Veils of Silk

by Mary Jo Putney

  After drying himself, he donned the embroidered blue robe that had been provided. The folds fell around him as gently as a whisper. Indians had nothing to learn about sensuality.

  Returning to the bedroom to await his new wife, he checked that the bedside lamp had enough oil to burn until morning, then went to a window and looked out at the lake.

  Lotus plants floated on the dark water, their pale blossoms closed for the night. He felt like a lotus himself, suspended between past and future, darkness and light, despair and hope. And the key to light, hope, and the future was Laura.

  He'd assumed she would be a long time in her bath, but she came sooner than he had expected. Turning at the sound of her footsteps, he watched her enter the room, his heart giving an odd lurch as she paused.

  Her tawny hair had been brushed into a waterfall of polished bronze that spilled halfway to her waist, and she looked soft and heart-stoppingly lovely. She wore a long, European-style nightgown made of layers of translucent white silk that drifted around her like a cloud and revealed that her figure was even lusher than he had realized.

  It was exactly the sort of garment a girl was supposed to wear on her wedding night, designed to arouse both desire and tenderness, He thought, for the thousandth time, of what he was depriving her. But it was too late for regrets. He could only pray that she was right in saying that she knew her own mind.

  She smiled shyly. "What happens now?"

  He tried to speak and couldn't. After clearing his throat, he tried again. "I'd like to hold you. Just hold you. If you don't object. Or we can talk."

  He would not have been surprised if she had politely declined, for he was still unsure how far her dislike of touching went. Uneasily he realized that they hadn't even discussed the basic issue of whether they would share a bed or he should make up a separate pallet for himself.

  Laura answered his question without a word, crossing the cool marble floor and walking straight into his arms. She smelled of jasmine and was soft, so soft. Ian drew her close with exquisite care, resting his chin on the top of her head as his hands slowly stroked down the graceful curves of her back. He whispered, "I thought that I would never hold a woman again."

  She nestled closer. "You can hold me whenever you want."

  Ian's tension dissolved like mist in the morning sun. He was physically aware of Laura in a way that he had never been with a mistress, for in the past passion had overpowered subtler perceptions.

  Freed of the rude urgency of desire, he could savor the texture of fine-spun hair falling across the back of his hand, and the velvety feel of her nape. The warmth of her breasts compressed against him, the greater warmth of her loins; the arc of her ribs, the slight depression of her spine, the gentle flare of her hips. Lightly he kissed her hair, awed by the rediscovery of what a wondrous creature a woman was.

  Feeling immensely protective, he bent over and lifted Laura in his arms. "Time to put you to bed. You must be tired."

  After a quick inhalation, she relaxed in his grasp. "Not so tired that I couldn't walk, but this is a lovely way to travel."

  He carried her to the canopied bed and pushed aside the mosquito curtain, then laid her on the cotton-filled mattress. Gently brushing the tawny hair from her cheek, he said, "Shall I join you, or would you prefer I make up a separate bed?"

  "I would like very much for you to join me." She caught his hand and drew him down beside her. "You said we should have a real marriage in all ways but one. I'm sure that includes sharing a bed."

  "Insomniacs aren't very restful bed companions." He pulled a light cover over them. "You're allowed to change your mind if I toss and turn so much that I ruin your sleep."

  "I'll worry about that if it happens." She rolled onto her side and pressed the soft length of her body against him, one arm going across his chest as naturally as if she had lain with him a thousand times before.

  He was touched by her willingness to accept her new situation. He had expected her to be much warier about physical closeness. "Pyotr Andreyovich claimed that in spite of the reputation Russians have for being tempestuous, there's a vast patience, a willingness to accept, at the center of the nation's character. You have that."

  "Perhaps." She gave a delicate yawn, covering her mouth with one hand. "Or it could be English patience. I'm not sure there is any such thing as national character."

