Beast (37 page)

Fidelity
, she thought. Yes, constancy. She hated affairs. She would never have another. She didn't want this one. "Charles—'" She tried to push the man on top of her back.

After two or three good shoves, he said. "What? What is it?" His breath rasped. "What, for God's sake?"

She tensed her fists. She was going to cry. God, she was going to cry like a reprimanded child. She pinched her eyes closed.

Charles Harcourt grew still. After a moment, he said, "Look at me." His mantra tonight.
Look at me
.

She opened her eyes, slits. And what she saw on his strange face was surprising: She saw concern.

There was frustration as well, even a note of anger. But the other was unmistakable: Charles Harcourt looked at her with a great and amazing kindness, mature, patient, the sort of goodness that didn't deny more selfish feelings but somehow transcended them. An extraordinary man, she thought. She bit her lips together. She could be kind too. She closed her eyes and murmured, "Go on." Let him. "Do what you want." She tried to relax.

He was still. He did nothing. He said, not meanly vet faintly exasperated. "Louise, if I had wanted to do this alone, I could have stayed in my bedroom and not had to deal with all your wet nonsense. What's wrong?"

She leaned her head back on the bathtub. It hit with a clonk. "Oh. Charles," she said. She let out a long, sighing groan. "There was this man. You remind me of him." Not the nicest position—under him in a bathtub—in which to tell a husband this. The connotations were obvious.

The miracle, however, was that this incredible soul rolled with it. He nuzzled her cheek. "That's all?"

"Yes."

"Well, he was a man you liked. I hope."

The amazing French, her mother had said. Yes, most tolerant. "Indeed," she answered. "I adored him."

She needed to tell someone, and the man she had married—oh, how right her dear parents had been—was turning out to be one of the nicest human beings she had ever met. She told him, "He's dead."

Her husband raised up slightly, straightening his elbows. "Dead?"

"Yes, he, well—well, he sort of died. Suddenly."

Stillness. He didn't know what to say. Small wonder.

She added, "I think I am grieving for him. I think about him a lot." She ventured to open her eyes more fully.

His face looked stunned. He could barely speak. He whispered, as if truly aggrieved himself, "Oh. dear Lord." He shook his head as he stared into her face, a small back-and-forth no that seemed to wish he could explain away this profound absence she felt.

And all her husband's unbelievable empathy, sympathy, his patience and goodness and concern came crashing down on top of her.

The next sob wouldn't swallow. Louise half choked on it. Then she let out a big, blubbering wail and threw her arms about the neck of this very decent fellow. She cried for a long, horribly embarrassing time—a good ten or twelve seconds of throat-constricting, belly-buckling sorrow, then she turned in the water—he had backed off as if to assess and wonder at her sorrow. She tried to struggle to her feet. She slipped. Her legs were rubber. The robe fell open.

All at once she felt the tub, the floor itself lift away. Her stomach dropped from the swift scoop of arms that came up under her, one sturdy arm under her knees, another under her back, hoisting her, then rolling her up against a solid shoulder. High over the tub. Louise turned her face into the wet hair of her husband's chest, the sound of water, like a waterfall, filling the bathroom, running, pouring, dripping. Her robe pulled open under the weight of its own wetness. It bent her ankles down, turning her feet awkwardly, then this burden slid off. She was naked briefly, then a towel hit her, nesting soft and dry against her belly.

There was movement, what she recognized after a few moments as the slightly off-tempo rhythm of her husband's walking; he carried her. He said nothing. She couldn't speak and was glad.

For she would only have screamed out the rest: Duality be hanged. Fidelity, indeed. She was being faithful to a scoundrel with whom she had been completely herself, from whom she had held nothing back save the obstacle of her beauty. And what had he done? He had left her. After five days. He wasn't coming back. He wasn't coming to get her. He didn't
care
where she was. He was gone. Without so much as a good-bye or thank-you or backward glance.

Damn him anyway, the jackass deserved to be dead.

Charles took Louise to her bedroom where he lay her down on her bed. She seemed small where she lay upon it, not asleep, not crying, but not awake either; moody and introverted.

Dead? He was dead? What did this mean?

How would she feel about a dead man crawling up out of his coffin to join her here? Should he tell her the truth? Would she gasp with less revulsion now? Would she be less angry? More welcoming? Surely, this pain she felt was the disappointment of youth at the end of its first love affair.
Come on, Louise
, he thought.
It was only five days. And I didn't exactly drop dead or off' the face of the earth. We
parted company. We parted

company pleasantly, like adults
. He'd left a dozen women under worse circumstances.

Yet not a one of them had been eighteen.

What had he done? What could he do to make amends? To comfort her?

