Beast (27 page)

What baggage of Louise's that did arrive at the hotel was a trunkful of evening gowns and a valise of clean underlinen. So at least she had clean underclothes. After the large, outdoor gathering, she changed and freshened what she could, then went down to a late lunch in a private dining room of the hotel, where she sat at table with more than fifty people, all "family."

She chatted as graciously as possible for as long as she could. Speaking French was a pleasure. She liked the language, its sound and flow and the way it moved her tongue and mouth. As in Montreal, it seemed incredible that everyone spoke it. As if her tutor had secretly been teaching the same lessons to an entire country of people, the same books, the same dictionary. When the Prince d'Harcourt asked if he could get her anything (for the third time—he hovered solicitously after this meal, closing in from the perimeter where she'd banished him), she said, "Yes. A place where I can sleep for an hour before the train: without a single, solitary soul within a hundred feet of me. including yourself."

He blinked. a little taken aback. She might have softened the request, had she had even an ounce of stamina in reserve. But she did not. She merely let him lead her away.

Finding what she'd asked for wasn't easy. It seemed the prince knew everyone in the city, and every one of these acquaintances had decided to come by personally so as to express his or her delight in the marriage that was, as one man put it, "ending such a long and successful bachelorhood."

Louise glanced at the prince then. Briefly. From the back. At hair that was too long, at the slight indention left in it by his hat. His shoulders were very broad, she supposed.
Not so bad
, she told herself.

Not so bad really. Yet when he pivoted around toward her, no matter how dexterous he used his cane to do so, she felt her thoughts turn inward, her gaze become unfocused.

She and he made it at last through the horde and up the staircase, then in the room set up for the bride they found more confusion. The prince's cousin's children's nanny stood before a dresser, changing the diaper of his newest cousin once-removed. The bed was heaped with an overflow of coats and hats.

Louise's misdelivered gown trunk lay in the center of the floor, her dog asleep on top of it. There was barely room enough to enter.

The prince declared himself "desolated" (the elaborate way he and his countrymen claimed sorrowful fault) by the inconvenience to Louise, then suggested the "only place" he knew. He walked her to one of the carriages that stood in a line of empty vehicles waiting to take them all to the train.

After helping her step up and into one, he stood there before the open door. His eyes—eye, actually—eerily scanned the dark interior. For a long moment, he stared like this, into every lightless corner of the carriage, his body tilted as he leaned upon his cane, the upper portion of him framed at this angle by the doorway.

And from her corner of darkness, Louise finally brought herself to look at him directly, to size him up.

The Prince d'Harcourt was tall (taller than her Other Charles, she thought; too tall). Giant. He had a massive chest (though not nearly so lean muscled as the one she compared it to in her memory). And his face. Lord, his face. It was dominated by a blank bluish eye—unreal, inhuman—further twisted by a scar. The sight was so grotesque, it was almost fascinating: horrid.

It was an understatement to say the man was no beauty. Add to this a macabre taste in clothing—he dressed rather like the devil himself, if the devil were a dandy. Louise cast a glance at the cane on which he braced his weight. It was made of blued steel and ebony.

As if in response—he'd realized she was studying him—his cane swiveled up suddenly. The prince tucked it under his arm, shifting his weight onto one leg. He was like this, terrifically self-aware; every effect chosen. The man her parents so loved was a calculating one, though not necessarily in a bad way; he calculated to please. In this regard, the turn of his cane was a little trick he did—she had seen it elsewhere in the course of the day, she realized. He could negotiate the thing without disturbing a flap or vent of his coat, up and into his armpit from where he hung the weight of his hand off the end, making his cane into a kind of debonair accoutrement, Beelzebub's magic stick. Or he could hide it entirely among the flaps of his coat when he chose to. Or bring it out again with a twist of his wrist, with the dexterity of a swordsman.

Louise found his manner—his looks and size and demeanor—mesmerizing in the hair-lifting way of the outlandish, the unholy. In these first hours of their acquaintance, she realized, she had tried
not
to look at him, for he was a dazzling horror, this husband-to-be: a near-grisly sight made sharp and neat, meticulously turned-out, a perfect ruin to the left—the eye, the scar, the limp all to that side of his body.

