Grahame, Lucia

by The Painted Lady

  His skin was damp and tropical; his breath was a warm southern wind. There was no part of him that did not pulse and surge with fire. There was no inch of flesh on me that his insistent and intrepid hands did not claim for his own.

  He showed me no delicacy now. His lips burned my ears with words I never dreamed any man would dare to breathe in my presence; he called me everything except my name and made my blood race madly. My body rose and fell, mastered at first by what had seemed to be his will and not my own; yet my every nerve responded so unhesitatingly and urged him on so strongly that I could not have said for the life of me which one of us truly set the measure for that headlong race.

  Our bodies rocked together. His breath grew as ragged as my own; the sound of it incited me further. I heard myself yield to the cries welling up within me. I felt his excitement mount higher with each whimper of passion I could no longer contain.

  “And how do you like me now?” he whispered. Again I heard that almost soundless laughter.

  Sobbing, I bucked against the pressure of his arms, secure that they would never let me go.

  But in the end, of course, they did.

  Almost as soon as he had released me, I retreated in disarray.

  He had thrown his head back, his eyes were closed, and he was breathing hard.

  I staggered to the bed and pulled the scarlet dressing gown over my damp, smoldering skin.

  He lifted his head. His face was still flushed but now otherwise icily impassive. I arranged my features likewise. I thought of the final taunt he had flung at me, when I was so far gone that, instead of bringing me to my senses as it ought to have, it had pushed me over the brink.

  “Well,” I said, “that’s one out of the way. I trust that it was everything you hoped for.”

  “Not quite,” he replied. I bridled slightly, for I could not imagine in what way I had disappointed him. “However,” he continued, his breath still uneven, “I will admit that you surpassed my expectations.” He pulled himself to his feet. “Good night. Again,” he said.

  His eyes were as impenetrable as granite.

  I half turned to leave.

  “Take your things with you,” he tossed over his shoulder as he strolled off toward his dressing room.

  I gathered up into the arms that only moments earlier had been entwined around his neck all the banners of colored silk still strewn across his bed. Then I retreated to my own room and began the lonely struggle to unbind myself from the green stays.

  I did not see him on the following day, but a terse little note in his handwriting arrived with my breakfast tray. It told me that the coachman had been instructed to deliver me that afternoon to Victoria Station, to the train that would take me back to Charingworth.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Alone at last.

  At Charingworth, I did not dwell upon my recent misadventures in London. To have allowed—no, to have encouraged!—my detestable husband to evoke that blazing response from me—I could not bear to think of it. I preferred to occupy myself with visions of the future life which those weak-willed antics would help to buy me.

  In a month or two I could return to Paris. Surely the gardens and boulevards which Frederick’s death had so darkened and blighted would become, merely by virtue of my freedom to walk in them alone, almost bright again and lively. And with money enough to keep her, I could take Andromeda with me, leaving nothing behind to regret.

  But as the days grew longer and the empty nights milder, my mind began to revert to what my husband had described to me as the culmination of his revenge: Then your punishment will have just begun.

  Not a word came from him. I wondered how long the embargo would continue, whether he was already planning his next sally, and what form it might take.

  The waiting became a subtle form of torture. I felt as used as a maidservant tumbled one evening and forgotten the next by her heartless, neglectful master.

  Twelve days passed. Then, late one rainy afternoon, the sound of carriage wheels in the avenue announced my husband’s return.

  I had adopted the habit, when my husband was absent, of taking dinner in my sitting room. It was too depressing to preside alone over the huge table in the dining hall, like a solitary mariner cast ashore on a desert isle.

  On the day of my husband’s return, I had already arranged to have dinner brought up to me. I will admit that I was somewhat curious to see my husband, but at the same time I was extremely reluctant to come face to face again with the man who knew so much about me now, and all of it to my discredit. Most certainly I did not wish to dine with him.

  I was not pleased, therefore, when Marie delivered to me, less than a half hour before dinner was to be served, another note in my husband’s hand. This one commanded me to present myself at the table.

  I made an effort to conceal my impatience with Marie’s painstaking thoroughness as she helped me to dress. I feared if I was tardy it would bring my husband to my room before I was ready to confront him. However, I was unwilling to join him until I was in full panoply.

  I chewed my lip with vexation as Marie carefully arranged my hair; the clock had already struck the hour. I wanted to snatch the comb from her hands and finish the job myself, but she had far more skill, and I could no more afford imperfection than could a knight being girded for bloody battle.

  It was my aim to look austerely beautiful, concealing every haggard hint of anxiety. Only when I was satisfied that, in a sleeveless gold damask gown with a heart-shaped neckline, I appeared as splendid and impregnable as the flagship of an armada did I sail down the stairway. I entered the dining room with a deliberate, leisurely gait. It was twenty minutes past the hour. I expected my husband’s expression to betray some surprise—perhaps even approval— at the sight I presented to him, but all his face revealed was irritation.

  “You’re very late,” was his welcome. “I was about to come and fetch you.”

  “Good evening, Anthony,” said I very graciously, making neither excuse nor apology.

