Dark Season (22 page)

She tried to control her breathing and felt, remarkably, a blush rising. Heat moving from her core up to her neck and face.
Thank God.
It meant her blood hadn’t congealed in her veins.

“I would have had the foot warmer prepared, if I’d known we were bathing in the Thames tonight.” He lifted his head, hands still gripping her feet, rubbing the soles, the heels, rubbing up to and around the ankles, sliding up the curve of her calves and back down. He looked worn and grim, jaw hardened against the cold, but his lips quirked.

What was he about?

“You
attacked
me,” she said wonderingly. One moment she’d been staring out at the black forest of yards and masts across the river, the next she was battling an unknown assailant, larger than she, and far stronger, battling for her life. That instant, when the iron arms closed around her, had been more terrifying even than the fall into the water.

The river, at least, was indifferent. Men, on the other hand, exulted in cruelty. Mastered all of its forms. She would rather drown than become fodder for such delights. But it wasn’t a cutthroat who’d grabbed her. It was Isidore Blackwood. She could not assimilate this knowledge.

“Attacked you?” The mockery in his eyes puzzled her. “Is that what happened?” His cheekbones stood out like blades as he thinned his lips, suppressing a shudder. She tried to open the greatcoat, to spread it over both of them, but he tucked it back around her.

“Keep it,” he rasped.

“You’re freezing.” She tried again to open the greatcoat. He swore again and pulled her onto his lap, wrapping his arms around her, holding her and the greatcoat firmly in place.

“I can’t freeze,” he said, shifting her to the side so his cheek was near hers. “Too much gin in my blood.”

She couldn’t smell the alcohol on his breath. All she could smell now was river slime. The fumes rising off both of them. And to think, the poor
drank
this fetid liquid, redolent of feces and decay. She shoved Mr. Penn’s voice from her head. Her stomach was still making noises.

“I doubt the coat is doing you much good.” Blackwood braced her with one arm and used the other to hook her wet hair and tuck it behind her ear. “Your dress is soaking.” His voice was low, lips against her earlobe. “I should have cut it off you.”

He sounded as though he were still considering the option. She half expected him to reach for the knife.

“I’m quite warm now,” she said hastily. He laughed against her neck, a little gust of warm air.

“Come, Miss Reed, we both know you’re a better liar than that,” he said.

“Ella.” It felt good to speak the truth. “You may call me Ella.”

Be careful. Be on guard lest you tell this man too much.

“Ella,” he repeated.

How could she be on guard? She was fighting to keep herself from dissolving into tears. After the shocks of the last few hours, physical and mental—it took the last remaining bit of her strength to remain clam. She
wasn’t
warm. The icy dress was a torment. They would both be so much warmer if he did cut the clothing off their bodies. If they clung together, skin to skin. The hard muscle of his thigh had pressed between her legs when he embraced her in the park. Now she was resting on those long, hard thighs, cradled against his chest.

She supposed, in a sense, the coat was doing her
plenty
of good. It kept her from feeling the heat of his body, yes. But it also kept her from feeling the contours of his body beneath her. The ridges of lean muscle. The rise of his hipbones.

“Why aren’t you asleep in bed … Ella?”

It seemed unfair that he would ask her that. He knew what tomorrow held. She was to be cast back on the world. The fragile calm she’d known at Trombly Place would shatter. Mrs. Trombly would be told that she was a thief. Mrs. Trombly would sit mute on the pretty sofa, a sorrowing, foolish woman, her misguided attempt to connect with the spirit world eroding her faith in the living, leaving her at the same time farther from the dead than ever.

And she would be friendless again and would feel it even more acutely for having had—though briefly, though she had won it falsely—the promise of help.

She said only, “Sleep doesn’t always come at the appointed hour.” There was nothing he could say to that. He wasn’t asleep, either. “I needed to think.”

She had to clench her teeth then, bite back the torrent of language that threatened to spill from her mouth. Her body wanted to void everything now. River water. Her inner ravings. She wanted to say more. Gush the words out.

I was going mad.

I was going to wear through the carpet, pacing.

