Beast (6 page)

Don't meet me then. Or do."

"How did you—"

"The jasmine will arrive shortly." Charles depressed the hook and hung up the earpiece.

The second call took less than ten seconds. He arranged with the florist to send one of the Rosemont suite's jasmine branches to Miss Louise Vandermeer's stateroom, after which Charles sat back, amazed at himself.

He was always astounded when he did things like this. So much pride. So much vanity. Yet he felt exhilarated, and he couldn't say he was unhappy or exactly ashamed of himself. He felt his lips curving up into a faint smile. An idea was taking shape, dim, slightly nefarious, amusing, and above all gratifying.

Yes. Yes, yes, there was one very interesting way to ascertain just how devious this young woman was, how determined she was to make a fool of her "ugly" French husband.

Charles himself would lure her into the dark, where he would make considerably more sophisticated overtures than he had witnessed last night—he would show her just how charming and creamy smooth "a little different" could be. That is to say, if she allowed it, he would seduce her. He would woo her at night among the shadows of the ship where she could not see him with any exactness. Then, if he succeeded, he would allow her to awaken by daylight to the sight of her "monster," that is, to the husband-to-be whose looks—his "aged" differentness—made her run for the shelter of a pretty young man.

What a fine joke
, Charles thought. For he knew how to hold up a mirror to shallowness—he had been mocking it all his life; if it was there within her, he would find it. He leaned back, lifting his bad leg off the chair to stretch it out with the other. (Even his knee felt better; an omen.) His black mood had lifted, or at least permutated. The whole enterprise was a jest of the first order, the possible outcome appealing enormously to the darker side of his sense of humor.

Louis XV used ambergris to flavor his favorite dishes; Queen Elizabeth to scent her gloves and
capes.

Charles Harcourt, Prince d'Harcourt

On the Nature and Uses of Ambergris

Louise Vandermeer hung up the telephone's earpiece, staring at it, amazed. Someone was spying on her. Then more amazing: It occurred to her that this someone could be her parents. How strange to think of them as the enemy, yet this was actually possible since her discovered adventure to Montreal.

Annoyed—as much with herself as anyone—she stood, then felt her collar flop open at the back of her neck. Reaching up and back, she began again with the buttons she'd been fastening when the telephone had interrupted her. (She was dressing herself, having sent her maid to the ship's clinic to fetch some seasickness medicine for her parents.) She stood there buttoning, one hip braced against the bedstead for balance as the room tipped. The floor leveled, and she paused, straddle-legged, elbows pointing to the ceiling. A more likely explanation occurred to her.

No one was spying. The source of her unsettling telephone call was that stupid ninny of a junior ship's officer from last night. Lord, he hadn't turned out to be at all what she had expected. And now, big man, he was shooting his mouth off, getting even. This phone call had to be from him or from one of his friends having some fun with her.

She could find out. She buttoned the last button as she turned back toward the telephone, then picked up the black earpiece and rang for the switchboard.

"Operator, this is Miss Vandermeer in suite one-oh-three. You put a call through to me a few minutes ago. Can you tell me who the caller was?"

A twangy voice replied. "I connected the Rosemont suite, miss. The gentleman wouldn't give his name."

Louise puzzled a moment. "Thank you." She hung up, frowning.

Not likely one of the lieutenant's friends, given the price of the Rosemont suite. It was one of the four grand luxury suites on an upper deck at the front of the ship, any one of which costs more than five times that of the largest first-class stateroom. The Rosemont suite was an extravagant bid for complete and utter privacy. Then another fact rose to the surface of her awareness: The voice spoke English with a faintly British accent or. no—there was another accent, slight but sure, the sound of non-native syllables educated in the British speech pattern. How curious. A European. Louise could count all the Europeans she knew on one hand—two of her fingers taken up by the woman who had been her nanny and the man who was the family butler.

For another minute she lingered over the rhythms and intonations of the voice. There was something else…
You like jasmine, don't you
? (How would a stranger know this?) An emotion seemed to come across the wire, acknowledged and given reign in a way that was foreign to Louise's experience. She mulled this briefly, then stood up. No, she corrected, she had heard nothing else here beyond the gloating of a stupid prankster.

Her father, of course, could get the name of the fellow. She would speak to him about this. The question was, though, How could she get her father's help without the subject of the phone conversation coming to light? No, given her own behavior last night, she would prefer her father didn't know about this call just yet. She would find out who this was and deal with him herself.

Twenty minutes later, just as she was leaving her stateroom, a scrubby, green-budded branch arrived.

She turned the ugly thing around in her hands a moment, then with a snort of disgust pitched it into her wastebasket on her way out to breakfast.

Louise stopped by her parents' stateroom to make sure they had gotten the medicine. They had, then Josette, her maid, had gone on to the servants' dining hall. Thus, Louise found herself alone with her mother and father, something she had not exactly planned. They lay side by side on their bed, both of them sea green, with ice packs on their foreheads. She bent over to kiss them each, then leave immediately, but alas as she raised up, finished with the last cheek, her mother took hold of her hand. The torment began.

Her mother started off with her usual admonishments that Louise was to behave like a lady, with reserve, regally aware of her position, while being "generously kind to those with lesser blessings."

"And you must make more friends," her mother added.

