THE PROPOSITION

by Judith Ivory

  All three men waited at the front door for Winnie, while they took turns fussing with Mick's bow tie. Both Jeremy and Emile wore one. Emile's was pretied and hooked into place. Jeremy could tie his, but he couldn't reverse the process and make it work at Mick's neck.

  "I can do it."

  They all turned, looking up. And there was Winnie, standing at the top of the stairs, and, oh, what a sight.

  She'd run out and bought shoes, little satin slippers that were pretty on her feet. She carried her mother's purse, with its jeweled metal frame and gold tassels that looked like acorns, made of wrapped metal threads. The only other accouterment she wore were opals, also her mother's. Mick had never seen opals until Win had taken them out this afternoon. They gleamed now at her throat, showing off her long, graceful neck. She shone like them, pale, iridescent.

  As Mick's eyes rose to her face, he found another small alteration that he liked particularly well: While out buying her shoes, she'd found a jeweler who was able to mount the rimless lenses of her spectacles into a pince-nez on a satin string, a stylish solution to her nearsightedness that, as she raised the elegant article to look at him, caught pleasing light. An edge glinted warmly, playing hide-and-seek with the blue of her eyes.

  Even Jeremy and Emile caught their breaths. Princess Edwina, with her hair piled up on her head. Oh, she looked the part tonight. Tall, willowy, elegant. A vision of opals and salmon-rose light and long white gloves.

  Mick beamed at her. "You are gorgeous," he said. He went to the foot of the stairs and offered her his hand.

  She came down only so far as the last step, though, then, looping her evening bag over her wrist, began tying his tie. Her fingers were shaking. He looked at her. She was excited. She was terrified. How very much like Winnie.

  She did what no one else could—tying his tie in a few seconds—while looking as if any loud noise might make her race back up the stairs and decide not to go.

  He touched her arm. "You'll do fine."

  She made a face, unconsoled.

  He shook his head, trying to smile reassuringly. At his timid, long-legged fairy. His tall, tetchy imp-face who had no breasts to speak of, full hips, and perfect legs. And whose idiosyncratic, capricious pieces came together somehow in a way that was so amazingly attractive his chest ached at seeing her.

  Outside, they all ascended into Winnie's carriage, which then rolled out into the street at about six in the evening. They would miss dinner. They were going to be quite late, with Uelle Castle still an hour southwest of London.

  In the carriage, the three men sat opposite Winnie for the first five minutes, then Mick thought, The hell with etiquette, and shifted over to sit beside her. He took her hand. She smiled briefly, letting him, then stared out the window, tense but quiet. Poor thing, he thought. Yet once they arrived, they would surely enjoy themselves: better they had this night than nothing.

  Their emotions seemed to joggle along in tandem as they rode, she perhaps a little sadder, while Mick felt resigned; the two of them together in an understood bittersweet harmony. One way or another, an exciting night lay ahead. Then nothing. They wouldn't speak of it; there was no more to be said. When Mick tried to imagine his walking out her front door tomorrow morning, on his way elsewhere, he couldn't envision it. Literally, he couldn't. Nothing. As if he would step off her threshold into a void.

  Eventually, from simple, baffled irritability over the fact that Emile Lamont watched him with a small, self-satisfied smile on his face, Mick said, "Why are you so happy? You're about to lose a very large bet."

  The man's smile didn't change, faint but smug as he said, "Merely seeing if you can pull this off—the pure dangerous mischief of it—intoxicates me. It's worth it, even it I lose, to watch you do it." He laughed. "And of course Jeremy is going to squirm with worry all night. That's always fun."

  His brother huffed, then interrupted, cutting off further exchange between Emile and Mick. Wisely perhaps. He involved Winnie in conversation, something about the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.

  Mick was becoming accustomed to discussions of topics he had no knowledge of, discussions that Winnie's bearing, her accent, something about her, generated when anyone came near who could engage in what he thought of as toff conversation. It didn't bother him. He settled back, listening, the rhythm of her voice reminding him of good music played well on a fine instrument. He let the sound of it lull him into daydreams as he watched the sun set into the horizon. Whenever the carriage turned a little southward, these last, gold rays would cut across Win's face, and he'd watch her mouth.

