Rachel lifted one eyebrow in a way that finally made Kitty flush. “Yes,” she agreed. “You could say it was tedious.”
The muted show of spirit caused Kitty to narrow her eyes, then smile. “How interesting. Now tell us about discipline, Mrs. Wade,” she said in a soft, silky tone. “What did they do to you when you were a bad prisoner?”
Sully leaned in closer. She must be able to feel his breath on her cheek. But she didn’t move, trapped between him and Bingham. Kitty’s smile turned crafty. Flohr licked his thick lips. Sebastian had a sudden, rabid desire to get drunk.
Her pale face slowly suffused with blood. “One was sent to the refractory cell.” They waited, poised like cats over something still twitching, still trying to get away. “I must see to—”
“Were you sent there? What had you done?”
In spite of Sully’s arm, she managed to push her chair back and stand up. “I must go and help—excuse me, I’m needed downstairs now. Pardon me. I’ll—” She looked at Sebastian, but only for a second. No help from that quarter, she knew by now. “I’ll come back,” she said hopelessly, and fled.
***
But she didn’t come back. He had to send for her, after they’d reassembled in the drawing room. He didn’t wait for Sully or one of the others to ask him to do it; he did it on his own, deliberately, cold-bloodedly, because baiting Rachel was to be the evening’s entertainment. Everyone knew it. The fact that he’d lost the stomach for it himself didn’t signify; on the contrary, it pointed to a new and dangerous weakness in himself he didn’t like and was determined to snuff out. Sully and the rest could be his proxies while he regrouped, reminded himself of who he was and of what his purpose in life had always been—the pursuit of selfish pleasure.
Sully called for cards. The sharp-faced maid named Violet brought them, and stayed by the door afterward until Sebastian noticed her and told her to go.
“A little game?” Sully proposed with cunning in his eyes. He began to go through the two decks, culling out the crown cards and laying the others aside. “It’s called Truth. Know it?”
No one did. Kitty, on the floor, inched closer to him until she was sitting at his feet. She laid her hand over the instep of his shoe and asked, “How do you play?” Her long hair gleamed blue-black in the lamplight; she pulled it over one shoulder and stroked it lovingly over her bosom with her open hand.
“Nothing to it. I’m the dealer. Since we’re six, we’ll have two cards apiece. Ladies are queens, gents are knaves and kings. Mrs. Wilson, you’ll be the black queen, spade and club.
“I like that,” Kitty cooed, squeezing his foot.
“Mrs. Wade, you’re the red queen, if you please. Heart and diamond.”
Rachel nodded. She sat straight and stiff in a ladder-back chair she’d pulled as far from the group as she could and still pretend she was part of it.
“Bertie, you be king and knave of diamonds; Tony, you’re king, knave of hearts. Sebastian, king, knave of clubs. Et pour moi, king and knave of spades. Do we all know who we are?”
“Yes, yes. What’s the object?” Bingham demanded. His dinner had made him sleepy; he lay backward on the chaise longue, supine, with his knees cocked over the top.
“It’s quite simple. What can I use for a table? This.” He found an old issue of The field in a basket by the sofa and put it on his lap. “Two stacks of cards, notice, twelve each. I pick one from the left—king of hearts. That’s you, Tony.”
“Right-ho.”
“And one from the right. Ah, the black queen.”
“Me,” smiled Kitty. “Now what?”
“Now the king gets to ask the queen a question, any question, to which she’s bound to respond with the truth and nothing but. Hence the name.”
“Any question?” Bingham asked, turning on his side.
“I have said so.”
“Gor blimey.”
“Your slang is becoming tiresome, Tony,” Kitty complained. “Amusing for the first year or two, you know, but not anymore.”
“Oh, do you think so?” Bingham’s vapid face formed a sneer. “Answer this, then. Who was the first man you cuckolded Wilson with?”
She didn’t even blush. “George Thomason-Cawles,” she answered readily. “We met him in Athens on our honeymoon.”
Everyone laughed, even Flohr. Sully shuffled all the cards again and drew two more from each pile. “Queen of clubs may ask queen of diamonds anything she likes.”