I felt as though I really were a criminal, stealing out of the house, walking the streets in the night when all the innocent maidens are tucked under coverlets, dreaming sweet dreams with their curls spread on scented pillows. Perhaps I belong to the streets and the wharves and the drear, anonymous night. Insofar as I belong anywhere.

I felt as though I couldn’t stay another minute in that bedchamber, where Phillipa once dreamed her own sweet dreams, of her wedding, of her children.

I felt as though I were a nightmare that troubled Phillipa’s sleep. If I disappeared, she would wake up. None of it would ever have happened. She would be beside you now, in a tester bed, the two of you dry and warm. She would murmur as the memory of the nightmare faded, and you would smooth the worry line from her forehead and whisper, “It was just a bad dream.”

A dream sent by a jealous fairy. Morgan La Fey, lonely on her misty island, longing for the love of mortal man.

Insane fantasies. She’d been beside herself.

Thank God her lips stayed closed. The words did not spew forth. She forced them back.

She felt his chest move as he took a deep breath, preparing to question, to accuse. She couldn’t handle an interrogation. Not now. She was too cold, too tired, too defeated.

“Please,” she said and heard her voice break. She had the mortifying sensation that she needed to expectorate and did so, discreetly, into the fold of the coat. Funny, how she had swallowed half the Thames and could suddenly feel this desperate thirst.

She tried again. “Tell me the story of Rhodopis,” she said. “You asked me to remind you.”

He let his breath whistle out. Said nothing. The silence lasted so long, she began to drift away from herself. She was drifting away from her huddled body and the vibrating coach, up over the wide lanes of mansions, the dense, evil-smelling rookeries, the factories with their smokestacks like iron trees, up over the river that curved through it all, carrying disease, lapping against stone walls and marshy shores and causeways. She was drifting up over everything great and small, so high nothing could reach her. Then he spoke, and she heard him as though from far off, and at first his words sounded alien, as though she were no longer part of the human community. But they tethered her. She could follow them back down.

She turned her face so her cheek touched his before she realized what she was doing. His cheek was clammy. The soft rumble of his voice resolved into meaningful units.

“Rhodopis was a Greek girl,” he said. “She lived on a rocky island where cyclamen grew pink and white, and the sea was clear as glass. She tended goats and ate figs and honey.”

She could
see
the island as he spoke. He conjured it with his words, with the cadence of his voice. She curled up more tightly, burrowing into the coat, into him.

“One day,” he said, “raiders came and slaughtered the goats and burnt the fig trees and smoked the hives, and they took Rhodopis to Egypt, where she became a slave. She was sold to a cruel master who took her to his city. It was called Hephaestopolis. Can you guess what that means?”

“City of the fire god,” she whispered. She could see that too. City of metal, scorched clay, living coal.

“Yes,” he said, stroking her hair, then resting his hand on her brow. The comfort she derived from that gesture. It made the tears stand in her eyes.

“It was always hot in Hephaestopolis,” he continued. “And Rhodopis was forced to do the hottest work. She had ashes always in her hair, and she turned the oxen on spits all day and night for her master. But her spirit was unbroken. Every now and then she would creep away to the river Naucratis and dance and sing for the fish and the birds and shake the ashes from her hair and wash the soot from her skin. The animals loved her and wanted her to be happy. But they knew not how to help her. Then an eagle flew down while she bathed and stole one of her slippers. He flew with it to the Pharaoh, who was driving his chariot through the desert. The Pharaoh trusted that the eagle had presented him with the slipper for a reason, and he vowed to test it on every woman in the land until he found its owner. Rhodopis was found and brought to the Pharaoh at Memphis, and though his advisors cried out that she was only a slave and worse, a Greek, no fit queen, he swore that none other would be his wife. He married her at the river Naucratis with the fish and the birds and the eagle in attendance.”

“And she was happy?” Ella stirred, and he took his hand from her head, clasped her again around the middle.

“Ever after,” he said. “So the story goes.”

“Cinderella.” Her eyes had closed, and she could not open them. Her tremors were getting worse not better.

“The first Cinderella,” he said. “The earliest known tale. The third pyramid was built for her.”

