Susan Johnson (38 page)

So with resolution she intended to eject Trey from her thoughts and begin to reestablish her Jordan identity. That summer she kept busy with all the details of setting up their household, seeing that their town house was staffed with her own servants, arranging for her mother’s rose garden to be replanted to its former glory, having the nursery redecorated for her child, escaping when she could to the estate at Chantilly for peace. No, not peace, not with memories of Trey resisting expulsion but quiet at least … and solitude.

With the International Exposition taking place in Paris that summer, feting the centenary of the revolution, the children wouldn’t stay content in the country for long, a phenomenon typical of most rural citizens of France. The city was thronged with visitors. The Eiffel Tower, raised at the cost of fifteen million uninflated francs, was condemned by many as a disfigurement to Paris, but it lured with affronting style and became famous overnight. Tourists visited it, artists painted it, newlyweds with happy faces were photographed beside it, suicides and inventors of flying machines jumped off it; there was no resisting its truculent stance as the first monument to modern engineering.

Scientific exhibits, pugnacious with the myth of progress, filled several buildings, including the colossal Hall of Industry. Gauguin showed his paintings at the Cafe Volponi, a Cairo street scene was constructed with imported Egyptians to live in it and perform the
danse du ventre
; the Javanese dancers became the rage of Paris. Thomas Edison visited his own pavilion, one of the largest on the grounds, and bought the allegorical statue entitled
The Fairy of Electricity
for his new West Orange laboratory. This winged woman, crouching on a dilapidated gas jet, surrounded by a Volta battery, telegraph key, and telephone, brandishing an incandescent bulb, all in the finest Carrara marble, perhaps best confirmed the flamboyant excess, the exuberant pageantry, of La Belle Epoque.

At first Empress partook of the festivities for the sake of the children, accepting the limitless daily invitations of friends, but by summer’s end she was able to plead her condition as an excuse to avoid the unending round of activities:
concerts, teas, dances, the races, and daily rides in the
Bois
all seemed empty, everything lacking that spark of enjoyment. She found herself thinking many times a day, Trey would laugh to see that, or scowl his displeasure at such pedantry, or say in his utterly charming way that something was delightful when he was bored to tears. She measured all her pleasures against his remembered tastes, then, outraged at her missah pining, would smile more determinedly at some vapid remark or say, “Really, how terribly interesting. Tell me more,” at a discourse already tedious beyond belief because she would
not
, she heatedly reminded herself, remain hostage to a memory … no matter how seductive.

But it was an education to discover how one person in the entire world could so temper the warmth of the sun that she felt alone, like an alien in a chill inhospitable landscape, too far from the sun’s warming rays.

And her sun was back in Montana.

Luckily, on the worst of her melancholy days, the children kept her irrevocably linked to the prosaic movements of life. They would not let her slip into her cloistered blue nunnery; she must see to their active, childish schedules of lessons, sports, and frivolity. And while they flourished in the resilient way of youth, she envied them their joie de vivre.

Trey regularly asked for his mail the first month after Empress left, but when no letters arrived, he abruptly ceased asking. Throwing himself into horse training after that, he rose early and worked the young bloodstock until late in the evening. With an unusual reticence, he spent long hours on the lunge, patiently took the new horses over the low learning jumps again and again, cajoled the belligerent young geldings into a semblance of obedience, mastered the stallions with gentleness rather than force … dusty, hot hours each day of intense concentrated schooling. But everyone close to him saw what effort it took for his reserve to remain intact: he was often preoccupied; rarely spoke; walked away from any questions about Empress; was miserably unhappy.

He hadn’t had a drink in weeks, unusual for a man who’d congenially spent time in the bunkhouse over cards and bourbon. “Have to stay in training,” he’d jest when he was coaxed
by the men at the end of the day’s work to sit in on a game, “until this young bloodstock gets off to market.”

And he didn’t even bother with an excuse when he was asked to join the expeditions to Lily’s. “No thanks,” he’d say, and his voice was so curt, his friends looked away, embarrassed by his grief.

On his own initiative, Guy mailed a letter to Trey in July, telling him he was now a
comte
(Pressy had taken care of everything, he wrote); that the Eiffel Tower was
magnifique
; and all the children sent their good wishes, each child adding a few lines to fill up the page with Eduard’s rough scribble translated “I love you” at the bottom. Although Guy didn’t fully comprehend Empress’s express orders not to communicate with Trey, she’d not been the same since they’d left Montana, and his note was a surreptitious attempt to repair the friendship between his sister and Trey.

