by Judith Ivory
It was a stranger, standing in quarter profile and holding her father's crystal decanter of cognac up to the light.
The room's wall lamp made the brandy, as it tipped gently back and forth in the decanter, cast amber prisms across the side of his face, his shirt. Gold light. It made him look like an apparition. She might have said the intruder was a handsome, genteel burglar, for he was elegantly proportioned and certainly well-dressed, but he was in no rush—too much at his ease to be robbing the house. His shirttail was out, his shirt cuffs turned back. He wore a vest, but it hung unbuttoned. Less like a burglar, more like a ghost, one of her father's old friends come as a houseguest.
Mr. Tremore, she thought again, trying out the idea. Who else? It had to be him. Yet the man standing before her seemed so unlike her new student. Yet similar: He had the same dark hair, dark as night, but it was slicked close to his head and combed away from his face. Was Mr. Tremore this tall, so square-shouldered, so straightly built? This man looked leaner, neater. Handsomer. His clothes were simple, but nice. His white shirt was neatly pressed, open at the neck; it was missing its collar. The vest—
She frowned. His vest was oddly familiar. As were the trousers somehow, or what she could see of them. He stood behind the edge of her father's desk.
He turned toward her, lowering the decanter in front of him, as if suddenly aware of her. Their eyes met. His face changed, drawing up into a crooked smile, showing a deep dimple to one side of a thick, well-trimmed mustache that rose up on a lot of even, white teeth. A remarkable contrast. Edwina was halted for an instant in the warmth of his smile, the way a small animal is stopped foolishly in the road sometimes when the beam of a carriage lamp swings, too bright, suddenly onto it. Lord, the man was good-looking. A sharp good looks, the sort that absorbed a woman's good sense and turned it to mush in her head. Refined, cultured somehow, with a subtle air of competence.
Not Mr. Tremore, who certainly was vigorous-looking and masculine, but—
He held out his arms, the bottle in one hand, the other palm up, and said, "Well, whaddaya think?"
Edwina quite nearly fell over as he offered himself for inspection, turning slowly. It was, of course, none other. "Mis-Mister Tremore," she said, though almost as a question, looking for confirmation. "I—um—ah—you—" she stammered.
Even staring right at him, she couldn't quite believe it was the same man. To say he cleaned up well was so much an understatement, it stood reality on its head.
"How do I look?" he asked.
"Unbelievable." His mustache. Someone had trimmed it, made an attempt—not all that successful a one—to tame it.
"Diabolical," he suggested, wiggling his eyebrows, then laughed. He loved the word; he must, he used it enough. "I look like a bloody lord, don't I?"
Edwina cleared her throat. Well, yes. And here stood another unwelcome bit of truth: The handsomest "bloody lord" she had ever seen was a ratcatcher wearing her father's outdated trousers, shirt, and vest—and wandering her house in the middle of the night so as to steal brandy or whatever else he could find, no doubt.
She drew herself up, then demanded, "Put that down."
He looked at the decanter, seemingly surprised to find his fingers around its neck. "Ah," he said, as if now understanding. He made a knowing cluck with his tongue, then grinned gleefully, a man smiling at a good joke. "Wasn't pinchin' none, if that was what you be thinkin'. It just shook me, see, a little—"
"Put it down."
He put it on the desk, though he frowned, doing a very good imitation of a man unfairly called to account. He repeated, "Wasn't pinchin' none. See, I have this dream sometimes—"
"I'm not interested in your dreams of easy liquor, Mr. Tremore. You may not enter this room, unless you do so in my company."
He grinned again. "Well," he said. "Then come in, Miss Bollash."
When she only stood there scowling at him from the hallway, he came toward her.
Lord, with his mouth shut, he even moved right. Lithe, graceful, a male who was physically confident of himself, in the full flush of bold health—and probably used to smiling at women who stood in a dim hall in the middle of the night.
"You be a right fine sight in that, Miss Bollash."
She looked down. Her dressing gown was unsashed on her night-shift. She quickly pulled the gown around her. Not because there was anything here to make a man misbehave, but for pride's sake, so neither one of them had to admit there wasn't.
