The Shadow and the Star (46 page)

Leda swallowed. She nodded.

"Smile for me. It's not terrible. It's very nice. Have you ever had warm sand between your toes?"

"No, ma'am."

"Think of something warm and luxurious, then. A feather comforter. A cashmere shawl."

Leda's glance wandered to the canopied bed. Tess' quick look caught her. Leda blushed hotly.

"Are you thinking of Samuel?" Tess wriggled as if she were a delighted child and leaned forward. "That's excellent. Now, I'm going to tell you all about what Mahina told me about men… and it's all true, too."

By the time Tess had finished, Leda knew the Tahitian names for things that she'd never even imagined existed, and for places that she had only thought vaguely of as "there." Miss Myrtle would have fainted dead away long before Tess gave Leda a quizzical look and said, for the twentieth time, "Now I've shocked you. Don't giggle, if you please. It sounds much sillier than it really is."

"Oh, dear," Leda said between her fingers. "If it's only half as absurd as it sounds, I don't know how one manages."

"You'll manage. And don't succumb to the giggles at the wrong moment, or you'll hurt his feelings. Men are very sensitive. And Samuel…" She grew pensive, spinning the brush in her hand. "I think I should tell you about him, Leda. He wouldn't wish me to, but—" Her lower lip tightened stubbornly. "But I'm a meddlesome old lady, who's convinced she knows best."

Something in the careful way she laid the brush on the bed and stood up, holding onto the bedpost, made Leda's heart beat faster.

"All these things I've been telling you—" Tess said, "—I believe they're good and right between people who care for one another. Within a marriage. I should tell you that I was married once before, a long time ago, when I was very young and extremely stupid. It was annulled, after a short time."

Leda controlled her surprise, not knowing what to say.

"The man was—a Mr. Eliot. He was—quite frightening. It worries me still, sometimes, because I never understood why he was the way he was. Why he did to me—what he did." Her fingers grew white where she held the post. "There are people who mix all these things up, Leda, and turn them inside out, and make love into something terrible. And I don't know why—I really can't explain that part, as old and wise as I am." She smiled wryly and drew a breath, as if arming herself to go on. "There are men who will pay women to do what I've been talking about, and mostly they're to be pitied, because there's no love in it. There are men who will pay other men. And there are men who will buy children."

Leda's spine straightened. She looked toward the slender woman leaning against the bedpost.

"The first night I was in Mr. Eliot's house, a boy came to my room. He was—five—perhaps six. I don't know. That was Samuel." She spoke evenly, but her voice held just the tiniest quiver. "He was very docile. He never said a word. Mr. Eliot tied his wrists and beat him. And it's very hard—it's impossible—for me to understand, or explain, or even talk about—but that was part of Mr. Eliot's method of obtaining pleasure for himself. And when I objected—forcefully—he locked me in a room, and didn't let me out for almost a year."

The quiver in her voice had become an audible shaking. She stood very still, looking off into a corner of the room.

"When you think that you're safe," she said, "when you think that everything is reasonable and logical and people are what they seem, and something like that happens to you… you never forget it. Never. I will
never—
"

Her voice finally broke. Leda stood up, not knowing what to do or offer. Tess turned, and met her dismayed gaze. She smiled, but there was no amusement in her eyes.

"It changed me. The world has never seemed the same. And I was lucky—I had friends who rescued me and took me away and arranged the annulment, and then I had Gryf—but I couldn't forget that little boy. We had detectives looking for almost three years. He was found in one of those places where children are sold to men."

Leda was still standing. She sat down heavily in the chair.

"I'm not—I don't wish to upset you, Leda. I only want you to be able to understand him a little. You said that he hurt you that first time—and frightened you, too, I think. Only imagine what it must be like, to be not yet eight years old, and alone in such a place."

Leda drew her knees up into the chair and rested her face in them. She thought of all his small, loving gifts to Tess, so meticulously considered; of the coin on a ribbon around her own throat; of the silver brush and mirror. And she thought, with a sudden certainty, of the strange pattern of his thefts in the city.

She thought:
He meant to close them down, those places
.

Instead of marches and hymns and ladies' campaigns, he'd simply, alone and silent, made it impossible for them to exist in the glare of public curiosity.

"How remarkable he is," she said, muffled in her gown.

"Do you think so?" Tess sounded so hopeful.

Leda nodded into her knees.

"Thank God." Tess sighed, a long and deep release of air. "I've been terrified to tell you. I was afraid—I knew I should, but I was so afraid that you wouldn't wish to marry him."

"I always wished it," Leda admitted, without lifting her face. "I'm only afraid—that he doesn't."

"But he has done it."

Leda curled her fingers in her gown. "Because he had no choice."

"No choice?" Tess' voice held a crisp note of incredulity. "I'm afraid that's giving him a bit more sympathy than he deserves. No one forced him to make love to you. No one coerced him to stay with you as he did, when he'd have known as well as you or I that the servants begin work at six. No one persuaded him that there would be no consequences. He's a grown man; he's done nothing that he hadn't perfect freedom to refrain from doing."

