Eating Memories (25 page)

“It is not snails, my boy,” said the old general in a self-righteous tone. “Surely you know women have no fascination in such things. Were you not blind, you would see the way Haverty looks at her, like a mouse on cheese.”

Careful not to make a sound, Iona crept to the withdrawing room. To her dismay she saw that Adeline was there by the fire, head down in thought, poking at something in her hand.

As Iona drew near she saw that the object of Adeline’s attentions was a
helicacea,
much like one of those Cook had presented her. When she sat down on a nearby settee, Adeline glanced up and met her gaze. The woman’s gaze was clouded with a surfeit of laudanum.

“I was trying to see what you saw in them,” she said.

Gently Iona plucked the snail from Adeline’s palm and set it on her own. In the library Lionel and Sir Edward were speaking of scandals, the worst one hidden from Sir Edward’s knowledge. Lionel could not admit to his own impotence, she knew; and if he must hide it, he might barter that for some other disgrace.

Given the choice, Lionel would choose to be called cuckold before being known as half a man.

With wry shame, she remembered how her body had strained toward the image of Haverty. It was not that she loved a servant. That was unthinkable. No, what needed consideration was that she was looking for something, and even desire would do.

In her palm the snail lay quiescent, snuggled in its narrow, solitary house.

“You are so pretty,” Adeline told her. “I was never pretty, you know. Yet you are of such a serious mind. I quite admire you for that.”

Iona lifted her gaze in astonishment and was trapped by the longing in the other woman’s expression. “It is such a delicious thing to be engaged in men’s studies. Tell me,” Adeline said, leaning forward in desperate, second-hand interest, as though prettiness and high-mindedness might be conveyed. “What do you see in these creatures?”

Iona looked down at the snail and smiled. It had poked its head out of its shell and had begun, shyly, to explore. “They are so like we are,” she said. “So limited in knowledge, so locked up within themselves. See how their horns strain forward in curiosity—” Her voice failed her and she went silent, watching the slow, guarded creep of the snail along her palm. “And then draw back,” she said, gently touching her nail to the creature’s waving horns, “in imagined harm.”

“So timid,” Adeline said, her voice catching.

Iona glanced up to see tears coursing down the woman’s cheeks.

“Yes,” Iona said softly, not knowing from where the woman’s sorrow sprang nor how to soothe it. “Quite timid.”

There was a noise at the door, the heedless, careless noise of the men’s entry. Iona looked up in surprise, meeting Lionel’s rage. “God!” he shouted. “You bring that filth into the withdrawing room?”

For a moment she feared he was speaking of her suspected adultery. Then he lunged forward, snatched the snail from her hand and threw it into
the fire. When Iona turned to Adeline she saw horror and grief blanch the woman’s face as though she had been witness to a murder.

Without another word, Iona rose and made her way up to her room. A moment later she heard the heavy tread of Lionel’s feet on the stair. He entered her room without knocking.

“Do, er, whatever you do,” he said with a graceless gesture, “to prepare yourself to receive me. I will not be rebuffed as I was last night.”

She stood, highly aware of the clatter of rain against the eaves, cognizant of the quality of silvered light on the carpet. She lifted her chin a little. “No,” she told him. “I think not.”

His face flickered, through a range of emotions, possibly trying to translate her words. Had she meant, he might have wondered, that she would not rebuff him again? Or had she meant the unpardonable, that she would not receive his attentions? His expression hardened. “Put on some perfume or whatever you do to make yourself pleasant. I will wait.” “

“No, you will not,” she said.

His face altered again, this time to ‘a fretful insecurity. “Are you—I mean—indisposed?”

She turned her cheek away to stare into a comer of the room, wishing Lionel would leave. One of the things she loved about snails was that they were so utterly inviolate. “I simply have no wish—”

For a moment she was sure that the bedpost had somehow collided with the side of her face. As she fell against a footstool she saw that the bedpost had not been the attacker, but Lionel’s fist.

She brought her disbelieving fingers to her mouth. They came away bloody.

“God!” he cried. His face was twisted into a fearsome grimace as though he were the one in pain, and not her. “You are not the wife I married at all! Get up! Damn you! Get up!”

Unsteadily she rose, clutching the footstool.

