Judith Ivory (25 page)

Their gazes locked.

Perhaps it was nothing more than feeling at the same moment the shock of crystal-perfect pleasure, these tender places of their bodies so delicately and substantially united. A connection passed between them, bewildering, surprising, something beyond the physical union. Whatever the feeling, it was sweet and faintly painful, prohibited…an unexpected, inchoate connection too stunningly strong to name.

He shifted his weight, adjusted the angle, and Emma’s head grew light. It was sublime. His fingers brushed her face. She reached for him, his hair, his wide shoulders, and he sank downward onto her. She clutched him, letting out a small breath of satisfaction as she arched her back, pushing her body more tightly onto him. She closed her eyes, and her head dropped back. He bent her backward over a pillow.

Oh, the pleasure of Stuart inside her. It was vividly similar to their insane morning in Hayward-on-Ames, yet distinctly more. Slow. Watchful. She would open her eyes to slits and find his own penetrating gaze right there, on her. He smiled faintly at one point, moving his hips into her with a rhythm that had taken them both. He clenched his jaw, groaned softly, trying to hold back.

No use. As they watched each other in the firelight, face-to-face, body to body, sensation washed over both of them like a tide coming in in a rush.

Emma jerked, panted…that feeling, that perfect, spasming satisfaction peaked inside her, then—shocking—mounted again, peaked higher. Then again. Stuart let out a muffled cry, his body shuddering. Hers answered again. He drove himself into her, muttering pleas, prayers, invocations, lowering on bent arms to kiss her neck, the insides of her arms, both about his neck. Her body contracted in more
small shocks of pleasure, uncontrollable, one following after another, again and again and again.

He finished, groaning softly as he ground his hips against her; he licked her collarbone. And again she shuddered, hard, vibrating from it. She half feared she’d never stop.

But at last the sensation became echoes. Stuart backed onto his knees and kissed her belly, then the backs of her knees. His hair tickled at her waist, then at her cheek as he moved to suckle her breasts, one, then the other. Only to return to take her mouth over and over, wet passionate kisses, deep and strong.

He was beginning again. He didn’t even lose entry, but rather slowly brought them both back around again. Her own body was so responsive, she felt electric, a touch sending her off.

This time, he’d rock himself deeply into her, pausing at the end of each stroke with a swift pulse of pleasure at full penetration. Then he’d draw himself out slowly, maddeningly to the very edge, pausing before he’d swiftly take her again.

He made love to her for what seemed an endless rise toward release, then withheld release till she was squirming, till the blood of her body throbbed at the surface of her skin, welling up from the hot pounding that roiled in her belly. His hands began to explore her more freely. He rolled, took her with him, moved pillows. His broad chest, hard and muscular, flattened her soft bosom one moment, then pressed against her shoulder blades a minute later. Their skin slid, warmed by the fire, warmed by contact, gliding against each other, wrapped together, hips undulating, their legs entwined. Oh, nothing left undone, left unattended. She had him at a new angle in each passing minute; she wanted him with the sharpness that seemed to bend her in half. She wanted to take him in, swallow him, hold him inside, tighten around him.

“Now,” she whispered urgently. “Now.” She became the aggressor.

He let out a startled groan and was lost. As he turned himself loose on her a second time, it was close to violent. Then they plummeted into the dark release together, an abyss…a loss of conscious self…nothing but pleasure, clean, clear, pure, blissful pleasure…an explosion of it, followed by throb after throb after throb….

They lay there panting, Stuart’s weight on her, both of them damply hot on a cold night. Emma closed her eyes and languished in the feel of him, heavy, limb on limb; she couldn’t move.

If she could find any remorse at all, it was distant: intellectual, rhetorical. She felt in fact relaxed, relieved in a way that made her legs ache, her belly liquid. Some part of her said,
Finally
and
Thank God
. While another part said,
Oh, no. This complicates everything.

Did it?

“Are you all right?” he asked.

All right enough. They didn’t sleep till dawn had drifted into the room, faint beams of sunlight through tall, sheer draperies between rows of dark books. Only then did they finally collapse into a haphazard tangle of limbs, their bodies beneath the outspread robe and her retrieved blanket, buried in piles of pillows. They slept curled together, Emma in the crook of Stuart’s arm, half-draped across his bare chest, which proved to be a marvelous place to sleep. She lay nearly unconscious for hours, as did he. A sound, sated sleep as she hadn’t known in months.

No, not in years.

