"The Slightest Provocation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rosenthal Pam)

Chapter Four

He was quite certainly awake; she could tell from how he was breathing. And how he was moving too-inch by sweet inch, just as she was, their intertwined bodies striving for a more harmonious alignment of limb and torso. She always loved this moment, the humor of it, the graceless intimate shifting about to make provision for the awkward extra arm that inevitably gets in the way of postcoital bliss. Until at last he’d gotten his body curved around hers, her head fitting (perfectly as ever) into the space below his clavicle.

Her thoughts drifted back to Curzon Street.

“ ’Ere you are, gov’nor,” the hackney driver would sing out, “and my compliments to your lady too.” She and Kit had been favorites among the town cabbies: running, laughing and half-unbuttoned, up their front steps, they’d fling large coins behind them, all breathless eagerness to finish what they’d started on the way home. Though they might have to wake the servants to let them in, for they frequented such raffish parts of town that they’d sometimes lose their keys and purses to pickpockets.

Astonishing that the house had never been robbed. And that all they’d lost was each other.

Perhaps if they hadn’t behaved so badly… she should be regretting it. But instead she felt herself almost drunk on unbearably sweet nostalgia. A sigh escaped her lips before she could bite it back. He dropped a kiss on her forehead.

Had he guessed her thoughts? And could he also remember how much fun they’d had?

“I want you again,” she said. “Soon. Before we begin remembering…”

He stopped her lip with a fingertip, laughed, and took her hand. “No chance that I could forget how demanding you are.”

Just as well to turn it into a joke. There’d be no suppressing the memories, but she supposed there was no reason to speak about the horrible parts.

“Soon,” he agreed. “Give me just a few more minutes.”

A few more minutes would be quite acceptable, even nicer, perhaps, than the times when he’d been ready for another go-round before she’d entirely caught her breath. And maybe by the time they’d quite finished with each other, they would be too tired for conversation.

She snuggled against him while he kissed the inside of her wrist. And then her palm. Very softly, and oh, very nicely indeed, his lips and tongue insinuating themselves into hidden places where one wouldn’t have thought there were any.

“And I’m not so demanding as all that,” she protested happily. “I’m perfectly content… Well, it’s perfectly nice…”

She wasn’t quite sure what he’d contrived to do with his tongue just then. No, not his tongue-it was his teeth, and whatever he’d done had caused her to gasp and forget to finish her sentence.

She only knew that she wanted to do something equally nice for him. To trace the sinews of his neck with her lips; sniff, snuffle, and lick at him; nibble at his ear.

Of course, things would be nicer still if there were no obtruding buttons or wet and sticky layers of clothing interposed between their bodies. But on the whole, these were very minor inconveniences.

She wriggled a bit and settled her other hand into the little arch at the small of his back. Good. Excellent, in truth. He breathed deeply and let out a ragged chuckle.

“This wasn’t at all how I planned it, though,” he said. “I’d imagined us sipping our Calvados and exchanging compliments…”

The bottle on the dressing table, next to her journal and portable writing desk. She’d utterly forgotten.

As she slipped away to get it, she could hear him rearranging himself in bed. Backing up against the head-board, he’d propped his head against the bolster to watch her.

“Well, I do have some news,” he said.

“Hell.” She was fiddling with the cork.

He laughed. “Bring it here. I’ll do it.”

“It’s coming, just give me a moment.”

He sighed comfortably. “I was going to tell you later, but maybe we could drink a toast to… to a possible new career for me. You see, I’ve got a letter recommending me…”

Perhaps if she used the tail of her comb to wedge it out, or the little knife she used to trim her pens…

But she’d missed a bit of what he was saying.

“… a talent for organization and intelligence. You’d laugh to see how neatly I file my papers nowadays and how many details I have at my fingertips. An army needs to communicate-about supply routes, enemy movements, all of that-and it seems that I enjoy that sort of thing. And since I’m going to need something to do, now that there’s peace, and Wellington will be ending the occupation soon enough anyway…”

He spoke quickly now, a little too carelessly. “Of course, there are still a great many details to attend to. I can’t leave immediately. And I’m a bit nervous about it, if truth be told… Letter of introduction to Lord Sidmouth.”

