforting for you to speak with someone who has had similar experiences to yours.”
Elated at the idea, I embraced him. “What a splendid suggestion, professor. Thank you! Now I have something to anticipate besides...” I stopped before I could betray the extent of my nervousness about meeting Julia, but my friend seemed to sense my thoughts.
“Never think for a moment that Julia poses any threat to you,” he told me, taking me by the shoulders to impress upon me the seriousness of his words. Behind the lenses of the pince-nez his eyes looked very old, but very wise. “Beautiful she may be, but so are you... far more so when it comes to inner beauty. And you have wrought a transformation in Roderick’s life. Loving Julia nearly destroyed him, body and soul. His love for you is different. You give him confidence, hope, optimism.
“But that having been said...” He looked gravely into my eyes. “He may need your strength to draw upon,” he told me. “And your loyalty and patience as well. For it is possible that once he is again within the sound of her voice, he may find himself recalling the excitement of their time together.”
The Last Serenade (Sybil Ingram Victorian Mysteries Book 2) Page 3