Paying Guests (34 page)

He smiled again but more warmly this time. Because he was still kneeling beside the
chaise longue
, his face was on a level with hers and also very close and she could see clearly that there was a small quirk in the corner of his mouth and found herself thinking, he must have been dimpled when he was a child. A ridiculous thought to have in such circumstances and her awareness of that made her sharp. She drew back from him against the corner of the
chaise longue
and said. ‘So, what were
you
doing wandering about the house at such an hour?’

‘The same as you were, I suspect,’ he said and seemed to take the message from her, for he sat back on his heels, leaving more space between them. ‘I heard sounds and was alarmed. I do not believe that every night we are surrounded by would-be robbers, yet one hears so many tales of barefaced burglary that – well –’ He shrugged. ‘I felt some concern.’

It made sense, she thought, looking at him. There had indeed been recent tales of local houses being broken into by robbers in the
boldest manner possible; had she not herself thought that she was being robbed, though perhaps by an insider rather than an outsider?

‘But why creep about so, like a robber yourself?’ she snapped. Her strength and self-control were returning to her now. ‘If you thought there was trouble abroad, why not come out with a light and call out as any sensible person would?’

‘You did not,’ he pointed out with sweet reasonableness, still smiling. ‘As I recall, you too were creeping along the hallway in the dark trying not to be heard.’

She flushed. ‘I was not sure – it might have been – I did not know –’ she began and he lifted his brows and nodded.

‘Precisely. I felt the same way. It might be a robber bent on stealing – or it might have been some persons showing a greater interest in each other’s company than – well, we have an interesting household here, after all.’ He quirked an eyebrow at her. ‘Have we not? Mr Cumming and Mr Hancock and Mademoiselle Salinas – after all, people are but human –’

‘Not in my house!’ Tilly said with a snap in her voice. ‘I would not permit – I mean – this is a respectable lodging. I would not have among my guests such as would misbehave in such a way that –’ Her voice faltered and she looked down at her hands, which were twisting and untwisting in her lap.

‘Yes,’ he said after a moment, his voice grave, and he got to his feet and sat down on the end of the
chaise longue
, not too close to her but near enough for her to be very aware of him and feel the heat of his body. He was wearing a thick silk dressing-gown and beneath it she could not help but see his bare ankles and feet in leather slippers. Clearly he too was in his nightshirt beneath the gown, and no more, and there was something so intimate in that thought that she found herself getting flustered again.

‘I hope – ‘ he began and then stopped and thought for a while before trying again. ‘I hope you will not be too perturbed by tonight’s events,’ he said at last.

‘Perturbed?’ She too was thinking, remembering the way those two faces had looked in the gleam of the single candle in the split second in which she had seen them, before Silas had put his hand
over her mouth and she had closed her eyes automatically as she struggled to escape his grip. Duff, looking rather foolish if the truth were to be told, with his mouth half open and his eyes set so wide with shock that she could see a line of white above the pupils, and Sophie’s own face, for she had stood there with her cheek pressed to his and also staring at Tilly. But she hadn’t looked foolish in the least. The expression on her face had been a complicated one, a half smile curling the lips, the eyes seeming modestly shaded by the lids but gleaming in a way that showed they missed nothing – she had looked more like a satisfied cat, Tilly thought suddenly. A cat with cream on its whiskers.

‘I’m not sure what you mean by perturbed,’ she managed to say and put her hands up to her face again. Her eyes were feeling hot and sandy and her lips were tight and dry. She licked them in an effort to be more comfortable but that seemed to make the dryness worse.

‘It is not easy when a mother – when young men grow up,’ Silas was saying carefully. Too carefully, she thought; he sounds like an adult talking to a child and I am not a child. ‘So he and the delectable Sophie are enjoying a little amatory adventure? You should be happy for him that he has so much pleasure in his life rather than –’

‘You do not need to lecture me, Mr Geddes,’ she said icily. ‘I am well aware of the responsibilities and problems of a mother of a young son. I have after all, been such a mother for some years. You have not.’

He looked taken aback. ‘Well, no, I have not. But –’ He seemed to gather his composure, ‘But I have been a young man like Duff, and I can only commend his good taste and applaud his good fortune in finding a young lady so willing to dally with him.’

‘In the middle of the night? In a hole in the corner fashion? Dressed like a – like a –’ She could not say the word that had come into her mind and she suddenly remembered those words she had heard out there in the dark hallway; words she knew were curses, even though she was not certain of their meaning. Now she
thought of it, they had been said not by Silas or Duff as she had supposed, but by Sophie. ‘I have been wickedly misled,’ she said with sudden passion. ‘I believed Sophie to be what she seemed, a respectable, well-behaved young lady. I set aside my doubts about her living alone at her age, even set aside my concern when she admitted to being a dancer on the stage, but I should not have done so. I should have sent her away immediately and never have let her anywhere near Duff.’

She felt sobs choking her throat and could not stop her eyes filling with tears. ‘It was all my fault. If I had not been so anxious – if only I had – oh, I am wretched! Quite wretched.’ And the tears overflowed and began to run like a tap. So did her nose. She was sobbing bitterly and her face was wet and she had no protection for it but her own two hands.

He moved closer and set one arm about her heaving shoulders and with his other hand set a large handkerchief to her face. She seized it gratefully, and mopped her cheeks and blew her nose and tried very hard to stop the tears, but it seemed beyond her powers to do so. The weeping went on and on, her shoulders enveloped by his warm grasp and her nose filling yet again. She seemed to consist entirely of head; there was no sense of any other part of her body. There were just her eyes and nose and ears and face, all melting away into thick, scalding, horrible tears.