He stopped at the doorway, her in the hall, him in the room. "Do your mates call you Edwina?" he asked. "Ain't you got a sweet name?"
She stiffened, frightened somehow. "I don't have any 'mates,' Mr. Tremore, and Miss Bollash sounds respectful—sweet enough to my ears."
He screwed up his mouth, making his mustache slant sideways—it looked more fashionable for its coiffing but no less rough, bristly.
"Winnie," he said suddenly.
She jumped.
He put his hands on either side of the doorjamb, arms spread, elbows bent, and contemplated her for a few moments. Then he repeated, "Winnie. That be it. That be what you call an Edwina, right?" He smiled because she admitted, either by her frown or her jump the moment before, that she identified with the name, a name she hadn't heard in ages. "Ah." He nodded. "Much nicer. Soft. Dear-like, you know?"
The way he said it… His tone gave rise to a kind of confusion. Embarrassment somehow. Fright again. His expression invited her to smile back at him, but she couldn't have if she'd wanted to. And she didn't; she certainly didn't want to, she thought. He was playing her for a fool, trying to distract her from the fact that he'd been stealing liquor, which, of course, she had to put a stop to.
She said, "No, Winnie is not nice. When I was little, my cousins used to neigh like a horse when they said it. They used to call me Wi-i-i-n-n-ie." She whinnied for him as she said her name. Then she wished she hadn't.
Because he winced, reacting to the pain of it. His concern made her look away. She heard him say, "Well, you bloody well fooled 'em, Miss Bollash. 'Cause you be a beaut, if ever I seen one."
She glanced at him—as harsh a glare as she could muster—then contradicted his malarkey. "Mr. Tremore, I am a gangly, plain woman with speckled skin, who wears glasses on a nose that looks like an eagle's. I'm taller than any man I know." In a moment of confusion, she had to rethink that statement. "Except you." She went on with forced patience, "But I'm an honest woman, a smart woman. And I don't hold truck with a lot of lying falderal from some Cockney-Cornish womanizer who thinks he can talk his way out of being caught red-handed in the liquor shelf. If you wish to drink, you may go to the public house on the corner of the next block. Sit in the pub, drink till your heart's content, then come back when you are sober."
Goodness, she couldn't remember telling anyone off like that. Of course, she couldn't remember anyone trying to flatter her so dishonestly. The injustice of it made her angry. Surely there was something else she did right, something he could praise, without dragging her odd looks into the matter.
His face remained focused on her, furrowed with curiosity and consternation. He shook his head. "I didn't take a drop," he said. He smiled his crooked smile that, despite herself, was somehow appealing. A charming villain, this one. "Want to smell me breath?" he offered.
God, no. She took a step back.
He took a step closer, letting go of the doorjamb, coming through the doorway into the dim hall. He smelled of soap and something else, barber's talcum perhaps. Milton had taken some scissors to his hair. It was shorter, neater. Up close, with her standing there in her bare feet, he was tall enough that she had to bend her neck back to look up at him. She wanted to laugh: She felt short next to him. "I'm not pretty," she murmured.
His shadow, a silhouette with the room's light behind him, shook its head. As if speaking to a dim child with whom he was having difficulty communicating, he said, "Miss Bollash, we already know you be better with words than me. So all what I can tell you be th
is—"
His head bent toward her. No, he wouldn't, she thought, almost giddy now from the absurdities that ran through her head. He certainly wouldn't … well, no— Men had to know women well to do that, didn't they? So, no—
But, yes. Much to her dismay, her new student's moustache brushed her lip, then his mouth pressed to hers. The feel of his lips, the warmth that radiated off his face were such a surprise—a disarming surprise—it didn't leave her with the presence of mind to do anything. She just stood there befuddled. Being kissed.
Strange, what her first kiss, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, brought to mind. Her first reaction was to cry. To just plain weep and wail. Damn you, she thought. Damn you. Don't play like this.
Her second thought, though, was to simply blank out the first thought. She said nothing, did nothing—half-waiting for him to laugh, to announce his funny joke on her, half-praying he would be kind about it: while one of the most elegant-looking men she had ever seen pressed his mustache, warm and dry, against her mouth.
