“Ye-e-ah!” Annie’s face split in a widening smile as the dimmest of dim memories grew brighter. “Blimey! That’s an age ago and all, what, ‘my lady!’”
“A lifetime it seems.” Abigail was suddenly at her ease. Those ridiculous resurrected phrases had worked some soothing magic and she was no longer afraid of going back to meet Pepe, no matter what happened. She was ready for him; yet she did not think about him—what he would do, how he would treat her. All she could think of was, Will I be any good at it? Will he like me or will I disappoint him? She remembered Annie’s image of the cat and the rabbit.
“Remember, love,” Annie said. “If it goes wrong, if you take on more than what you bargained for, if you know my meaning, come straight to old Annie. It’s not the end of the world.” Then she whispered her final words, for they were now back outside the supper-room door. “I’ll see you’re not disturbed—until you call.”
Pepe was sprawled across the divan, staring at a recharged tankard of ale. A fresh tankard awaited her on the dresser but she left it there, preferring to drink from the same one as Pepe.
“So where d’you go now?” he asked.
Over dinner she had told him of her decision to leave home.
“I’ll stay at home until I find a suitable place.”
“If you had enough friends like Annie, you could move around for months and never come to rest!”
“Why not forever?” she asked, sipping his ale.
He looked at her, suddenly more alert. “What a marvellous little article that would make!” he said. “How to cadge a living off your friends!”
Abigail saw it at once—and saw better. “Let’s pretend there was once this woman—one of those dull, solemn, well-meaning creatures who writes for your rags—and she wrote a book called…er…‘How I Managed My Household on £200 a Year.’ What name shall we give her?”
“Mrs. Warren? Does that sound solemn enough?”
“Yes! Well, I’ll pretend to be Mrs. Warren’s flighty young daughter.
“And I’ll write a piece saying how I get by on two hundred. An income of two hundred and an expenditure equivalent to eight hundred—all done by staying at friends’ houses.”
“You’d have to be married—I mean, you’d have to write as Mrs. Warren’s married daughter. It wouldn’t be funny to hear a single girl boasting of doing that.”
Abigail thought about it and realized he was right; then she laughed. He asked why.
“It’s almost exactly the point my mother was making earlier—from a different angle.”
“Marry me, Abbie.”
He slipped the words in as casually as if he were asking whether she wanted more ale; but he watched her with unblinking eyes and bated breath.
She kissed him, long and gently, their lips barely brushing. “I love you, Pepe,” she said as they separated. “I will never love any other man so much as this.”
But despite these words she managed to convey that she would not marry him. She saw his disappointment.
“Listen,” she said, taking the tankard from him and putting it under the divan. “What would marriage be for us? A house to maintain. Servants to pay, to organize, to watch over for their honesty, to guard from each other’s spites and jealousies. It will mean children—strangers to come between us, to claim you from me, me from you. I will not be chained at the mill of childbearing till I am dry and you are grown fat. Is that so very wrong?”
“There need be no children,” he said.
She looked at him, fearful of his meaning.
“There are ways,” he said. He pulled her head to him, brushed the hair from her temple, and kissed the delicate, blue-veined skin there. “This fine, beautiful head,” he murmured, “of this fine, beautiful girl—so quick of wit, so graceful, so intelligent, so gifted, so astonishing, so original, so…so absolutely stunning. And so wrong!”
For a long time then he kept his lips pressed to her head.
“Pepe?”
He heard her gentle voice coming up from below. “Mmmm?”
“If there were no children, there needn’t be any marriage. Nor any house. We could just be together whenever we wanted.”
He shook his head from side to side, still brushing his lips on her temples.
She chuckled and pulled away to look him in the eye. “I hope all our arguments are so gentle.”
“I am not arguing,” he told her.
“No!” Her vehemence was pretended but he could see the grain of genuine annoyance at its heart. “You just sit there knowing you’re right and I am wrong. Why do I feel wrong?” She turned her anger on herself. “Especially when I know I’m right.”
Now, laughing at her own confusion, she threw her arms about him and pressed kiss after kiss all over his face. “Oh, Pepe,” she whispered. “Let’s just see, eh? Let’s just see.”
His hands caressed her shoulders. She shivered. He undid the lace between her neck and the top of her bodice, which was by no means low cut. His hands, still barely touching her, gently stroked the skin the lace had partly covered. She shivered and gave a little moan of pleasure.
She longed for his hands to stray below the top hem of her bodice; but they did not. She marvelled at his self-control. She marvelled, too, that she, feeling as she did, yet made no move to show him he could go further; but she did not see that as having anything to do with self-control. It was simply the rabbit again.
At length he said, “We really ought to go.”
And twenty minutes later they did manage at last to tear themselves apart and leave—thanking Annie profusely for everything. Abigail contrived to gesture a “no” at Annie’s questioning eyes; and Annie understood that Nebuchadnezzar had not grazed.
“Pepe,” she said when they were almost home, “d’you keep accounts and all that sort of thing to do with my book?”
“Of course!” He laughed.
