The Headmaster (12 page)

“My parents’ dearest friends were a wealthy couple who’d helped them through some difficult times especially when I was in the army. They had a daughter a few years younger than me. It was our parents’ dearest wish that she and I would marry. I adored my parents and couldn’t bear to disappoint them.”

“You married out of duty to your parents?” she asked, utterly incredulous. “Not even Mr. Darcy did that.”

“Mr. Darcy’s parents were dead.”

“Right,” she said. “Good point. Go on.”

“Victoria was a lovely girl, intelligent and kind so I hardly considered it a sacrifice. We weren’t in love but we respected each other and had a solid friendship. The first few weeks of our marriage, however, were…difficult.”

“Had you been with anyone before her?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Gwen drummed her fingers on his chest. He said nothing. She drummed them harder on his chest. He still said nothing.

“Gwendolyn? Are you attempting to beat me to death with your fingers? I can suggest some more efficient killing techniques if you are.”

She rose up again and looked down at him.

“Who were you with before you were with your wife? It better be the queen or there’s no excuse for being so secretive.”

“It wasn’t the queen, I’m afraid. She was the widowed mother of one of my schoolmates. Before you’re too terribly scandalized, I was eighteen and she only thirty-six.”

“I’m not scandalized at all. What happened with you and your friend’s mom?”

“He was away and asked me to check on his mother who had no other children. I won’t say she seduced me, but I promise I went to her home only to see if I could be of service to her.”

“And then you were of service to her,” Gwen teased.

“I was of service to her three times the first night alone,” Edwin said, then laughed. “Our rather meaningless affair lasted for the summer.”

“Did she teach you all sorts of sexy things? The ways of women and all that?”

“She was instructive, yes. But hardly affectionate. Things were…perfunctory between us.”

“Perfunctory? That might be the least sexy description of sex I’d ever heard,” Gwen said.

“Perfunctory but thorough.”

“If it was that thorough she would have gone down on you.”

“She did.”

“But you said you’d never tasted yourself on a woman’s lips before.”

“That’s because she never kissed me.”

Gwen sat up and stared down at Edwin.

“Your first lover never kissed you?”

“She said we weren’t to have that sort of relationship. Feelings would complicate things more than they already were.” Edwin spoke the words with little emotion, but Gwen heard the ghost of hurt pride hiding behind the dispassionate tone.

Gwen leaned over, took Edwin’s face in her hands and kissed him. She kissed him like he deserved to be kissed, like he should have been kissed the night he lost his virginity and every night there after. She kissed him so long and so hard that she almost forgot why she started kissing him in the first place other than kissing him was the best idea she’d ever had. He kissed back with his hands on her naked shoulders and his chest warm against her breasts.

“What was that for?” Edwin asked when Gwen finally pulled back.

“An apology kiss on behalf of all womankind.”

“Apology accepted.”

“Now go on with your story,” she said as she straddled his hips and rested on top of him again.

“My first lover, as I said, was thorough if indifferent. I felt confident I would be able to please my new bride once we were married. I was sadly mistaken, however.”

“The first few times can really hurt for a woman. I was in pain about the first two weeks after I started having sex.”

“It wasn’t physical pain,” Edwin said, caressing her back with his fingertips. “I could tell she had already been with someone. I didn’t mind. I had, as well. But she cried when we tried—before and after. I offered to stop and wait for a few weeks. Months would pass between attempts. After a year of feigning happiness in public and awkwardness in private, I discovered the cause of our incompatibility. Victoria had another lover.”

“God, that must have been devastating.” Gwen kissed his chest in sympathy.

“It was a shock, to say the least. I hadn’t even suspected. But then by accident I came home a day early from a trip and discovered her in bed with her lover. She confessed to everything.”

“Were you angry?”

“No,” he said and Gwen believed him.

“I would have been furious. I would have beaten the hell out of that man.”

“But you see,” Edwin sighed, “it wasn’t a man.”

Gwen rolled up and stared down at Edwin in wide-eyed surprise.

“Your wife was gay?”

“Gay?”

“You know, a lesbian? Played for the other team? A member of the Sapphic sisterhood?”