She raised her eyes from the bottle.

“Oh, I know,” he continued, “the Home Office doesn’t seem like much, shockingly small staff and what all. But there are important things to attend to. I don’t wish to alarm you, but there’s been rioting in England this last year. Anarchy. Insubordination. And now that there’s peace on the continent, order and, um, legitimacy restored, it seems to me that one ought to be bringing all that home, where it’s needed as well. For there’s been a serious report to Parliament, about certain dangers.”

She’d put down the brandy bottle somewhere after Home Office, and had completely forgotten about prising out the cork when he’d gotten to order and legitimacy.

For if he’d practiced for days-and perhaps he had, she thought sadly-he couldn’t have found a worse way of putting it to her.

He didn’t wish to alarm her. Yes, she expected that’s what one would say to a lady who didn’t read the newspapers. An understandable error: she’d been a very giddy young thing during their time in London. How could he know that she’d had a few thoughts, developed a few opinions since last they’d seen each other?

Perhaps if she spoke carefully, if she reasoned deliberately, if she simply tried hard enough, she could explain that it was hardly anarchy for a propertyless man to petition to vote. Or to claim the right to distribute literature, assemble with his fellows to discuss it.

In any case, she had to say something. He was already manifestly disappointed by her silence.

Slowly, reluctantly, she began, “But you must know that there’s been a terrible harvest. Famine in some places, unemployment, soldiers returning home without pay. Men are angry, even in the… in our village.

“They believe themselves misgoverned,” she continued. “They want to remedy it, by helping elect the Parliament. They petitioned all over England. They collected a million signatures, and their shameful government refused to look at it.”

Perhaps the words our village had come out too sentimental. She didn’t care. She’d first laid eyes on him there; it was their village. Unfortunately, he’d probably paid more attention to shameful and misgoverned.

Had she really needed to plunge them into argumentation?

She watched his mouth harden while he fiddled with his clothes and then swung his legs over the side of the bed.

Couldn’t she, perhaps, have waited?

He’d been away for so long, fought bravely, risked his life for his country. It would be stupid to expect him to understand all at once.

But now that she’d begun… well, in truth he ought to know that the government he’d fought for had claimed the right to lock people up indefinitely without bringing charges against them-since last February, after the petition had been delivered.

She wasn’t good at political discussion-a woman didn’t get much practice. She could write things down clearly enough, but in the heat of disputation she tended to become overexcited, forget to watch her language.

She tried to calm her voice, which seemed to be shaking.

“Jessica’s been writing me about the people in the village. They need so much; it’s been so difficult. And of course Richard says…”

“Of course. Richard.” He was staring down at her from where he stood, speaking stiffly through pinched, whitish lips.

So much for that, he thought.

So much for telling his exciting news to the person he most wanted to tell it to.

How many times had he imagined… you see, I’m not such a scapegrace anymore, Mary.

Spoken modestly, of course, with an ironic twinkle… quite the responsible officer, don’t you know… even Wellington agrees, in fact he…

He’d been an idiot. He deserved whatever radical claptrap…

No, he didn’t.

He didn’t deserve to hear his government slandered.

Nor to hear whatever bloody Richard had to say.

It felt better to pace around a bit. Better being a relative term. It felt like hell.

She’d wrapped her shawl about herself and had begun her own pacing, in the half of the room nearest the fire.

Of course. She would take that half of the room, just as he’d become conscious that he was freezing, his hands in particular. Probably because there wasn’t much blood in them-nor in any of his limbs, his vital fluids having reasonably assumed they’d be needed elsewhere just about now. He thrust his fists into his waistcoat pockets so precipitously that a button popped off and rolled under the bed.

How many more damn buttons am I going to lose tonight?

He’d pick it up later; right now he didn’t relish the thought of scrabbling around on his knees while she vented her spleen at him.

