Death be Not Proud (26 page)

It was his turn not to answer and he continued to stare without perceiving, his head averted.

“
Matthew!
”

He turned his face slowly towards me.

“Why are you still here? Why are you not running from me – after what I said to you? You were frightened – I saw it – I could taste it. But here you still stand.”

He shook his head, confused.

“Yes, and here I'll stay. What you became just now –
that
frightened me – but I'm not scared of
you
, Matthew. I don't believe you would have hurt me, no matter what you said you would do.” His shoulders slumped and he suddenly aged with the burden he carried. “Why are you trying to frighten me off? What have I done?”

The snarl resurfaced. “You?
You
haven't done anything.”

I backed away again. He stepped forward, his hand out to me, pleading.

“No – Emma, please, you're right, I won't hurt you – not like that. But I am going to hurt you in other ways – I can see no other choice. I am going to hurt you and I don't know whether you will ever be able to forgive me.”

My heart collapsed into the pit of my stomach.

“Is that why you brought me here, so that I couldn't run?” His lack of an answer verified my assumption. “What can be so bad that you think I would want to, anyway?”

His eyes slid to my face and then away again.

He banked the fire right up until the log burner was stacked full, his hand placing the timber in the middle of the flames leaving no more than a slight reddening of his skin that disappeared almost as soon as he withdrew it. The fire belted out heat but I felt cold. A steady stream of freezing air filtered from the broken window, now no more effective at insulating the room from the elements than a single sheet of glass. But had the triple-glazing been intact, I would still have shivered, both from the shock of what had happened and from the expectation of what might come.

He had hardly spoken since.

I sat stiffly, crammed against the arm of the taupe cord sofa, still fearful of his reactions and watching him warily. He made slow, deliberate movements and kept as far away from me as the confines of the seating area would allow. I strove to think of anything he could have done that might horrify me the way he believed it would.

A burning log fell against the glass of the door, breaking the taut silence.

“Is it because you have killed – is that it?”

“Yes, I have killed – a long, long time ago – and I would have killed again if you hadn't stopped me.”

His eyes reflected the frantic dance of the flames.

“You said I was a whore, Matthew.”

I couldn't keep the hurt from my voice; he had made all my longing for him seem cheap and dirty – no more than an overzealous slut in a hotel room.

His head snapped up. “No, Emma, I did not. I said that I would
make
a whore of you if I…” He swore quietly under his breath before he continued. “I asked you what you see when you look at me.” He checked that I remembered, but it was something I would find hard to forget. “I'm going to rephrase that; what do you
know
of me?”

I licked my lips nervously, wondering where this would lead.

“I… I know what you have told me,” I said, hesitant.

He pulled a face, indicating regret. “I won't get angry, no matter what you say.”

“I know what I found out – you know that now, too. I know what others have said about you…”

“Ah.” He nodded, a twist to his mouth. I stopped again, waiting for the reaction. “Go on,” he said. “What
do
people say?”

“That you are one of the finest surgeons they know, a bit of a loner, a family man.”

“Ah,” he said again. My hand went up to my cross to jumpily fiddle with it. He followed every movement I made.

“What about my
family
?”

His tone had that quality that made me flinch, overly
calm, searing in its softness.

“That you are devoted to them,” I said desperately. His eyes glinted and he leaned towards me, the firelight illuminating one side of his face, the shadow-side almost demonic in the dark contrast into which it was thrown.

“And?”

“And? And what? That you… you…” I began to stutter. I swallowed. “That you came to Maine after your wife's death…”

He startled me by leaping to his feet without warning, lithe as a cat, and began treading the small square in front of the fire.

“My wife, yes. I'm a widower – isn't that right, Emma?”

His head swivelled to look directly at me and he stopped pacing for a second,

“Y… yes.”

A humourless smile carved across his face.

“Well, that isn't
quite
the case.”

“What?”

A horrible, familiar sensation began to form where my stomach should have been. I wasn't following the script. He began his patrolling again – back and forth, back and forth.

“Emma, my wife isn't dead.”