He was glowering at her, tears in his eyes. “For years I have allowed you your little interests, yet even my generosity will not earn me your regard. God’s sake! How can I understand you?’ How can I lie with you when you shut me out? How do you expect me to do that?”

“I do not expect—” she began softly.

He raised his fist again, paused in the glare of her steady, unflinching look, then slammed his way back out the door.

She sat on the footstool, her head in her hands, dazed by his brutality. In a while he was back, bursting in unannounced. In his fist he clutched a scarf.

“Here,” he said. “I have discovered at least some of your secrets.” Releasing his grip, he let the scarf flutter open. Shells dropped like hollow, heavy rain.

Her fear forgotten, she fell to her knees to gather up the exotics. His boot was faster. She watched as he crushed them one by one, their gay colors ground into pale dust.

Lionel pulled her roughly by the elbow and flung her onto -the bed. The high wooden foot bruised her back. Her head hit the counterpane, loosing her hair from its pins. He was on her, pulling her skirt up, tearing at her petticoats. But his infirmity gelded him. After a frantic time of trying, he fastened his trousers and quit the room, leaving her exhausted and sore.

She did not venture downstairs all that day. The next morning when her chambermaid came to arrange her hair, the girl daubed a little powder on the bruise on her mistress’s cheek and then blurted, “Master has given Haverty the sack. All the house is in disarray for it.”

Iona’s heart fell. Poor, loyal Haverty. Her studies had undone him, as well. Guiltily, she glanced to the girl and saw tears standing in her eyes.

“He so admired you, missus, for your seriousness of mind and all. Because of you, he taught me to read and bought me books so that I might engage him more aptly in conversation when we married.” The girl’s gaze dropped to the floor.

So what Haverty felt for his mistress was not love but an overwhelming respect. “I’m sorry,” Iona murmured, uncertain whether the flood of emotion she felt contained a majority of relief or envy.

“And the worst of it is,” the girl continued, “he’s thrown out without no severance nor letter of recommendation. There’ll be no posting at all for him unless he hires on in the fields or is sent to the workhouse.”

“I shall write him a letter,” Iona said immediately, bringing a fragile cheer to the girl’s face. “And certainly he deserves a severance. I have some means of my own saved from the monies Lionel has given me.” She opened a drawer and drew out a velvet change purse, handing the maid two gold sovereigns. Then she took out pen and writing paper and inscribed a fitting recommendation.

When she opened her eyes the next morning, the sovereigns were glinting on her nightstand. Haverty’s letter of recommendation was lying next to the coins, the sealing wax broken, the thick paper tom.

Iona sat up quickly, holding the blankets to her chest. The room stank of whiskey, and across the carpet sat Lionel, glass in hand, his tall body slumped in a chair.

“It is like a fire that cannot be put out,” he muttered.

Sunlight trickled through a space between the curtains, igniting a stripe of blue in the carpet to stunning incandescence. “Watching you lie there, wanting so badly to take you.” He smiled a bit, his lips stretching without humor, a terrible tautness in his eyes. “It isn’t that I lack interest, you know.”

“I understand,” she whispered. .

“No,” he said. His voice was bitter and hollow at the same time. It reminded Iona of a bottle emptied of some caustic poison. “So clever in all other things, and yet you have no idea.” Suddenly his eyes grew glassy with memory. “I wasn’t always like this. Once I had control of my virility.”

She glanced in alarm at the coins, the tom pieces of the letter. “I agree it has gotten worse of late,” she said in a faltering voice, “but even in the beginning there were times—”

“The guests have gone home.”

To protect herself from the icy draught of his gaze, Iona pulled the covers more, tightly around her shoulders.

“I’ve had no choice in the matter, Iona. No choice. To be so betrayed, my trust altogether shattered. Of course the chambermaid and cook have been given the sack.”

When he rose she shuddered. When he came to her, she drew back.

He seemed to take no notice. Leaning over, he kissed her on the forehead. His lips were dry; his breath stank of stale liquor and sleeplessness. “You will stay in your rooms now,” he said.

It seemed to Iona that he meant she would stay there forever.

