Judith Ivory (22 page)

She bit her lip, absorbing the idea. London.

It would still take the rest of the week to organize what
remained, but he was right: London was the best place to do it, the city of opportunity. She made a jerk of her head, agreement.

“Good night then,” she said, looking down on a handsome man she couldn’t understand, who attracted her in ways that unsettled her.

He stared up at her a moment longer. “Good night,” he said, then walked forward, under the balcony.

Emma found herself bending over its railing, trying to follow him with her eyes, but she saw only the top of his head and wide back disappear into shadows.

The words were from a bit of poetry about God, Stuart thought, since that was fairly much all that the Sufi poets wrote about. And sugar. God and sugar, as he recalled. A poem by Rumi, though a few lines applied to Stuart, to the present, right now. He lay in bed trying to remember them, a little obsession—or rather something to do with himself, since sleep seemed elusive. His arms under his head, he lay a long time, staring up at the ceiling, trying to summon the full meaning, the full text from memory. Finally, he got up, put on a long, roomy robe, an old, favorite bisht, and slippers, then padded down the corridor and stairs, off to search the matter further in his library. He knew just where the book would be.

He was surprised to find his desk lamp burning already. He must have forgotten to turn it off, with his butler having already gone to bed. He shrugged at the lamp burning in the empty room. Then frowned to see the fire in the hearth wasn’t out either. Well, good, he reasoned, and threw another log onto the embers, imagining he might read, even doze here, once he’d located the book. As he stood, he considered taking the lamp up the ladder with him, then didn’t. He’d come back for it if need be.

At the top of the ladder, though, he had to roll the contraption down the runner by hand a few feet, further into the dark than he’d planned. The volume wasn’t where he’d first
thought, though by author and within a few shelves. He ran his finger along spines, pulling himself and the ladder along as he checked in Arabic and English, thinking to find a good translation, then decided, no, he wasn’t going to be able to read the spine without better light. He was just looking down to find his footing, about to fetch the lamp, when a sound made him jump, then look across the room toward the doorway.

And, lo, Emma Hotchkiss, wearing his own nightshirt with a blanket wrapped round her shoulders, walked in on the soles of Turkish slippers, her hair tumbling down over the blanket at her back, loose, and over one of her shoulders: three feet of silvery gold ringlets as curly as swaying, jiggling springs.

Stuart was brought up short for an instant, then wanted to laugh. She did a kind of double take with regard to the fire, as if it had started itself. She looked around—she seemed to look right at him for a moment—then her eyes passed him over. She didn’t see him. He was apparently too far into the dim rear of the room and higher, at the top of a ladder, than her usual line of vision.

Assured she was alone, she walked over to the fire and tossed several more logs onto it, emptying his basket. Well, he laughed to himself, she was planning on staying a while and readily made herself at home in his house.

He liked that she did. He watched as she bent, chucking logs a bit heavy for her, then closing the fire screen, then pushing her hair back from where it had slid to the front. She shook her head as she stood, an unconscious gesture—she had the prettiest hair he’d ever seen on a woman. Thick and healthy and of such a delicate color. Such a pretty woman, he thought.

Who then walked over to his desk as if she owned it, and reached into a bottom drawer. She took out a deck of cards, then, pushing his parliamentary papers aside, dealt out a line of playing cards as if for solitaire. He liked that they both seemed to have the same problem, he, combating sleeplessness with poetry, she, with cards.

He leaned on his elbow, raising his foot one rung, and settled himself comfortably to await discovery.

She slapped cards down with a vengeance.
Flap, flap, flap
, they went, as quickly as he’d ever seen a person put them down. She looked like a dealer at one of the gambling houses in Monte Carlo. She certainly would have been the sort of distraction welcomed there, with her hair down and her blanket sliding off one shoulder.

After a minute or so, she frowned at the lay of the cards, raised one hand a moment, wiggled her fingers in the air—then let out a snort of disgust and threw the whole mess down. Cards slid, several
pat-pat-patting
off the desktop entirely onto the floor on the other side.

