Eating Memories (23 page)

Before she reached the forest and the twin ashes, she had the chance to wonder whether she had achieved sanity and the odd creature of her imagination might be gone.

As she slipped through the space between the trees, she saw the being sitting as he had sat the day before, plumped in a chair in the plain white room, his somber eyes drawn to her face.

Part of her wanted to flee, but curiosity engaged her. Thinking to see how far her madness might go, she walked past him to the window and looked out. In the Garden of Perpetual Happiness it was still raining. Fat, yellow chrysanthemums dipped their heavy heads in the force of the shower.

Whatever the creature was, she realized, symbol of her aspirations or guardian of her conscience, he was not much of a gentleman. He had not risen as she had entered, and he did not bother to offer his seat.

She turned, and her skirts nearly toppled an empty chair just behind her. It was a wondrous thing, of a brilliant white which seemed not to have been painted on, but which was part of the integral structure itself, like the pale of milk glass.

She sat and faced the creature, who was gazing at her with interest. “Are you comfortable now?” he asked. The hands clasping the arms of the opposite chair were slightly webbed, the digits altogether too long and thin for relaxed study. His skin in places was bubbled up like hardened foam.

Before she had a chance to reply, he told her, “I am not what you think. And I am older than you imagine.”

“Imagination,” she answered sweetly, “is ancient.”

He glanced away. Through the window came the dripping, liquid music of the rain and the heavy perfume of flowers. The creature looked sorrowful there, dressed in his tight, white suit, and she reminded herself that grief and loneliness, too, were as primal as imagination.

“Does it please you?” he asked. “What I have made for you in the window?”

“Yes. But then you would know it does.” Inquisitively, she ran her hand over the slick arm of her chair and then up the warm white wall.

“It is not paper,” he said.

She paused in her study of the odd room and met his gaze. “I see that you wish it to be paper, but I hope this will do.”

“Why?” she asked.

He lifted that great head in apparent query. “Why what?”

“Why do you wish to please me? Is it because I have not been pleased in so many years?”

He looked down at his legs, spread presumptuously and casually apart. “No. It is because I have not been pleased in such a long time and I wish you to come back.”

He looked so downcast that she laughed. “O, dear Froggy. May I have leave to call you that? For it is altogether what you remind me of. My dear sir, I can see you are my shell, made of my very warp and woof. Where I go, you go. Why look so forlorn when I carry you with me, except that perhaps my mind is forlorn as well?”

“Look through the window,” he said.

After a pause for confusion she rose and looked out. The Gardens of Perpetual Happiness were gone, and in their place was a harsh, red-lit land where a bloodshot and angry sun peered down onto low apartments. Startled, she leapt back.

“Do you see?” he asked.

She whirled to face him. “Of course I see,” she said with a frightened gasp.

His magnificent head lowered. “No, you do not. But I perceive you are anxious to get home, and I will not stay you.”

She walked to the blank wall, and as she did, she heard his low, desperate plea behind her, “Please. Do come again.”

* * *

The next day was stormy, the wind lashing the branches of the laurels outside the French doors of the withdrawing room. She and Lionel and their subdued guests sat before the fire nudging a recalcitrant and dying conversation, Iona thinking of Froggy.

The following morning dawned sparkling and fresh, but, before she could quit the house, Lionel reminded her she was due for a day of good works and should call on the farm families. She might have asked Rosanna Powell to accompany her, but the woman was still abed. She asked Sir Edward’s wife instead, and to Iona’s surprise and regret, the woman accepted.

Adeline was so frightfully shy that she looked about to bolt from the trap. Her nervous hands clutched and plucked at the side of the carriage. The carriage was just approaching the gates when Adeline, a rare glint of mischief in her eye, leaned across the seat and whispered, “Your butler cuts a handsome figure.”

The
butler,
had she said? Iona was not certain for a moment that she’d quite understood.

“Oh, Lionel is all right, as far as that goes,” Adeline added pensively. “But he’s too old and much too British for my tastes. A bit smooth-faced and weak about the eyes. But Haverty is young and possessed of a dark, gypsy charm. You are a lucky one, my dear.”

