Grahame, Lucia

by The Painted Lady

  I lay down upon his bed and thought about all the things I would never have the opportunity to say to him. I had barely ever had a warm word for him, and certainly never an affectionate one. I wondered why this had continued to be so, even after my feelings for him had softened.

  Perhaps it was because I could not bring myself to trade in the coinage I had debased. Long ago, when he’d asked me whether I loved him, I had answered yes; I had corrupted the language of the heart. How can it hope to reveal its secrets, when words have lost their meaning?

  I contemplated this now with regret but without despair. I felt open to every sad truth, yet strangely peaceful. The realizations came, I accepted and acknowledged them, and let them pass on. The unrestrained tears I had shed earlier had left me with an exhausted sense of calm. I did not resist the currents of my thoughts.

  My mind drifted back to Andromeda. I wondered whether my husband would take her out occasionally and let her run. He had never ridden her; I had had a proprietary attitude where she was concerned. Now I hoped he would. I knew he admired her passion for speed.

  As I contemplated this, I felt a curious twinge of envy for my little horse. I let myself imagine what it would feel like to be his mount, controlled by the warm pressure of his knees and calves and by the delicate, assured touch of his hands on the reins. My blood sang softly at the vision of having the passionate impulse liberated and at the same time skillfully directed.

  Now, as the scent of new-cut grass drifted up from the lawn and the curtains rustled softly in the breeze, unsettling images sprang into my consciousness like water rising from a subterranean stream to replenish a woodland pool.

  Perhaps if I had been able to transmute myself into a beautiful, four-legged creature, built for speed and schooled to respond to the most subtle, expert hands, my husband would have kept me—might, in fact, have taken some delight in me.

  The idle fancy was seductive, compelling. To be prized and petted, curried and groomed, to be coolly, masterfully used, to have nothing more demanded of me than silent, sensitive responsiveness…. Oh yes, this was the adventure I craved, the experience to which I ached to surrender. As I acknowledged the secret hunger so long disowned, I understood at last why my husband had been able to unleash such an astounding torrent of sensuality on that distant night in London, why he had awakened in me a response of such profound obeisance.

  He had stopped talking of love. He had offered me the only thing my frozen heart could accept. He had catered to my deepest, most inadmissible wish—to surrender myself, not to love, but to a power worthy of respect and admiration, a power that weighed and measured its demands instead of insisting that it must have everything.

  Could he have perceived that dormant yearning when he married me? And if he had, why had he waited so long to assert his own appetites, which so perfectly complemented my own? My mind wandered back to the beginnings of his courtship. I knew, from what he had told me when we had stood together on the Pont-Neuf in that gentle rain, that he had always been aware of his own darker desires—the lust for power, the joy in exercising it—and that, although he had guarded against these, he had never disguised his hungers to himself as I had mine.

  Perhaps, at the very beginning, his recognition of me had been only barely conscious, and untrustworthy in the face of the smooth, unassailable facade I had presented to him once we were wed.

  But I did not blame myself now for the huge gulf between the woman I had seemed and the woman he had revealed me to be. How could I have known that other aspect of myself?

  I thought of my beloved Frederick, easy, laughing, and indulgent. Frederick, who had not shrunk from passion, but who, on the other hand, had never insisted upon it. Never could he have steeled himself to such sublime and necessary ruthlessness. Never could he have exercised such glorious, implacable severity. Even the paintings that brought me down had been done in a playful spirit; they had never affected Frederick’s perception of me.

  But my husband, seeing them through the lens of his own self-knowledge, would have recognized exactly how much I had withheld both from him and from myself, would have discerned in them instantly that capacity for passionate submission that the artist had unwittingly captured.

  I stood up. I supposed this greater awareness, so painfully acquired, could help to clarify the past, with all its confusions and ambiguities, but it would serve me little in the future. The opportunity for that was gone.

  I straightened the coverlet and the pillows, to erase any evidence of my visit to my husband’s room, and left.