But slowly the storm subsided until she found herself clutching the sodden rag that was Silas’s handkerchief in one wet hand and lying with her head resting on his shoulder. He was rocking her gently and crooning into her ear and it was agreeable in the extreme. She sat there staring sightlessly ahead of her and making no effort to move at all.

How long she might have gone on so, she could not know. She was, in fact, becoming sleepy. The excitement and the great rush of emotion added to her existing fatigue had almost overwhelmed her. She should, she knew in a vague sort of way, be concerned with the fact that she had surprised her innocent young son almost
in flagrante delicto
with a girl who was, she was now certain, no better than a slut at heart, but somehow there was no emotion left in her.
It had happened and that was that, and she felt her eyes slowly closing.

Silas moved beside her, putting his head forwards so that he could look down into her face and without thinking she lifted her chin and looked up at him, her eyelids heavy and blinking. She wanted to say something; that she was appreciative of his care; that she was sorry to have made such a cake of herself; that it was time for him to go, please, and thank you for your interest and just leave me be so that I can go to sleep – I am aching to sleep –

But he seemed to see something else in her face for suddenly he bent his head and put his mouth on hers and her eyelids, hitherto seeming totally out of her control, flew open in amazement and then, as he became more urgent, pushing her lips apart with his tongue, closed again and now she had no control over them whatsoever.

Or indeed over anything else, it seemed. It had been many years since she had been this close to a man. In the days when her first husband, Francis, had been alive, his attentions had been more frightening than enjoyable, more painful than pleasurable, but this was different. Sensations were moving through her body that amazed her. It was as though there was sitting beside her and watching her with a sardonic eye another Tilly who was observing and recording all that happened and saying in an amused sort of voice, ‘Well, well! Dear me! Imagine you, Tilly Quentin, behaving in such a manner! And enjoying doing so, what’s more. And there were you criticizing your son, or rather Sophie – well, well, dear me.’

But she ignored that cool and critical watcher and let herself sink into the sensations she was so enjoying, sensations which filled her belly with heat and tightened her chest and made her breasts ache. Her nipples felt hard and very sensitive against the fabric of her nightgown as he pulled her closer and began to caress her back with both hands, and she thought the hurt was wonderful. There was nothing for her but the here and now and feeling, feeling, feeling.

SHE WAS VERY tempted not to go into the dining room for breakfast but to send for a sweet roll and coffee in her morning room; but she found a shred of pride somewhere deep inside and refused to behave in so craven a manner. She dressed carefully, getting up as soon as Rosie brought her morning tea and her jug of hot water, and went to considerable trouble to make herself look as presentable as she could.

It was not easy. Her head ached dully, and her eyes were reddened and the lids were swollen. She bathed them in cold water which helped a little, but all the same, even when she had put on her newest day gown, a crisp russet-coloured gaberdine with handsome green braid, in which she knew she looked particularly fetching, she looked the way she felt. Drained, pallid and bone weary.

She had slept eventually, but the sky was already paling by the time she did so. The first thought to come into her head when Rosie rattled her curtain rings was not the earlier part of last night’s extraordinary events, but what had happened with Silas Geddes. She had come to, as though from a faint, when his kisses had started to become more urgent, and his hands had moved from her back further forwards, all of which she had found herself liking, but somehow she had managed to dredge out of her depths a few shreds of constraint, and was able to pull herself away and say in a cracked and gasping voice, ‘No – please. No –’ He had stopped at once, pulling back from her to sit in the corner of the
chaise longue
, staring at her with wide eyes and an expressionless face.

‘I think,’ she had said after a silence, ‘I think I would like you to leave now, if you please. I am very tired – and I think I would like you to leave.’

He did not move. ‘Are you angry with me?’ he asked softly.

‘Angry?’ She considered that carefully. It was difficult to think; her head felt stuffed with feathers, and ideas had to push and claw their way to the surface. ‘No, I do not think I am angry precisely –’

Then what are you?’

Tired,’ she had cried, almost piteously. ‘I am desperately weary and I must, I really
must
ask you to leave me. I cannot cope with much more, indeed I cannot!’

At once he had got to his feet and stood there, his head a little bent as he looked down at her.

‘Then of course I shall go! I want you to know, though, before I do, that I regard you – with – with the greatest respect and behaved as I did only out of – out of an impulse which I did not have the strength to put down. It is not an ignoble impulse, however, and is based, I am most anxious you should know, in only the deepest of regard for your character, your charm, your intellect –’

‘Oh, please!’ she cried, unable to take another moment of his careful speech. ‘No more, please. Just go – I cannot take another word – goodnight –
goodnight
.’ And she had turned her head away from him and put up her hands to her face and stayed resolutely so until she heard the door close softly behind him.

She had collapsed into bed then, and had been certain that she would fall asleep immediately, but of course she had not. The remainder of the night, short as it was, seemed endless, and when at last she did sleep it was to dream dreadfully vivid dreams which she could not remember when she woke. Which made them harder to be rid of, for the menace in them seemed to hang over her.

But she did the best she could and came downstairs in what was, she hoped, her normal composed manner. Polly was at the foot of the stairs, a duster in her hand, rubbing the bannisters, and Tilly stopped when she saw her and frowned.

‘What are you doing there, Polly?’ she said sharply. ‘Why are you not in the kitchen with Georgie?’

‘He’s had his breakfuss, Missus, and he’s asleep, in the corner, Missus, so I asked if I could do somethin’ useful, and Mrs Horace, she said I could do this.’ She scowled a little then. ‘If I’m doin’ it wrong then I’ll ‘ave to be taught ‘ow, won’t I? I can’t know from nothing, can I? I never lived in ‘ouses like this before.’