To Have and to Hold (7 page)

"I made 'er acquaintance this morning, sir."

"Did you? And what did you make of her?"

"My lord?"

"How did she strike you? Will she do? Ought we to cover our backs when she's about?"

Holyoake looked unamused by his levity. "I should think she'll do all right after she gets 'er feet wet, so to say. At the present, she's very raw, m'lord."

He meant "new," but Sebastian thought she was raw in another way as well: she was tender, as unprotected as a fresh wound. "I've heard that she murdered her husband," he mentioned.

Holyoake grunted. "Aye, it's what they do say."

"Was Wade a local man?"

" 'E had a big house betwixt Wyckerley an' Tavis-tock, m'lord."

"How did he make his living?"

"I couldn't say as to the particulars o' that, except he had mining interests here and about, and I b'lieve he had other businesses as well. In general, 'e were a businessman, Him and the mayor might've had some dealings together."

Sebastian thought that over. "He must have been a good deal older than his wife when he married her."

"Hmm, ha," said William, signifying assent.

"Must've been quite a scandal when he was murdered."

William said nothing.

"How was he killed?"

" 'E were bludgeoned to death wi' a poker."

Sebastian swore softly, staring at Holyoake in shock.

"Aye, you could say that. It were a right panjam-ble,m'lord."

"Did she confess? Was there no question that she did it?"

"Oh, there were a question. And she never confessed." He was silent for a while, then added with obvious reluctance, "They'd've hung 'er if it hadn't of been fer the circumstances."

"What circumstances?"

Holyoake had a habit of pressing his lips together in a tight smile when he was thinking hard, or undecided, or uncomfortable. At the moment, he appeared to be all three. "They was only married about a week, as I recollect. He had a daughter who was Mrs. Wade's school chum. Lydia, her name is; she bides in Wycker-ley now wi' her aunt, a widow lady named Mrs. Armstrong."

Bloody hell, thought Sebastian. Not only had he hired a convicted murderess, but her victim's family lived here in the village. Why hadn't Vanstone told him?

"At the trial," Holyoake resumed slowly, each word sounding more unwilling than the last, "it come out that Mr. Wade had certain, ah, peculiarities."

"Peculiarities?"

"Propensities. Of an unnatural nature. He weren't altogether normal-like in 'is sexual partialities, you might say. That and her being only eighteen is what made 'em let 'er off wi' penal servitude instead o' hanging. Or so it were said. And that's all I do know o't, m'lord."

And that's all he would say. At the river bridge, he turned his sturdy cob around and began to plod back toward the village. Sebastian had planned to ride to Tavistock this afternoon, to see what amusements the town had to offer. Instead he stayed home, and spent the rest of the day thinking about his new housekeeper.

5

The London Season began in earnest during the second week after Easter. By now, all of Sebastian's social acquaintance would be swept up in the annual storm of galas, court balls, concerts, and horse races. When he was in England, he never missed it, not because he found the frivolous whirl especially enjoyable anymore, but because there was nothing else to do.

This year, surprising himself, he didn't go.
I'll take the train up on Wednesday,
he would plan; and then, when the departure date came and went,
I'll go on Friday.
But something always came up, or he was too preoccupied, or he'd forget to tell Preest to pack. April turned into May, and without ever making a deliberate choice, Sebastian remained in the country.

For what? Sheep-dyeing and barley-sowing, orchard-pruning and field-manuring. No one who knew him would have credited it, but the process of farming was actually beginning to interest him. He wanted to observe the full cycle at least one time, witness causes and effects—planting and harvesting— maybe test his own resources against nature's. That was as close as he could come to defining the quality of his fascination with the lush Devonshire countryside in this spring of 1856. The novelty of landowner-ship probably played a part, as well as the completely new experience of being the one to whom others looked for guidance, looked, in fact, for their very livelihoods. He could have been sitting on his bench in the House of Lords, looking at pictures in the Royal Academy, gambling at Strouds's, or taking his pleasure with the ladies at Ascot—or the girls at Mrs. Fielding's. Instead he rode his horse over his twenty thousand acres of field, pasture, orchard, and forest, meeting his tenants and measuring his hay crop; and at night he perused seed catalogs and books on wool marketing and ram sperm.

