As I began unwillingly to dismantle the flimsy barricades, my husband disappeared within his dressing room. In his absence, I examined my new prison. How I wished my inspection would reveal some ancient priest’s hole through which I might escape. But, of course, the house was too new for that—less than two centuries old—and nothing in the room was conducive to flight.
Every element had quite the opposite effect. Velvet curtains of midnight blue hid the windows and shut out the world. More night-sky velvet framed the great bed; these hangings had been drawn back to reveal a billowing coverlet, also deep blue and filled no doubt with the finest eiderdown. There were great soft pillows everywhere—massed at the head of the bed, clustered at each end of the long sofa, propped against the striped-silk ottomans that flanked the fire. Indeed, every object that met my eye issued a wordless invitation to sink into idleness and sensuality.
Now my husband returned with what I recognized as the parcel Hélène had shown him on the previous day. He placed it upon the bed, opened it in a leisurely way, and, laying back the tissue paper, drew out its contents one by one. These he arranged upon the blue ocean of the counterpane. The resplendent, frothy masses of color, brilliant heaps of silk and satin and lace, made a dazzling regatta.
He then removed his dress coat and took up his station in a gold velvet armchair which stood hard by the bed. Beside his chair, a table with a black marble top held a decanter of Madeira and a pair of wineglasses. My husband leaned forward to pour some of the pale wine into one of them, but he did not lift it to his mouth. Instead, he settled back into the chair, crossed one leg over the other, and glanced at the palette of color spread across his bed.
“Now we will see how some other things fit,” he said.
I wondered whether the ingratiating Hélène had tried them on for him the previous day, to persuade him of their charms—and hers. But no, it was impossible. She had twice as much flesh on her lovely bones as I did.
Still I hesitated.
Surely my husband could see now how cruelly all this opulent sensuousness must set off my dessicated self.
But he only gave a little lift of his chin, which instructed me, as clearly as if he had spoken the order, to approach him. His face was implacable.
As I stepped forward, I concentrated on obliterating every sensation of shame and hatred. By the time I reached him, I felt nothing: I had willed myself back into that state of somnolent detachment that had possessed me in our marriage bed and upon which I knew I could depend to get me through even this night.
My husband lifted his hand and idly ran the back of a fingernail along the inside of my right wrist. I felt a soft, not unpleasant shiver.
“Try that first,” he said, indicating a fragile, low-cut nightdress of sheer black lace. With the composure of an automaton, I drew it over my head. But as I did so the faint scent of fresh, crushed rose petals wafted from the lace, so hauntingly seductive that I could not resist inhaling it wistfully.
That, I suppose, was the beginning of my undoing.
The fragrance came like a faint siren’s call to stir my sleeping senses.
I fastened the red silk rosette buttons that secured the gown across my breasts and down to my waist. The lace clung to me from shoulder to hip; below, on the left side, the skirt fell in soft folds to the floor, while on the right side, the hem was hiked and anchored just at the top of my leg by another, larger rosette.
“Turn around slowly,” directed my husband when I had secured the last button.
“That fits you nicely,” he commented. “Madame Rullier was right. It does seem that I learned your body well—even with so few opportunities, and all of them in the dark. No, don’t say a word. Come closer.”
How can I describe my confusion as I obeyed? I moved toward him in a faint mist of invisible roses that filled my head with wisps of ancient dreams and slumberous longings. He took my hands and laid them on his shoulders. I felt his muscles move beneath my palms, under his white waistcoat, as he began to unfasten the first few little rosettes. The lace fell away. His fingers grazed my breasts but did not linger there. I closed my eyes for a moment; my contrived numbness began to have a tormenting pins-and-needles quality as my husband’s hands glided slowly down my lace-covered back to my waist. His left hand slipped below the rosette at my right hip and came to rest upon my skin.
“Oh, you’re lovelier than any painting,” he said softly, leaning back to give me an appraising stare. “I’ve rarely seen such color in your face.”
It was true. I knew my cheeks were brighter now than they could possibly have been made by the faint touch of carmine I had applied to them earlier, at my husband’s wish, before we had gone out.
“Well, I’m very pleased with that,” remarked my husband after a while. “You may take it off.”
I roused myself and slipped out of the nightdress.
Next he directed me to put on a low-cut chemise of claret-colored silk, likewise redolent of a summer garden, thickly edged with creamy lace and matched with a pair of very short, loose drawers. Then he beckoned me to him again with that wordless, imperative tilt of his chin. Already disarmed by the languorous spell under which my senses threatened to pull me ever deeper, I approached him.
“One must be rather particular about garments like this,” he told me, fingering the silken drawers like a connoisseur. “Unless they are generously cut, they can sometimes be obstructive.”
These could not be faulted in that respect. His hand met no obstructing fabric as it plied its way slowly up the inside of my thigh and came at last to the tender flesh it sought. He cupped me in his palm then and curled his fingers slightly. At that small movement, I shuddered involuntarily. He pressed the heel of his hand against me for one singeing instant, giving me another, stronger jolt. I caught my breath in a sharp gasp.
