The Abandoned Bride (16 page)

“Don’t,” she said, a
n
d he stopped immediately, but drew no further back. His gaze left her hair and brow, which still tingled from his imperceptible touch. They stood so close she could feel his warm breath and he could see the tiny blue traces of veins that lent an azure hue to the pink of her lowered eyelids.

“What happened between you that last night?” he asked softly, his breath stirring the light tendrils of hair at her brow.

She did not have to ask him which night, she would not pretend she did not understand. She knew the question very well, for she had asked herself the same on a thousand nights of her life since that night.

“I don’t know,” she said, to herself, to him, with the same pain that she always felt when she asked and answered that question.

And as they stood as close as lovers, she was not surprised when he asked, “Were you lovers?” although he was so near to her she could see that he seemed to be as startled at his own words as though someone else had spoken them.

“No,” she said, shaking her head again and again in denial, closing her eyes so she could not see his look when the motion sent some strands of her scented flaxen hair sweeping lightly across his face, “no. Never. He never ... we never ... it was not that sort of love. No.”

He stopped the sidewise motion of her head with one hand. Then he took his hand away, bent his own head, and kissed her lips lightly, as feather-lightly as her hair had touched him. Then he drew back and gazed at her curiously. And in a moment she found her lips beneath his again, and he kissed her longer, and more longingly, although he in no other way touched her. He stepped away then as she caught her breath and sought a thing to say to explain lightly why she had not to
rn
away from him, why she had not resisted him, why she had lost track of everything but him in those odd moments.

But he only looked at her lips even as she gazed at his and then he said in wonderment, “No. You were not lovers. There’s truth in that, at least,
”
and he seemed as amazed as she was at his words. With an effort, he left off looking at her lips, and asked again, “What happened that night? Now I understand even less.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I never knew.” And because she wanted him to look at her with desire again instead of standing and staring at her as though she were some weird creature, and because she knew that in some wise, she was, and that even if she weren’t she could not bear to be so close to him again, she said wildly, “And don’t kiss me again. If you want that sort of thing, there is Delphine. And don’t offer me friendship when you only want information. And don’t make me trust you, when you know I cannot.”

Celeste Vitry was a woman of the world. She did not comment when Julia came rushing back to her room, wild-eyed and shaken. She did not say a word when she watched her mistress wash her face in the basin of warm water and then scrub it with a damp cloth and then wash it again with cold water, although she knew that to be unusual, not to mention being potentially ruinous to a fine complexion. And she had the grace to say nothing but good night when she left her mistress alone at last in her room.

Julia scarcely noted her maid’s departure, she was so meshed in her own thoughts. She had thought the same things before, she had been over the same ground again and again, but the touch of his lips had not only brought it all back to her, it had added more. The leaping of her senses was new, although the pain of the memory was old. What had happened that night? She had not lied to him. She did not know.

He had never kissed her like that, Robin had never kissed her at all save for the chance d
r
y peck upon the cheek, or the little warm salute upon the back of her hand, except for that once, the night they had parted. But then, she could not count that once, that had not been Robin at all. For it had never been that way between them before. In fact, she often was to think later, if he had covered her with kisses as he made his offer, she would have been too frightened to make any reply, instead of laughing as she had, and saying, “Oh Robin, me for your lady? Oh Robin, do not jest so.”

Even in the coach, on the long ride to the inn, they had done no more than hold hands, like the happy children they were. But she hadn’t worried over it. She knew what gentlemen and their ladies must do when they were wed, for her mother had taken great pains to educate her girls early on. She told them she did not want them to end as a famous local girl in her own youth had: with a pair of twins at her breast and the vague notion that they had come to her because she had shared a peach with her lover, and somehow swallowed the pit.

No, Julia had known what to eventually expect. But it did not sound
v
ery comfortable or very easy, so she decided not to think about it until she had to do so. She nourished the vague hope that people often cherish about their own mortality: that in their case, what was inevitable might prove to be avoidable.

