Sleeping Beauty (12 page)

“But then—oh, my. The May sun set about its work, and about six days ago honey started dripping
in through the rafters onto everything in the upper east side of the house. Into my bed, my bags, onto my dresser.”

“Honey,” James said disbelievingly, but he was transfixed. He chuckled.

Which only encouraged her; so did she. “It’s funny, isn’t it? It’s funny!” Coco sat back, shaking her head. “Lord, it wasn’t funny when it first happened. And it remains an onerous problem. I’ve had to call in a roofer, and a carpenter, and get some people to come in and clean everything. But it’s still—” Her laughter became hearty. She had to put her hand over her mouth to keep deep, unladylike guffaws from coming out. “It’s hilarious, isn’t it? Honey pouring from the rafters, over everything! So predictable, yet we just didn’t think of it. Who would imagine?”

The two of them sat there laughing over the poetic revenge of wronged honeybees as Coco tried to get the rest of the story out. “I—I had to find”—she covered her mouth with her napkin—“find a place to stay. Then, worse, it turns out there’s an international colloquium on something or other right now—”

“Geology,” he said. “Geology—I’m part of it.” More laughter.

“Yes! And there is not a free room anywhere, so I moved in with my aunt. End of story.” She set her hands on the table and simply let her laughter go.

When she had calmed down enough, she let herself look at him. He was watching her in an embarrassingly attentive way. He murmured, “A long
way from boring.” Then, with hardly a pause, he added, “I love that you can do that.”

“Do what?”

“Laugh so much. At everything.”

She wasn’t sure what to say. She stared at him, then said, “Only with you. And there are those who might think that to laugh so much is shallow.”

He shook his head. “The Wakua laugh all the time, over everything—”

“The Wakua?”

“The tribe who entrusted me with their gold.” He continued, “The Englishmen that met us at the river thought Mtzuba and his friends—”

“Mtzuba?”

“A Wakua friend of mine. They thought the Wakua were fools because of their laughter. Children. But I have seen them laugh over death and blight and fear and war. They see the ironies of life; they live its absurdity: when you think about it, everything
is
funny.”

Coco laughed—self-consciously this time—at his odd, flattering turn of mind.

He let her humor die off, his lambent eyes watching her the whole while. Then, as if it were part of the same conversation, he said, “And your aunt is—?”

He wanted a name. She was thrown, bumbling out, “You won’t know her.” He waited. She snorted, then said, “All right, I’ll tell you. My aunt is the head cook for one of the larger households here. I am living downstairs with the serving staff.”

“You’re joking.”

“No, but it’s quite all right. Nothing I haven’t done before.”

He paused over the rim of his raised coffee cup. “You have lived below stairs?”

Coco smiled at the euphemism
hired help
and sat back. “I worked ‘below stairs,’ as you call it, for four months when I first came to this country.” She raised her eyebrows, mildly tormented again. “Then I found more suitable work. One that pleased my inclinations.”

He blinked, jerked slightly. She really had to stop playing with him like this, she thought. But then he didn’t glide his eyes away as she expected; and after a moment she had to drop hers. Because James Stoker had somehow gotten beyond her vague joking references to her “profession.” It didn’t bother him anymore.

Staring speculatively at her, without lifting his eyes away for a minute, he said, “We have yet more in common: you’re the niece of a cook. I’m the son of a coachman.”

“Really?” She suppressed a giggle just as it was about to come out. Lord. The urge to laugh again. And it was not wisdom, as he said, but pure, simple nervous reaction by now. He unsettled her horribly, though she couldn’t say why.

“Really. So you have me: we weren’t even indoor servants. We lived over the carriage house.”

“Now I
am
impressed. You sound as if you were educated at—oh, Harrow or Eton.”

“Close. Tutored by an Etonian-Cantabrigian.”

“Well, you
have
come a distance, haven’t you?” A social distance that was purely astounding. She shook her head in wonder. “The son of a coachman: soon to be an earl.”

