Blue Damask (36 page)

     She prepared herself for that.  She still hurt inside, so food was not a problem.  She could use more water, and tea or coffee would be nice to have as the chill of the night descended.  She wondered again if he would build a fire.

     He disappeared and was gone so long she decided to build a fire herself before it got too dark to gather wood.  She slid lower down the hill to where cottonwoods grew along the banks of the river and carried two loads of brush and tree-fall back to the mound of earth.  She built the small fire and had it crackling with the light and sound that had comforted mankind for thousands of years.  The fire brought Sonnenby back.  He set down the filled water skins, and then followed them to the ground.

     Elsa put the coffee pot in the fire to boil and began to grind their coffee beans with Descartes’ mortar and pestle.  Sonnenby brought the horses closer to the grave and ferried their supplies to the edges of the firelight.

     “Do you think we will be attacked?” She asked him while the coffee boiled.

     “No.”

     “Good.”

     When he was finished he sat down across the fire from her and stared into it as she did.  She passed him a tin cup of hot coffee.  “Drink.  You will feel better.”

     He took the cup, but glared at her.  The planes of his face were harsh in the firelight.

     “You will,” she insisted.

     “What is the point?”  He drank his coffee and poured himself more.

     “Of feeling better?”  She shook her head.  “I don’t know.  I am trained to make people feel better.  It is what I do.  I suppose the point is to relieve suffering, but if one enjoys suffering then I am doing them a disservice by relieving them of their pleasure, aren’t I?  One should know the difference.”

     He snorted.  “Answered like a therapist.”

     “I am a therapist.”

     “I don’t want to talk to a therapist.  I want to talk to you.”

     Elsa was silent.  Her stomach started to hurt again.  She rubbed it with her hand and drank her coffee.  She poured another and then said, “Did you know Jean-Philippe had a wife and a child?”

     He shook his head.  “He never told me.”

     “I have to assume they are dead,” she continued.

     “Why?”  He drank his coffee and set the cup down by his knee.

     “Because he would never leave them to come out here to the wilderness.”

     “How can you be so certain?  Perhaps he couldn’t wait to get away from her.  Perhaps she was an unfeeling shrew who hounded him day and night.”  He bit off each word.

     Elsa sighed.  She got up and moved around the fire to sit beside him.  He tensed but made no effort to move away from her.

     “An unfeeling shrew?”  She kept her voice low and soft and took his right hand in hers and rested it on her lap.  “Hounded day and night?”  He tried to take his hand away but she held tight.  “Henry, you are my patient.  I cannot be your lover.”

     “I don’t need a
nurse
.”

     That might be true.  He might improve more with a lover than a caregiver, but Elsa’s heart sank.  He would find it difficult to entice an honest one.  Some women might be attracted to the idea that he had money and a title, but there was no escaping his past.  He was labeled a lunatic.  This usually marked a man loveless for life. This is what he is thinking
.
  The only love he could expect would be false love from prostitutes and gold diggers.

     Elsa felt a pang in her middle again.  She was surprised that thoughts of strange women locked in embrace with Sonnenby brought out ferocious feelings of jealousy.  How odd.  She looked up at him.  He was looking down at her under the brim of Descartes’ fedora.  He was calm.  He blinked steadily, his breathing normal and even.  His hand was warm and heavy in hers.  Descartes blood and the dirt from his grave were ground into the bandages on his hands.  The bandages needed to be replaced.   Elsa stopped herself. That was a nurse’s thought. She realized she didn’t want to be his nurse.

     She said, “Hamlet worried.”

     His eyes slowly widened.  “Hamlet?  We are talking about literature now?”

     She nodded and started to unwrap his hand absently, picking at the edges of the cloth.  “Hamlet wondered if he were really mad.  The idea terrified him.  It was better to tell his friends he was pretending.  This way they would not suspect the truth.”

     “I thought he was quite sane,” Sonnenby murmured, watching her unwrap his hand.