  PART THREE: 1893

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  It was Théo who found me the position in Geneva. He had a cousin who ran a girls’ school there. The English mistress had been called away suddenly by a family crisis, and Théo’s cousin needed a temporary replacement until Christmas.

  “If I recommend you,” Théo told me, “Elisabeth—Madame Vignon—will take you on in a second. She’ll work you like a dog, of course, but she’s very decent.”

  The luster of success was becoming to Théo; he was more amiable and less volatile than I remembered. He and Marguerite would have extended their hospitality indefinitely. But I was eager to supplement the tiny nest egg I had gained by selling the last of my grandmother’s jewelry. I kept only one poor little emerald necklace with which I could not bear to part.

  “The only thing is,” Théo went on, “my cousin is anxious to protect the school’s reputation and to avoid anything that might bring it notoriety. So it would be best if you were to use an assumed name.”

  That was how I became, once again, Caroline Flora Hastings. Only Théo, Marguerite, and Guy knew where I had gone and the name I had taken. I did not attempt to communicate with my husband, who had said he wanted nothing more to do with me.

  During the few months I would be at the Vignon School, I was sure my secret would be safe. No one could mistake a plainly dressed, respectably widowed schoolmistress for the infamous Lady Camwell, that parvenue who’d scandalized English society by bolting her marriage, throwing over both her handsome husband and his immense fortune—and for what? Or, as some people whispered, for whom? The behavior of the abandoned husband provided no answers: He had neither opened his lips to illuminate the mystery nor taken action against his errant wife.

  The sensible thing would have been to forget him. It was impossible. Although Madame Vignon, the endless demands of her pupils, and the almost unquenchable flow of idle conversation from the sewing mistress, Mademoiselle Hubert, with whom I shared a tiny attic room, commandeered most of my attention during my waking hours, my estranged husband was my first thought when I awoke in the morning, my last as I fell asleep at night. It was useless to think of forgetting.

  I tried to harden my heart against him: What could be said for a man who, motivated by vengefulness and hatred, had deliberately awakened a woman’s sleeping passions and slaked his own merely so that he might then enjoy the crueler satisfaction of casting her aside?

  I swore he would never learn from any action of mine how well he had succeeded in exacting the revenge he’d forecast with such coldness and held to with such determination.

  Or had he?

  When I felt my implacability faltering, I would sternly remind myself of his infidelities. Or I’d think of the joyless, virtually silent meals we had shared, when it seemed that we could find nothing to say to each other, even as the sham of our marriage was collapsing about our heads.

  But my thoughts kicked over the traces; they persisted in wandering back to the moment he had turned to me in the darkened carriage and gently invited me to talk about my daughter.

  There was little point, however, in dwelling upon the past when my future was so uncertain.

  Madame Vignon expressed great satisfaction with my work, but it went without saying that I would be redundant once the regular English mistress returned after the New Year.

  Marguerite, although she scorned my lowly ambitions, acknowledged that with
Madame Vignon’s recommendation, she might be able to help me find employment as a governess in theatrical and artistic homes where my identity, which could probably not be concealed for long, might not be as severe a handicap as it would be elsewhere. She agreed to try to arrange several interviews for me in Paris during the Christmas holidays.

  In early October, she wrote, “I saw Guy and Harry at the Opera last week. Guy seemed dismayed to hear of your plans for the future. Nevertheless, he knows so many people, I asked him please to keep you in mind should he learn of any position which might suit you, and he has promised to apply himself to that.

  “I must tell you that I have seen Anthony,” she added to my chagrin. “I don’t think he can be sleeping well—he was as haggard as a ghost and begged for news of you. I kept your secret, however—though I had to bite my tongue, I felt so sorry for him!—and did nothing more than assure him that you were safe and well. That seemed to ease his mind somewhat, but I think he is far from happy. His apparent composure is beginning to wear very thin.”

