Grahame, Lucia

by The Painted Lady

  “And what brings you here at this hour?” he inquired with cool civility. I slipped out of the robe. His lips curved as he surveyed me, once again decked out like a scandal in red and black.

  “Must you ask?” I whispered.

  “I am afraid I must. I have learned that it is never safe to assume anything where you are concerned.”

  I bit my lip and began to saunter restlessly up and down before the fire with one hand on my hip and the other arm crossed over my waist.

  At last I tossed my head and said, “Well, tonight you may assume anything you like.”

  He turned this over in his mind for a minute or two. Finally he said, “Very well. In that case, I will assume you are anxious to be free of me and eager to speed along the payment of your debt. Is that it?”

  This being the least humiliating explanation for my presence in his bedroom, I did not repudiate it.

  “You’ve read my heart,” I told him.

  “Amazing! And here I did not even credit you with having one.”

  I let that go.

  “How I wish I could oblige you,” he continued, with the specious regret of a lord dismissing a mendicant. “But I am afraid that now, as bad King Richard would have said, I am not in the vein.”

  My eyes fell to his trousers. I would have liked to reach out and test my suspicion that he was lying, but of course I could never have done anything quite so indecent.

  He caught my glance and smiled.

  “However, I can think of a way you might be able to put me in the vein,” he offered suddenly.

  “I am at your command,” I replied, very cool and stiff.

  That made him laugh. He reached out and pulled me to him and began to run his hands boldly up and down my body.

  “At my command,” he repeated, sounding very pleased. “So if I were to command you to go at once and leave me to my… less troublesome pleasures”—he tilted his chin in the direction of the camera stand—“you would depart as meekly as a mouse?”

  He had me there. I knew I could not assent truthfully to that proposition.

  “I don’t see what pleasure they can give you tonight,” I said. My voice trembled slightly. His fingers were lazily at work now, fanning the flames they had kindled earlier. “There’s nothing here to photograph.”

  “That’s just the dilemma that was worrying me when you arrived to present such an interesting solution.”

  I froze.

  “No,” I said.

  “So much for being at my command,” he responded with a shrug and let me go.

  And so, like a fool, I put my head inside the noose for the second time.

  We proceeded at a very leisurely pace, but eventually I had been propped against nearly every object in his bedroom and had decorated nearly every inch of sofa and bed, carpet and hearth, tables and chairs.

  At intervals, he encouraged me to refresh myself with generous libations from a claret jug.

  My pulse was soon racing madly, but the cool-eyed would-be recorder of these antics was exceedingly difficult to please. None of the ways in which I disported myself, at first somewhat grudgingly but soon with far too much zest, did he deem worthy to immortalize with his silver compounds.

  Nevertheless, it was not long at all before his eyes began to dance. Worse still, I was disgracing myself with barely muffled laughter.

  At last he said, with a devilish gleam, “You know, I’m not so pleased with that red thing after all. Take it off. I think I shall make this a true nocturne in black and white.”

  And so, with scarcely any hesitation, I shed the bright tulle and stood before him, laughing still, in nothing but the black stockings and gloves and the black band at my throat. He pulled back the coverlet from his bed to expose the glistening white pillows and sheets beneath and bade me lie down upon them.

  I did.

  With a perfectionist’s thoroughness, he arranged me fetchingly, examined me carefully, adjusted my limbs a bit this way and that, at last pronounced himself completely satisfied, and commanded me not to move.

  Then he disappeared behind the camera and aimed the lens at me. I sparkled recklessly back at him as I anticipated the joyous conclusion to this night of folly and delight.

  I heard the shutter close.

  “You’re so piquant,” he whispered, emerging from beneath the hood with tousled hair and an oddly tender expression upon his face.

  But that earlier playfulness seemed to have fled. As he began to remove his clothes, I saw the familiar aura of restraint and self-control fall over him again like a veil. It only heightened my desire.

