Black Silk (26 page)

Graham had no idea who was right. He brought in his
doctor for the sick infant and let the three of them work it out.

“Father?”

Graham was glad he had a doctor on hand when he looked at his daughter, Claire. She made a grimace as the doctor removed an eye patch from her right eye.

“Who is that awful, bleak woman?” She wasn’t in so much pain that she couldn’t turn the grimace into a moue of disdain. “The one who came yesterday with the bald, pudgy barrister?” Claire was not tolerant of any irregularity from beauty; she adored Rosalyn Schild.

Graham gave her a wry look. “Her name is Lady Motmarche, and just for the record, you have very indiscriminate taste. The lady is a lovely, intelligent marchioness who will undoubtedly come into at least part of a fortune that will probably make her the richest woman in England, save the queen.”

“Is that why you like her?”

“No.”

“I think she’s dour and plain.”

Graham set the coffee cup he’d brought in with him onto his daughter’s breakfast tray. “She’s lost her husband. And her home. You might be dour too in such circumstances.”

Claire laughed at the thought. “But never plain.”

“No.” He smiled at her over the head of the doctor. Her eye itself was bright red. The skin around it was black and blue and yellow—she’d been hit with a croquet ball. But the eye, without its patch, shifted to look at him. “No,” he reassured her again, “you’ll never be plain.”

The eye, with its dark, rather stunningly large partner, stared up as Claire spoke in a rush. “I love Mrs. Schild. I want you to marry her. She says you might. Will you? I’d love to have her around all the time. I want to be just like her—”

His expression must have given him away. As the doctor
turned to get something from the table beside the bed, Claire quickly became a bumbling, apologetic little creature, playing with her bedcovers.

“Well,” she continued, “not completely like her.” Then she threw him the most unlikely glance, a tilted chin. Her watery eyes—her injured one in particular had begun to run—held for a moment an unprecedented willingness to confront him. “Why can’t I be like her?” she pouted back at her covers. “Why do you like it just fine for
her
to behave like a courtesan, yet I can’t admire such a free life?”

Graham turned away from the bed, looking over the doctor’s shoulder. “I won’t even dignify such a question with an answer.”

“Because she behaves like a courtesan with
you
,” she accused.

He was forced to turn back to her at that remark. He sat on the arm of a chair and looked at his daughter. “Absolutely,” Graham said. “So don’t you dare get involved with anyone like me.”

She made a face. The poor, puffy black eye did not quite work with her antics. She winced. “I’ll never find anyone so fine as you,” she said with childish sincerity. “I think Mrs. Schild is lucky.”

He didn’t know what else to say. “Thank you.” He paused, then said, “I think Mrs. Schild is lucky, too—she has a husband who loves her very much.”

“You don’t love her?” The doctor was putting some sort of goo on the eye. She kept flinching, getting it all over her cheek.

He didn’t answer the question but said after a moment, “See that you’re polite to Lady Motmarche.” He got up again, thinking their little conversation done.

“Graham—”

And this really brought him up short. He turned, frowning deeply at this new facet to Claire’s experimentation in
the forbidden gardens of grown-up life. “I’d prefer ‘Father,’ if you don’t mind.”

Her chin lifted away from the doctor’s hand. “And if I do?”

“Then you can have your supper in your room till you change your tone with me.” He turned his back again.

“My eye hurts,” she complained, trying to lure him back.

“Dr. Grable can put another patch on it.”

“It makes me look ugly.”

From the door, he told her, “It makes you look injured, which you are.”

But she didn’t want to be rational. As he left, she called rather loudly, “I don’t like that stupid widow. I think she’s boring. So does everyone else.”

The words trailed after him down the hall.

William caught him before he could escape for a nap, his cousin getting finally to the point of his visit. William came periodically to hit anyone up for money he might have missed the last time around. People groaned when they saw him coming. Today he wanted a great deal more than usual. Graham wrote him a draft on his bank—it seemed worth it just to have him leave and thus leave poor Submit alone.

Unfortunately, William was thanking Graham effusively at the door of his study when Submit walked up.

