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He thought suddenly of Iris—a poor, suitable brood-cow found for Adelina’s son, the Marquess, who had suddenly stopped breeding—and let his lips twist. Ah yes, how he’d enjoyed telling the old bitch that happy piece of news. He neither liked or disliked his bovine Marchioness, who had no idea from whom, or after what kind of stimulations, he came to her bed for the minute or two that was necessary in order to deposit his sperm in her; and he was immensely relieved when that effort was no longer needed. And as for his three daughters, he tolerated them and provided for all their needs as long as they did not make any demands for a show of affection from him—until they were ready to be married off to suitable husbands who would be chosen, no doubt, by his mother.
Knowing his Uncle Newbury’s habits and guessing where he spent at least a short part of his recent evenings, Lord Deering was quite taken aback when the Marquess was announced quite unexpectedly.
“What an unexpected surprise and a pleasure to see you venture so far into the countryside, sir,” Charles stammered.
“Well, I certainly hope you will be pleased in the end, my dear Charles,” the Marquess rejoined drily as he surrendered his outerwear to a servant and went to stand by the fire. “But why is it you’re at your house this evening? I had quite expected the opportunity of calling on the charming Lady Travers in order to find you.”
Noticing his nephew’s flush and tightened lips, the Marquess raised an eyebrow as Charles said sulkily: “It’s because she decided she needed an evening to herself, the teasing bitch! By God, I’m beginning to learn that she knows all the tricks of a born cocotte in leading a man on without once committing herself to anything. If we had been married I would have...”
“Well then, put forward the date for your nuptials, my dear boy. And then you’ll be able to teach her quickly! Perhaps she’s tired of being kept dangling by you.”
“Kept dangling by me?” Charles ejaculated furiously, leaping to the carefully angled bait. “Why, it’s the other way around, you know? For now she says she’s not ready for another marriage so soon after her husband’s death, and in the meantime my creditors have begun to dun me, since the announcement of our wedding has not yet been published. Why, I’m beginning to think that she only meant to use me from the very beginning, to get her revenge on Embry, I suppose; as well as being protected from the gossipmongers by announcing her engagement to me! She’s been making a fool of me, that’s what she’s done! Begging me to come down to the country with her because she would positively pine away if she did not have my company every day, and then...”
“Spare me, I beg you!” Newbury said in a pained voice as he held up his hand, cutting his nephew off in midsentence before he continued in his usual bored tone: “Of course she’s making a fool of you, my dear young nephew. All women will try to do so if you let them, you know. But one way of keeping them busy as well as more malleable is to bed them more often and more—um— forcefully, or so I’ve often observed. Try having her outdoors, for a change—in a hayloft like a milkmaid or in the stable if she likes the smell of horses and grooms. Come, Charles, come! Your lack of initiative quite disappoints me, you know.” He had been studying Lord Deering’s sullen and rather thwarted expression as he spoke, and now after an infinitesimal pause the Marquess said in a softer voice, “You do bed her, don’t you, Charles? Have you done so?”
“Only once, damn her!” Charles admitted angrily, his face reddening again as he went on furiously: “And then she only lay there stiffer than a poker and twice as cold. Why, even a harlot would have done better! She will hardly even allow me the rare privilege of kissing her dainty lips, you know, and yet when that swine Embry kissed her before me that night I might have sworn... Why, damnation, she has only to hear the bastard’s name mentioned and there’s a change in her face at once. In fact, to tell you the truth, I’ve started to wonder if she didn’t enjoy being used by him and playing his whore! Why hasn’t she taken off that damn gold chain he hung around her hips as if she was his tame bitch? Told me it was only because it meant going to a jeweler to get it sawn through and she was too embarrassed. But I think she’s a lying little bitch. Why, if Embry himself‘ had not admitted he’d put restraints on her because she would not...” And then, as if he’d suddenly been dumbfounded, Lord Charles said in a disbelieving whisper, “No! Not Embry of all... He’d never be such a quixotic idiot as to...do you think?’”
