Black Silk (13 page)

“Hardly.”

“Why you?”

The subject exhausted him. He told her as much by a look.

She looked away. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make your receiving them as reprehensible as Henry’s hiding them then giving them to you.”

“I wouldn’t be too angry with him.”

“Well, I am. I feel so—deceived.” Her eyes fixed on him. He was overwhelmed for a moment by a brave, disconcerting intelligence, an unflinching, unshrinking scrutiny. Then she bowed her head. “And you know things you’re not saying. You know all about this in some way. Were there more? Was Henry—peculiar?”

“Henry was decidedly peculiar.”

“
That
way.”

“What way?”

She made a little reprimanding snort.

“Not that I know of,” he answered.

“Are you?”

He frowned sharply. “Perhaps you’d better be more definite.”

“You know. Do you go in for that sort of thing? Like it a lot?”

“What sort of thing?”

She turned away. “Looking. Pictures. It excites men sometimes, doesn’t it? Does it you?”

He didn’t know what to say. A woman he had considered a prude was outmaneuvering him on the subject of dirty pictures. “That is quite the most private question I have been asked in the last few hours.”

“But does it?” she insisted.

Graham couldn’t understand why she would force herself through this. “It can,” he said, “and I’m not sure that’s peculiar.”

That proved something. The young widow stood and walked to the wall. She leaned back on it. Then his frank response drew an unforeseen, reciprocal candidness. “They stir me a little,” she admitted. Self-consciously, she laughed.

It was the nicest, strangest sound. Her laughter, unvocalized, had a soft, shudderlike quality. She laughed with her mouth closed, her smile slightly crooked, this appealingly lopsided expression faintly narrowing one eye. He didn’t think she was aware of it—it was not artifice, but when she smiled, her wise young face took on a wisdom that was worldly and strictly female: beguilingly sly.

“You have no idea what a surprise these were,” she said. The smile faded, leaving behind the narrow, thoughtful look.

“I can imagine.”

She shook her head—no, he couldn’t—then raised a hip slightly and pulled back her hoops. She sat on the walltop, leaving one foot to dangle above the dirt floor.

“Perhaps it’s normal,” Graham Wessit offered. “A husband doesn’t tell his wife everything.”

Submit sniffed at that. “My husband was my friend.” Then she objected violently to her own statement, shaking her head. She came off her perch in one movement and strode to the far side of the patio. She put her back to him.

She bent her head so low that Graham wasn’t sure if she had given up the head-shaking or not. He watched her for a while, until his own silence began to feel contemptible.

“I was sent down from university for these,” he said finally. “Henry must have wanted me to know—oh, I don’t know what. But I’m sure it wasn’t for prurience he saved them. Quite the opposite, I imagine. One last sermon from the grave. It must have been irresistible.”

Submit looked around. “You passed them at university?”

“Like a bag of crumpets.”

“And got caught?”

“And expelled. And jailed and—more. I read humility that year and took a First.”

He watched her face. It remained blank—perhaps the politest expression possible under the circumstances. At least the head-shaking had stopped, the self-reproaching questions, the hypothesizing. Her comment that the pictures “stirred” her was curious to him—it was curious that she would have such stirrings, more curious still that she would mention them. There was something about her…. He speculated to himself that Henry might have secretly fancied the pictures. Looking at his wife made unusual things possible for Henry. Young love. If not a penchant, at least an interest in the angles and curves of firm, green coitus.

She had turned her back again. Her chignon was thick, the tied volume of baled hay. It made her fragile body seem to need a ballast to counter the weight. The heaviness rested against the nape of her neck. It seemed to press at her spine. Then he thought perhaps it was not the outline of spine he saw, but French hooks beneath a placket. He stared at the dress’s closure.

She turned suddenly. Again he was confronted with her smile, its faintly crooked and intriguing friendliness, her direct eyes. And he realized that by telling his reluctant little
partial truth, he had made her indebted to him: He had given the husband an upright and plausible motive for passing pornography.