“That will do,” he said pleasantly, withdrawing his hand. But my fickle nerves had already begun to play me false; they clamored softly for me to pull his bold hand back and hold it there. Still they were, as yet, very weak, and I was quick to suppress them.
“I think I might even enjoy seeing you in your demure little patched gowns again,” remarked my husband, “if they were merely camouflage for this.”
I remained motionless, still struggling to collect myself in the aftermath of that brief and gentle assault. How had he succeeded in provoking my flesh to betray me so blatantly?
It occurred to me that, since my will alone might prove woefully inadequate to the challenges confronting it, perhaps a little wine would take the edge from my nerves and dull my ears to their perfidious whispers. I moved toward the little table and reached out to take the neglected glass my husband had filled earlier. He took me gently by the wrist.
“No wine,” he said softly. “I want all your senses at their sharpest.”
I might have resisted him easily. That numbing draught was within my reach, and his fingers lay upon me so lightly that the smallest exertion would have broken his grip. My pulse beat against his fingertips.
“I want you to feel everything,” he said.
I took a step backward, and my wrist was my own again. The last thing I wanted was to feel any more than I already did, but under his steady, unsettling gaze, which held both a challenge and an appeal, that traitorous heat rose within me once again.
I pulled my gaze away. The moment passed. When I looked at him once again, I saw only a frosty glint of amusement on his face.
“I won’t ask you to try on all those that are cut to the same pattern,” he said, referring to the chemise and drawers I wore, which were replicated in a multitude of colors upon his bed. “But I would like you to remove the chemise and let me see you in those green stays, if you don’t mind.”
From among the silken pools of sapphire, topaz, amethyst, garnet, coral, and lapis lazuli, I drew out the emerald stays and examined them with a barely repressed quiver of dislike. They were thoroughly immodest, having been made to cup only the underside of the br
easts. But convinced that to balk at my husband’s wishes would simply turn the whole business into an interminable and degrading exercise, I slipped out of the claret-colored chemise with a sigh.
The stays, however, with which I had been instructed to replace it, laced up the back and gave me considerable trouble. To add to the difficulty, some of my hair, having fallen from its diamond pins, was already becoming entangled in the strings.
“What are you doing—it’s useless to struggle with it,” said my husband with a little laugh. “Just come here, for heaven’s sake…. Now turn round and pin up your hair as soon as I have gotten it free.”
I obeyed. While I restored my hair to its pins, he began to lace me.
As he did so, my renegade memory wandered back to our early rides together. My thoughts lingered in pleasant reminiscence on the graceful ease with which my husband had saddled and bridled his horses—he always began by whispering soft words to those high-strung creatures and by stroking them gently. He had taught me to do the same with Andromeda and had shown me all his ways of making certain that no piece of metal or leather tackle was so carelessly fitted as to pinch or chafe her.
Now he was securing the laces at my back, testing them to make sure he had left sufficient slack to permit me to breathe easily. Then his hands came around the swell of my ribs to stroke me lightly. He was behind me: That deft, almost soothing touch might have been anyone’s. I felt my strength ebb further, like a gentle, outgoing tide.
At first he confined his explorations to the territory encompassed by the green satin. He ran his fingers up the whalebone ridges and downward over the smooth fabric of the interstices; he circled my waist with his hands and drew me into the embrasure of his thighs. His breath warmed my bare skin but his hands never touched it. They were content with satin.
As I grew weaker, he closed his knees around me, supporting me. His fingertips began to sketch little crescent moons upon the smooth fabric that only half shielded my breasts. My eyes fell shut.
At last he let his hands glide downward to the bottom edge of the stays. At last he crossed that dangerous border. He slid the tip of his index finger under the satin and ran it slowly along my skin. I felt my long-standing protection, that arid tightness within me, begin to loosen again alarmingly. I pressed my knees together, as if I imagined I could hold back the waves.
The hands drifted downward, the fingertips slipped beneath the band of the claret-silk drawers I still wore. I held my breath, fearing and willing those fingers to venture onward, into deeper regions, but they did not.
Instead my husband released me from his thighs, flattened his palms against my skin, and pushed the drawers slowly down my hips. They slithered to the floor. My body clenched in anticipation—was it a welcome or the last shred of resistance? I could not tell.
But it did not matter. The hands merely glided back to the place where his fingers had earlier tattooed those slender crescents. Idly he retraced their outline. His thighs closed round me again.
My unruly longings seemed about to choke me, but either my husband did not notice or else he did not care. He returned his attention to the lines of whalebone. His touch was even lighter now, almost absentminded, almost as if he were preparing at any moment to dismiss me with a yawn.
The fear that he might do so gave me an intense and shattering thrill.
He withdrew his hands. The thrill gripped me even more violently. I half dreaded that he had suddenly tired of these diversions. But he had not. He dropped his palms to my waist once again and again let them glide upward. This time they did not stop when they reached the top of the green satin. He spread his hands over my outthrust breasts, capturing my nipples between his fingers and pinching them lightly. They had grown firm long before, and now they tightened and swelled so violently that I knew myself to be on the verge of losing every shred of self-control.
A tiny sob broke against my closed lips and shook me. I could no longer hold my back straight. I fell forward like a broken doll, bracing my hands against my husband’s knees.
