The Wildest Heart (4 page)

A garment fit for a queen—the gift of an Indian prince. What was I thinking of as I slowly wound it around my body as the women had taught me? Did I imagine that I would be magically transformed into a princess? I cannot remember what thoughts went through my head, but when I put it on I shook my hair loose so that its straight, fine strands hung about my face, giving it a shadowed, mysterious look.

Beneath the thin material my pale flesh seemed to take on an amber glow as I saw myself outlined against the fire—all subtle shadings of hollows and curves. Seized by a strange, trancelike feeling, I stared at myself, and it was like looking at the shadowy portrait of a stranger. Was that exotic creature in the mirror really me? All the features I had so despised in my face seemed to take on a new, softer look. I felt like Narcissus discovering his own beauty in a pool of water, and could not stop staring at myself.

I think I was a little mad that afternoon. Not only did I look like a stranger, but even my thoughts were not my own. I remember putting my hand up to touch my face, as if I could not believe it was mine, and the gesture had a strangely sensuous grace I had never possessed before. I was a woman, discovering her own beauty before a mirror—an Indian princess, carefully cloistered from men, and yet born to please them… and then, with a shattering force, the spell was broken.

I hadn't heard the door open until it slammed shut behind him, and I whirled around with an involuntary, gasping cry of fear.

“What in hell do you mean, treating Tom that way? I tell you, girl, once and for all…”

He had begun to shout at me in his loud, blustering voice, and I smelled the liquor on his breath as he came closer. And then his words trailed away as his jaw dropped, and I saw the look in his eyes as they slowly widened and then became narrow.

“Good God!” he said, very slowly, and I saw the look of rage on his face replaced by something else. “Are you really the shy little spinster we all took you for? Is this what you've been hiding away all these months under those ugly clothes you wear? For what lover are you guarding those treasures I see, little Rowena?”

For those few moments, while he was talking to me in that strange, thick voice, while his eyes were moving greedily over my body, I remained as frozen as a marble statue, incapable of motion, or of coherent thought.

And then Sir Edgar began to laugh, and his arms reached for me.

“To think—to think you had me fooled—all these months, and right under my own roof too. Why, you're a raving beauty, girl! The prettiest body—”

“No!” I remember saying. Had I already, without any experience to warn me, sensed his purpose? I had meant to scream the word, but it came out as a choking whisper from my dry throat.

And then, when he put his hands on me, it was too late. My pride would not let me cry out aloud and beg him for mercy, and nor, I think, would it have done any good, for he had become a man possessed by lust.

I struggled—I beat at him with my fists and kept on struggling until I was half-swooning with exhaustion. Somehow he had dragged me over to the bed, ripping my lovely sari off my body with his greedy, grasping fingers. His face loomed over mine and I heard him mutter hoarsely.

“God, you're a lovely thing! I've got to have you, don't you understand that? You've no right to hide such beauty away—no right to wear any clothes at all with a body like yours…”

He kissed me, his mouth covering mine, stifling me so that now I panted and gasped for breath and heard the strange, whimpering noises that came from the back of my throat.

The weight of his body pressed me down until I felt my back must surely break. But that pain was forgotten when a worse one took its place—a terrible searing agony like a knife thrust between my thighs. I would have screamed, then, if his mouth had not been pressed over mine. I remember that my body arched with shock as he gasped, groaned, and shuddered against me.

It was over. He still leaned heavily above me, his sweat dripping onto my still body, but the terrible pain I had felt was gone, succeeded by a sticky wetness that I knew was blood.

Of course. It's normal for a virgin to bleed when she first lies with a man. I remember lying there, feeling as if every bone in my body had turned to water. I was no longer a virgin. I had been raped by my own stepfather. I watched his face change, its muscles growing slack as the taut expression of lust was wiped out by the gradual realization of what he had done.

He suddenly rolled away from me with a groan, and I lay there watching him as he staggered to his feet, fingers fumbling with his clothing.

“Dear God, Rowena! I didn't know. Girl, just seeing you the way you were, half-naked—so lovely—I don't know what got into me!”

“It's too late to feel guilty now, isn't it?”

Was that my own voice I heard, sounding so calm, so dead? Suddenly I felt a sickening feeling of distaste for the soiled, stained sheets I was lying on. Without looking at Sir Edgar, who still stood there watching me, I used the corner of the sheet to wipe the blood from my thighs fastidiously, and then I stood up, and brushed past him, to walk to the mirror.