It wasn't prickly at all. Not bristly. Not broom-like. It was soft. Cushiony. It moved gently with his mouth.
She backed away a little; he followed. She drew in a breath, though it sounded more like a hiccup of air than breathing. He caught her arm, pulling her toward him a little, his hand strong, warm, sure. The skin of her lips was more sensitive than she would have dreamed. His mouth was smooth against hers, and so soft—she would never have thought a man's mouth was so soft to touch, when the rest of him looked so hard and rough. As his mouth skimmed hers, she knew a tiny place on the curve of his lip where it was chapped. She could feel so much with her own mouth. Who could have imagined it was so … alive with feeling like this?
His thumb touched her cheek. She made a small jerk to realize his hand was at her face. Jumpy. Nervous. While pleasure materialized in the pit of her belly like smoke, wisps of it that became soft billows. The feeling was so keen and foreign, she didn't know what to do with it. His mouth stayed on hers till the clock downstairs suddenly began to chime. One, two, three… It awakened good sense. She jumped at four, shoved away at five. It continued chiming, counting off the moments till midnight, while her palm lay flat against the chest she'd seen. Its predominant feeling was hardness, as solid as a cliffside under the shirt. And warm. His chest was several degrees warmer where it provided resistance against her hand.
His face was close. "Ah," he said. "Yes." Ace, his ridiculous ace. He nodded, as if he were agreeing with something. "I was fair enough sure I'd like kissin' you, and I do. You, Miss Winnie Bollash, are better than pretty—"
Oh, the insult of his game. The hurt of it. Tears rose up. She wanted to knock him down, to laugh, to cry. Outwardly, though, she moderated herself, only pushing him back more firmly. She was, after all, the sophisticated one here, the one who was supposed to teach him rules he didn't know to play by.
Her throat tightened around the words even as she said them. "I want you to know"—she paused, gathering herself—"that I am not angry with you." Just the bare bones, Edwina. Just make him stop. "Um, you caught me off guard, Mr. Tremore. You can't do, well—do what you just did. Don't ever do that again." There. Hold to the rules, she thought, and all will be fine. "It's not right. You can't do what you normally do." Something made her add, "I'm not a shop girl who can be flattered into believing nonsense, just because it suits your cheeky sense of fun."
He laughed. "Fun," he repeated, saying that particular word exactly right. "Miss Bollash, life be rich. Why don't you bite yourself off a piece?"
She had no answer. Speaking to him in the middle of the night in a dim hallway—about whether or not he could kiss her—was like walking into an unfamiliar, pitch-dark room. She wasn't sure which way to turn without running into something, without hurting herself. Every direction was potentially unsafe.
His head bent. He was looking at her nightclothes.
As if her simply standing there in them was somehow provocative. Now that was an unusual feeling. It made her spine shiver. It made her heart beat in a panicky rhythm. The shadows of his shirt rose and fell, his chest making it move, a deep rising, falling. The sight sent such a shot of apprehension through her, her knees turned liquid.
She'd already told him once, and he wasn't stepping back. She burst out with, "I wouldn't be standing here in my nightclothes, Mr. Tremore, if you weren't prowling my house in the wee hours like a piece of Bow Bells riffraff, taking stock of what he can steal."
He cranked his head back. Light from the study cut across his shoulder, revealing a plane of his face: the look of insult. She regretted having said those precise words, yet couldn't think of different ones, better ones.
He tilted his head to look at her, then said quietly, "You can rest easy, lovey." Loovey, he said. "I ain't no thief. I work hard, and I be good at what I do."
She continued to be up in arms. "Not so good that you can keep yourself clean and in decent clothes."