So shocked was she that Iona failed to do the proper thing and draw away. Instead, she accepted the woman’s presumption with wide and startled eyes.

“Yes. Quite comely,” Adeline added, “and I can plainly see that he is smitten with you.”

Iona sat frozen, her hands clasped in her lap. Adeline cast her gaze wistfully to the road where oaks grew to either side at stem attention. “How I do miss the wars,” she said softly. “And all the virile young Ghurkas.”

For a moment Iona searched for a pleasant reply, then gave up the effort and sat in rigid silence. At the farmhouses she handed out cakes to the children and jars of chutney to the wives, all the time grappling with the shocking nature of Adeline’s confidences.

Iona had known adolescent fantasies of romance, of course. Then the cage of her arranged marriage had snapped closed. During her wedding night’s awkward and hurried deflowering she’d begun to suspect that there was wisdom in her mother’s whispered injunctions. Iona had closed her eyes, endured, and thought, with limited success, of England.

When she and Adeline rode back to the manor house it was Haverty, not the footman, who came out to hand her down from the carriage; Iona had the harsh thought that Adeline might be right, and that the butler had indecorous ambitions. She discovered that, after all those years of marriage, she had them, too. Some scandalous part of Iona cherished the firmness of Haverty’s gloved hand in hers. She was aware, for the first time, of the strength in his shoulders and the fit of his trousers at the joint of his legs.

Fleeing from her thoughts, Iona raced up the steps and paused, turning in time to catch the simpering glance from Adeline and the answering discomfort in Haverty’s lowered gaze.

Soon after luncheon Iona made to repair to her rooms, but exited the French doors instead and went straightway to Froggy.

“So sorry I was detained,” she blurted as she walked through the wall.

Froggy glanced up, a sparkle of amusement in his eyes. “But you
did
come,” he said.

She crossed to the window, where the Garden of Perpetual Happiness was being washed by the rain. Casting her mind back to the puzzle of the red, dreary land she had seen during her last visit, she was not aware of Froggy’s quiet approach until he grasped her fingers.

It was not Froggy she thought of in that instant, but Haverty. Haverty and his wide, sympathetic smile. Instantly she drew back, slipping her hand from his.

He let her go. “I did not mean to alarm you,” he told her. “I simply meant to show you I was real. Look out the window, please,” he said.

She looked. In the ruddy light of a foreign sun tenements sprouted thick and round as mushrooms. Grotesque frog-shaped forms darted through the bruised and purple shade.

There were more beings like him. Someplace.

Froggy left her side, her stunned gaze following him. When she peered again out the window, the rain-swept gardens were there.

“So,” he said, sitting down and leaning forward over his knees expectantly. “As I sense your thoughts, I see that you begin to understand. I, too, am a scientist. I, too, went out on exploratory expeditions. I was left here by my fellows a great long time ago.”

She did not wish to believe him, but the scene out the window had given her no choice. It was detailed, very real, and unlike anything her own mind could have conjured. The blood suddenly drained from Iona’s cheeks. She was fighting for breath, her lungs struggling against her whalebone stays. Her head swam and she flung her hand out to the chair.

“Are you all right?” he asked solicitously. “You aren’t dying, by any chance?”

“No,” she sighed, dropping into the chair carelessly, her taffeta skirt crinkling. She looked up at him. Not a creature of her own imagining, then. Froggy was a being far stranger than that.

“Tell me about yourself,” he urged, settling himself back into his chair. “Tell me why you are lonely.”

She cast about for a response, but the answer itself was so huge that it made up the whole of her mind. There was no distinctive place where loneliness was and all the rest was satisfaction.

“As you have already perceived, I am a naturalist,” she began, lifting her chin as though defying him to refute her. Yes, she thought. A naturalist. And the specimen of a lifetime was sitting opposite her, his webbed hands absently caressing the smooth cloth at his chest.

“I study gastropods; snails in particular.” How odd, she thought, that she would think of her pastime first and her position second. “I am married to Lionel Whitstone who owns the land you live on.”

A glitter of humor came to his eyes. “Well, after all, it is not as though I take up much room.”