“She was, yes. She’d secretly been involved with a friend of hers for years. The marriage to me was meant to shield their relationship from scrutiny. My kindness to her, she said, made things more unbearable. She hated that she had trapped me in a loveless marriage. There was nothing else to do. We divorced on the grounds of adultery.”

“Well, at least she took responsibility in the divorce.”

“She didn’t, Gwendolyn. Her parents would have disowned her had the truth come out. I allowed Victoria to claim I had strayed.”

Gwen's heart twisted, her blood quickened, her smile fell.

“You…” she said. “I just have no words for you.”

“It was the only thing a gentleman could do. My family was, of course, furious and ashamed. I’d brought embarrassment onto their good name with the divorce. I packed my things and came to America. I found work here at the William Marshal Academy, and when the headmaster retired, I was elevated to his position. I told you it wasn’t a terribly interesting story.”

“You were seduced by a friend’s mother, served in a war as an officer, and was married to a lesbian and divorced all by age…?”

“Twenty-four,” he said.

“If that’s not an interesting story then I don’t know what is.”

“I’m sure your life story is far more interesting than mine.”

“It isn’t at all.” Gwen pulled a pillow to her chest. “I was born in Asheville. Grew up among the hippies and hipsters. Normal childhood. Loved reading. Bit of a nerd. Like I told you, both my parents are both gone.”

“Gwendolyn…I’m so sorry.”

“Orphan by age eighteen. I guess it does sound Dickensian, doesn’t it? But I never became a street urchin.”

“How did you cope losing both your parents?”

“It was hard,” she confessed. “But books saved me. I know that sounds silly and glib. But I lost myself in books. Read constantly. I was a glutton for fiction. Any world was better than my own. Elizabeth Bennet had a fool for a mother but better a living crazy mom than a dead one. And then Mr. Darcy came along and saw her virtues, plucked her from obscurity, and made her his wife. Perfect. I wanted a Mr. Darcy of my own. And Jane Eyre, she was an orphan like me. And yet so much braver and stronger than I ever hoped to be. Being alone in Asheville wasn’t much fun so I moved to New Orleans—in my head, at least—and lived with some vampires for a while. Vampires, wizards…I got into more serious reading in college. Faulkner. Flannery O’Connor.

“Faulkner? Modern tripe.”

“Oh hush. Not every book has to be
Ivanhoe.
Anyway, my grandparents accused me of hiding in my books. But I wasn’t hiding, I was healing. Those stories made me believe bad things happened for a reason and good things happened if you kept going all the way to the end. Hope and perseverance—that’s what I learned from books. So now I teach literature to teenage boys. And maybe they’ll learn some hope and perseverance, too.”

“Was your hope and perseverance rewarded?” Edwin asked, his voice soft. Gwen smiled.

“I’m at a teacher at the world’s weirdest school—The William Marshal Academy,” she said. “And I’m in your bed. Yes, it was rewarded.”

“The William Marshal Academy is not weird,” Edwin said with feigned severity.

“Your students put on Shakespeare plays for the fun of it. There are approximately zero computers in the entire school. The buildings look like they’ve been transported from fifteenth-century France. There’s a big wall around the school like it’s some kind of fortress. Oh, and there’s a crazy woman wandering around at night. And you say Marshal isn’t weird? You and I need to have a long talk about the definitions of interesting and weird. You are living in opposite land.”

“First of all, The Bride isn’t a crazy woman.”

“I know.”

“You do?”

“She’s one of the boy’s girlfriend’s, isn’t she?”

“I can’t comment.”

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes,’” Gwen said.

“Gwendolyn.”

“What?”

Edwin kissed her and dragged her into bed. Soon they were making love for a third time that night. The third time would be their final time. Afterward he pulled her close to his chest again and she fell asleep, wrapped in his arms.

It felt like only a few minutes had passed when she woke up that morning. No, not quite morning. Barely dawn. She extricated herself carefully from Edwin’s arms and wrapped herself in his Oxford shirt she’d nearly ripped off of him last night. She pulled back a corner of the curtains and peered through the window. An autumnal fog covered the grounds of the school. The grass, the trees, the walls even huddled in a shroud of white. Night had fled, but the sun hadn’t taken the moon’s place in the sky yet. The world had turned white.

