Judith Ivory (33 page)

“Not so much.” She laughed ruefully.

He contradicted. “You told me once, ‘Clowns make you laugh.’ But you make yourself laugh, Emma. You see the humor and fun in life. What man could possibly not be laughing beside you?”

And something deep inside her sighed, pleased to hear him speak thus, to know he meant it. Stuart, who laughed so seldom, laughed a lot with her, she realized.

Did she make herself laugh? she wondered. Had she learned to do for herself what Zach used to, since he had given it up? Stroking Stuart’s bare chest under the blanket, she wondered, Had she moved on to other needs and desires?

It seemed possible. Stuart would have intimidated her at seventeen. She could have swindled him back then, but her heart would have been beating in her throat, frantic to get away as soon as possible, because she also would have been intimidated by his power and confidence. She would never have let him near her.

“So, was he any good at anything besides swindling people?” Stuart asked out of the blue. “He must have been for you to love him? A good vicar perhaps?”

“He was middling. Good enough.”

People had liked Zach. They came to him. He discharged his duties to the best of his abilities, limited though they were. He was a charming man, especially when he bordered on sober. He no doubt charmed a good many people into a better life, a better way of thinking and behaving: charmed them right into Heaven, Emma used to like to think. That Zach: turning his talents at the end to the use of God.

Did it count, she wondered, if it was not out of charity or goodness but out of sheer guilt that he did so?

Yes. She liked to think it did, that God didn’t care what drove a person into goodness, that He only judged one’s in
tentions, and Zach’s intentions were flawless. No, God didn’t take off points from a good deed for being, while you were at it, self-abusive. In fact, maybe it counted more, if a man had to struggle so hard for it. Zach had died with a short list of good works to his credit that took a lot of effort on his part, considering he did most of them blind drunk or between binges while enduring sweating, shivering hangovers and always, always under the pall of believing he’d let everyone down who loved him, which, most of the time, he had: a good man, if an imperfect one.

“How old was he?” The sun was beginning to show on the horizon, but Stuart lay as wakeful as she. They were both either too happy or else both a little anxious about tomorrow. In harmony, in any event.

“Fifty-one when he died,” she answered.

“Fifty-one! I thought he was young!”

“He was. In the head. The most immature man I ever knew, but that could be fun, let me tell you. He was thirty-five when I met him, and more fun than a twelve-year-old with a pocketful of firecrackers. Mischief, oh, the mischief that man could get up to!”

“And he drank. You’ve mentioned he drank. How much? A lot.”

She sighed. “He was a lush, a drunkard.” There, she’d said it, betrayed her dead husband down to the last. His secret, which she’d conspired with him to cover, was out in the open, spoken.

And wasn’t Stuart thrilled to hear it! “Zachary Hotchkiss was an impotent, old lush!” He laughed triumphantly, a man discharging demons, belly-laughing, cackling over Zach’s many weaknesses.

Emma did indeed feel a little bit faithless for putting Zachary up for ridicule. Yet why be faithful to a man who was gone, who probably didn’t deserve all this loyalty to begin with. Let him go.

Stuart needed no such encouragement. If he was letting Zach go, it was with flags and parades and confetti, a celebration. He added up more against the man: “And you were young when you met him. Then you matured, and he didn’t. And he wasn’t your first choice anyway. You said so.”

“No, my
first
choice”—
would be an English peer I know
, which left an awkward pause she quickly bridged with—“when I first came to London as a young girl there was a sixteen-year-old boy of the world who took to signing my name to his bills. I couldn’t get him to stop doing it. So I went for Zach instead.”

“Zach,” Stuart said, and the name sounded odd for so seldom coming out his mouth. “Oh, if you only knew how I’ve been
hating
him. The husband. This vicar. This paragon who tippled perhaps. When all the time he was an old drunk.” He laughed, beside himself, delighted. “With nothing but a flaccid little—”

“Hey! It wasn’t so easy to live with. Don’t be so glad.”

“I’m not glad.” He shook his head, becoming serious. “It was terrible, I’m sure.” Then he burst out laughing again. “Yes, I am glad. I’m thrilled. I thought you loved him.”

