THE PROPOSITION

by Judith Ivory

  "Aren't."

  "Right." Mrs. Reed came into the hallway just then, humming and dusting knickknacks on a shelf a dozen feet from them. They both listened to her till she disappeared again. Mick lowered his voice, in deference to the intrusion, but he brought the conversation right back. "Serious now," he asked, "do you believe some word you say or don't say can shave the hair off my lip? You didn't do it—I did. And when I want to, I'll grow it back again." He laughed softly, then winked at her. "Which is better than you can say, Miss Bollash. 'Cause I'll always know you have the prettiest legs in all of England. Any time I want to see them, all I do is close my eyes."

  Oh, the cheek of him. Winnie smiled when she shouldn't have, then couldn't let him get away with being so self-satisfied. She said, "No, Mr. Tremore, imagination is a fine thing, but we both know there is nothing like reality. I can see your mustache is gone right here—" She touched his face above his lip before she thought not to. Taking her hand back quickly, she said, "I know reality. You have only what you are able to remember and daydream."

  His eyebrows raised. He touched his own lip where her fingers had been the second before. He looked surprised, then not. He laughed, this time letting out that deep, low rumble he could make in his chest. It came forth through his easy, sideways smile. "Why, Miss Bollash," he said, "are you flirting with me?"

  No. But heat began immediately to seep into her cheeks. She couldn't stop it. She couched her face, hiding it and the beginnings of a smile. "No, of course not."

  "You are," he insisted.

  "No." She shook her head vehemently, but the smile kept coming.

  His finger touched under her chin, and he lifted her face to make her look at him. "You are," he said quietly, with utter seriousness. "Watch out, Miss Bollash. I like to flirt, but I like better where it gets me—and you don't."

  She tried to absorb his admonishment as she stared into his eyes, shadowed there in the hallway. Smoky green eyes that made her heart thud; they took her breath away. He was right, of course. You watch out, Miss Bollash.

  Yet she couldn't make herself stop smiling slightly. He found her attractive. She truly might be attractive. She'd been turning that idea over and over in her mind since this morning. It wasn't just words any longer. She had felt how attractive he found her. And, oh, she discovered, what a greed she had for that notion. Attractive. In her way. To the right man.

  Mr. Tremore broke in on this sweet thought by saying, "Don't dally with me, Winnie. I'll lead you down the path. Sooner or later, I'll have you." Then he used a word she'd used once half an hour ago: Carefully, thoughtfully at each syllable, he said, "In-ap-pro-pri-ate." After a pause, he took the word for his own by saying, "As inappropriate as that'd be."

  In that moment she understood: Mick Tremore was smarter, more attractive, and more aware of himself that she had ever supposed. And these marks in his character made him powerful. She was to be wary of that power; he understood it. She was wary. But she was something else, too. Her chin balanced on his fingers, she felt nothing ambiguous in one particular fact: Her blood came alive, as with nothing and no one else, when he stood near her.

  * * *

  That evening a tradition, born of cowardice, began. After dinner, Edwina still couldn't look a man in the mouth who was promising to lead her "down the path." Hunting for a way to sidestep their usual focus on his organs of speech, she came up with what possibly would become her best idea for re-tailoring his words, even his thoughts.

  "I'd like to go into the library tonight, where I'll read to you aloud." She suggested brightly, "We'll douse you in the sounds of proper English, while we educate you in the classics."

  In the library, she drew down a book, and began to read to him—he on the sofa, she in a chair at the other side of an unlit fireplace.

  She expected to read to him for only an hour or so. But as she began the stories—with Dryden's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses—Mr. Tremore grew silent, rapt. He listened to the rhythm of English in heroic couplets, chosen so he'd hear the music of the language in a different way than prose exercises. Eventually, he scooted himself down onto the floor and lay nearer on the hearth rug, one arm over his head, the other fiddling with the brim of the hat on his chest—he'd worn it through dinner; he loved it.