Then they got to the inn. And he had bade her rest and then change to her best gown for the ceremony, for his friend was coming to meet her and he wanted her-in her highest looks for the grand occasion. He had left her alone in the room. And after a space she had begun to do as he asked. And then he had come back in again unexpectedly. And, Julia decided, rising from her bed, she did not wish to go over it again. A thousand times in one lifetime, she swore as she paced to her window, was quite enough.

She stared down at the same courtyard she had gazed at during her dinner with the baron. It was too bad, she thought, that they always came to blows or to words or to—and here she hedged even with herself for she did not wish to remember his kisses—or to physical contact of some sort, she temporized, for she had enjoyed his company. She had thought that such a fine-looking fellow would have had nothing on his mind but horses and wagers and fashions and gossip, as so many of London’s leading gentlemen supposedly did. But he had a firm grasp of current events, he was lettered, and he could make such a merry jest that one could forget that one had to dine with a long spoon when one supped with the devil.

Julia stared out into the warm, blurred darkness of a summer’s night. The moon was haze-covered but bright, and aided enough by midsummer’s long twilight to yet show shape and shadow below. She could pick out the forms of the trellis of roses, and the well and the grape arbor. There were some other points she could not identify, but then she was not really trying, she was too busy trying not to think of where the baron was now. She had told him to seek out Delphine, and doubtless, he had done so. But the thought of Delphine and the baron enwrapped in that complex set of contortions she had been told of all those years before gave her an unexpected jolt of dismay. Worse, it made her remember how queer it had been to feel so completely enfolded and immersed in his regard even when all that he had done was simply to briefly touch
her brow. And the memory of what had transpired after that set her to wondering at exactly how he would enact that heretofore unimaginable set of exercises, and how gracefully he might accomplish that which she had always thought to be essentially awkward.

She passed her hand over her face in an angry gesture, and tried to put such uncomfortable thoughts from her mind. For no matter how she envisioned the baron at that elaborate task, she could envision Delphine being ecstatic at his endeavors. But then, a lighted window near the kitchens drew her attention. As she was on the second floor she could see down into the window below very well, and was very unwell at what she saw. For it was Delphine. No doubt, she thought, it must be Delphine, those lush configurations could not be mistaken even at a distance. No one else surely had such a light blue blouse which would not stay anchored to her shoulders, or such a welter of long black hair to cover the absence of blouse upon those white shoulders. Delphine, Julia knew it could be no other, also stood at her window looking out into the courtyard this soft summer’s night. Then a larger, darker, unrecognizable but plainly masculine shape appeared behind Delphine. A shape which sprouted a shadowy arm to circle Delphine’s waist and draw her back from the window into her room again. And then the curtains swung closed.

It is what gentlemen do, Julia told herself as she stood by the window and sought to see behind closed curtains, and sought at the same time to drag herself away from the window. It must have been the ridiculous tear that splashed against her arm even as she leaned on the windowsill which called her attention to the movement of the rose trellis in the garden below. But it hadn’t been part of the trellis at all, it had been, she saw now, as he stepped out of the shadows, the white of his neckcloth. And it hadn’t been the last red glow of the roses she had seen as she watched Delphine, it had been the small red glow of his cigarillo. This she knew now as a certainty, as he looked up at her and she saw his pale face clear in the moonlight despite the blurring in her tear-drenched eyes, and she saw him bow, making a great circle with his cigarillo as he did so, making a deep and mocking bow to her there in the blameless moonlight.

₁₀

A The servant left the room with the last of the dinner’s crumbs safely collected within the discarded napery he bore away. He had been so thorough in his cleaning that all he left behind him in the dining room was a deep and unbroken silence, and the two former diners, who sat and glowered at each other across the now empty table. It was the gentleman who spoke first, as the door nicked slowly closed upon the heels of the departing waiter.