Kitty took her hand off his knee and sat up straight. “Oh, lovely. Mrs. Wade, I want to know what a refractory cell is and what you did to be sent there.”
“That’s two questions,” Bingham pointed out.
Sully said, “The dealer, whose word is law, will allow it.”
Sebastian had been playing a one-fingered melody on the piano. He stopped suddenly, and the room fell quiet.
Rachel sent him one last glance, but this time it was more of an acknowledgment of his complicity than a plea for help. She was drowning, but the look said she knew for certain that there would be no lifeline flung to her from him.
She directed the answer to her knees. “The refractory cell is a room. It has no window. No furniture, no bed. No light—the walls are painted black. Two doors, to make sure the silence is . . . complete. It’s a dungeon.”
He couldn’t bear it. He looked down to see his hand clenched around the stem of his empty brandy goblet so tightly, his fingers ached when he released it. He got up and went to the drinks table for a refill.
“Second part of the question,” Sully reminded her. “Why were you sent there?”
“The first time, for looking about in chapel.”
“Looking about?”
“It’s forbidden in prison to look at anyone.”
“My God. How long did you have to stay?”
“Ah, ah,” Sully corrected Kitty. “That’s too many; you’ll have to wait for another turn.”
He shuffled the cards again. “Knave of spades—that’s I—demands the truth from king of clubs. You, D’Aubrey. Hmm.” He scratched his head, pretending to ponder. Kitty giggled, pulled on his trouser cuff. He bent down and she whispered something in his ear. He smiled when he straightened. “What I would like to know, Sebastian, is whether or not you’ve bedded Mrs. Wade yet.”
He said, “Yes, of course,” as quickly and casually as possible. It worked: except for the inevitable laughter, they let the subject drop, sensing no tension, no undercurrent. Like sharks, they smelled no blood and swam on.
Rachel, of course, said nothing; he didn’t look at her, but from the corner of his eye he saw that she remained motionless, expressionless, not moving a muscle.
The questions and answers continued. Sex was usually the topic, who had slept with whom, who wished he was sleeping with whom, what sleeping with so-and-so had been like. The sameness of it began to numb; nothing sounded coarse or shocking anymore, only dull. The unimaginativeness of his friends’ preoccupations ought not to have surprised him, but it did. Had they always been this shallow and insipid? This vicious? What made him think he was any different from them?
Rachel was the target of the questions too often for Sully not to be engineering it on purpose, but no one called him on it. Indeed, the conspiracy against her became more obvious as the evening wore on, until no one even snickered when every second or third question was directed to her. Whether they could admit it consciously or not, she was the only interesting one among them, and now they wanted to know all about her.
Sebastian drank steadily and heavily, but he couldn’t get drunk. Kitty came and sat on his lap, pushed her hand inside his waistcoat, squirmed on his thighs. When his turn came to ask a question, he asked her how old she was. It cooled her ardor for a while. Her perfume was lilac, powdery and more than cloying; suffocating. Her long hair repelled him. He thought of Rachel’s shorte
r hair, the way the silver in it shone like speckled jewels in candlelight. He remembered the precise shape of her skull when he’d molded it in his hands.
Horror after horror she enumerated for his jaded friends, forced admissions of constant hunger, petrifying monotony, despair. Bingham asked her about the “dry bath,” a degrading, dehumanizing strip search she’d endured once every month for ten years. So: in prison they’d even robbed her of the freedom of her own body. So had her husband. So had he.
How long would she let it go on? For as long as he’d known her, she’d never surrendered to anything, not really, no matter how callously he’d treated her. But this was different. This was worse. He was letting it happen, watching it grow more beastly by the minute, because he wasn’t testing her anymore. He was testing himself.
Sully was the smartest, and the most dangerous. While the others kept asking Rachel their lewd questions about prison—had a guard ever touched her? did the women prisoners ever seek each other out for amorous comfort?—Sully asked her about her husband. She tried to be circumspect, but eventually they caught on. Randolph Wade, they began to realize, had been a pervert. Bingham vaguely remembered the story in the newspapers; Kitty went on blind instinct, uncannily accurate in her guesses; Flohr followed it all with his dark, ophthalmic eyes, obscenely fascinated.
