I thought about that rainy night on the Pont-Neuf. Even then, I had not yielded fully.
“Hardly,” I said with a certain pride. Everyone I had ever loved hated tears. My grandmother regarded them as a sign of weakness, unless they were used deliberately and with the greatest caution and self-control as a weapon. Frederick had regarded them as one of the grotesque and depressing excesses of the previous generation. “I mean, one would hate to be like the Queen, making a fetish out of mourning, parading one’s sorrows endlessly—it’s so morbid and undignified,” I explained, thinking of my husband’s air of dignity, which I had come to admire greatly, and which I longed to emulate.
“Perhaps,” said my husband. “But you talk as if there is no difference between making a cult of grief and simply allowing oneself to weep. What could possibly be more natural and healing than tears?”
“What have tears ever healed?” I asked bitterly.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” said my husband, who did not seem disposed to argue the point any further. “Is your face dry now? Let me see.”
I lifted my damp eyes reluctantly to his. It was too dim in the carriage to see very much at all.
“Why don’t you tell me something about your daughter,” he whispered. “Just a little. Only as much as you feel you can.”
For a moment I was at a loss for words. No one had ever acknowledged her reality, that there might have been something—someone—to talk about. Everyone, even my darling Frederick, had behaved as if the only tragedy was that she had never existed. I had never demurred. But she had existed; that was my tragedy—or my weakness—to have entertained, as I had whispered foolish, loving bagatelles to my distended belly, the absurd fancy that I could feel the force of her tiny personality’s response to me. To have watched her fight for her life, and die, and then to have had to seal my lips and pretend that she had never been, because that eased the disappointment for— I cut off the thought.
“What did you call her?” asked my husband gently.
How could he have suspected my folly—the silly nicknames I had given her when I didn’t even know her sex?
I almost smiled. I opened my mouth to answer him, but before I could say more than a few halting words, I started to sob. Once I had started, I couldn’t stop. I no longer even cared about stopping. I buried my face in my hands and wept as heedlessly as Niobe.
My husband, beside me, put a tentative hand upon my shoulders. Rather than recoiling from the comfort he offered, I turned to him. He drew me into his arms and wholly absorbed that flood of tears. Between my sobs, I told him things I had never told anyone.
I pulled myself upright in a daze and tried hastily to arrange my tumbled hair and rumpled clothing when the carriage came to a halt in Grosvenor Square. But then my husband called out to the coachman and asked him to go on, to drive us around Hyde Park.
“If you don’t mind, it will give you a little more time to compose yourself,” he said to me.
Mind! He must have understood completely how I would have detested having to exhibit my reddened eyes to the butler and Marie.
I leaned back into the soft upholstery with a sigh. I was still feeling my sadness more profoundly than I had ever permitted myself to feel it, but now it seemed to expand, like a shimmering, trembling bubble, to encompass not only my lost little daughter, but my poor, weak Frederick and my fierce, devoted grandmother. And, not least of all, the man sitting silently beside me, whose love I had betrayed and forfeited.
Yet now, rather than being overwhelmed by sorrow and remorse, I had a curiously buoyant sense of relief. It did not mitigate my regrets but blended with them, both softening them and deepening them.
“I thought you had the stiffest upper lip in England,” I remarked after a while. “Where did you learn about tears?”
“Oh, I’m not half so unflappable as I like to appear,” he replied. “My father died when I was still a boy—it was the summer I turned fourteen. He’d been planning to take me on the Grand Tour of Europe that summer, but by then he was too ill. I adored him.”
This was something I had never known and had never even suspected.
“I was completely devastated when he died. I had really not thought it was possible, and I had no idea what to do. When I was among other people, I was so afraid I might break out in tears that I simply refused to speak to anyone at all. That lasted for days. It drove my mother wild. But I knew exactly what she would have said otherwise. ‘Show your breeding, Anthony. Have some backbone, for heaven’s sake! You don’t see me sniveling like a girl.’” He mimicked her to perfection. “Of course, whenever I was safely alone, I cried like a baby.”