  “Turn over,” he said when he was done.

  Silently I obeyed.

  “Lift your hips.”

  I did; there was no posture I could pretend to be too proud to assume for him now.

  From behind me, on his knees, he entered me quickly, sharply, without even the most perfunctory of preliminary caresses. I didn’t need them. I wanted to draw him into me so completely that we would be no longer two bodies, but one. I wanted to absorb his cool, masterful dignity and make it my own. I felt myself tighten with the longing to bring him yet closer.

  He groaned softly and shuddered. The sound and the sensation made me rock and writhe.

  “Don’t move,” he whispered raggedly, and laid a cool hand on my cheek.

  It was all I could do to obey, but obey I did. The clock on the mantelshelf ticked the minutes off as I bent against him, drowning in the exquisite agonies of wild longing and impossible self-control.

  He stroked my hair and told me what a lovely little trull I was. I cried out then; my core exploded in one brief, violent spasm before I could bring myself in check again.

  I felt my husband’s lips nuzzle the back of my neck.

  He brought his fingertips close to where our bodies merged and began gently to test delicate variations of pressure and rhythm. He found the right one quickly. It tore me loose altogether from the self-willed restraint into a frenzied dance of passion. But he was with me all the way.

  When I awoke, the fire had died and the room was cold. Beneath the covers, I moved closer to my husband’s warm body. He stirred. I felt him harden against me. I braced myself, with luxurious anticipation, to receive him again. Instead he moved away.

  “Are you still here?” he said with something like annoyance and surprise. “You should be off.”

  “Be off?” I mumbled in sleepy confusion. “Do you want me to go?”

  “Please. You ought to have been in your own bed hours ago. Now run along. And wash your face so that you won’t shock Marie when she brings your coffee.”

  Too stunned and wounded to protest, I slipped from the bed and departed—yes, as meekly as a mouse.

  When I had gained my bath chamber, I stared with disgust at the sordid apparition in the glass. The rouge had streaked and faded; the kohl had run from my eyes and smudged my cheeks.

  Dear God, was this the image that my heartless husband had captured only a few hours earlier?

  A wave of horror and revulsion swept over me as I recalled, in every hideous detail, what I had done and what I had permitted him to do.

  I thought of the way he had dismissed me and I nearly banged my head against the wall in a paroxysm of self-directed anger. How could I have been such an idiot? How could I have let my body rule me so completely?

  The thought of the appalling photographic testimony to my immodesty that was now in my husband’s possession made me ill. What would he do with it? Lock it away in an album to remind himself from time to time of my unworthiness once I was gone? Stuff it carelessly into some drawer where God only knew who might stumble across it one day? Use it against me in some unimaginable way? Why, oh why, had I lacked the wit to destroy it while he slept! But I was so ignorant of even the barest fundamentals of photography, I would not have known what to smash or to steal— or even where to look for it.

  On the chance that my husband had not yet returned to

  London, an
d not wishing to leave him with the impression that I was hiding out in shame, I forced myself to appear at the breakfast table the following morning. My face was scoured, my hair pulled up with ruthless severity, and, should that alone not make a sufficiently strong statement, I wore a gown nearly indistinguishable from the one I had preserved from Madame Rullier’s dustbin.

  My husband greeted this unappetizing vision with a slight, startled grimace, but rather than chastising me as coldly as I might have expected, he merely remarked, “I see you’ve dragged out the hair shirt again. Is it your penance for last night?”

  He had a very self-satisfied glow. His little joke appeared to have amused him hugely.

  “I’m sorry if it displeases you,” I said without a milligram of regret. “I had supposed you would be on your way to London by now and that I might dress as I please.”

  My husband raised an eyebrow.

  “And what made you think I was going to London?” he asked.

  “You generally do,” I pointed out, not adding the obvious conclusion to my sentence: Once you have had your way with me.

