by Baird Wells
Hannah drew up her shapely legs and wriggled beneath the covers before he had stepped back, and James felt some comfort that he was not the only one afflicted by a drop of modesty. But his had passed, and no quilt would spare her now. He swirled a finger at her, huddled in the bed’s center, and smiled at her wide, curious eyes as she rolled onto her belly and stretched along the mattress. She tucked a slender arm beneath her, and the other between her cheek and the pillow and cocked her head to steal a sidelong glance at him over her shoulder.
He grasped the blankets and drew them down her body without the reservation he’d felt at her drawers, until the bedding rolled in on itself and tumbled atop the bench where they’d begun their exchange. Hannah shivered and nestled into the sheet, and even though she kept silent, he caught a blush which painted her cheek and burned to her hairline.
Hannah’s body caused him a moment of rage at the contortions of ladies’ garments. There was sound purpose in the Greeks and Romans sculpting their women nude, purpose echoed in Hannah’s firm hips and soft thighs, her high breasts and the gentle, twin teardrops of her backside. To reshape what nature had crafted so perfectly seemed cruel.
He settled on the mattress beside her, seated so that his hip was just shy of touching hers, and traced a hand over her back from shoulder to buttock with a space of charged air between his palm and her flesh. When he’d reached her neck again, he allowed himself a first real contact, and brushed fingers up her nape and into long u-shaped braids pinned tight up to her crown, egged on by her soft hums. He slipped each silver pin free in turn and with the side table stubbornly beyond reach, dropped each one in silent discard to the rug.
When both braids were unfastened, he drew out their length to below her shoulders, and swept her with their ends, like a paintbrush, until she burrowed into the mattress and shuddered. Blue grosgrain ribbons which bound her plaits were wound impossibly tight, and their undoing was long in coming. His reward was worth the wait, unweaving the thick sections and raking them between his fingers until black waves formed a curtain over the pale canvas of her back. She shifted at each pass, and again when he draped some of the raven strands over her shoulders.
He tore his collar and neck cloth free in a single crumpled wad before he got hold of himself enough to take the three buttons on his shirt with more restraint. He stood and snapped his shirt tail from his waistband in four sharp tugs and tossed it away, onto a battlefield already littered with Hannah’s fallen garments.
She was bare now save her long white silk stockings and their furtive powder pink garters hanging spent from their bands, relieved of tension in the absence of her corset. He buried fingers inside their tops and folded, then rolled them down her calves and over her slender ankles and feet. He retraced the path with the tip of his nose, from the backs of her knees, kissed her ankle and rested his cheek in the curve of her foot’s high arch. All the while she was still and quiet like a proper lady, except that he knew she wasn’t passive at all. Hannah was not a woman who was acted upon, and he was subtly aware that whatever pleasure she took from his caress, she had allowed him to give it to her.
She stretched along the mattress, soft and languid with beauty and shape enough to rival the nude paintings that, in fashionable circles, were hidden away but still admired. Maybe it was right to conceal them; James inventoried himself, the desperate tension lacing him, and wondered if he could survive it as a standard of daily life. She had saved him long ago from a quick death only to kill him wonderfully slowly now.
He raised his face from the cradle of her foot and came back beside her, and rested two fingers at her neck until her eyes met his. “Hannah.”
Understanding, she stretched down an arm, drew the tangled bedspread over her, and turned onto her back. If it had been difficult for her to face him when he undid her gown, and if he’d struggled to look at her when her drawers fell away, James saw by her steady matching of his gaze that those shy dodges had passed, and a weight settled on him. It was the delicious encumbrance of realizing suddenly how far they’d come, contrasted with how scandalously slowly they’d gotten there. When he pinched the cover and dragged it down, Hannah turned her face away and draped it with a slender arm that left her smile exposed. It was a sweet and eager smile, the sort which only new lovers enjoyed, and James welcomed it on his lips, too. He pried off his shoes against creaking laces, knelt on the bed and straddled her, not at the gentle flare of her hips but lower at her knees. Inky curls spilled from above her arm and over the pillow, and below it. Her cheek dimpled and her pretty coral mouth went on smiling, but still she hid her eyes.
