Sleeping Beauty (19 page)

James Stoker
RGS expedition diaries, 1872–1876

A
s James came through Arnold Tuttleworth’s wide entrance room, he could see the glow of the dining room in the distance. The house’s gas jets had been turned low. The soft radiance of candles illuminated the far room, golden, casting faintly guttering shadows. Within the dining room, beyond its French doors, James could see several people—men like himself in white tie and tails, women in low-cut satin and plumes—gathered near a huge, dark-wood sideboard on which burned two giant, ornate, silver, multistemmed candelabra, their candles dripping, burned halfway down. He was a bit late.

“Still time for a sherry,” Tuttleworth said. The man had answered his front door himself. “We’re all keen as bells to see you. Been waiting for you, old man.”

James smiled and proceeded toward the quiet chatter of a dinner party he was not terribly thrilled to go to. Some duke or other was in town, a long-ago graduate of Trinity, he thought, with not the faintest notion of university needs or funding, or any inclination to learn about or answer to them. James neither knew the man nor cared to. Yet here he was, the resident African explorer. The man had expressed a desire to meet Sir James Stoker while in Cambridge, so meet him he would, since the fellow was cousin to some rich benefactor or other and wealthy in his own right. A mark, as it were, James thought. In the great shell game of money and science.

In fact, he had yet to settle down from Phillip’s little revelation. He’d been livid all afternoon. He hardly felt like eating; his stomach was in knots. If
he got hold of Nigel Athers in the next twenty-four hours, he would be greatly constrained not to put his fist through the man’s face.

Nonetheless, James followed Tuttleworth politely into his dining room. What he had thought was a large sideboard was actually a liquor cabinet. Perfect.

“Sherry, James?”

“Whiskey, if you don’t mind.” All seemed very civil.

Then James turned, looked down the room, and the floor shifted beneath his feet, a kind of tilt that left him leaning forward, pressed upon his toes: for there, standing down the table, was the Bishop of Swansbridge in person, his hand on one chair, his other holding a glass of sherry.

Anger rose up, so surprising, so primitive that James was taken unaware. Like molten magma, it simply came from the core of him and flowed over his every thought. Before he knew what he’d done, he’d called, “Athers, you sodding son-of-a-bitch—”

The Bishop turned. The room grew silent.

For three pounding seconds of uncertainty, no one was sure what to do. With James red-faced, wanting to throw the glass of whiskey that was pressed into his hand at Athers, wanting to cock his arm and plug him with it.

His name, like music, rang: “James.” It came from the side, from just behind the French door.

He swiveled his head. And the floor that had merely tilted before seemed now to drop out from under him. Coco Wild glided toward him, her neck, shoulders, and most of her bosom bare. Full evening
dress. She apparently had no problem spending her evenings with Athers (notably minus Mrs. Athers). Or Tuttleworth or Mrs. Tuttleworth-to-be (one-third old Tuttleworth’s age), or a dean and his spouse, two assistant deans, the heads of Trinity and King’s, and the asinine duke they had all come to court. And here was the explanation of why Coco Wild was suddenly welcome in this company: the duke was traveling in the company of a woman who was clearly not the duchess.

Coco squeezed James’s arm. “They just told me you would be here tonight, Dr. Stoker. What a pleasant surprise.”

James stood like stone, fused into rock.

He heard Coco tell a joke, something about “bedders” and “gyps.” Everyone laughed. She eased James into a chair, then sat down beside him.

Across from them, Tuttleworth cleared his throat. He said, “I thought you and Coco would get along. Sat you beside each other. Didn’t know you two were already acquainted. Isn’t she, though, the most charming creature, James? Been everywhere. Done everything. One of the most agreeable, most accomplished women….” La la la. James stopped listening. He understood. He was to let her take charge of him. And, oh, wouldn’t he just love to.

He kept glancing at her décolleté, where candlelit shadows flickered across ivory breasts mounded above dark purple satin, a purple so dark it was all but black, the color of the skin of plums. The dark sheen of the satin was remarkable against the white of her breasts, breasts that were very round, very full, wider than his hand, crowded onto her small chest. Never mind that every dinner dress here had
as low a neckline. Never mind that it was perfectly proper for a woman to display herself thus in the evening. It was a display to James, the way certain birds in mating season fanned their feathers or did a particular dance.