“I can’t put you with him,” he said. “You are totally unlike any woman I ever knew growing up. Of Henry’s, I mean. He liked ones who could talk you into the ground. On politics or books or finance or something. He liked ones who carried banners, in their eyes if not in their hands.”

She laughed, a breathy sound. It was their first agreement.

He smiled. “He was so—old,” he continued, “even when he was young, if that makes any sense.”

“I’m old.” But she was more amused.

“Are you?”

Her eyes—bannerless—teased, a feminine refusal to discuss age. Or else she was saying it was unimportant. “I couldn’t comprehend it myself for a while. To like Henry so well, I mean. He was my father’s choice. But I did come to like him. Exceptionally well.” Then, as if she had bungled, she added, “I am sorry you didn’t. He was full of wit and intelligence—he was a sensitive man in many ways.”

Graham restrained the awkwardness he felt. Her evaluations—elevations—of his former guardian at every turn seemed so wrong. There was no right way to respond: He couldn’t be honest, and he couldn’t bring himself to be polite. The impasse again widened, leaving a gap in the conversation. At length, he stood to go.

As he did, the case slid from his lap. It crashed on the flooring, splitting its hinge and spilling its contents. Pictures scattered out across the stones like someone’s burdened, babbling conscience confessing up in graphic detail.

Graham bent immediately, trying to gather it all up. “The stupid perversity of it,” he mumbled. “Swooning and groaning over these stupid things for all these years.”

“I seriously doubt that he swooned and groaned.”

“He hated the whole episode. How could he own them? Will them? Be so preposterously godlike to keep them then dump them on me—on you—with no explanation? I wonder if he looked them over periodically.
That
must have been goddamn sweet torment. The stupidity of it!”

“Mr. Tate kept them for him.”

“Oh, splendid!” Graham looked up long enough to shake a fistful of erotica at her. “Are you going to stand there and defend this—this prank, this stupid, posthumous game…this…this….” The latch wouldn’t close. He bent over it, fumbling on one knee. The thick paper stuck out in corners and folds. “There was no reason for him to involve you in this. Although you certainly take it in your stride: Nothing surprises you. Well, it surprises me!
You
surprise me. These weren’t the only surprising pleasures Henry obtained for his old age, were they?”

He meant her, Submit realized. She took a step back. She felt the blood in her face rise.

While Graham felt nothing but exasperation. He couldn’t get the case closed. He knelt there, silently cursing it, wanting with all his might to heave the thing into the sky and watch it sail beyond sight. But Submit churned by him instead, as if he’d lit a firecracker at her back. She went by him with such force, she knocked him off balance.

He sat with a
plonk
. “Wonderful,” he said to her marching back.

She left him there, sitting in his own pique on a pothole in the floor, holding the black box in his hands. He looked down at it, feeling stuck with it—stuck with its misaligned corners, its broken back, its legs and arms hanging out in wrinkles and folds. Always stuck, it seemed, with having to organize unwelcome pieces of his life that never should
have been in the first place. He stood up, finally succeeding in closing the box: Henry’s generous gift.

He set it down, only to realize a drawing remained on the ground. “Thank you very much, Henry,” he murmured as he picked it up. “You miserable old pisspot.”

When he looked back toward the person he wanted to speak to most, she was already a third of the way to the poplars, a black, shifting dot on the vivid greensward. He cursed Henry again, then started after her.

In the open field, her own dress was the only movement—so it was easy enough to tell he was behind her, half walking, half running, trying to catch up. Submit walked as fast as she could, hoping he would drop back once he saw there was no point in pursuing her.

The poplars and their shade waited in the distance. She longed to be there again, yet she didn’t dare move any faster. The late afternoon sun dazzled, saturated. Her black dress churned about her. Beneath it, at the pace she was going, her legs already felt blanketed and hot. She heard the man behind her, closing the distance.

“Lady Motmarche,” he called out. “Wait—”

The sound of his voice only galled her. Graham Wessit was not only brutishly crude but relentlessly stupid as well.