His attitude, she reminded herself, was otherwise. He seemed normal; polite, considerate, a decent fellow. More than decent. She kept thinking, Stop being so nice to me. All his solicitude made her uncomfortable.

As Louise leaned forward to take hold of the door handle, she shivered once there in the dark—and immediately knew why she had avoided looking at him all day, why she let other preoccupations distract her. Though his physical mien was merely unsettling in a social context, it was more than unsettling in a private one: when she reminded herself what a husband and wife did together in the dark. Oh, she supposed she could get through it. She had once let a spider crawl on her when she was young—a large, furred creature with a surprisingly heavy, bulb-like body—just to prove that she could. And in Miami she had once touched an alligator, an ugly, huge, real-life dragon wrestled by the Indians for tourists, that had been both slothful and unexpectedly agile, faster—explicitly so—than a chicken or jack rabbit.

On this note, Louise closed the door quickly—and with an unexpected shot of gratitude toward, of all people, Pia Montebello (who had been present today, though keeping her distance). It was good to know that this man had found himself an appropriate mistress, being slightly demonic herself, who had an appreciation for his—what did one call it? Fiendish charm?

She told him through the window, "Thank you. I'll be fine now." Then pulled the curtain, obliterating the sight of him, while making the carriage interior as dim as a… as a tossed ship in the night. The vehicle jostled gently under the impact of the door's closing. With a sigh, Louise closed her eyes and settled back into this, the sweet comfort of indistinct, rocking shadows.

Why, anything could happen between here and a wedding. There was time for small changes, radical ones, intercessions, adjustments. Or even marriage to another entirely. She dozed into sleep, dreaming of the ocean…

The train was late in leaving. Everyone was tired, especially Charles. His knee was killing him. He was relieved when he could just sit down beside Louise and enjoy the simple pleasure of bumping against her as the train took a curve or went over a rough stretch of tracks. As they clattered along through black countryside, she alone seemed bright, rested. She'd slept for more than three hours. When the carriage had pulled away from the hotel, he'd let her fall against him; she'd sleep right through the ride to the train station tucked into the hollow of his arm.

What peace. How he had loved to feel her relaxed posture and movement, to hold her in such familiar circumstance while she slept. Then, as their carriage rolled into the bright station, how disconcerting to have to return to his new role, to slide away to a more gentlemanly distance as she startled awake.

Presently she read a book she'd brought with her, one in English on mathematical probabilities.
Egad
, he thought. No one else was up to talking. Their compartment—in a car with four such roomy compartments on a high-speed, entirely first-class express train—was quiet except for the rattle of the mind-boggling eighty-one kilometers per hour on the tracks. Across from Charles, Harold and Isabel Vandermeer slept, one against the other. Beside them, Uncle Tino sat wakeful but silent. He'd been signaling Charles since they had boarded the train that he wished to talk to him privately. Charles ignored him, closing his eyes and letting his knee drop against Louise's dress. His cousin Henri, stretched out on the other side of her, prevented her from moving too far off. She jerked her knee away effectively, however, when the "'sleeping" Charles let the weight of his leg drop all the way up against hers. Like some degenerate on the Paris subway, he thought. God, this was going to be so difficult, pretending he didn't want—know—the feel of her. If they could only have been married immediately. They had gotten everything backward, having the honeymoon first—

"Charles."

Charles opened his eyes with a start and stared blearily into the face of his uncle not an inch away from his nose.

"Get up and come with me. I want to smoke my pipe, and Her Highness here won't let me do this in the same train compartment with her. We can step out into the corridor."

Charles shifted forward, a rote, half-asleep obedience to a relative who rarely made a to-do over anything. As he sat forward and found his feet, Charles realized he'd been sound asleep—and was coming to wakefulness with Louise and his uncle glowering at each other.

Louise twisted her head, tilting it at him, then said in her clear, flawless French, "It's a small compartment." It was a huge compartment, though Charles reminded himself that in America she and her family had their own private railway car all to themselves. She added, "If he smokes that thing in here, we will all arrive smelling as if we've been burned at the stake."