His right hand deserted its post at my breast, drifted down my spine like a falling leaf, and then softly began to nuzzle into the moist heat between my legs.
This time my lips opened as I cried out.
He took his hands away.
I struggled in vain to part my thighs, to invite another tender invasion, but his knees held me like a vise, and I could not.
I continued to writhe in that iron grip for a moment, laboring for breath, and then gave up.
“There,” he said, releasing his hold. “I know this has been difficult for you. I won’t ask too much of you all at once. You may go now.”
I stumbled forward. I was facing the doorway through which I had come earlier, but I was now so weak with hunger for all that I had barely tasted, as well as with the shock of disappointment, that I could have reached it only by crawling on my hands and knees.
I turned around unsteadily. My husband, reclining comfortably in the depths of his chair, wore a challenging look that conveyed a clear message.
He was daring me to disobey him.
“Good night,” he said.
I glanced at the door behind me and then back at him.
“Take the dressing gown, if you like,” he said indifferently, pointing toward a scarlet peignoir that lay at the end of the rainbow on the bed.
Modesty ought to have made me cover myself with it, but those casual and insinuating hands had driven away all my pretensions to modesty. I lifted my own hands to pull the pins from my hair and let them drop. I let my gaze drift back slowly toward my enthroned husband. His face showed nothing. I felt my skin grow brighter. I shifted my eyes and glimpsed my own image in the looking glass on the wall behind him. I was too drunk with desire now even to feel much amazement at who was caught there—that other woman, the one whose flesh had once burned so wildly that, long ago, unable to hold her pose for the man she loved, she had been driven to assume an even bolder one.
And now it was worse. Like that abandoned creature of the paintings, I was offering myself, not to my beloved Frederick, but to a man I did not love, for whom I had ceased to care in even the smallest way, and who now seemed bent upon teaching me how to hate.
The painted lady was real.
My husband watched me steadily. His expression did not change.
Not knowing what to do, how to curb my reckless impulses, and half swooning with desire, I dropped to the floor. My knees sank into that soft Chinese carpet, that thick expanse of blue as dark as the nighttime sea. My eyes came back to his rock-hard gray ones, and a tumultuous yearning, utterly unfamiliar, utterly debilitating, swept through me.
I closed my eyes. My hands began to move, as if of their own will, over my body, touching every spot where his hands had lingered earlier and where his adventuring fingers had probed. Thus, in the language that has no words, I recounted to him every fleeting delight he had inflicted upon me and avowed my hunger for more.
I no longer knew myself.
I had never imagined what it would be to fall so completely under the spell of another’s sheer sexual power. My old self, even that long-ago self beloved of Frederick, the one he had called his fleur du mal, was a pallid and conventional creature compared to the woman I had now become, kneeling on the carpet before my enemy and proclaiming in this mute and urgent fashion my desperate longing to give myself up to him.
All that came back to me was stillness and silence.
At last I heard the sigh of a necktie being pulled free, the whisper of starched, boiled linen and soft wool falling to the floor, the click of a diamond stud striking a button….
“Come here,” said my husband huskily. He sounded shaken, no longer cool.
I opened my eyes and lifted my damp face. My husband was standing before the chair; his clothes lay at his feet.
I had never seen him naked.
As he had pointedly reminded me only a short time earlier, I had always insisted upon having the l
ights put out on the few occasions when we had made love.
Now I saw what I had always suspected: that my husband’s lean and lightly muscled frame was as beautifully sculpted as any of those marble pagan gods and mythic heroes I had once admired in the Louvre.
He took only a half-step toward me, then halted. I came to my feet and moved forward slowly. Although he had not laced me tightly, my lungs felt starved and my breathing had a terrible, jagged urgency.
Only a few inches of carpet separated us when I reached the point where I could not go on without some sign of encouragement, some assurance that he would not simply fold his arms against me and rebuff my advances like a stony wall. I knew he had the strength to do that, in spite of the evidence of his own desire, if all he really intended was to teach me the cruel lesson he had hinted at, only days ago, in his study.
We faced each other, silent and immobile.
He took the final step and closed that tiny gulf. He brought his hands to my shoulders and bent his head to mine. His hair fell across my cheek like a curtain. My mouth melted under his demanding lips. Hours—or seconds—later his hands moved to my breasts.
I nearly stumbled with the shock of my response.
He drew backward and sank into the chair again, pulling me with him. Holding me by the waist, he lifted me slightly, as he forced my legs apart with his knees; in a moment I was straddling his thighs. His hands dropped to my hips and pulled me closer still. I brought my knees up, opening myself to him as he entered me. He used none of the restraint that I had come to expect from him. I didn’t mind. He lifted his hips beneath me and then let them drop. The pleasure was nearly intolerable; I could no longer hold myself still. I thought he would object to this. Instead, I felt a whisper of soft laughter stir my hair, as he altered his rhythm slightly to mine, spurring me on.
My breasts strained toward his lips, his tongue, and, as they received his benedictions, my spine curved like a rainbow. Only his arms around my waist prevented me from falling away under those scorching, suckling kisses.
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