Laura Kinsale (54 page)

“Where are we?” she asked in a small voice.

“My house,” he said shortly.

“Oh. But I thought—”

“Welcome to my burrow,” he said shortly. “My aunt left this to me years ago. There are mines and sheep, and the railway—an income independent of my father, bless her.” His face lightened a little as an elderly housekeeper came into the passage, hastily adjusting her cap. “Mrs. Bode,” he said. “Can anywhere be made fit for her to sleep?”

The housekeeper gave a little creaking bob of a bow, showing the hump in her back as she dipped her head. She managed to produce a strange combination of fluttery nervousness and authority as she said, “I’m sure my lady must go in the mistress’s old room, though if the chimney will draw I can’t say.”

Zenia stood in her quilt during a conversation about the chimney and Mr. Bode’s ability to start a fire—Lord Winter did not wait for the other man to return, but took up a load of firewood from the box by the door while Mrs. Bode fluttered and protested in a way that showed she had not much hope of preventing him. With the housekeeper carrying a candle ahead, Zenia followed them down the passage into the house.

It looked as her father’s house in Bentinck Street had, everything covered in sheets and the doorways all closed, but this had an air of permanent disuse, an undusted and unused smell, the corridors lined with boxes and obscure items of furniture, the cold saturating the house as if no fires were ever lit there. Upstairs, the bedchamber Mrs. Bode opened was dark and frigid, the wind rattling the windows, one sill dusted with snow where a pane had broken and been stuffed with cloth.

“She can’t sleep here,” Lord Winter said impatiently. He looked about the room with a frown. “I beg your pardon, ma’am,” he said in Zenia’s direction, “this is something of a bachelor house. Mrs. Bode, I hope you will see to that window tomorrow. At least the shutters should be closed.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, with a glance at Zenia, one woman to another. As Lord Winter passed out into the hall, the housekeeper said under her breath, “Nor he hasn’t paid me the least mind when I told him that the shutter had fallen off, ma’am, and him and Mr. Bode all taken up with that gamekeeper’s cottage like they been this past week, I don’t know what he thinks I’m to do but take a ladder to it myself, and break my neck too.” When Zenia nodded politely, the housekeeper seemed to take it as a gesture to unburden herself further. “A bachelor house it is, ma’am, and no but m’self and Mr. Bode left, and at our age there’s this great old place falling down about our ears while his lordship gads up and down the world, never here from one year’s end to the next. I do me best, ma’am, but I’ve seventy and six years, and not even a girl to help, and I beg you’ll forgive the state of the place.”

“Please don’t concern yourself, Mrs. Bode,” Zenia said. “I’m sorry to put you out. I’m only staying the one night, and any place you can find for me will be quite all right.”

“Oh, are you going off so soon?” the old lady asked, wringing her hands in disappointment. “I had hoped—with a new mistress—it was used to be a fine old place, it was, when Lady Margaret was alive, rest her soul.”

“I’m sorry,” Zenia said, “but I’m not—” She found that she could not bring herself to tell this fragile old woman that she was not the new mistress. “I’m sure it was very pretty.”

Mrs. Bode went ahead toward the stairs, with Zenia following. “I assure you that it was, ma’am. But if a gentleman lives in two rooms of it like a hermit, why—” She lowered her voice as they began to descend. “The creeping damp will carry him off, I vow, as Mr. Bode and m’self both tell him again and again, but he is—I’m sure you know what he is, ma’am. A good, generous master, but no sense of what is due to the house. He don’t think a thing of it but a roof and four walls. He could live under a bridge, I daresay, and never know the difference. I tell you, ma’am, I took pity on him from the day he come here, with a lot of books and guns and nothing else—a reserved, shy gentleman like himself—I was mortal pleased to hear he was married and would have a lady to see after him, because he was right set to turn into one of them strange old queer gentlemen who never speak to a living soul, but only collect things and sit all alone in their rooms, only I’ll never live so long as to have to worry about it much, but I thought it a shame.”

Lord Winter came striding out of a doorway off the staircase hall, dusting wood chips from his sleeves. “This will have to do,” he said. “Mrs. Bode, I’ll find myself somewhere to sleep, if you’ll bring her case here and clean bedclothes and all that sort of thing.” As the housekeeper hurried away, he glanced at Zenia. ‘This is the best we can do, I’m afraid,” he said abruptly, indicating the door.

Zenia walked through into a paneled room lined by books and strewn with a diversity of articles: rolled maps and boxes of shells and traveling tokens. A folded, tasseled and embroidered umbrella of gold and red silk, the type used to shade a pasha on his camel, leaned against one window bay. Next to it, pinned to the somber green curtain, a huge cobra’s shed skin dangled down to brush the floor.

Already a fire blazing up behind the elegant brass fender was taking off the chill in the library. Lord Winter picked up another log and threw it on, watching the flames.

The light pulsed on his face and on a gilded clock set among pieces of broken statuary on the mantelpiece. Sheaves of handwritten notes waved gently in the fire’s draft, stuck beneath a cracked marble bust on the mantel. Zenia recognized a
hijab,
an amulet that would hold a charm to ward off evil, hung on a leather thong that dangled from the sculpture’s stone ear.

In a corner near the fire there was a Turkish sofa piled with cushions and wrinkled sheets. Mrs. Bode came in with fresh linens folded atop Zenia’s traveling case.

As she bent to begin remaking the sofa bed, Lord Winter turned his rapt attention from the fire and said, “It should be warm enough in here. I will bid you good night.”

He walked past Zenia and left before she could answer him.