“Ah,” the Marquess said in his silkiest tones, “if you really wish to know what I think, my dear nephew, I believe we should try to search out the real truth for ourselves, don’t you? And after we have discovered it I am quite certain that your shy little fiancée will be more than happy to marry you as soon as you like!”
Chapter 46
How controlled by seasons everyone was here, Alexa thought as she turned away from her bedroom window with a light shiver. The London season was followed by a mass exodus to country estates or shooting boxes, and then it was Europe and the fashionable spas before it was time to return to London and the same old round again. She had to allow herself a rueful smile at that. “Same old round.” As if she was so used to it as to become bored already. She caught sight of herself in the mirror above the fireplace and made a grimace to replace the smile. Bored! Yes, that had to be it, of course, accounting for her strangely tense and uncertain moods of late. She was bored with the country, with fox hunting, with evenings spent listening to amateurish piano playing and shaky soprano voices after heavy six- and seven-course dinners, and—oh God—most of all she was bored with poor Charles.
Walking over to the fireplace, Alexa could not suppress an involuntary shudder of distaste when she recalled what a fiasco that night two weeks ago had turned out to be, despite the care she had given to planning and atmosphere once she had made up her mind that she should and must, for her own peace of mind, follow her aunt’s cynical but nevertheless quite logical advice and “allow” him to take her to bed.
“My dear, a woman always thinks that the first man she gives herself to is the only one she could ever love—until she finds out that there is no better way of judging men than by comparison! I hope for your sake that you have not compounded your foolishness by imagining that you are in love!”
In love indeed! Hadn’t she decided a long time ago that she would never, ever give in to such a foolish, weakening product of the imagination? And Charles had actually saved her by asking her to marry him in spite of the scandalous rumors she had brought upon herself. He said he had always loved her, that he worshipped her and wanted only to please her. Such a difference from... Alexa found herself worrying her lower lip with her teeth, wishing that she was able to prevent herself from thinking about him. Nicholas Dameron, Viscount Embry, who in spite of his “hasta luego” had apparently found it all too easy to put her out of his life without another thought.
“But where on earth is Embry these days?” she had heard one lady query rather petulantly at a dinner party a week ago. “I thought he was supposed to be here for the hunt.” And someone else, with a chuckle, had interjected, “Probably paying attention to his pretty little fiancée for a change, I should imagine. Wonder when that wedding will be announced?” Of course he must be with Helen at Newbury’s country estate near Scotland, Alexa had thought, and wondered why she felt so angry all of a sudden. After all, she was engaged to Charles and Nicholas was engaged, as he had always intended, to Helen.
“I do hope we are not‘ going to run into Lord Embry at any of the functions we go to?” she had said to Charles soon after that, and he’d reassured her quickly by saying he believed Embry was visiting friends in France, or some such thing. He wasn’t even in the country then, thank goodness. But nonetheless it did not stop her from dreaming about him against her will, or stop Charles Lawrence from boring her either. What was the matter with her? She didn’t know herself how she felt or why. She had thought that learning all the arts and techniques of a courtesan could help her to perform if she had to and remain detached, and yet with Charles she had only felt revolted. And far from being able to bind him to her more closely by pretending a passionate response, she had barely managed to lie with him and let him use her body while she tried to close her mind off from the unpleasantness that was taking place. Ah, Solange was right! In spite of the “lessons” she had been supposed to learn well enough to practice, she could never have succeeded as a courtesan or even as a kept light o’ love!