The top of her head began to feel warm—she wished she had her hat. She wished he’d go away. Why had he come here anyway? He was a foul-mouthed, silk-vested popinjay who hadn’t the first bit of taste, not for people or clothes. His disdain for Henry mingled for a moment with his garish sartorial affectations. The vest today, she remembered vividly, was green. A dark green velvet with the substance and texture of cut silk. She could have lived a fortnight on the vest’s buttons alone—they were
bain d’or.
She heard him come up behind her within a few yards. His pace slowed—a little healthy prudence at last. Then he fell in step just a few feet behind, as if they were out for a stroll.

Submit turned on him. He drew up, startled by this preemptive stop, as she asked him with a sharp, wordless tilt of her head, What exactly did his following her out here prove?

“I’m sorry,” Graham answered. “I didn’t mean to offend
you.” Then, with a grimace of closed eyes, he actually took this back. “Well, perhaps I did. But I—I regret doing so now.” He paused. “I’m sorry. I was out of place. Everything else aside, Henry was a highly principled man. His interest in you would hardly have been—”

Submit angled her head up at him. “Henry married me,” she pointed out. “He didn’t adopt me. His interest in me, for your future reference, was completely that of a husband.”

He blinked. He had no more apologies, no more words.

Good, she thought, she’d stunned him a little herself. He grimaced again, then ran his hand back over his head, as if to say it was hot standing out in the middle of the sun. He did look hot. A velvet vest was heavy for summer. His coat was dark. Then she noticed something in his other hand, at the end of one dark sleeve. “Let me see that.” She held out her hand.

Graham stared at her palm, held expectantly open. He looked at her face and dropped his eyes to where hers fell. He saw he’d carried the sketch with him from the terrace. It was creased between his fingers, readily available to keep him blundering along. His wrist and arm made an involuntary movement away from her extended hand. Then, with a long, noisy sigh, he turned his contraband over to her.

He waited, cursing himself, the sun, his heavy clothes. He had sent all his more appropriate things to Netham. Why wasn’t he there now? he wondered. Instead, here he was, standing in a hot, open field, with a full bladder. He cursed the tea. He had drunk too much. Henry’s widow hadn’t bothered with it. He shouldn’t have; he cursed himself. While the widow, it seemed to him, remained unreasonably comfortable, cool in fact, as she studied the drawing. He was beginning to wonder about a young woman who gave such things so much careful attention. Her intrepid march into truth was beginning to hint at salacious curiosity. Then
he saw, to his further disgust, that she noticed what she had missed before.

Submit looked up at Graham Wessit’s face, then back to the face of the man in the drawing. She did this again; up again, down. The face of the man on the page was not exactly the first thing that drew one’s attention, and it was younger of course, but there was no doubt whose face the artist had drawn onto the limned, naked satyr.

She raised a brow. “Lovely,” she said. “You should have sued him, you know.”

Graham only laughed, a short, self-disparaging sound, then exhaled a long sigh. He slipped off his coat and began to unbutton his vest. A breeze flapped his shirt against his body, flipped his vest open to the lining. He flung his coat over a shoulder and looked around. They had come out a long way. The first of the poplars was within a dozen yards.

Submit offered the drawing back. “You look cool enough here. Who is the woman? She looks familiar.”

Graham didn’t take the picture but stared steadfastly toward the shade of the trees.

“An actress,” he replied finally.

“Elizabeth Barrow?”

He nodded.

“She’s pretty.”

“She’s actually rather nice, too.”

“Yes. It looks as though you liked her quite well.”

“Like. Present tense.”

“Is that a fact? I don’t think Mrs. Schild is aware of this.”

“Mrs. Schild is unconcerned.”

Meaning, Submit took it, that it was none of Mrs. Schild’s business. She gave him a doubtful look.

He sent her a tired look back. “She knows,” he clarified. “She doesn’t worry about it.” He raised a brow. “She worries a little about you, in fact.”