Her concealment made him feel less vulgar while he drank her in, the mounds of her breasts capped by flesh the color of fruit and the soft rise of her belly, which swelled from her tight waist and fell again just above the crisp dark hair that joined her long thighs. He rested fingertips at the smooth ridge of her shoulder, never as self-conscious about his callouses, and dragged them over her arm. He cupped her breasts in his palms and weighed them, and Hannah drew her arm tighter over her eyes but her smile glowed. He traced each globe with a thumb, its outer curve only and no more, and slipped lower to her ribs. A doctor touched people differently, he knew from experience, and he mourned that another man inherently felt less pleasure at touching a woman the way he touched Hannah now. He felt the beauty of her, the composition of her and how she was made; her reaction, inside and out, to his exploration. A hitch to her respiration when he stroked her wrist was as consuming as the heat of her legs which seeped through the wool of his trousers. The purse and roll of her lips did as much to unravel him as her arch when he dragged a finger between her breasts but didn’t touch them.
When he had studied and caressed for a while in the warm, sweet silence of her room, Hannah lifted her arm from her face. She must have felt their sudden arrival at the border as keenly as he had, his desire which had crashed up against fear and anguish and spilled over his hesitation like waves over rocks. Her smile tempered to insightful, and she raised that same arm and held it out to him in an invitation, reassuring that they would only go as far as he wished.
He fell beside her on the plush down mattress and clutched her with an arm, pulling her with him as he rolled onto his back. She cradled his face, nestled to his side, and rested her cheek on his bare chest. He held her in return. The fingers of her left hand played in his hair, and her heart beat back steadily against his own through the walls of their breasts. He breathed in the floral heat from her hair and measured the soft curve of her back and buttocks with a few slow passes. Her breathing slowed and hypnotized him. He closed his eyes, and knew a tenuous sort of peace.
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CHAPTER NINETEEN
Hannah woke by layers, her first conscious thought a blissful thrill that prompted her to stretch out an arm and rake the mattress beside her.
He was gone. But then, she’d known he would be. She smiled and flipped onto her belly and nestled deeper into her pillow. She hadn’t expected him to come in or to come upstairs. What they had shared exceeded her wildest hopes. Despite all that they had lost, they’d still managed to let each other in.
He was her sister’s husband. Should she feel disgust at bringing him in, tempting him? She could punish herself, but it wouldn’t suffocate the embers inside. What had grown between them was something independent and new, wasn’t it? She’d thought so and was confusing herself the more she obsessed over it.
This was why she slept in. Morning was too philosophical a time for her natural proclivity to overthink things. Guilt could be enjoyed at any hour; for now, she wanted to indulge in something more like pleasure. It also felt like frustration, but she welcomed that too. With Gregory, there had been years of the worst sort of disappointment, unloved and untouched, and even in the beginning of their marriage she’d never enjoyed the gratification that mothers and ladies’ handbooks hinted was the path to moral downfall. She had suspected truth to the scandalous rumors, but not until James had she b
elieved it possible, and he had convinced her with nothing more complicated than a routine she engaged in three or four times a day. She buried a grin in her pillow, and when the door clicked and thudded open, added insurance by wrapping her arm over her head.
“These came for you just this moment, Lady Hannah,” murmured Bethany in her long Scottish brogue.
“Mm.” Hannah grunted and feigned half-sleep, only raising her face when something thumped atop her nightstand.
“Didn’t dare leave them in the hall,” whispered Bethany, who shared Mrs. Delford’s distaste for Margaret. “No kenning what she might do with them.”
Them was a long, narrow, brown-paper box, from which Bethany produced a full dozen tightly ruffled buds in a dusty lavender, green stems trimmed to perfectly fit a crystal vase waiting on the nightstand. Their sweet oily scent filled the air, and her heart skipped.