  “I am beginning to find Charingworth more hospitable than it once was,” he remarked as he returned his attention to the orange he was peeling with a small pearl-handled knife.

  “By the way, if you can take any pleasure in an enemy’s sorrows, I have a piece of news for you,” he suddenly announced in an almost friendly tone. “Have you heard what has happened to that scoundrel Poncet? Apparently his daughter, who was the light of his life, has had a falling out with him. And she had an admirer, a musician, who is as poor as a church mouse and whom her father thought entirely unsuitable. He had higher aspirations for the girl. But she has gone to her musical lover and will have nothing more to do with her father, who is beside himself, for she was all he cared for: His sole ambition in life was to build her a fabulous dowry and buy her a gilded match.”

  I could not help taking a pinch of satisfaction from this news; I bore the girl no ill will and was pleased to think that in her own pursuit of happiness she had deprived her father of his. But I did not appreciate being reminded of Poncet, or of the paintings—not after the performance I had given for my husband only a few hours ago, not after the casual way he had dismissed me, as if I were nothing more than a girl he had bought for the night. And because of this, I said, “So you have become such good friends with that pander that he confides his troubles to you? Well, it doesn’t surprise me. Like attracts like.”

  My husband froze and flushed darkly.

  After a very long time he lifted his head and fixed me with a cold stare.

  “You are mistaken,” he said. “I merely chanced to hear the story from an acquaintance of mine. But now that you have pointed it out, perhaps I really ought to find more opportunities to do business with… your marriage broker.” He paused thoughtfully and then went on, looking at the orange he was flaying and not at me. “After all, you made an extraordinarily provocative picture last night. What a pity that it is only in black and white and fails to depict the brilliance of your blushes. I wonder what it would cost me to have it copied in oils. Perhaps if I show it to our friend, he will recommend an artist. No doubt he’d welcome such a diversion from his private troubles.”

  I blanched.

  He lifted his head again and caught my anguished eyes with his own remorseless ones.

  “You must come with me when I go to Paris to see about it,” he said.

  I closed my eyes and shuddered.

  “Oh, surely it won’t be as trying as all that,” he said. “Besides, think of the pleasure it will give me. And my kindred spirit,” he added scathingly.

  I could not respond. I already felt completely corrupted by the hungers, unhallowed by any glimmer of affection, which he had managed to awaken in me. Now the shock of such deliberate malice, coming on the heels of those recent intimacies which I had dropped my guard to partake in so enthusiastically, only sharpened my sense of vulnerability and betrayal.

  The rain poured down in sheets. The wind blasted it against the leaded windowpanes and shook the branches of the ancient oak trees on the lawn outside. The air within the huge, high-ceilinged rooms of Charingworth felt dank and chill; the fires which had been lit provided only small comfort against the drafts.

  “You wouldn’t do that,” I said at last. “I don’t believe you are capable of such a thing.”

  He laughed.

  “Oh, you have no idea what I’m capable of,” he said. “Haven’t you learned that yet? So don’t provoke me by pretending to be coy, or you may discover there are worse things than having your picture painted.”

  I wished more than ever that I had resisted the call to that blinding, bewildering, and dangerous erotic sublimation. Now I understood—too late—how completely he had disengaged his affections; not even my helpless ardor had satisfied his lust for revenge. It had only whetted his curiosity to discover how far he could make me stoop on a whim.

  I saw that I had never even guessed the true depths of his animosity.

  On the following day, the rain stopped and the gray clouds parted to permit a few hours of watery sunshine. My husband left very early for London, and when the house was at last free of his oppressive, disturbing presence and I was able to think more clearly, I ventured boldly into his room. But the photographic equipment had vanished.

  So there was no way to prevent him from carrying out his evil design. Still I knew I could not endure another moment in his company. How to escape? I owed him two more nights of fealty before he would be honorbound to set me free. It made me queasy, now, even to think of them. Was there no way out?

  And then it came to me.

  The diamond collar.