“I did. Rather. To the extent you can love someone who just keeps raking you over the coals, over and over and over. I was always covering for him. He was never where he said he’d be. Sheep would get sick because he’d forget to feed them but tell me he had, because he didn’t want me to know he’d fallen over drunk and been out cold all day—he could do things like that for days, sometimes weeks, before I’d realize. The only reason he himself didn’t die from being passed out all day in the barn in dead winter was because, I think, the alcohol content of his blood was so high, he didn’t freeze like a normal human being.” Emma laughed. It was dry laughter, not pure humor, but it was amazing enough to hear herself laugh over the matter at all. Her sheep. She loved her sheep.
Their
sheep. And Zach could have died in the bargain. Still, remembering made
her laugh now for how stupid it was, though it had been a long way from funny or merely stupid at the time. Die from the cold? By jings, she’d been ready to kill him some days herself.

“How did he carry on—write his sermons for one thing—if he was always on a bender?”

“Oh, he was very good at covering. With a lifetime of practice. Plus I wrote most of the sermons.”

“You did?” Stuart’s incredulity gave way to a little knowing snort. “Come to think of it, I can imagine.”

She twisted in his arms to give him a look, a pull of her mouth. He was calling her sanctimonious again.

“So you wrote his sermons, and he gave them, taking credit?” he continued.

“Oh, no, it wasn’t like that.” She shook her head. “He’d be too drunk to write anything, but come Sunday morning, if I could shove a speech into his hand, he was willing to get up there. Cold, sight unseen, he’d read what I wrote the night before, usually in a monotone—about God and fairness or whatever moral binge I happened to be on.” She laughed at herself. “Sometimes it was about the anger a woman or family could feel when one of them was drunk all the time.” She grew quiet. “Anyway, he inevitably would get to some part that touched him and start to cry, then he’d take off. It was magic. He’d leave my words behind, the orator, the confidence man winning the confidence of every soul in the church. By the end, there was never a dry eye in the place. Very moving sermons, the Reverend Hotchkiss gave. Half-mine, half his own on the fly. And all, one hundred percent, full of repentance and prayers for redemption.”

He looked at her. “Except your eyes. They were dry, weren’t they?”

“My eyes?”

“You didn’t cry over his sermons.”

“Of course not.” Emma blinked. Why
of course not
? And how did Stuart know? And why did he ask? “Well, I wrote
the speeches. I knew what they said. And I knew Zach. I usually knew where he’d go with them.”

“No one’s mark,” was all Stuart said. “Not even your own.”

She paused, frowning into his chest. “I’d cried already over most of my complaints. I cried; I moved on. No point in prolonging the agony.”

“Unless you were Zach.”

“Right.” She nodded and grew quiet, very still. Zach. He was in love with it. No woman could compete with his passion for pain.

Lying there, suddenly Emma was struck by a bolt of honesty. She needed it, went for it like a nun marching into the confessional. “Stuart?”

“Mm?”

“I was leaving him. I wouldn’t have stayed.” Here was something no living soul knew, that the vicar’s wife, as much as she loved the title, the job, and the village it embraced, had been giving it up. “Just as we’d decided I couldn’t stay with him, he grew ill. Very ill. I stayed to take care of him, knowing he was dying. A few days before he went, he said, ‘At least I had the good grace not to survive this too long, Em. Sad that it’s probably the kindest thing I have ever done for you: to die quickly.’”

Then—such a surprise!—a sob did break out. It was like a hiccup, rising up from inside, from nowhere, and bursting out without the first warning or ability to stop it. And it brought another and then another, and suddenly Emma was crying, turned into Stuart’s arms, where she sobbed for ten minutes at least, maybe more, such sorrow unleashed: like a child’s whose Christmas was canceled.

Where did this come from? The hurt and anger and pure unadulterated grief—though less for the man who died than for the man she’d thought Zach was at one time, the man he might have been, who saw what he did, what he was, the ambiguities, so smart, so educated, or who could pretend to be
so at least—oh, Lord, and for herself. For her duping herself with regard to him. Not her own mark? Think again, dear heart.
I am my own mark. I was
. She muttered words like these against Stuart’s chest as she made such a wet mess of the silky hair there, making his skin slick with her tears and the ensuing, highly unattractive runny nose that went with them.

