Judith Ivory (14 page)

“Oh my—” Christina laughed quietly. “What did you say?”

He turned, leaned back on the balustrade. He looked at Christina. “I told her,” he said with a grin, “that it wasn’t so much a problem of a wife not tolerating my mistress but of my mistress not tolerating a wife.”

“Did you really say that?”

“No.” He laughed. “But I was thinking it.” He grew
more serious. “It would have been over, wouldn’t it? If I had come out of that room engaged to that young woman?”

She bowed her head. “Such an understanding woman might have made you a good wife.”

“So right.” He flounced the bows at the back of her bustle. “And here I am, stuck with a perfect shrew of a woman, not the least bit understanding.”

“No,” she affirmed, “not the least.”

Living in proximity to Adrien Hunt was not quite so easy as Christina had first imagined. His life was a mass of social commitments and responsibilities combined with a long-standing commitment to his own needs and indulgences. Over the years, this life had acquired a momentum, an incredible energy dedicated to the fulfillment of these things. Trying to float along with this was a bit like trying to negotiate the course of a ship under full sail. Adrien Hunt moved swiftly. He seemed always sure of where he was going, what he was doing. It was flattering that he seemed also sure now that he wanted Christina there beside him. Still, on a day-to-day basis, she could find herself feeling less an object of affection and more a little pinnace dragged along in the wake of a looming flagship.

Dances. Parties. Tennis. Riding. He took her shooting; both target and for pheasant. They went to teas. They went on side trips; to a festival in the village, to a play in the town. Christina loved this life—though, for some reason, she found it a little more exhausting than
she had at nineteen. It became an almost common sight, by midsummer, to see the young Mrs. Pinn dozing at a late-night dinner or over a midnight table of cards. Then, the earl excusing himself, gathering up her fans and feathers and pockets, her heavy satin skirts, and carrying her up the stairs to bed.

“I have never seen him so completely devoted, Christina,” Evangeline told her as she was leaving. Her pregnancy was advancing and Charles was taking her home. “I think you will leave your mark.”

Flattering. But also sad, Christina thought. Even Evangeline spoke of the love affair in terms that pre-figured its end.

By August, most of the other guests had departed as well. The larger part of the group was traveling to Lyme.

“Usually, I would go with them,” Adrien told Christina. “But I don’t want to. I want you to stay as well. Here, with me. Will you?”

“Lyme?”

“Lyme Regis. It’s a little town on the Channel coast. Pump rooms like Bath. A bathing beach like Brighton. But less crowded than either of these towns. I’ll take you, if you want; it’s very nice, really…But I’d rather get out from under all the social commitments. I’d rather be with you alone.”

It was the right thing to say. “Yes. I’d like that.”

So, with Christina by the hand, Adrien Hunt had waved good-bye to the carriages as they’d pulled away from his own door.

With fewer guests, the household calmed. Now and then, a batch of people would breeze in from London, or some personage with a retinue would upset the generally less frenetic pace. People seemed to appear in waves, one group drawing two or three others. But, mostly, the stays were short and the entertainments more independently organized.

Late summer brought beautiful weather. Adrien was,
however, less available to enjoy it. He seemed to have to be away more frequently. He had, all summer long, dashed off periodically. He would be gone sometimes two or three days, return for a week, be gone again. Christina was sure he went to France, but he no longer admitted he was going there. He concocted various excuses. Business in London. Problems on an estate in far-off Cornwall.

For the last few days of August, Adrien made sure he was home. Christina’s divorce decree would be entered on August 31st. Adrien had promised to accompany her to London, to support her through this last ordeal. Also, Adrien himself needed to go to London. He was to be gone the entire month of September, perhaps longer. He needed to “tidy up” some loose ends.

Christina wondered how she was going to be “tidied up.” She couldn’t live with him forever—she was sure Adrien didn’t envision this. She wanted to spare them both the awkward embarrassment of having the former mistress still installed in the house when a new lady gained favor. Once the divorce was final, it seemed only logical Christina should find a place of her own.

Some major loose ends were apparently right there on the Kewischester estate. The afternoon before they were leaving for London Christina accompanied Adrien into the west wing—the offices—of his house.

He had disappeared into the west wing for an hour here, an hour there, on previous occasions. Yet, she had never gone with him before this.

