The Proposition (19 page)

What could he possibly mean? she thought. Here she was standing next to him, tidy, full of good information, in control of herself—doing her work with grave dignity. But, odder still, for one instant she wanted to answer his question by throwing her forehead onto his chest and wailing,
No, no! I'm not all right at all!

She said, of course, "Yes. I'm fine."

He smiled, making a quick, little nod. "Good." He smiled wider, though his sideways, slanting good humor was almost a wince when he added, "Glad to hear it, loov." He nodded again. "No worse for wear?"

Ah. "No worse for wear," she repeated.

If she harbored any resentment for his part in their rough morning, she forgave him completely in that instant. She looked at his smooth lip and smiled.

"Good," he said again. "Good." And he meant it. Relief settled tangibly on him. "So shall we go in and do your vowels again then?"

She smiled perfunctorily, while thinking, Oh, no! She couldn't decide how to avoid spending this afternoon and all subsequent afternoons, evenings, and mornings for the next four weeks watching his mouth form sounds. She nodded, full of deceit. "Yes. Shall we?"

Chapter 12

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A
s Edwina and Mr. Tremore crunched along the gravel drive that led back to the house, she asked herself, So what in the world were you thinking, when you suggested your game in the first place? That it would be innocent? That you could throw him out if it wasn't?

You misled yourself, Winnie. You set yourself up
for a month of discomfort.

Indeed. The best that could be made of the situation, she thought, was to pretend that she hadn't made a horrible, indecent fool of herself and that he hadn't behaved like a bull in a mating paddock. This morning didn't exist. She wished he hadn't referred to it, even obliquely.

She wanted the idiosyncratic structure of his speech. She wanted to take it apart and rebuild it—something that could well yield a paper to read before the Royal Philological Society. It was a once-in-a-lifetime project that, on top of everything else, was free, since she was being paid to do it. He needed the money he could earn if he carried the bet off, and he might gain in the process a way to speak himself into a better station in life. They both had losses if they stopped and advantages if they did not. Yes, here they were, treading along toward the house and an arrangement they neither could afford to back out of, not without great cost.

Moreover, either one of them would have been hard-pressed to explain what had gone wrong with a bet in which the Lamonts now had a great deal invested.

At the house, they discovered a pocket watch had arrived—Mr. Tremore held it up, delighting in it. It chimed in pairs,
ding-ding, ding-ding.
Inside the boxes that had arrived with it—that he and she opened instantly like curious children there in the hallway—were two pairs of day boots, some men's formal evening slippers, a pair of dark kid gloves, a pair of white formal ones, and two top hats, one for evening made of black silk and one for day, a dark brown thing made of beaver felt that was luscious to touch. Edwina hadn't seen anything like it up close in a dozen years.

Surprised by the man's day hat (for what purpose did the Lamonts think he needed it?), she raised it from its box, then stood there holding it balanced on her fingertips inside the crown. She turned it, imagining it on the head of a man who knew how to wear it. The crown was high, rigid, and perfect, with a black band, while the felt of the crown and brim were softer than the underbelly of a cat. It was lined in silk.

As she held the hat up, examining it, Mr. Tremore abandoned the watch. "Well, I'll be buggered," he said, coming over. Then he corrected himself, laughing. "What an astonishing hat." It came out half-right—he found the
an
properly, but missed the H.
An astonishing 'at.

He plucked it off her fingers and set it onto his head. The astonishing hat fit him perfectly, of course; it had been made for him. But the way he set it on his head was the truly astonishing part: at an ever-so-slight angle, instinctively debonair. Well, Edwina thought. She had wanted to see the hat on a man who knew how to wear it, and here he was.

She stepped out of the way, so he could see himself in the hallway mirror. His expression in reflection liked what he saw, then she watched a ripple of displeasure pass over his face as his eyes dropped to his upper lip. He truly did look different wearing a top hat—and no mustache.