Lionel’s sickly melancholy pervaded the halls like the damp stench of rot. Shut in her room, Iona ached for the three loyal servants, turned out as they were without prospects; but the hurt of Froggy’s absence was like a soreness deep in the bone.

She took the precaution of hiding some of her books and congratulated herself on her canniness when Lionel took the rest of them away. When he wordlessly came to appropriate her books he did not accost her; but she was alarmed at the ragged pallor of his face, the hectic madness in his eyes.

He drank a great deal, so that she could not define a moment between his sobriety and his drunkenness. The footmen and the parlormaids took to tip-toeing the halls.

For four days she remained confined, feeling Lionel’s anger charge the house as electricity does a storm. His sullen rage chaffed at her, wearing her down, the fickleness of his blusters seeming to pull her now here, now here, so that she had no clear idea of their ultimate direction.

On the fourth evening he retired to the downstairs sitting room, and, although she stayed awake, she did not hear him come up. He had obviously drunk himself into a stupor.

Just before dawn she crept from her room and exited into the garden. Clutching her gift to Froggy, a slender copy of Keats which she had salvaged from Lionel’s ravagings, she hurried her way across the meadow. Near the lake a dark figure stepped out from behind a tree, directly in her path.

She halted, alarmed. In the gray light of dawn she recognized the tall, slender form, the hunched shoulders. Lionel’s coat was unbuttoned, his hair in great disarray.

“I found him,” he said, leaning unsteadily on his walking stick.

Her hand flew to her mouth. She imagined Lionel’s huge, drunken ungainliness in Froggy’s small room. Froggy would have met his sullen rage with curiosity and perhaps even amusement. Had they fought? she wondered. And could one do harm to such a creature?

Yes, she knew. Froggy’s peace was a fragile, hushed one, like the stillness inside a bubble. Shatter that, and Froggy might fly into a thousand pieces, too.

“Did you touch him?” she shouted angrily. “Did you hurt him?”

He reached out and furiously snatched the book from her hands. Swaying a bit on his feet, he blinked at the title. “Keats,” he muttered. “Milksop love poesies that you considered me too dull to understand.”

The sun had gained the horizon, turning the gray morning pink. With a growl of rage, Lionel flung the book. She saw it for an instant before it splashed into the lake, its brief flight dark as a startled bird’s against the sky.

“So you loved him,” he said, his gaze drawn to the water.

She considered that for a moment, all desire aside. Lust was an insignificant matter, she realized jadedly, when compared to the fierce attraction of like minds.

“Yes,” she said, astonishing herself. “Yes. I truly loved him.”

She knew Lionel would never allow her to see Froggy again. There would be no one who would share her delight in questions, no one with whom she could share her thoughts. Anguish, hard and brutal, thrust itself into her. Tears started up in her eyes. She saw Lionel’s hand go up and flung her own out to stay him, but her gaze was so clouded with grief that she did not realize the import of his gesture until the walking stick cracked her temple.

The blow drove her to her knees.

“God!” he screamed. “Enough that you cuckold me with a clever servant! Enough that he sneaks around the woods! I see him through the window at night, a shadow among the trees! Dear Christ, I see him everywhere!”

The silver knob of the stick came down. Bright agony exploded in her forehead. Dazed, she pitched forward, grasping his trousers. Her blood splattered his legs and her own clutching, desperate hands.

She thought to explain that the creature she loved was not Haverty at all, but something so strange that Lionel should have no fear of her dalliance. Her mouth and throat moved, but all that came from her was muddy syllables and nonsensical, terrified babble.

She was being dragged across the grass now, Lionel tearing at her fingers. The stick came down again, this time across her shoulders, driving the breath from her lungs.

The cold shock of the water was like a slap. Silt oozed into her sleeve. She thrashed as he drew her deeper and fought as her face was pushed under the wet chill.

She struggled, but Lionel was stronger. Opening her eyes wide she saw light filtered through the olive-colored water. In her chest was a sharp, burning ache as though she had swallowed badly and something hard had lodged in her gullet. For a moment all there was pain and the pellucid, greenish glow.

Then the agony wavered, dissolved, and drifted away on the current. The light grew brighter, the motes of algae burning to pale embers. What was left was a soft, blank white, a white like the beginnings of things: the stainless pallor of paper before it is written on; the white of untrampled snow.