The thought of such private, extravagant emotionality lying under his cool self-possession gave me a dusky thrill. That he would admit to it so freely surprised me. Of course, I reminded myself, he had been much younger then, only a boy.
“What was your father like?” I asked.
“Oh, rather retiring and scholarly. Hardly dashing or heroic. And certainly not as… demonstrative as one might have liked. But he was kind, very kind, and very gentle. Too much so, I think, for his own good. But I loved him for it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Outside my bedroom door, we hesitated for art awkward, silent moment. I longed to reach up and take his face between my hands, to bring my lips to his. But I was too overwhelmed by a peculiar shyness and a deep, incomprehensible and debilitating tenderness. It was so disarming that I wanted to hide. Scarcely knowing what I was doing, I dropped my fingers to the door handle.
“Well, good night,” he said, and moved down the passage.
On the following day, I was despatched to Charingworth, where my husband joined me several days later, but only to attend to some business there.
I saw very little of him, and when we did encounter each other, we behaved with extreme politeness. By unspoken, mutual consent, we had once again laid down our weapons. But the few meals we took together during this state of fragile peace were almost silent; it seemed that, having ended our sparring, we were left with nothing to say.
My husband retreated behind his customary air of remoteness, and I reminded myself of his remark about being unable, ever, to forgive me. It was better, really, that he was not tempted to sweeten his revenge by exploiting the dangerous softness he had discovered in me.
But the tender weather of late June did not assuage my vague longings. It was easier to keep them at bay during the blue, sweet days; but the evenings, all muted violet shot with glowing red and gold, and cruel with seductive and unfulfilled promises, undid me.
Everything about my life had become ambivalent. My husband lingered at Charingworth longer than one would have thought necessary, but barely spoke to me. What his intentions might be I could not guess. He had hinted at releasing me without extracting his full due—yet now he made no move either to set me free or to collect the final payments.
Meanwhile the moon fattened. On the night it came to fullness, my husband had dined elsewhere. I had not seen him since breakfast, yet I had rather deftly managed to ascertain from Mrs. Phillips that he had not returned to London. Now, as I lay in bed, I heard my husband’s light tread upon the stairway. Soon it faded down the gallery toward the wing where he slept. I tried to imagine how he had occupied himself that day and with whom he might have dined. But I could not. I knew virtually nothing about him; for nearly the entire duration of our brief marriage, I had absented myself as much as possible from his company. I had shared neither his troubles and worries, if he had any, nor his pleasures. I had shunned his pastimes and allowed anything he might have revealed about himself to pass over me like smoke.
The moonlight spilling through my window illuminated everything except the small mysteries which occupied my restless mind. It coaxed me from my bed. The night was mild; rather than merely standing at the window, I put on my dressing gown and stepped out into the empty gallery. The great house was dim and still; there was no danger, at this hour, o
f running into my husband or anyone else.
Barefoot, I stole down the angled wooden staircase, with its quaint turned banisters and elaborate newel posts, each one surmounted by a fabulous mythical beast. I crossed the chilly tiles of the great hall, passed through a dark passage, and entered the music room, which lay on the same side of the house as my own bedroom.
The polished piano gleamed in the moonlight. I thought of the expensive lessons my grandmother had insisted upon, and of how rarely I had ever opened the piano at Charingworth. I ran my hand over the cover longingly, and then passed to the French windows. I unlatched them and stepped outside.
The grass was cool and moist underfoot as I wandered over the long terraced lawns and then down to the edge of the river, where the light shimmered like silver foil on the water. A few birds, deluded by the brilliance of the sky into believing it was daylight, chirped and twittered in the treetops.