Back to the window she paced and then back to the mirror again. Perhaps she too needed a holiday abroad! Anywhere but here, facing interminable boredom and Charles’s sulks. Perhaps she should take advantage of Perdita’s repeated invitations and go back to Rome for a while. Perhaps... And then, as suddenly and as vividly as a blow she saw a picture of his face in her mind, and when she put her hands up to her face she remembered that he had done so, very gently, before he kissed her with almost painful tenderness. Oh God—Nicholas! Alexa thought, and put the back of one hand against her parted lips to stop herself from speaking his name out loud. How had it all happened? What had happened? She didn’t want Charles; she could never marry Charles, never share his bed. She wanted... She continued to yearn, as most people did, for what she could not and should not have—against all logic and all reason. And what she should be grateful for and had in the palm of her hand, she was bored with! Looking u
p, the face of the woman she saw in a gold-framed mirror was far too pale and almost tormented. Alexa? she thought uncertainly, and almost reached out to touch the stranger that stared back at her through eyes that seemed hollowed into her face. An elegantly gowned stranger with carefully arranged hair and a tight-lipped, frustrated look, who knew inside herself what she wanted, but who did not have the courage to break out of the bounds that other people had set for her in order to seize it. Harriet! she thought suddenly. Poor Harriet, who hadn’t grasped what she wanted in time because she played the game of coyness that was customary and fashionable. The lovely, vibrant young woman in the sketch she still had and the embittered, cynical old woman she had known were such opposites!
“Tell me where is fancy bred; in the heart or in the head?” Shakespeare had written of life as a series of tragedies and a series of comedies—cards falling face down on the table, and you held your breath and picked one, wondering, which? which? Or you refused to accept a chance decision made for you on a falling card, and you tried! Why not? What a fool, what a fool! Why, less than a whole season in London and she had begun to think like everyone else, swayed by their opinions, feeling she needed their approval, dreading their disapproval, whereas—dear God! As if a blinding light had exploded in her brain to cut her thoughts free, Alexa suddenly had a sensation of dizzy soaring that so exhilarated her that she wanted to laugh out loud. What had happened to her clearness and her directness and her honesty? She, who had too often expressed her disdain for hypocrisy and for masks, had donned one herself, and all too easily. Society—a set of people whose arrogance intimidated the weak and whose good manners and adherence to “convention” hid every kind of vice and debauchery. Why had she ever thought she had to have their approval? She, who had been warned solemnly against being swayed and influenced, against being used, had let those very people who issued such warnings influence her actions against her own instincts, and in doing so had lost something of herself, including her courage and her truthfulness. She did not need them. Why, she did not even like them! She felt stifled, she was bored and pretended to enjoy herself. She did not dare to lie naked in the sun, because a naked body offended them and at the same time, because they had made everything that was natural and good unnatural and bad, they encouraged lies and deceit and prurience. She had fallen into the very trap and in with the very people she had always despised.
Look at my hair! Alexa thought, and now she did laugh at herself and her dimple creased her cheek. How I hate these tortured ringlets I affect just because everyone else does their hair this way! Perhaps if I appear somewhere with my hair loose and say it is the very latest thing in Paris they will all be doing it the next day. And why do I go to the houses of people who are boring and stuffy, and why do I go to balls and soirees and levees and routs, and why do I have to be seen here and seen there when I really don’t enjoy any of it? And why do I wear corsets that cut off my breath and so many layers of petticoats and... Her laughter stopped as she thought suddenly and almost fiercely, And why was I so afraid of gossip, and why didn’t I face him with all my doubts and trust him with the truth when he asked for it? When he cut through all their silly conventions and customs and carried me off with him, why didn’t I accept it naturally and joyously? What he did was not through calculation but through instinct. And he never did use me as just a female body and a receptacle as Charles did; he made love to me and thought of my pleasure before taking his. And why was I so blind and so bigoted as to pretend for them that I felt nothing when actually I felt everything, and I should have known, if I had not let my instincts become dulled, that he felt the same?