  While she read, he and she didn't argue. They didn't challenge each other. He stopped her occasionally for words he didn't know. That was the limit to his objection. He wouldn't let her speak a word, if he couldn't guess the sense behind it, not without her telling him the meaning—there were some they both had to look up. Winnie read for three hours through two different authors—he asked enough questions that she took down Bullfinch's Mythology—until at last she grew hoarse.

  At the end, he must have drifted off to sleep. She wasn't certain when. The hat had covered his eyes for the last half hour. Something now though in the rhythm of his breathing, the movement of his chest, made her stop reading. He said nothing, when up till this point, if she stopped, he lifted the hat and encouraged her to continue.

  He lay there now on the hearth rug, completely relaxed, his dog stretched out beside him, both sleeping peacefully. Edwina sighed and smiled at the sight of the two of them, motionless, quiet. A rare state for either.

  She closed the book in her lap, resting her hand on it. Then the pressure, the odd pressure as she stared at him, made her draw in a breath. Hesitantly, then intentionally, she pressed on the book, over where he had touched her today. There. Winnie had never imagined he might want to do that. It had been shocking: humiliating for him to know that animal part of her, to know her—

  She couldn't proceed further in her thinking … but, oh, the feeling his hand had left on her. It was a constant battle not to remember the strong curve of his fingers, the feel of his hand when he curved it to—

  Enough. She really had to not think about it. Yet more and more there seemed a bevy of things she was not supposed to think about—and by virtue of trying to remember not to, she hardly thought of anything else.

  Shaking her head at herself, Winnie stood and walked to the bookshelf, where, as she replaced her book, the hair on her arms suddenly pricked with the full irony of what she'd been reading. The spine that she pushed into place read Bulfinch's Mythology: The Age of Fable, the last tale that she had pronounced aloud beginning:

  Pygmalion was a sculptor who made with wonderful skill from ivory a perfect semblance of a maiden that seemed to be alive…

  Winnie glanced at the man asleep on her hearth. She was vain of how clever she was at teaching phonetics, how smartly she could break down the vowels and diphthongs of upper-class English, manufacture its inflections, feed its vocabulary, instruct on the human considerations that were its manners. That was partly what had gotten them here, her vanity. She was good at it.

  An art so perfect, he fell in love with his counterfeit creation…

  Yet, today, she had stepped beyond her art, and she knew it. She pushed Mr. Tremore to embody her own conception of what a man should be—or rather what a gentleman should be, she corrected herself. She was limning out her own personal conception of what a gentleman should look like and say and how he should behave, while Mr. Tremore was grabbing up the notion, running like a racehorse with it, embodying her ideal more perfectly by the day.

  And smoke roiled up … and Pygmalion made sacrifices on the altars of Venus…

  The festival of Venus was at hand… Victims were offered, the altars smoked… When Pygmalion had performed his part of the solemnities, he stood before the altar and timidly said, "Ye gods, who can do all things, give me, I pray you, for my wife"—he dared not say "my ivory virgin," but said instead—"one like my ivory virgin."

  "Pygmalion," The Age of Fable

  THOMAS BULLFINCH, LONDON, 1855

  * * *

  Chapter 13

  « ^ »

  When Winnie was seventeen years old, her father died. This was eleven years after her mother had left them, only to die on some forei
gn continent—her mother had traveled so much after her departure that no one had been able to keep up with her. The letter announcing her death had been forwarded a number of times, leaving Winnie and her father with only the information that Lady Sissingley had died of pneumonia in Africa, India, or, possibly, China.

  Winnie had been raised by a series of governesses and a father who—though he loved her, she was sure—was preoccupied with his own work. He was a linguistics scholar of some stature. Before he died, he'd written more than a hundred monographs on language-related topics and two textbooks. He was the foremost British theoretician on RP, received pronunciation—that is, the sounds that originated in upper-class mouths, how these sounds were formed, how they were perceived in the ear, and what subtle changes were happening to them as they were being transmitted via the public schools to the English middle class.