I felt as if he had just inserted his hand into my gut and was extracting it piece by piece.

“She's alive? You're still
married
?”

I waited for him to deny it, to say that it had all been a misunderstanding – even a sick joke – but he continued marking out my heartbeats with every step he took.

“You
lied
to me?”

He ceased pacing. “Isn't it what I do best?”

His words sank into place.

I was on my feet, yelling at him, blind fury taking over every sinew of my body, all fear and caution gone.

“You lied to me all this time? You could have told me – you utter and total
bastard
!… I would never,
ever
have looked at you, never let you touch me, if I'd known. I would have done anything for you, I would have died for you, I believed in you… And you do this to me… you've betrayed me, you've betrayed
her
.”

And I flew at him as I had never done at Guy, because Guy had meant nothing to me in comparison to what this man had become. I wanted to hurt him in any way I could, I wanted him to suffer as I had, as I did, in the only way I could express it: beating him, hitting him, flailing against his chest, welcoming the pain it brought to my own arms as they made contact with his hard body, the frenzy of my attack made more passionate by the futility of it all. The pain became unbearable and he grabbed both of my arms and so I kicked at him instead, but he just stood back so that I abused nothing but the air. Overwhelmed with frustration, unable to find the words to tell him how his own had shredded my heart, I tried to break free from his grip, wrestling without result, ready to run, wanting to run, ready to find oblivion out in the frozen expanse. But he wouldn't let me go. I wrenched to free myself from him, my arm screaming in pain where the newly healed bone threatened to break again.

“No, Emma – stop!”

I tried to bite his hand, but he held it out of reach, so I tried to break his thumb instead, but it was useless; I was trapped.

“Emma – stop. Enough!”

He let go of one of my arms, then the other, swiftly encasing me in a ring of steel made of his own arms so that
I couldn't move any more. I attempted to twist out of them, duck beneath them, but there was no give in the cage he made around me.

“Enough, Emma; that's enough now.” His voice poured balm on my wrath, but I would have none of it.

“
No!
”

“Emma, shh.”

How dare he – how
dare
he try to calm me!

“NO! You lied, you lied!
Let… go… of… me.
”

“No.”

“
Bastard!
Let me go –
now
!”

“No, Emma.”

I pushed against his arms, dug my nails into his hands, but nothing I did made any impression on the confinement in which he held me.

“Let me go…
please
…”

Exhausted, what fight I had left in me evaporated, and my legs gave way. Matthew continued to hold me until he could feel my sobs coming harsh and freely, then he lowered me onto the sofa, where I buried my head in the deep upholstery, my body shuddering convulsively. He found a heavy blanket and wrapped it around me and then left me to cry.

 

I had been such a fool – hadn't he said as much only a short while ago? What ever made me think I could trust him any more than I could have trusted Guy? But I thought I could – my handsome, clever, good and trustworthy doctor – who had risked exposure to save me, who had crossed the Atlantic to bring me back, who undoubtedly loved me. But not enough. Not enough to tell me the truth and not enough to leave his wife for me. For all his extraordinary past, his present was as fallible, as imperfect, as
mortal
as my own. My anger burned
from deep within – an all-consuming furnace that rendered void all other emotion – his betrayal complete.

 

“Emma, have this.” I felt the touch of his hand on my shoulder, and shook him off roughly.

“Drink this, you need it, it'll help.” His hand lay insistently on me.

“I don't want it,” I barked at him.

“I know you don't, but drink it anyway.”

I steadfastly refused to move and I heard him sigh and put something down on the floor. Placing his hands under my arms, he lifted me like a child, turning me around and putting me back on the sofa so that I faced him. I tried to cross my arms in denial of him but they hurt, and he winced. He crouched in front of me, lower than my line of sight so that I would have to turn my head to avoid looking at him, and I was blowed if I was going to do that. He held a red-and-white checked mug out to me, its cheerful gingham in direct contrast to everything I felt. Rage still purred through my veins: delightful hot fury, as vengeful as lust.

I lashed out. “I said I don't
want
it!”