She laughed. The formal stiffness left her back, and she slumped with an unladylike posture in her seat. He was a charming creature, her Froggy. Not sour like Lionel sometimes could be; not lost in his element like Haverty. No, Froggy was very much his own man, as easy in his surroundings as a bullfrog on a lily.

But perhaps not a he, she thought, her brows knitting together in confusion. There was no hint of a bosom on his chest to be sure, but a furtive glace at his tight trousers assured her there was no bulge there, either.

“I am both,” he told her pleasantly.

“Pardon?”

“Both male and female at the same time.”

Iona fought her embarrassment. She was a scientist, after all, and had studied the hermaphroditic
pulmonata.
For a difficult moment she searched for a proper response. “How . . . convenient for you.”

He quirked his head to the side. “At times. Is it because you are not both that you are lonely?”

“I shouldn’t think so,” she told him earnestly. “And you have stated that you are lonely, as well.”

Poor, abandoned, lost creature, she thought, her own solitude grown suddenly paltry. How long had he been separated from home? And how comfortable could he be in this yellow-lit, alien place? She lowered her gaze and, from the comer of her eye, caught a glimpse of the watch pinned to her dress. Nearly four, she realized with a start. Lionel would be beside himself.

Froggy met her apologetic look with a knowing, jaded one of his own. “Given a choice in the matter,” he told her, “it is best to be both, I think.”

As soon as Iona arrived at the house she fled up the stairs to change. Entering her rooms, her eye swept over her terrarium, the tracks of
polygyridae
painted across its glass. Then her gaze caught the exotics placed on a shelf above. She stood for a moment, entranced by their beauty, afternoon tea quite forgotten.

The shells of the English snails were mostly all of a kind, but the Eastern ones were banded with color, complex as pagodas. She took one down and, lifting it to the window, gazed inside. Through the chamber, more delicate than any porcelain, glowed a gentle, kindly light like the light in Froggy’s rooms.

How long must Froggy have been trapped in that place, a two-dimensional spot between three-dimensional trees? He had told her time was not for him what it was for her, yet space must not be alike, either. Her mind played back the scene of the red-skied land in the window, a sight which for her was a nightmare, which for him must have been dear. How different they were, she thought. And in the confines of their existence, how alike.

When Lionel burst in without knocking, she nearly dropped the shell. His face was high-colored from fury, and his hands were clenched into fists.

“Where have you been?” he demanded. “Sir Edward has noticed your absence.”

She lifted the shell carefully to its place and turned to her dressing room. “I will change immediately.”

Behind her there was a horrendous, splintering crash. She whirled. Lionel had struck the terrarium from its base. Sand and snails and bits of glass lay strewn across the floor. He raised his boot and brought it down. Snails died under his feet, their lives crushed out with a gritty, broken-eggshell sound.

“There,” Lionel said. “Perhaps you’ll tend to me now, rather than to your snails. Perhaps then, if you become a real woman, I can—”

There was a sharp knock on the door and the chambermaid’s voice on the other side, raised in alarm. “Missus? Are you ill?”

“We’re quite all right,” Lionel shot back.

Iona could hear the tap-tap of the maid’s boots as she beat a hasty retreat down the hall.

“I’ll have Haverty clean out the rest,” Lionel said, his affronted gaze lifting to the shelf of exotics and then dropping with gratification to his handiwork. “And you will get dressed and come down to tea. Be pleasant, for God’s sake.”

Her lips parted. A lone tear dropped from her eye, leaving a moist warm trail down her cheek. “Why?” she asked numbly, her voice barely above a whisper.

He glanced up at her, a hint of guilt in his gaze. “Sir Edward knows of many opportunities for investments. He is well-placed in London society. I am surprised that you have not realized the benefit. It would be in the best of both our interests that we—”

In a moment of glass-clear lucidity she realized that Lionel had dared to do the unforgivable and that, like the crushed snails, her life would never be mended. “Why take from me my only pleasure?” she cried.

He jerked his head back as though slapped by an unseen hand. For a giddy instant she thought that Froggy had reached out through his pocket in the world to strike him. “I would think you get your pleasure from tending a home, from ministering to me,” he told her firmly. “And for once I would remind you of your place.”