Grahame, Lucia (6 page)

Sir Anthony's mere physical presence had had a subtle but
undeniable impact upon me. Being in the same room with him made me feel as if
I'd drunk a little too much from a bottle of rare old wine.

I tried to pretend it wasn't so. I tried to ignore the disturbing
feeling or to push it away, but now, alone in the darkness, I felt a warm, slow
thrill as I let the guilty awareness fill my mind.

What was it exactly that made his company so pleasant in ways that
had nothing to do with the words he spoke or the things we did?

Was it that calm air of expectant stillness, which made me feel
almost as if he were lying in wait for something, like a lion lounging indolent
yet alert in a sea of tall golden grass? Or the quiet grace with which he
moved—which compelled not only my eyes but my senses?

The truth was—and even in the darkness I could feel my cheeks burn
as I acknowledged it—that I liked to watch the way he used his body: I liked
the way he got up from a chair, the way he walked across a room, even the slow,
lazy way he smiled.

I liked his low voice, too, and his understated way of
speaking—soothing, but with enough bite to keep you on your toes.

He was very different from Frederick, who'd moved with an
expansive, exuberant energy; who'd filled up a room as soon as he entered it,
with his body, with his voice, and with his robust laugh that could lift you up
like a great warm gust of wind. Frederick, who'd never waited for anything.
Frederick, whose language was the language of superlatives; it was how he'd
talked, how he'd painted, how he'd moved. It was how he'd lived.

No, Sir Anthony Camwell was nothing at all like Frederick. And
therefore, I assured myself, if our pleasant acquaintance were to continue to
develop, it would certainly be as innocent as it was enjoyable.

To fully appreciate the treasures of the Louvre would take far
longer than a lifetime. Sir Anthony and I had given ourselves less than a day.
But when he'd returned me to my door, he'd said nothing about repeating the
adventure. Perhaps I had disappointed him. I had not revealed the discerning
and critical eye he had looked for in me. I had not explained, in disengaged
and pedantic tones, why this piece of work, although charming, is indisputably
inferior to that one. I had not detailed with dispassionate condescension the
small failings of great talents, nor had I pointed out, with perverse smugness,
the little flashes of genius in obscure works that are commonly overlooked.

No. I had artlessly exposed to him the very worst evidence of an
undisciplined mind and an uncultivated eye: I had expressed my enthusiasms!

True, he had encouraged me to do so, but a man whose tastes had
surely been shaped by a Cambridge or Oxford education must have been quickly
bored by my lack of erudition.

On the following day I received a rather formal but extremely
gracious note from the baronet thanking me for the time I had spent with him.
It concluded with a hope that we might visit one of the Louvre's other
galleries at some unspecified future date.

I responded with what I hoped was a reserved and dignified yet
encouraging reply.

Before a week had passed, another note in Sir Anthony's severely
unembellished hand informed me that an engagement which he had not been
anticipating with much pleasure had mercifully been called off. This freed him
for the afternoon of the following day. If I cared to revisit the Louvre with
him, I had only to send word. Of course, he hardly dared to hope that I would
likewise be free on such regrettably short notice....

My inexplicable but growing fascination with Sir Anthony prompted
me to try to read between the lines of his economical pen.

He was rich, unattached, and sojourning in a foreign city —surely
his time was his own. He might have easily pinned me down days ago had he
issued his invitation in person at the end of our last excursion, when it would
have been rather awkward to refuse. On the other hand, perhaps there really
were a great many unpleasant demands upon his time; there was a suggestion of
earnestness in his nature which might have made it difficult for him to turn
his back on the needs of others.

In any case, had I not wished to pursue our acquaintance, he had
given me, by issuing his invitation only one day in advance, a fine opportunity
to make a refusal that would not seem contrived. But surely he knew by now that
I had no pupils on Friday afternoon—the time of the week he and Lord Marsden
had called upon me, the time of our first visit to the Louvre.

Of course I was pleased to accept.

Sir Anthony and I fell rather quickly into a pattern of spending
our Friday afternoons together, and for the most part, we sustained the
pleasant, easy tone we had established early on.

In September, Sir Anthony returned to England. We spent our last
afternoon together at the Luxembourg Museum but barely commented upon the
paintings. Indeed, I was all but oblivious to them. A real sadness that our
lazy summer afternoons were coming to an end had me in its grip.

My regrets were made more difficult to bear by my consciousness
that it would not do at all to express them; such a confession seemed very out
of keeping with the light-hearted tenor of our relationship.

But when at last Sir Anthony handed me down from the fiacre onto
the Boulevard de Clichy, his hand clung to mine for perhaps a moment longer
than necessary, and when I met his gaze, I saw a much softer glow in his eyes
than I was accustomed to find there.

He escorted me up the narrow stairway to my door, where we made
our farewells on the dim landing.

"You have been very generous with your time this summer,
Madame Brooks," he said, taking my hand again. "I don't know how to
express my gratitude."

"Oh no," I said quickly. "All the gratitude is
mine. You have helped me through what might otherwise have been a very
difficult and lonely time. I can't thank you enough."