  We ate in silence. I watched him guardedly, but with new respect. He had dressed for dinner with his customary understated black-and-white elegance and appeared as remote and unprepossessing as always. Why, then, as the meal progressed, did my composure ebb, to be replaced by that tremulous anticipation which had come increasingly to plague me in recent days?

  I could not resist an occasional, circumspect glance at the opponent whom I knew I must never again underestimate.

  He caught me once. I dropped my gaze—but the damage had been done. His gaze fell over me like January sleet; I felt my face take on the telltale color that my accursed pale skin could not conceal.

  We were alone. My husband disliked to have servants hovering at his shoulder after our plates had been filled. Now he laid down his knife and fork and leaned forward with his elbows on the table and his palms pressed together.

  “I really have no objection, when you are alone, to your taking supper on a tray in your room, like a governess,” he said. “But on the rare occasions when we are under the same roof, I will expect you to join me at the dinner table. And I will expect you to be punctual. I cannot think of any excuse for putting the kitchen staff to the trouble of keeping the dishes warm until you have managed to drag yourself to the table. Surely you—who have so little else to do—can at least exert yourself enough to show a modicum of respect for the work of others.”

  I burned at the rebuke. My husband’s well-ordered household ran with a smoothness which concealed the enormous amount of labor thereby consumed. He behaved toward his staff with a courtesy that manifested itself not only in the politeness with which he addressed them but also in his scrupulous habit of advising them as early as possible of any anticipated disruption to the usual routine. For my part, I had tended to accept these tranquil and orderly functionings—to which, as my husband had indicated, I contributed virtually nothing—as evidence of his annoying lack of spontaneity.

  Now, although I resented his tone
, I could not dispute the justice of his observation. Nor did I dare; I had agreed to the bargain which made obedience, out of bed as well as in it, the price of my eventual freedom.

  “I regret having been so inconsiderate,” I heard myself say in a low voice. “It will not happen again.”

  As I indicated my acquiescence, I felt a sensuous languor slide over me. My nerves tightened for an instant, and then loosened softly, as if preparing to deliver me over to my adversary.

  His eyes met mine again, and I had a sharp and vivid recollection of that moment of ecstatic release he had given me. I dropped my gaze and lifted my fork, but now my appetite, never hearty since the loss of my child, had completely deserted me, and I merely toyed with the turbot that adorned my plate until my husband directed me to ring for a footman to come and clear the table.

  I went immediately to my bedroom when the meal had ended. My husband had disappeared in the direction of his study, where, I supposed, coffee or brandy would await him, along with a stack of papers demanding the instant attention of the absentee master. I ensconced myself among my pillows with the latest literary production of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. The reviews proclaimed that it lived up to the promise of her fabulously popular Robert Elsmere. I hoped it would. Neither Robert Elsmere nor anything else from that woman’s pen had I ever been able to finish, but the spiritual torments of her vaguely repellent characters seldom failed to induce sleep.

  Savoring one of the hard mint candies I kept in a covered crystal dish on the table beside my bed—they had the pungency which Mrs. Ward’s prose lacked and were the only sweets I ever craved—I opened the book. And, indeed, I soon began to nod. Yet when I gave in to the drowsiness and put out the light, my eyelids refused to remain shut.

  The room had a brightness, half warm, half cool, that came only in part from the dying fire upon the hearth. The afternoon rain had cleared the sky, and now moonlight poured through the sheer, pale blue silk curtains, between the old-fashioned window hangings of heavy flowered chintz with which my husband had had my bedroom outfitted shortly before I took possession of it. These gave the room a quaint, cheerful informality which never could have been achieved with more fashionable velvet. I always opened them before I went to sleep to admit the moonlight.

  At last I abandoned my bed to stand at one of the long windows, which offered a view of the silvery lawn’s gentle descent toward the riverbank. As subtle variations in the dim landscape slowly began to reveal themselves, I thought I glimpsed a figure among the venerable oak trees. These cast such deep shadows that it was impossible to distinguish substance from illusion; the effect might have been only a trick played by the night wind, the tossing branches, the ragged little clouds sailing across the moon’s face, and the dappled light she shed.

  Then I saw a flicker of matchlight as my husband—for it was he below me on the lawn, the moon had laid her fingers on his hair and told me so—lit a cigarette. The bent head lifted. Was he looking upward at my window? I stepped back, out of the pool of moonlight, alarmed. The gauzy curtains fell shut.

  He gave only the most perfunctory warning knock before opening the door to my bedroom a quarter of an hour or so later. I pretended to be asleep. Without a word, the invader lit a spirit lamp, banishing the moonlight. I sat up in bed, feigning as much confusion and dullness as if I had been dead to the world for hours.

  He pulled the chintz window hangings closed and laid some wood upon the fire. When the flames were dancing to his satisfaction, he sat down in an armchair a little distance from the hearth. He was still dressed in the black tailless evening coat and narrow trousers he had worn at dinner.

  “You seem to have had trouble sleeping,” he remarked, by way of letting me know that he had seen me at the window.

  “I had no trouble at all until you awakened me,” I replied, to maintain the fiction that I had been rudely jolted from my dreams.

  He met this with a long, slow, and knowing smile which told me I had chosen my words unwisely.

