Sleeping Beauty (37 page)

She bit the edge of her lip and looked down over the rail again. Had he really been there? What had she said? Awful things. Like the truth. Like what she really thought. Except that she didn’t remember telling him that she loved him, which was the truth as well. “Oh, James,” she said. “Where have you been?”

“I don’t know where I’ve been. Asleep. African sleeping sickness. But I’m awake now,” he yelled up at her, “and I want to put it back.”

“Put what back?” The vast auditorium had grown absolutely attentive.

“Your tooth,” he called up. “Please. Let’s put it back as it was.”

Any child could see there was no putting back what she held in her hand. “You can’t.”

“No,” he agreed. For a moment her James looked more cheerless than she could even imagine seeing. But then James the Stalwart, the relentless man who’d crawled through jungles and ridden thirsty on a desert and battled bats, was about to proceed—

When the mechanical bat took another plunge at him. He ducked, waved his hands for a frantic moment. “Coco!” he called over the next foray. As if she might save him, but by then a doorman had his arm.

James ducked the bat once more, then, on rising, his arm simply came out. Straight from the shoulder. That was James. Nothing devious. He simply and straightforwardly decked the fellow.

She laughed; she wanted to weep.

“Coco!” James called again.

“Watch out!”

Five more liveried doormen took hold of him at once. They all but lifted him, while he yelled, “Coco—” He faltered, an
oof
as they grappled. “I want—” he said. The bat hit him, a misguidance on its puppeteer’s part, she thought. It ran into the back of James’s shoulder. He leaped as if the devil had found him. “Jesus,” he said loudly. Then he spoke very quickly from here: “Coco, I want you to marry me. I don’t give a—a—a flying bat what anyone says. I love you. I’m unhappy without you. No one is as—as—as real as you are to me. I am
connected to you somehow, the way I’m connected to myself.”

Now the place hushed. Coco rose slightly onto her toes, her fan dropping to dangle from her wrist. She rested her belly against the railing, leaning slightly, as if she could get closer. She couldn’t have heard correctly.

“I love you,” he said again. Someone cheered in the front circle. The largest doorman, who had James by the scruff of the neck, let go. The others seemed perplexed. Cautiously, romantics that they were, they turned him loose. “Your fairytale ending,” James called up again. “I want to give it to you. Marry me. Become Mrs. James Stoker.” He laughed. “Dame Nicole. Or Dame Edith, if you prefer. I want to wake up beside you forever. And if there is anyone who doesn’t like that, he or she can go jump in the Thames.”

There were people who wouldn’t like it, of course. And a lot of them were sitting right here in the room. Reality was reality. But Coco herself felt as if she could have flown out over the box rail, done a swoop with the bat around the room, then landed gently beside the handsome wonder of a man who stood beneath her box, waiting for her response.

Since she was too practical a woman to try flying, however, she lifted her skirt, spun around, started to weave through the two rows of chairs, then remembered: “Excuse me,” she said as she shoved Jay out of the way to rush back to the box rail. She leaned over out into the air, bending in half to get as close as she dare to James thirty feet below her. She called down to him, “Yes! I’m saying yes! You
wait right there!” She turned again. This time Jay had the presence of mind to get out of her way. He moved himself and two chairs quickly, making her exit clean as she broke between the red, gold-fringed curtains and let herself out a black velvet door.

She ran the full length of the upper lobby, then descended the side staircase at a gallop down into the main lodge. Hardly anyone was there. She heard the orchestra strike up the overture again.

No James. Till she came level with the mahogany bar-kiosk. At which point James Stoker walked out the center doorways, two doormen behind him, both stone-faced, one holding a fistful of his collar rather like a bouncer removing a disturbance from a posh brothel. She laughed.

James smiled at her. They let him go when they saw her, then closed the doors to the main auditorium.

Alone. Or almost alone. The man at the kiosk. Two ladies exiting the powder room. It was quiet, just rich swaying music playing softly beyond. Coco walked up to him, stopping three feet short of rushing into James’s arms: just for the simple pleasure of looking at him. “Oh, you are a fine-looking sight, James Stoker,” she said.

