But even if she had stayed as cold as ice herself, she knew at once that it would be impossible for her to remain under the same roof as Mr. Thornton and to go on being lady’s maid to Mrs. Cornelius. She could never have looked at either of them straight again; and they would surely have put things together for themselves then.
That was why she had to escape, of course. She kept repeating the reason to herself. But where? What could she do? Without a character, what could she do? No one would look twice at her, except for that. There had even been girls with good references down on the quays. So if she didn’t want to find herself back there, she’d have to get a protector. She had only the one sellable commodity, so it didn’t take much puzzling to get that far.
There was only one man in all the world who occurred to her: John Stevenson. Funny, whenever she had thought of a husband in these past years, it had always been John. By other names, of course, and in other walks of life, usually closer to her own likely sphere. An imaginary police constable called Henry Turvey—he had looked the image of John Stevenson and had rescued her from a fire that had killed everyone at the Thorntons’ and the Refuge. Beautiful tears. A ship’s mate called Zachary Hitchens had been smitten with her down in the market and had taken her off to a tropic isle where they had lived a long and happy life all alone, spending the gold that a pirate had left there long ago; Zacky, too, had been the spitting likeness of John Stevenson. And there were dozens of others.
But that was not really why she had now flown to him. She knew from the way he had looked at her that night he rescued her she had that power on him. And since! Every time they met, or, rather, every time their paths crossed, she could see that surprise in him, and the longing. She knew he wanted her, though she never thought anything would come of it.
But that wasn’t it either. She knew he wanted her and she only had to make it acceptable, even noble, for him to—no, but it wasn’t really that. Now that all the bridges were burned behind her she could at last admit to herself that she loved him. She always had admitted it, but only in a very chaste, secret, admiring sort of way. There was no other man, anywhere, not now, not at any time in her past, she loved like that.
And also there was this threat that Thornton had talked to Mrs. Cornelius about; something to do with her. Mr. Stevenson’s past was somehow bound up with hers. She couldn’t think how. It couldn’t be that she was a long-lost daughter—besides, she didn’t want to be his daughter! So it couldn’t be that. But what if the government people came and started asking her questions? She wouldn’t know what answers would help him best. So if she did nothing else, she had to get to see him and warn him and find out the answers.
That was the missing note of pure altruism which finally spurred her into making the break with Bristol and going to find Mr. Stevenson.
These were not the thoughts that had gone through her mind as she stood eavesdropping on Walter and Sarah. But feelings akin to them had bubbled in her blood, and she had reached that final resolution before the other two had finished.
“Did they see you at all?” John asked, more to break the embarrassing silence than to be informed.
“No,” she said. “Of course, they weren’t looking for anyone. They thought they was safe there. And so they were, except for me, which they didn’t know of. The Rescue girls were gone for the morning along of Mrs. Thornton. And the good girls, they don’t go up in those parts. They don’t mingle. Not they…good…”
At that moment he saw a most violent change come over the girl. Up until that point she had been telling the story as comedy. Her attitude had been slightly brittle, a bit bright-eyed, a bit garrulous. But suddenly, over those last three words she burst into tears.
And it was not a quiet little cry, either. Bitter sobs shook her whole body, squeezing the last ounce of breath out of every shivering exhalation. She breathed in as though drowning and she begged something from him with great, frightened eyes. It was obviously as unexpected to her as it was to him.
“Come!” he said, stirring uncomfortably but making no move toward her. The thought of being close to her really frightened him. He did not trust himself at all.
She mistook his meaning and half-rose to fall into the comfort she imagined he was offering. But when she saw him sitting on his hands, bolt upright, and looking more scared than she would have thought possible, she realized she had turned to the wrong person, that all her hopes of him were groundless, and that she was as alone, as friendless, as penniless as she had ever been in her awful former life. She flung herself down on the seat and wept even more hugely.
He leaned forward and tentatively grasped a fold of her sleeve. “What is it?” he asked. It was all he dared risk touching.
She shrank from him and redoubled her sobbing.
“Please? Tell me,” he said. Now he caught her arm gently. The cloth was harsh but his imagination supplied the softness and youth beneath it. He closed his eyes so that he should not see what he was doing.
“I worshipped her!” Charity said in a rough, salty sob. “That Mrs. Cornelius, she were like an angel to me.”
“Well, that was foolish of you,” John said. He opened his eyes but did not release her arm. The cloth was no longer harsh, somehow. “She is flesh and blood, like all of us. She is vulnerable. She needs your understanding—not your contempt. Just as you once needed hers. And, I may say, got it.”
Charity buried her head in the seat once again; the sobbing resumed with all its previous strength.
Knowing the folly of it but unable to help himself, John moved forward and knelt on the floor between the seats. He pulled at her arm to disengage her hand. Surely he could hold one of her hands between his?
She clutched at him with eager fingers. She was quite a strong little creature, really. A moment later he was to find out just how strong, for she darted that hand forward, thrusting his aside, and clutched behind his neck. Before he could recover from his surprise she had pulled him down toward her and was kissing him with big, bold, passionate abandon.
