Laura Kinsale (56 page)

“Something of a bachelor house,” the housekeeper muttered audibly as she took away the plates. “Nasty guns all over, and my lady allowing it.”

The curate instantly covered himself in stuttering apologies to Zenia, while Lord Winter looked up with a slightly startled expression. He sat down, leaving the rifle scattered between the green peas and marrowbone pudding.

“Lady Winter is familiar with guns,” he said, with a trace of defensiveness. “She is a fine shot herself.”

Zenia, afraid that Mrs. Bode had little respect for rifles, gathered the pieces up from between the dishes and put the Colt back together, as she had done a hundred times in the desert after cleaning and oiling it. She looked up to find Lord Winter smiling ironically at her, and the clergyman watching her in wonder.

“How you must long to be back in such marvelous strange places,” the curate said warmly. “Do you plan another journey soon?”

Zenia touched the amulet about her neck. She curled her fingers around it.

“No,” Lord Winter said, “I am a little weary of marvelous strange places. I am glad to be safe home.” He gave Zenia a sideways smile. “If the chicken pox doesn’t kill me.”

The curate proposed a toast to Lady Winter. The conversation, easier now, led away to more mundane things, and the clergyman took his leave after an apple tart and port. Zenia went back into the dining room as the two men lingered at the foot of the front stairs. From the window, she saw the curate accept his vail, and give every appearance of surprise and heartfelt gratification before he went off in his little buggy.

Lord Winter stood watching after him a moment. Zenia waited, expecting him to come back, but he turned instead and vanished from sight around the corner of the house.

She sat in the window, trying to imagine the dining room without the gun racks and the jumble of books and charts. There were two pretty cascades of woodcarving, flowers and fruit and wild birds, framing the space above the mantel, and scattered about under the overflow of maps were side tables and needlepointed chairs that seemed as elegant as the ones at Swanmere.

It
would
be pretty, cleaned and straightened, the rose-colored curtains renewed, the woodwork and brasswork polished. With a little wonderment, she realized that it was hers. Mrs. Bode had made a number of remarks implying that Zenia would be grossly derelict in her duty if she did not see to putting the house to rights, and sending the snakes and guns to some proper territory within it, masculine but strictly confined.

But Zenia was not certain what Lord Winter would think. Perhaps it would make him uncomfortable—more inclined to leave. Perhaps he wished her to live at Swanmere, so that he could keep this place for his own retreat.

Doubt began to possess her. Had he not sounded faintly troubled when he said he was glad to be home? And the rifle, the excitement in the desert—had he not had the same light in his eyes when he spoke of it?

He had not come back for a long time. She closed her eyes and put both her hands about the
hijab.

She heard the sound of a horse and then his voice shout her name from outside. Zenia jumped up, leaning on the window.

He rode Shajar bareback, right up under the window, grinning at her.
“Yallah!”
The mare danced and reared, flinging her long mane as if she were ready for a
ghrazzu.
“Open up, beloved!”

She forced open the sash. Cold air poured in. “What are you doing?”

“Repeating my one success,” he said, breathing frost as he reached up to catch her hand. “Abducting you again. You’ll have to cooperate a little more this time, unless you wish me to drag you out the window.”

“You are mad!” she cried, laughing.

“Well,” he said, “it seems to work rather well.”

“And Mrs. Bode says you are a shy gentleman!”

“Not much for small-talk,” he admitted.

“May I come out the door?”

“No, beloved, that is entirely too sane and simple.” He urged the mare up close. “You must come out the window, to prove you love me.”

She sat on the sill. “I don’t have a cloak.”

“Such ladylike scruples! When it’s your undying devotion at the test. Duck now, we’re on our way.”

With his arm about her waist, he pulled her down before him. Zenia had a moment of falling, tumbling, and then he drew her firmly between his arms as the horse reeled around, following the buggy tracks in the melting snow.

She looked back at the house. In the afternoon light, its golden stone and tall white windows made a fine sight against the open moorland beyond, where streaks of yellow grass and rocks were beginning to show.

“Will Elizabeth and I live here?” she asked, afraid to be more pushing than to put it as a question.

He laughed. “I sincerely hope so.” Then his voice changed, and he said stiffly, “I suppose you would prefer Swanmere. It is far more civilized, of course.”

“Yes,” she said, “but this is mine.”

He held her hard against him. “My opinion precisely, wolf cub.”

“Perhaps you will not care for it so much if we put the guns into a special room.”

“Mmmm,” he said, nuzzling her throat. “Mrs. Bode has been working upon you, I see.”

“May I buy some fabric for new curtains in the dining room?”

“You may take everything out, burn it, and start over. It’s just a lot of old antiques. Burn the house down, if you like, and we’ll sleep in our cottage.”

“You are a horrid Philistine. Mrs. Bode says that you could just as well live under a bridge.”