She remembered, as she started to pull the pins and false braids out of her hair, that afternoon in her bedroom when she had waited stiffly for him to rape her, and he had not. And the exquisite ecstasy she had felt when he had made love to every part of her body after he had secured her wrists and ankles, not to degrade her but to teach her that loving and the act of love itself was something that was felt and could never be learned from text books or demonstrations by experts, because emotion was nothing calculated or clinical or pretended. He had pursued her openly and obviously, in spite of the gossips and in spite of Helen and in spite of her grandmother the witch; and that should have told her something if she had not been so preoccupied with fighting herself.
Oh, she had not felt so light and so carefree for months, Alexa thought happily as she kicked herself free of petticoats and pantalettes and finally her fashionable gown and even her corset.
“Oh, but, milady—!” Bridget protested despairingly while Alexa rummaged through closets and trunks stowed away in an attic until she found the riding costume she had worn in Ceylon that had shocked all the proper planters’ wives. “You cannot go out riding like that surely? Oh ma’am—if Lord Deering should... Ohh!”
“Oh Bridget! Do you know that I have suddenly grown tired of conforming and doing everything I don’t care to do just to please other people? Think—why should I? I am rich enough to go where I please and to do only as I please, and I am free, Bridget, I am free!” Not even bothering to braid her hair, Alexa tied it back from her face with a ribbon and let the ends hang down as loosely as her hair; and when she looked in the mirror again she liked the wild untrammeled creature that she saw. Turning around she said severely: “Bridget, we are going to please ourselves from now on. I, for instance, am going riding exactly as I am; and tomorrow or the day after I am going to find out where Lord Embry is hiding himself, and then I am going to hunt him down!” Throwing back her head, she laughed again at the expression on poor Bridget’s face before she said teasingly: “And if you really like Mr. Bowles, then I think that you should try being a little forward sometimes. A little more self-confident, even if you don’t feel so inside yourself. And perhaps we’ll trap them both at the same time! Oh Bridget, don’t look so horrified, for I am only a little mad this morning, you know! And it’s only from...I think it is like being light-headed from the thin air at the very peak of a high mountain, or like being able to swim without any clothes on, or...it is almost like being made love to, but not quite. And don’t faint! You might as well get used to it, because when I find him... Do you think I might need a pistol in order to make sure?”
Unable to help herself, Bridget sat down abruptly on a satin-covered chair, and kept sitting there with her mouth hanging open while her mistress ran out of the room and banged the door shut behind her like a high-spirited child.
Oh dear! she thought. Oh dear, and now what will we do next? Before Lady Travers had become engaged to Lord Deering and seemed to become more subdued, poor Mr. Bowles had been hinting darkly that he might have to give his notice. But now... And then suddenly Bridget got up with her face flushed and studied herself in the mirror as the thought, Why shouldn’t I be the one to hang back and play coy for a change? And why shouldn’t it be my feelings that come first? Hah! I’d like to see him find some female who’d listen to those long stories of his and to his sermons as well. “What people might say” indeed! And who cares? With a toss of her head, Bridget proceeded to sweep confidently downstairs, giving the pretty parlormaid she had always disliked a sweet smile as she passed her. Men were inclined to be slow as well as a trifle obtuse sometimes; which meant that sometimes, if a woman did not take the initiative, he might never find out what he was missing.
I’m happy, Alexa thought. I’m happy! How comfortable and natural it felt to ride astride a horse instead of sidesaddle, and how pleasant it was to go out riding alone for a change without a groom trailing behind her or Charles beside her to hold her back. She was tired of conversations that consisted of banal trivialities and masked real feelings, and eyes that assessed and bored into her above mouths that smiled politely; and above all tired of pretending!
For a while it was enough to ride almost without thinking, letting her thoroughbred mare take her wherever she would. There was the feel of the crisp autumn air against her skin, blowing through her hair, and t
he autumn smells of fallen leaves and ripe fruit and newly mown hay, and distant sounds blended in with the air and carried along its currents to form part of the same feeling. And how sensuous was the feeling of feeling free and of yielding for a time to nothing else but that.