     She tilted her head.  “No.  He was not.”

     Sonnenby inhaled sharply as she touched a swollen knuckle.  He argued, “Hamlet was not mad, he was depressed.”

     “Certainly he was.” Sonnenby had new raised blisters on his palm from the shovel.  “Hamlet contemplated the nature of life and death,” she turned his hand over and smoothed her finger over the back, “but he rejected suicide.”

     “At first.”  Sonnenby said.  He gave her his other hand to examine.  “But in the end he did kill himself deliberately, with honor instead of the ignominy and cowardice of an obvious suicide.”

     She looked up.  “Really?  I did not see his death that way.  What makes you say that?”

     “From what he said near the end. About how forty thousand brothers with all their quantity could not make up his sum of grief.”

     “What?”  She knew the lines he spoke of.  They were part of the grave scene at Ophelia’s funeral.

     Sonnenby watched her work on his hand. “Hamlet was moving through his life without direction, first this way, then that way, but when he discovered that Ophelia was dead, it was all over for him.  He did not want to live anymore.  He did love her, you know.  He was only acting for Polonius and Claudius when he was so cruel to her.”

     Elsa unwrapped his other hand, slowly, understanding.  “What tipped you off to his final despair?”

     He raised his chin in a theatrical pose and said, “
If it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all
.” He turned his dark eyes on her.  “He was finally ready to die.”

     Elsa considered this idea then argued, “But he told Horatio he would not lose the duel.  He wanted vengeance. He was ready to kill everyone.  He had already started to kill methodically.  First with Polonius, then Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, then certainly the king--”

     Sonnenby shook his head.  “No. He wanted honor.  Hamlet told Horatio to tell his story, lest he be known as a wild murderous madman instead of an honorable man trying to right the rottenness of Denmark. He wanted honor.”  Sonnenby’s voice cracked, “There is nothing else a man takes to his grave.”  He leaned closer to her, lifted his hand from her lap and pointed at the fresh mound of dirt beside him. “There is nothing but honor in the end.” His voice then turned savage, “Is there?”
His eyes challenged her to deny it.

     Elsa swallowed.  Her stomach hurt.  He was correct.

     “Elsa Schluss.  Do you love me?”  He took his other hand away from her.

     She felt the sudden loss of both his hands.  To love him was to lose all honor.

     “I am forbidden to love you,” she told him honestly.  Her voice sounded like another woman’s voice.

     “I do not care what is forbidden.  I want to know the truth.”  He swallowed hard as though he might not really want to know.

     Elsa covered her face with her hands.  She had not allowed herself to weep for Jean-Philippe, but now she did.  She wept for both of them, and for herself.  Her shoulders shook and she wept into her hands, sobbing loud enough to make the horses raise their heads from the grass.

     “Elsa.”  He took her hands away from her face and she let him see her wet and blotchy and miserable.  He looked at her eyes and her cheeks and her mouth and nodded to himself.  “You do love me.  Thank God,” he sighed with relief.  “I thought I was crazy.”

     She coughed a reluctant laugh that was on the edge of hysterical, and then told him, “I cannot. I cannot love you.”

     “You do though.”  He kissed her palms.  “Ophelia went darkly mad, truly mad, for love, Elsa.  Don’t make her mistake.”

     “No.”  She agreed.  “No.”

     “I love you.  I want you to be my wife.”

     “I cannot.”

     “You can.”  His voice was deep and even.  “Just say you will.”  He handed her the cloth they were using on the handle of the coffee pot.  She wiped her eyes and her nose.  “Say it,” he insisted.  “Tell me you will be mine forever.  You will wake up beside me every morning.  You will drink your coffee with me every breakfast, read the newspaper with me, walk with me, go to the theater and the opera with me, talk to me, talk to me, talk to me every evening, and then lie every night in my arms with my kiss on your lips as you fall asleep every single night for the rest of your life.”  He brought her hand to his lips.  “Tell me.”  He kissed her thumb, and then each of her other fingers. “I want to hear your voice talking to me for the rest of my life.”