He smiled. But still my hand remained in his. It seemed that
neither one of us wished to be the first to sever that innocent connection.

"I fear I shall miss you," I confessed at last.

Sir Anthony looked oddly gratified by this admission.

"I am flattered," he replied softly, "for I
know
I shall miss you."

I felt my cheeks flush faintly. And still my hand rested in his.

"I hope to return often and soon," he went on, his own
face coloring slightly. "Paris has come to feel like a second home to
me."

"I hope it will always seem so," was all I could manage,
as I gently disengaged my hand.

It wasn't until after the fiacre had carried him away, however,
that I began to fully comprehend how much his companionship had meant to me.
Those afternoons had been the high point of my week.

They must have been all that had kept at bay the terrible reality
of my losses, for without Sir Anthony's tactful and undemanding company, my
grief and loneliness returned with a vengeance. Even more disturbing, however,
my thoughts did not entirely confine themselves to my dead husband.

It was Frederick's name I whispered when I clung to my pillow in
the dark, but, to my shame, the lips that came to me in waking dreams were not
Frederick's lips... and this unsettling development had begun long before the
end of summer.

If I'd been wiser or more experienced, no doubt I would have more
carefully examined my tangled and obscure feelings where Sir Anthony was
concerned. But I could not see the need: I regarded him as a very minor player
in the drama of my life. The kisses that my drowsy imagination allowed him were
not chaste ones, but I never allowed my mind to race beyond them to visions of
greater intimacy.

In any case, my black gowns were my protection. The rules of
correct behavior required me to continue my mourning for nearly eighteen months
more, and it was my prerogative to stretch it out even longer—for decades, if I
chose to. From behind my barricade of black, a fortification that demands both
sympathy and respect, I could keep life's complexities and ambiguities at bay
for as long as it suited me.

And if my interest in Sir Anthony was not entirely innocent, that
was nobody's business but my own. Certainly Sir Anthony himself would never
know.

By summer's end, of course, I supposed that he might have been
fleetingly attracted to me. Harmless flirtations between men and women who are
entirely unsuited to one another are very common, as everyone knows, but
sensible people can be trusted not to act on them. And Sir Anthony Camwell was
eminently sensible. He impressed me as the least impulsive, most judicious
person I had ever met in my life, and if a dishonorable or foolish thought had
ever wandered across his mind, I was certain that he would have routed it
instantly.

Even if his attraction to me had been stronger and more enduring,
he could not possibly have acted upon it. He would never insult me by trying to
claim a husband's privileges outside the bonds of matrimony, and he could not
possibly think of marrying me. He was of ancient English stock and the whole
weight of English tradition would require him to take a wife from a family with
a bloodline as unsullied as his own. In a year or two, he would be thirty; it
was time for him to begin looking seriously for a bride. Perhaps it was this
very recognition of the demands and responsibilities of his station that had called
him back to England and ended his pleasant dalliance in France.

The more that I tried to consider his situation from this
practical point of view, however, the sadder I felt. He would make a proper
marriage to some thin-lipped, coldblooded English girl with a puritanical
streak even broader than the one I had glimpsed in him. She would embody
everything that I most detested in the English upper classes. Her blue eyes
would bulge with confused incomprehension should her husband ever attempt to
infuse her with the enchantment he'd once felt under the gaze of a marble faun.
But what did these things matter? She would bring him the kind of pedigree that
could never be mine, and equally important, she could give him children. Who
was I? A creature of murky lineage who had not even been able to carry my
beloved's child to term.

We spent a good part of it idling over a bunch of autumn grapes
outside a cafe in the Boulevard des Italiens, while the October sunlight fell
upon us. I felt oddly happy and oddly shy.

"And how did you find England?" I asked.

"As lovely as ever," was his reply, "and as
imperfect."

"Imperfect?" I repeated. "In what way?"

I have always regarded insular England as very imperfect when
compared to cosmopolitan, democratic Paris, but I was curious to know in
precisely what way Sir Anthony Camwell found his native land wanting.

His lips curved into a hint of a smile.

"It hasn't quite the charm for me that Paris has," he
said, flashing me a sidewise look that I found difficult to interpret. "Of
course," he added after a pause,
"you
must feel this even more
strongly, for you are English by birth and yet have chosen to make your home
here."

"Oh yes," I told him cheerfully. "On the great
railway line of life I regard Paris as one stop short of heaven."

Sir Anthony's smile broadened.

"And where on the line do you put England?" he inquired.

I wrinkled my nose as I considered this for a minute or two.

"I don't know," I replied at last. "It is so very
smoky, you know, I fear it must be rather close to hell."

Sir Anthony burst into laughter, but when he spoke again he
sounded more piqued than amused.

"So that is your opinion of England," he said.
"Don't you think you are being unjust? There is a good deal more to
England than smoke."

I popped a grape between my lips and considered this with an air
of skepticism.

"I have no warmth in my heart for England," I said at
last.

"But you
were
born there, were you not?" he
asked.

I had the feeling he was trying to draw me out.