  I puzzled over this last bit for a long time. I knew he would never come to Geneva and expose my identity, even if Marguerite had been foolish enough to tell him where I had gone. But why had my husband, who’d made it clear that he wanted no further communication, sought news of me? I couldn’t stop my thoughts from wandering back to this question on many an occasion.

  Of all the girls at Vignon, I was particularly fond of Nina Lewingdon, the moody, precocious, and often wildly dramatic daughter of a London solicitor. Unfortunately for Nina, the dirt and congestion of the sooty metropolis where her family made its home had proven too much for Nina’s fragile respiratory system, and, upon the advice of the family doctor, she had been sent away to the wholesome shores of Lac Leman. She was desperately homesick, and she was lonely: Having just turned thirteen, she was the youngest girl in the school.

  There was nothing meek, however, about the poor little misfit. She had an impudent tongue and clashed endlessly with Mademoiselle Hubert, who disapproved of Nina’s undisciplined stitches. But she quickly developed a strong attachment to me. This concerned me a little; my tenure at Vignon would end at Christmas, and I sometimes worried that Nina might then be lonelier than ever. I raised the subject with her once.

  “Oh, I shall miss you fearfully,” replied Nina offhandedly. “But I shall never surrender to despair! You see, you have taught me something!”

  “I can’t think what you are talking about,” I said with a laugh.

  “You set such an example,” declared Nina. “Here you are, all alone in the world, your adored husband dead—”

  The adoration was a pure flight of fantasy on her part; I had never discussed my “adored husband” with Nina Lewingdon or with anyone else at Vignon!

  “—no relatives to take you to their bosom and to give you a home where you are cherished and beloved. Forced to work for a living, and worse, to share a room with that gargoyle Hubert, which I would consider a fate worse than being thrown down the oubliettes at Chillon!” declared the extravagant Miss Lewingdon. “But you are always cheerful and kind, and no one has ever heard you grouse or get in a wax about anything.”

  “No one is always cheerful, Nina! But I do consider myself very lucky to be here.”

  “I wish I did! But I like it better than I did at first. If only La Hubert were leaving, instead of you, I might be entirely happy. You ought to hear how she talks about you! I don’t know how you bear it! She finds you unduly mysterious and speculates about you constantly. She thinks you are hiding something! It’s your own fault though, for being so tight-lipped.”

  Perhaps it was true. At Vignon, I had revealed as little as was humanly possible of the details of my life.

  “For example,” pursued Miss Lewingdon, “where were you born?”

  I hesitated.

  “Oh, you needn’t worry, I won’t betray your confidences to Hubert. But we are friends, aren’t we?” she concluded plaintively.

  Oh, what harm could it do?

  “In Brighton,” I said.

  “Brighton!” she repeated happily. “I was there one summer. It is so very sad, the condition of the Royal Pavilion. It must have been beautiful once, but the Queen doesn’t keep it up at all! If I am ever rich, I shall restore it and live there. Is Brighton where you grew up?”

  “No, I grew up in a little village in Kent.”

  “What was it called?”

  “Holwich,” I said. I was not enjoying the innocent interrogation at all, but neither did I wish to fabricate a history or to seem “unduly mysterious.”

  “And your parents, do they still live there?”

  “My mother died when I was born, and my father went to America.”

  “Oh, my goodness! Were you sent to an orphanage, like Oliver Twist? No wonder you think yourself lucky to be at Vignon!”

  “My grandmother raised me,” I said. “You will be relieved to know that she was not at all like Mr. Bumble. And that is the last such question I intend to answer today.”

  How strange that Nina should regard me as an example of courage in the face of misfortune just as I was coming to the humbling conclusion that I had never shown any courage at all! It was true that at Vignon I had managed to rise above self-pity. But as the weeks passed and my bitterness toward my husband relaxed, I began to look back upon both my marriages with new eyes.

