Laura Kinsale (48 page)

“You agree, Lord Winter?” Lady Caroline asked, smiling at him. “But you would understand. People speak often of freedom, but I believe it requires a knowledge of the true cost of a free life to genuinely value it. If he were in the jungle, this fellow, every day of his existence would be struggle and savagery. Here it is easy. But still he longs to be free. He has tasted it, and anything less will always be torture to him.”

“Certainly,” Arden said, wishing that she had not worn quite such a tight bodice. “Torture.”

Lady Caroline slipped her hand into the crook of his arm, turning to move further down the hall. “I’m glad you don’t think my conjectures so odd as others sometimes do. I’ve not been into London society yet. My aunt warns me that I may not find it pleasant. People can be disagreeably severe, she says, and I fear I may not be quite the thing.”

“I’m sure you will be the thing,” he said, pausing to let Beth coo at an ocelot that was sticking its paw through the bars. “Whatever the deuce the thing may be.”

She laughed as if he had made a great jest, the sound of it resonating against the roof. “That is reassuring.”

He shrugged. “I’m hardly the one to know,” he said. “I detest polite society.”

Her hand curled tighter on his arm. “Do you?” She lowered her voice and bent her head toward him. “I should not say so, for Lady Broxwood has been so kind—but I’m entirely of the same mind. There is nothing so dull as a ball or rout—in Bombay we used to have them until I was ready to scream for the tedium of it. But then Aunt and Uncle George would always promise to take me on a hunt, or a trek into the mountains. Have you seen the Himalayas, Lord Winter?”

“I have not,” he said.

She squeezed his arm. “I wish I might have the privilege of being there, my lord, to see your face when you do.”

Arden began to feel a sensation of entrapment. He turned, dismayed to find Zenia very close behind him. “You have her much too near,” she said sharply, and for an instant he thought she was speaking of Lady Caroline’s attachment to his arm, but he realized that she meant Beth and the ocelot, who were stretching toward one another.

“Of course,” he said, using his move away from the spotted cat to slip free of Lady Caroline. “Am I the only one who finds this a melancholy exhibit? Let us proceed apace to feed the monkeys.”

Lord Winter was by no means the only one who felt melancholy. Zenia suffered every degree of jealous misery, from rage to hurt to despair, struck to the heart with the look of stark intensity on his face as he gazed at Lady Caroline and the caged tiger.

Zenia hated the zoological exhibits. She hated the yellow-eyed cats pacing relentlessly in their prisons: their beauty and their wildness; their frustration. She hated Lady Caroline for speaking of it, for standing beside him as he held Elizabeth, for detesting polite society, for being exactly and precisely and effortlessly the woman who should be his wife.

Lady Caroline loved the jungles and wild places, she spoke lightly of hardships and dangers. She was the first to feed the monkeys and bears, and pleaded with Zenia so prettily that Miss Elizabeth would be perfectly, perfectly safe upon the elephant that Zenia was constrained to let her ride. She had supposed it would be Lord Winter who took Elizabeth up, but it was Lord Winter and Lady Caroline, with Elizabeth tucked between them, squealing “ ‘Fant! ‘Fant!” at the top of her lungs, while the animal’s huge ears flapped languidly back and forth as it walked ponderously about the yard, each huge foot squeezing up a circle of mud. Lady Caroline waved at them, her skirts all akimbo so that her boots and stockinged ankles showed, though she pretended with a mischievous smile to try to push down her petticoats—which only drew Lord Winter’s attention to the whole business, Zenia thought angrily.

“I hope we have not spoiled your outing,” Lady Broxwood said in a low voice, coming up beside Zenia as she watched.

“Of course not,” she said coldly.

“Lady Belmaine particularly wished him to be introduced to her. They do suit, do they not?”

Zenia could not bear it; she looked aside at Lady Broxwood.

“I should not in general notice a person of your position, Miss Bruce,” the older woman said, “but as I understand that you and the little girl are to go the Continent directly, and Lord Winter so rarely appears in society, I felt I could not scruple to pass over such a golden opportunity for them to become acquainted.” She gave Zenia a piercing look. “You have been most discreet today; I am sure you will continue so.”

“You need not be concerned, ma’am,” Zenia said, her lips curling proudly. “We are going home as soon as Elizabeth is let down.”

Lord Winter escorted Zenia to the front door in Bentinck Street, while Lady Broxwood’s large, elegant carriage waited beside the curb.

“Zenia, I will come back as soon as I see them to—wherever the devil they live,” he said, while Zenia stood holding Elizabeth, waiting for the maid to answer the door. Mrs. Lamb lingered at the foot of the steps, finding the coal hole of supreme interest.

