True Born (7 page)

Georgiana said nothing, she walked straight
to John and, raising the whip, she lashed against his face with all
her strength.

The noise was almost sickening and his head
turned as a gash appeared on his cheek, but he was swift as he took
the whip from her, lashing at her shoulder.

She might have screamed in pain, but she
didn't, just as he hadn't. Both of them stood in the room looking
at each other, as blood appeared on his face and down her breast,
as if their acts of violence had suddenly broken the spell which
had made them unable to see each other.

"Georgiana!" he cried out.

He reached out and took her wrist, bringing
her to him. They held each other by the hair and kissed with so
much violence that it hurt. Everything hurt, the lashes, their
hair, their mouths crushed against each other, but it had to hurt
more. They tore at each other's clothes like beasts attacking, and
fell on the bed together.

There were no words between them, only the
ferocity of their passion, of their hatred, of their
misunderstandings, only their terrible need for each other.

John's lips were near the gash across
Georgiana's shoulder, mingling with her blood. "Forgive me," he
said.

"I hope it never fades," she replied.

He raised his head to look at her, "Would you
want me to always be reminded that I did this terrible thing?"

She ran a finger across his cheek, "I did it
to you first."

"It's not the same..."

"Because I am a woman?" There was a deep
melancholy in her eyes as she added with a smile. "Women can bear
so much more pain than men!"

"Because I deserved the lash and you didn't.
I don't know how I could come to you like that. I think of the
girls' faces now, of your face! No man worthy of the name should do
things like that."

She sighed. "I think I was like you today. I
just saw a darkness. And I know it's wrong of me to love you for
being so wild. I should want you to be serene, but I cannot help
it."

There was a silence between them, until he
asked, "Why did you not at least tell me yourself? Perhaps I could
have borne it better, if it had come from you."

"Did you not receive my letter?"

He frowned. "I got many letters from you,
none about your marriage."

She started to laugh, almost hysterically.
"So you had all the letters before, about jam making and bee
keeping, and you never got that one?" She stopped laughing and
shrugged. "It's no matter now. There was nothing you could have
done, in any case. My father died soon after I wrote, and we were
to be turned out. I suppose I was a coward."

"You're no coward," he said, looking at her
tenderly. "I thought you had forgotten me, or not thought I was
worth a word!"

"I thought 
you
 had
forgotten 
me
!"

"Oh, my love, what a mess!" He smoothed her
hair away from her forehead. "Do you still care for a brute who did
not even stop to ask what happened, or what you had suffered?"

"Yes!" she said simply. “I will always love
you, John. Always.”

He lifted her and held her, repeating, "What
a mess! What a mess!"

Georgiana snuggled against his chest,
thinking that soon enough she would not be able to touch him, but
she didn't cry. Tears wouldn't help or change anything, and their
fury against each other had calmed her, somehow.

"Your eyes are different," he told her.
"Sad."

She shook her head again, "We will never have
what we want the most, will we? I wonder if people ever do...I
wonder if they still want what they want, when they have it."

"Don't talk like that, George. You are so
young!"

"Just the other day I saw two old ladies
together, I think they were sisters. And I envied them. I thought,
they are past all the troubles, now they play cards and go to
church and talk, and wait to die."

"Don't, George!"

"Every day, almost all day I wonder what it
would have been like, if you hadn't gone to war, or if you had been
the vicar. If we could turn back time, and you never had left, we
would have married, wouldn't we? I wonder if we would have been
happy, as we were that summer. Do you think it?"

"I do, my darling."

She laughed, "I am sure some dishes would
have flown, and we might even have whipped each other, but I keep
thinking, how could we not go on being in love? It felt as if it
would never end!"

He couldn't say anything, he only put his
lips to her forehead and left them there.

"Don't be sad," she said. "I know you won't
see me anymore. I know you won't sneak behind Hugh's back, it's not
your way."

It took a moment for him to speak. "I can't
do to you what was done to my mother, even loving you as my father
loved her. I could never touch you if Hugh were touching you,
because I would end up killing him. And..." She felt him stiffen,
then sigh. "I would be the lowliest thing, if I ever allowed a
bastard child of mine to be born. Nothing would be worse than that,
except that it should be brought up by Halford."

Georgiana also sighed. "I know!"

He sat back to look into her eyes. "And if I
ask you to come with me, now, would you do it?"

"Your child would still be a bastard."

"We would go away, where people did not know
us, where it wouldn't matter! And I would be there to see our
children growing up, to be next to them.”

"You, live a lie? You never could!"

"If it's the only way for us to be
together..."

"I would give my life for a month's happiness
with you. Oh, I would be such a glutton for it! But you know I
cannot do it! How can I abandon my sisters, who have been my only
comfort? How can I decide their lives in this way? I have a
responsibility to them, now that my father is gone!"

"Georgiana, my love, you can't ensure that
they will be happy, or that there will be no misfortune in their
lives, whatever choice they make!"

She put her hands on either side of his face,
and he did not wince in spite of the gash on it. "John, I
understand you, I don't blame you for anything -- I do nothing but
love you. You must understand me! Out of this whole terrible mess
some happiness has to come, for girls who are still innocent! There
would be nothing between us and complete destitution except you,
and your capacity to work." She paused and drew breath. "I think
Hugh will make it very hard for you. He will have you thrown out of
the army."

"I resigned my commission before I went to
his house that night."

"Oh, John..."

"It doesn't matter. I didn't like it!"

"But you were a hero, they promoted you!"

Now there were depths to his eyes as well,
but not of sadness, of something like horror. "I may seem like a
madman and a murderer, but it's only when my blood is up. To plan
the wholesale massacre of people...to lead boys to their
death..."