It was servants who finally, somewhat delicately, woke them. “Excuse me, your lordship,” said Stuart’s butler from the doorway, pointedly looking over their heads. “You have tickets for the train, I think, in an hour.” For a train half an hour away in Harrogate. “Shall we send someone to change them?”

It took some scurrying even to make the last train for London. Their tickets were for separate compartments: They be
gan separating their lives, preparing to be strangers. If she closed her eyes, though, they weren’t separate in her imagination; she could conjure him up in a moment. That look on his face as he stared down, moving over her…the feeling as his eyes met hers, held…the pleasure of their bodies that linked them…the cold beyond them of the room, the warmth between them.

It was a heady note on which to part company. Handsome Stuart, so powerfully built, so memorably beautiful when naked…while his eyes seemed so in love with what he looked down upon. Or at least so in love, engaged completely, in what was going on between them at that moment.

T
HERE
was a small incident on the way to the train station. Almost to Harrogate, with the coach going pell mell, a fox darted across the road. Stuart’s driver reined the team sharply to avoid the fox’s getting slaughtered under the hooves, not for the fox’s sake but for the sakes of the horses’ vulnerable galloping legs. The maneuver should not have been worth noting, so matter-of-fact that the passengers of the vehicle would have been all but unaware of it. Instead, though, mayhem followed for a full two or three minutes after the driver first called out, “Whoa,” and shortened the reins. Rocking, the coach zigged, then zagged across the country road. It wobbled drunkenly on its springs as first one of the horses, then the rest went wild, the passengers inside battling to hold their balance as if a cyclone had hold of them.

When all at last settled and Stuart could be heard, he rapped for the coachman to pull to a stop. At the side of the road, he descended his carriage, inordinately irate. “What the hell was that?” he shouted.

“The left lead,” his driver called—the same horse the man had pronounced was trouble just before their trip to the Stunnel Farm. “When I pull the reins taut, he heads for anything that moves.”

“Cut the team,” Stuart yelled. “We’ll run a team of six in London.” They were shipping the carriage and horses by train, an expensive but fashionable convenience. “There’s a trainer
there who is supposed to know what he’s doing. I’ll hire the fellow to work the damned animal, see if we can sort him out.”

When Stuart climbed back into the carriage, he shoved through the doorway like a man who was more than merely frustrated by a wayward horse. He was angry. He sat back heavily into his seat, then glanced at Emma. “Happy?” he asked, as if she’d had something to do with it. “No more wild, whirling rides once we get to Harrogate.”

Mystified, she told him, “It’s a good decision.”

But he didn’t like it. Reducing the team to six, removing perhaps the fastest, strongest animal and its harness mate, seemed to mean more to him than giving up “wild, whirling rides.” He saw it as giving up something else, something she didn’t grasp, though nothing he would speak about.

Then, when they arrived at the train station, he slid across the space between the seat, took hold of her, drawing her near, and kissed her on the mouth. It was a feverish kiss, passionate, warm where their mouths met over their winter-bundled bodies, slightly awkward for his angling his head so their hats didn’t collide. Yet, for all this, there was a clear, sharp edge of desperation to the kiss.

After a moment, still holding her, eyeing her, his dark eyes beneath his hat brim narrowed, and he asked, “You
will
be there, won’t you?”

“I will, or I’ll end up in jail. That’s my understanding.”

He drew in air, a long inhalation, then nodded and let her go. He reached across, opening the carriage door from the inside. As she passed in front of him, lifting her skirts, bending, he called from behind her, “Emma?”

She looked over her shoulder, one foot on the step.

“I can’t even explain why, but it’s important to me, and I wish—” He broke off. He looked down. She couldn’t see his eyes at all for the shadows of his hat. “I wish,” he repeated, “you were doing it because”—another pause—“because you knew my uncle or knew more about me and the statue than even I do”—again he bowed his head, then snorted, laughing
at himself. “Or just because,” he said, “I’ve made it affordable for you to do and because”—he hesitated, then laughed again—“because you like the rhythm of my speech.”

After a moment, she answered, “I do like it.” Then she turned and stepped down.

The door closed. And Stuart’s huge black carriage, with its troika bell clanging, pulled off under the power of his eight, glorious stallions. What a sight. She didn’t blame him for not wanting to give it up.

He would see it loaded onto the train as well, then take up his first-class compartment down the train from hers.

London. Even in the dark of evening, the smell of it, the
clop
of the carriage, the streetlights, the bends and turns of the avenues. Oh, how little the city had changed.