He smiled at her. Really at her, not at what she’d
meant as a compliment. He said, “Sitting across from a beautiful former—what?—assistant to the cook?—who became the most independent woman I have ever met, save perhaps the Queen.”

They sat there, each offering the other a kind of admiration, each watching from their new, extraordinarily rare, common perspective.

He asked finally, “Is the rest of your family in France, then?”

“One sister. The other here.”

“Parents?”

“Both dead, years ago now.”

“Do you see your sisters?”

“No.” Coco frowned at all these questions. It was usually easy to keep a man talking about himself. Not so with James Stoker.

She pondered him, while she used her fork to move bits of her breakfast about on her plate.

“Which household? Where does your aunt work?”

She looked up, prepared to be annoyed. But his candor took her aback. He wore his deep, deep interest in her right there on his face for her to see. Along with an understanding—she had the uneasy feeling that he understood her far better than she wished. And patience. A profound patience lay in his feature, a tolerance for waiting, watching.

Which set off an alarm. For Coco knew herself to be a woman who lived by secrets. To share them at one point in her life would have meant her career, her ruin, all trust in her gone. To share them now would simply mean her best associations betrayed, her self-respect pierced, her dignity damaged or
lost. No, she would not let him disarm her, though God knew that was his intention.

“I need more tea,” she said. She started to get up, thinking to go to the front counter.

Dr. Stoker stood faster, taking her cup. “I’ll get it.” He picked up his own cup as well.

She watched him weave his way through the now mostly empty tables—only one other one at the front still occupied; the morning crush for breakfast had abated. At the counter, he gave over the cups, then waited, one hand in his trouser pocket. He stood there, relaxed, slender, more natty in attire than any donnish Council of the Senate’s Chairman of the Financial Board had a right to be.

No academic gown today. His trousers were well tailored; they hung with the weight of expensive worsted—a warm reddish-brown herringbone pattern. His jacket matched; his waistcoat was the color of English cream, decorated only by a dangling gold watch chain that swung when he walked.

The girl behind the counter struck up a conversation with him. He responded in a friendly manner, laughing in that easy way he had. He was the one who laughed effortlessly at most of what life brought him. A happy man. He was happy, Coco realized with some amazement. It was not a quality she would attribute to many.

There was no snobbery to him. None. Which Coco found unusual. She had never known an Englishman of his class, his education and background, who didn’t possess a grain of it—then she paused, remembering his background. A coachman’s son. Like herself, he was not true gentry.

Or, no. That was the thing about James Stoker.
He
was
a gentleman. There was nothing false about him. His kindness, generosity, and awareness of others were real, intrinsic to him. He treated everyone with consideration. James Stoker was a gentleman at his core, at his heart.

It came as no surprise to Coco that the Queen should wish to honor this quality in him, make it official. Indeed, why should Victoria be immune to what any number of women must feel when they looked upon him? The desire to favor him, grant him privileges—and make him obliged.

Coco lowered her eyes to stare at the tabletop. Good Lord, where had
this
thought come from?

When he came back with the tea, coffee for himself, she asked flippantly, “So how is old Queen Victoria?”

“Queen Victoria?” James looked surprised as he sat, sliding Coco’s tea across the table to her. But he answered anyway, “Her Majesty is stiff, no nonsense, but nice. With a lot of questions.”

“Questions? You’ve talked to her?”

“Twice.”

“You’ve had audiences with the Queen?”

“Yes.”

“Private audiences?”

“Yes. Why?”

“And you think of it like that: ‘Yes. Why?’ Do you realize there is a line of people, powerful people, waiting, scrambling to meet with her?”

“I suppose.”

Coco shook her head. This brash young fellow knew he was successful, enough that he could swagger and grin. But he had no real idea
how
successful. It was charming. It was maddening. It made her
want to shake him and wring her hands.

She wondered if she should mention that she herself had had contact with the Queen years ago and that it had not gone well—that she was not Bertie’s mother’s favorite person.

