Beast (42 page)

No. Enough. Not from a young woman to whom he gave so much leeway. A wife whom he had only kissed once in all their short marriage: one kiss and one kiss only. It was insufficient suddenly, unbalanced. He deserved more.

Also, perhaps someone bumped him. He would never be sure. People were close, chatting away, moving around behind him. Charles stepped up against his wife partly of his own volition, though the last centimeter may have had help from the jostling of the crowd. He was suddenly body to body with her, pressing into her dress.

"Charles," she breathed. She tilted her head up, her eyes wide.

He tipped his head down, angled his face—she tried to duck again. "Come on, Lulu-girl." he said.

"You're safe. There are a hundred witnesses behind us. What can I do?" He put his hand to her cheek to hold her face steady and kissed her full-mouthed.

And suddenly it was a really shame there were so many people, because his success was astounding. If one could call this success: Married almost two weeks. and he at last kissed his wife for the second time in the way of a man and a woman. A deep, carnal kiss. And she kissed him back—withholding herself somehow yet not quite able to withhold everything. As if she liked it, but wasn't comfortable with liking it.

He angled his head to get as deep a drink of her as he could.

And, ooh. God, it was wonderful, whether she liked it or not. It was like leaping over the balustrade and falling the distance toward the rocks and trees below. His stomach lurched then was pulled home by the draining twist of his testes that seemed to draw every last ounce of blood he possessed toward his lower parts. He tongued inside her mouth, pushing against the soft, glassy-wet lining of her cheek, engaging her tongue—it was small, very warm, lively. He stroked her tongue with his, wooing it. Charles instantly found himself erect, as stiff as the pine tree beside them, its top blocking the sun, its roots down on the ridge.

A voice said, "Excuse me."

Charles drew back, breathing like he'd landed from the fall as well. Kissing Louise knocked the breath out of him. Her eyes were half-closed, that look that could outright level him. He and she stood there, a few panting breaths apart from each other's face.

"Charles?" The voice spoke again.

He glanced over his shoulder. He'd be damned if he was going to turn further and let anyone see how bloody far astray he was from social decorum.

"Charles? Louise?" It was Isabel Vandermeer standing at his elbow and looking ever so disapproving.

"Would you like to go in for a while?" She made a weak smile. And a transparent offer: "I was thinking that Louise looks a little tired. Perhaps you should see her upstairs, Charles."

"Um, ah—" He smiled sheepishly and turned around as much as he dared, revealing Louise while being still in proprietary contact with her skirts, her shoulder. He squeezed her to him, a pull at her waist with his arm round her back.

Louise bent her head, looking down between their bodies, a crimson-deep flush all over her in the way only he seemed to produce. She said, "It's all right, Mother. We have to be going anyway. Thank you for such a nice afternoon. It was a lovely party."

What? Charles thought. He had just arrived. Oh. this was not going to make anyone happy. But him, of course. His spirits took wing. "Yes, we must be going."
Oh, yes, oh, yes
, Charles thought. After a kiss like this, he was going to consummate this absurd marriage in the coach on the way home.

Even more heady, as they walked through the crowd to say their good-byes, he realized he'd made a regular spectacle—and couldn't say that he was anything but elated by it. And, alas, not just because he adored the feeling of half-eating Louise's hand off her wrist then mopping his tongue around inside her mouth. Charles's ego reeled and staggered at the kiss, at his wife's blushing exit as she picked up her shawl. He was instantly drunk on his own bravado, in front of half a dozen young fools who ogled her.

Poor insecure ape, he thought. Yet, joy of joys! To let them know (somewhat dishonestly for the moment) that she who walked in the ethers of the most ethereal beauty of all was his. All his. He walked to the carriage on air. Oh, things were going well. Better and better. He wanted to crow about the conquest of his own wife, imminent though it still was, shout it out to the world.

As they stepped into the carriage, however, Louise said in a vehement whisper, "If you ever do that again in public, I will slap your cocky, one-eyed face. Do you understand me?" She prevented his sitting beside her by spreading herself, dress, pocket bag, shawl, and fan into the center of the seat.

After a pause, he sat down opposite her, twisting his "cocky, one-eyed face" into a grimace. "No, I will never understand you. You liked it."

"It embarrassed me. You may as well have lifted your leg like Virgule"—one of his dogs, a rude mastiff here in Nice—"and marked me like a tree: mine."

He crossed his arms. "You are mine."

She leaned toward him a degree, contradicting. "No, Charles. I belong to me."

He scowled. He couldn't even argue, for he understood too clearly what he had done.

They took off in silence.

Ambergris is alchemy. It proves the earth is magic, that transmogrification exists: feces into
something more wonderful than gold; treasure that drifts upon the sea till it finds a likely shore.

Charles Harcourt, Prince d'Harcourt

On the Nature and Uses of Ambergris

As they jostled along, sunlight flitted through the carriage window, mostly across Charles's chest and face, making him squint: a monstrous expression if ever there was one.

Alter watching this for a while, Louise fell vaguely penitent. Stiffly, she offered, "You shouldn't be jealous."