I turned my face to the moon. For how many hundreds of thousands of years had she stared down upon her sleepless subjects with that same cool, archaic smile? Now, for all but a few of those whose paths had brought them under her detached, beneficent gaze, whatever sorrows, labors, or joys kept sleep at bay had long ago waxed and waned and vanished forever, beyond even the reach of memory. The Greeks had made a minor deity of her. To me she remained a goddess, silent, remote, and constant. A goddess for everyone who walked in the shadows while quieter souls lay cushioned in the slumber of the righteous and the just. I thought of my husband dreaming quietly in his own dark bedroom.
But this only exacerbated my loneliness, and the beauty of the night, which seemed made for magic, impressed upon me only more heavily the weight of my own empty existence. I sent a brief prayer skyward. I asked my goddess only to lighten my heart for a few hours. But now her blank, closed smile no longer appeared benign, and feeling melancholy indeed, I turned back toward the house.
As I approached the last turn of the stairway, I heard a door close and the sound of boots striding along the gallery. I looked up. There was my husband, dressed in riding clothes, and as startled at seeing me, it seemed, as I was to see him.
“Where have you been?” he demanded.
“I went out to look at the moonlight on the river,” I stammered. “Were you looking for me?”
“Why would I do that? It never occurred to me that you were not asleep in your bed until I saw you drifting up the stairway like a ghost.”
“I could not sleep.”
“How unfortunate. Neither can I,” he said coldly, and started to pass me on the stairway.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
The words were scarcely out of my mouth before I realized my faux pas. Of course he would be going to a woman.
It made me ache. He had made love to me so seldom and, I was pretty certain now, intended never to again. I was certain, too, that he must still be conducting his careless infidelities in London. He had a real taste for such pleasures, and no reason to give them up. I tried not to think of this too much. But I had not divined, until this very minute, that he could also betray me so close to home.
He had already reached the second landing; now he paused and looked back at me.
“I beg your pardon,” I said, trying to muster some dignity. “I did not mean to pry.”
But he was gazing at me thoughtfully and appeared more conflicted than annoyed.
“Well, if you can’t sleep, put on your riding clothes and come out with me,” he said, somewhat ungraciously, and then added, “if you like.”
My heart leapt.
“I’ll just be a minute,” I said. “Shall I meet you in the stable?”
“As you wish,” he replied indifferently, as if he already regretted the invitation. He hurried on down the stairway.
At Charingworth I never rode sidesaddle. It was scandalous, of course, to ride like a man, but my husband did not object at all and had cheerfully paid for my outre riding habits. Now I dressed quickly, not bothering with stays, not taking even the time to pin up my hair—I pulled it back and tied it with a red velvet ribbon.
But once I was dressed, I lingered, despite my promise to be quick, to inspect my mirrored image carefully and to make the countless tiny adjustments by which I hoped to render my appearance more fetching.
When I reached the stable, I found Andromeda already saddled for me.
We trotted out of the stableyard together and down the long avenue. The strange cool light and the stark black shadows had altered the pleasant landscape from its daytime aspect and made it as newly glamorous as the first snowfall. Every cluster of trees was touched with wonder and mystery. I felt altered as well, dazzled and expectant. To have found druids gathering beneath the oak trees could not have amazed me more than had my husband’s invitation to ride with him.
“Can you keep up with me?” he asked when we reached the high road.
“I’ll try,” I said.
He brought Perseus to a gallop; Andromeda needed no urging to follow. The sound of the hooves, the rush of the night air over my cheeks, the blur of hedgerows and meadows on either side were as intoxicating as the moonlight. I drank the fragrant breeze. At the crossroads, we turned onto the road that ran along the river. We raced for miles over the still, silent countryside. Andromeda never faltered; she might have been flying. Each hoofbeat seemed to strike a burden from my heart; useless regrets, petty concerns, and grudges fell away. I wondered how long I might outrun them; would it be days or hours or only minutes before they found me again?