Unfortunately the letter had the opposite effect. At first sight of the postmark, Trey’s heart leapt with joy, but the script was large, rounded, and childish in appearance, not small and neat like he’d expected on opening the envelope, and when he’d finished reading, he was gloomily reminded of Empress’s words the previous winter: “I think they love you more than I.” Certainly they missed him more than she; Empress hadn’t taken the time to write a single word. With bitterness he reflected on the ironic justice of a mocking fate: after all the relationships and women he’d politely evaded, he’d fallen in love with a woman capable of the same elusive withdrawal he’d perfected to a fine art.

For the first time in his life he pessimistically considered the possibility of heavenly retribution.

No more than ten minutes after reading Guy’s letter, Trey saddled Rally and left for Helena. A mile down the road, he stopped and waited patiently in the hot sun for Blue and Fox to overtake him. When they rode up, he bluntly told them he wasn’t interested in either bodyguards or friends. His eyes were chill ice, his mouth a grim slash. “I don’t need taking care of,” he said. “Jake Poltrain is at Li Sing Koo’s and in no shape to threaten anyone.” He sighed then, and the grimness mitigated. “Do me a favor,” he went on with a rueful smile.

“Give me a few days to go to hell in my own way.… I promise to send you a special invitation if I think you’re missing anything fascinating.”

“You’re sure?” Blue said.

Trey nodded.

Blue and Fox looked at each other in brief silent communication, sympathy and understanding in their dark eyes. “If you need us …” Blue said softly.

“I’ll call,” Trey quietly finished, and raised his hand in salute. Wheeling Rally, he rode away, kicking up a haze of dust on the dry road.

In Helena, Li Sing Koo, discreet as always, personally ushered Trey into a large silk-draped room. “Would you like company?” he inquired politely, his face bland.

Trey looked at him blankly.

“Company. Would you like a woman?”

“No.” A soft, abrupt refusal, then apparently a rapid rethinking, for Trey said, pulling his dusty shirt out of his buckskins, “Maybe later.” He sat down on the opulent lacquered couch, the burnished wood a rich, deep scarlet, its scrolled and fretted carved canopy like an elaborately sculptured cavern. The silk-covered cushions were so heavily embroidered, the design gave the impression of three dimensions. Pulling his boots off, Trey lounged back against the embroidered silk flowers, riotous in scheme and color, the harsh darkness of his skin and hair offsetting the brilliant blooms, his fringed buckskins incongruously juxtaposed to the luxurious fabric. The gold chain of his cougar charm flashed as he moved to one elbow and reached out for the gilded pipe, his thoughts disarrayed and brooding, his eyes momentarily startled to see Koo still standing near the door. “Thank you, Koo,” he said with an inbred, facile politeness.

It was a dismissal, however polite.

And when Koo quietly closed the door behind him, Trey’s fingers curled around the lavishly engraved pipe on the low table beside him, and he let his morbid anger off its leash. For months now he’d controlled his exasperation and rage, tightly reined his impulse to strike out at Empress for the pain she’d
caused him … was causing him; lived with a relentless, corrosive hurt. And he meant now to find some forgetfulness.

So in Li Sing Koo’s luxurious private rooms Trey and Jake Poltrain both searched for an elusive peace or temporary respite from the caustic anger inside them. Jake Poltrain lived for his dream of Trey’s death, while Trey struggled with his own black demons, cursing Empress as a fickle trollop interested only in his money. When Valerie had convinced her that there was no marriage in the immediate future, she’d left; it seemed quite plain in retrospect, and the only deductive conclusion for her not writing to him.

In the days ahead, together with the golden, tranquil dreams, existed alternate odious sensations urging him to punish Empress, rank and pernicious feelings, thin-skinned and violent, and he faced with perceptible horror the acute possibility that he’d enjoy the punishment. For the first time he was conscious of a dark side to his nature, a destructive, irrational impulse only wanting revenge. The opium always helped after it took hold, helped ease the rancorous malevolence and smother the battle lines between good and evil in his soul, smother them like a dense fog bank would terminate a day’s fighting. But the drug never resolved the conflict, only disengaged the combatants until another day.