There was a moment—it lasted perhaps less than a second—when he could have pulled away from her and halted everything between them. She could not have recovered from such rejection, and he would then have gained in moral strength each second that passed. He very nearly seized that moment. It was so real it became almost physically there, as if he could have literally grabbed it as it passed.
But it did pass. He merely stared at it as it went by. He stared as a condemned man in a tumbrel might stare at some landmark for the last time, knowing it to be the last time. The rest of him was too busy discovering that this was not Alice—a safe, dead memory whose image he could cherish in the safety of that supposed death—this was Charity. Soft. Young. Warm. Cinnamon-smelling. It was the unexpected smell of her that finally overpowered him. Not quite cinnamon, but he could think of nothing closer. It was very compelling, very heady.
Then she was sitting up and he was still kneeling. And their lips were still together, but the touch was gentler, less urgent, less fearful it might not last.
Blood and sensation returned to his lips. Hers opened, opening his. Her tongue wriggled through and the whole of him revolved around that soft, wet warmth.
I must not do this, he thought. I am over forty. But no part of him felt half so old. No part of him did not rejoice at this delight—which every part of him had forgotten until now.
What is it like to start being in love? If one of his boys had asked him, he could not have told them. But now he knew! He remembered. This was exactly it. This warmth of lovely flesh you crave; the question: “What’s it like to be you?” and wanting to do nothing all your life except find the answer; this sharpening of every sense, tuning it to the one melody alone, making it flat to every other theme…all this was happening, like a long-silent machine fired in steam once more.
She took his hands from her neck and put them on her
breasts, moving his fingers with hers, making them caress her. Strange thrilling softness, different from Nora’s. Until now he had not known how far Nora had let herself drift from him.
Her knees moved apart, bringing him even nearer her. “Mmmm?” she made a little, questioning moan.
“No,” he said, pulling away from her at last. “We’ll go somewhere else.”
She nodded, smiling contentedly. A little gesture like that, and it put him all in a turmoil! It was marvellous.
Then she looked alarmed. “Here, I can’t go back to Bristol.”
He rose stiffly, dusted his knees, and sat beside her, putting out an arm for her to settle into. “Of course not,” he said. “Now you’re with me.”
He thought of asking her why Mrs. Cornelius’s one slip had so distressed her when what she was now doing, and going to do, had such an opposite effect—but one look at her, so severely exquisite, so flawlessly lovely, and the question foundered in his throat. What did it matter? Who understood motives anyway!
They drove straight to his office then, where he collected some money and left a plausible message for Nora or anyone else who inquired. She wouldn’t expect him home, anyway. The quarrel had bought him a good fortnight, he imagined. His lack of feeling, and even of regret, did not astonish him. There was no room inside him even for astonishment, much less for any more complex feeling. He burst with the sudden realization of all that his life had lacked during these latter years. And now the lack was to be met. It was—marvellous, he told himself again. He kept telling himself.
Still in the same cab they meandered down through the West End, stopping every now and then to buy all they would need to support their role as travellers, man and wife, passing through. Especially she needed a cloak to cover her servant’s clothes. Along Oxford Street they went, down Regent Street, through Regent Circus and Leicester Square, and so by St. Martin’s to the Strand. Their goal was one of the numberless small hotels in the streets south of the Strand, between it and the river. You didn’t even need to hand in a visiting card in most of them.
Impatience did not let them go farther than the first one they tried, a small, clean place in Villiers Street. “Mr. and Mrs. Stenson” he gave as their name.
“See, that’s a bad start,” she said archly when they were alone together.
“Oh?”
“Yes, you be already less of a man than you were when you met with I up in that park.”
“Ho! I’ll show you!”
She tried to think it was wrong, and it felt like the rightest thing she had ever done. She tried to feel shame at her nakedness—or, rather, she tested herself for shame and could find none. All those sermons she and the other Fallen Women had heard on the evils of the flesh—they referred to other situations, sordid situations, not to wonderful and rare moments like this. He wasn’t shamed either, he was marvellous, doing everything so calmly and with such assurance, and so right. She’d do anything for him, and it would be right. This was what bodies were for. You didn’t need words to tell you that. And words that said otherwise were words of the ignorant.
His hands, straying over her, melted everything they touched. Her head and limbs moved only to yield. He could do anything, touch her anywhere, and that part developed a magical sensitivity to him. Five years ago a hundred men had been there and back with her and it had meant nothing; but she only needed to see John looking at her, even at her wrists—or toe-nails—and they tingled. For him she felt peeled. He drowned her. She did not know there was such delight. At its pinnacle it tore her apart, racked her in a delirium of sweetness, left her more whole, more together of herself, than she could have believed.
And so it was again in those small hours when even your own name sounds like a comic label and your real name is body-arms-and-legs-feeling, and everything tastes slightly of salt, and you are sure you are the only two people in the world. And again—long, slow, lazy again—when dawn said it was the day of rest, and the church bells summoned communicants out of doors.
To John’s surprise Charity sprang from the bed and began to dress.