Someone mentioned Phillip. James realized he was being asked to explain Phillip’s absence. “Phillip left,” he said.

When he offered no further comment, he was amazed to hear Coco fill in the rest. “This afternoon. He followed his wife to Bath, a little family vacation.”

He
took
her to Bath, James wanted to say, to sober old Willy up. But the minor inaccuracies weren’t the point. The surprise was that she knew of the Dunnes’ activities at all. And, while he was at it, James asked himself peevishly, what did she know about “bedders” and “gyps?” Even at Oxford the servants who made the beds and lit the fires in the colleges were not called by these names. The terms were strictly Cambridge expressions. So who the hell had she slept with here? Athers, for certain. Possibly Tuttleworth. Probably everyone here but himself, James thought.

He downed his whiskey over starters—tiny dove breasts stuffed with apples. Dove breasts. He devoured them, then drank down the glass of claret that came with them. And if he found himself feeling sane for even a moment, all he had to do was look down the table at the Bishop—a man ready to call him a liar and murderer if it would get him a map to gold. Athers talked away blithely to the old duke and the ducal companion, a young woman not a day over twenty.

James felt like an animal, a naked man.

Native. Coco had not said the word. He’d never admitted it aloud. But he’d done it, and she knew.
Gone native
was the expression. Been one of them. Run with them on a hunt. Joked with them over their fires. Learned the weight and feel of a long spear, understood its advantages; utter silence and, in close range, great accuracy and damage. James looked down at his white bib-front and vest, at his black trousers; they were a joke. They were ridiculous. He looked at Athers and wanted the limb of a long, heavy hardwood in hand, honed, smoothed, made aerodynamic, the tip tongued with a sharp stone point.

Coco must have sensed some of his mood, for under the table, quite astoundingly, she put her hand over his. She stroked the back of James’s hand once, his friend. And, God bless, it felt so good—her hand stroking his where it rested on his thigh—that he could only stare at her: a look he could not keep inside, a look he knew to be burning, open, filled with lust, vivid-bright sexual awareness.

She glanced over at him, away from a conversation, smiling, then blinked, lost her smile, and tried to take her hand away. He caught it under the table, no longer his friend’s hand. He gripped the hand of his would-be lover, the woman he wanted above all others. The center of his emotional and erotic interest, the subject of all his fantasies.

This woman smiled at him sweetly and murmured, “If you don’t let go of my hand, I’m going to dump this cold, palate-cleansing sorbet they’ve just brought me directly into your lap. Settle
down.” She raised her eyebrows. “Cleanse your mind.”

Right. Yes, yes, he needed to, though he couldn’t remember why. He let go of her hand, lifting his finger toward a servant. More wine. He pointed to Coco’s glass. “And give her some, too.”

Food came in waves, trays of it. Only God knew what had arrived on James’s plate. It could have been lion or boar. Caribou. Biltong. Fish and chips, for all he knew. James ate it.

Miraculously, he eventually did what he was supposed to do. By rote. The duke asked about Africa. James regaled him with tales of natives and jungles, deserts and camels; nothing too original or taxing on the imagination. He then explained how one could boil iron pyrite in sodium hydroxide to determine if it were fool’s gold or the real thing—and of course how the chem lab could really use new gas fittings and pipes and a way of valving air into their new Bunsen burners so as to regulate their flow better, the implication being that one could boil more gold, find more gold…and, of course, this was expensive. Money and gold. Gold, gold, gold. James was sick of the whole business. What was a geologist doing here?

He had another glass of wine and let go. Who gave a damn, anyway? His eyes found Coco and feasted. Dessert came. Fish and chips again, with ice cream this time. It tasted like vinegar. He forgot to eat it, though he drank the sauterne that came with it, gleefully, while he watched Coco over the rim of his glass.
Coco, Coco, Coco-Nicole
, like the call of a bird somewhere in the high trees.