And a sheepish one. He looked down. “I have to tell you what I’ve done.”

“What?”

“I’ve almost certainly lost my job,” he said. “You see, I took all the tags from the bore samples this morning.”

“You did what?”

“I removed the tags that identified where all the
gold samples came from, then mixed everything up. There will be no figuring out where the gold is.” He shrugged, smiling, delighted with himself. “Other than somewhere in the south of the African continent.”

“But you told Phillip where the gold came from—”

“Ah.” He shook his head, a mock apology. “Didn’t really trust Phillip. So I told him a longitude and latitude that should put anyone who attempts to go to it into the hottest, wettest part of Africa that any man has ever attempted to visit. Not been there myself frankly, but I suspect there’s more mosquitoes there than gold.”

Coco started to laugh. “You told Phillip the wrong place?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Do you know the right one?”

James’s smile crinkled up, sweet at the edges as it so often could be, then his expression, the smiling timber-wolf eyes, became somehow sly. “Perhaps. But I’m not telling if I do. And I’m never going back.” He made a more serious face. “Look. After I confused things immeasurably in the geology lab, I packed up all my own notes and took them. As I see it, the notes at the very least are mine. They’re going to run me out, almost certainly. But I don’t care. Ruling over the whole mess wasn’t nearly as interesting as I’d thought, anyway. I was forever fighting to steal a moment for my rocks or lectures or readings.

“In any regard, I told several fellows at All Souls what I did. They were appalled but said I could stay.” He shook his head. “They said they’d back
me, but it’s going to be ugly, I think.
I
think I’ve behaved more heroically than ever before in my life, but this time, alas, no one will cheer. I’ve essentially robbed people of gold. Gold that wasn’t theirs, but still they won’t see it that way. And they’ll find it anyway, of course, eventually. They know it’s there somewhere.”

He smiled broadly then, holding out his arms, turning once before her eyes as if putting himself on display:
Look at me
. “I am so happy with myself though, I can’t tell you.” He came around to face her. “I have given Mtzuba and his family another year, maybe two, maybe three, maybe a decade. Enough time for his child to learn to walk and his wife perhaps to have another before their way of living is turned upside down.

“And I decided to spare All Souls. I moved my things out. I’ve left. Every possession I could carry is now in boxes at the train station. Not so many boxes as all that. And my carriage will arrive on a car tomorrow.” He rolled his eyes and smiled at this point, mugging with his handsome face. “Can I stay with you?” he asked. “Just for a while. Till I can figure out a way to make ends meet again.”

She laughed. “You want me to
keep
you?”

“Yes. If you would.”

“Well, I don’t know….” She sauntered toward him now, opening her fan, circling him as she looked him up, then down. “Yes. I think you’d do nicely. Can you entertain? Are you polite and well mannered, presentable to the Grand People?”

He laughed. “Probably not. I have developed some rude habits.” He wiggled his brow. “I go naked sometimes.”

Quite suddenly, James rushed her then, grabbing her round the waist, swinging her up, spinning her. The room went round and round, with James at the center. “Where’s your wrap?” he asked.

“Where’s yours?”

“Forgot it.”

“We’ll share mine.”

“Wonderful. I don’t own much, I should warn you. Some clothes, my books and rocks, and a carriage with nothing to pull it. That’s what I bring. And this. Ta-
dah
,” he announced, setting her down as he pulled a box from inside his coat like a magician. A very tiny velvet box, the sort that held rings. “It used to be a bracelet, one I didn’t get a chance to give you. The jeweler exchanged it for this, though, when I added my pocket watch and—”

“You traded your pocket watch?”

“Yes. And the horses for my carriage.”

“Your horses!”

“Yes, yes,” he said, as if horses were bothersome details. “You see, I wanted to offer you something grand, something ridiculously beyond my means. Just once. Something that seemed as unrealistically wonderful for me to have as you.”

