Not Quite a Husband (13 page)

“Certainly,” he said. “Could I get you something to drink?”

She declined and took a chair in front of the desk. “Would you like to have a seat also?”

He sat down behind the desk, across from her. She sat stiffly, her face wan, her lips pinched, her eyes deeply shadowed. And she smelled of some strange chemical substance, not carbolic acid, but the offensive pungency of ammonium. Yet he’d never been so glad to be near her, to be on speaking terms again
.

She placed her hands on the desk, her fingers interlaced, and began to address him
.

Beyond the first sentence, her words washed through his hearing like a random sampling of the Oxford English Dictionary. He stared at the movement of her mouth, the shaping and reshaping of her lips, and felt the vibration of her speech against his eardrums, but understood nothing beyond that she meant to push him off a cliff
.

At some point he left the desk and opened his watch by the window. Some barmy part of himself wanted to keep track of time, to see how long it took her to make the case that they should end their marriage in a pack of lies. But he could no more read time than he could read Etruscan. So
he only stared at his watch, a watch she’d given to him as an engagement present, a watch that had the words “Love is patient. Love is kind.” inscribed on the inside of the lid
.

He felt neither patient nor kind. When she finished speaking, he was going to drag her upstairs. And she could tell the bedpost what she thought of his barbarity
.

And then she did finish speaking. He looked back at her. She gazed at him expectantly. “May I count on your assistance in this matter?”

She’d stood up. One of her hands rested on the surface of the desk, the other on the case that contained the microscope
.

He walked back to the desk, pulled out the case from under her hand, opened the clasp, and assembled the microscope as she watched. When it was done, he took a step back. Yes, it was very fine-looking indeed, and he’d been promised that it would last a lifetime
.

Across the table she cast a blank look at the microscope and raised her eyes to him, eyes that were the green of a wet summer. “Well
, may
I count on your assistance in this matter?”

And he came to a startling realization: She was not worth it. She was not worth the microscope. She was not worth the effort he’d expend to fuck her quiescent. She was not worth the dignity and solemnity of a marriage
.

“Of course,” he said. “You may be assured of my every cooperation.”

If he stared hard enough, he could make out the shape of a shoulder, the flow of an arm. She sat above him, frozen, as naked as a beached mermaid, her skin a smooth dusky expanse that glimmered faintly blue in the starlight. Her hair, like a rising tide, concealed the curvature of her breasts and half of her face.

He’d never seen so much of her, even though he could hardly see anything of her except shadow and shimmer. In her sleep, in the cool, shuttered darkness of her bedchamber in Belgravia, he’d mapped every inch of her body. He knew her by geography (the ascent of a kneecap, the bumps of her spine), by texture (the slight roughness of heels and elbows, the tiny hairs on her forearms and calves), and by taste (the milky sweetness of a nipple, the soft turmeric tang between her legs). But never by sight.

He spread his hand over her abdomen. She was warm and still, like Pygmalion’s statue brought to life. He looped his other arm about her, and pulled her torso toward him.

She resisted, but it was a resistance more of form than substance, for he applied only a slight pressure. When he had her close enough he kissed her chin, her jaw. She turned her face away, as if afraid he would kiss her on the mouth. So he kissed her ear, most attentively, and listened to her soft, ragged breaths of pleasure.

Her ear, her shoulder, the top of her arm. His hands pushed their way down her back, and cupped her soft, round bottom. He was hard again inside her. She whimpered. Such a beautiful sound, pure lust, pure pleasure.

Slowly, for the camp bed was narrow, he turned them around so that he was above her. He kissed her throat, her collarbone, her breasts. Her hips moved, flooding him with sensation.

Her fingers encircled his wrists tentatively. For a moment he was petrified with fear, that she would push him away. But her hands traveled up his arms, and finally hooked behind his neck.

His heart slowly fell back into place. His body moved into an appropriately worshipful rhythm. But her concurrence was a powerful aphrodisiac, and soon he was again drunk on desire, helplessly in thrall, holding back only to please her.

And once she clenched about him and quavered—ah, then he could not hold back anymore at all, the long-gathering wave crashing ashore, the fervent worshipper driven into ecstacy.

He thrust into her fiercely, claiming her, marking her, filling her with himself, dominating and submitting, taking and giving.

Her master and her slave.

As soon as she’d gathered her wits together, she left the bed. She picked up her nightgown and hurriedly pulled it over her head.

“Stay with me,” he said.

“I’d better not.”

“So you were only exploiting me?” There was a hint of smile in his voice. He knew very well that she was not capable of such a thing.

It took her half a minute to find the sleeves of her nightgown and thrust her arms inside, by which time he’d risen from bed and lit a lantern.