Submit frowned and looked down. “I know. That’s very
strange, isn’t it?” Mrs. Schild suddenly became a subject neither one of them wanted to discuss.

She followed Graham Wessit as he walked toward the stand of poplars.

When he spoke, he startled her by asking a question in her own mind. “How did Henry get these?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea.”

“I never knew he’d even seen them, let alone owned them. I assumed they’d been destroyed. Or gravitated into the private collection of some fondler of such things.”

The slight wind lifted again. She looked at him. Beneath the unbuttoned vest the wind showed one white trouser brace. It came down the front of his chest, thin and taut, a seeming contradiction to the loose shirt, the frivolous velvet. He was a confusion to her for a moment. Stiff tension, soft cambric, velvet and starch.

Submit glanced down. “Who did them?” she asked.

“What?”

“The pictures. Were they blackmail?”

She watched him sit down in the shade. He leaned his head against a tree trunk, resting his arms on his knees. He made a dry laugh. “No.” He closed his eyes. “It was no blackmail. A number of us did it together. Elizabeth. The artist. Some of her friends. Some of mine.”

“Why, for heaven’s sake?”

“It’s complicated. And stupid.” He shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Submit could not grasp this. She sat down. “You didn’t actually pose?”

He sighed. “We did. On numerous occasions.” He made a sound, disgust or simple lassitude, down his nose. “I won’t pretend to make it into anything very acceptable. All I can tell you is that we found it exciting. The actress in Elizabeth, I suppose; she loved an audience. And, at the time, I was in love with the profane, the idea of setting everyone, espe
cially Henry, on their ears. Elizabeth and I used to get hot just knowing Pandetti was about to arrive.”

Submit felt her skin prickle. “Not Alfred Pandetti,” she said.

“The same.”

She felt warmed, alarmed, and curious in a way that made her stare at Graham Wessit, study him unreservedly while his eyes were closed. “That’s impossible,” she suggested. “He’s part of the Royal Academy, a leader of the group trying to put fig leaves on Greek statues—”

Graham Wessit opened his eyes to look at her. His eyes were more startlingly handsome than she’d been aware. For a second, they took her breath away. Beneath their deep brow, they were the color of India ink. Large, shadowed, downturned, these extraordinarily dramatic eyes fixed on her for several seconds, making her finally look away.

“My dear marchioness,” the man beside her said quietly, “Alfred Pandetti, like all of us, has inclinations that are private and inclinations that are public. Publicly, he’s simply what his ambition has made him, Victoria’s artist, a servant of Her Majesty the Queen.”

She shook her head. “You’re wrong. People would know. The Academy wouldn’t have let him in—”

He laughed softly. “My dear young woman, people don’t always tell.” He paused. “For instance, Henry didn’t. Henry knew perfectly well that Alfred had penned the drawings, but Henry had become some what Alfred’s patron. Henry had already made a huge to-do among his friends within the Academy over this bright new artist. Alfred Pandetti had a future. I, so far as Henry was concerned, did not. So Henry spared Pandetti—and himself—and threw me to the wolves.”

“If Henry did this”—Submit wasn’t certain she believed it—“
you
should have told.”

“Why? Henry and I both knew I would protect my friends—that’s one of the reasons why I had no future.”

“I still can’t understand why, if you knew this, you didn’t say.” Then a very good reason suddenly occurred to her. She could hardly believe it, even as she pronounced the possibility: “You protected Henry.”

The shadowed eyes clouded further. “I most definitely did not. I would have given Henry over to the Academy, St. John’s, Cambridge, every blessed temple he worshiped at, if only I could have. I just had no desire to ruin the career of so talented a man as Alfred Pandetti.”

“Then you shouldn’t have done the pictures. Someone could still speak up. People become jealous, gain enemies. Anyone who knows might suddenly tell.”

“And I’d defend him.”

She gave him a dubious look. “By lying?” she asked.

“By focusing on a broader truth.”

“Which is?”

“His art: It’s beautiful.”