"Well, excuse me if I am."

"It would be better if you would control it."

He looked at her sullenly, then asked, "Has it ever occurred to you that, given my wife's amazing looks, and mine, I will never be able to cope beyond this."

"You're a grown man—"

He threw something at her from the seat beside him. A wad hit her chest.

"Oh, that's quite mature." His handkerchief, wrapped and knotted into a ball.

He snorted. "You don't outgrow frustration or confoundment or—"

"Behaving stupidly."

"Right."
Exact
. The word buzzed in French.

It reduced them to riding along in silence again. Fine, she thought. As the coach descended, Louise realized its interior smelled strange. The small space contained a faint but peculiar, really peculiar, odor, and the scent emanated from the balled handkerchief in her lap.

"What's this?" She picked it up.

He glanced, then looked back out the window. "A gift. I was bringing it to you."

"A gift?" she repeated.

He didn't explain. He didn't answer at all, but rather stared out moodily at the sky. From the evidence out his window, their carriage could have been aloft, flying. The earth was nonexistent but for treetops and the rocky joggles that creaked springs and axles. Noise.

Scent. Louise let the "gift" take her attention. It wasn't much of a gift. A simple handkerchief wrapped tightly around something small. The odor, sweet, strong, and mossy, grew heavier as she untied then unfolded the corners of linen. She unrolled the center from its edges—whatever was inside was well-wrapped. As she opened the last layer, she saw a small, unimpressive, waxy-gray nugget. Pellucid, marbled. And the smell, though strong, was not unpleasant, not at all.

Just powerful. Indeed, as pungent as excrement, only sweet, good, if that were possible. Cool, mellow, faintly seaweed-like, the odor was as fresh and clean as rain, almost loamy like earth from a damp woods.

The little gray bit contained fragments, debris—ground squid beaks, she decided—embedded, clouding it. Louise knew what this was, what it had to be. She let the small ball of ambergris roll from the handkerchief into her palm. It was soft. The warmth of her clenched hand melted it slightly, the texture of solid oils, waxy tallow. It was fascinating. On her hand, its odor changed. It smelled muskier. Faintly spicy, somehow almost oriental.

"This is fabulous stuff," she said aloud for the sake of the man who would not look her way.

This won her an irritable glance.

How was it that
he
had come to be the one irate here? she wondered. She was the one who had been made into a beet-red spectacle.

After a moment, she told him again, "You shouldn't be jealous. You should get hold of yourself."

He got hold of the hand strap instead, clutching it, white-knuckled. He said: "My God, I behave this way because I am so much in love with you."

Louise startled. Her mind went blank. All she could think to say was, "Why?" A sincere question. Less sincerely, snidely, in fact, she asked, "What do you
want
from me?"

Without so much as a pause to gather himself, he said: "I love you because of your drive, your honesty regarding yourself, your resolve, the amazing force of it—the way it propels you toward what you, and only you, chose. I love your choices themselves: I want to be one of them. What do I
want
?" he repeated. "I want you to choose me. Freely. I want you to come at me headlong with all the force of your steely will."

He sat back and folded his arms, not satisfied so much as finished. Too disturbed to continue. As if all this had come upon him with as much surprise as it had Louise.

He had spoken a mouthful. She couldn't look away, his words, his bizarre and beguiling declaration of love holding sway as they rocked down, then around a steep slope.

Till she consciously lowered her gaze.

In her cupped palm, she caught sight of the little pebble of ambergris. Its looks so unimpressive, its smell huge. An insistent, implacable attraction—visceral, invisible. Its odor hung in the air, it insinuated itself into the pores of her hand. It was the strongest scent she had ever come across that could still be termed
pleasing
. Cool, fragrant. Like kneeling in a spring rain, ripping the mossy mat up off the floor of a forest, smelling this, pressing the soft, furry tufts, the tender roots, the gritty soil to one's nose.

How little the sight of ambergris, she marveled, had to do with its draw, its full nature. Or its origin: How strange that such divine scent, such permeating tenacity, should get somehow into the uncouth concretions of a whale.

At the house, Charles descended the carriage. When he held his hand out to Louise, though, she paused in the vehicle's doorway. Bent, she looked him levelly in the eye, assessing him. He was still livid; he couldn't hide it. As she put her hand into his, she said, "You needn't feel so insecure, you know. You are not so ugly as all that."

Oh, fine, he thought. At least though they weren't going to discuss his absurd confession of love.

Then they were. Obliquely. She stepped down. smiling faintly, and said, "My 'will'?" Half a question, half a mockery.

He didn't know how to answer. She was shaking her head, no—though
no
to what, he couldn't decide.

Then she repaired his bewilderment and called back any hurt with surprising effectiveness: She took hold of his arm. "Charles," she said, "you have been saddled with a difficult mate." She frowned, narrowing her pretty eyes, a troubled visage. After which she offered, "I know who I am. I'm selfish. And I can't be unselfish except in the most insincere ways. I never
feel
generous. I've all but given up trying. My drive?