Conjurer (11 page)

So engrossed is Emily in this most unladylike response that it takes her a moment to realize that Paladino has taken her hand, and another befuddled moment to recognize that the assistant is no longer present. “What do you wish of me?” she manages to whisper, but the words have lost their urgency and force, and she can only gaze at her hand in his. She knows full well that he's about to kiss it, and that she will let him.

Oh God
, her brain cries out,
what have you done by sending me into this place?
By now, she's weeping openly; she knows she should flee but also realizes that that is the last thing she wants—or is capable of accomplishing.

So Emily permits Eusapio to untie her mantle and pull off her gloves. She watches him push back her long sleeves and kiss her wrists, then smile into her face as he holds her palms to his lips. His eyes are mesmerizing; they seem to bore all the way into her. All Emily desires in this world at this moment is to trust them.

In the bed, obscured within a welter of silk hangings and crumpled sheets, Emily turns her face toward the man who is now her lover. Her tears are long since dried, and her apprehensions miraculously withered away. She raises herself on one elbow and begins to stroke his chest. He has the torso of a statue, she thinks, chiseled and perfect and seamlessly young. Emily feels ancient beside him.

“Bimba triste,”
Eusapio laughs, pulling her face up toward his own, and kissing her damp face and swollen mouth.

I am not sad
, Emily wants to protest. Instead, she runs her warm hands down over his wondrous body, and he responds by wrapping his arms around her and pressing his hips into hers.
Again?
she thinks.
Do we do this again?
Not even in her most unbridled dreams has she experienced anything like this encounter.

When their bodies are fully joined, length to length, she has a sudden and disconcerting memory of her husband. He's climbing into his favorite gig with his Thoroughbred gelding at the ready. Poised, whip in hand, his broad back tensed within his driving equipage, John is a spectacle of accepted power.

“Cavallo,”
Eusapio murmurs into Emily's ear.
“Vedo.”
I see a horse.

The Italian words mean nothing to her. “Hold me,” she answers.

“Vedo un cavallo … Aimilee
…”

“Eusapio,” she moans in reply. She has no comprehension that her lover is envisioning the same picture as she.

In the midst of their lovemaking, Eusapio's legs suddenly stiffen and his hands turn into claws. Emily protests in words he can't understand, stroking his thighs, then taking his tightened fingers into her own. “My love? Eusapio? Are you quite well?” But his distress increases; and by the time she recognizes the totality of his affliction, he's begun to recoil from her, sitting huddled in the corner of the bed. His body trembles; every sign of his previous lust has dwindled to nothing.

“Una scarpa,”
he mutters.
“Senza lo piede.”

“I don't understand.”

Emily reaches for him. He draws farther back until he seems in danger of tumbling through the bed's half-drawn draperies.

“Una scarpa.”
He points to a shoe lying on the floor.
“Lo piede.”

He grabs his own foot as if to wrench it off, then begins to stroke his toes, curling them under until they all but disappear.

“Don't,” Emily says. “You're hurting yourself.” She sits upright, drawing the sheeting around herself while Eusapio Paladino grows ever more irrational.

All at once, her thoughts begin focusing not on Eusapio but on her own predicament. She, Emily Durand, a married woman of great social standing, is in a hotel with a man who is neither her husband nor her peer. Her eyes dart across the room, searching for her hastily discarded clothes.
If an acquaintance of John's were to discover my presence here
, she thinks, but doesn't allow the idea to advance. Nervous sweat beads on her brow and neck and shoulders, running in rivulets between her breasts.

“Dal piede corto
…” Eusapio marches two fingers over the mattress, creating a lopsided gait like that of a person horribly deformed.

“Eusapio …” Emily enjoins with a stilted, pleading smile, praying that he won't cry out as he did in the Ilsleys' drawing room. “No more of this nonsense. You're not on display here. You needn't pretend. Come … I will be your
bimba triste …
your
Aimilee
…” She begins smoothing her hands across his shoulders. “… Come, no more pretense …” But Paladino scuttles away, jumping from the bed, then favoring one leg as if it were of no use while he stares into the room's dark corner as if intently watching someone moving there.