Lavender roses. They didn’t need a card; their sender was as plain as their message. Lavender for half-mourning. James had told her with flowers, better than any words, that he needed time. There was a promise there, too, that ignited genuine gladness. Hannah buried her face again to hide her tumult from Bethany. After yesterday, she was more than content to wait.
Bethany raised the carton and shook it, and then peered inside. “Can’t think who’s sent them. There’s no card. Mister Hamilton, maybe?”
“Hm.” Hannah tried not to giggle at the absurdity. Tad had never sent her flowers, would know better than to ever do so. Their friendship, borne of mutual suffering at the hands of the Webster clan, was established enough that she would laugh in his face at such a gesture, and he would fully expect her to do so.
“Look at this room!” gasped Bethany under her breath, shuffling and bending, pecking like a skinny hen at her mistress’s clothing discarded around the room. “You must have been full well exhausted last night.”
Not exhausted; peaceful and replete. The moment James had drawn her against his side and she rested her cheek on his chest, the steady drum of his heart had lulled her into a sleep the depth of which she couldn’t claim in recent memory.
“Is Miss Maddox at home?” she whispered.
“Oh, yes,” grumbled Bethany, who smoothed down her crisp white tucker and then performed the same maintenance on her unruly brown bun. “Witches is always home before daybreak.”
Hannah bit her cheek to straighten a smile. They all had to endure Margaret, but they didn’t have to enjoy it. She rolled over and wriggled up, then stifled a laugh at Bethany’s gasp.
“Lady Hannah!” She shuffled her freckled limbs to the wardrobe, one hand shielding her eyes, and the other swatting inside like a wild bird. “What possessed you to sleep in such a state?”
Seduction.
Hannah sighed and pulled the quilts up higher to cover her nakedness ahead of Bethany’s canted approach. “I made up the fire more than I ought to.”
A white muslin dressing gown was relinquished somewhere near her lap, and the maid turned her back until Hannah had wrestled herself into its folds and long sleeves. “Have you seen the invitations today?”
“A few, ma’am. Two for dinner this week, three for balls – one of them next week. Luncheon, twice. And one for tea. I didn’t pay no mind to the others, owing to the one you set out.”
“I set out?”
“Yes ma’am, the one on top and turned just so. I thought you meant to say it was that one you preferred today.”
“Oh,” she stammered, aware that she hadn’t touched a thing after returning home with James. “Oh. I can’t recall which one it was.”
“Lady Avaline Guildford, for supper.”
Lady Avaline was older than the railroad that had made her rich for a second time, and was a thick, gregarious woman who rarely took company. Avaline was also one of the only people in London who had been kind to Hannah all along, too contrary and socially secure to give a damn what anyone else thought. Her invitations came seldom, but Hannah enjoyed the rare occurrence.
“Of course. Now I remember.” Margaret had likely set it aside as a warning of how she preferred they spend the day, and that she intended to spoil Hannah’s small enjoyment of it. Of course, she could overrule Margaret, but most days it wasn’t worth the frustration.
“She has seen ‘em, too. Came in directly behind me and snapped out her hand and sorted ‘em through.”
This stopped Hannah with one foot on the rug and half up from the bed. “But Lady Avaline’s was arranged differently before Miss Maddox examined them?”
Poor Bethany, who thought that her mistress had just agreed to having set out the invitation, nodded slowly. “That’s right. I had already made up my mind to go up to the attic and bring down a coat that would do for the occasion.”
“Thank you.” She mulled over the matter while Bethany finished with the fire and went down to get her breakfast. Mister Grant, the butler, never troubled himself with more than collecting post and invitations at the door and wouldn’t have known where to start in their arrangement. Mrs. Delford asked but never decided which summons took precedence, and Margaret had not been home. Only one other person had been in the house.