“Three days,
I
believe,” he said, as though he were replying to some question, although his companion at the table had not addressed anything but a singularly mistrustful look to him for some moments. “Yes, three days, I am sure of it. It was the very first night we arrived here in Paris. I asked you if your room was comfortable, I inquired as to whether the dinner had suited you, and then, just before I bade you a good night, I told you, no, I recall,” the baron said with some show of discove
r
y, “I
suggested,
I
strongly
suggested,” he amended, “that you visit a dressmaker and have some new garments made. I believe I even suggested that since we were now in Paris you employ the services of Louis Hippolyte Leroy. As he was good enough for the Empress Josephine, I thought you might find him adequate. I left a pur
s
e upon the table to that purpose, I am sure of it,” he said with a bit more force, “for though I might forget a great many things, I always remember both promises and payments. It makes me a better landlord, and a better friend as well, I believe, for close accounting is important to both purposes. I’m not clutch-fisted, Miss Hastings, but neither am I quite blind. It is not the money I inquire about, it is the use it was put to. The purse is gone and so far as I can see, that garment you are wearing now, that grayish-brownish colored frock,” he gestured toward her with a dismissive wave of his hand as he spoke, “is the self-same one that you wore three days ago, or as near to it as to be its twin. I can see that it is not soiled, I am aware that it is fresh as a dew-washed daisy, but I am also acutely aware that it is not, I repeat,
not,
a new frock. And unless the French have gone mad with grief over losing the war, I doubt that they have begun to style such garments for foreign trade, so I take leave to doubt that it is one of the Parisian creations that you ordered and purchased as I requested you to do those three nights ago.”

The young woman looked unperturbed. Her expression did not change and she did not shrink back as the gentleman leaned forward with his chin upon his hand, his elbow upon the table, as he awaited his reply . Her pale face was composed, her chin was lifted, and her hands remained folded in her lap. It was well that they were, for that way the gentleman could not see how much they would have trembled had she not held them so closely together.

Her clear blue gaze met his regard evenly as she said softly, “No, but I don’t believe that you listened to my reply to your request, and if accounting is necessa
r
y to friendship, I believe that attention is even more of a requisite. Not that I require your friendship,” she said hastily, dropping her gaze as she saw the fury gathering in the gentleman’s face, “but I did tell you that I didn’t require any new gowns, and I
did say that payment for them was unnecessary. But you left the coins there on the table just the same before you left, and I could not simply leave them there for the servants to gather up as some sort of superior gratuity. I took them, and I did use some of them,” she said to his incredulous look, “for I’ve been sightseeing with Celeste and I had no other French currency in hand. But I’ve been keeping strict accounts,” she said rapidly as he began to speak.

But all she heard was a long sigh, and when she raised her eyes again, she saw that the baron was looking at her and shaking his head slowly, with no anger evident in his expression and only exasperation writ large upon his face.

“Miss Hastings,” he said carefully, “you need new gowns.
It is well that you have enjoyed yourself seeing the city, but I repeat, you can no longer do so attired as you are.”

“But I do not,” she said speaking just as precisely as he had done, “for I have no use for
them at all. We’ve hired a boat, a little skiff really, that this fellow rows for us quite cheaply, Celeste and I, and we’ve seen the city by water. And we’ve seen the Bastille itself, and the Arc de
Triomphe de
l
’Etoile that Napoleon commissioned, and the great cathedral of Notre Dame, and even climbed its stairs as far as we could go. We’ve been very circumspect and proper and we’ve stopped for luncheon at respectable cafes and I assure you, my mode of dress is unremarkable. Or at least, it is for my purposes. Although there are a great many fashionables here, my lord, I am not one of them,
I don’t go about with them, and so I don’t need to be in the first stare of fashion. And when this incident is over with, I shall have no more use for fashion than I do now. I accept that I must be with you,” she said, her voice becoming so soft that he had to strain to hear her even in the quiet room,
“
but I have no desire to call attention to myself.”

“Yes,” he said with such a world of agreement in his tone that she looked up sha
r
ply, “but for that very reason you ought to obey my wishes in the matter. Miss Hastings,” he said seriously, his handsome, usually animate face still and solemn with the weight of his sincerity, “it was only because I wished to please you that I made my request, believe me. And so it is only yourself you harm by disregarding it. For it matters ve
r
y little to me. My reputation will not be ruined, I assure you, if I am found to be traveling with a single young female. If anything, it would be enhanced in certain circles. It is very unfair, to be sure, but there it is.