“That would make me a troll, rather than a Philistine. And I suspect there is something of a fortune in fusty old masterpieces somewhere in there, so perhaps you had best not put it to the torch, at least without an inventory.”

The gamekeeper’s cottage was in view now, tucked below the edge of the moor.

“What is a troll?” she asked.

“A demon, wolf cub. The djinn that live under bridges and under the ground.”
 

“Oh,” she said.

In the night, after he had entered her deeply and at sensuous leisure, and lay warm and asleep beside her, she stared at his face in the glow of the fire. She could feel the amulet about her neck, a silver shape pressing into her breast.

It troubled her. It had brought her instant comfort, but when she touched it, calling on its magic, she felt unchristian and un-English—she felt herself sliding into the old world of the East.

She had married him. He had understood her well enough to guess that in that moment of crisis, she would respond from her deepest fears, from the magical fantasy of her mother’s faith, the realm of demons and supernatural powers. So he had written her a charm.

The worst of it was, she believed in it. Even as her reason fought the feeling, she was certain in her heart that this
hijab
held him. She had seen the truth of it when he looked at her; when he spoke to her; when he answered its magic.

She crept out of bed, kneeling beside the last leaping flames of the fire. He moved, and she looked up quickly, ashamed that he should see what she was doing, but he only shifted on the pillows, settling deeper. The light glimmered on his face and bared shoulder, on golden warmth and his black eyebrows and hair that blended with the shadows.

Zenia held the amulet, frowning down at it.

She did not need magic to trust him. She did not need magic to hold him.

With a deep, unsteady breath, she used a broad knife from the table to pry the silver seal open. She would put it into the fire, this charm.

The little roll of paper fell into her palm, smoke-scented and faintly darkened by the candle flame. But just before she threw it into the hearth, she hesitated—and then spread the ragged slip open.

Her heart contracted a little at the sight of the cabbalistic script, the mystical writing that was not Arabic or English or any familiar lettering. It flowed strong and black across the scrap, a strange elegance and power. It was fascinating and repelling at once, like his demon-look, an electric energy that made her loathe to toss it into the flames.

“I believe you have it upside down,” he said.

Zenia looked up at him with a faint startled gasp.

He smiled lazily at her, lifting up on his elbow. “Turn it over, wolf cub. And then come back to bed.”

She inverted the fragment of paper. And instantly the words were dark and clear.

I love you,
her charm said. Her magical charm to hold him.

I love you.

Very carefully, she rolled the small scrap and put it into the amulet again. With the knife she pressed hard to reseal the silver strip that bound the talisman. Then she put it over her head and climbed into bed and buried herself deep and safe in his welcoming arms.

HISTORICAL NOTE

While the heroine of this novel, Zenia, is entirely my fictional creation, Lady Hester Stanhope and her young lover Michael Bruce were quite real, as fantastic and dreamlike as their story seems. I have adhered to the available historical facts about them, only extrapolating from holes in the record: while there is no evidence whatsoever for an illegitimate child of their love affair in the desert, there was a period of time, immediately after Lady Hester insisted that Michael leave her in Lebanon, during which she fell ill of a malady she called the plague. She was certainly surrounded by a frighteningly severe bubonic plague epidemic, but her stated symptoms were not very plaguelike. During her long recovery, lasting some eight to ten months, she isolated herself even from her faithful medical attendant, Dr. Meryon, and then suddenly sprang up refreshed and ready to hunt treasure in the desert. There was even one rumor, published in a French paper, suggesting she had one or more children by Bruce, but that is the sum total of historical evidence on the matter.

To tell the story of Lady Hester Stanhope and Michael Bruce would take a whole novel in itself. For those interested, I recommend the brief biography of Lady Hester in
Passionate Pilgrims: English Travelers to the World of the Desert Arabs
by James C. Simmons. Most of the earlier biographies are marred by unrealistic allusions to Lady Hester as a wrinkled old crone at the age of thirty-four and unsubstantiated pronouncements against Michael Bruce’s “weak” character, both of which do disservice to the very real high drama and intensity of their affair. Bruce’s and Lady Hester’s collected letters in
The Nun of Lebanon: The Love Affair of Lady Hester Stanhope and Michael Bruce,
and
Lavalette Bruce: His Adventures and Intrigues Before and After Waterloo,
both published by his descendant Ian Bruce, give the reader a clearer and fairer picture of an interesting and complex young man who—if he failed to fulfill the vicarious aspirations to greatness which both his father and his lover forced upon him to gratify their own ambitions—at least had a life beyond Lady Hester Stanhope.

And as for aged crones who have passed the thirty-four mark—well, humpf! Is it realistic to suppose that a handsome, healthy male in his early twenties (who certainly proved in later life that he could have any woman he wanted) was only interested in Lady Hester’s politics? In the end, outside of all the biographers’ suppositions and historical evidence, I suspect that Lady Hester’s and Michael’s real relationship can be most vividly imagined by listening to Rod Stewart’s song “Maggie May.”