  "Perhaps not." He smiled a little as she dozed off, trusting as a kitten. Though it was not how he would once have imagined spending his wedding night, it was more than he had dreamed possible just a fortnight before.

  But it wasn't enough. Dear God, it wasn't enough.

  His contentment vanished as he studied his wife's elegant profile. For the first time, he realized just how much of passion was mental. Though he was incapable of physical desire, his mind and emotions ached to possess her, to penetrate her, body and spirit, to make her his own in the most primal of ways. In doing so, he would also be opening himself so that her healing warmth could flow into the darkest corners of his soul.

  But he was trapped by the limitations of his body. There was no solace in the knowledge that he and Laura would not be together if he were unimpaired. The bitter rage that rolled over him had nothing to do with reason.

  In the wake of fury came black, suffocating despair, a melancholy so profound that he feared it would scald the woman lying in his arms. He disengaged from her embrace with trembling hands, praying that she wouldn't wake.

  Desperate for fresh air, he made his way to the window again. His entire being was saturated with agony, a pain so different from physical suffering that it defied description.

  Outside the dark waters beckoned, a drowning pool of peace and surcease. And yet, he thought with a trace of bitter humor, even if he had the strength to will his own destruction, he was too damned good a swimmer to drown in a pint-sized pond. He would fail, just as he had failed at everything that gave life meaning.

  Shivering with anguish, he folded his arms around his midriff and leaned against the window frame, too drained to support his own weight. He had wanted Laura to be his salvation. Instead, in his selfishness, he would drag her down into the depths of his own mortal despair.

  And that was the most agonizing thought of all.

  * * *

  Laura awoke and reached sleepily across the smooth sheets, wanting to touch her new husband, but Ian was not there. Suddenly alert, she sat up and looked about. By the light of the bedside lamp, she saw that he was at the window. He might only have wanted a breath of fresh air, but she didn't believe that, for his bowed figure radiated unimaginable bleakness.

  He had warned her of his dark moods, and she sensed that now he was in a more desolate place than any she could imagine. She stared helplessly at his back, unsure whether it would be better to go to him, or to leave him alone. If he rejected her comfort, it would not only be horribly painful, but it would make it harder for her to reach out to him in the future.

  Her indecision was brief. Quite simply, Laura was incapable of watching someone suffer without trying to help.

  Silently she slipped from the bed and crossed the cool floor. Ian didn't hear her footsteps. When she drew near, she saw that he was in a trancelike state, his face rigid and his fixed gaze unseeing.

  She slipped her arm around his waist and leaned against him. At first his chilled body was stiff as a statue. Then his taut muscles flexed. For a brief, ghastly moment, Laura thought he was going to break away from her.

  Instead his arms circled her with rib-bruising force and he buried his face in her hair. He was shuddering like a man who had been running for his life and had finally reached the end of his endurance.

  Acting from instinct, she caressed him, rubbing his back, smoothing his auburn hair. "Ah, doushenka, my soul," she murmured, using the tenderest of Russian endearments. "It's always darkest before the dawn, isn't it? The demons of despair don't want to lose you to the light, so they are fighting for your spirit. But they won't win, for I want
you more."

  Her words shattered his last threads of control and he began shaking with the dark, rasping sobs of a man who had never learned to cry. Perilously near weeping herself, Laura rocked him in her arms, praying that his tears would be healing, like the lancing of an infected wound.

  After the storm had passed and he was still again, she whispered, "Come, my dear. You need rest," and led him back to the bed. His movements were brittle, as if a misstep would cause him to break, but he came without protest.

  When they were back under the light blanket, she pulled him into her arms so that his head was pillowed on her breast. At first he clung to her like a drowning man clutching a branch, but slowly his terrible tension ebbed and his body softened.

  For Laura, it was enough to know that the worst of his misery was past. But to her surprise, in time his breathing took on the slow, steady rhythm of sleep. Perhaps tonight his frayed spirit would finally begin to rest.