Leda could not look up. "I'm still afraid," she whispered.

Tess came to her, and touched her hair. "Yes. Of course you are, love. Everyone must be, when they have to look into the future and wonder what will happen. But I'll tell you something that gives me so much hope. You said�he's remarkable. If I were to tell Kai about him, she wouldn't see that he's remarkable. She'd be distressed, and she'd pity him, and he would die before he'd endure it. He's so proud, and so ashamed."

"He should not be." Leda raised her head. "What happened to him wasn't his fault."

"Oh, Leda." Tess smiled. "What a wise old woman I've turned out to be, to trust you to see that."

"Of course I see it, ma'am. Who would not?"

"Samuel," Tess said simply. She took both of Leda's hands. "And now I've tampered quite enough with you and your future. Even we interfering old ladies must be reined in at last. I'll tell Samuel he may come up. Be happy, Leda." She gave a squeeze, and went to the door. "You're quite remarkable yourself, you know."

The door closed behind her. Leda hugged her knees.

She held Miss Myrtle's mirror and looked down at herself in it. Her hair curled around her shoulders and cheeks. She thought it was a most anremarkable face—not wise or certain or clever at all.

Samuel played the part set for him. He accepted congratulations, smiled when he was expected to smile, sat down and stood up and did what he had to do through an interminable day. Most of the guests—the Hawaiian consul, a few business associates of his, and the trio of elderly ladies on Miss Etoile's side—knew nothing of the scandalous circumstances, although he doubted that it would be long before they found out. The prospect disturbed him; he didn't wish her to be subjected to more of the looks and whispers that tormented her.

So he made sure that he appeared to be honored by the bestowal of Miss Etoile's hand upon him, as one diminutive old lady with a gentle, fluttery voice and a dead bird on her hat put it. His smile wasn't completely feigned; these faded grande dames, with their potent scent of violets and soap, their intense interest in what would be served at the wedding luncheon, their complicated stratagems to satisfy their inquisitiveness about the household arrangements—everything from servants to the amount of coal consumed in heating such large rooms—without betraying an ill-bred curiosity, their staunch pride in "their" Miss Etoile and sincere concern for her happiness—he found them oddly touching. They made only the simplest of demands: an estimate of the number of candles in the dining room chandelier appeased them, a promise to have the cook send a recipe for lemonade gratified them, a cup of tea brought by the bridegroom put them into a delicate fuss of self-conscious delight.

He spent the afternoon mostly in their company, avoiding deeper connections, as he'd avoided them since Christmas by traveling to London and Newcastle, investigating the potential of Charles Parsons' turbine steam engines. While Samuel had been gone, Lord Haye had come back to Westpark—with a motive so obvious that Samuel wondered with a remote contempt why the engagement had not yet been announced.

He would not be here to see it when it was. Watching Kai's enthusiasm in the wedding celebrations, hearing Lady Tess talk of what might be planted in the gardens in spring, he thought:
I won't be here
.

It was like an unexpected cavern at his feet. He felt dazed with it.

But he had always been out of place. He'd simply proved it, surrendering finally to the darkness that had never left him.

He'd tried, turning and turning away. But the other was there. It was there now, inside him, springing to intense life when Lady Tess took Miss Etoile—his wife, God… his wife—and went upstairs with her.

Robert grinned and winked at him. He returned an austere stare. Everyone else went on talking, as if it were the most common of occasions. But he sensed the new note of distraction beneath the outward ease. No one else would look directly at him. They smiled past him and around, as if he embarrassed them by standing there.

He felt himself going numb. Was it so flagrant, what he wanted? That even now, when it had ruined him, when it had brought him to this, he still craved to lie down with her and be covered in that seductive, secret blaze?

Even Kai avoided him, contriving a sudden exhaustion, making a motion as if to reach for his hands, and then, pink-cheeked, breaking it off without touching him. "Good evening, Mano. Congratulations."

As if it were a signal, the whole company began to break up. In her mother's absence, Kai shepherded the overnight guests toward their quarters, while Robert and Haye wandered out together. Samuel was left alone in the drawing room, among the flowers that Kai had tied with white satin bows, the table of gifts, the veil that lay discarded across the embroidered cushion of a window seat.

My wife
, he thought.

Even the words seemed foreign. But the slow burn of desire—that he knew: the shadow of his other self, the enemy inside him.

He went to her because it would have been a defeat not
to. It would have been an admission that he had no rule over himself at all.

She was curled up in a chair when he entered, clasping her knees, like a painting he'd seen once of a pensive young girl nestled in an alcove, her hair flowing loose, trailing with the ribbons on her gown. The doorknob made a click as he released it. Her head came up sharply at the sound. She looked toward him and immediately rose, snatching up the robe that lay over the back of the chair.