“Would you let my mother see them?”
He stopped laughing. “Why?”
“Oh,” she said lightly, “it was just a thought that occurred to me when I was talking with her earlier. I can’t think why now.”
“Did she suggest it?”
“Heavens no! No, it just…struck me. I’ve forgotten why. Still, it would do no harm. You, I mean. It would do you no harm with her.”
“She shall see them tomorrow,” he promised.
When they drew up at Hamilton Place, she said, “Annie says we can go back as often as we like. We’d never be disturbed there.”
“Good.” He was shivering as he kissed her. “Tomorrow then?”
“Friday,” she said, it being three days away.
“Bring your two-hundred-a-year piece. Mrs. Warren’s married daughter.”
Later, when she was in bed, she relived the evening with him, caressing her own shoulders as he had caressed them; then she let her hands slip to where his had failed to reach. It was a pleasure, but only for as long as she could forget the hands were really hers. Breasts were for keeping her own hands warm between on winter nights.
As she fell asleep she wondered why—when every minute away from him was a sweet torment—why she had put him off until Friday night? Was it because she wanted him never to take her for granted? Because she wanted everything about their love to be a surprise?
She did not think so. The decision seemed to have come from much deeper levels within herself than that.
Chapter 19
Laon brought his books around the very next day. Nora had not looked at them above a minute before she smelled a rat.
People who worked for her asked her how she did it. Once, for a wager, John had got a City accountant to doctor a set of books—for an imaginary company, of course—in which the embezzlement was as perfectly buried as human ingenuity could manage. It had taken Nora the best part of a day but she had found it. “How d
id you do it?” the accountant asked, echoing a hundred others.
The only way Nora had ever been able to explain it was by a parallel. “Imagine a chess game,” she would say, “between two first-rate players. Suppose you stop it halfway and then move a piece—a pawn, say—just one square. A trivial little move that most ordinary players wouldn’t even notice. But ask another master of the game to look at the board and he’d sniff something wrong at once. He’d tell you that there was no possible play between first-rate players that would result in such a board. He might even put the pawn back where it belonged and say, ‘Now if that pawn were there…!’ Well, that’s how I am with account books that have been tampered with. I smell it at once, however long it takes me to run it down.”
Laon knew none of this when he presented his books to Nora. And she did not want him to know until she had all his accounts there; these were only his publishing records.
“You are your own printer, too, are you not, Mr. Laon?” she asked.
“It’s a separate company, Countess.”
“Nevertheless you own both?”
He agreed he did.
“Then—though this is plainly a farce, for these accounts look immaculate to me—I think for completeness’ sake, and to satisfy the dear girl, I had better see the printing accounts, too.”
His face fell—confirmation enough of his guilt. And he redoubled her certainty of fraud when he took back his publishing accounts. Obviously that was to enable him to doctor the printer’s accounts so that both told the same lie. With a hunter’s relish she waited for him to return the following day. At last she would have solid evidence against Laon to lay before Abigail.
He was most ill at ease when he came back with the books next day; had someone breathed her reputation to him?
“Lady Wharfedale,” he said with a strong tremor in his voice, “I obviously cannot bind you to such a promise in advance. But when you have satisfied yourself as to these accounts, I am going to ask you to promise never to reveal to Lady Abigail what you have seen—nor anything you think you may have discovered.”
I’ll bet you are! Nora thought.
Five minutes later she was ready to confess that these were the most bewildering accounts she had seen for years. They were doctored; there was no doubt of that. But she could see no way in which Laon had benefited from the doctoring.
“You seem to have made no profit at all as a publisher,” she said.
“Yes,” he said in a voice eager to persuade. “Here, see!”
“But no,” she said. “That actually belongs here.” And she turned to the ledgers of the printing company. “And see—it is exactly wiped out by these three entries. Exactly. Now, how can that be? In truth, you have made no profit at all—either as publisher or as printer. These books smell worse than all Billingsgate Fish Mart. Yet they reveal you not as a swindler but as a fool.”
“Damn!” he burst out. Then he turned red and apologized. But when he saw she was not really shocked, he said it again. “Damn! She might have told me how good you are at it!”
“But…” Nora laughed, still completely baffled. “The only person who has made any money out of it at all is…” Her voice trailed off as enlightenment reached her at last. “Abigail!” She waved her hands over the books. “You’ve given it all to her.” She was shocked.
Miserably he nodded.
“But why? To entice her away from us?”
Now it was Laon who was stung to shock. “Of course not! I simply did not wish to make a profit from her. I took care to make no loss—as you have discovered—but I have also made no profit.”
“Because you love her?”
He looked angrily at her. “Did you need to say that? And now I must ask you to make that promise, please?”
“But why?”
“Because I do not wish her to know. It would cheapen the whole thing.”
“If it came from you, yes. But not from me, surely?”
“Please, Lady Wharfedale, I do not want her to know. It is best if she believes we have normal business relations as far as her writing goes. It is important for her to believe that. Just as it is important for me to know I have not profited by her. This”—he pointed at the book—“reconciles those demands.”