He didn’t seem to notice. He only petted her head and held her bare shuddering shoulders, two naked people. Nothing more vulnerable, she thought, than two naked bodies without the power of sexuality to make them into angels, into gods and goddesses on the Mount Olympus of desire.

“Ah, us,” he said after the torrent had died down, holding her in the crook of his bare biceps and chest. “Orphans.” He meant they were different—misfits, renegades—that it was harder for people like them to find a place to belong. And he was right.

Us. Orphans. All of us are orphans, Zach used to preach to the masses; these were his words, not Emma’s. Orphans looking for a home. Come home, he’d preach.

Not Emma. She’d left home to find Zach. She’d left Zach, emotionally at least, because it hurt too much to stay with him. And she was leaving Stuart, though he didn’t know.
Us
. What a dear word. Enough to make her melt with tenderness for her misfit viscount.

Why was she leaving him? At that particular moment, she couldn’t say. It didn’t feel all that wrong to stay with him anymore. Who cared what people said? Who cared that she was a little ewe in his big tup’s barnyard? That he’d leave her backside with paint on it, raddled, and be on to the next? Let it happen. Let it be. Could she stand it? Could she stay till he was finished with her, wait to move on herself till then, so as to get every last little moment of happiness out of him? Sell her pride for every last precious second?

Maybe. They were damn fine seconds lately, each one as they came. So fine that maybe he wouldn’t—

She caught herself. Her own mark. She was doing it again, tricking herself. No, she wouldn’t do it twice. She knew who Stuart Winston Aysgarth was and where his affair with a local sheep farmer was going. No point in prolonging the agony, as she’d said. She didn’t need to get there to know what was coming. Better to continue on her own way, as planned, and save them both all the explaining and sighing and maybe even crying.

Since Zach—maybe even before Zach, maybe she’d always been, maybe she was born this way—Emma was a big proponent of sparing everyone, especially herself, any unnecessary pain.

The next morning, Emma was lying in her hotel bed, half-awake beside a lightly snoring, naked viscount, when the fact of the matter dawned: She loved him. No, all those tears last night, all that crying into Stuart’s shoulder? It hadn’t been for Zach, or what he’d been or could have been, or even for herself and all she’d wanted and not received.

Her tears, her sobbing were for the man in her bed, the long, handsome, slightly rangy fellow, the
living
man lying beside her. She couldn’t have him, and she’d cried like a child for the fact.

She ran her eyes up and down him, lingering over his sleeping penis where it snoozed, nose down, in the hollow where his leg met his groin. Her gaze traveled downward along his sinewy thigh, the sheet a tangle around it, down his bony shin to his high instep, his long, graceful toes. Stuart was on the thin side. It was why clothes looked so fine on him. He could wear layers of them and look elegant—unlike herself. And he could have been thinner still and yet handsome, because his bones themselves were beautiful.

And, like that, she recognized the depth of her affection for him. Marrow-deep. Once acknowledged, it seemed everywhere in her, welling up till her breastbone ached from it. As if her heart could literally swell too big, putting pres
sure against her sternum. Indeed, her tears the previous night were for this fine-looking, slightly odd nobleman whose criminal father had married for money and who would undoubtedly be courted by real titles himself, honest titles, while she, a farmer and former thief, wore nothing but pretense and clothes he’d bought her himself.

And he didn’t understand that yet. He would. But he was too wrapped up in his fear that his own heart wasn’t good enough, a man who truly searched himself on the matter, never satisfied with a good act alone, wanting the motives that drove it to be pure. Oh, what a creature. What a man. How she loved him.

Alas, she’d cried for having nothing better than this—love—to offer as a reason for him to stay with her forever, to keep her, to court her, to marry her: and for having learned and learned and relearned with Zach that nothing was more poignantly inadequate.

E
MMA
sent Leonard a note to join her for breakfast, then took a back corner table, ordered tea, and told the waiter not to bother them until she or her friend signaled they were ready.