Louise's mother wanted her to be both aloof, with "upper-class bearing," yet warmly beloved by everyone, from her father's valet to her mother's Friends of the Opera Society. Louise was not inclined to form quick friendships with anyone, least of all with two parents who had grown tetchy and carping.

As if the earth turned upon how she ordered her eggs and whom she sat next to, they took turns giving her advice on how to comport herself at breakfast without them. Then her father from his supine position, just his nose and mouth visible, launched into his well-worn lecture, "Behaving other than like some directionless adolescent."

"You have a future," he said for what had to be the hundredth time since she'd arrived back home just a week ago. "Don't lose sight of your goals."

Louise muttered, "
Your
goals, you mean."

"And don't be disrespectful." Her father raised his head, lifting the ice pack, his bushy brows furrowing out from under it as he looked at her. "You are becoming quite impudent, Louise Amelda-May."

She said, a little irritably, "I'm not becoming anything. You taught me to think for myself, only now you would like to take all that back because you don't like what I think."

She had liked Montreal, for instance. She had spent a very nice day and a half there before her parents had located her. Suddenly this episode, of course, was exactly what they were speaking of. In the whirlwind of the prince's offer of marriage, the three of them had yet to find the appropriate moment to discuss Louise's flight from home at any length.

Her father, staring hard at her now, said, "What
were
you thinking?"

"About what?" Louise asked, one last pass at avoiding the inevitable.

This made her mother lift her ice pack too. Louise groaned inwardly as she faced both of them, both waiting for an answer.

She defended, "I wasn't thinking anything. There was a train for Montreal. You thought I was at Mary's for a few days. I believed I could get there and back, and no one would know."

Her father asked, "Why, for God's sake?"

"Because there is a music hall there where they play backgammon for money, and I thought I could win."

Her mother's face took on a distressed, bewildered expression that was painful for Louise to see, the look of a mother who couldn't get so much as a foothold on her daughter's motives or logic. She said helplessly, "But you could have done
that
in New York."

"I have. But now I wanted to do it in French, just to see if I could."

"You've gambled in New York?" her father interjected.

"A few times."

"And could you?" her mother asked.

"Could I what?"

"Gamble in French?"

"Yes."

Her father glanced at his wife and said, "Honestly, Isabel, as if it matters… "

From here, the two of them engaged in a little entwining conversation, where the)' both talked at the same time and finished each other's sentences. "Well. I know it's scandalous, her running off… on lour indeed… we should have told the prince… yes. then he would have been as wary of everyone else, should they find out… and just think if anyone fully-realized… yes, what she finally did once she got there… I still can't get over the fact… our beautiful, clever daughter… the most extolled, sought-after girl this season… why. dear Lord, why… what did we do to deserve this…"

All right
, Louise thought.
It wasn't smart
. Or at least her adventure wasn't worth all the aggravation it had caused. But her parents—and she had
known
that they would—were blowing it out of proportion.

She interrupted with, "You know, I haven't taken up gambling as a life's vocation. I don't even care if I ever do it again. I just wanted to see—"

Her father turned on her. "See what?" he said. "If you could ruin the best prospects since Consuelo Vanderbilt married the Duke of Marlborough?"

"I didn't ruin anything. I am about to do better, in fact."

"Because of
our
intervention."

Louise bit back the sarcastic reply, that she had
known
she could fall back on their "intervention," if necessary. She hadn't done anything her father wasn't perfectly capable of fixing.

Her mother added, "What in the world do you think people would say if they found out—if your father wasn't able to pay off every soul who had seen you, from the train conductor to the bellhop to the hotel night-clerk?"

Louise took the offensive. She said. "
You
don't worry about others' opinions. You stayed in your cabin all yesterday morning, even before the ship had sailed. Don't you imagine everyone else out on the promenade thought
that
a little inappropriate?" The closeness between Louise's parents had always been an anchor, a dependable piece of her life. Yet somehow in the last months their union, the way they joined against her. made her feel forsaken. She continued, "And you hold hands in public, when you have been married for more than two dozen years. I mean, 1 would feel like a third wheel—" She corrected,

"a fifth wheel, whatever—unnecessary—if you weren't so old that I can't think why I should be resentful and—"

"Louise!" Her father stopped her diatribe.

Both parents had sat bolt upright in bed to stare at her.

Her face infused with blood. She wasn't certain exactly what she had said that was wrong, but her parents looked horrified. They looked hurt. In perfect unison, they looked utterly dumbstruck.

Louise wanted to apologize but could not find the words. And, in all honesty, a part of her was happy to have had such a profound effect on these two people. A separate effect, her own effect; an adult effect.

There were times, these days, when she wanted to slap them. Or slap herself. Or slap someone…

The words came haltingly. She said, "Oh, I'm—" She looked away, embarrassed, feeling both ashamed and righteous, misused. She cast her regard about the room, looking from the drawn drapes to the steamer trunk standing on end, to the chair over which hung her father's frock coat and her mother's dress: looking, looking for something she couldn't name, for something that perhaps just wasn't here. She took a breath then let it out, a heave of frustration. "Oh, I'm just feeling lost"—she scrambled angrily—"I mean, cross. I've had a very bad morning." Her stupid slip of tongue made her irrationally furious. She wasn't lost or confused or anything else childish. She was angry with these two people, fully and justly angry that they clung together, did as they pleased, then upbraided her for clinging to herself.