“Oh, James, that is so unnecess—” She broke off.

Inside the box was a wide, simple wedding band set with diamonds. If you could call a band of peasized, back-to-back diamonds simple. When she could catch her breath, Coco said, “James, this is so foolish.”

He was disappointed. “No, it isn’t.”

She looked up at him, dismayed. “You sold your horses?” she repeated again.

“You have some. We’ll hitch your horse to my carriage. A marriage made in heaven.” Furrowing his sincere, well-meaning face, he said, “Coco, I saw it. I had to have it for you. I want to marry you tonight. I want you to put it on and never take it off again.”

As it turned out, they couldn’t marry that night. There was no one to do the job so late. But they could start the honeymoon—which they did. In her carriage on the way home, and then upstairs in her room in her house in London, the house where he had first arrived and asked how to court her in what seemed an age ago now.

Chapter 24

Though given many great blessings—beauty, wit, grace, wisdom—the Princess conquers what was to be her ruin with the best gift of all: serene endurance
.

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

I
ndeed, a further scandal ensued, with the London
Times
somehow getting the inside details of all Sir James Stoker did and why. Few people were understanding. James was removed from committees, from boards, from the Council itself, and all but thrown in jail “for vandalizing university property”—for rearranging and unlabeling the rocks he himself had carried up the length of the African continent. Needless to say, he did not get his professorial chair.

In the end, he resigned his lectureship early—it was difficult nigh unto impossible to teach anything, whether in supervision or in the readings, partly because of his own distracted state, partly for the impassioned feelings everyone seemed to have, one way or another, about what he’d done. Moreover, what part of his work he himself had not destroyed was taken away. By the end of the year he had retired to London, completely severed from the town in which he’d been born and the university life he loved. James did what he could: he applied for posts at several other universities and awaited word.

It was a hard time for him, but it was not without its consolations. He and Coco settled into a quiet married life, the rhythm of which suited them both. Privately, the worst that befell them was his nursing Coco through what they both thought was the grippe just before the New Year. She held down no food for days, was weak and tired. She missed her menses—and laughed over the notion of being pregnant. Then her menses came, or so they thought. In fact, much to their surprise, she miscarried a child.

She recovered quickly. The pregnancy, obviously from their time in France, had barely started. Coco joked over her narrow escape. James was happy if she was happy. The idea of the lost baby made him oddly sober about the notion of never having children, more so than he would have expected, but he was content when he saw Coco’s health bloom again in her face. She resumed doing her sketches, finishing all but the last for Mr. Pease. She began to look for a castle, planning a day trip so as to
make drawings. It was with some relief that the New Year began without fanfare. Eighteen hundred seventy-seven promised to be a better, more uneventful year.

Until an emissary from the Queen knocked at their London door. A scolding at least, James supposed. It was due. And indeed it was a kind of scolding that Victoria sent. But the means of it was quite shocking.

Sir James
,

We take great exception to your recent behavior. Our differences, however, do not annul the fact that you have been of great and heroic service to us in ways we had always intended to acknowledge. You are a man of integrity, even if I do not think you are a man of perfect wisdom. Please accept the enclosed documents as they signify as tangibly as we are able to express our most gracious thanks for your service to us
.

HRH Queen Victoria

Three weeks later, Coco said, “My lord, it
is
a castle.”

She and James stood in a carriage drive, frazzled and dusty beside their laden coach-and-eight. Their footman and driver came to stand beside them. “My lord,” she whispered again. The sight before her took her breath away.

The windows of Bromwyck Castle looked down at them like hundreds of sleepy eyes, blinking, startled awake. It was a trick of the light, of course,
only morning sunlight flashing off glass—off all the many diamond-shaped quarrels set between the crisscrossed cames of latticed windows. There were three floors of these tall, graceful windows, like the twinkling regard of a group of shy but curious medieval ladies, huddled together in their steeple headdresses—blue turrets limned a roofline that was delicately dotted with an uncountable number of chimneys, the whole crowned with a central dome that rose to a single glorious spire.