“Un huomo dal piede corto,”
he says.
“Vedo.”

Parallel Lives

“P
LEASE SHOW HIM IN
,”
MARTHA
Beale tells the footman, then immediately regrets her decision as the man withdraws. The hastiness of her action seems both anxious and overt—as well as clumsy and unsophisticated.
And I should be in the withdrawing room rather than the parlor
, she reminds herself grimly.
Father would never receive a guest here. Handsome though the space is, it doesn't have the grandeur of the other. Besides, it seems … it seems too intimate
.

But she cannot call the footman back, and she can't go running through the corridors of Beale House hoping to reach the better room before her visitor does, and so she sighs and sits, takes up the book she was reading, but finds her hands are trembling. She returns the volume to the table, then looks at the title as if noting for the first time what type of reading matter she has selected from her father's library:
Plutarch's Lives
.

Oh dear!
she thinks,
oh dear, what a mistake!
Her cheeks redden as she recognizes how overweening and unfeminine the choice seems. She reaches for the spine to turn the title from view, but before she can accomplish the task, Thomas Kelman is admitted to the room, and the footman withdraws, closing the doors behind him and leaving the visitor framed at the swagged and garlanded entrance.

Martha forces herself to sit erect and motionless in her chair: an acceptable although wholly false facsimile of a self-possessed woman. “Mr. Kelman. I'm surprised to see you in the countryside again. It's quite a journey you've made, and I thank you.”

“The pleasure is mine, Miss Beale.”

Both smile politely, hesitantly, noting the colors of clothing, of carpets and tabletops, of brocade and plush-covered chairs. They recognize and categorize the hour—it's approaching midday—by the amount of winter sun filtering through the high, draped windows, and they observe the yellow and gaseous light emanating from the numerous lamps. Their two faces, however, remain unexamined: a haze of pinkish flesh that the eye brushes rapidly past. When they speak again, their words fall out in unison.

“Mr. Kelman, I must apologize for that unfortunate missive you received. I questioned Mr. Simms—”

“Miss Beale, please forgive my brusque behavior in the street—”

As if they could physically retract the awkward beginning, both straighten their spines and shoulders, pulling themselves infinitesimally farther apart.

Kelman begins again. “My behavior the other day was hurtful. I'm sorry for it, and now, too late, I realize I should have written you to request this interview—”

Martha's speech breaks in upon his a second time. “You are always welcome at Beale House, Mr. Kelman. And at my father's house in town, as well, of course.”

Each pauses. Each takes a breath. Each reassesses the situation.

“You were reading,” he says at length. “And I have interrupted.”

Martha feels her face and neck grow hot again. She glances sideways at the book as though it were a prohibited object while Kelman moves closer and picks it up.

“Plutarch's Lives.”

She lets her gaze travel to an inconsequential part of the room; she doesn't reply.

“Plutarch,” he says again. He opens the cover and reads aloud. “‘As, in the progress of life, we first pass through scenes of innocence, peace, and fancy, and afterwards encounter the vices and disorders of society …'” He shuts the book quickly but doesn't return it to the table; and he and Martha remain motionless, arrested by words.

“Mighty thoughts,” he allows at last.

Martha can't think what to answer, and so affects a dismissive smile that Kelman either doesn't notice or doesn't understand.

“I've disturbed your studies,” he says. “I apologize.” He turns the volume over in his hands; it hasn't occurred to him that she would be less than a thoughtful and well-read woman; his only surprise is that he has not had evidence of it before. He opens to the preface again.

“‘Nor will the view of a philosopher's life be less instructive than his labors. If the latter teach us how great vices, accompanied by great abilities, may tend to the ruin of a state; if they inform us how Ambition, attended with magnanimity, how Avarice, directed by political sagacity, how Envy and Revenge, armed with personal valor and popular support, will destroy the most sacred establishments, and break through every barrier of human repose and safety …'” He ceases his recitation; he places the book squarely on the table. “Parallel lives,” he states.
“Plutarch's Parallel Lives.”
Martha can see how deeply affected he is.