Too quick, he removed the mug from the path of my arm before I hit it.

“I heard what you said,” he said calmly – not the spooky calm of before, but the tranquillity gained from letting go of something that had haunted him for a very long time. “Emma, I want you to drink this and I want you to do so
now
.”

I scowled at him and he held my gaze, but I couldn't not do what he told me, even though I resisted with every inch of my being. He raised the mug to me again and this time I took it.

“
Gheugh
– you've put sugar in it!”

“Drink it.”

“Bastard.”

“Yes, but drink it anyway.”

“I didn't mean the bloody
tea
.”

“Yes, I know you didn't.”

“Stop agreeing with me.”

He sighed again. I fully intended making his life hell and he knew it.

There is that province that lies between sleeping and waking in which the tranquillity of the night still reigns before the harsh reality of day begins.

For those few brief moments before I became fully awake, I drifted comfortably in a half-world before the significance of the previous night imposed itself forcibly on my waking mind. My eyes cracked open and for a second I didn't know where I was. A chilly white ceiling climbed to an apex above my head with heavy wooden beams spanning the space below it. My resting pulse quickened as I remembered, and I jerked fully awake, leaning on one elbow as the fog cleared from my brain. He had put me to bed, still clothed. He had removed my shoes and loosened the waistband of my trousers, but that was all. My eyes and mouth were dry – tacky dry – and a taste clung to my tongue. A glass of water sat by the bed untouched. I lifted it and sniffed, but it smelled as it appeared, and I sipped it once before draining the glass. I strained to listen for any sounds that might tell me where Matthew might be, although what I would do if I saw him was anybody's guess.

An eddy of conflicting currents obscured my mind – a mass of information recorded in fleeting images and half-
remembered words, confused by the chaos of emotion. The yo-yoing between his anger and the threat of violence, and the very real assault on my sensitized emotional state, left me crippled but seething with resentment.

I had been here before.

I hadn't believed my tutor at first because it was so much easier to pretend that it had all been a ghastly mistake. But she had presented me with the evidence of Guy's perfidy in the full knowledge that I would first examine the facts. And I did so, picking away at the mortar of our relationship so that, brick by brick, it disassembled before me; she knew it to be the only way I would accept what she told me.

I had crawled back to my room in the old stone college in a state of numbness, before making up my mind what to do with the information. I knew Guy well enough to know that he would have been content to allow things to continue in just the same way they had done before his little secret had been uncovered. I even thought that he would have rather enjoyed the additional titillation it would offer our relationship, especially since I then discovered that I had already met his wife.

She had been at a faculty party at the end of the Michlemas term – a tall, striking woman with dark-brown hair which she tied back from her face, elongating her already fine cheekbones and evening out the first telltale signs of age. She wore a tight-fitting black cocktail dress that showed off her toned legs and bum, and she told me that she ran by the River Cam every morning before taking the children to school. I found her self-assurance quite intimidating – gained, I supposed, from her success as a lawyer, and as wife to a leading academic. My sense of betrayal was as much for her as for me: we were both the unwitting victims of the same man's ego.

When I told Guy that our relationship was over, I listened to his excuses patiently before telling him exactly what I thought of him. Even then, he persisted – phoning, writing, waiting at the door of my room – until it all became too much and I told my father, because there was no one else in whom I could confide. It left me shattered – bruised enough to jeopardize my studies, but not damaged enough to destroy them.

Despite his protestations of love, there had always been a part of me that reserved judgment on Guy, never quite trusting him as fully as I needed to, but willing myself to believe that I did. That tiny part of me remained inviolate, cushioned from the full force of his deception by my passion for my subject. The journal had been the safety net into which I fell, and my new-found faith plucked me from the tangled mess in which I'd found myself, and put me back on my feet.

This was different. I had given Matthew every ounce of what made me whole; no part of me lay hidden from him and I felt fully exposed to whatever he chose to throw at me. What hurt all the more was that, unlike Guy, he never assumed I was his for the taking. I offered myself on a sacrificial plate, a willing immolation to his fire. Perhaps I had been wrong in supposing he felt the same way I did. Perhaps, because of his old-fashioned manners, I imagined we shared an old-fashioned attitude towards marriage. How
stupid
! I should have known better.