  Watch what you can see of my tongue, she'd told him as she'd shown him her teeth, making an Eee. Oh, yes. Whenever he listened to the tune of her voice, he wanted to lean toward her, up onto his own arms for balance, and bend down into her mouth. Watch what you can see of my tongue. He wanted what he could feel of it. He wanted to touch into her well-spoken E, into teeth with a space between, to twist his head and press himself into her clever mouth. He wanted to make her his own again for the night. Ah, tonight, he thought.

  Possession. He'd tried not to want Winnie, but he did.

  He wanted her so much it made him shudder to think of it. With delight. With dread. Wanting Winnie, so far above him, was as practical as wanting to walk on water. Even as he enjoyed her—the miracle of floating, the sparkles and ripples beneath his feet—he knew that to sink was inevitable. What he feared, in fact, was that he had succeeded too well, that he'd gotten out too deep with Princess Winnie of the Empty Tins and now all that was left was to drown.

  There was no bridging the gap between them.

  When he thought of her with her linguistics and her house and her students, it was hard to imagine a life more removed from his in Whitechapel or even his new possibilities in Newcastle.

  Hard to imagine a life more removed, that is, until the place where she was born came suddenly up over the horizon.

  The road curved, a zigzag that turned the carriage south along with the river. Winnie pointed. Mick leaned to look out her window: and there it was. Uelle. Yule. Like the pagan festival. A celebration of stone and fire, of Thor. Of power. And eternity.

  Against the darkening sky, the seat of the marquisate of Sissingley rose up and onto a south bank of a bend in the river Thames. A spreading rise of yellowish stone, it extended itself out and up, the setting sun's colors sheeting up steep walls and limning a crenellated skyline of towers and sentry walks, casting the whole in an aura of a golden, pinkish orange light.

  Mick blinked for a few seconds, squinting as if he might bring it into more realistic focus. This was the home where Winnie had lived? This was what she had lost?

  The structures that made up Uelle were as numerous as those of the town where he was born. They took up more space. A massive gatehouse before a high barbican. A huge, central octagonal keep. A high-spired chapel built in the shape of a cross. Square towers set into walls with arching gates, nestled against round towers that extended upward into turrets. Behind all this, a separate, long, flag-flying hall, with high, imposing bay windows down its entire length.

  It was a congeries of civilization, like an old medieval village, yet orderly, the buildings—there were corridors of them—arranged in courtyards around gardens, squared, their corners rising in massive, castellated towers. Uelle was larger than Buckingham. It was older, more a fortress, yet grand, beautiful. And more dramatic for sitting on the far side of the river, alone in the midst of darkening English countryside, meadow and hedgerow.

  Princess Edwina. How astonishingly accurate. A princess, deposed, her fall from grace the scope of a chasm: come to reclaim her place, Mick hoped. If only for the night. And he would help.

  He'd help, that is, if whatever Emile and Jeremy were planning didn't bind him, hand and foot.

  He happened to catch glimpses of their perfectly replicated faces as they leaned forward to stare out the carriage window. Neither man had ever been here before. The fact was written all over their
gaping awe; they were as impressed as Mick by the small town of a castle toward which they all headed. So how the bloody hell had they gotten invitations? It was the question of the hour.

  He hoped it wouldn't be the question of the evening. It was past time to find out.

  * * *

  Chapter 27

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  Uelle. Winnie was surprised to know it still moved her to see the old place. It was a large, squared, battlement affair overlooking the river, though to call it so was truthful without conveying the effect.

  Tonight, the torches were lit. As the carriage clattered across the river, the air drifted with the smell of rosin burning at regular intervals in small iron baskets along the bridge. They didn't show up well at sunset, but she delighted to glimpse their fire; they would light up the night. She could see more cressets atop the rampart that rose up from the banks of the river, cups of flame that guttered in the wind, extending in both directions, up and down along the whole length of the castle. An architect, a century ago, had turned the rampart into the wall along a wide promenade that, all along the riverside of the castle, looked down into the Thames. The river below was already coming alive with reflections of flickering light.