As Leonard came up to his chair, before he even sat down, she began. “Oh, I’m so glad to get you alone for a moment. Last night—” She broke off and looked away, bringing her fist to her mouth. “Oh.” She looked back briefly as if embarrassed, then down and murmured, “Last night,” as if correcting herself, unwilling to say more, “last night,” repeating it though to give it significance, “I—well, I thought about all you said, how Stuart truly isn’t a part of us. He hasn’t put in as much money. He’s fearful, worried about his position in Parliament, his friends there. I’m anxious that he’ll say something to someone.” She sighed with a huge heave of breasts. “We must cut him out.”

“Really?” Leonard’s eyes all but popped out of his head with glee and greed and, alas, possibly lust. “Why?” He sat, mesmerized.

Quickly, “Because of everything you outlined last night.”

“Something happened,” he said insightfully, the goose—he didn’t even wait for act two. Emma had been all ready to have the story pulled from her in bits and pieces. But, no, Leonard leaped to it immediately. She might as well spit it out. Looking down, reluctant in every syllable, she told him, “Last night he pushed his way into my room. He—”

“Why didn’t you call out? I was right across the hall!”

She whispered across the table, “I didn’t want to cause a scene. I thought I could handle him.”

“But you couldn’t!” he asserted. “Did he violate you?”

Lord, Leonard, let a girl get it out, will you? “Almost,” she said, just to frustrate him. A near seduction was better anyway. “I was so frightened. I didn’t want to make a scandal, you see? With his being your nephew.” She winced sympathetically for his having such a horrible relative. “Plus, with all we have going, we don’t need public attention. At any rate, I prevailed finally, after, oh—” She looked away, a woman unable to tell him all the indignities.

“After
what
!” He leaned on his palms, even rising a little over the table, on tenterhooks to know the lurid details.

She shook her head. Far too discreet to say. “Never mind. The point is, we must cut him out completely.”

“You are absolutely right. You couldn’t be righter. He’s a menace, just like my brother, his father. We must…”

He blathered on. She let him rant till he was finished. Conclusion: Leonard’s confidence was hers completely. He’d been converted to the game, as they said. In up to his eyeballs, his complete faith in her won. He trusted fully that he was about to become filthy rich, get back his own statue, possibly have Emma in the bargain, and betray, for good measure, the nephew, for whom he bore incredible, competitive ill will.

He made only one digression. “I’m simply aghast,” he said with gentlemanly affront, “so very upset, my dearest
Emma, that Stuart would be such a cad. How did you possibly stand it? What exactly did he do—no, no, don’t say. It must be painful to remember. Thank God, though, he didn’t fulfill his intent. Still, I wouldn’t have thought Stuart had the nerve to force his way into a lady’s bedroom, no, not the ballocks for it, if you’ll pardon my French.”

Ballocks? What a lovely euphemism! Oh, he had them; she’d seen them. “You have no idea,” she said dramatically to Leonard. “We must move immediately, because he has—well, there is no predicting him.”

“Immediately?”

“Yes. You must get the statue today. Now.”

“Now!” He was startled. “But the forged provenances aren’t ready, and Stuart thinks—” Leonard then made the longest dawning moment of recognition—in fact, reveled in it—in Emma’s history of hoodwinking men by means of their own greed and dishonor.
“A-a-a-a-ah,”
he said, lifting his head in wonder and appreciation. It took almost a full minute for him to get the full
a-a-awe
-someness of his esteem for her thinking out and expressed.

“Right.” You clever bugger, she thought. “We flee, take everything with us, then run the game from, say, New York without him.”

She had trouble getting him moving. He wanted to celebrate their good notion, their “brilliant idea,” “the best effing scam ever invented by man or woman.” Eventually, she had to claim her “ordeal” last night had left her too overwrought, in need of a rest—which was not entirely false, since she had been at Stuart’s beck and call all night long. They’d moved to her bed, with him rousing twice more in the night. The man was amazing—they’d made love more often, more ways in one night than she had in the last ten years of her marriage. And it was divine—if a little wearing on a body unused to such things. That either one of them could walk today was little short of a miracle.

Emma didn’t have to exaggerate when she rose carefully. “I’ll go lie down,” she said with the valor of someone holding great distress from her voice.