“Don’t go yet.”

“It’s late.”

“It was already late when you came.” He’d worn only a pair of pyjama trousers in bed, but now he’d put on the kurta tunic too. The three buttons at the top of the kurta, however, were all open. The flickering lantern light gilded the exposed skin of his throat and his chest. “Have a seat.”

She shook her head.

He rubbed a thumb across her cheek. “Are you going to force me to keep standing in my condition?”

Medically speaking, he was a well man and could stand any number of hours. Not to mention, they were headed up Lowari Pass in the morning. But he
was still too thin, and she was still of the belief that he needed far more rest than he allowed himself.

Reluctantly, she sat down at the edge of the bed. He sat down beside her and placed his arm across her shoulders. “I won’t bite, you know,” he said. “I might lick, but I won’t bite.”

“I don’t want you to lick either.”

“I will lick only where you like, how is that?”

“No. This won’t happen again.”

“Hmm. Then why did it happen at all?” He kissed her lightly on the corner of her eye. “Have you become delirious too?”

Of course she had. A delirium of primal urges and senselessness. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“I want it to happen again,” he said, his voice low but fierce.

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“Because it was a mistake.”

“Just as our marriage was a mistake?” His voice lost some of its warmth.

She swallowed. “Precisely.”

He rose; the tent was barely tall enough for him to stand straight. “Did your heart turn into stone when you lost Toddy?” he asked, his back to her.

Her not-at-all-stony heart seared in pain. “Please
don’t make conjectures on a subject of which you know nothing.”

“You are right, I know nothing of your heart, because you’ve taken great care to ensure that is the case. But you have studied science; you understand that sometimes indirect observation can yield equally powerful evidence.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What I have seen. Irrefutable proof of your unfeelingness.”

All the excess warmth of the night drained away. Her toes were cold on the ground. “If this is something to do with our annulm—”

“It’s not.” He shoved his hand through his hair. “You’ve likely forgotten this already. But a long time ago, you received a letter from a woman named Bettie Young. You had delivered her baby by caesarean section. In that letter, she wrote that one day, when her baby was old enough, she’d tell him that when they needed it the most, God sent an angel in the form of a lady surgeon.”

She was suddenly shaking. “I remember that letter.”

“I’m surprised, because I found it crumpled and thrown away.”

“I don’t keep every thank-you letter I receive.”

“I would have thought if you kept any at all, that
would be the one you kept.” He turned around and faced her. “Or are you so bitter from losing Toddy that you cannot bear to see another child
not
lose his mother?”

She was on her feet. A loud smack reverberated in the tent. Only as she looked down at her smarting hand in shock did she understand that she’d struck him. “Don’t you dare say such a thing about me,” she said, her voice just short of a growl. “Don’t you dare even think it.”

He rubbed the back of his fingers against his cheek. But his expression was relentless. “Why shouldn’t I think it? Why shouldn’t I draw logical conclusions?”

“Because your conclusion is wrong.”

His lips flattened in scorn. “Then you explain it, since you know your own reasoning so much better. Why was the letter in the wastebasket?”

Bryony was having an excellent day. Leo had come to see her at the hospital to take his leave—he was traveling to Paris the week before their wedding, to give a series of lectures—and her fellow physicians, many of whom were meeting him for the first time, had been dumbstruck by her charming, beautiful fiancé. She’d floated on a sharp, superior pleasure
.

And now she could add a successful out-patient caesarean section to the accomplishments of her day. The circumstances were somewhat unusual: A lady’s maid who’d left service to marry, only to return to her mistress’s employ six weeks later, after her husband died in an industrial accident. The housekeeper stressed repeatedly that the maid had been married—that the child was legitimate—as if Bryony had a special set of shoddier operations she kept in reserve for the illicit and the illegitimate
.

The baby had cried loudly and lustfully when she had pried it from the womb. The attending nurse had already bathed him and swaddled him and reported that he was doing well. Bryony snipped the ends of the stitches and peeled off her bloody gloves
.

She’d brought printed booklets with her on how to care for the surgical wounds that resulted from a caesarean section. While the surgical assistants cleaned and packed the surgical implements, Bryony gave a booklet to the housekeeper, went over the most salient points, and reassured the housekeeper that a nurse from the hospital would also come to check on Mrs. Young and the baby every day for three weeks
.

The surgery had taken place on the table in the servants’ hall in the basement of the house. As the housekeeper studied the booklet, a cultured female voice drifted down from narrow windows near the ceiling that opened to the small garden between the house and the mews
.

“There you are.”

Then Bryony heard
his
voice. “I thought you said it was the servants’ half day. I can see people in the servants’ hall.”