“I forgot ’twas Sunday,” she said when she had her chemise fastened. “Come on, you’ll be late.”
He stared at her, too astonished to speak.
“Come on!” She was already half dressed.
“To church?”
“’Course to church. We’d be in time for second communion. Come on!”
He laughed, embarrassed. “I don’t,” he said. “I don’t go. I mean, I don’t go to communion.”
She stopped with her bodice half hoisted down over her arms, making him marvel, as he ran his eyes from her elbows down to her petticoats, that fires were left in him to rekindle. “That’s terrible!” she said. “But you got to start sometime. Come on now—up!”
“I will not,” he said, laughing again.
“I can’t go ’lone. Just come and sit by I. No need to go up for the wine and that.” She shrugged into the bodice.
He frowned. “I meant to ask you,” he said. “Why are you talking like that again? They taught you to talk quite respectably these last few years.”
“Dunno,” she said. “Didn’t sound like I no more, I s’pose.”
“I’ll come if you promise to talk properly from now on,” he said. “If I’m going to pass you off here and there as my wife, you can’t talk that ‘low Bristow.’”
She leaped on him then and kissed him. “Oh John, oh John! I do love you so!”
He imprisoned her with a hug. “Stay and prove it,” he challenged. “I shan’t let you go.”
She put her lips to his ear and said in a voice that made him tingle—but in her thickest Bristol accent: “Theese dursn’t hinder I, sinna, else I’ll tell they gov’ment geezers on ’ee!”
He pushed her away, smiling. “Very well! You win,” he said.
And to make sure she won, she pulled the sheets off as she stood again.
“Couldn’t do nothin’ with that wheesh li’l twig anyway!” she sneered.
He looked down and nodded glumly. “And you think a reminder of my religious duty is going to help?”
When they were on their way to St. Mary-le-Strand he returned to the theme. “How can you pass the night as you’ve just passed it and go straight to the Lord’s Supper?” he asked.
“It isn’t the worst He has to forgive I—me—for,” she said.
“You mean”—he chuckled at her simplicity—“if forgiveness hasn’t become a habit with Him by now, it never will.”
“Yes,” she answered, not seeing that he was being flippant. “Anyway, what about you? Do you think it was wrong? I mean a big wrong? A real sin?”
“Well—two commandments down and only eight to go. And when we get back to the hotel, this being the sabbath, we’ll make it three, no doubt.”
“I’m serious,” she said. “Last night was the happiest I ever spent. If it was a big sin—well, that’s a funny sort of Father to His children. That’s all I can say. And I’ll leave it all to be explained on Judgement Day.”
But she must have gone on thinking about it during the service, for on their way back she said, “You don’t believe in God at all, do you? You’re worse than me—going and not believing.”
Her hand rested lightly in the crook of his elbow; he squeezed it with his other hand. “I was laying a line in Anatolia last year with Christian labour—Eastern Christians. And we couldn’t make them understand they had to get rid of all the topsoil—that you can’t lay a line on topsoil. I tried everything. Then my general manager, Mr. Flynn—you may know him. I think he has called on Mr. Thornton in Bristol?”
“That little Irishman?”
“That’s him.”
“Oh, I liked him.”
“Everyone likes Mr. Flynn—except the lazy and the incompetent! Anyway, he had a word with their priest. And the pries
t told them it was a mortal sin to leave any topsoil beneath a railway line. And, by heavens, never in twenty years have I seen a working so free of topsoil! So of course I believe in God.”
“Oh, that’s all right then,” she said, as if he had just lifted a burden from her.
They drove out to Richmond for lunch, where he was fairly sure of not being recognized. Then in the afternoon he took her over to St. John’s Wood, where one of the properties acquired in the settlement the previous year stood empty awaiting sale. Hamilton Cottage, it was called, and it marked the dead end of Hamilton Place.
It was a more imposing building than the name implied, worth at least four servants. It must have been built in Regency days, when this was all still countryside—the open fields of Portland Down.
It had been recently remodelled to give it a more cluttered frontage, a tower at one end, and broad windows in late Gothic style.
“Like it?” he asked her.
She looked at the house as she had gazed at everything that day—with a tourist’s eyes. “Why?” she asked.
“Would it suit you?”
She looked at him and her eyes shone. She looked back at the house. After a time she took the breath she had forgotten when his question hit her. “Could you get me a position there?” she asked, only half believing still.
“A very good position,” he said solemnly. “The best.”
“Go on! Scullery maid more likely.”
“Better,” he promised.
“Housemaid?”
“Better.”
“Lady’s maid?” She bounced up and down in excitement.
“Better.” He persisted.
She frowned. Her horizon had no better to lady’s maid. “What?”
“Mistress!” he said and burst into laughter.
Slowly she grasped what he was saying and her puzzlement turned to laughter too—delighted, fearful laughter. “Missy!” she giggled. “Me! Your missy! Well!” Then she looked back at the house, no longer with a tourist’s eyes. “My! I couldn’t do that. Not there. ’Tis too big.”
Sons of Fortune Page 21