  When Lionel Bollash—Regius Professor Bollash, Marquess of Sissingley by courtesy of being the fourth Duke of Arles's only son—died, everyone expected that his daughter would be taken into the household of his second cousin, Milford Xavier Bollash, who, up to that point, had been merely the grandnephew of the fourth duke, second in line, part of the family, but with no title other than the courtesy of "Lord" before his name.

  To everyone's astonishment, however, when Xavier succeeded to the marquisate—inheriting not only Edwina's father's title, but every one of her family's possessions, the money, goods, and entailed estates that composed the full honor of being heir apparent to the duchy—he did not welcome her into his household. Winnie had barely absorbed the implications, however, when another calamity befell the family.

  The hale and hearty fourth Duke of Arles, Winnie's grandfather and someone she might have counted on to lean on Xavier to sponsor her at least through a Season, to be of nominal support, while out on a walk at the ripe old age of one-hundred-three, was struck by lightning and smote dead on the spot. He followed his son to the grave by a delay of only three days. Xavier acquired the duchy of Arles in the same week he succeeded to the already vast and lucrative holdings of the Sissingley marquisate, ascending to the full roll call of honors: the fifth Duke of Arles, Marquess of Sissingley, Count of Grennewick, Viscount Berwick—oh, there were more; she couldn't even remember them all.

  At which point, Xavier told the seventeen-year-old Winnie quite plainly that, not only was she not residing under his roof, but: "There is no point in sponsoring you for a Season in London either, my dear. You are unmarriageable. You have no property to speak of. Heaven knows you aren't pretty. And, as if these facts weren't enough, you ruin what little femininity you have by mimicking your dotty father's obsession with how people talk."

  He told her this by way of excusing himself for using her dowry to buy an elaborate custom, crested brougham with eight matching bays and uniform livery for his footmen and coachman.

  The day he packed her into this coach to send her off, one-way, he added, "You may as well be a man."

  If only she had been, she would have been in line ahead of him.

  But she was a girl, a funny-looking girl who, grieving for a father and grandfather, was ill-prepared. She—nor her father nor grandfather, she was sure—had considered for a moment that a cousin would not see to her at least modestly. She hadn't fully believed it, even as he was saying he wouldn't, till she was riding away in the coach with Milton, her butler, on her way to his sister's house. Her butler's sister's house, for goodness sakes.

  Of course, by Arles's standards, he had seen to her: A year and a half later, when the Home Office caught wind of her situation (as it turned out, what Xavier had done wasn't quite legal) and said he must make restitution of her dowry—property he had sold, money he had already spent—he resigned claim to the only thing he didn't know what to do with: her father's library on human speech and the building it was housed in, the marquess's town house in Knightsbridge.

  What was Arles like? Mr. Tremore had asked. Besides greedy? Old, but spry. When he had inherited the world, Xavier was already in his late seventies. All her life, he had stood at the self-assured center of her family. The witty one, the clever one, the one who entertained them all, the one who had the parties and the friends and connections. He loved power and influence; he cultivated them. He wanted to be adored and, generally, was.

  Edwina had actually admired him. She had circled the little planet of her father—a father who floated in the solitary ethers of academia—in awe of her brighter, more gregarious second cousin, once removed. An obscure little moon to Xavier's sun.

  She used what she'd acquired of her father's things and her father's knowledge to make ends meet in a way her father never could have imagined. Lionel Bollash had had no head for business; he hadn't needed one, having enjoyed, as his father before him and every other previous Marquess of Sissingley, one of the most lucrative entailments in the empire. Edwina had come through, though; she was even proud of herself. She was happiest when she was working. She loved what she did.

  Nonetheless, she retained a degree of rancor for Xavier and an odd sense of shame.

  One of her first students, who knew of events, said, "Oh, it was perhaps for the best. These things happen." It was meant as consolation. Yet Edwina could not surmount a sense of horror to hear the words.

  For the best? As if, given the choice, she should have wished all this to befall her? Sought it on purpose? Since it was so good?