“Graham,” William was saying, as he ogled the bank draft, “you have no idea how much this helps. I will be forever in your debt—Why, Lady Motmarche, we were only just speaking of you.” He smirked. “Indirectly.”

She looked from William to Graham. It would have been hard to convince her, Graham thought, that he hadn’t been speaking of her. He had been thinking of her as he had contemplated, then written and signed, the draft. The awful, insidious pleasure of giving William the money was that it guaranteed a longer lawsuit. Graham would have supported
William anyway perhaps, but it was an added attractiveness that he was, by helping William, incapacitating Submit, tethering her economically either here or to the inn, never too far away. Whenever he had looked at her over the last twenty-four hours, in his house, in his garden, in his boat on the lake, he’d felt a kind of elation—and a kind of terror that this bliss would end. It seemed hardly more than whim that had brought her here, making it seem equally plausible that she might suddenly, whimsically reverse all his pleasure and leave.

“Motmarche,” William was going on. Submit’s eyes had fallen on the draft in his hand. He made no effort to hide the zeros; there were three of them—his thumb over even one would have been nice. “Beautiful, beautiful Motmarche,” he said as he slowly began to fan the draft, as if drying the ink. “You have a lovely home, Graham, don’t misunderstand me, but Motmarche…. It’s a palace, aland of its own.”

“Yes.” Graham looked down. “It was incredible.”

“Is,”
William corrected.

“Yes, it is incredible,” Submit spoke finally. She was eyeing him with a perfectly focused and condemning regard.

“Well, thank you so very, very much.” William lifted his hat. “I must be off.”

She waited till he was out of earshot before she said in a low voice, “You gave him a thousand pounds. Do you know what that means to me?”

Graham frowned uncomfortably. “I’ve never made a secret to you of how I feel about William and Henry’s will.”

“Have you been giving him that kind of money all along?”

He had no idea if she would believe him. “No.”

“Why now?”

“He asked.”

“Lord.” She turned, actually pushing him in the chest as she wheeled around. When she glanced back at him, emotion
sparked off her eyes. “This is unconscionable, do you know that? You deserve that stupid serial. You
are
a blackguard.”

She disappeared up the stairs with a familiar sound: the churn of yards and yards of taffeta moving along at a crisp, angry step.

“The Black Widow,” William said again as he was getting into his coach. Graham had walked him out.

“Leave her alone, William.”

He smiled from the seat of his open landau coach. He had a driver in full livery—Henry’s livery. The vehicle was new. William was not suffering much through his lawsuit against the widow, though Graham shuddered to think of the debts that had to be mounting up.

Graham stepped forward to close the door, then hung on, speaking over it. “If you come again, don’t humiliate her, don’t torment her, don’t say one miserable thing, do you understand? If you do, I’ll never give you another halfpenny.”

William looked a little alarmed. “I thought you understood, Gray. She’s awful—”

“She’s very nice,” he contradicted.

“Then why are you helping me?”

He shrugged. “Habit, I suppose. It’s always seemed so pathetic that you can’t help yourself.”

William pulled his jaw forward into a jowly frown. “I can help myself, if you’ll let me. I could crush that silly girl who thinks she’s getting my father’s house and money.”

“Leave her alone.”

“She’s been nothing but a—”

“She’s not done a thing intentionally to you.”

“She took my land! And my father’s love!”

“Damn it,” Graham said a little impatiently, “you can’t sue for a larger portion of your father’s love. You’re going to be in litigation forever with this attitude. It’s going to gain you little but debt, and I’m sick to death of bailing you out.”

Abruptly, William’s face changed. His expression became stricken—humble remorse so perfectly contrived that Graham half believed his cousin felt a fraction of it. “Don’t think I don’t appreciate what you do,” William said. He leaned forward, putting his elbows on his legs as he looked between them. “Do you remember when we were younger,” he said to the carriage floor, “the time you told Henry
you
took the money meant for the milkman?”

Graham nodded, wondering where he thought this was going to get him.