"But you were there with them, in danger of
death too!"

"It would have been easier for me to die,
than to see them blown up like that or cut into pieces. I may be
bad, Georgiana, but I am not cold. And for what? So that rich men
like Hugh keep getting richer?"

"You are not bad, John. Never bad."

"Then you forgive me, for causing you more
sorrow? To lose your father...I know what that must have
meant!"

"You lost your parents, and were not there
when your mother died..."

"You were by her side, I know. I heard from
other people as well. You risked your life! Look how I repaid
you..."

She wanted to comfort him, and began to kiss
him, and soon they were making love again, and she was happy to
feel him in her, his eyes on her face, his body covering hers.

When it was over he stood up, went to his
chest of drawers, and brought back a little tin and a wet cloth. He
cleaned the gash on her shoulder carefully and started to put
ointment on it.

"I don't want it to fade," she repeated. "I
want to have something of you, even this. I shall think of you
every day as the most beautiful thing in my life."

His face was even more troubled as he said,
"Georgiana, for heaven's sake, don't speak as if your life were
over! I understand that I am a poor man now, and that to come with
me would expose you and the girls to difficulty. But trust that I
shall find a way! Trust in me, I beg you!"

"I have no right to take away all the
possibilities they have. I have no right to place them under
persecution from the society they know. This will never change,
John."

She was already getting up and getting
dressed, and when she was ready, having managed to cover the damage
to her dress and the gash on her shoulder, she walked over to him
and kissed the welt she had left on his face, and kissed his lips,
but she said nothing else.

Georgiana left, and he didn't follow her
downstairs. He held the handkerchief which he had stolen from her
sleeve, and saw with a grim smile that the initials on it were GB,
the initials of her maiden name. He had wanted to ask if Hugh at
least treated her well, but his jealousy and the fear that he might
see that her husband hurt her had stopped him. He had lost his head
enough times, and none of it had helped her.

John went to his desk and opened it, taking
out a pack of letters tied with a ribbon, then he fell onto the
bed. Her handkerchief and his pillow smelled like her. He untied
the ribbon, and the letters fell on his chest. There were many of
them, over the course of two years, and he hadn't reread any since
he had found out that she had forsaken him, but neither had he had
the courage to burn them.

He started to read them again now, from the
beginning, and the happy girl on the page was so different from the
woman with the sad eyes that this man, whom so many other men
feared, couldn't help the tears that stung the gash on his
cheek.

John reflected on the nature of his love for
Georgiana.

What had it been before he left for war, when
she had been a girl and he had considered himself a man, and yet
had been untested except by the accident of his birth?

He had thought there could be no one more
lovable than she. Nothing had made him happy, until he had been
with her, in the fields at Halford, at her father's house with her
small sisters, at his mother's seeing how much they liked each
other.

She had been purity and innocence, with wit,
generosity and heart -- a chance for things to be good and clear
like the water of a brook.

What had she been to him during the years of
war, when her letters made him smile after he had waded in blood,
smelled rot and seen human bodies treated like meat?

And what had she been when he had heard that
she hadn't waited for him, but had instead married his despicable
brother for money, with nary a note to warn him?

What was she now, when he had come back to
find her a woman, more beautiful than ever, with a sadness and
longing in her eyes that hadn't been there when he had left?

He had thought that he loved her before, with
passion, but as he looked at her from across the theater he knew
that he loved her now, that 
this
 was love.

John had watched Georgiana more than once in
the three weeks that had passed since they had been together in his
room. He had seen her riding in the park, at Vauxhall Gardens, at
the opera and at mass in the cathedral, since she had had to
convert to Catholicism when she had married Halford.

He had known where she would be, because the
steps of a fashionable and dizzyingly rich noblewoman were often
announced in the paper, just as the paper had announced that she
planned to attend this performance
of 
Rinaldo
 tonight.

John had told her that he wouldn't try to see
her or seek her out, and he had meant to keep his word, but he
thought that if he only looked at her from afar there could be no
harm.

Except to him, he realized. He had bought a
place in a box across from hers and it had cost him a sum he should
not spend, but he did not care. He stood at the back of the box, in
darkness, and didn't look at the stage but at Georgiana.

She was in one of the best boxes in the
house, at an enviable proximity to the stage. Cecily and Dorothea
were on either side of her. John saw that Cecily had become a woman
of eighteen, and that Dotty was still a child at fourteen, with her
round cheeks, blonde curls and dimples. He loved these girls, who
had been present during his courtship of their sister. Cecily had
carried notes between them, and Dotty had never been able to keep
herself from hanging onto his arm or holding his hand to tease
Georgiana, who was not a child and could not touch him whenever she
wanted to. He loved them, and yet he had not stopped to think of
how he would frighten them when he had, in fury, climbed the steps
of Halford House on his horse.

There was someone else with them in the box,
a woman. Hugh was absent: perhaps he was still nursing the scar on
his face.

The welt from the whip lash on Georgiana's
shoulder was covered and might be starting to fade, just as the
mark of the gash on his cheek. The memories of that day, however,
were vivid. He could still see how she had looked in his bed, he
could still feel her skin, and her lips.

Many lorgnettes and opera glasses were being
turned on the Countess of Halford with the peculiar freedom
Londoners employed to watch each other. People stared openly so
they could admire or envy her beauty, and copy her finery.

He could not stop looking at her either,
 because of the different quality she had acquired in his
absence: the womanliness of her expression and her shape, the soft
bosom which rose and fell with the music as she looked towards the
stage, seeming to feel so much.  The diamonds around her face
and neck at this moment did not shine more brightly than a tear at
the corner of her eye, as she listened to the words being sung.