Join her
, Charles told himself. Comfort her like an adult. Oh, yes. And comfort yourself. He stepped back and out of his wet underdrawers, thinking this was what he was going to do. His action, however, was overly optimistic. As he kicked the wet wad of under-linen out of the way, he heard her sniffle once, a deep wet intake of breath through her nose. Then, young, healthy thing, after an equally lengthy, somewhat shaky sigh, her breathing settled into a deep and regular rhythm. She dropped off to sleep.

Charles stood there naked, bewildered.

Behind him through the sitting room and down the hall he heard the faint slap and slop of a wet dressing gown—or else his shirt or undershirt or trousers. The housekeeper had gone into the bathroom. She was

tsking
and wringing things out. The maid was with her, both of them cleaning up water. He and Louise had left pools on the floor.

At the next sound, though, Charles turned sharply and grimaced: whispering then giggling and tittering.

He skulked back into the sitting room, ducking into his own room via the connecting door. In his room, his consolation was a gawky yellow-white puppy. Louise's Bear greeted Charles with a mad race across the floor, then leaps of welcome up his leg. The dog's tail wagged so hard his rear feet slipped and slid on the polished wood. And, thus, Charles began to sleep other than alone: After the puppy made several pointless attempts to stretch and launch himself onto Charles's bed, Charles lifted him up. The dog went to sleep happily at Charles's shoulder, as if he were home, his fur smelling faintly of Louise's jasmine-acacia perfume.

Ambergris has, over the ages, been worth as much as twice its weight in gold.

Charles Harcourt, Prince d'Harcourt

On the Nature and Uses of Ambergris

The next morning, Louise woke once, saw the day, then simply rolled over and slept until noon. Tino sent up a carping message at one point. She was supposed to be reviewing with him today the rest of the list entitled "The Princess d'Harcourt's Potential Responsibilities." As mistress of two different households, with a third somewhere in Paris, Louise was supposed to be finding her "most useful interests." With equal deference, or rather equal lack of it, she sent Tino a message back: Since he and everyone else were so blessed good at running everything, they could continue to do so. She had no desire to plan menus or meet neighbors or arrange for repairs or redecoration. At noon she got out her math books, in the margins of which she unraveled theorems till one.

She was just coming downstairs, dressed at last, as Charles, home for lunch, was about to leave again.

On seeing her, he delayed in the entryway. "Lulu. Come with me. I will show you more flower fields."

Flexing her fingers over the large, round newel post, she tightened her mouth. "Why? So you can dump them and me backward into a bathtub?"

He smiled. She realized: This Charles, that Charles, she was angry at both of them.

He told her. "I wish I could say I regretted doing that last night." He shook his head, a slow, remembering back-and-forth movement; no regrets. His introspective smile drew up at its slightly crooked angle as he used his cane to brush her skirt down from where it had remained folded over on the last stair tread.

Louise stepped back from him. She was a little wary of what this fellow might think to do next. Upset tables. Women into tubs. Following them in in his underdrawers.

He drew his cane back and leaned onto it, one hand over the other atop the polished handgrip. He made a tutting sound, a French click of his tongue through rounded lips pushed forward. "Well, if you would rather spend what remains of the day with Tino—"

"Which fields are you going to?"

"Jasmine and roses, then I have to stop at the greenhouses."

Louise lifted a finger in warning. "I don't want you to think just because I'm going that I—Well, I intend to put a chair against the bathroom door next time."

He smiled politely. "That would be lovely. Your coming with me. that is. I much prefer having your company to going oft by myself, and I think you will like what I show you. As to the rest, since we are giving fair notice, don't use a chair you like to hold me on the other side of any door anywhere, much less in my own house." More reasonably, he asked, "And why would you? Did I treat you badly last night?"

"No—"

"Did I do anything you didn't like?"

"Not exactly—"

"Then give me some credit, and stop roasting me on a spit."

His literal words,
roasting me on a spit
. Louise was taken aback. "I wasn't being—"

"No, of course you weren't, sweet thing. So, Your Highness, are you coming or not?"

He was being ironic. Louise didn't know what to say. No one had ever been sarcastic with her in quite his tone before. He continued to smile. He wasn't angry. He liked her fine, Miss High-and-Mighty-Not-So-Sweet-At-All.

She frowned, not sure whether to take offense or not; none seemed intended. Perhaps she was missing one of her mother's nuances here. "I'll get my wrap and a piece of cheese, if you'll wait. I haven't had, um, lunch." Or breakfast either, for that matter.

Charles Harcourt rode with a natural, loose movement, in a secure seat and with long reins. A mistral wind that took off rooftops could not have taken him out of the saddle. He was experienced, steady, seasoned, and not only as a rider. Louise, as she rode beside him, felt young in the worst sense, callow.

It was easy to blame her dissatisfaction today on a man who wasn't here to defend himself. Her caddish pasha. The bounder. "Be herself." Hah!
Be loose and let me have what I want
was more like it. She wouldn't think of him any longer. Proof: She had killed him off last night, hadn't she? She was better off without him.