“You will stay for luncheon, Mr. Kelman. Mr. Simms is engaged in the city today. I am dining alone and would welcome—”

Kelman regards her; his eyes are bleak, the scar on his cheek as silverine as water in the sun. “I have come on business.”

Martha sinks back in her chair. “You have found my father's … body … I should have intuited as much when the footman announced you. But I thought when we met by chance two days past that …” The words trail away.

Kelman frowns. “Miss Beale, my visit was not intended …” He leaves the phrase unfinished, although his expression grows fiercer. “I've been insensitive. It's not usually my nature.” He looks at her with quick and lonesome candor, then all at once imagines himself accepting her invitation, picturing conversation and warmth, then a stroll in the chilly and bracing air. She might take his arm as they tramp the winter-dead lawns. He would feel her breath near his face, the heat of her shoulder and wrist and hand.

He shakes the thoughts from his mind. “Did your father suffer from brain fever or any psychic abnormality, Miss Beale?”

“Immediately prior to his disappearance, do you mean, Mr. Kelman?”

“Or at any previous time.”

Martha thinks. “He had no mental afflictions of which I was aware, Mr. Kelman. May I ask why you pose such a question?”

Again he hesitates. How to disclose his suspicions? How to broach the subject that Lemuel Beale might be alive? And that his drowning may have been meticulously plotted and staged? The effort of a deranged mind, or the careful conniving of a rational person with much to lose by remaining in his accepted persona but everything to gain by means of his deception.

Martha regards Kelman with her green-gray eyes. “You appear to have new information you are not revealing.”

“I have some reason to hope that your father may yet be living, Miss Beale.”

Martha starts in her chair. This is an extraordinary disclosure indeed. “Rescued unconscious from the river, do you mean? And recovering in some woodsman's cottage, as I had originally …? Oh, Mr. Kelman—!”

“No, that's not what I mean.” Again Kelman pauses, and it's Martha who propels the conversation forward.

“Then, please, sir, do tell me what it is that you intend.”

Thomas Kelman weighs his words. “There have arisen reports that your father has been seen walking abroad—”

“Walking abroad! But you told me two days ago that … and Mr. Simms also assured me that you—”

Kelman interrupts her. “The reports may prove insubstantial, Miss Beale.”

“Reports?” Martha finally notices the plural form of the word. “There has been more than one?”

“Three, Miss Beale. One claims to place your father in Philadelphia—near the commercial wharves—one in Chester, and one in New Castle, Delaware.”

“And all since we last met?”

“It was only late yesterday that I was apprised of them … which is why I present myself to you now.”

Martha considers the information; incomprehension furrows her brow, although her posture remains outwardly composed and pragmatic. “Are you intimating that my father suffered some dire blow during his accident—one that has rendered him insensible of his own identity?”

Kelman avoids the question by posing another. “Is it possible your father had an enemy he wished to escape? Or creditors?”

“I've already mentioned that I know of no enemy, Mr. Kelman; and as to creditors, surely Mr. Simms would have revealed as much.”

“Is Owen Simms aware of every aspect of your father's business activities?”

“I imagine so …” Again Martha's brow creases in puzzlement. “But I cannot answer with certainty, as I was kept from full knowledge of my father's affairs. However, wouldn't creditors have applied to me—as Lemuel Beale's only child?”

Thomas Kelman gazes down at her, and she looks up at him, hoping for but not anticipating a reasonable solution.

“As I stated, these reports may prove to be false, Miss Beale. When a person as well known as your father disappears, there are bound to be peculiar and unfortunate tales. There are lunatics who insist they are the sole surviving heirs of wealthy and upstanding men—”

“That's a terrible consideration, Mr. Kelman … that someone could be cruel enough to either spread rumors or seek to resemble a vanished relation.”