Laura Kinsale (41 page)

He forced himself to relax his hands and sit down again. In the most passive tone he could muster, he explained Zenia’s zealous confinement of Beth and their single day of freedom. “I should not have ignored the calls for us to come,” he said, feeling embarrassed to admit it. “But for God’s sake—she was never in the least danger. Never.”

“I see,” Mr. Jocelyn said. “I see.”

“I want to talk to my wife,” Arden said, forcing himself to stay calm. “I insist upon it.”

The lawyer did not quite smile, but he looked down and shuffled the papers without any particular result. “Lord Winter, I must beg your pardon. I think perhaps I have unintentionally involved myself in a little disharmony between you and Lady Winter which is none of my affair. I must apologize for taking up your time, but my duty to Mr. Bruce—” He put the papers away and offered his hand as he stood up. “I hope you will forgive me as a benevolent meddler when I say that I only wish the best for your wife and daughter. I shall tell her that she cannot do better than to see you, as you urged in your handsome note, so that you may speak together sensibly about the situation.”

Arden saw Mr. Jocelyn out. A few moments later, he followed himself, walking out of the hotel with his collar turned up against the damp cold. He was inured to London weather, but the wind seemed to cut through his coat, provoking a queer shiver. He put his head down, turning toward a bookshop in The Strand.

He was well known there. A pile of geographical and scientific volumes awaited him, but the bookseller was a little perplexed by his request for a book of conversation.

“Something in Greek philosophy, sir?” the man asked.

“No. English.” Arden leafed through an atlas, keeping his face down. “Examples. How to speak to—various persons.”

“Ah! A book of diction, I believe you mean, my lord. Elegant means of expressing oneself. Proposals of marriage, congratulations upon promotion, that sort of thing, sir?”

Arden frowned at Cape St. Marie on the island of Madagascar. “That sort of thing, yes.”

Zenia had chosen one of her new gowns, a subdued silk striped in russet and fawn. She had no maid, so she had to ask Mrs. Sutton to help her with the corset and buttons.

“It’s Mrs. Lamb, madam,” the nurse said, yanking at the strings, “now that we are not at the great house. Which his lordship asked me long ago was I really called Sutton, and I said to him no, and he has called me by my proper name this age.”

Away from Swanmere, Zenia had discovered that Mrs. Sutton, or Lamb, as she chose, was a considerably more militant character. She made no secret that she deeply disapproved of Zenia’s removal to town, and had even ventured one or two remarks indicating her respect for Lord Winter as a father and a gentleman, which hardly endeared her to Zenia. But there was no choice at the moment— Zenia could not do everything for Elizabeth herself, not while she was alone in London, so she merely said, “I will be happy to call you Mrs. Lamb if you please. You should have mentioned it before.”

“Will you wear the bonnet with the pretty orange scarf, ma’am?” Mrs. Lamb asked, lifting Elizabeth away from the open wardrobe, wiping her runny nose and catching up the bonnet in question with her free hand.

“It is only Lord Winter,” Zenia said. “My everyday black one will do. I’m afraid Elizabeth is catching a cold.”

“Ma’am looks a fright in the black one, if I may say so,” the nurse remarked. “His lordship will be passing through Oxford Street on his way here, and certain he’ll see ladies aplenty who know something of fashion.”

Zenia was well aware of the insidious intent of this remark, but it was nevertheless effective. “You are to keep Miss Elizabeth strictly to the nursery in the attic,” she said. She felt Elizabeth’s forehead. “She seems a little warm. You are not to bring her down under any circumstances. Do you understand?”

“Ma’am.” The nurse dropped a curtsey. She picked up Elizabeth and carried her out, muttering that any child who had been pulled from her bed and carried all about the country in the middle of the night would certainly have a fever. Zenia turned her head toward the door, and when she heard them reach the second landing above, she put down the black bonnet and reached for the one with the colored scarf for a tie—”capucine,” the dressmaker had called it, but the color was the deep vivid orange of the nasturtiums that had grown in her mother’s garden. There was a shawl that went with it, so sheer that Zenia could see through it, and a pair of fawn gloves with tiny matching flowers embroidered on the back.

She looked at herself in the glass and thought of all the fashionable ladies he would pass on his way. Her hair fell in ringlets against her cheeks, confined by the bonnet, perfectly clean and shining. The dress was tight at the waist and spread full over volumes of petticoats. It was fitted and trimmed and styled in the latest mode, entirely English, and yet she was afraid that he must still look at her and see the ragged Bedouin boy.

The knock came as she was descending the stairs. He was early—the housemaid hurried out of the dining room, stuffing a dust cloth into her apron, and answered the door. Zenia paused on the bottom step.

He stood in the doorway, a dark outline against the gray rain-soaked street behind him. He looked up as he took off his hat and stepped inside, lifting his blue eyes to hers.

If he could see beyond her English dress to her wretched barefoot past, he did not show it. His face was sober as he made a bow, handing his greatcoat and gloves to the maid. “Lady Winter,” he said stiffly. “Good afternoon.”

“Please come up,” she said, turning on the stair. “Clare?”

The housemaid curtsied, instantly turning toward the back stairs to fetch the tea tray.

Zenia led him up to the drawing room. She and the maid had worked all day yesterday to hang the drapes again and pull the covers off the furniture and mirrors, but still the room appeared barren with no knickknacks or kickshaws set about. In the grim afternoon, the oil lamps cast a steady yellow glow.

“You look beautiful,” he said in an abrupt way, and immediately turned as if he saw something that caught his eye in the street. Then he looked back at her with an air of detached survey.