And a week passed in the hushed privacy of Helena’s most lavish opium den.

Indulging his son’s need for solitude, Hazard dispensed with Trey’s usual bodyguards, but with Jake Poltrain at Koo’s, his son required security. Li Sing Koo was to find replacements for Blue and Fox, and Trey was to be kept from harm; those were Hazard’s explicit orders. And under normal circumstances a guard was constantly posted outside Trey’s room.

But late one night in an altercation between two local Chinese warlords over a beautiful young prostitute, one of Koo’s patrons sank a battle-ax into his adversary’s head. The practiced blow, perfectly executed, sliced through the man’s skull like it was butter, and the carnage drew everyone to the sight … including Trey’s guard.

Day and night blended in the opulent, silk-hung room, and Trey, unconcerned whether it was day or night, had no perception of the frenzied activity one floor below him, insulated
as he was by paneled walls and hazy dreams. He had lost weight in the past week, his hands were no longer steady, his pale eyes shone with brilliant intensity, the dark shadows beneath his eyes accenting the leanness of his face. And he dozed between wakefulness and sleep on the soft cushions, his whipcord slender body clad sparely in black silk trousers. Only recently bathed by several of Koo’s accommodating female servants, his dark hair lay coolly damp on his shoulders, the perfume of the bathwater still clinging to his skin. He was pleasantly quiescent, unruffled by black demons, his internal visions of a mountain landscape in early spring.

He stirred suddenly at dim sounds of shouting, his eyelids lifting indolently, a strange sensation intruding into his pastel and sunlit landscape. Listening intently for a moment, he heard nothing but felt more distinctly a hard, cold nudging infiltrating the tranquility of his dream. Lazily sifting through numerous possibilities in a narrowing sequence of sensitivity, he thought himself very astute to ultimately distinguish the site.
My ear
, he casually reflected. And then his eyes opened fully to absorb the unusual sensation.

Shit.

Jake Poltrain towered above him, his close-set eyes virulent with hate, pressing a revolver into Trey’s temple. This is, Trey ironically thought, a classic nightmare.

“You’re going to die,” Jake growled, the effort of holding his hand steady causing sweat to bead on his forehead, “and it’s so easy,” he murmured, his sense of euphoria animated in his voice. He’d simply walked through the unlocked door, crossed the carpeted room to the opium couch, and positioned the pistol barrel on Trey’s temple, his first stroke of luck in dealing with the Braddock-Blacks. And he meant to take advantage of the opportunity. “I’m going to skin you afterward and make me a pair of boots.”
¹¹
Jake’s smile was malevolently smug. “See if your daddy’s millions will save you now, half-breed.”

Trey laughed, a low, slow chuckle that shook his lean body, and his eyes drifted shut again. Irrationally the situation struck him as ludicrous, like some staged melodrama. All Jake needed was a thin waxed mustache and a leer, Trey speculated with amusement, although with those tiny pig eyes in all those folds of flesh, a leer wasn’t a certainty. He chuckled
again, a variation of a pig’s face superimposed on Jake’s, vivid in his mind.

Trembling with rage at Trey’s casual indifference, Jake emphatically jabbed the pistol barrel roughly into Trey’s flesh and growled, “Open your eyes, dammit.”

Several moments passed before Trey ceased laughing and complied, moments in which Jake Poltrain cursed a torrent of vilifying invective having to do with degrees of skin color, and his wavering, unsteady hand clenched and unclenched on the pistol. He’d expected Trey to grovel and plead, a scenario he’d fantasized a thousand times in a thousand variations. Damn him for laughing, he thought, disordered by Trey’s irregular response. He wasn’t supposed to laugh; he was supposed to beg for his life, and Jake’s opium-clouded brain failed to assess the boundaries of reality and fantasy.

When Trey’s dark lashes eventually rose, his brilliant eyes indolently surveyed Jake’s contorted face, vaguely felt the cold steel at his temple, and wondered briefly if there was pain with a shot in the head. He smiled then at the irrelevance and said, “Relax, Jake, it’s not hard to shoot a man. You’re taking this all too seriously. Take everything too damn serious, that’s your problem,” he murmured, his mind gliding lazily into more pleasant thoughts. “Now, Koo here knows how to take the seriousness out of life. Right, Jake?”