“I beg your pardon, ma’am,” Mrs. Bode said. “But his lordship’s right enough; this is a good cozy room if you can bear with foreign snakes and that. Would you like me to have Mr. Bode take the snake out, ma’am?”

Zenia looked at her dubiously. “Do you mean the skin?”

Mrs. Bode burst into a quavering laugh. “Oh, yes, ma’am. That awful old thing. I don’t mean to say a real snake, I declare! We aren’t that bad!” She tucked in the blanket. “But bad enough, for all that. I wish I’d had word that the new mistress was to come, and I would have hired some girls and turned the place over right, and paid for it out of me own jar if I must!”

“The snakeskin is fine,” Zenia said. “And I have slept in far worse places than this, Mrs. Bode.”

The housekeeper gave the sofa a last pat. “That’s kind of you to say, ma’am. More than kind. Would you like some buttered toast?”

“No, thank you. I’m very tired.”

Mrs. Bode made her creaky bow. ‘The bell’s there, then, ma’am. Perhaps we’ll have a blue sky in the morning, and you’ll see the place in a better light.”

There was no blue sky in the morning. There was only a leaden gray through the cracks in the curtains. Zenia sat on the sofa in her traveling dress, uninterested in the tray of toast and tea Mrs. Bode had brought, reading Lord Winter’s note.

He told her the time she must leave to meet the train, that the carriage would be ready, and asked her to allow a moment to speak to him about a business matter before she departed.

She waited as late as possible. She sat looking about at the jumbled library, the desks and notes and maps.
 
It was not homelike; it had more the appearance of a large closet used for random storage, and yet she breathed his familiar scent, in the room and on herself. Inside her.

She knew that he would not ask her again to be his wife. She had gone too far; she had made her final choice. The creature of last night, that had screamed at him and cried, seemed distant now, and yet she felt the source of it still within her, driving her away from him.

It was an intimate anguish, a grief she had known forever—she longed to be with Elizabeth to assuage and forget it, and yet she knew that it would be there, unalterable, underneath all the happiness she could contrive. It was a pain that seemed more safe and familiar than happiness itself: happiness that she could lose, that would slip away, and leave a mortal wound for having once existed.

She understood her mother now in a way that she never had before. Lord Winter was right. Knowing that her father would not—could not—stay, her mother had forced him away. There was a terrible rage inside Zenia too, and fear. She picked at the dark fur on her muff, afraid even to see Lord Winter, with no certainty whether she would shriek at him or plead forgiveness for what she had said to make him let her go.

Finally it was Mrs. Bode who came to tell her that he wished to see her, and led Zenia into the next room, another elegant chamber that had been filled with books and odd objects. Here there was a long dining table, half devoted to maps and atlases spread open, and the other half cleared but for a coffeepot and the remains of breakfast upon it. In the dull places where paintings had once hung on the walls and over the mantel, an array of polished guns rested in well-kept racks: Frankish rifles and pistols, along with weaponry of the East, beautifully chased muskets and golden scimitars.

He stood beside the single chair at the table, dressed as she had first seen him at Dar Joon, in a sporting coat and high boots. “You must leave in a quarter hour,” he said, without greeting her. “I want to come to an understanding about Beth.”

There was a dangerous edge to his voice, a determination that seemed intensified by the gleaming armory that surrounded them.

“I thought about this all night,” he said. “I don’t know what you expect of me—what sort of agreement you have made with Jocelyn—but if it is in any expectation that you and I would”—his jaw was rock-hard—”continue as lovers, while you are married to him, that is impossible. If our—if last night results in another child, then anything we agree upon now about Beth applies to that also. Do you understand?”

Zenia nodded. She could hardly lift her eyes from the plates on the table, where it appeared that he’d had even less interest in eating than she.

“I want Beth to know who I am,” he said.

“If you insist,” she said. “If you think that will be best for her.”

“Don’t presume to tell me anything about what’s best for her, damn you.” Then he shut his mouth hard, as if he would have said more and refused to allow himself.

“What else?” Zenia asked.

“I want to see her. Daily, if I like.”

Zenia shook her head. “No,” she said emphatically.

He turned to the window. “Are you so afraid I’ll steal her?”

She was afraid of that; she was afraid of seeing him herself. “I think visitations would be too difficult. For her. She might learn to care for you—depend on you to come—and then be hurt when you don’t.”

“When I’m not allowed to,” he said, low and savagely.

“Will you be staying in England?” she asked.

He did not answer that. Evidence of his traveling, drifting life lay all about them.

“So I am never to see her again?” he asked coldly. “Even once?”

“I will speak to Mr. Jocelyn about it, and see what he suggests. I’ll have to consider it.”

She half expected him to fly into a fury, but he only stood still, staring out the window, his face remote. “There is the carriage,” he said, at the sound of wheels and hooves in the icy snow.

Zenia’s heart began to beat very hard. She gazed into a cup of coffee, still full, that had gone cold on the table.

“I suppose,” he said, “that you are right, and I will be leaving the country.” As he spoke, his expression did not change, and yet he seemed to withdraw entirely from humanity. He looked out the window with an unblinking detachment. “I suppose that you are also right, that it is best for your daughter and all of us if I do not see her again.”

“It would be less painful.”

“Would it?” He smiled, a small inhuman smile. “Excellent.”

“I must go,” she said desperately.

He turned, almost as if he had forgotten she was there. The mantel clock began to chime as he stood looking at her. “Yes, of course.”

He opened the door for her, and followed her across the front hall. Mrs. Bode was there, peeping out onto the steps. “Mr. Bode has put in a hot brick, ma’am,” she said, keeping her eyes down as she held open the door.