From the train station, Emma took a hansom to the Hotel Carlyle just off Belgrave Square, where she stepped out into a mild winter evening—that is to say, it was rainy, windy, and forty degrees. From beneath her umbrella, she glimpsed the front of a hotel she’d lived in on three other occasions—if one pretended to immeasurable wealth, only a handful of hotels in London would do, and the Carlyle was indisputably one of them. Gas lamps lit its pale brick and stucco facade; it looked not a whit different from a dozen years ago. Its architecture was not its hallmark, however. Its fame lay in its interior, its service, its appointments, and, most of all, its clients: the rich and famous who came to stay.

Inside, except that frock coats had gotten longer and women’s dresses a bit more natural—as if a deflating pin had at last been put to all their bustles—the Hotel Carlyle’s elegant front foyer and reading room could have been a window into a decade ago. Its guests flowed like the cream they were through its chandeliered rooms. As she signed the register (discovering that Stuart had put her into one of the expensive suites on the top floor, a floor she had never laid eyes on), as she directed her trunks, enjoyed the service of a concierge,
two bellmen, a maid, and another uniformed fellow who followed along, his only duty to lay, then start the fires in the rooms’ hearths, Emma was assailed by the steadfast English tradition of the place—nothing ersatz about it even if the woman partaking wasn’t exactly authentic.

One took a carpeted staircase to the first floor, the famous restaurant where the well-to-do writers and artists of London ate beside its peers and cabinet members and financiers. From the first floor, one took the modern lift to get to the suite level, her rooms. Her trunks were already within, new, bright, and shiny on a thick carpet of mossy greens and blues. The largest trunks she’d ever owned looked small in a room with a high gilt-and-aqua ceiling, a large canopied bed, a bay window wide enough to hold a small dining table and two cushioned chairs—one could dine overlooking the square below.

Which is what she did that night. She sent for a light supper, that turned out to be faintly amusing: A “small meal” consisted of a roasted breast of quail with capers and greens, a white bean cassoulet, and poached pears and cherries with cheese. As she picked at her food, Emma told herself the lonely feeling she felt was due to missing her sheep, her cat, her neighbors. Yet that all felt distant.

Stuart. Here was what she couldn’t move away from—the idea of a man who was no doubt having supper somewhere only a few blocks away.

Emma held to her room the entire evening, no stomach for mixing with people, for pretending when she didn’t have to. When she went to bed early, she dreamed so vividly of a tall Englishman, that in the morning she startled an instant upon finding the white sheets beside her rumpled but empty, absent his dark limbs, his dark, mussy hair. Stuart.

Oh, Emma, she thought and sighed. You are wholly infatuated. What to do about it?

Nothing. There was nothing to do. Except meet him at
nine o’clock as planned at the art gallery. And begin the game he so richly paid for, that was so “important” to him.

The Henley Gallery of Classic Art was a large though relatively new exhibition hall connected to the Sir Arthur Henley Art Institute, a small, endowed art school in a rather unfashionable part of the city. Emma was not originally in favor of Stuart meeting her there, but he’d insisted. He wanted to meet the people he’d be depending upon, know what was happening, how she was setting everything up. Her main objection was that he and she should not be seen together. She’d relented fairly quickly, however. The gallery was a long way from Belgravia and Mayfair. London itself was hardly populated for the season. And, too, Stuart’s presence, just the look of him, would add the credibility of money behind her plan. If she could find some of her old cohorts, they would know immediately they could trust the profitability of the venture.

Thus, early the next morning, she entered the gallery to find Stuart already standing next to the main staircase, tapping his trouser leg impatiently with the brim of his hat.

“You’re late,” he said.

“You’re cranky.”

He made a face, frowning, and looked away.

At the Rembrandt collection, where she’d hoped to find an old fellow who had once specialized in copying the old master, there was no one about. A little disappointing, but not completely unexpected.

The great collections attracted budding artists all through the day, setting their own hours. They’d come, set up easels and paints before a masterwork of their choosing, proceeding to copy it, brushstroke for brushstroke. Some, in fact, would actually be quite good—Bailey’s, the man she looked for, were on the mark so identical to the originals that his work had fooled art experts upon close examination—once even fooling the artist himself. It had been much the joke
once that Alphonse Pietre, a minor French painter of some popularity, had acknowledged one of Bailey’s paintings, a “new” pose of a model Pietre had often used, giving the painting a genuine provenance.

