Laura Kinsale (18 page)

“She needs help.” Mrs. Smith’s voice had a little edge. “You may believe me, I know what it’s like to be alone and increasing in a foreign place!”
 

Mr. Harrow left a little pause. “I’m sorry,” he said stiffly.

“Well, it is all water under the bridge now,” his sister said. “But I will not abandon her for some scruple about her background! I mean to see her safely to her people.”

Mr. Harrow’s silence was longer. At length, he said ironically, “I only hope they’ll thank you for it.”

Zenia turned on the stairs and went away, lying down in the cabin and clutching the miniature of her father in both hands.

Don’t cry, damn you,
a voice chided her roughly.
It’s a waste of good water.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She would not cry. She wanted him to be proud of her.

Zenia was paralyzed with excitement and fear and cold. She sat shivering in the berth, hearing all the sounds of London outside, smelling the smells, the air thick with smoke. It was so cold that she could see her breath even in the cabin, and outside everything seemed dark, the deck speckled with charcoal, the huge darkened buildings, the bleak, black-coated, shouting people. It was all ugly; horridly ugly and stinking.

“Don’t cry, don’t cry,” she whispered to herself, a litany. “Don’t cry, little wolf.”

Mrs. Smith came bustling in the door with a cloak. “Now. It’s all arranged.”

Zenia went with her. She did not question Mrs. Smith’s arrangements; they were the only reason she was still alive, she thought. Alive, and in England. Oh, it was so cold. It wasn’t green—there was not a single tree to be seen, only the dead tall spikes of ships’ masts.

She walked down the gangway with Mrs. Smith holding her arm and Mr. Harrow behind them. There was a little group of waiting people on the dock, standing still amid the bustle of the seamen. For an instant, Zenia stopped.

She saw a ghost; she saw Lord Winter in a tall man who looked up at her, his face half-hidden between his hat and his upraised collar.

Then the illusion vanished, and she realized that it was someone much older, who looked at her without recognition. And Mrs. Smith was leading her down, turning her to someone else, another gentleman who was clenching and unclenching his gloved hands.

Zenia lifted her eyes from the tight fists he made. She knew before she looked—she knew what Mrs. Smith had done; her heart flew up into her throat and she raised her eyes to see her father’s face.

He was older than she had expected, with lines of worry about his eyes and carved into his cheeks, with the handsome features gone stark, the wind blowing his graying hair against his hat brim. For a moment he stared into her face, a searching look, at her and yet beyond her, as if he had expected to see someone else there.

She drew herself up and held out her hand. “Mr. Bruce?” she asked, with a proud lift of her chin, so that no one would see how she was dying inside.

Suddenly, weirdly, he began to laugh. “Oh my God,” he said. “I remember.” And he took her hand hard into his and pulled her up against him and squeezed her to his chest, muttering and laughing. He was much stronger than he looked; he almost smothered her in his arms, and then held her back and stared at her hungrily. “Please come home,” he said, his voice shaking. “Please come. There is so much to make up for.”

London transformed. From a bleak, noisy, gray place, it began to glow.

‘This is Bentinck Street,” her father said, as the carriage turned into a row of solemn brown-brick houses with white casements. “St. Marylebone. Home—such as it is.” He smiled at her. When he smiled, she could see the young man in the painting, and she smiled back. “Are you quite cold?” he asked.

“Very cold!” she said. “I love it.”

He laughed at her. All of Zenia’s need to weep had left her, but her father kept sniffling and smiling, his handsome eyes reddened with emotion. “Well, we shall keep the fires up this winter.” The carriage had stopped, and he caught her hand. “Now, I must tell you, Zenia, that my wife suffers from ill health. But she knows you are coming, and wants you as much as I do. She is a very special lady. You must not be afraid of her.”
 

Zenia nodded.

“You know that I was never married to your mother,” he said, tilting his head down. “But you are my daughter.” His hand gripped hard on hers. “When I received Mrs. Smith’s letter—I have not slept one night since, for wonder and remorse.”

“Miss Williams said—” Zenia spoke faintly, hardly able to get the words out. “She believed that my mother never told you.”