  After the bridge, the carriage plunged into a tunnel lit by torches, then it climbed out again at the first gate, upward into the lower ward. As they went under the gate, she called to Mick, "See the slits overhead?" He angled his gaze to look out and up, and she explained, "They're for pouring boiling oil down onto the castle's enemies." She shivered and laughed.

  They passed under the iron and wood grate, a portcullis, that could be raised thirty feet into the air. Its full drop took less than thirty seconds, its iron spikes coming down with the force of two tons—guaranteeing for centuries that no one entered Uelle without invitation.

  Up they climbed through a corridor of guardhouses and outbuildings, their crenels and merlons having once hidden legions of archers. It made her skin prickle. Oh, Uelle, she thought, such a lovely, shivery place—and so suitable for the duke's ball. A place built for the sake of intimidation. An elegant, embattled fortress, the home of knights from centuries past who had brought back treasures that had remained.

  They pulled into a courtyard, and footmen rushed forward from the shadows to help Winnie descend into an Arabian-tiled coach entrance. Mick came down behind her as more servants scurried toward them from a dark illuminated by tall windows that bent long, bright, paned rectangles of light over bushes and ground. The sound of people and music rang from inside.

  Winnie gripped the hand loop of her evening bag, clutching her own squeaky-gloved fingers. The Lamonts walked past, while she remained transfixed.

  Mick hung back with her, silent, taking everything in. She wondered what he'd been expecting. Not what stood before them, it was safe to say. Unless he'd ratted Buckingham Palace, he had no reference point, nothing in his experience against which to measure this.

  He wasn't silent, she feared, so much as dumbfounded.

  She herself felt a stab of faintheartedness, and she knew the rooms they were about to enter. Though she didn't know them as they were—not lit, full of people, an orchestra playing, not as an adult admitted to partake. It was so unnerving. Poor Mick, she thought.

  She heard her carriage roll away to take its place in the line of carriages that would wait all night, then before her two doormen pulled back heavy double doors.

  Light and music and chatter poured out, amplified, dignified, clinking with crystal, humming with sociability. Inside would be people whom Winnie hadn't seen, save her own students, in a dozen years. Why had she chosen to return? Why now?

  To see a joke as she'd imagined six weeks ago? The joke of sending—no, bringing, as it turned out—a ratcatcher to dance in her cousin's ballroom? It had seemed like such a good idea then. Now, if it were a joke, it was no longer funny.

  Then, worse, when she glanced over her shoulder for reassurance, she got none: for the man she looked at wasn't a ratcatcher.

  Instead, she saw a tall gentleman standing beside her, straight-postured, his top hat at an insanely right—rakish—angle, his shoulders wide as the wind off the river billowed his long dark cloak. Mick. He was shadow and light standing there in the nightfall, the back of him only a glow across his shoulders from the torches, the front of him stark, his shirt and vest a snowy contrast to the black of his evening suit.

  And his face. Dear Lord, his face. The brim of his hat cast his eyes into perfect obscurity, while the light from the reception room made the rest—the angles of his cheekbones, his straight nose, the wide, masculine set of his jaw—simply and stunningly handsome. At her side was a mysterious gentleman in a cloak blown by the wind, a cloak that cast shadows across him, its lining flapping eerie bursts of vivid, sheening purple.

  For a moment, she didn't know who he was, why he stood there, or why she was beside him. To be here felt unreal.

  Then he asked, "Shall we?" And a smile she knew, yet didn't, crooked up sideways, devastating.

  She was so taken aback, she asked, "Mick?"

  The hat turned, looked right at her, responding to the name. In a whisper, she asked a question in her own mind. "Are you sure you wish to go through with it?"

  Without hesitation, he said, "Damn right." She felt a strong arm loop about her waist. He whispered, "I wouldn't miss it."