  I thought of how my idyllic romance with Frederick had cracked under the first real strain. It had seemed so easy to love, but what could be said of “love” that was nothing more than a feeling? Was it possible that I had never loved Frederick until the day I had dragged myself—too late— out of my self-imposed, despairing isolation, had committed myself to try to reverse the disastrous course our lives had taken, and had asked him for his help?

  I burned inwardly as I dared even to consider that the great romance of my life had been little more than a case of passion without love, a passion that had survived, thanks to a happy compatibility of temperaments and inclinations, until circumstances demanded more of it. And even if I had managed to rise to the challenge, had Frederick?

  As I entertained the searing possibility that perhaps Frederick had not been able to fully return my love, and that my isolation had not been entirely self-imposed, I was consumed with a mixture of anguish and pity.

  Later I went on to contemplate not only the sad events that had led to Frederick’s death but those that had followed it as well. Had they perhaps been, not simply the result of fate and unhappy circumstances, but the inevitable consequences of choices made—not only Frederick’s but my own.

  I had chosen fear over love.

  I had chosen not to put my faith in the love I had glimpsed in my suitor’s eyes at Fontainebleau.

  I had chosen to turn away from my husband every time he had come to me and begged me to open my heart to him.

  He’d sworn he would make me feel passion without love —what mortal being has such power to engineer another’s feelings! And if he had possessed such remarkable abilities, was it passion without love that he’d have chosen to make me feel? If that was all that I felt, perhaps it was because that was all I had wanted or dared to feel.

  And when my heart had begun to move past fear, past indifference and resentment and hatred and blind desire, to feel that strange blend of admiration and compassion— love?—for my husband, I had barely expressed my softer impulses. I had bowed without resistance to the separation my husband imposed.

  Which one of us had chosen that final estrangement? Was it my husband’s choice, simply because he had initiated it? Or was it more truly my own? Had I yielded too readily to his decree? Had I wilted under the lash of a few petty rejections merely because I lacked courage—or the motivation to challenge them? I could not avoid comparing my behavior to that of my husband, who had exposed himself to rejection over and over again during the first months of our marriage, as he’d sought the way to reach my heart.

  I had chosen to believe him w
hen he said he would never forgive me, because it was easier than asking for forgiveness that might come slowly and painfully, or not at all. It was easier than trying to express feelings for which I had no words.

  Each night, as I slipped between the cool sheets of my narrow bed, I thought of these things. I yearned to bridge the gulf between my husband and myself. But I could not imagine where or how to begin, nor could I even have said what outcome I desired.

  I did not wish to leave matters as they were. But still less did I want to return to the strained silences that had been so much a part of my empty, idle life as Lady Camwell.

  By mid-November, thanks to the efforts of my friends, I had four prospects for a new position. Madame Vignon took an active interest in them.

  “How many children are there?” she demanded, when I received a letter from the secretary to a Mr. Henry Blake, an Englishman dwelling in France who wanted a governess for his children and who had obtained my name from Guy Hazelton. Mr. Blake would be in Geneva in December and wished to meet with me then. “And what are their ages?”

  I scanned the letter again.

  “He doesn’t say.”

  “Throw it away!” cried Madame Vignon with a shudder. “I know that trick! To omit such pertinent information means only one thing: There are so many children and they are all so small that the truth would prejudice any sane woman against him!”

  “Oh, it can do no harm to meet with him,” I said. My prospective employers were not so numerous that I could afford to reject any of them out of hand. I wrote to accept the date Mr. Blake had suggested for our meeting. Madame even offered me the use of her study for the interview.

  In late November, Nina’s father came to Vignon to pay his daughter a visit. While he was at the school, he requested an interview with me. In contrast to his scrawny, high-strung daughter, the solicitor was a rotund, placid-looking gentleman.

  “Ah, Mrs. Hastings,” he greeted me warmly. “Such a pleasure to meet you at last. My daughter writes of you so glowingly! My wife and I want you to know how much we appreciate the time you have taken to help her feel less lonely here. We are sorry to think that you will be leaving Vignon next month.”