Submit was a little uncomfortable with this. She frowned and leaned back onto her hands. A feeling had come over her, a feeling related to the one she’d had when he’d blurted out his involvement with the pictures in order to spare her memory of Henry—the contradictory sensations of disapproval, admiration, and gratitude. She felt confused again now. Graham Wessit flirted with the dark side of human nature and, in an upside-down way, this seemed honest and brave.

After perhaps a minute, Graham glanced again at her to confirm what seemed very unlikely to him—after all these revelations, Henry’s widow remained beside him. Mountains of skirts and crinolines were folded and spread, her copious dress encroaching upon his buttocks and shoe. He looked at her black-stockinged ankles peeking out of all this propriety. Irreverently, his mind suddenly called up other images. In all the pictures, Elizabeth had worn black stockings. Black stockings and garters and nothing else. “Aren’t you frightened to be out here alone with me?” he asked.

“Should I be?”

“I don’t know. Do you pose for sketches?”

Submit made a nervous laugh and rolled her eyes. “My gracious.” She addressed the inn on the horizon.

He smiled at the expletive and its underlining remove from such things as dirty pictures. It dawned on him that this woman knew how to keep him at bay—leaving him no sexual opening—while she probed him from one end of his privacy to the other. Like a doctor—
this will only be mildly uncomfortable….

She glanced at him and asked, “Miss Barrow. What has become of her?”

“Still in London. I don’t really see her much anymore. And I am ever so private about it now if I do. If that redeems anything.”

“Have you more elsewhere?”

“More what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Sketches, actresses.” She paused. “Twins.”

He glanced at her sideways, muzzling a meaner response. “Oh, dozens,” he replied. “I thought you might be more skeptical than that, might not be taken in by everything you hear.” He snorted: “Rumor.”

Submit floated the paper between his feet. “Fact.”

Graham didn’t answer, though neither did he see the picture. He stared blankly into it.

“I could start a new rumor,” she said after a time.

He made a sarcastic pull of his mouth as he picked up the picture, rolling it. He used it to dig absently in the grass between his legs.

“In a way, the earl of Netham is very like the marquess of Motmarche.” He looked over his shoulder at her. “Henry,” she continued, “was susceptible to moodiness, melancholia—almost as if he had an aesthetic preference for discontent. Whenever he would discover himself to be accidentally
happy for even a moment, he grew suddenly disgusted, revolted by the ugly simplicity of it. Angst, unhappiness seemed somehow to him more worthy, more complex. I would tease him. ‘Don’t
try
to be morose,’ I’d say.” She paused. “‘You can smile if you’d like.’”

Graham stared at Henry’s widow. She was still looking off, wearing a smile
he
liked very much. It was faintly crooked and richly feminine, the unique little line her mouth could draw. He wanted to be angry at her for her mildly gleeful and wholly unsympathetic speech, but he couldn’t. She cocked her head a few degrees, looking straight ahead as she leaned back on her narrow little arms. Her posture made her breasts pull taut against the front of her dress. They were plump little mounds. Sitting there smiling, she was naturally, horribly seductive, it occurred to him. Dressed in her widowhood, from her throat to her knuckles to the tips of her toes, she was a little piece of black silk erotica sitting beside him.

He watched her, her weight resting back on her arms, her legs stretched out before her on the ground. He noticed her black shoes tapping together, making a little squeak of soft leather as they stuck momentarily with each tap. When she caught sight of her own movement, her smile broadened. As if to counteract this betrayal of seriousness, she tilted her head down until he could see only her smooth, pale crown. Then she made a quick, unself-monitored gesture. She pressed her dress between her breasts—the black dress looked finally hot. Perspiration showed wet under her arms, ran a path down the bodice. Graham felt sexual interest ripple over him warmly to settle in his groin. He felt the first mild lift.

He stretched his own legs out and rolled to an elbow, noticing her retraction from him. She changed to a more upright position, contriving to put another inch or two between them. But his hand caught her chin. He stopped the retreat and forced her to look him in the face.