It snowed viciously now – hard flurries diving, rattling, hissing against the window-wall of the room. Drawing up my legs under the heavy quilt, I attempted to squeeze the gnawing discomfort from inside where all the nervous tension of the day before had taken up residence, and thought about where I would go from here. But there was no point staying in bed
and I resented the fact that he had put me there. It had only ever been meant for the two of us and, without him, it made a mockery of my desire. I no longer wanted to be here. I had nothing left to stay for.

Hot water from the tank, heated by the log burner downstairs, flowed into the heavy bath, and I bathed quickly. Had circumstances been different, I would have enjoyed staying at the cabin; as it was, I couldn't wait to escape.

I couldn't care less what I wore. I angrily pulled on jeans, and brushed my teeth and hair in the same frame of mind, tying the hair into a rough plait; but that was it – that was all the effort I would make and it sure as anything wasn't for
him
.

The faint smell of cooking bacon interrupted my silent tirade. Despite my rancour, I felt hungry; I had missed a meal last night and fallen asleep soon after drinking the tea.

“
NO!
”

I realized now what the strange taste in my mouth had been when I woke. By the time I made it downstairs, I had worked myself into a fury and I knew who would get the brunt of it.

 

“You
drugged
me!” I accused him as soon as I stalked into the kitchen.

Matthew continued to break an egg into the griddle on the stove. It spat as the hot fat cooked the edges of the white, crisping them a friable gold. Strips of bacon kept warm on a plate next to the griddle.

“I sedated you; you were in a pretty bad state.”

“I was angry – there was nothing wrong with me.”

He spooned hot fat over the egg, the transparent white becoming opaque in an instant.

“You were distraught, you needed to rest.”

“That was not
your
decision to make.”

My fists clubbed as I readied myself for the fight. He looked at me for the first time, the blue of his irises intensified by the white of the snow outside and the cream sweater he wore.

“I rather think it was.”

He remained infuriatingly calm, and returned to the task in front of him. I wanted to shake him, abuse him, reduce him to a writhing mass of black spite, as he had done to me – anything to get a reaction which would justify me hating him.

“What are you doing
that
for – you don't eat,” I said rudely.

He refused to be goaded, placing the cooked egg precisely on the plate next to the bacon.

“No, but you do.”

He held the plate out to me, but I stood there like a spoilt, stubborn child, my arms stiff by my sides, glaring at him.

“Emma, it's not much, eat it – you can argue with me as much as you like afterwards.”

I snatched it from him, detesting my behaviour as much as I hated him. I slammed the plate on the table where already a knife and fork lay next to a slate place mat, hearing the satisfying
chink
of porcelain on stone. If I tried again a little harder, the fine china would disintegrate into as many pieces as he had broken me. Matthew watched as I picked up the knife and fork reluctantly – fighting my hunger – and then turned his back to allow me to swallow my pride and eat.

As I finished the last piece of bacon, he placed the mug in front of me, taking the empty plate away. I eyed it suspiciously.

“It's just tea, Emma.”

He had the patient tone that adults adopt when dealing with a disgruntled child, but the food had taken the edge off
my temper, despite myself. I was still up for a fight though, if he offered me one.

“That's what I
thought
it was last night.” I took a sip anyway; he'd remembered not to sugar it, but then he wasn't trying to disguise the taste as he had yesterday. “Now what happens? Is this where you tell me that your wife doesn't understand you, or that you were going to leave her anyway?”

He had been in the process of cleaning the work surface, but now he turned slowly, leaned against the kitchen sink and folded his arms, regarding me sombrely.

“No, I won't leave her.”

Now, why did that not surprise me? I gave a snort of a laugh.

“So, what do you want from me – do you expect me to be your mistress?”

I couldn't disguise the bitterness in my voice and he heard it, too.

“No.”