He was presently at his ledgers.

“Adrien?” Christina called softly across the room.

He didn’t look up, but kept reading, dipping the quill in ink, writing, sprinkling sand, blotting, reading…. He sat behind a huge desk nearly three times the size of the library desk in the east wing. This one housed a multitude of drawers and cubbyholes within his reach. On its
giant marble surface stacks of items did battle for room. Papers and more papers, three quills, three inkwells, two ledgers, a heavily marked calendar, and a crystal dish with a lit cigar.

The room itself was not much to see. After only ten minutes, Christina was as bored here as she had been in any of a dozen rooms in the west wing. The endless succession of rooms, offices, corridors, clerks, and lawyers, ad infinitum, was all too tedious for words. The only intriguing thing about the place was that one needed a key to get into these rooms.

“It would never do for people to realize how much like a bank clerk I can be,” he had said with a laugh. He had turned the lock with a key that hung on his watch chain.

Indeed, as the morning wore on, Christina began to see that Adrien brought the same brand of energy to his business concerns as he did to his social obligations—though it was hardly on the scale of a bank clerk. He
owned
two bank charters, she discovered. And a shipping company, twenty-seven rental properties, and a dairy farm—not to mention the Kewischester estate, the hereditary seat of the earldom he managed. She was flattered that he had admitted her into this inner sanctum. And slightly amused. There he sat—the local “prince of darkness,” the difficult, hunting, riding, drinking, dancing, womanizing, bastard-producing social horror and pet prodigal son of blooded society—overseeing it all, down to every last boring detail. He was right. There was a surprising side to him—serious, responsible—that would have shattered his reputation for self-indulgence.

Christina got up. She wandered into the next room.

There, a clerk sat over a table busily copying from a stack of sheets. He was lettering neat, beautiful script in a quick hand. He worked hard and carefully, giving the task his full attention. Each room, each worker seemed
so industrious, so perfectly integrated into the whole of what the earl required. In fact, it was so well run, so organized, it was a little intimidating.

“Where are you going?”

Christina bolted around. Adrien stood in the doorway, the cigar in his teeth, a paper in his hand. She shrugged. “I thought I might explore.”

“Bored?”

“A little.”

He smiled. “Are you good at adding figures?”

“I’d rather move around.”

“And I’d rather you didn’t just wander. There are people working—”

She laughed. “Do you really expect me to just sit and watch you work all afternoon?”

He did. She could see it by the mild puzzlement this question caused him.

She threw him a look over her shoulder. “You can find me when you’re done. I’ll be off in this direction.”

“Christina—”

Room opened into small room. A thoughtful clerk took note of her. A solicitor bobbed a surprised head up out of a book. But people knew her, who she was; she was not questioned. She walked briskly through eight or ten rooms, wanting to put the hub of activity behind her. Most of the rooms in the west wing opened on to each other without access corridors, somewhat like a maze.

Then, all at once, a corridor presented itself to her. Rooms opened off it. They looked cared for, clean. But they also looked unlived-in, vacant, and dated in décor. They had the still, sleeping quality of a museum. She walked along the hallway, peeking into each room. She noticed hardly any difference between these rooms and the ones Adrien had claimed as offices except that there were no clerks here, no more Adrien, no more of his vast reach into every corner. Then, one room was
different. As Christina first peered in, she saw it was larger. But it was pictures on a wall that caught her eye and drew her in.

It was a dim room of majestic size and proportion. It had been perhaps a library. A few books. Large, comfortable chairs with footrests. Candelabras on tables positioned all about the apartment, as if for reading. She wandered over to one table, fingered, then opened a large scroll of paper that lay on it. It was a map. Of France. It was heavily marked in various shades of ink. She looked again at the chairs. Suddenly they took on a new perspective. There were ten or twelve of them, and they all faced this particular table and the chair beside it. With a ripple of apprehension, knowledge flooded through her. The trips to France were planned here in this room. Somehow this made it worse, that they should germinate in the humming little mecca of the west wing. It made them more considered, more purposeful; more conspiratorial. The dimensions of Adrien’s illicit activity, whatever it was, loomed suddenly larger.

Christina let the map curl up on itself. It made her feel like she shouldn’t be there. It was the pictures she had been interested in, she reminded herself.

