Beast (8 page)

Yet she had cornered her parents last night before they had gone to bed, and, after a month of calling him

"unusual," even "wonderful" to look at, they had owned up somewhat indirectly. ("Limp? Does he walk with a limp, Harold? I don't remember. But, yes, dear, he has a bad eye, though that hardly makes him less attractive. He is quite interesting to look at." Interesting. Louise was sure that the hunchback of Notre Dame was
interesting.)
Perhaps it
shouldn't
matter that the gracious and well-connected Prince d'Harcourt was a less-than-whole physical specimen, but, to be purely honest, it did. Louise wasn't too fond of homely men; disfigurement she found repulsive.

Covertly she scanned the table now, looking at the men. The older ones didn't bother her, as long as they weren't too old. But the plain ones and funny-looking ones and the downright drab… She was pretty-enough to have
any
man. Didn't she deserve a handsome one, at least once before she was married (and perhaps even now and then afterward, if Charles Harcourt was as unsightly as she thought he might be)?

Louise reasoned with straightforward logic. The Prince d'Harcourt was a very good match for her in many ways. She shared her parents' opinion that a hospitable, intelligent, generous man with a lofty title and as much wealth behind him as she had was nothing less than what she merited. But she also valued beauty, who didn't? (If it wasn't worth
something
, her own worth as a human being certainly dropped.) She wanted to meet, to flirt, to kiss, to know a man who was handsome
and
kind, handsome
and
intelligent, handsome
and
generous. Then, as she looked at all the very ordinary men around her. craning her neck, she realized she was having to stretch to see around Mrs. Montebello.

The woman smiled and moved her head so as to make eye contact. "So what did
you
study, my dear?"

She had apparently not been put off by Mary's chitchat.

Louise had no idea what they were talking about. "'Where?" she asked.

"In school, of course." The woman coached, "Sewing? Music?"

The interest was sincere, but the question somehow wasn't. Louise speared a forkful of omelette.

When she offered nothing immediately, the woman said with the cheerful tolerance one shows dull children, "Deportment?" She added, "You really have a lovely way of moving, my dear."

Louise slid her eyes to the woman again, ate the omelette, then said, "Mathematics."

"Mathematics?" This made Mrs. Montebello giggle.

"And languages."

The woman's giggle became open laughter. "A young man's education," she said. "You're having me on, aren't you?"

"No."

Lightly, the woman asked, "Which languages then?"

"French, Italian, German—"

"My, how busy you—"

"Flemish, Spanish, and Sanskrit."

The woman grew quiet. Then she asked in Italian (one of the languages Louise actually
did
speak—another little vice of Louise's was that, under the right circumstances, she enjoyed lying). "Are you always this much of a smart aleck?"

Mary cut in. "Oh, don't," she said. "She'll answer. She really does speak some other languages, though not
that
many." Mary rolled her eyes. "She can be such a show-off." This complaint was followed, however, by a beaming smile into Louise's face. "We always say Lulu is way ahead of herself."

The woman smiled thinly. "Lulu?"

"A nickname," Mary explained. "From when she was little."

Mrs. Montebello raised one brow. "Not so very-long ago." she said. Frowning, she grabbed up a pale.

plump English sausage with her fingers and bit into it.

By the time cakes and coffee arrived, Gaspard, the society matron next to him, and Mary were discussing, of all things, great passenger-ship disasters. It was an uneasy conversation, full of reassuring jokes and false laughter. From here, the topic turned to food, the abundance and magnificence of it on the ship, and the great shame that everyone's stomach wasn't up to enjoying it completely. Someone said the wine, drunk the night before, had settled her stomach, one of the properties, she'd discovered, of a truly good, old red.

A reflex, Louise corrected this misinformation. "It was a young one. The old ones are terrible sailors."

"Pardon?"

"There is no ocean-going vessel that offers a good Bordeaux," Louise informed the table.

There was a pause, in which she realized that Mrs. Montebello had been speaking. The woman glowered at Louise a moment, then said, "Well, aren't you just a fountain of information suddenly." She quickly and diplomatically pulled her smile back into her cheeks. "I'm sure you're right, though." She added, "Lulu."

Unsettled, Louise murmured. "Sorry." Though she wasn't precisely sure what her apology was for.

"No, no," the woman insisted, again with obvious insincerity. "Never apologize for being right." She laughed. "I don't." As her laughter died, it left behind in her smiling eyes a kind of penetrating scrutiny.

She looked hard at Louise, then sat back, dropping her arms onto the armrests. Out of nowhere she said, "My, but you are so young." She laughed again, this time seeming quite to enjoy herself.

Louise couldn't understand the humor, though she understood that there was something unpleasant in it that went beyond mere rudeness. She turned her back on the woman, responding to something Gaspard said.