I think I wanted to see if I had changed in any way—if my face would carry the marks of my experience, but it looked unchanged. Pale, still a stranger's face, with black hair lying in tangles around it. “It shows in the eyes, when a maiden becomes a woman.” Where had I heard that? But my eyes showed nothing, except a kind of blankness.

Without knowing why I did it, I seized my silver-backed brush off the dressing table and began to brush my hair, with long, viciously tugging strokes. Perhaps I was suffering from shock, perhaps my strange action was due to my instinct of self-preservation that fought to keep me sane by forcing me to concentrate on some small, ordinary task.

Strange as it seems, I had almost forgotten Sir Edgar's presence as I stood there at my mirror, with not a stitch of clothing to cover my nakedness. And then he came up behind me. I saw him in the glass, his eyes gleaming with a strange light, his mouth twisted in a smile.

“Damnation, but you're a lovely creature! First virgin I ever took without paying for it. Only one who didn't cry afterwards. You're a strange girl, aren't you?”

He put a hand on my bare shoulder, and although I stiffened, I didn't flinch away from him. He gave a small, satisfied chuckle.

“You're sensible. I like that. So cold, so lovely—” his voice dropped, and I heard him say softly, “You're the kind of woman who can carry off diamonds, you know. With that dark hair and your eyes—yes, by God, you're a diamond girl, all right! And I want to make it up to you. See here, Rowena, I'm not a brute, I'm a fair man, and I can be generous too.”

He quickly left the room and I remained standing, trancelike, before the mirror.

I saw something sparkling in his hand as he returned and my arms dropped to my sides, very slowly, as I felt him lift the heavy mass of my hair—felt a coldness like ice around my throat.

“There!” he said triumphantly. “There, now. Look at yourself in the glass, girl! You should not wear anything else. Diamonds—and maybe sapphires on some occasions, to match your eyes. What do you say, eh? I'd be kind to you—wouldn't hurt you again for all the world. Dress you in jewels.”

His hands, with the reddish brown hairs on the back of his fingers, slid slowly down my shoulders, and still I did not move, but my eyes met his levelly in the glass.

“What exactly are you suggesting to me, Sir Edgar? Are you attempting to bribe me not to tell anyone what you have done, or are you proposing I become your mistress?”

I felt his fingers tighten about my arms for an instant, and then he swung me around to face him.

“Will you always be so cold? There's flame burning under the iciness of a diamond, Rowena. I'd like to uncover the fire in you!”

I stood passively in his crushing embrace, and watched his eyes search my body greedily. I felt nothing, except for a slight soreness between my thighs. Was that all there was to the act of love between a man and a woman? Love, lust. I suppose the two were inextricable.

“Rowena—Rowena! Now that I've discovered you for myself, I'll not let you go.”

When his mouth had lifted itself from mine I twisted from his grasp and went back to brushing my hair. If I had a thought at that moment it was, strangely, that I hated my mother even more than I despised her husband. This was the man she had left my father for—this man who had so little self-control that he had taken her own daughter by force only moments before, and now proposed to make her his mistress! This same man, who had seemed so arrogant and overbearing at the beginning, but now pleaded with me for warmth and a response to his bestial embraces. He could have overpowered me again by sheer brute strength, but no. He wanted more. He wanted response—the feigned passion of a whore! Was that the only way a woman could dominate a man? How easy it would be to exploit this man. Yes, and to make my mother suffer too! If I wanted to…

“For God's sake, girl, aren't you going to say anything to me?” He was pleading again, eyes almost haggard now. “What's done is done. I would have preferred it to have happened differently, but I had had too much to drink at the club, and when Tom came storming in—”

For the first time since Sir Edgar had entered my room, a spark of anger pierced my defensive shell of reserve. “Don't speak to me of Tom Wilkinson! To think you sent him to me, knowing I'd be alone—to think you considered him good enough for me!”

“No, girl, no! But how was I to know! By God, I think I'd kill that young pup if I thought he'd touched you! Didn't I just say I'd make it all up to you, for everything? Listen—” his voice became feverish, his hands touched my shoulders again as if he could not help himself—“listen, you shall have everything, anything you want, do you hear? Fine, fashionable clothes, jewels—would you like your own horse to ride in the park? A small carriage? I'm a rich man.”

“And how will you explain your sudden generosity to—your wife?”

Deliberately I hesitated before my choice of a word, and he flushed dully.