“God, I was so grateful. Rugger was going to kill me if I didn’t pay up. Then Henry—you took such a whipping for it. I was sure you were going to tell: I would have. Every time I saw you flinch, over the next few days, I felt horrible.” He put a pause here, then said with facile, somewhat belated sympathy, “It must have been damned awful.” He looked at Graham, as if expecting some sort of comradelike corroboration. When he didn’t get it, he went on. “I also felt I had a friend. I thought—still do—you were the most loyal, courageous ally a man could have.” He waited till Graham looked at him, playing it very broadly now; sincere. “Thank you for the bank draft, Graham.” He made a faint snort. “Henry would hate you for it.”

There was a funny little moment. Perhaps it was the snort that made it so, accompanied by a sideways, crooked smile. These were the only honest expressions of pleasure that William possessed.

Graham tapped the top of the carriage door once as he stepped back. “You’re right. He would.” Henry didn’t believe in anyone getting anything without just merit: Henry didn’t believe in compassion. Nor could he have believed for even a moment that a resentful, rebellious young man might take a beating strictly for the satisfaction of undermining a pedant’s pitiless ethical code. Now, as then, Graham found a kind of blissful power in granting William a reprieve, while
at the same time turning Henry’s version of life’s order and consequences upside down. He felt a smile pulling at his mouth. “It’s what makes helping you so appealing, I’m sure: Henry wouldn’t like it at all.”

“And she’s his envoy.”

“Pardon?”

“Submit. She’s his representative on earth. His votaress.” William was absolutely serious. “Mephisto’s wife.”

“You have completely lost your mind, do you know that? You see devils in the skirts of a woman who is frightened and alone.”

“I see a Black Widow. And if you’re smart, Gray, you’ll bear in mind what I say: She’s poisonous, and she bites.”

When Graham saw her again, it was from his bay window. She was out in the back garden peeling an apple with a little knife. Looking at her, he thought,
My God, she does look deadly determined sometimes, lethal.
But it was not in the way that William suggested. Submit Channing-Downes’s lethal streak had a kind of objectivity, the same sort that characterized the necessity of nature, no matter how brutal the act. Something in her seemed to feel it vital that she go back to Motmarche. Graham had felt, in that moment when her eyes had glistened with tears, her tenacity, her determination to have what she needed. Like the spider. Submit survived in the way all relatively defenseless creatures did, Graham thought, her most wholesome, self-preserving traits misconstrued, maligned, and blown out of proportion.

Others besides William had trouble defining her or giving her a category. It would take Graham the rest of September, however, to understand that Submit was not universally liked. He knew already that Claire was no fan. Neither was Charles. That weekend, Tilney began referring to her as the Little Motmarche. He called her “wooden” and said she gave him the chills. Her detractors began to make
up a kind of club in Graham’s mind; the young, the literal, and the inane. She was becoming a kind of dividing line among his friends. Those few who had the discernment to like her—even Tate—grew in Graham’s eyes.

Graham watched her bite into the apple, her wet, mobile lips, her little white teeth crooked enough to make him push his tongue against the backs of his own, trying to imagine what her teeth would feel like. He was attracted to her. Perhaps
because
she was so difficult to classify. Watching her, he couldn’t decide what sort of female he was staring at—the arachnid, with its single fatal sting of sexuality, or the eternally attractive Eve.

“Submit?” Arnold Tate caught her attention. She was sitting on a bench in the back garden by the apple orchard. “I’d like to talk to you a moment.”

She didn’t feel much like talking, but she moved over and made room as she put the last bite of an apple into her mouth.

“I’m leaving,” Arnold said as he sat. He put his palms on his thighs and absently rubbed. “As soon as I can get my things together—and you yours, if you’d like. I’m sorry, but I can’t stay the whole weekend.”

She looked at him. “Has something happened?”

“No. Not exactly.” He was playing with his watch fob. “Well, in a manner of speaking.” He took a long, despondent breath. “What has happened is, well, Netham is right. Lawrence Carmichael jumped to a rather ugly conclusion about—about you and me last night. I have no business escorting a young woman to a country house for the weekend.”

“Arnold, don’t be silly. There is nothing—”

“Hush. I have a wife, with whom I don’t get along very well, I’m afraid, and two children I hardly see, but I have responsibilities to them, to myself. I shouldn’t be here.”