Zenia’s instantaneous glow of pleasure dimmed a little at his impersonal expression. “Thank you,” she said. “You look very well.” He looked as he always did to her: handsome, intensely masculine, darkness and cobalt blue. His physical presence carried with it a subtle impression of dominance; of solid strength. She had felt it in the desert; she had followed him there because of it. Slept near him because of it. She could have picked him out among a hundred men in the street outside because of it.

“Please sit down,” she said, indicating an armchair near the fire screen.

“Where is Beth?”

“Upstairs. She has just fallen asleep. She is a little feverish, and I do not wish her to be disturbed.”

He looked as if he might for a moment dispute her, but instead he made a bow, waiting for her to seat herself on the settle before he placed the armchair facing her and sat down. Clare came in with the tea and a plate of thin-sliced bread and butter. She set the tray down on the tea table before Zenia and closed the door behind her.

“I’m sorry that we have no cake,” Zenia said, pouring for him. “Will you take sugar?”

“Is it possible,” he asked, “for us to dispense with this sort of polite diversion for once, and simply talk together?”

She put down the teapot without pouring her own cup and laid her hands in her lap. “If you wish it.”

“Zenia,” he said, “I’m not good at it—tea and cakes. I have no patience with it.”

She looked directly at him. “I suppose you would prefer to eat on the ground with your fingers?”

Her dry remark seemed to take him aback. He looked at her with a faint frown.

“Shall I sprinkle some sand on the butter,” she asked, “to put you more at ease?”

He tilted up one corner of his mouth. “No.” He lifted his cup, extending his little finger with an exaggerated delicacy. “I can play, if I must. How does your dear aunt do, Lady Winter? I hear she has the vapors once an hour. I have a receipt for a rhubarb plaster—most efficacious! Of course, if you prefer a more permanent cure, nothing can surpass a fatal dose of arsenic.”

In spite of herself, Zenia felt a reluctant tug at her lips. She picked up the teapot, drawing her cup and saucer toward her.

“Do you remember when Chrallah woke me in the night?” he asked suddenly.

Zenia bit her lower lip. His camel Chrallah had grown spoiled with handouts of bread, and poked her long neck into the tent one night, her questing head hanging above them like a huge white serpent, her warm breath tickling his ear. “Yes,” she said. “It was a nice tent while it lasted.”

“Unjust! What’s one camel-sized hole?”

“One of her size, and one of yours,” she exclaimed. “I did not think I would ever disentangle you.”

“Rubbish. You were merely laughing too hard to be of any serious use.”

Her lips pursed, and then spread irresistibly. “Poor Chrallah, standing there with a tent about her neck. She bore it with great dignity.” Zenia glanced at him. “Quite unlike you.”

As their eyes met, both of them smiling, she felt the blood rise in her cheeks. She looked away, flustered, and spooned sugar into her tea.

“When Beth laughs,” he said, “I can see you laughing.”

She kept her face down, sipping the tea. Her heart was beating hard, as if the next moment, the next thing he might say would change her life forever. Mr. Jocelyn had urged her strongly to marry him, in spite of all she had told the lawyer about her fears. He had made them seem overblown and foolish; he had not supposed that Lord Winter would separate Elizabeth from Zenia, even if the law gave him the means to do it as her husband. Every husband had the same ability under the law, when it came to that, Mr. Jocelyn said, and yet it was genuinely extraordinary to find any man cruel or mad enough to act upon it. The alternative, a life as a ruined woman with an illegitimate child, he stressed urgently, was far more to be feared, as much for Elizabeth’s sake as Zenia’s.

She was reassured, but not entirely certain. Lord Winter was no ordinary man. It would not be cruelty that drove him, but the diabolic force, the same djinni that had impelled her own mother to the East, to isolation and absolute liberty, the blood that Lady Belmaine said ran true in her son.

“Zenia,” he said, with a seriousness that impelled her to lift her face again, “I want to say that I—”

She waited. Her look seemed to distract him from his sentence, though she was careful to keep any emotion from her face. He hesitated, watching her, as if he expected her to finish it for him somehow.

“I mean to say,” he went on finally, with less authority in his voice, “that I have a very great... that I feel a particular...” He stood up, turning toward the fire. Looking at the screen appeared to restore his line of thought. He said abruptly, “I feel that you cannot truly have considered your position in a rational manner. That is why I wished for this meeting. All these damn—I beg your pardon—these lawyers have spoken to you, but perhaps no one has made you understand what it would mean for you and Beth to live outside my legal protection.” He gripped his hands together behind his back. His voice hardened. “If a marriage to me is so abhorrent to you that it is your preference to be received nowhere, to live in poverty, to be out in the street, to have men—feel themselves free to approach you in an insulting manner—well, then, that is your choice. But you should understand that you will be condemning our daughter to the same indignities. You seem to think that I have no care for Beth’s welfare—” His hands tightened; the veins stood out against his whitened knuckles. “—but I believe you are far more to be condemned, by this foolish—this selfish, unthinking, damned stupid, mulish obstinacy in the matter.” He took a few strides, stopped and looked back at her with an aggressive set to his mouth and his shoulders. “I would have to be a far greater monster than I am to justify it!”

“I am not selfish or obstinate or foolish.
 
I mean to protect Elizabeth!”

Behind him, the rain began to beat in earnest against the windows. He scowled fiercely at her. “Do you truly think I am a monster, Zenia? What terrible crime do you suppose I intend to commit against her?”

She lowered her eyes. “I do not think you would deliberately cause Elizabeth harm.”