His uncle said nothing, but backed away so that Charles could stand and follow him. His expression, however, said that a burning stake was exactly where the young Louise belonged—and not as the martyr as she suggested, but as an American witch. The distaste in his uncle's face was surprising and dismaying.

Out in the corridor, with his back pressed against the cold, vibrating window, Charles asked, "So what is this all about? What is so important you will wake me up to tell me?"

"Well, I could have said something sooner, but you seemed nervous earlier. I didn't want to make you more nervous."

"More nervous? What's wrong?"

"Vandermeer was telegraphing us two and three times a day from the ship for the last three days."

Charles squinted at him. "He was what?"

"Sending us telegrams—instructions, questions, requests. It got to be too expensive and complicated to telegraph you back and forth, so I took it upon myself to respond."

Charles was amazed to hear this. "What did he want? What did the two of you have to say to each other?"

"What he wants amounts to a quick wedding. Something is very wrong. He wants to marry off M'moiselle High-Society here as fast as he can."

Charles laughed and leaned his head back, feeling the train
clackety-clacking
against his skull, his shoulder blades in a rhythm of relief. He glanced past Tino's head through the partially open blind, at Louise sitting inside the compartment: a lovely young woman on a red velvet-tufted seat, with her nose in a book on mathematics. "Yes," he said, "I'm sure he does. Before she gambles him out of house and home. And sleeps with every fellow between here and Paris."

Uncle Tino's face blanched.

Charles touched his arm. "Only joking. She's a little wild, uncle."

His uncle frowned, then relaxed. "Well, good." He paused. "I suppose." He turned in the direction of Charles's gaze, staring at Louise himself. Then he said, with a note of deliverance in his voice, "I was worried you might have made her pregnant or something. You haven't, have you?"

"God, I don't think so."

It was a stupid answer. It admitted a great deal too much. And it was positively invalid in the way of information. Who knew if she were pregnant or not? A quick wedding, for a host of reasons, sounded damn fine to Charles.

When he looked at his uncle again, Tino's steady gaze was on him. The wiry, middle-aged man twisted his mouth sideways and sucked his teeth. Then he said, "Well, think about what you are doing, ambergris or no ambergris. You're letting the wrong head do your thinking. The girl is snappish and too pretty by half."

Charles frowned at him. "Come on, Tino. She is a bit of a priss—she's been bred to be aloof. But, believe it or not, I think she's lonely. But that is in public; in private,
o-ooh
—" He let out a low whistle of breath. "Never in my life—" was all he could get out in the way of words.

Uncle Tino snorted. "Well, think twice before you marry her. all the same. A man shouldn't wed a woman who is just a piece of cuckold bait waiting to happen."

A sore spot. Charles said nothing.

"You should take an ugly wife." his uncle advised, his voice sage and serious.

Charles laughed. This was not a slight to Charles's appearance, but rather honesty. Uncle Tino's wife, Heloise, was the ugliest woman Charles had ever met. On the other hand, Tino was enormously fond of her. Heloise and Constantine Dmetri Harcourt had, at present count, eight children between them, with another one due in January. Charles and Tino joked fairly mercilessly between themselves about their differing preferences and abilities to attract. He elbowed his uncle and said, "And have eight and a half ugly children like you do?" he asked. Tino's children were actually quite charming, and every one of them appealing in some way or other.

"You'll have ugly children, anyway," his uncle retorted, "if they look like you." A glimmer of a smile appeared as he bit down onto his pipe and began to hunt his pockets for matches.

"Only if they get an infection in their eye that the surgeon has to cut out." Charles grew earnest. He wanted no more remonstrations from someone he needed to count upon. "Tino," he said, "I really want to marry her. It has nothing to do with the ambergris"—he laughed—"though, of course, I want that too. By the way, was the jasmine unloaded all right?"

"Yes. It's on its way to the greenhouses at Grasse. Ernest and Maxime should be able to begin budding it in the next day or so." Tino took a moment to light his pipe with a puff, then shook his head. "Very bad," he said lugubriously, nodding back toward Louise. "You are a sure candidate for heartache.