Captain Carnock was a gentleman farmer when he wasn't being a magistrate. Sebastian invited him to dinner and picked his brain on the minutiae of corn pricing, dairy improvements, and tenant cottage construction. But his true mentor was William Holyoake. There was very little about estate management the taciturn bailiff didn't know, and he was infinitely more willing to share that expertise than to gossip about ten-year-old neighborhood scandals. They spent hours in conversation together, and Sebastian couldn't deny that it was warming to see William's estimation of him go up a little, day by day. The bailiff hadn't thought much of him when they'd first met. Not that he'd ever said anything; no, he hadn't raised so much as a disrespectful eyebrow. But Sebastian knew. What he didn't know was why Holyoake's good opinion of him mattered one way or the other. But it did.

The other reason he stayed in the country was because he hadn't seduced Mrs. Wade yet. Hadn't had the chance. She glided around the house like a ghost, never seeming to speak—although she must, to
someone
if not to him, because his household was running smooth as a top with precious little help from him. Precisely the state of affairs he'd been hoping for when he'd hired her. But she was a slippery fish and she had a pure genius for avoiding him; he had to be quick just to catch a glimpse of her these days. So he'd recently contrived an ingenious ritual, ostensibly to keep up with domestic a&irs: he made her come into his study every morning at nine o'clock and "report" to him on matters about which he couldn't have cared less—tradesmen's bills, menus, spring cleaning, the hiring of a new laundry maid.

At first he enjoyed making her stand while he lounged at ease behind his big desk. Why? Because that master-servant simulation had piquant sexual overtones he found stimulating. But after a day or two, he started inviting her to sit, because then he got to keep her longer, and their brief conversations could more naturally blend and merge into subjects unrelated to housekeeping.

She'd obeyed his command and bought a new dress. It was black, anything but stylish, obviously cheap; still, it was a huge improvement over the old one. Beauty wasn't what had attracted him to Mrs. Wade and made him hire her that day in the town hall, but here she was, looking . . , if not beautiful, then striking in her plain wool gown, high-necked and tight-sleeved, with a dainty white apron he'd have called coy on another kind of woman. After a few days of seeing her in her new dress, he'd told her he liked it but he didn't want to see it all the time. Get another one, get two more, he instructed, and this time defy housekeeper tradition and don't get black. Anything but black. The next day she appeared in his study wearing her second new dress: brown. Dark brown. But, strangely enough, it suited her, looked almost pretty on her, probably because it matched her hair, and so he hadn't complained.

She was by no means blooming, and yet she had come a long way from the silent, downcast spectre at the magistrates' hearing. She must be eating better; she'd lost her alarming pallor and even some of the angularity in her figure. She always wore her hair pinned up under a cap, and the shortest strands escaped and hung about her neck in a becoming way that came close to looking youthful. But she was still solemn as the grave, spoke only when spoken to, and never, ever smiled.

Holyoake's astonishing revelations had raised Sebastian's already keen curiosity about her to a new and salacious plane. He wanted very much to know what her one-week marriage had been like, and exactly what had been the late Mr. Wade's "ah, peculiarities." He entertained himself by imagining her in lewd sexual situations, but the man in his fantasies was always himself; when he tried to put a deviant or a pervert in them with her, someone who hurt her or degraded her—someone other than himself—the fantasies evaporated, leaving him with a bad taste in the mouth.

Whenever possible, he tried to shock her out of her brittle composure. One day, in the middle of a onesided conversation about a chimney fire in the best drawing room, he interrupted her to inquire casually, "Tell me, Mrs. Wade, did you kill your husband?"