“You need not,” Zenia said. She had kept the tremble from her voice for all the time it had taken to disengage from the party, to suffer the discussion of whether they should all ride home in Lady Broxwood’s chaise, to listen to Lady Caroline’s enthusiasm and Mrs. George’s invitation to dinner. Lord Winter had accepted the invitation, looking hard at Zenia—and she had refused it, of course, on account of her fictitious sister, Elizabeth’s fanciful nameless mother. “You need not come back,” she said to him now, hearing the tremble threaten.

“It was horrible, I know,” he said low. “I am so sorry, beloved.”

The door opened. The housemaid held it wide, curtsying.

“I am coming back,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”

Zenia stepped inside. She didn’t turn to look at him. She heard Mrs. Lamb come in, and the door closed behind her. “Please change Elizabeth’s clothes immediately,” Zenia said, handing her to the nurse. “She smells like a menagerie.” Without pausing, Zenia pounded up the stairs.

In her bedroom, she tore off her cloak and gloves, hurling the muff into the corner of the room. She pulled her bonnet off and began to pace like the caged animals had paced.

“I cannot bear it.” She panted a little, biting her lip. “Impossible, impossible, impossible.” Her eyes blurred. “It is impossible!” she cried.

She stopped, staring out the window down into the little garden. Angry tears spilled down her cheeks.

“I have done this! I would not listen to them. It is my fault. Oh, Elizabeth, it is my fault!” She pressed her fists and forehead against the cold windowpane. “If only—”

If only what? If only she was married to him now? If only it had been Lady Winter who had stood there and watched him with her? And if not Lady Caroline, then some other; some free and fearless woman of his own heart—he did not even know himself; he still believed in some connection that could bind them—Zenia did not know if he meant marriage still or the house in Switzerland, but it made no matter. She could not bear either. She would not.

She flung herself down at the writing desk. The letter to Mr. Jocelyn in Edinburgh did not take so long to write, it was only that she stared for so long at the blank paper, weeping, and finally laid her head down on her arms and sobbed until she was hoarse.

Mrs. Lamb came in quietly and laid a hand on her shoulder. Zenia sat up, turning her face away.

“His lordship promised he would return,” the nurse said firmly. “You must have a little faith in him, ma’am.”

“You don’t understand,” Zenia said, leaning her forehead on her hand.

“A mustard seed will move mountains. And this is only a little hill, ma’am, if you’ll pardon me.”

“You don’t understand. She is right for him. Perfect for him. He doesn’t even understand himself. Freedom is everything to him. It is his very life. Like those animals in the cages—he will fret himself to death if he cannot go. And if I—if I don’t—if I don’t have the courage to let him go now, I shall have to w-watch—” She swallowed. “It would kill me.”

“What, do you suppose he will fret to death if he cannot ride an elephant in some nasty desert? When he has you and Miss Elizabeth at home?”

“He will take her!”

“Then perhaps you ought to go along too, ma’am!”

Zenia sobbed. “You don’t understand! You don’t know what the desert is—it is not elephants, or tiger hunts with servants, or whatever it is that Lady Caroline spoke about. It is life and death, and he must live between them or he is not alive at all.”
   
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“Nonsense. I never heard such talk.”

“He has a djinni; he has a demon in his blood. My mother did. And I am afraid that Elizabeth has it too.”

“Please, ma’am, a demon! Your own husband. I would spank a child for such folderol.”

Zenia began to laugh and cry at once. “Oh, you have not seen him. You have never seen him when he is Abu Haj Hasan, and rides against the Saudi or the Rowalla. He is so beautiful and terrifying. I’m the only one who knows.” She shook her head. “The only one.”

She stared into nothing, remembering what she had wanted to forget and could not. It was the demon-haunted man that she had first learned to love; the man she would trust with her life, and yet feared to the depth of her soul because he knew no fear himself.

“Now, ma’am,” Mrs. Lamb said, “it’s only that silly chit this afternoon has put you in a black melancholy with all her talk of elephants. Dry your eyes, for his lordship will be here soon.”

Zenia jerked to attention. “No.” She turned to the paper. “I will not see him. I cannot.” She scribbled, folded the letter, and handed it to Mrs. Lamb. “This is to go to the post office directly. Find a boy to take it immediately, do you understand?”

Mrs. Lamb opened her mouth, clearly intending to object. But then she closed it. She made a curtsy. “Yes, ma’am.”

It was the nurse who met Arden at the door and slipped out onto the step, closing the door firmly behind her.

“Ma’am is not at home,” she said.

“That bad?” he asked apprehensively.

“If you were one of mine, I would box your ears, sir. Box your ears! Why you allowed that horrid girl to hang all about you while you made such sheep’s eyes at her, I can’t conceive!”

“Did it seem that I looked at her so?” he asked in consternation. “I made sure that I did no such thing.”