Sully had been saving the best for last. Once more he turned over his own card and Rachel’s worn queen. “Ah, back to you and me, Mrs. Wade. I hope this won’t embarrass you. You’ve been so wonderfully forthcoming.”
The worst for Sebastian was recognizing his own soft, mocking tone in Sully’s despicable cadence. He felt physically sick.
“I’m recalling something you said at the trial. Something that must have helped you enormously at the sentencing, assuming it’s true. It’s rather dreadful; one hardly knows whether to believe it or not.”
She hadn’t moved in ages. But she looked up at that, as if she knew what was coming. Her eyes took on a haggard cast.
“Can it really be true, Mrs. Wade, that on the last night of his life your husband tied you over a chair and used a riding crop on you? A special sort of crop, one whose—wait now, I haven’t finished—”
She’d stood up. The horror in her ashen face riveted their attention, and Sebastian thought of slavering wolves moving in for the kill. She moved toward the door, her legs stiff and jerky.
“I haven’t finished the question.” Sully’s voice, although he didn’t raise it, grew shrill with suppressed excitement. “Is it true, Mrs. Wade—” She began to run, awkward and uncoordinated, the necessity for flight robbing her of grace. “I say!” Sully jumped up. “Is it true,” he called to the empty doorway, “that the handle of the riding crop was a phallus?”
The thud of her running footsteps died away quickly.
No one spoke for a moment, then they all spoke at once, in low voices full of lewd enjoyment and manufactured shock. Sebastian couldn’t hear the words over the soft buzzing in his ears. Something was tearing inside. Something was coming completely apart.
Sully was still on his feet. He came into Sebastian’s line of vision, mouthing something, the words barely audible over the buzzing. “I said, where’s her room?”
He blinked at him. “What?”
“Where’s your housekeeper’s room?”
Kitty laughed low in her throat and her breath, soured by wine, fluttered against his cheek. He separated the question from its implications and considered it in the abstract. “Her room is in the chapel wing,” he said in a strange, offhand tone. “Near the library.”
Sully’s face was flushed. “Last question. Is she yours?”
“Is she mine?” he repeated blankly. “No. Of course she’s not mine.” It sounded foolish. What an absurd question.
“Good. Then she’s mine.” He gave Bingham a playful kick, snatched up the wine bottle from the table, and strolled out of the room.
Sebastian kept his gaze on the empty doorway. They’re gone, he thought. He’s gone and she’s gone, and they’ve gone together. It’s out of my hands. Brandy stung the back of his throat; he grimaced, and Kitty put her hands on the sides of his face. He couldn’t hear what she was saying to him because the buzzing was louder and more raucous now. He felt the tear down the middle of himself widening, and that was wrong; it should have been narrowing. He’d just done a thing to make himself whole again. He poured more brandy, knocking Kitty’s arm away to get to the bottle, and he muttered, “Excuse me.” She spoke; her breathy voice rose at the end, so she must have asked a question, but he couldn’t make out the meaning. He pulled her closer and kissed her.
Something happened then. He wasn’t on the piano bench with Kitty on his lap. He was halfway across the room. He heard a snap in his head, exactly like a bone breaking, and at once the eerie fugue state evaporated. His past and his future had broken cleanly in two. This, now, was the present, a violent limbo he had to smash his way out of to survive.
He began to run. His legs pumped blood to his brain; clean air filled his lungs, clearing his head. He ran as fast as he could, his shoes sounding hollow on the wood floor, sharp on the stones when he turned the corner to the chapel wing. No lights here; he ran in the dark, heart pounding, his breath coming hard. He saw faint candlelight spilling out on the stones thirty feet away—Rachel’s room. He’d opened his mouth to shout when he heard her, then saw her. She was beside him, nearly invisible in the blackness, and Sully was behind her with an arm across her throat and one around her waist. The sound she’d made was a strangled, “No.”