“Don't turn hard, girl. Fanny—well, you don't know her, do you? She—she's not the same. Always those headaches, dragging me off to dull dinners.”

“Don't you mean that my mother is no longer young—and I am?”

He could find nothing to say to refute my blunt statement, and I moved away from him.

“Please, I'm rather tired now. I think I would like a bath.”

I was trying my power over him already, and we both knew it.

He looked at me, at my body, and I saw his shoulders sag.

“I'll—I'll send Jenks in to you. She won't talk—owes me too much. I'll have her move you to the blue room. It's larger, and has a view of the park. And—we'll talk tomorrow?”

“Perhaps,” I said coldly. And for the moment, that was the end of it. He left my room and I was alone again. Automatically, I took my one, ugly flannel dressing gown from the wardrobe and draped it around myself.

“Vanity, Rowena! It was your own vanity that caused this to happen.”

Why did I suddenly imagine I could hear my grandfather's voice? Deliberately I shut it out. He had educated my mind, but taught me nothing about the world as it was. I had realized, in the space of an afternoon, that I was ignorant in many other ways. All of my education had not taught me to get along with other human beings, any more than my birth and breeding had protected me. For the first time, I realized that I was completely alone, with only myself to depend upon. And yet, somehow I would survive—and I would use any methods I could think of to do so.

How can one describe the passing of time? Light and shade—patterns seen through a kaleidoscope—

I blossomed forth, like a butterfly from a cocoon, taking, as one of my many later admirers said, all London by storm. I'm sure he exaggerated, although my sudden transformation from quiet, dowdy obscurity to flamboyant debutante was bound to give rise to some comment.

I shall never know what transpired between Sir Edgar and my mother—if anything did—but almost overnight I found myself no longer a retiring, unwanted poor relation. Suddenly I was the petted, spoiled daughter of the house, a pampered creature whose every wish must be indulged.

I was presented to Her Majesty. Like the rest of that year's debutantes, I was dressed in virginal white; my dark hair crowned with a diamond tiara. I was seen at all the fashionable functions with my doting parents.

My mother and I were still virtual strangers, but what did it matter? In public she was proud of me; in private, we had nothing to say to each other. And Edgar Cardon, as he promised, continued to be generous.

We traveled in Europe, and my knowledge of languages proved an asset, instead of the liability it had once been considered. An Italian prince dubbed me “the marble goddess” when I rejected his attempts at seduction, and the name followed me back to London. I was an acknowledged beauty now; I, who had always considered myself plain, who had been called ugly and frumpish. And when the prime minister said I had a mind as scintillatingly clear as one of the diamonds I constantly wore, my position in society became secure. The Earl of Beaconsfield had also added, in private, that I was as cold and as hard as the stones I seemed to admire, but this comment was never noised abroad. I put him off by protesting that he was a married man, but he was also a supremely intelligent individual, and my evasions did not fool him.

“I wonder if you are capable of loving?” he once asked me when we were alone. “I could almost understand your rejection of me if you were in love with poor Edgar Cardon, but I know that you're not. You are too intelligent to be a lady, and too much of a lady to be a little whore at heart. Have you ever asked yourself what you are searching for, Rowena?”

My eyes met his. His honesty appealed to me. “Why should I have to search for anything?” I said lightly. “If I'm not entirely satisfied with my way of life, I'm not too discontented either. I manage to fill up my days.”

“With a man like Edgar Cardon? What do you have in common with him? I'll be frank. I've known my share of beautiful women, but in your case, it was your intelligence that appealed to me. You're wasting yourself.”

I realized that I could be perfectly honest with him. I shrugged. “Would you have noticed me at all before? I was an ugly duckling before sheer chance, and Sir Edgar transformed me into a swan. I still had the same intelligence you say you admire, but who would have bothered to pay any attention to it then? No, my lord, it is you who are not being logical now. I discovered that in order to be recognized as an intelligent woman, I had first to be noticed as a woman. Would we have met at all if you had not been alarmed that the Prince of Wales might have formed a
tendre
for me?”

He laughed, and leaned forward to pat my hand.

“Touché, my lady! No, I must confess that it had not entered my head what a disadvantage it might be to be born a female—and an intelligent one, at that! May I wish you good fortune?”

He kissed my hands when we parted, and that was that. Sir Edgar was flattered that the prime minister had noticed me, and I never told him what had transpired between us.