Annoyingly, her face didn't change. Her hands tightened on the accounts ledger she always brought with her, but otherwise she didn't react. After scarcely a pause, she said, "No, my lord. But everyone in Dartmoor Prison is there by some terrible mistake; certainly I never met a guilty inmate in all the years I was there. The English penal system was built to incarcerate innocent victims—were you not aware of that?"

He didn't know which was more discomfiting, her sarcasm or her indifference to whether he believed her or not. He sent her away with a curt word. This time the one who had been shocked was himself, and he didn't like it.

He wasn't sure why he tormented Mrs. Wade, why he had numerous new torments in mind for her in the future. It wasn't his usual style. But he'd seen a change coming in himself for a while now. Out of boredom and cynicism, he was starting to become nasty. He didn't approve of it, but in some ways he saw it as inevitable. Life, he'd decided years ago, was supremely, spectacularly pointless, and a wise man learned to deal resourcefully with that disappointing truth. Fortunately, Sebastian Verlaine had been born into wealth and comfort, two commodities that helped mitigate pointlessness no end.

But the older he got, the less fun he was having. It took more every day to divert him, and lately he'd begun moving gradually, with misgivings, into excess. There were no vices and few depravities he hadn't tasted, with differing degrees of satisfaction. He worried that when he ran out, he would choose a few favorites and indulge in them until they killed him.

In some ways, what he saw in Rachel Wade was what he couldn't see in himself anymore. She was like some raw, naked thing, stripped down to the basics, without illusions or hope, without vanity. The fire she'd been through had burned her clean to the bone. She knew something now; she'd learned a secret— maybe
the
secret—and he had some idea that if he could
possess
her, the essence of what he lacked and she had would be his. He would appropriate it.

It made no rational sense, but he told himself it was an instinct, and instincts were allowed to defy reason.

On a rainy Thursday morning, he sat at his desk in his first-floor study, paging through his correspondence while waiting for her to join him. She had a distinctive knock; he listened unconsciously for the soft
tap tap
—
tap
she always used to announce herself. But the appointed time came and went, and after only a few minutes he decided not to wait; he decided to go and find her.

He went to her room first. Cold gray light from the open doorway spilled onto the stone corridor, picking out every worn place and threadbare fiber in the thin carpet that ran down the center. He paused for the barest second, then entered without knocking. The sitting room was empty, but he heard a soft noise from the bedroom. Bad manners to walk in on a lady in her bedroom. Keeping his feet quiet on the meager rug, he moved toward the bedroom door.

She was coming out—they almost collided in the threshold. She started in surprise and backed up, begging his pardon. She had her white cap in one hand, the heavy accounts ledger in the other, clutching it to her chest. "I'm sorry I'm late, my lord. I was just on my way to come to you. There was a crisis in the kitchen just now, nothing terrible, but Clara burned her hand on the stove. It's not serious, but I stayed to see that she was all right and that Susan put the salve on—" She came to a sudden halt, flushing, gathering herself.

It never failed: the more agitated she became, the calmer he felt. "Relax, Mrs. Wade," he drawled. "Being late to our morning meeting is not grounds for dismissal."

She dropped her eyes, embarrassed. She had on her brown dress today; she must alternate: black, brown, black, brown. The bodice crossed modestly over her bosom and tied at the waist in two plain, practical bows. Such a demure dress. So easy to open. Yank, yank, and there she would be, clutching her corseted breasts, red-cheeked and wide-eyed. An enticing picture altogether.

He came farther into the room, and she had no choice but to back up. An invasion of her privacy. He did it deliberately, even as he wondered what in the world it was that made him want to test her, push her, see how far he could go before she broke.

"This is pleasant," he said, pleasantly, glancing around. It wasn't the austere nun's cell it had been a few weeks ago. She'd put jars of flowers in the window and on her small night table; a few actual possessions could be seen here and there. She had a yellow flannel nightgown, folded neatly at the foot of her bed. He thought of picking it up, shaking it out, bringing it to his nose to discover what it smelled like. He resisted the impulse, but imagining her reaction made him smile.