“Did you go there?” She wanted him to keep talking, to keep telling her stories. He could be whimsical. She already knew that about him. He had alluded to Arthurian legend. To Hansel and Gretel and their trail of crumbs. This demon viscount—so tall, so broad, so strong, so harsh and unbending—he reminded her of the heroes she’d read of in books. He did not seem like a man who would stroke her hair and murmur fairy tales into her ear. But he was full of contradictions. He loved myths as much as she did. How odd that they had this in common. Imagination for her had been a refuge. Imagination was for the weak.

She lifted her lids partway and peered down at his hands, one folded atop the other on the greatcoat. They were large, brutal, the knobs and hollows of the wrists pronounced, roped by veins, but the fingers were long, sensitive, just the slightest bit tapered. When she’d first seen them she’d been struck by their menace. Their beauty. The hands of a strangler or a sculptor. She was beginning to think it wasn’t one or the other; he had proclivities for both, destruction and creation.

“I went there.” He nodded, the roughness of his cheek abrasive. She wanted him to nod again. Anything to make her know her skin was living, connected to sensation. Not wax. Not clay. “I climbed the pyramid at sunrise. I could see in front of me the Nile valley, white mist parting above green plains and black soil, and behind me the desert, vast as the ocean. The sands looked purple. Inside, the chambers are filled with bats.”

“What else?” She used the excuse of speech to move her face ever so slightly against his. His voice lulled her, rising and falling, as he painted pictures in the air.

“What else?” He paused. “I met a party of Frenchmen and rode with them to their camp. They’d raised a tent in the shade of a palm grove. But most of them had passed the night like the Arabs, wrapped in blankets, burrowed in the sand. They were proud to tell me that. We drank coffee and smoked pipes. They showed me their booty, collected from the tombs and caves. I remember one had a mummified child, an infant really, curled up. He wanted me to hold it. Feel how light it was. They invited me to go with them to watch a beheading in a nearby village. I made it to the courtyard and turned around.”

She felt the tension in his jaw. “This isn’t what you meant,” he said. He barked a bitter laugh that turned into a cough. “Why am I telling you these things?” He shook his head slightly. “Another legend says that Rhodopis was never a queen. She was a great courtesan. She rubbed gold powder on her skin and glowed in the sun. Her eyes were like fire … ” His voice trailed off.

She whispered, “I could listen to you for hours,” but her voice was fading. It was almost inaudible, even to her. Right then, Egypt sounded like paradise to her. Blazing sun. Burning sand. But it was more complicated than that. What he said, and what he didn’t say, revealed so much. He had seen things, maybe even done things, that troubled him. She wanted to be someone to whom he told his stories. Someone with whom he shared his troubles. This desire frightened her as much as anything.

“You’re a good storyteller,” she said in a stronger voice.

“No one has ever complimented my storytelling.” She thought she could detect a hint of pleasure in his ironic drawl.

“It’s important,” she said. “Storytellers pay attention. They care about the little details. They’re awake to beauty.”

“And ugliness.”

“You can’t have one without the other.” She coughed too, muffling her mouth in the coat. “They exist as a dyad, together.” It was one of Papa’s favorite topics, culture as composed of oppositions—good/bad, beautiful/ugly, life/death. “Only art, poetry, music, by
intensifying
experience instead of merely identifying and delimiting, can rupture the binary system. Make it overflow. The beautiful and the ugly, each in excess, no longer divided. One is carried into the other and back again. A vortical motion.” She stopped, her scratchy throat closing. She’d never voiced anything like this outside of the library at Arlington Manor, where she and Papa had discussed philosophy, religion, the hermetic tradition, neo-Platonism, metaphysical poetry—everything unfashionable. These notions, these abstractions,
mattered
to her. She shouldn’t have attempted to explain them. She’d sounded embarrassingly earnest.

But he didn’t jeer. He shifted her again on his lap, so she sat turned to the side, his arm supporting her back. In this position, they could see each other face-to-face. His gaze was a snare. She couldn’t look away. He was thinking about what she’d said. He was intent
. Interested.

“And this motion?” he asked. “This motion by which the dyad becomes other than what it is? Do we know it when we experience it? What is the effect?”