There were other things to think about. I was almost twenty years old, and a grand birthday ball had been planned for me. Had I but known it, my whole life was to be changed again, drastically, following that special occasion.

It was truly an enchanted evening. I had danced every dance, consumed great quantities of champagne, and laughed and flirted the night away. The festivities continued until after six in the morning, when the last of our guests finally went home, fortified by an enormous breakfast.

When, at last, I climbed the stairs to my room, I was so weary that I had barely enough energy left to take off my shimmering satin ball gown. I dropped it on the floor next to my satin dancing slippers, and threw myself into bed.

I slept deeply, dreamlessly, waking only when my maid—or so I thought—drew apart the heavy velvet draperies that covered my window and brilliant sunlight suddenly streamed across my face.

“Did you have to open them all the way, Martine? What time is it? I promised I would go riding in the park this afternoon…”

“Perhaps you could postpone your riding until later. There is a certain individual you should see this afternoon, on a matter that might prove of vital concern to your future.”

I sat up in bed with a jerk, my sleepy, swollen eyes widening with surprise. The last person I had expected to see, in my bedchamber of all places, was my mother.

“I'm sorry if I woke you up,” she said in an expressionless voice. “But the news I have wouldn't keep. I told Martine she could leave, that I would see you had your hot chocolate. It's there on the table by your bed.”

I looked at her, bunking to clear the last vestiges of sleep from my eyes. My mother—Lady Fanny. All these months we had existed like complete strangers, passing each other in the corridors of the house without any visible recognition. It was by her avoidance of me that I first sensed she knew very well what had caused my changed position in the house, but like an ostrich, she preferred not to see. I had hated her all the more for it, of course. My mother, the procuress! She had been Sir Edgar Cardon's mistress while she was still married to my father, and now, in my own twisted way, I was paying her back in her own coin, on my father's behalf.

We watched each other for a few moments, while I reached slowly for my cup of chocolate.

The morning light was cruel to her face, in spite of the carefully applied powder and rouge she always used. Perhaps she had been pretty once, but her plump blonde beauty was not the kind that lasts into middle age. I saw her suddenly, in the harsh light of the sun, as a fat, aging woman—an object of pity, if I had been capable of pitying her.

As if she could not bear to look upon my face for too long, my mother had walked impatiently over to my dresser, where she stood fiddling with my combs and brushes as she waited for me to finish my drink. All this time I had said not a word to her, but now at last I put my cup down and saw that she had picked up the necklace of sapphires and diamonds which had been Sir Edgar's birthday present to me.

“Do you like them?” I said idly. “I also have the bracelet and the earrings to match. But the necklace is a beautiful piece, don't you think?”

She dropped the necklace as if it had suddenly turned red-hot and looked at me with hatred and malice in her eyes. It was just as if a mask had dropped from her face.

“Perhaps you could soon be buying your own jewels, Rowena. That is—if you are sensible.”

“Why don't you come right out with whatever it is you came here to say, Mother? I'm still too sleepy to find solutions to riddles.”

I swung my legs off the bed, realizing I was naked only when I saw the expression on my mother's face.

I laughed, reaching for one of the sheer, lace-embroidered robes that Sir Edgar had surprised me with on one occasion. “Heavens! What strangers we are, to be sure! I had no idea that my nudity would appall you.”

“It's not that…” she began, and then bit her words off short. “Never mind,” she went on quickly. “I did not come here to quarrel with you, but rather—rather to offer you a belated birthday present, you might say.” The short, almost hysterical laugh she gave startled me into looking more closely at her, and indeed, her face bore an almost unnatural flush that underlay the rouge she had applied too heavily, and her plump, be-ringed fingers trembled as she nervously pleated and unpleated a fold of her skirt.

“It's a little late for recriminations between us, isn't it, Mother?” I said equably, and began to brush my hair. “Well?” I went on when she seemed to hesitate. “Aren't you going to tell me what my belated birthday present is?”

“It must be a secret between us,” she said quickly. “Edgar—I do not want Edgar to know—not yet. He never did like your father, you know. Guy's name must not be mentioned.”

My hand stopped in midstroke. “My father? What has he to do with it? You've never mentioned his name before!”