“You do that,” Leonard told her, though his sympathy seemed a little preoccupied: He was so happy to be knifing his nephew in the back.

Leonard left to get the statue in such high spirits, she was worried he would wander into traffic and get killed before he could deliver it.

Stuart was late. Emma spent the time, till she heard his boot strides, trying unsatisfactorily to manufacture summonses for him to appear in Yorkshire, thinking to hire someone to deliver it to him, so as to send him on his way quickly once he and she were finished in London.

She’d decided, once she had done what he’d asked of her and he had his statue, she should leave as quickly as possible, and she didn’t want any battles or pleas or arguments. She debated about the two thousand pounds still in her drawer. If she took it all, she could make a fresh start anywhere. It was his, but it was there. She’d decide later if her conscience would let her take it. Getting rid of Stuart long enough to go truly where he couldn’t come after her seemed the main problem. That and her sheep. Her sheep and farm and cat and friends.

Yet she couldn’t think how she’d ever live beneath the shadow of Castle Dunord again and be happy.

Then Stuart himself relieved her of writing her dismal, poor facsimile of a court order by arriving with a reason of his own that would take him away almost immediately after Leonard was disposed of.

Breathless, he whisked into her room and said, “They took my horse this morning. I argued for half an hour, then raced here. I’m sorry I’m late.”

“It’s all right. Leonard won’t be back for a good forty
minutes yet, if he hurries.” Of course, there was always the chance he’d never come back. Or come back with the police and arrest them both.

“Why did they take your horse?”

“The trainer’s assistant pulled on its lead, apparently a bit hard, and the damned horse went for him. He tried to kill the fellow. I was able to have the judgment delayed, but the horse was taken away, impounded. I have to go argue with them as soon as we’re finished. The trainer’s assistant is saying he wants it put down, and the trainer isn’t helping.”

“I’m so sorry. If Leonard actually arrives and actually brings the statue, we’ll get you out straightaway. How long can you afford to wait?”

He took out his watch. “If he doesn’t come within the hour, can you delay him?”

She nodded.

Leonard came within forty minutes on the dot, huffing and puffing because he’d used the stairs. The lift was busy, and he didn’t want anyone seeing him carrying a hatbox—the container into which he’d bundled his precious statue. He, of course, found Emma alone.

“Here it is,” he said as he brought it in and set it on her table by the window.

A lady’s pink hatbox. Almost surely Stuart’s mother’s. Emma couldn’t resist. She opened the lid and peeked inside. There was a lot of old newspaper, which she pushed aside, then frowned down at what she saw.

It was disappointing. Small, green, and gaudy. Full of jewels. A beastly face peered up at her, inhuman, wearing a sly grin of merriment. She pulled the little thing out a moment, turned it in her hands. It was no particular animal but several, a mishmash pastiche. Indeed, it looked like an ancient deity of some sort. Powerful in its ugliness, like a Foo Dog. She laid it back in its paper, in its box, more puzzled than before she’d seen it as to why anyone would want it.
That Zach, he’d been a better confidence man than she’d known, if he’d sold this to the old viscount.

“So are we ready?” Leonard asked, his eyes alight.

Her bags sat packed by the door. She went for her coat. Stuart had to have heard his uncle come up the stairs. He and two of Charlie’s people were in the room next door, waiting. From here, timing was crucial.

Indeed, as she came from the bedroom, carrying her coat, her suite doors burst back on their hinges, and Stuart pushed his way in.

He looked livid, his face red with rage—a look he’d been working on next door under Mark’s and Mary’s tutelage, holding his breath, patting his cheeks. The look was important, because talking had to be minimal: Anything he said had to come off his resistant tongue around a bladder of turkey blood held against his cheek. “I—I thought as much!” he proclaimed. He pointed at his uncle, then at Emma. “You—you—you—”

Leonard’s face went white with shock upon seeing him. “How the blazes—”

Stuart continued, puffing his cheeks, spitting the words. “You—you take my lands,”—a grunt—“my title,”—pause—“the woman I want,”—a deep, very threatening scowl that quite frightened Emma, and she knew it wasn’t real, making her back up—“then double-cross me—”

Leonard said quickly, “I-It wasn’t a double-cross exactly—” He stepped backward.