His insulted expression softened into a kind of disappointment. He folded his arms over his chest, letting his weight fall against the edge of the door frame. "You be a snooty thing, ain't ya? Think you know everything there be to know about a bloke, because he don't talk like you, because he catches rats for a livin'—"
"I know a man too lazy to sew the buttons onto his coat. And who ends up being chased—"
He let out a single snort of laughter, loud enough to silence her. "First," he said, "who I be chasin' or who be chasin' me ain't none of your business." His face took on the shadows of his crooked smile before he added, "At least not yet. Second, the coats what I can afford don't right off have many buttons, and what buttons they do, I sell. See, I got ten younger brothers and sisters in Cornwall what depend on me to support them. I send most of me money home. And third—you will notice, I can count, by the way, all the way to third, and I can read, too, Public Education Act, you see. And third, loov, you ain't so funny to look at as you think. You be right nice to look at. True, you ain't pretty exactly, but you be—" He struggled for the right word, frowned, looked down, then said, "I can't explain it. I like lookin' at you." The dim light seemed to show him grinning again; it was hard to be sure. But there was wryness in his voice when he offered, "Different. A long pretty thing with the face of a moppet. You be loovly, Miss Bollash." He repeated softly with satisfaction, "Loovly."
Lovely, he meant, of course, but the softness and rhythm in the way he said it struck her.
"Loovly," she repeated, saying it his way. Then laughed. She meant her laughter to be ironic, a hollow humor full of disdain. Her usual kind of laugh when confronted with her own looks. But despite herself, she felt genuine amusement. "More on the long side though than the loovly side," she added.
"Well, long and loovly, yes." He laughed, too, possibly at her attempt at his word, at her saying it less naturally than he did.
He stood there, his chest reverberating with that low, base-drum sound again. While Edwina released herself into her own laughter, letting it out softly, letting it go till it ended of its own accord. The two of them slowly calmed till they were just looking at each other.
And there it was: For an instant, reality permutated. For an instant—villainous black mustache and all—a handsome gentleman smiled on her. It seemed suddenly plausible that a man could find her appealing. In a loovly sort of way. Mind-boggling, but plausible.
Then a moment later she truly did want to burst out laughing. For here in the half-lit corridor, of course, was only mousy, lanky Winnie Bollash—being flattered by a ratcatcher who didn't know any better.
She sighed, both her smile and the nice feeling dissipating into that sure piece of truth. She stepped back, pulling her dressing gown up tight, wrapping her arms around herself. "Please don't go into the study. It was my father's."
"Your father's?"
"He's gone now. Dead."
"Sympathies, loov."
"Thank you." She nodded. "It was a while ago."
He hesitated a moment,
only a moment, then said, "You should have the room then. Your father don't need it now."
Edwina looked away, as if around them she might see something besides the dark landing. "The whole house was his," she said. "I've taken over all the rest, made it my own, but I've left his study as it was." She murmured, "I use it as the masculine place to take my ladies, to show them how to be comfortable in a man's world." She laughed without humor. "A good joke, don't you think? I'm not very comfortable in such a world myself. Except in that room. My carefully preserved upper-class male habitat." Like a museum, she thought.
She'd said too much already. "Good night." She walked past him, into the study, ostensibly to put out the light. Then she thought to ask, "You have everything, yes?"
He nodded. The question, she realized, was just an excuse to look at him in better light. He stood just beyond the doorway in the corridor, partly in light, partly in shadow. The study's electric bulb threw sharp definition up the front of him: Her father's trousers were too short; they came to the top of his boots. Chances were, under the long shirttail, the trousers weren't buttoned. The vest without doubt couldn't be. No cravat, no collar.
None of this stopped Mick Tremore from being handsome, however. His jaw was square, chiseled. He had a straight, high-bridged nose—a Roman nose that, with his deep brow, shadowed his eyes like a ledge. He was striking, there was no doubt about it. Elegant, she thought again. Not just good-looking. Handsome in a polished way that defied explanation. The luck of heritage, an accident of features. Whatever made him so, it was a stroke of good fortune for her—and for Jeremy Lamont. It was much easier to pass a man off as a gentleman when he lined up with preconceptions of what a splendid one looked like.
Which, she realized, in another sense was not a stroke of luck for her at all.
"Good night," she said again.
She went into the study, but delayed pulling the chain on the light. She made herself dawdle, reshelving a book, realigning a vase. She didn't let herself look back at him, not once. Even though she knew he watched her, waiting. It was at least a full minute before she heard his footfalls turn then walk the short distance to his room at this end of the hall.