He lifted his eyes, locking his fingers in hers. “Zenia, I have done things in my life that shamed me. Your mother—I can’t make excuses, I left her when she told me to go—but one thing I want you to know and believe. I would not have left you there. I would not have abandoned you. I swear it with every fiber of my being.”

“I’m glad,” Zenia whispered. “I was always glad that you were my father.”

“I wish—did you never think to write to me?”

“Oh, no!” Zenia shook her head. “Nothing left Dar Joon that my mother did not see.”

His eyes narrowed a little. “You were afraid of her.”

Zenia gave a small shrug. “She did not like to be disobeyed.”

He held her hands for a long moment. Then he said, “You do not have to be afraid anymore.” He knocked on the roof with his cane, and the cabman came down and opened the door.

His wife insisted that Zenia call her Marianne. She was quiet and elegant, with a tender transparency. She had pretty, subdued manners that did not hide a generous welcome for her husband’s illegitimate daughter.

Zenia could hardly keep from staring at her, fascinated. She could not imagine a woman more different from her own mother. Her father had a little tendency to hover about his wife, asking twice if she would like a shawl. Zenia met her half-brother, another Michael, an ardent youth of sixteen who shook her hand nervously, asked her about the government in Egypt, and talked for half an hour about European politics until his father chased him off with an awkward laugh, advising him to finish his Latin before tea.

Zenia felt unreal. She was welcome in the house on Bentinck Street; they offered her welcome so openly, as if there was a place that had been empty, and she had slipped in to fill it. No one asked more than simple commonplaces about her trip, and Marianne even expressed a discreet sympathy for her mother’s death.

There was no sign of other children, and Zenia gradually came to understand, without being told, that they had died. When Marianne led her up to a bedchamber, it was clearly one that had belonged to a pair of young girls. There were two beds with embroidered pillows and lace coverlets, and two little beribboned silhouettes hung one above the other on the wall.

Marianne paused before she closed the door. “You must believe it when I say I am glad you came to us,” she said softly. “Michael always loved my sons from my first marriage, and I am glad to love you, for his sake and your own.”

“Thank you,” Zenia said foolishly.

“Thank
you, “
Marianne said, “for coming to us. I hope you will decide to stay. It would make your father very happy.”

In his wife’s bedchamber, Michael Bruce stood with his hands behind his back, staring down into the barren fall garden behind the house. “I don’t know what to make of it,” he said. “I don’t know, Mari.”

“There can be no doubt that she is yours,” his wife said, with a faint smile. “The Bruce looks are obvious, I should think.”

“Are they?” He turned, frowning. “But—she is the most beautiful creature I’ve ever laid eyes on in my life.” Then he made a wry face. “Excepting you, of course. So saith the belated knight!”

“I rest my case,” Marianne said, leaning back in the bed.

He gave an ironic laugh. “Flattery, my dear? After all these years?”

“Why should I not pride myself on my conquest of the splendid Mr. Bruce?” she said gently. “You are a superior man, and your daughter is a diamond of the first water. When we have restored her complexion, and filled out her thinness, she will be beautiful beyond anything.”

“If the world thinks so, then pray God that she has more sense than I ever did at her age,” he said. “She must be twenty-five, Mari. Twenty-five! And she is thin, isn’t she? I hope she isn’t ill.” He made a turn about the room, and then stopped, sitting down beside her on the bed. “You have a lunatic for a husband. For the last three days, I’ve been a lunatic. You must think—” He broke off.

She laid her hand on his. “Michael. It is all right.”

“But to bring her here, Mari; to force her on you and our son.”

“She is as much yours as Michael is. I have only to look at her to see it.” She squeezed his fingers. “I was never jealous, was I? You told me everything long ago. It was one of the things that I admired in you, that you did not seek to hide it. I will confess, I was a little afraid—” She shrugged. “I thought she might be more like her mother. I’m not sure I could have loved her as well then, though I would have tried. But she is not, Michael. She is yours. And that is enough for me. Besides—” She curled her fingers around the coverlet. “I have missed having a girl’s voice in the house.”

He leaned over and kissed her. “I don’t deserve your goodness.”

“Perhaps you don’t,” she said tapping his cheek lightly, “but it’s your innocent daughter we speak of.”