Nora smiled. “Does it! I could show you a dozen ways of doing it less clumsily. But I apologize to you, Mr. Laon. You are obviously a man of fine feelings.”
Laon also smiled. “What did you really expect? That I was making money out of her?”
Nora shrugged.
“Really!” he said. “Making money is no problem. At least, I have never found it so.”
“Come, Mr. Laon! You sound more eligible by the minute.”
He barely noticed her compliment. “But Abigail!” he said, more to himself than to her. “She is unique. There has never been, and never will be again, such a girl as her.”
And Nora, who had feared for Abigail’s vulnerability and Abigail’s capacity for pain, now saw that the boot was on the other foot.
“Poor boy,” she said. It was almost a whisper.
“She will not marry me, you know.”
“She is still young. Here.” Nora touched her own heart.
He looked at her with his dark, piercing eyes. “Help me,” he begged.
And Nora, to her own utter astonishment, heard herself saying, “Of course I will.”
Later she wondered what on earth could have induced her to such agreement. Of course she would not honour it; but now, more than ever, she worried for Abigail in her dealings with this man.
Chapter 20
You’ll never guess what,” Laon said that Friday evening. “Rossetti thinks I am the Abbot!”
Abigail joined his laughter until she realized it was not entirely at Rossetti’s expense, nor at the exquisiteness of their secret; it was at his own cleverness—that he was the sort of person who could be mistaken for the Abbot even by someone as perceptive as Rossetti. It seemed to her then that she was the victim of a trick, that something precious had been filched from her. But it was only a passing feeling, and Laon was so charming and attentive she soon forgot.
“How’s Mr. Oldale?” she asked Annie, who came to supervise the clearing of the banquet.
Annie pulled a sour face. “I’ve seen ostriches fly better,” she said. But then she laughed, so Abigail understood it was nothing serious, especially as Annie left them alone with a solemn wink.
They were in each other’s arms at once, almost bruising their lips with the passion of their kisses. Again she revelled at the sweetly aching emptiness he made at the very centre of her, felt her breathing turn to disorder.
In the midst of this abandon he said, “Tell me what it’s like.”
“What?”
“Oh, please, Abbie darling! I have never known a girl like you. No one has ever had this effect on me. I want to share it. I want to know it all. Please?” His dark eyes, so full of pain and hope, held her pinned to his will. “Help me!”
For this dinner she had not put on her evening gown with its fashionable low-cut bodice and yoke of lace (and its myriad hooks and buttons). Instead she wore a much simpler, flowing gown of her own devising. Its inspiration was Pre-Raphaelite—very much the “aniline-dyed druid costume” the Abbot had mocked. At a distance, and in silhouette, she might have been taken for a Quaker girl in an older sister’s dress; but no Quaker girl ever wore such lustrous silks, so richly amber in colour. She reached a hand inside, where she hoped his hand might have strayed, and delicately eased out a button she hoped his fingers might have discovered.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Telling you.”
“Not that way.”
“It is the only way I can.”
“Telling me what? Say it!”
“That I love you. That love sanctifies us. That
I feel no shame. That I am yours in every way and always. That we might do anything—things that in words might seem shameful—and we would make them glory.”
She had meant to say “holy” and could not understand why she had blurted out “glory,” with all its overtones of battle and victory.
Gently he pulled her hand from the folds of her gown; gently he took her back in his arms; gently he murmured into her ear, making her thrill again at the vibrant nearness of him, “I’m sorry, darling. It’s just…I want to know you better than I know myself, better than anyone ever knew any other being. You are the warmest, loveliest, most breathtaking, most captivating, sweetest, brightest, most astonishing girl who ever lived. You are magical. The whole world is different just because you are in it. Wherever you go, the stones and trees beside your path—the very air you walk through—are all transformed, because they have shared a little in the rarity of you.”
His hands invaded the folds of her sleeves and, finding no resistance, were soon caressing her shoulders and shoulder blades and, through her chemise, her spine.
“That’s what it’s like to be me,” he said. “Heaven and hell. And the hell of it is not knowing you—not being you. What is it like to be you?”
The room dissolved in a shimmering; her voice became a quicksand for her own self-possession. “I don’t know,” she stammered. “You must help me—to find out.”
She threw herself back on the divan and, with clumsy urgency, began to undo the inner buttons between her neck and waist, until his grip stayed her. He lay mostly on the divan, only slightly upon her, and gently parted the long, open folds of her bodice, kissing the line of her jaw, her cheekbones, her ears, running his lips down her long, slender neck.
His fingertips, and sometimes his fingernails, strayed where her body lay peeled—over her shoulders, her arms, her ribs, down her breastbone, to the taut skin of her stomach—everywhere but her breasts. She shivered until the divan itself turned to jelly; her heartbeat was a thunderous ripple, in her scalp, in her toes. A strange, glowing fluid seemed to irrigate her, a solvent of all her senses. It reached into everything, every part, uniting in a way she had never before experienced—a mysterious sweetness that felt like strength yet left her overcome with drowsiness.
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