  No, she personally thought she could have done without it.

  Oddly enough, the parents of the same student, when the duke had first dispossessed Edwina, had been outraged. People in general at the time were outraged. Then they weren't. Life went on. It took a year or more, but eventually everyone returned to making their morning calls on Xavier's wife, to seeking his support, to asking him to donate to the missionary fund, to invest in their projects. And they never stopped decking themselves out and going to his annual ball.

  A ball that Edwina herself had never attended—she'd been too young, then too strained a relation. Nor could she call at Xavier's house. He wouldn't have allowed it; she wouldn't have wanted to. Which made her feel more or less marooned, a little red boat in a dry basin at low tide. She could send other little boats out upon the sea of English high society. She could teach them to sail, to skim along the water with style and grace. While her own sails only luffed in the wind.

  * * *

  The next morning, Mick lathered up his chin and cheeks, but left his upper lip dry. In one night, he already had a dark shadow of stubble on his lip. He twisted his mouth, holding his cheek taut with his fingers, and shaved as usual: both cheeks, his chin, his jaw, his lower face, save the place under his nose.

  He rinsed, stood up, then, as he toweled himself dry, stared into the mirror. The dark hair across his lip looked like dirt on his mouth. He'd looked better clean-shaven. In a few days, he'd look fine again, he supposed. His old self. But his new self stood there, cogitating, unhappy with an itchy lip that looked as if he'd been drinking stout and forgot to wipe his mouth.

  So which self should I be? he asked.

  Then the question unnerved him.

  Which self? There weren't two of him.

  Get rid of the thing, he told himself. Don't make it complicated. Winnie liked him better without it. Anything that reminded her that his sex was the opposite, the mate, to hers alarmed her. Fine, he could go delicate with her. He could become the most gentlemanly gentleman she'd ever known. All her ladylike rules were a lot of bung, but he was beginning to understand why gents went through the ordeal.

  He stared into the mirror, turning his head. A barber had come in last week and taken a razor to the hair at the back of his neck. There was a clean line where his hair met his collar, nothing scraggily on his neck. Neat. His shirt collar was high on his throat, snug. It half choked him sometimes to wear it. Milton had been showing him how to tie a necktie, but he'd made a tangle of it today. It draped, wrinkled from effort, on either side of his neck down his vest.

 
Outside he was looking more and more like—what was it they wanted him to be? A viscount? But inside he still felt like Mick from Cornwall who lived underneath a shoemaker's shop in London next door to the Waste Market.

  Winnie liked the result, and that made half of him—the lower half of him—want to go on. He'd done crazier things to get up close to a woman he liked. The other half of him, though, hesitated.

  More and more, he spoke differently. He acted different, too. But the strange thing was, sometimes he thought different lately. Differently. Hell, he worried over whether to say different or differently, when how the hell much could it matter? And why did he care?

  He thought things like, Wouldn't it be nice to have a respectable woman like Winnie Bollash? When what he wanted of Winnie, of course, was for her to be unrespectable with him. No, no, he corrected, not Winnie Bollash. He didn't want her; he couldn't have her. But … oh, a seamstress's assistant maybe. A woman like Winnie Bollash. Good-hearted, smart, hardworking. And faithful. Of the half dozen highborn women he'd been with, every one of them had been married. But Winnie … a woman like Winnie would be loyal. Hell, there she was yesterday, steadfastly trampling along beside him after he'd scared half the wits from her just hours before. And grit. She had grit.

  He picked up the razor again, then spoke to the fellow on the other side of the mirror, taking exaggerated care with pronunciation. "I rahther think you should take the mustache off, old man. Jolly good idea."

  Stupid toff. Except he liked that his room was dry. In the cellar under the shoemaker's, half the time when it rained, water seeped through the walls. He liked not being exhausted at the end of the day. Eating well and regularly had its advantages. And new words—especially finding new words, more particular words, and being understood when he said them—were bloody marvelous.