She went to a window and drew back the heavy drapes. The afternoon sun poured in, lighting the room with a dignity that surprised and pleased. This was such an improvement, she repeated the task, adding light from one huge window after the other, four in all. The room brightened and revealed itself. The pictures were hung in a formal pattern along the one wall.

Christina backed into the middle of the room. There were fifteen pictures. Dark, golden-hued paintings in various styles of portraiture. The last one she looked at made her heart leap.

“My goodness,” she murmured. She went close to this last painting. A very young, but very recognizable
man gazed challengingly out of the frame. She backed up a step to look again at the row of portraits. Indeed, the Earls of Kewischester, all seven of them, hung there on the wall with their various wives—one of them had gone through three. She had come across the House of Hunt.

Christina surveyed the canvas faces; one stern, one sublimely bored, each its own version of prescribed, lordly expression. At the last picture, she paused again with great interest.

She judged it to be at least a dozen years old—Adrien at perhaps age twenty. He stood there in the perfect poise of aristocratic manhood, looking more pretty than handsome. His black hair was worn long and tied back with a stiff, blue satin bow. He wore no powder, even though twelve years ago that would have been very much the style; just as he now wore his hair decidedly shorter than noble fashion. She wondered if it was vanity that made him flout convention and current style. Or just an ever increasing desire to free himself from the care of his unusual hair.

The young Adrien was possibly not as personable as the present one. But something else in the canvas face mitigated this. It was in the eyes: Innocence. Asleep, the face of Adrien she knew held a measure of this. But here, the painter had captured a frank, uncorrupted naiveté she had yet to see in the face of the real man.

Christina’s eyes caught sight of a mark, an irregular area on the wall to the right. She reached up to touch it with her finger.

“What are you doing?” a voice called from behind her.

Christina had to grab the last picture to keep from knocking it off the wall. She turned. “Heavens, Adrien, you scared the life out of me.” She looked back to the spot on the wall, touched it again. He was behind her.

She felt his lips brush her bare neck.

“Adrien, look at this. The wall plaster is discolored.”

“So it is. I should have had the wall papered.”

“And here, someone has filled in a hole; the plaster has shrunk.” She ran her finger over the indentation. “Why, there was another picture here! Who was it?”

When he didn’t answer, she turned to face him. He barely allowed her room—he had her backed against the wall. And, she realized, he wasn’t going to answer. He was going to kiss her.

She put her hand up, covered his mouth. “Who was it?” she asked again.

His eyes frowned over the small, gagging hand. His mouth opened. He bit her hand, gently, and pressed himself against her. She leaned, let the wall take her weight. She had thought she might get used to this. But his nearness, his flirtations and advances still flustered her. “You’re trying to avoid this. Why? You’re…” she groaned, “…confusing me on purpose….”

He laughed softly. “Mmm, so right,” he said. “The second you left, I was wishing you hadn’t. I didn’t get another thing done. ‘So,’ I said to myself, ‘I might as well go confuse Christina.’”

The only evidence of what had gone on were the muss of her skirts about her knees and the state of his shirt, untucked and hanging. Adrien was sitting, his back against the wall. His legs were bent, like a bridge over Christina’s body. She lay in the shelter of his legs and body.

She looked up and over her head. Upside down, she could still make out the telltale marks on the blank wall where the mystery picture had hung. “Who was it?” she said.

“Who was who?”

“The picture.”

He gave her a flick of his finger. “You are as tenacious as
a flea, do you know that?” He laughed, leaned his head back. “My wife,” he answered. “You must certainly realize it was a picture of my wife.”

“Your wife!” Christina sat up on her arms. She would have gotten up all the way, but Adrien flattened his legs. One of his little games, he held her to the floor. “You never said you had a wife!”

“I don’t have one. Not now.”

“I don’t understand. What—? Where—?” She tried to calm herself. “What became of her? Is she dead?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Lost then? At sea?” Christina wished she could take it back. It wasn’t very nice, disposing aloud of Mrs. Hunt—Lady Hunt, she corrected, the Countess of Kewischester. “Let me up, Adrien. I have to go.”

“Stop it,” he chided softly. “We’re divorced.”

This should have relieved her, in light of her own failed marriage. But it didn’t. The very fact that this was the first she had heard of this—when the subject must have stared them in the face a hundred times—was ominous.