She looked about instead. Tolly’s was all but empty. Even the girl at the counter had retreated to the kitchen.

Coco heard her own voice echo softly against the bricks of cellar-cum—dining room as she asked Sir Knight, “What do you and the Queen speak of, when you go for a visit?”

He scooped sugar into his coffee. “Africa, mostly.” He let out a single-syllabled guffaw:
Har
. “My manly adventures.”

“Tell me.” She watched him. Yes. Oh, dear. Manly, indeed. He was. Her Majesty’s knight was slender but solid. Strong, tan-skinned, sun-streaked: reeking of health. His intelligence had a quirky, humorous aspect to it. It made him calm; it gave him a lively awareness of everything around him.
Vivace
, she thought.

“Tell you what?” he asked.

“Tell me whatever it is you’ve told her.”

He frowned down at the wood table top. “I told her how and where the others died: why I didn’t.”

She waited, pondering him—as she felt his trust spread out to reach her, all but tangible. She was aware of it like the smell of something cooking in a closed kitchen, drifting under the door down the hall. Secrets. Coco knew when one was coming.

He was at pains for a moment, trying to avoid being pressed into account. Then he began. “We
were there for a year, then got lost coming home….”

She sat back. She didn’t know where it would come or when it would come. But she knew she would hear something no one else ever had.

Chapter 9

The Princess awaked, and said she to him, you have waited a great while. The Prince, charm’d with these words, and much more with the manner they were spoken in, knew not how to shew his joy. Their discourse was not well connnected, little eloquence, a great deal of love. He was more at a loss than she. In short, they spoke four hours together, and yet they did not say half the things they had to say
.

Charles Perrault
“The Sleeping Beauty of the Woods”
Tales of Past Times
Samber translation, London, 1729

“W
e were deep in the jungle, on a native footpath,” James told the lovely, sympathetic woman across from him. He prepared to
tell her a story he had told a dozen times now, the story of how men had died—and how he himself, miraculously alive, had come to step off a boat onto English soil again. “It was the only way north. The African rivers, other than the middle Congo, are not navigable by any conveyance larger than canoe. No roads, no communication.”

He was quiet a moment, finding it all too easy to be again in that dark place. Sitting back with his coffee, he let flow whatever wished to well up into his consciousness; he thought merely to indulge in a slightly more poetic version than he had given the Queen of England.

“It’s hard to imagine,” he told Coco Wild, “how completely adrift you are, how primitive. The savannahs are stark, wild. But the jungle…There, at night, the sounds are beautiful, eerie, and they rise up out of pitch black. Even moonlight doesn’t much penetrate the densest part. You can’t imagine such utter darkness.

“Anyway, after having taken a steamer round the Horn, landed at Cape Town, then been there a year, we were now traveling north through unmapped terrain, dense, remote: in a single file of porters on whose heads balanced all our earthly possessions in straw baskets, possessions that included our expedition’s treasures, our samples and notes and records. I brought everything home, by the way. It will take me years to organize and decipher everything in those trunks. A year’s work of one hundred forty-eight men.” He paused. “With me the only survivor.” He stared down into his black coffee, a drink he’d acquired a taste for from a Boer guide who had perished, a drink the color of skin everywhere
he had looked at one point. “I wonder sometimes why I was spared. It doesn’t seem right.”

He couldn’t talk for a few moments.

“Don’t feel guilty for being alive,” said the very civilized Coco. “What happened?”

It was logical enough to say, “They took all my instruments.” But he didn’t know where the next came from. “Then wanted my clothes.”

He waited to see if she understood.

Of course, she didn’t. Who would believe it?

“Your clothes?” she asked mildly. Then she raised her eyebrow, tilted her head, and followed him into his own private jungle. “What did they wear themselves?” she asked.

“Nothing.” He let her absorb the word before he went further. “Though eventually various of them wore my trousers or vest or cravat.”

She blinked, trying to make what he was saying into something else. She couldn’t. “You went naked with them?”

It wasn’t really a question. She knew full well what he had just said.