With a sigh, she stood and came around, picking some up haphazardly. Then she didn’t put them immediately together with the rest. What was she doing? Stuart squinted, leaning a little to see as she walked toward a dark window, then turned her back. When she stepped away, he almost lost his balance: She’d perched a card on the bust of old Uncle Theo, between his deep brow and upward-turned nose—making him look like a circus seal. She had no respect at all for the Mount Villiars heritage, which made Stuart smile and smile, because it gave them yet something more in common.

“Oh, yes,” she said, chuckling gleefully over her trick. Her voice carried very well down the length of the library gallery. “That suits you. If only the master of the house was here, why, I’d tuck one right there.” She flipped a card at the stone bust’s ear.

Stuart watched her arrange three more playing cards, like a fan, balancing them carefully where the old fellow held his fist against his carved throat: Uncle Theo became a performing-seal cardsharp, balancing one card with his nose while holding the rest close to his chest.

She tried to fit a card into the statue’s pinched mouth, but the card would only stay briefly. As she fiddled with it, replacing it several times, her blanket slid down, off one arm
entirely, hair running down her back in the lamplight, a kind of pale, liquid, rippling gold. In profile, while chuckling to herself, she played, then caught her blanket, swooping at the knees to yank on it, jostling it up into place again. An elf, he thought.

Neobychny
. Incomparable. The Russian word had sprung to mind before with regard to Emma. She certainly was unique.

As the blanket slid again—she had its weight and volume unbalanced, too much to one side—his nightshirt moved against her body. One moment, the fabric rounded at her buttocks, the next, it sloped at the sway of her hip. In front, the pleats that usually ran straight down his chest shuddered over the jiggle of breasts, while Emma laughed lightly—so beautiful, this woman’s laughter—amusing herself.

Stuart felt the lift and change in his body and dropped his head. He stared down at the rungs, at his feet in the dark for a few moments. Watching her felt suddenly less than innocent. She was in her nightclothes. Or in his, technically. He should clear his throat, let her know the master of the house was here—he smiled—should she want to tuck anything anywhere.

Then she pivoted, and he drew back against the ladder. She walked directly toward him—surely she saw him. For a moment, she appeared to stare up, directly where he stood at the top of the bookshelves. Or at the ladder itself. She walked toward him for the thirty or so feet, yet her attention kept glancing sideways, at books against the wall. She reached out, her fingertips touching their spines. As she walked along, the pads of her fingers made a light little patter,
poppa-pappa-pap-pap, poppa-pappa-pap-pap.
At his ladder, she didn’t even hesitate. She walked right under him—he smiled down as she passed between his feet and the wall—then she stopped just beyond to lean close to a photograph, trying to decipher its content in near darkness. She gave up.

Emma did a full turn of the library’s circumference. It had become her favorite room of the house. Her eyes lingered over the shelves and shelves of books. Oh, so many. It would take a lifetime to read them all. The books were in several languages beside English, several alphabets for that matter, Cyrillic, Arabic, Latin letters, everything but Sanskrit, it seemed. Little volumes, thin ones, tomes, colorful, drab, they encircled the room. As she emerged from the far end, the dark end, photographs on both sides of the room took over in the niches of the shelves. Once portraits had hung in the spots, discolored places on the walls indicating they had been a long time before being recently removed. By the fireplace, she gravitated toward a well-lit collection of photos, their sepia tones reflecting the layers of silver in the firelight and the light from the desk.

The subject of these was otherworldly—pictures with surprising clarity, of a surprising reality: the desert, a low palm, camels, foreign people in loose clothes, their heads covered, their robes flowing. A caravan. In one photograph, a group of Arab men stood before a long line of caparisoned camels with saddles tasseled and ornamented. Of the three men, one looked familiar, a dark, thin face with dark, intense eyes and a gleaming black beard. She thought she knew him from a book or the newspaper, a famous Arab—a prince from the House of Saud, a caliph from Persia.

