Sleeping Beauty (22 page)

There were several moonlit rooftops in the direction he indicated, stables, a carriage house, a number of apartments for the outside staff, if Coco remembered correctly.

“From the time I can remember,” he said, “I used to come up to the house. Phillip would give me tuppence for hauling rocks around for him, sorting them. Once I was older, I sometimes got to drop them into chemicals or split them or pulverize them in some cases.” He paused thoughtfully.

“I should remember, but I’ve forgotten,” Coco said. “How did your parents die?”

“In a carriage accident, of all things. On the way home from my aunt’s wedding in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the public coach overturned. The carriage tongue broke as they were taking a curve. The horses took the bend, while the coach took the ravine.” He stared out for a moment without saying anything. “I was staying with the gardener and his family. Phillip sent for me, gave me the news in his study. Then he took me by the hand and walked me up here. My things were already moved in. I was—I don’t know, nine, I guess: I became his lab assistant.”

“It’s funny that we didn’t know each other, isn’t it?” she asked.

He looked at her over his shoulder. “You only worked here four months, you said.” She nodded. “And how old were you?”

“Fifteen.”

He laughed. “Well, I was masquerading as a seven-year-old at the time. You just didn’t recognize me.”

“And you were out there and I was inside.”

“And I was more interested in the dogs at the kennel than in pretty girls from the kitchen.”

“What a shame,” she murmured. “Yet there we were, within a stone’s throw of each other. How odd life is sometimes.”

He glanced at her again, then turned. He looked her up, then down. “It has its moments, though, doesn’t it?” He reached behind him, lifting the curtain higher, letting the moonlight flood up the front of her body. In silhouette, she watched his body change. His penis rose from partially to fully erect, a stiff, upward angle, bold, sleek, beautiful. It was gorgeous. Round-headed, helmet-rimmed.

When he reached for her, Coco backed away, leading him toward her bed. There, she pulled back the covers, climbed in. James stretched out beside her. Ironically, the young man who had fought over his pants in the kitchen lay down beside her, easy in his nakedness.

“A tribe of two,” he said. And with these words, he became the man who broke down doors, who stood her hair on end for his open sexuality. He grew happily, darkly erotic.

Any vestigial notions she’d had that the young gallant was other than a straightforward, fully mature—and very free-spirited—male were contradicted. He covered her with his body; he made love like an angel, his hands warm, his mouth and tongue hot, his erection thick and strong when he entered
her. In the last seconds, rising up onto his knees, he pushed her legs all but onto her chest and drove into her till the room itself seemed to shimmer, her body alive, electric. Then, with a jolt that began at the center of her, the feeling burst into pure, ringing sensation. She arched like a bow, shivered, then lunged upward, arms, legs, body, and clung to James, his wide shoulders, his strong hips, holding him till she could feel the bed, the real world, again.

Sometime later, when he’d grown quiet yet seemed wakeful, she simply said, “No matter what tribe life drops you into, large or small, I suspect most of its members will see your excellence, your decency.”

“Well, I don’t know about that—”

“And humility.” She shook her head, rolling toward him, smiling in the dark. “You’re just plain
good
, James Stoker. Gold yourself. A heart that is pure twenty-four carat weight.”

They made love on and off all night, till the sheets became damp, till their bodies were sliding together. In the wee hours, James ended up awake, staring into the canopy, his arms behind his head.

He had more or less put together that Coco had arrived here, a young girl come to work in the house with her aunt. Phillip would have been already five or six years into a marriage that was proving difficult. The very pretty young Coco got pregnant, so Phillip shipped her out. Then what? Where did Phillip fit into this? And why was James lying here in a room in his house, with Phillip out of town, with Phillip’s…what, who was Coco to Phillip?

James lay there worrying over these and other
vague anxieties, thinking he was alone in his fears.

Then Coco spoke up out of the dark. “Phillip thinks he wants me back,” she said.