“Many artists, these days,” Emma told Stuart, “learn to paint by imitating the masters. So long as the replicas are sufficiently larger or smaller than the original, it is perfectly legal.”

Not so with sculpture, though. The “master” whom a sculptor was taught to imitate was the one who’d designed the human body—students modeled their work off live models. Or some did. Sure enough, in the first room of small statuary, an elderly man sat slouched, doing sketches of small Greek statuary—something of an unusual practice.

Emma walked around so he could see her and asked, “Charlie?” She smiled. It was indeed Charlie Vandercamp. “How are you?”

“Emma?” His voice was faint, half the strength it once had. “Emma!”

She felt her smile stretch her face. “Indeed.” She held her hands out, saying and meaning every word. “I can’t believe how wonderful it is to see you!”

He stood up, a little more bent than he’d been a dozen years ago, then asked immediately, “How’s Zach?”

She shook her head. “He passed on almost a year ago now.”

“Aw, girlie, I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. Still doing it, I see,” she said, indicating his sketch.

“It’s all I know how to do. Doesn’t net much money these days.”

“Are you still as good?”

A little smile played across his wrinkled mouth. “Would you like to see?” His eyes, all but blank the moment before, suddenly danced.

In Charlie Vandercamp’s very humble East End flat, the
statue he was sketching was all but finished. He was filling in details.

“Can we use this for a few days?” Emma asked, holding up a small
Psyche
. “And is Bailey or Ted around? We were hoping for one of the small Rembrandts, two or three copies of something like
Christ at the Column.
”

Charlie’s eyes opened wide and a grin stole over his face. “Art insurance!” he said and laughed. He threw a glance at Stuart—Emma hadn’t introduced them, letting the two men look each other over and come to their own conclusions.

“Against the wall,” she told Charlie. “Though I might be able to use a hotel maid in full uniform, dressed for the Carlyle.”

“Ah, boy, Emma. You never did flinch at the tough ones.”

“You have any faith in me?” she asked.

“Always did.”

“You in then?”

“I am.”

“Know anyone else still around?”

“Not Bailey. Dead. But Teddy lives in the back. And Mary Beth knows the maid role, plus she might know where Mark is.”

“Good. I’ll need her, Ted or Mark, plus your delicate expertise. Any chance either one of them have some paintings already done? Something going to waste in a cupboard somewhere?”

He shrugged his hunched shoulders. “It’s possible.” He smiled fondly at her. “We could all use the work.”

“You have it. Get in touch with me at the Carlyle.”

He smiled. “The old Carlyle. Good for you, Em.”

She shook her head, refusing his admiration. “Just for a few days, then back to my sheep.”

Still, the pleasure she felt in that moment was an unexpected bonus. Not only would she help Stuart stiff his thieving uncle, but she was also going to help people she’d loved
as a young girl, people who had not been as lucky as she. Charlie, Ted, Bailey, and Mark had all gone to jail, and Charlie limped because of the bullet she’d watched go into him.

Just as they were leaving the flat, Charlie took hold of her arm, eyeing Stuart over her head. Her old friend pulled her toward him, then said loud enough that Stuart could hear, “If he’s your roper, he needs a better English tailor. Good-looking fellow, Em, but don’t let prettiness blind you: He’ll never pass for a nob.”

She laughed. “No?” Then smiled. “Not even a foreign one?”

He pursed his mouth, looking Stuart over. “Can he do accents?”

“I don’t know. He really
is
a nob, Charlie.”

But her friend disapproved; he frowned.

“He’ll do,” she told him.

He waggled his head. “Maybe. If you say so.” As she passed through his doorway, having to step over a bucket in the hall that spoke of a leak in the roof, he added solicitously again, “Sorry about Zach, Em. Right sorry.”

“Thank you,” she acknowledged. “He didn’t linger. It was quick.”

“Glad to hear it. Sorry though, you know? Right sorry. He was a good bloke. The best.”

She stared at him for half a second, before she was able to smile. “Right.”

In the carriage—pulled by six horses that made Stuart sigh every time he saw them—her English viscount asked her, “What you’re setting up for my uncle you did before with your husband?”

She nodded. “Something similar. The art insurance swindle was one of Zach’s best. He invented it, though it’s a variation on an American confidence game that Charlie taught him.” She rested back into her seat, then pulled the carriage blanket up—the temperature had dropped again below freezing, snow expected tomorrow.