  If he was truly determined to display that dreadful photograph to Poncet and, worse still, to have it reproduced in paint, there was little I could do to stop him. I could only pray that no one besides those two devils and the artist— oh God, what if it were someone I knew?—-would ever see it.

  But I would not suffer any further degradation at his hands, not for anything. It was even possible that if I fled, depriving him of the opportunity to savor the rigors of my intended humiliation, his wretched plan might lose its allure.

  That fabulously expensive diamond collar would keep me indefinitely from destitution: I could leave at any time—I might have done so long ago.

  But even as I considered this, I felt an uneasy premonition. I raced up the stairway, along the gallery to my chambers and into my dressing room. There lay the jewelry case in its usual place on top of a chest of drawers. I approached it slowly, my heart pounding. There was a key to it somewhere, but the staff at Charingworth had an air of such incorruptibility that I had never felt the need to use it. I lifted the cover.

  The diamonds were indeed gone; in their place lay the broken chains of cheap little white-brass bells.

  I withdrew into my bedroom and sank onto the bed. I hardly knew whether to laugh or to weep at my stupidity. He had told me he intended to have the clasp replaced, and still I had been as passive as a sleepwalker.

  My grandmother would be turning in her grave. None of the self-protective instincts that she had labored so hard and so thanklessly to instill in me had been able to take root in the stony soil of my youthful foolishness. Now it was too late.

  I thought of the way she had left her Italian count, fleeing his dilapidated palazzo in the middle of the night to go to her new lover, carrying with her all the jewelry the poor count had lavished upon her.

  The image of my grandmother’s ignominious departure from the one man who had truly cherished her, needed her —the man whom she was far too proud to go back to on her knees, pregnant, desperate, and remorseful—had always been repugnant to me. Was that why I had ignored, until too late, the glittering avenue to freedom which my far-sighted husband had just sealed?

  There were, of course, many other small objects of inestimable value at Charingworth, but something in me resisted even the idea of tak
ing them. Perhaps it was the unpleasant thought of branding myself as a thief on top of everything else. Perhaps it was merely the fatalistic inertia that for so much of my life since the death of my child had held me in so cruel a grip.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The days that followed were not pleasant ones. The fear that at any moment my husband might attempt to carry out his threat poisoned my waking hours and skulked through my dreams.

  He remained in Grosvenor Square for nearly two weeks, and during his absence I wrote a brief letter to Marguerite. I told her only that the business with my husband had gone badly, that he had adopted a cruel and vengeful attitude of injured self-righteousness and was making me horribly unhappy.

  My husband returned to Charingworth very late on a Friday in May—long after I had retired for the night. But I heard his arrival and did not sleep.

  At breakfast the next morning, he announced that he wanted me to come to London the following week. This made me distraught, for during my sleepless night, my dread had increased. From London, no doubt, we would go on to Paris….

  I excused myself from the table. I felt very ill and hoped that I might reach the stairway in the great hall before he could destroy my composure any further. But as I began to climb the stairs, a wave of nausea gripped me. The walls grew shadowy and began to spin. I clutched the newel post and swayed, shivering.

  The next thing I knew, I was in my husband’s arms.

  “Are you ill, Fleur?” he asked, and I could have sworn that for an instant there was a note of stark concern in his voice.

  “It’s nothing, nothing,” I said, clinging to him as if he had been my savior rather than my tormentor.

  He lifted me easily and carried me up the broad stairs and along the gallery to my bedroom.

  “You are ill,” he announced after he had laid me upon the bed, removed my shoes, and drawn the counterpane over me. “I’ll send for Doctor Blount.”

  “No!” I insisted miserably. “I don’t need a doctor. I tell you, it is nothing.”

  I could not bear the thought of Dr. Blount’s solemn examination, which would surely culminate in a portentous announcement to my husband that I must be suffering from an attack of nerves, a diagnosis which I was certain would provide my husband with no end of amused satisfaction.