I stared at him, wavering between hurt and rage. For all the protestations I made over Guy and his marriage, there had been the tiniest part of me that hoped – even if I wouldn't admit it to myself – that Matthew and I could still be together in some way. I felt another door slam in my face and my temper began to blaze from desperation.

“What, then? If you won't leave her and you don't want me to be your
whore
, I take it that you don't want me at all. You went to all that trouble to fetch me back from the UK and to bring me up here, to tell me
that
? You could have saved yourself the bother and told me a long time ago; then I wouldn't need to be here.” Heat flooded my face. “Actually, you could have saved us all the time and trouble and not have spoken to me in the first place. Why did you do it? I was
perfectly happy before I met you; why couldn't you just have left me
alone
, Matthew?”

A sudden gust of wind sucked at the chimney; inside the log burner, the flames stretched and flared, licking the glass.

“I told you once that I'm selfish. I didn't set out to fall in love with you; I tried not to…”

“You didn't try very hard,” I snapped.

“I tried hard enough, believe me.”

“After
this
? Why the hell should I?”

I found his quietude disturbing. “Because you love me as much as I love you.”

“Don't bet on it,” I hissed.

Matthew fixed me with his unwavering gaze, his head tilted slightly to one side. I felt as trapped by his eyes as a butterfly inside a jar. He spoke quietly.

“Are you telling me that you don't love me, Emma?”

I wanted to scream at him that I didn't love him, that I hated him, that I loathed the very sight of him, but why should he believe me if I couldn't even convince myself? So I didn't answer and looked sullenly at the grain of the table instead. With a slight movement of his hips, he pushed himself away from the sink and came around the side of the table, standing within a few feet of me. I felt his nearness like an open wound. I glared at him.

“There's no point in discussing any of this any more – it's all a farce, a total farce. Why couldn't you have just told me the truth to begin with? Why wait until now?”

“Would you have stayed if I did?”

I looked away, avoiding his eyes.

He answered for me. “You'd already made it perfectly clear that you wouldn't date a married man, and at what point would I draw the line and start telling you the truth?
How would you have reacted if I turned around one day and said, ‘Hey, Emma, I'm married, oh, and by the way, I'm four hundred years old and should be dead.' Would you really have been able to cope with
that
?”

The wind gasped and moaned down the chimney. Outside the snow had thickened until the closest trees were entirely obscured by the sheer mass of it. Even if I told him to take me back to the college, we wouldn't be able to leave now, which made the situation all the more intolerable because I had no choice but to bear it. I looked back at him.

“So instead, you made sure I was well and truly hooked before I found out, is that it? Was that part of your game plan?”

“I had no plan. I didn't want to make things difficult for you, but I couldn't let you go. I won't live without you, Emma.” He meant it as a declaration but it came out almost as a threat. I narrowed my eyes.

“So you said. Hah! You've not much choice, have you? You've certainly not given me any. Does your
wife
know you've been cheating on her?”

He flinched as if I'd struck him, taking a step back from me.

“It's more complicated than that and yes, she does know about us.”

Incredulity followed scorn and I half stood up, shaking my head in disbelief, and leaning my hands on the table lest he conclude that my trembling limbs were anything other than unqualified rage.

“You stand there and tell me that she
knows
? You have the
audacity
to tell me that she knows, yet you won't leave her? And she's happy with this little arrangement? What, do you cuddle up at night and tell her all about it – all about
me
? Does she find it funny – do you both have a really good
laugh
at my expense? Or does the whole idea of it turn you both
on?” Through my anger my voice began to break. He reached out to me, torment on his face.

I pulled back sharply. “Don't touch me – don't you
dare
touch me.”

He kept his hand out, imploring. “Emma, let me explain, please; it's nothing like you think…”

Without the prop of the table I began to shake uncontrollably, as disappointment, rancour and despair combined with pungent humiliation.

“
Think?
I don't know what to
think
, Matthew, because you never told me.”

He took another step towards me.

“I'm telling you now – I'm telling you
everything
now. Please, just listen.”