“Of course I haven't. Why should I? We are divorced, and all the unpleasantness he put me through… but that no longer matters,” she said hurriedly, when I would have spoken. “The least you can do is to hear me out. It will not take long. Your father—you knew he went to America? When your grandfather died, the lawyers had a difficult time tracing him. No one had an address, and of course, it was out of the question that he should ever return here! Even so, there was the matter of the title. He is the Earl of Melchester now, murderer or not.” A barely suppressed note of bitterness had crept into her voice, and I wondered whether she had begun to regret the fact that she might have been a countess, instead of the wife of a mere baronet.

I repeated, “Why should you suddenly speak of my father now? What are you trying to tell me?”

Suddenly there was a note of triumph in her voice.

“That he wants you to come to America to live with him! Yes—” she hurried on, seeing my expression, “it's true, the lawyers found him. He had not known that his father was dead, or that you were here with us. I was contacted by the solicitor who is acting for him, and he wishes to meet you, to discuss various arrangements that will have to be made. You will go, will you not, Rowena?” In the face of my stunned silence, her voice became almost desperate. How much she wanted to be rid of me! I had not realized.

“He's a rich man, Rowena! I cannot imagine it. Guy, who was always such a spendthrift, a man who never cared for money, except to get rid of it as quickly as possible. But Mr. Braithwaite tells me he's a millionaire, and it will all be yours! You'll be an heiress! The minute you sign those papers and I give my consent for you to go to him, you'll have fifty thousand pounds settled on you outright. Do you understand what that means? You'll be rich—and completely independent, of course. Well, what do you say?”

I had received a shock—and if I managed to keep my face expressionless, I know it must have showed in the unusual brilliance of my eyes. I looked at my mother, who was biting her lip as she tried to search for some answer in my face.

“Well?” she said again, her tone a mixture of impatience and fear.

“I need time to—to think about all this, of course,” I said slowly. “My father—do you not think it strange that he should have waited so long to try and contact me?”

“I wrote to him!” she burst out defiantly. “Well, why not?” she went on, her voice rising slightly. “Do you think I wanted you here? Especially after—after—”

“Why are you so reluctant to say it?” I broke in coldly. “You surely mean that after your husband had raped me, he was weak enough to become infatuated with me. You are afraid you'll lose him to me completely, are you not? Is that why you've decided not to bury your head in the sand any longer, but to get rid of me instead?”

“You are a cold, calculating little hussy, Rowena!” she whispered, and by now I had regained enough composure to give her a scornful smile.

“Certainly, I must take after you in some ways, I suppose. Are we going to indulge in recriminations at this late stage?”

I could see her trying desperately to pull herself together, torn between her desire to pour out all the accumulated resentment and hatred she felt for me, and the need to placate me.

In the end, she said abruptly, “Will you go with me to visit Mr. Braithwaite or not? Once you have spoken to him and he has explained everything to you in detail, I doubt that there will be any need for us to converse further.”

“Quite so. At all costs, let us not become hypocrites.” I turned away from her once more and continued brushing my hair. “If you will send Martine to me, Mother, I should be ready to accompany you in less than an hour.”

The drive to Lincolns Inn Fields, where Mr. Braithwaite maintained his offices, was accomplished in stony silence. And indeed, once we had been politely ushered into the cozy office of the senior partner of the august firm of Braithwaite, Matthews and Braithwaite, my mother quickly informed that gentleman that I was possessed of an intelligent mind and had a will of my own, so that
her
part in this matter would be merely that of an interested observer.

I shot her a somewhat sardonic glance, but she had settled back in her chair with her hands primly folded in her lap, and would not meet my eyes.

“Well, Lady Rowena.” Mr. Braithwaite said briskly from behind his paper-cluttered desk, and I looked up to meet his blue, twinkling gaze, which was remarkably shrewd in spite of his advanced years. He surprised me by saying suddenly, “You look like your father, y'know! Hmm—too bad things turned out the way they did. Guy—but you're not here to listen to an old man reminisce, are you? Shall we get down to business right away, then, or would you ladies like a cup of tea first?”

Both my mother and I declined the offer of tea, and, nodding his head in a satisfied manner, Mr. Braithwaite made a small pyramid of his fingers, gazing over their tips at me like a benevolent gnome.

“Very well, business it shall be, then. You'll stop me at any time you do not understand something I am saying, or need clarification of any point, Lady Rowena?”

I nodded, and he inclined his head to me, in a courtly fashion.

“Good!” he exclaimed, and then picking up a sheaf of papers that lay in front of him, his voice became businesslike as he began to read to me—first a lengthy letter of instructions from my father, and then a copy of his will, listing all his assets.