She let this offhand revelation register before she added, “I won’t stop long enough to let him say it. But he sends me flowers. He had the servants open up this room when he heard I was downstairs. He moved my things up here when I was out to breakfast with you one morning.” Pause. “And David is delighted. He loves that Phillip is treating me well—after ignoring both of us for a decade. He wants his father’s attention. He wants to know his father, which has suddenly loomed as a possibility. Only—”

She sighed before she went on. “Only—well, Phillip is much more unhappy than I’d have expected, and I can see that he thinks I may be a key. A missed boat, something like that.”

“Are you?”

She left a dreadful pause, then said finally, “Yes. Very missed. Long past. But David might not be….” She let the thought drift.

He had a hundred questions, but was sure she would answer few or none. So he asked the important one—after he could get it unstuck from his throat. “Um…did you love him, do you think?”

“Oh, James.” She sighed. “I was a country radish fresh from the backwaters of France. I walked into a proper English house more grand than anything I’d ever entered, and there stood its owner: sophisticated, monied, a viscount. And the Viscount showed an interest in me—real, genuine interest. Love him? I’m not even sure. All I know is, for a time, I thought he was God. I felt as if I were sud
denly alive, as if I’d been sleepwalking till the moment he entered my life.”

“Then what?”

She rolled onto her side to look at him. She touched his face. “Then, my dear,” she said, “I grew up.”

James turned his face into her palm and kissed it, while he tried to make sense of everything here. “And David—”

“Has his own life, his own place. He doesn’t need this house or Phillip’s money. I’ve seen to that. And he’s a resourceful, resilient young man.” There was an odd moment then, a long disjunctive pause: a but. “It’s just that David wants the chance to know his father, and I’m afraid to ruin it for him.”

“Which means?”

She left another silence that was too long, too full of wrong possibilities. James dangled in it, growing more unhappy by the moment.

“Which means,” she said, “that I wish to treat Phillip civilly, fairly, while not giving him the first reason to believe I would ever start up with him again. It means I’m afraid of getting in the way of his and David’s building something.”

She left several long seconds before she announced, “My maid is in London getting us ship’s passage to Italy. The bees and honey are cleaned up. In fact, I was going to see the roof repair through, but I’ve decided, well—I’ve decided to leave early and let David see to it. I’m leaving day after tomorrow.” She rushed on. “I didn’t expect tonight. I’m not sorry it happened, though.” She ran her palm down his arm to his hand and squeezed. “But it’s still best that I go.”

“I don’t agree.”

“Well, you think about it. I can leave you my address in Italy.” She rose up on her elbow and looked at James. “If you were sneakier. If you
liked
conducting an affair as if it were commerce with the enemy. But you.” She sighed and touched the backs of her knuckles down James’s cheek. “Well, you. You are nicer. So nice. If I were twenty and, say, the daughter of a proper English family, I would set my cap for you. You are all I’d want, no one else. Ever.”

James let out a snort. “This is the most insane thing—”

She put her fingers over his mouth. “Go to sleep.”

“No, you can’t just walk away. We should be together forever, not just for a night.”

“I’m glad you think so. Come with me, then.”

“With you?”

“To Italy.”

The suggestion bewildered him. “Leave my work?” Everything he’d ever built for himself?

“I have money enough for both of us. A house on the Italian Mediterranean, one in London, another in Paris, another in Biarritz. Or we can sell them all and buy something new somewhere else.”

“Let you keep me?” he asked, laughing.

She shrugged. “Well…yes. I suppose.” The notion amused her. “Certainly. Why not?”

“I have a better idea,” James said quickly. He tried to sound light, tried to laugh. “You stay here with me.”

“Oh, yes.” She succeeded in laughing—in that sardonic way she had when she found things that
were not funny funny. “Wouldn’t that be lovely? We could sneak around under Phillip’s nose. He would love us both for that. And do we tell David, or keep it a secret from him, too? And your friends? Your proper English dons? And the Queen herself? Should I mention that Victoria intervened personally on her son’s behalf when she thought Bertie had sat once too often in my opera box in Paris? She sent an underling, offering me money to refuse him entrance.”