  Tomorrow, God willing, would be a better day.

  Chapter 11

  The next morning, Laura woke as soon as Ian moved. Opening her eyes, she found that the slanting rays of the early sun were filling the room with a honey-golden glow. The two of them lay face to face about a foot apart, her right hand interlaced with his left. To her relief, her husband's expression was composed. The demons had retreated back to the shadows.

  "I'm sorry about last night," he said quietly. "I thought I'd come to terms with what I am now, but apparently that is something that must be done more than once."

  "I'm afraid so," she said ruefully. "Though I know my stepfather is dead, a dozen times a day I find myself thinking 'I must tell Papa that' before I remember that he's gone. It hurts over and over—but a little less each time." Her fingers tightened on his. "You have also experienced a great loss, so it's hardly surprising that it continues to hurt."

  "I sincerely hope that next time it hurts less," he said dryly. "There are better ways to spend a wedding night than holding together the shattered pieces of an old crock."

  She gave a slow, teasing smile, glad that he could joke about what had happened. "You're not that old."

  "But a crock?" He smiled with real amusement and propped his head up with one hand. "You're a saucy baggage."

  There was powerful intimacy in sharing a bed, and it emboldened her. "And you," she said softly, "are a man who asks too much of himself. Uncle Pyotr said in his journal that you were born to be a hero—'the sort of man who can inspire other men, who can risk his life in battle with courage and flair.'

  "But while you would have met death with valor, surviving an endless, pointless ordeal requires a different kind of strength. Perhaps you can't forgive yourself for not being as good at enduring as you were at risking your life."

  Ian's expression became unreadable, but he did not pull away. "Did Pyotr say all that?"

  "The gist of it. I'm extrapolating some."

  "He was perceptive." Ian raised their joined hands and lightly kissed her knuckles. "If you can understand that and still look me in the face, I'm a very lucky man."

  His words sparked an idea, and daringly she reached out to the cord that held his eye patch in place. "I really would like to look you in the face, Ian."

  He became very still but didn't stop her. Laura didn't know quite what to expect, and what she found under the patch was something of an anticlimax: just a closed lid curving over a surface that was sunken a bit more than a normal eye.

  "I'm rather disappointed," she said lightly. "I'd begun to think of the eye patch as Bluebeard's closet." She leaned forward and kissed him at the corner of the closed eye.

  "Not Bluebeard's closet, but the mark of Cain," he said harshly.

  When Laura looked at him with alarm, his expression smoothed over. "I'm just being melodramatic. That's Scottish national character, for those who believe in such things." Before she could question his comment, he sat up and propped some pillows behind his back. As he replaced the eye patch, he said, "What was your first father like? You've never spoken of him."

  Disconcerted, Laura rolled onto her back and frowned at the canopy of the bed. Ian laid his hand on her wrist. "I'm sorry—it looks like this is a subject you would rather avoid."

  "No, it's all right," she said softly. Though she had always avoided speaking of her Russian father because the memories were too painful, on this sunny first morning of marriage she found that some of the sting had gone away. "He was the very image of a dashing, romantic cavalry officer—tall and handsome and reckless. He seemed larger than life, though I suppose most fathers seem that way to small children.

  "He had also something of his own father's melancholic temperament. When he was in a good mood, he was the fondest, most exciting father in the world. Other times he was moody and a little frightening, so I took care to stay out of his way." She thought a moment. "Strange. When my father died, he was about the age you are now. Much too young a man to die."

  "No age is too young to die," Ian said. "What happened to him?"

  Ignoring the question as if Ian hadn't spoken, Laura said, "I remember one winter when he took me riding in the country. He held me in front of his saddle and we flew over the snow, making wild jumps over ditches and fences. It was wonderful, like riding the north wind. I felt completely safe because I was with my father, but my mother was furious with him for risking my life, though she was just as reckless a rider herself. In fact, that's how she died—a fall when she tried to take a fence that any reasonable person would have refused."