When she puzzled it out, she smiled and buried her face in her hands. Plainspoken Doctor Grimshaw was all manner of clandestine today. She would take his dare, Hannah decided, and face him in the open.
“I like the roses,” Hannah declared to Bethany when she reappeared with the breakfast tray. “They agree with me. Search the dressing room and attic wardrobe and see what I have in the same shade.”
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CHAPTER TWENTY
James made his way up the pitted lane that ran from the gate to the church door, mindful that somewhere beneath a cosmetic layer of new snow a pothole or two lay in wait for his ankle. Exaggerating his suspicion of the terrain kept darker thoughts to the edges of his mind as he walked.
The sun had come out after a dawn shaded by frosty clouds and made prisms in the fog of his breath, dancing off the crisp white churchyard with the glint and glimmer of a thousand diamonds. An owl up in the steeple heralded James's trespass into its peaceful domain and otherwise the world was still.
A few sets of footprints marked safe passage for him, branching left or right at intervals to meander between the bleached and tilted headstones. Nearly halfway up the road’s low rise, James found himself in undiscovered country, where no wagon tracks or footprints marred the clean winter landscape. At a wide half-circle, which formed a turn-around at the church’s steps, he turned and skirted behind a row of grave markers to his left. The land at his right was low and even, but the hallowed soil was occupied beneath the snowy blanket. The last four rows reaching up beside the church were marked by flat limestone shingles in three possible outcomes: ‘Baby Boy’, ‘Baby Girl’, or ‘Baby, Unknown’.
Some of them he had known intimately, had celebrated their expected arrival, and had mourned their loss from a mother’s bedside. He pressed a fist to his heart and rubbed at a pang of guilt that his own little hapless victim lay higher up the slope than its nameless brethren, as though in a better overall situation.
When he reached Emily’s grave, he stopped and wondered if his idea was shared by her family, their first agreement on anything to date. No crisp brown weeds ringed her headstone, and a low iron fence had been erected as a border, so that even in death she could be kept a degree apart from the common folk. He wondered that Charlton and Harriette hadn’t just moved the whole bloody memorial off to a private vault at Highgate. Sighing, he brushed snow from atop her pink granite headstone, then settled on a low flat fieldstone just outside the fence, drawing his knees up to his chest.
“I have some things I’d like to say to you,” he began, as he always had whenever they needed to have a serious discussion, and stared up into the bright blue expanse overhead.
“I miss you,” he rasped, “every day. The way Mrs. Fitzgerald puts away my shirts, or the smell of roses, or food that’s just slightly burned; there’s something ever
y single day. And it hurts, Emily.” He drew a ragged breath. “It never stops hurting.” He reached out and trailed a finger through the snow atop her little fence. “I hope you won’t be cross with me for saying so. You don’t want me to go on feeling miserable, but I can’t help it.”
Then he was silent and stared at her name. She would always be Emily Grimshaw, and at the same time, never could be again. His old anguish welled up through the cracks. He had wondered many times, in the dark hours past midnight, if he could have saved her; if only he could go back in time to the night he’d left for Quarrendon. Now, he appreciated that to save Emily he would have to go all the way back to their beginning and leave her there by the side of the road, and wondered if he were capable. He wondered enough to dare a hard look.
* * *
“Reason with her?” He stared first at Lord Charlton’s bulldog face, and then at Lady Harriette’s blue eyes, wet and brimming and set like jewels in the beautiful oval of her face, but neither parent offered more information.
“Reason with her?” he repeated, strangling his hat brim and turning the accessory slowly in his hands.
“Emily has admired you for so long,” quavered Harriette in her bird-like warble. “She’s got this…mad idea into her head! Lord Charlton believes, as I do, that if you just hear her out and set her straight, she’ll see reason. You can make her listen.”
James exhaled and smoothed the hair from his forehead, but not the tension. “I will speak with her, of course.” He trailed off, not needing to say what the Lennoxes already knew: there was no persuading an Emily who did not wish to be persuaded. “I will see what I can accomplish.”