     She tried to keep her face from falling apart. She failed.

     He insisted. “Tell me.”

     Her voice would not obey him.  Her mind was too strongly in control of that part of her body.  But her heart took the rest of her and nodded her head even as she was trying to say how sorry she was that she could not accept his gracious proposal on professional grounds.

     He released her hand and leaned in to kiss her properly on the mouth.  Her arms put themselves around his neck and brought him close to her.  She breathed in his warm scent of sweat and dirt and horse and leather and coffee and grass.  She kissed him hard because it felt good.

     She rubbed her cheek against the stubble on his jaws and dug her fingers into his shoulders and the thick muscles of his upper arms. Inside her she felt the fluttering of happiness and no trace of an ache.  Losing one’s honor felt so good all over.

     He pushed her over onto the grass on the slow slope and laid her down.  He removed the fedora and set it gently on the dirt mound of Descartes’ grave beside them.  Elsa felt a shivering flash of anxiety.   It had been a kiss.  A good kiss.  An excellent kiss.  She realized she had needed a kiss. A therapeutic kiss, and a salutary embrace.  She had been feeling vulnerable and weak from grief and loss and exertion.  Human beings craved physical contact in times of great stress. It had been a moment of terrible weakness, but she would pull herself together.  She pressed her knees together under the long skirt.   It had been a kiss, not an invitation.

     But like pulling a trigger, that one kiss set in motion events that would end in injury or death.  Not the death of her body, but of her career.  If she were lucky it might only be a flesh wound.  But it did not look that way.

     He moved slowly, as though he was fully aware that she might bolt and head off downhill to the river like one of the horses freed from its picket line.  He was tentative, like he could not believe she had agreed to be his lover.  She had not, though.  Or had she?

     He spread his left hand and placed it carefully over her ribs beneath her breast and leaned over her to kiss her again.  He was caressing her now, not touching her breast, but moving down her waist and over her hip and then along the length of her thigh.  His kisses were alternatingly soft and then harder when his hand touched a part of her that excited him. Touching her was therapeutic for him as well.  She winced.  This was not the kind of therapy she wanted to provide.  Not what she intended.  Not good.

     His left hand pulled her blouse from the waist of her skirt, then slid up her ribs under the cloth. He spread his fingers to engulf her breast and squeezed softly, exploring its roundness and softness.   This movement was accompanied by another kiss and a soft sound of approval in his throat.

     “Henry,” she whispered.  His touch warmed her all over and when his fingers brushed past her nipple she felt an electric tingle that told her that her body was betraying her.  She did not want to feel good this way.  This was wrong.

     His hand left her breast and then her skirt began to move up her thigh.  She wiggled to break contact with his mouth so she could tell him that she thought he was being wickedly forward with her affections.  Her voice rebelled and refused to complain that he was taking liberties.  He kissed her again and now he was making soft humming sounds in his throat as he kissed her.  Low sounds, not exactly moans, but more like what accompanies arousal and intent.  His hand then disappeared from her thigh and she could feel him over her hips and belly fumbling with his belt.

     “
Gott im Himmel,”
Elsa murmured
.
It was really going to happen.  Here in the grass.  Beside the grave of their dear friend.  Somewhere northwest of Baghdad in the wilderness of Anatolia.  If she permitted it.  The loss of everything.

     He stopped fumbling with his trousers.  He looked at her with eyes dark in the night, but glittering with the reflection of the fire beside them, seeking permission to proceed by moving himself slowly against the inside of her thigh.  His readiness was evident.

     Of course he should not proceed.  But her knees relaxed and her hips moved to accommodate him.  She took a deep breath and wanted him.  She wanted to feel his warmth, breathe in the scents of grass and fire and man and leather.  She wanted to connect and not feel so alone anymore.