At last we turned and retraced our way back, slowly, as if unwilling to end the adventure. When we were close to an old apple orchard, my husband brought Perseus to a halt. I pulled up next to him. My spirits were still high. In fact, I felt as giddy as a schoolgirl on the verge of her first taste of longed for and forbidden pleasures. But underneath the excitement lay the strange sense of peace that had stolen like a drug through my veins during the long ride.
We let the horses drink a little from the river.
“We must go back,” said my husband at last.
“Oh, not yet,” I said. “Let’s walk in the orchard.”
“It’s late. You ought to be in bed.”
“But it’s so mild, and the moon so bright,” I pleaded. “Please, Anthony. Let’s just climb to the top of the rise and see what the view is from there tonight.”
My husband sighed, as if he did not altogether approve of my whim, but he followed me across the road and into the orchard. There he dismounted and reached toward me to help me from the saddle. I slid into his arms and knew, instantly, that he wanted me. In the same instant he released me and stepped back. We tethered our horses to a tree and began to climb the gentle slope.
It was not until I caught the toe of my boot under a fallen branch that my husband took my arm. At his touch, my strumpet soul rudely pushed the fainthearted Lady Camwell aside, brought my feet to a halt, and turned my face eagerly toward his as if to steal a kiss. It was all she had time for: Before my husband could do more than draw away slightly, I had the troublesome wench in irons once again. He moved decisively apart from me. To cover my embarrassment, I wandered off in the opposite direction and let myself surrender to an equally unseemly but more innocent form of playfulness. I found an open patch of grass and began to turn cartwheels; it was a trick I had learned from a schoolmate in Montreux. I hadn’t practiced it for years.
My husband started to laugh.
“What has come over you?” he asked.
I cartwheeled back to the tree under which he stood and pulled myself up onto a low-hanging branch, from which I then hung by my knees.
“Sheer lunacy, I suppose. Brought on by the moon, no doubt, to whom I will now pay homage.” I smiled blithely up at her through the mesh of branches. Then I reached behind me to tug at my husband’s sleeve. “Would you care to join me, Sir Anthony, in showing your devotion?”
By now I was laughing a little, too, because I knew very well that my husband would never d
ream of dangling from a tree by his knees. My jacket was pulling at me; I slipped it off and let it fall to the ground.
“You are a pagan,” said my husband.
“I suppose so,” I admitted, pulling myself upright. “Well, one must have faith in something. And my heathen goddess is in a generous mood tonight. She has already answered one prayer.”
“What did you ask for?”
“No more than this,” I said, smiling down at him in the moonlight. “Catch me.”
I dropped into his arms, so suddenly that he was obliged to catch me whether he would or no, and then, still moonstruck and reckless, I put my arms around him and kissed him.
For a moment he froze.
“Why are you doing this?” he whispered, sounding agonized.
But then he was returning my kisses, more fiercely and cruelly than I had ever known him to, and I could not have answered his question even if my lips had been free.
What self-control he still displayed lasted only long enough for him to remove his jacket and to lay it next to my own, spreading them both out over the rough earth like a blanket. Then he pulled me to the ground with him. He ripped off my shirt, scattering two or three buttons, and cursed my clinging boots and breeches roundly before he got me out of them.
Gone was all that elegant self-possession; gone was the cool and ironic restraint with which he had so confidently directed the pace of our other conflagrations; gone, the air of amused detachment and the cache of sophisticated erotic refinements. He was still half dressed when he fell upon me like an avenging demon.
Never before had I suspected how much unbridled anger he might be capable of turning on me. When I lifted my hands involuntarily to ward off that flood of rage, he yanked the red ribbon rudely from my hair and knotted it around my wrists.
“Oh no, you witch,” he said dangerously, “you can’t have it both ways.”
But I didn’t want it both ways any longer. I was no longer afraid of him: I hadn’t failed to notice that even in the midst of his fury he had slipped his fingers under that strip of velvet to make sure he had not bound me too tightly. I felt gloriously pacified. As he tore into me, all my own very weakly curbed desires sprang forward to envelop him.
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