The most interesting part of breakfast, however, came when a private dining alcove at the back emptied out, releasing into the main saloon a rare sight, a loose assembly of Middle Easterners—residents of the Mediterranean region toward which the ship headed. Few from the countries of this area had the money or inclination to travel to, or among inhabitants of, the West. All of them men, these people moved quickly by Louise, flowing past and between two tables, a tightly moving wave of murmured Arabic conversation. Their flowing robes swept along behind them in one exotic stream of colorful wools crowned with gleaming coils of silk—though beneath their robes they all. to a one, wore western trousers.

Noticing Mrs. Montebello's regard to be following this procession as well, Louise risked asking, "Do you know them?"

"No." She turned back toward the table, shaking her head. "Though for a moment I thought the tall one was someone I knew." She laughed incongruously then began to gather up her fan and reticule.

Louise stood as well, turning to watch the departing procession of men. "Where have they been? Where did they eat last night? This is the first I have seen them. Who are they?"

Mrs. Montebello faced around as well, and the two women stood together in uneasy truce for the sake of mutual curiosity. "Some sheikh or pasha, I imagine, with his retinue," said the older woman. "He must be staying in one of the suites at the top of the ship, where dinner or whatever you ask for is brought to your door."

"Really?" Louise glanced down at her—the woman was a good five or six inches shorter. "One of the grand luxury suites?" Arabia, it occurred to her, was known for its costly jasmine perfumes. Louise's interest increased.

The woman didn't respond further, but continued to watch with Louise as the Arabian men disappeared up the staircase.

Behind Louise, others along the table were standing to go. Yet when Louise turned to pick up her own things left on the chair, she found herself to be once more the object of Mrs. Montebello's close inspection.

Caught staring again, the woman laughed—partly a nervous, self-conscious sound, partly the odd, gleeful cackle she was finding so difficult to contain. She shrugged slightly. "I just can't get over how very, very young you are."

Louise rolled her eyes, making a "youthful" pull of her face. She told her, "Older than last night's wine, at least."

Mrs. Montebello raised one brow at this, the look on her face turning purely mean for a second; no social niceties, no disguise. She said to Louise, "Well, aren't you clever. It must be so nice being you: always the smartest, youngest, most beautiful woman in the room." Her eyes glittered with a bright, venomous anger.

Louise was so taken aback to stare into the face of such intense animosity, she answered honestly. "No.

It is a lonely feeling. I hate it most of the time. I would never wish these things on my most cursed enemy."

From the walkway two balconies above, Charles looked down fifty feet into the dining saloon to where Pia and Louise Vandermeer stood, two purple-skinned women in purple dresses standing in a purple panorama—all but for the edges of the balcony from where he watched. With one finger, Charles pulled dark, purple-lensed spectacles down the bridge of his nose, looking over the top of them. After hearing the American girl's voice again this morning—the delicious edginess that had crept into her cool.

upper-class tone—he had given in to the urge to see her in better light. And there she was: taller than he had realized (she had to be five and three-quarter feet standing there in her shoes), as unflappable as he remembered (with Pia giving her some sort of trouble), as elegant a creature as ever breathed air, and…

something else. Charles tilted his head slightly, studying her.

The girl's face was all but expressionless. She was cool, all right. He realized, in the time he'd been watching her, every glimpse of expression he'd seen on her face had been the same: even, unexcited, distant—that is to say. without much enthusiasm or connection to anyone or anything around her.

Perhaps he'd missed something; after all, quite a distance stretched between them. Yet even from this distance, there was something sad about her.

He shook off any sympathy for her. There was every possibility that she was a self-centered young thing out on a devilish, sexually precocious experiment—who fully deserved to be the butt of a little playfulness

herself.

Just then the sweet young thing turned her head and raised her eyes, her lovely, long neck arching slightly as her gaze scanned upward. It was as if she knew he was there. She was off by twenty feet and a pillar, but her gaze backtracked unerringly to fix on him. (He hadn't thought about it, but of course his very choice of cover made him stand out, should anyone choose to look up.) Their eyes met across the vast distance of the dining saloon and up three decks. Charles felt goose bumps ripple down his spine. Eerie.

He pushed the dark glasses firmly against his brow, grabbed up the sides of his gallibiya and kaffiyeh, and withdrew immediately.

Louise watched the man overhead turn, an embodied flow of color; he was leaving. His robes unfurled in folds of purples, blues, and golden yellows, then wafted out, a blood-red sail behind him.

It was the Arab shah or sheikh or sultan or whatever he was, an emir, a pasha, the tall man from the screened private dining alcove, the one from the grand luxury suite. And he'd been watching her.

Louise leaped. "Excuse me," she said. "I will see you all at—" By this time no further valediction was necessary. She was beyond the hearing range of her breakfast companions. She took the length of the dining saloon at a brisk walk, pulling herself along for stability here and there by a chair back. At the staircase she was able to pick up speed. She gripped and slid her hand up the banister as her feet tapped up the curving steps. Then at the top. she threw caution to the wind; she broke into a dead run.