She’d studied these pictures and others over the last several evenings. Stuart was slowly replacing his family’s portraits with modern photographs of foreign places. The photos never failed to draw her, like riddles, though they never yielded an answer. Tonight, she dismissed them as always, padding off to collect her playing cards from the floor, then from the bust by the window.

What silliness. At the desk, she carefully ordered the cards this time, watching as she shuffled, then picking at them with a few quick flips of her fingers, after which she smacked them down in under two minutes,
thwack, thwack,
thwack
. “Ta-da,” she said listlessly. “You win again, Emma.”

“You cheat,” said a deep voice. It laughed at her, welling out of the darkness, making her leap: low, the devil’s own mirth.

She jumped so high, her buttocks thumped upon its return to the chair seat. She lost her breath: Better the devil, for out of the dark from the back of the room, like a phantom she’d summoned up, came Stuart Aysgarth, looking a little bit like a caliph himself in a loose robe of dark purple. She put her hand to her throat, her heart
thump-thumping
like a parade drum.

“Y-you frightened me,” she choked out. “H-how—”

He pointed up and behind him. “I was looking for a book.” When she still didn’t understand, he smiled. “I was at the top of the ladder back there, when you came in.” He laughed. “You walked right under me.” He explained, “I couldn’t help it. You looked so sneaky”—he paused—“and, well, lovely in my nightshirt, I couldn’t resist watching what you’d get up to.” He laughed more openly still. “Clever card trick there”—he indicated the bust by the window—“Very creative.” Smiling, he teased her. “Do you always cheat at solitaire?”

“No,” she began and rolled her eyes. “God—” She broke off, then admitted, “Sometimes.” Then came totally clean. “Yes, lately.”

He came fully into the light. His loose robe was of doubled fabric, an inky purple on one side, a bluer tone on the other. It looked warm. Under it, he wore a nightshirt not unlike the one on her own body, though hers dragged about her ankles. His—white, pleated, and plentiful—stopped just below his shins.

“What is the point of playing alone,” she asked, “if you can’t win?” She made a yawn. Self-consciously, she stacked the cards together, tapped them into place, then slid them into their box: in preparation to go. More for politeness, a nicety on which to leave, she asked, “What are you doing here? Why are you up?”

He answered by raising his hand, a small, red leather-
bound book in it. When neither of them could think of anything further to say, he added,

“Rumi. A poet. A Sufi.”

“What’s
Sufi?
”

Instead of explaining, he paged through the book, then said, “Here. Listen,” as he put his finger on a page and read:

He paused to look up at her. He had a lovely reading voice, his pauses lending the poetry an idiosyncratic, unduplicatable lilt. He finished quietly without looking at the book:

She wet her lips, blinked. “It’s you.” She glanced to the wall by the fire.

“What?”

“The man in the photo, the one with the beard who looks familiar. He’s you.” She realized, with a full beard and in the right clothes, Stuart could perfectly well pass for an Arab. “You fit right in, didn’t you?”

He looked toward the wall, then wandered toward the photos she pointed to. “I tried to, that much was certain. For a time at least.” He set his book on a reading table.

“Where was it taken?” Emma followed him over.

“Near Cairo.”

Emma stood next to him to examine again these particular images. Indeed, a young version of Stuart Winston Aysgarth
gazed at the camera, his somber eyes unmistakable. How could she have missed them? Only the top of his face, though, was truly visible. He looked thin, sinewy, beneath the flowing robes and a headcloth tied with a twisting band. His amorphous clothing emphasized the clean line of his high forehead, the leanness at his cheekbones; the beard disguised the rest. He was tanned by the sun, dark-skinned, looking directly at the lens: seeming for all the world a native of Arabia or Persia or Turkey.

“Were you there long?”

“No. I made my home in Istanbul at the time, though I traveled quite a bit. I lived in Istanbul for three years.”

“And after that?”

“Russia. Apartments in Petersburg, a house in Tzarskoe Selo, and a small country estate outside Odessa. Mostly, I moved between the three, though I liked Peters best, the place I chose when I could.”