  His hand came up, and his head came closer. He was about to remove his hat to kiss her. But she quickly braced herself, holding him back. She felt a tension in his arm, in his chest where she pushed.

  And knew: God help them both, he wasn't intimidated. He was excited.

  Full of himself, she thought. His confidence panicked her. "Remember the rules—" she murmured.

  "Oh, Winnie," he answered softly. "Don't you know by now? There are no rules." Then he pulled back and laughed—at her, she feared.

  She was going to lecture him, bring him down to earth. But as their bodies separated, she felt something—a small, soft weight between them that rested in the lining of his cloak.

  "Do you have your gloves?" she asked.

  "On," he told her.

  "What's that then?" She reached for the weight.

  He drew back. "Freddie," he said.

  "What!" Her heart lurched quite nearly out her throat. Then, with sudden relief, she put her gloved hand against her chest, onto her shoulder cape. She shook her head. He was tormenting her. "Goodness," she said, "I almost thought you were serious. Don't be so unkind. You terrify me."

  He said nothing, only staring at her for a moment. Then quite seriously, he murmured, "I don't want to terrify you."

  "Then don't tease me."

  Nothing again. Until he said quietly, "All right."

  "Are you two lovebirds coming?" Emile Lamont called from ahead. With his brother, he stood just inside the doorway.

  Mick offered his arm. Winnie linked hers through it, and she marched forward.

  They left their wraps with the servant in the cloakroom with only minor incident. Mick hesitated to turn his handsome new cloak over to the attendant till she encouraged him. "It's fine," she whispered. "He'll keep everything sorted and watch over it. You can leave your things. Everyone does."

  That was the last of any awkwardness on his part. Shed of their wraps, he took her gloved hand and threaded it through the crook of his arm. All awkwardness became hers: She felt like a cliff-diver as they walked out to be announced. Once, she'd gone with her father to watch a man who dived from cliffs at Dover into a deep shoreline pool of the English Channel. She couldn't understand why the man kept doing it or how he did it at all without dying.

  That was how she felt, as if called upon to participate in a free fall that might kill her, when she heard: "Lady Edwina Henrietta Bollash and Lord Michael Frederick Edgerton, the Viscount Bartonreed."

  She and Mick walked out onto a huge landing that overlooked a monumental staircase leading down into the ballroom. Winnie drew herself up, having to remind herself
to breathe.

  Mick, it seemed, had to remind himself to proceed slowly. As they began down the stairs, he murmured under his breath, "Oh, look at the size of this room! Oh, my God. I can't wait to dance you out onto that floor—look at the size of that floor!"

  And the number of people. Dear Lord.

  And every single one of them seemed to stop and stare up.

  As they made their way down, Winnie stole sideways glances at him, looking for a kindred spirit: and not finding one. He held his head up, a faint smile on his face, perfectly calm, as if he walked down a hundred twenty-seven wide marble stairs—she had counted when she rolled jacks and balls down them as a child—every day of his life. Dashing. That was the word for him. Dashing, handsome, perfectly pressed, perfectly tailored, and poised.

  The poise was his own. The rest was a complicated overlayer of clothes, speech, and manners, applied to a ratcatcher whom she kept trying to see, yet couldn't. Where was Mick?

  Instead, she watched the ghost who had materialized now and then in the course of Mick's instruction. Only now, the ghost had taken over his skin. When she was younger, she would have had difficulty speaking to such a man as walked beside her. Words would have stuck in her throat.

  Where was Mick? She couldn't find him.

  Could anyone else?

  She lifted her pince-nez when she thought she recognized the Baroness of Whitting from the teahouse. Indeed, it was—the woman saw them, too, and began toward them from the far end of the room. The baroness's presence was expected. Less expected, Winnie saw two couples she was fairly certain had been in the same teahouse six weeks before on the day Mick had made his less than graceful entrance into it. Oh, dear, oh, dear. She spotted also several of her former students. One of them, the lovely young duchess, turned the moment she saw Winnie, lifting her skirts in a careful, ladylike hurry, waving as she approached—which she was not supposed to do.