"I'm sorry," she murmured.

He glanced at her. "About the mustache? Don't be. You didn't shave it off."

"I made you do it. I made us both feel awful."

He turned toward her, taking the hat off with a flourish of his wrist. The man loved style and show, and, honest to goodness, he actually had a little. He had a way about him. "You do this with everything, don't you, Winnie?"

"Do what?"

He shook his head. "All this thinking," he said. "It's like a superstition with you."

"Superstition?"

"Like throwing salt over your shoulder."

"Now, see here—"

"Winnie," he said, "let me tell you about my mum. Grand lady. Great mother. But a superstitious loon when it came to God. When I made her mad, she'd say"—he did a full Cornish accent quite well—"'Yee be a bad boy, Mick, but yee'll git what yee deserve. God'll see to it.' Then I'd fall and skin my knee and she'd say, real smug-like, 'See?' like God had shoved me down, not my own clumsiness or hurry. In the end, she died spitting up stuff from her lungs."

He looked down a moment, frowned. Then continued, "Hard and ugly for her, you know. I told her she didn't deserve it, but she cried and cried, full of teary regret. Oh, the confessions we got. She was sure she had done something wrong or hadn't done something right. But, you see, none of us believed bad of her. It was impossible. She was the gentlest woman. Couldn't hit us. The only weapon she had, when we were bad, was to promise us damnation. While us children just rolled our eyes at her, 'cause, see, not a one of us believed we were mortal: We felt so safe in her care."

He grew quiet for a few seconds, then said, "Don't die like that, Winnie. Or live like that either. Like you can know every little thing before it happens or can explain a mess away by retelling it to yourself a hundred times."

She frowned at him. "Sometimes, Mr. Tremore, it's
good
to question oneself—"

He leaned toward her. "Winnie, what I did, I was lookin' for a way to do. You just gave me the chance. Maybe not even that much. It's over. Let it go. You worry too much over everything."

"I care about details and my own behavior. I like to look at what I can, then rethink—"

He interrupted, shaking his head sadly. "No, the nits and picks will give you the miseries, if you let them. They'll weigh you down like stones, make you sad and dotty. They did my mum. You didn't do anything so awful, so can we go on now? You're a good girl, Winnie Bollash. Kind and decent. Right generous with yourself. You ain't a snoot like I said when I first got here. I take it back." He grinned then added, teasing, "Or mostly you ain't."

"Aren't."

"Right." Mrs. Reed came into the hallway just then, humming and dusting knickknacks on a shelf a dozen feet from them. They both listened to her till she disappeared again. Mick lowered his voice, in deference to the intrusion, but he brought the conversation right back. "Serious now," he asked, "do you believe some word you say or don't say can shave the hair off my lip? You didn't do it—I did. And when I want to, I'll grow it back again." He laughed softly, then winked at her. "Which is better than you can say, Miss Bollash. 'Cause I'll always know you have the prettiest legs in all of England. Any time I want to see them, all I do is close my eyes."

Oh, the cheek of him. Winnie smiled when she shouldn't have, then couldn't let him get away with being so self-satisfied. She said, "No, Mr. Tremore, imagination is a fine thing, but we both know there is nothing like reality. I can see your mustache is gone right here—" She touched his face above his lip before she thought not to. Taking her hand back quickly, she said, "I know reality. You have only what you are able to remember and daydream."

His eyebrows raised. He touched his own lip where her fingers had been the second before. He looked surprised, then not. He laughed, this time letting out that deep, low rumble he could make in his chest. It came forth through his easy, sideways smile. "Why, Miss Bollash," he said, "are you flirting with me?"

No. But heat began immediately to seep into her cheeks. She couldn't stop it. She couched her face, hiding it and the beginnings of a smile. "No, of course not."

"You are," he insisted.

"No." She shook her head vehemently, but the smile kept coming.