  "A great pity she didn't take more care."

  Laura sighed. "Yes, but it was the way Tatyana would have chosen to go. She was still beautiful, still able to bewitch every man who looked at her. She would have hated being defeated by age. For her, riding carefully would have seemed like a small-spirited surrender to the inevitable."

  "Like my sister, your mother sounds a bit overpowering."

  "You would have adored her," Laura said with conviction. "Everyone did, even women who disapproved of her. Apart from the fact that my mother was not melancholic, my parents were very much alike—beautiful and headstrong and passionate. They had wild fights and equally wild reconciliations.

  "Once, to apologize for some failing, my father filled the drawing room and bedroom with flowers, even though it was winter and must have cost a fortune. Another time my mother lost her temper and threw every cosmetic and bottle of perfume she owned at him. He just laughed and dodged the missiles. Said she had a terrible aim and that the bedroom was going to smell like a whorehouse.

  "I was lurking in a corner and made the mistake of asking what a whorehouse was. Tatyana rang for my nurse to take me away, so I didn't learn what my father meant until years later." Laura's mouth hardened as she remembered the scarlet rouge splashed across the wall, for the memory immediately triggered one that was infinitely uglier.

  Ian lightly touched her hand. "Such parents make for colorful stories, but it must have been a somewhat alarming existence for a child."

  "It was." Laura gave a wry smile. "It's hard to believe that two peacocks like my parents produced a wren like me."

  "You're not a wren," Ian said affectionately. "More like a swan who has the wrongheaded notion that she's a goose."

  His tone warmed Laura right down to her toes. "More like an owl than either. In fact, Kenneth called me his little owl sometimes. It's strange, but temperamentally I'm far more his child than that of my natural parents."

  "Your first father sounds very different from your second."

  Laura grinned. "That's because my mother had me choose her second husband."

  Ian's brows lifted. "Really?"

  Laura built up her pillows so that she could lounge against them as Ian was doing. "After Tatyana consulted me about my preference, she accepted Kenneth, who was my choice." She glanced at her husband and saw that the loose robe he wore had fallen open over his chest. She had a powerful desire to touch him, to brush her fingers across the dark auburn hair, to pull a
side the robe so she could explore further...

  Hastily she turned her gaze away. "After... when my first father was gone, my mother decided that she needed to get away from St. Petersburg, so she took me to a spa in Switzerland. I think she decided that it was the best way to find a new husband. Not only was she short of money, but she was the sort of woman who had to have a man in her life."

  "From your tone, you don't quite approve of the haste with which she remarried," Ian said shrewdly. "Yet for most women, marriage is the preferred choice. Few have the courage to voluntarily face the world alone, as you were willing to do."

  His comment made Laura wonder if some of her own stubborn determination to stay a spinster had been a result of distaste for the speed with which Tatyana had sought another husband. She filed the thought for later consideration. "There was no danger of her being alone for long. Men always surrounded her like bees around a jam pot and the Swiss spa was no exception. Some only wanted affairs and those she dismissed immediately. But it didn't take her long to acquire several serious suitors."

  "How did Kenneth Stephenson manage to enter the race? He doesn't seem to have been the sort to spend his time lolling about a fashionable spa."

  "It was pure chance," Laura replied. "He was returning to England to teach at the Company training college at Haileybury, The friend he was traveling with had health problems in India and wanted to visit the spa, so they did. Kenneth told me once that as soon as he saw Tatyana, he knew that he wanted to marry her. He was a dozen years older than she and not at all dashing, but he was very determined once he made up his mind."

  "When did you mother solicit your opinion?"

  "One day over ices she calmly asked if there were any of her suitors I would prefer for a father," Laura smiled reminiscently. "One was an enormously rich Italian count, another an equally wealthy Swiss banker. There was a French silk merchant and a Prussian general. Looking back, I realize that Kenneth had the least money of the whole crew."