He pounded past them before he could stop. Whirling, he said, “Let her go,” his voice ringing out clear and metallic in the stone corridor, echoing off the walls. Sully pivoted, taking her with him, then pushed her away. Turning back, he blocked her with his body. Blood from a scratch on the side of his neck spattered his shirt collar. He bared his teeth. “No fair,” he said in the horrible mocking voice that was too familiar, too much like Sebastian’s. “Second thoughts don’t count. You distinctly said—”
Sebastian grabbed his jacket, cursed in his face, and jerked him out of the way.
She had her arms wrapped around her waist and she was pressing back against the wall, trying to push through it, merge into it. Fear was like a film over her eyes, like smoke. She couldn’t see him. He couldn’t touch her—he’d lost the right. He said her name, standing close, outlining the shape of her shoulders in the air with his hands.
Sully grabbed his arm and yanked him around. “I said no fair.” Mild words, but his face was contorted with rage. “Out of the way now, D’Aubrey. You don’t want to fight with me.”
Sebastian shoved him in the chest, sending him flying.
“Rachel.” This time he couldn’t keep his hands off her. Miraculously, she didn’t shrink away when he touched her arm. “Rachel,” he said, and the mist of fear in her eyes began to clear.
Then she screamed.
He didn’t turn in time. A stabbing, ice-cold pain streaked down his side and turned fiery hot in an instant. Before he could dodge, Sully slashed him with his knife again, sideways, missing his throat by inches.
Sebastian whirled. The knife gleamed sharp as a razor in the dull light. Holding it out at arm’s length, Sully began to back away, eyes darting. Sebastian followed without care, without caution. He waited until Sully reached the splash of light from Rachel’s room, and then he sprang, feinting right, coming in low on the left, under the blade. He caught Sully’s wrist in both hands and thrust it up and back in a high, overhead arc. Flesh and steel met stone in a bone-crushing smash, and Sully shrieked. The knife dropped to the floor from his battered hand.
Sebastian was upon him. They stumbled in jerky, ungainly circles, grappling, until Sully lost his footing and thudded backward onto the hard floor. Sebastian couldn’t see his face, he could only see Rachel’s, pale and lifeless, done in, finished. Red rage c
onsumed him, and a deep, scorching shame. Sully was the blind target of his fury. He beat him with his fists even when someone pounded on his back and someone else dragged at his shoulders, his coat. He only stopped when he realized the voice crying, “Stop it! Stop! Stop!” was Rachel’s.
His whole body was shaking so violently, he could hardly stand. Strong hands helped him; he looked up to see William Holyoake standing by his side, looking big and competent and worried. “Right, then,” he said hopefully. “That’s all right then. Here, lad, have done. You can leave some for the crows, ay?”
The shaking worsened. He was bleeding like a pig onto the stone. He watched Sully flip over, struggle to his knees, and eventually stand. They faced each other. Sully looked sideways, and Sebastian noticed Bingham, Kitty, Flohr, all of them hovering, curious as cows. But enjoying it. Kitty especially; she probably liked the smell of blood, the taste of it, for all he knew. “Get out,” he said, not wasting much breath on them. “All of you.”
Sully’s lips were already swollen and his eyes would be in a minute. Blood ran from his nose in a black stream. He blew a bubble of blood out of his mouth and made his threat. “You’re going to be sorry.”
Before Holyoake could stop it, Sebastian hit him again. Just a gut-punch, weak and one-handed, but it felt good. Sully’s breath came out in a ludicrous whoosh that made his threat sound laughable. “Get the hell out of my house,” Sebastian told him, and it was good, it was sweet to have the last word.
XI
DR. HESSELIUS WAS completely bald, with gentle, wide-spaced brown eyes behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. The bowl of a pipe stuck out of the top of his waistcoat pocket, and the odor of tobacco smoke floated around him. “Any wound is serious,” he was saying, in answer to William Holyoake’s question. “This one is fortunately not deep—although it is long; it took sixteen stitches to close it—but there’s always a danger of infection. Who’s going to be nursing him?”
Rachel glanced blankly at William, who glanced blankly back.
“Someone’s got to change the bandage,” the doctor explained, “and keep an eye on the wound for signs of infection.”
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