His finger touched under her chin, and he lifted her face to make her look at him. "You are," he said quietly, with utter seriousness. "Watch out, Miss Bollash. I like to flirt, but I like better where it gets me—and you don't."

She tried to absorb his admonishment as she stared into his eyes, shadowed there in the hallway. Smoky green eyes that made her heart thud; they took her breath away. He was right, of course.
You watch out, Miss Bollash.

Yet she couldn't make herself stop smiling slightly. He found her attractive. She truly might be attractive. She'd been turning that idea over and over in her mind since this morning. It wasn't just words any longer. She had felt how attractive he found her. And, oh, she discovered, what a greed she had for that notion. Attractive. In her way. To the right man.

Mr. Tremore broke in on this sweet thought by saying, "Don't dally with me, Winnie. I'll lead you down the path. Sooner or later, I'll have you." Then he used a word she'd used once half an hour ago: Carefully, thoughtfully at each syllable, he said, "In-ap-pro-pri-ate." After a pause, he took the word for his own by saying, "As inappropriate as that'd be."

In that moment she understood: Mick Tremore was smarter, more attractive, and more aware of himself that she had ever supposed. And these marks in his character made him powerful. She was to be wary of that power; he understood it. She
was
wary. But she was something else, too. Her chin balanced on his fingers, she felt nothing ambiguous in one particular fact: Her blood came alive, as with nothing and no one else, when he stood near her.

* * *

That evening a tradition, born of cowardice, began. After dinner, Edwina still couldn't look a man in the mouth who was promising to lead her "down the path." Hunting for a way to sidestep their usual focus on his organs of speech, she came up with what possibly would become her best idea for re-tailoring his words, even his thoughts.

"I'd like to go into the library tonight, where I'll read to you aloud." She suggested brightly, "We'll douse you in the sounds of proper English, while we educate you in the classics."

In the library, she drew down a book, and began to read to him—he on the sofa, she in a chair at the other side of an unlit fireplace.

She expected to read to him for only an hour or so. But as she began the stories—with Dryden's translation of Ovid's
Metamorphoses—
Mr
.
Tremore grew silent, rapt. He listened to the rhythm of English in heroic couplets, chosen so he'd hear the music of the language in a different way than prose exercises. Eventually, he scooted himself down onto the floor and lay nearer on the hearth rug, one arm over his head, the other fiddling with the brim of the hat on his chest—he'd worn it through dinner; he loved it.

While she read, he and she didn't argue. They didn't challenge each other. He stopped her occasionally for words he didn't know. That was the limit to his objection. He wouldn't let her speak a word, if he couldn't guess the sense behind it, not without her telling him the meaning—there were some they both had to look up. Winnie read for three hours through two different authors—he asked enough questions that she took down Bullfinch's
Mythology—
until
at last she grew hoarse.

At the end, he must have drifted off to sleep. She wasn't certain when. The hat had covered his eyes for the last half hour. Something now though in the rhythm of his breathing, the movement of his chest, made her stop reading. He said nothing, when up till this point, if she stopped, he lifted the hat and encouraged her to continue.

He lay there now on the hearth rug, completely relaxed, his dog stretched out beside him, both sleeping peacefully. Edwina sighed and smiled at the sight of the two of them, motionless, quiet. A rare state for either.

She closed the book in her lap, resting her hand on it. Then the pressure, the odd pressure as she stared at him, made her draw in a breath. Hesitantly, then intentionally, she pressed on the book, over where he had touched her today. There. Winnie had never imagined he might want to do that. It had been shocking: humiliating for him to know that animal part of her, to know her—

She couldn't proceed further in her thinking
…
but, oh, the feeling his hand had left on her. It was a constant battle not to remember the strong curve of his fingers, the feel of his hand when he curved it to—

Enough. She really had to
not
think about it. Yet more and more there seemed a bevy of things she was not supposed to think about—and by virtue of trying to remember not to, she hardly thought of anything else.