He looked back at her. “Did you take it?”

Coco seemed momentarily insulted, then said, “Of course not. But I told him not to come any longer, that a future king should not just
be
above board, he should
look
above board.” She snorted. “After which he took up with that horrid actress.” A pause. “I’m hoping you’ll put my good advice to better use.” She waited before she said, “If you want that earldom, now is not the time to take up with a woman who embarrassed the Queen twenty years ago. Nor—if you want Phillip’s loyalty.”

They were both full of advice that night, though, good advice that was not very much fun to contemplate acting upon.

In the middle of the night, Coco’s tooth woke her up. It ached badly; her jaw was slightly swollen. James found her cloves. They packed half a dozen into her mouth. Then he got her a cool towel, lay it on her cheek, and curled up beside her, holding her, stroking the side of her head.

“You ought to have it out,” he counseled.

“I know,” she muttered against the towel and her own hand.

He segued into a litany of practical matters.
“Have you found a good man to repair the boardinghouse roof?”

“I think so.”

“Would you like me to check on it for you? Help David see the repairs through?”

“Oh, yes, please…that would be so nice. And you’ll write, of course, tell me everything that happens, keep me up to date in the ongoing battle over maps and Wakua gold. I’ll give you my address in San Remo as well as in Paris.”

“Yes, yes,” he said quietly, nodding. “We’ll write.”

After a long moment, though, she whispered, “Oh, James, perhaps we shouldn’t. We should make a clean break of it, don’t you think?”

“No.” He pulled her more tightly to him. “I must have some piece of you. I can’t give all of you up. You’ve become my friend, my sweetest, dearest friend. Everyone knows we’re on companionable terms, so let that be the case. Maybe a time will come when we can—” He didn’t finish the thought.

It should be enough perhaps that they were real, true friends. They trusted each other; they had the other’s best interest at heart. Here was a lot, in and of itself.

She asked him what exactly had made him burst out at Athers at Tuttleworth’s dinner party.

He told her the latest installment—the fact that Athers was ready to call him a liar and murderer, if he thought it would get him notes that would draw him a map to African gold. James spoke of how worried he was that Phillip, who had the means to stop Athers, was too distracted to care, that he seemed more a hamstring than help.

In the morning, James left out the back. The only way. The only reasonable thing. They used other idiotic words
—practical, adult, responsible
.

Mostly, though, James understood that he simply couldn’t have her.

Chapter 15

Whether set into motion by the pique of goddesses or evil fairies, the punishment of gods, or the wisdom of sages, in all versions of the Sleeping Beauty legend fate is the ultimate enemy. Though one can hope to mitigate its effect, no precaution is enough to avert its trouble
.

From the Preface to
The Sleeping Beauty
DuJauc translation
Pease Press, London, 1877

I
ronically, the next day, as Coco was waiting for her train that would take her away from Cambridge, who should arrive on an incoming train one platform over but Phillip Dunne. Neither his wife nor his family was with him. He stepped off the train, looked across the platforms. His eyes met
Coco’s and his eyebrows went up. She thought at first he would ignore her.

He didn’t. He smiled away his surprise and walked right around, right up to her. “Coco, I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

While staying two weeks under his roof, Coco had successfully avoided speaking to Phillip more than in passing. But here, in a public train station, she could not now think how to avoid a conversation. She smiled at him politely—distantly, she hoped—and prepared to have to say more than “hello” to him for the first time in a dozen years.

He wore his hair differently, combed straight back, against the way it grew in front. It was thinning. The combination, less hair combed against the growth, made it stand up from his face. The style—perhaps combined with the way he’d always watched a person’s face, as if gauging, always gauging, for applause—gave him somehow a look of edgy expectancy, an air of watchful, perpetual startlement.

“Hello, Phillip.” She apologized with the rise of one shoulder. “I’m about to go. My train is due any minute.”

“How are you?” he asked jovially. “You look wonderful.”