There beside him, the pretty bird’s waist looked
so small, he could have spanned it with his thumbs and fingers. Her bosom—oh, her bosom. Full and high and round, her dress pulled tight across it, shoving it more into view, every seam pulled taut. The fabric of her dress drew straight across her all-but-concave abdomen, then belled out softly across her chair, heaping slightly behind her, up her back. The bustle, James knew, gathered upward into yards of fabric, as if someone had simply unraveled bolts and bolts of inky satin onto her derriere to form the softest, most generous-looking…oh, God, he loved the bustles of her dresses. He wanted to plunge his hands into them, lose his arms beneath the yards of layered fabric.

He kept staring. Her dress was round where she was, every seam pulling just enough to acknowledge shape, yet not so much as to seem uncomfortable. He wondered if it was hard to take off, fitting as closely as it did. Did those tight, dropped sleeves have to be peeled down her arms…like stockings off her legs?

And under her clothing did the flat plane of her belly rise at all? Did it round softly or descend straight into the rise of her mons? Was the hair between her legs as black and glossy as the hair of her head?

What fine, civilized thinking as someone put eggs, little eggs, on his plate. Plover eggs. What course was this? What was he supposed to do with plover eggs? And why did he have to bother, when Coco was in the room, sitting right beside him? He wanted her. Why not? Who the hell cared what the two of them did in private? He just couldn’t remem
ber the answer anymore to the ringing question Why not? Why not? Why not?

Meanwhile Coco put her hand to her forehead, pressing a piece of her hair back. It was damp. The late April evening was unusually warm, while candles up and down the table made the room outright hot. And James…well, there was no word for him. He was an inferno tonight. Hot under the collar, tetchy, difficult, not his usual polite self. Not to mention as randy as a young bull on his first day out in the pasture.

She did not have control of the situation. She was not even sure what the situation was.

She tried not to look at him, because every time she did, she felt the heat of his regard like a thistle brushing delicately up her spine. So instead she laughed at Arnold’s stupid jokes, more loudly than she needed to. She teased Nigel and the duke about their politics. She baited James; she knew it a dangerous thing. But she couldn’t help herself. She punished him for his rudeness and for his gallantry both. She mocked him in her mind: Sir James, dining fashionably, succeeding admirably in his knightly vows, which included, of course, chaste, unworldly love.

His clean-shaven face, his natty attire, galled her. While Arnold kept eyeing
her
suspiciously, as if she’d seduced the young hero. As if she were Delilah, Salomé, Eve with a cartload of apples. Coco felt unhappy, exhausted, tired of being good—tired of a goodness that brought no peace and won no credit. Alas, one glance at James’s burning stares and it was hard to imagine that he was anything but her lover. The fool behaved like her lover. Bloody
hell and
sacre bleu
, she had tried to protect him from just the sort of speculation that was forming up and down the table, tried to protect herself from it. A calm and tranquil life, that was what she fought to maintain, for her own sake. But where had it gone? It felt tonight that, for a public dignity and a private calm, neither of which could she possess, she was depriving them both.

The whole blessed mess made her head hurt, her tooth ache. She had done what she had promised Arnold; she had soothed everyone’s nerves, everyone’s but her own.

She stood suddenly. Several men, including James, rose partway. “No, no,” she said. “Please sit. I just need some fresh air. Not feeling well….”

She excused herself with every intention of taking French leave, just the sort of thing that delighted the English anyway. Let them talk. Let tongues wag. She would write Arnold a little note, call a cab, and be gone.

James, however, followed her. “Coco,” he called. The sounds of the dinner party softened as he closed the dining room doors behind him. As he came toward her, she stood waiting in the entry hall, not happy or relieved to see him, a woman waiting her doom. He said, “Let me take you home.”

“No. I’ve asked for a cab.”

“My carriage is right outside. Please. I insist.”

“Well, go insist somewhere else. I have had quite enough.” Emphatically, she repeated, “Enough.”

He frowned, though it was a dispirited look. They stared at one another.

A maid brought her wrap, a fur cape.

James took it, held it. After a moment, Coco
turned around and let him place it on her shoulders. He whispered, “Please. Let me take you home.”

He wrapped the cape around her, then his arms, enclosing her. When she didn’t pull away, he bent his head, put his face into the curve of her neck. When his lips brushed her collarbone, his cheek at her shoulder, pleasure jolted through her so sharply and suddenly she couldn’t control a small, convulsing groan.