Ha. Stuart went toward him. The idea was to get Stuart’s body between Leonard and the statue, which worked fairly well. As Stuart bore down on his uncle, the man moved away backward, then, glancing at Emma, even sidestepped from her to the door. Good, good, Leonard.

“I’ll wring your bloody—” Stuart said. He was doing brilliantly with that thing in his mouth.

“Stop right where you are,” Emma said. She’d produced the small pepper-box pistol from her purse—or actually she
pretended to, since she’d had it in her hand since the bedroom, because she hadn’t wanted to fumble.

Leonard’s eyes all but bulged from his face at the sight of the gun. His complexion grew ashen. He took a step sideways along the wall, inching toward the exit. Perfect.

“Stay where you are,” Emma said.

Stuart halted. His hands raised slightly. Behind him and to his right, Leonard grew motionless, transfixed.

“We’re leaving,” Emma told Stuart. “Move over there.” She motioned with the gun.

He laughed and let out a most believable derisive snort, then managed a whole flow of words, “You wouldn’t use that little toy on me.” He took a step toward her.

She fired, hoping she missed him entirely; blanks could still do some damage at close range. He bit the bladder as he grabbed his white shirt front—there was another bladder in his hand. Blood spurted from his mouth. It leaked between his fingers. A very nice job, if she’d ever seen one. Stuart stumbled, looked shocked, then keeled over, rolling at the end to get the full effect: on his back, his chest red, his head lolled to the side, blood trickling from his mouth.

Emma dropped the gun as if it were a snake and put her hand to her mouth, her heart genuinely pounding. It was far too similar to another time, another place, while the sight of Stuart on the floor was horribly disturbing.

She looked up at Leonard, a kind of true grief in her throat. “Let’s get out of here.”

“What?” Leonard glanced at the statue.

A hotel maid, Mary Beth in uniform, exactly six counts after the gun shot, came to the open door on cue with fresh sheets in her hands. “Ah!” she let out, pulling the white sheets to her white apron. “You’ve killed him!” she said: looking from Emma momentarily to fix her eyes upon Leonard.

“I—I—I—” Leonard was so speechless he couldn’t get the denial out.

Emma began her most crucial minute. Mark theoretically, when Stuart left the room next door, summoned the elevator to this top floor. There were only two suites on it, hers and Leonard’s. Mark should be inside the elevator, keeping the operator and elevator itself busy. Anyone who wished to respond to a commotion that was going to get louder would have to come up six flights of stairs.

She rushed Leonard, grabbing him by the arm, drawing him toward the little desk with the drawer as Mary began screaming. “Listen,” she said with professional sang-froid over the noise, “It has gotten out of hand. Here.” She handed him a packet, then explained what was absolute fact: “It’s your ticket to New York—the ship leaves Southampton tonight. Get on the liner, whether you see me or not. I may take a different one. We can survive this. Get to New York, then make your way to a place called Wyoming. It’s very remote, unpopulated, a fine place though, trust me. No one will know you. Get whatever money together you can immediately and take it to Wyoming. I’ll meet you, when the coast is clear.”

“But—but—” Leonard was not only terrified, he was inconsolable. “If he’s dead”—he jerked a hand toward Stuart—“
I’m
the heir. I’d inherit everything, even the statue.” He looked at the box containing the statue, a last, longing gaze. For he knew as well as Emma.

She said, “Murderers don’t inherit. Get going.”

Mary punctuated this with a loud, moaning plea for help.

Leonard gave the statue and the deadly still Stuart one last glance, then asked, “Where in Wyoming? That’s an entire state.”

Was it? Oh. “The capital,” she said, rolling her eyes as if he should have known.

Leonard nodded. “Cheyenne.”

Criminy, his geography was good. She loved university men. It was the rule, not the exception that smart men made the best marks; they usually out-thought themselves. “Right,” she said. Perfect.

“I should take the statue,” he said and was going to step over Stuart’s body.

Mary, bless her, stopped him with a truly shrill scream.

Emma latched hold of Leonard’s arm again, leaning up toward his ear to hiss vehemently, “Do you want to hang by the neck till you’re dead?”