  “Indeed,” was all he said.

  I felt myself turn crimson.

  “Have you the necklace which I gave to you last month?” he then asked.

  “Yes.”

  “May I have a look at it?”

  “If you like. It is in my jewelry case.” I made a small gesture toward my dressing room.

  “Bring it to me,” he said.

  I left my bed unwillingly. In the dressing room, I opened the dark red morocco case, stamped in gold with my new initials, which contained the necklace and a few other pieces that he had given to me. My grandmother’s jewelry was in a strongbox in a London bank.

  I lifted out the necklace and delivered it to my husband.

  “Have you any idea why I gave you this?” he inquired, holding it up to the glow of the lamp on the table at his left.

  “You seem to enjoy decking me out in gewgaws and baubles,” I replied.

  “True.” He was looking at the necklace and not at me. His eyes were narrowed critically.

  “This has an imperfection in the clasp,” he observed after careful inspection. “I am surprised that I failed to notice it earlier.” He draped the diamonds over the fingers of his right hand and looked up at me. “If you use it roughly—as I fear you will, since you do not value it—the clasp may not hold.”

  “I do not intend to use it at all,” I told him.

  “Nevertheless, when I return to London, I will take it with me and have it repaired.”

  “As you wish.”

  “But for now, I would like to see it on you.”

  I thought the diamonds would provide a curious embellishment to my uninviting nightdress. However, I reached out obligingly to take them from his hand.

  “I’ll put it on you,” he said. “Kneel down.”

  As I obeyed, that strange and dangerous feeling stole through me again, that soft, dizzying lethargy. I kept my head bent and my eyes lowered so that if my face revealed this, it would not be visible to him.

  My husband lifted the hair that hung like curtains over my cheeks and let it fall behind my shoulders. His touch was as slow and delicate as a lover’s. He laid the diamonds on my throat and secured them there.

  “Lift your chin,” he said.

  Reluctantly I did so and brought my eyes to his. But already I felt as if my composed everyday face were being slowly chipped away from beneath by that other, purely sensual being, who was racing to take possession of me once again.

  “That is not one of the nightdresses I bought for you,” said my husband.

  “No, it is not.”

  “Then it does not belong on you tonight.”

  “Shall I put on one of the others?” I asked, perhaps a shade too hopefully.

  “No,” he said. “Since I do not like this one, and you seem to dislike those I have chosen, we will compromise.”

  I did not like the compromise this remark foreboded.

  “Shall I assist you?” he asked.

  I began nervously to unfasten the buttons which secured my nightgown from my collarbone to my waist. At last the white flannel slid over my shoulders and settled into a little snowdrift around my kneeling self.

  “Don’t look away,” said my husband.

  So I met his gaze, and although I was hardly a blushing innocent, my skin began to grow as rosy as if I were a maiden in imminent danger of debauchment.

  My debaucher was lounging with his right leg thrown over the side of the chair. His right arm lay across the back, his hand propping his head. His other arm hung idly over the left side; it needed only an empty wineglass dangling between the fingertips to complete the dissolute effect of his posture, which made so great a contrast to his flawlessly pressed coat, starched shirt, and creased trousers.

  His gaze drifted over me slowly and came to rest, with frosty approval, upon my traitorous nipples. At last he leaned forward and reached out languidly.

  “These seem a little more eager to please than they once did,” he remarked.

&nb
sp; Or to be pleased. It was true—his presumptuous touch had me quivering with rebellion and delight. I pressed my lips together.

  “Put your arms around my neck,” he said as his hands continued their leisurely exploration of my breasts.

  He leaned closer toward me and I toward him. I laid my arms upon his shoulders like a garland.

  His breath warmed my cheek. I began to tremble and sigh under his touch.

  “Here is what you’ll wear for me tonight,” he whispered. His hands left me. He slipped a tiny crystal vial from one of his pockets and twisted the cap. The light, fresh, springtime scent of lilacs spun around me as his fingertips touched the fragrance to my temples, my throat, my shoulders, to the insides of my elbows and the back of my neck, to my breasts—and then no more. He slipped free of the loose enclosure of my arms. I felt as incomplete as a half-finished painting, and drunk with lilac.

  He held the vial toward me with a hard little smile that conveyed his wishes clearly. I opened my hand.

  Slowly I clothed myself in those invisible flowers. They curled around my wrists and ankles and over my infertile belly, they wafted along my calves and wove themselves around my thighs.

  When I considered myself fully arrayed in this remarkable fashion, I reached out to take the cap from his hand.

  He shook his head.

  “A little more,” he said. “Between your lips.”

  I feared the potion would have a very bitter taste: With a slight frown, I lifted a hesitant hand toward my mouth.

  “Not those lips,” he whispered.

  I let out a little sigh of protest and assent.

  He was still draped lazily over the chair. With an inward shiver, I poured a droplet from the vial onto my fingertip and brushed it over the tender hidden flesh. I wished, suddenly and violently, that the brief touch were not my own.

  “Be generous,” said my husband softly. “Why deny yourself?”

  Our eyes met and held. Instead of taking the obvious meaning, I chose another one.