Soon the boys would wake and start to stir. She should hurry back to her cottage now before anyone was about to see her leaving the headmaster’s quarters. They wouldn’t be able to keep their love affair a secret for long, but she wasn’t terribly worried. The boys adored their headmaster and had even conspired to find him a girlfriend. No, not a girlfriend. A wife.

A wife? What the hell was she getting herself into?

Gwen dressed quickly and quietly and left a note for Edwin on the bedside table.

Headmaster Yorke—you are a heavy sleeper. Yet another of your many faults. If you’d been awake you could have had me again before I slipped out of your life forever. By forever I mean until I see you again later today. I adore you. Sincerely, Miss Ashby. PS—Tea later? And by tea I mean…not tea.

She kissed him softly on the lips. It broke her heart to know his first lover had treated him like a mere body and hadn’t even kissed him on the mouth during their trysts. And then his wife had revealed that not only had she no sexual interest in him, she had no sexual interest in men—period. Gwen was determined to make up for all the lost time, all the rejection, all the hurt. She would kiss him and touch him and pleasure him every chance she could. And although she feared it would be the most foolish of ideas—she would love him if he wanted her to love him.

She made sure she looked as put together and professional as possible on the off chance someone was out this early. But she saw no one and nothing as she left the main building by the back door and headed to her cottage. She was nearly there when she saw something out of the corner of her eyes.

Movement. Somewhere. She stopped and spun around. No. Nothing. But surely she hadn’t imagined that rustle of white fabric in her peripheral vision.

Gwen crept around the side of her cottage. She knew she’d seen something. She refused to accept she hadn’t.

Again, a flash of white. Now she saw it. Something white has passed across a window in one of the student dormitories. Seconds later, Gwen saw her.

The Bride stood on the back porch of the Pembroke dormitory with her face looking toward the sky and away from Gwen. Now they stood only fifty feet apart. She could see The Bride wore an elegant lace dress and had long black hair tied in a white handkerchief. Slender and tall, she had the bearing of a young woman and yet Gwen couldn’t see her face.

Gwen opened her mouth to call out to the girl. Before she could speak a word, someone joined The Bride on the back porch. From the back she couldn’t tell who it was because of the baseball cap he wore over his hair. But she could see him reach for The Bride’s hand.

That did it. Now Gwen was certain. The Bride was no bride at all. Just a girl in a dress sneaking on and off campus to see a boyfriend. Gwen wasn’t sure why she bothered with the wedding dress disguise. Maybe if she looked scary and ghostly, the other boys would keep their distance. Teenagers were weird. No doubt about that.

Less worried now, Gwen left the young lovers alone. She’d keep digging around for more information on the girl, but for now she wasn’t as worried. Although it might not hurt to find out which boy she was sneaking on campus to see. Last thing Gwen wanted was a Marshal student getting a towny girl pregnant. As if this school hadn’t been through enough lately.

Young love. Almost as powerful as not-so-young love.

Love? Was she already using that word? Yep. She was. How long had she been here? Only a week? She knew people fell in love fast. Her parents had. Her father told her he knew he’d marry her mom on their very first date. Still…it was strange how quickly she’d come to love this place and feel at home here. She hadn’t once gone to her car to inspect the damage from her accident. She’d do it later. Now she wanted to curl up in her bed, catch up on the sleep she’d missed last night and dream of Edwin.

Cars could wait.

Ghosts could wait.

The outside world could wait.

Sleep couldn’t wait.

And love. Love couldn’t wait either.

So she fell into love when she fell into bed and woke up a few hours later still in both.

Chapter Eleven

The next week passed in a haze of teaching and reading and Edwin and happiness. She worked with the boys in small groups during her free period in the hopes of getting them to open up to her. She was on the lookout for any hint of which one of the boys was sneaking a girl on campus. They all seemed to have baseball caps, so that one clue wasn’t a damn bit of help. Their necks betrayed no hickeys or love bites. Their smiles betrayed no secrets. She could only hope whichever student it was with the girlfriend was being careful.