For suddenly, they weren’t talking about politics at all. If you could even call what they were doing talking.

Lecturing. Hectoring. Reviving vicious old arguments and raking over horrid old events.

“Yes, it does still hurt,” she was saying. “Even after all this time. Of course it does. One doesn’t forget a husband’s cheating and lying, staying out nights whoring, and sometimes not coming home till noon. Not to speak of pretending to love me and then not touching me for weeks-as though I were… hideous, repulsive. After that first year when we’d been so happy-or so I’d believed.”

He’d thought that having popped into bed first-refreshing their memories, in a manner of speaking, with a taste of what they’d once had together-it would give them a kind of incentive to work out their differences. Ignore the difficult parts, at least for a while.

Lead with your strength. Any boxer in Britain could tell you that. Do what you’re best at.

No question what they’d always been best at.

Too bad it hadn’t worked out that way. For he loathed apologies and had hoped to avoid that part of it.

“I couldn’t touch you that time,” he said. “Well, you know why. I’d got a disease… Couldn’t touch anybody. I expect I should have explained it to you more carefully, the details, you know. But it made me shy, talking about that sort of thing to a lady…”

She’d sat down at the dressing table, her neck rising from the folds of the shawl. The back of a woman’s neck, he thought, a few bright chestnut curls nestled in the declivity at its center, was every bit as provocative as the parts people made more of a fuss about.

For a mad moment he imagined himself dragging her from the chair, tossing her onto the bed-solving their problems the easy way, by exercise of force. The thought rather repulsed him. Not that they hadn’t played at such things-and of course he knew plenty of men who felt it their right to impose themselves on a woman, as though to protect the public order. But no matter how infuriating she could be, he wasn’t one of those men. Nor would he be playing, if he tried to take her right now.

He peered over her shoulder, at her white face glaring up at him from the mirror.

“Yes, and when you did heal-isn’t it odd, Kit, how you were too shy to tell this lady that crucial detail, that you were quite well and… functioning again. He’s at White’s, I’d tell myself-or at the fives court watching the pugilists. He’s doing one of his gentlemen’s things that he suddenly needs to keep secret from me, these nights he stays out so late.”

When she spoke again her words fell heavy and dull as lead. “And so I had to find out for myself about that… actress, as I believe she called herself… hearing the news at Gunter’s, of all places, over my favorite… pistachio ice, from some ladies who didn’t think I was listening.”

The timbre of her voice grew stronger, burnished by irony now. “Let me amend that-from some ladies who must have known full well that I was listening.”

For she’d already borne some animosity from that particular set, whinnying like overbred mares in a paddock at whatever stupid joke had been making the rounds at White’s Club.

Better concentrate her fury on his slut of an actress. About whom, it seemed, he had the grace to evince a hint of discomfiture.

Or was that a trick of the light from the fire? He stood in front of it now, his hands (gracefully, elegantly-amazing that she could find them so at this moment) spread out to warm himself.

You don’t need the fire. Touch me instead. Here, where I’m so very warm. Her thighs trembled; she’d parted her legs without realizing it. She clamped them shut. Damn those absurd stray thoughts (if thoughts they could be called), tripping her up amid the worst of their arguments, disarming her before his next round of attack.

“That actress meant nothing, dammit, and you know it. And you were out too, quite often, in the afternoons, when I’d be, um, waking up. Gadding about with that swine Morrice…”

“He wanted to meet Sir Francis Burdett, who’d been Papa’s friend, and I was happy to do him the favor of presenting him to a circle of intelligent people. He’d had enough-as I expect I had too-of the imbecility that passes for talk in Mayfair and St. James. He was interested in learning…”

“About what mush-minded Jacobins thought? About what you thought?”

Politics again. Was there any more deadly combination, he wondered, than eros and politics?

“Please, Mary, the only thing Richard Morrice was interested in learning was what was under your skirts.”

She blinked at a sudden loud crash. Thunder and lightning: an unanticipated storm must have blown in from the Atlantic.

Nice to imagine so. Nice to delay acknowledging, for even an instant, that she’d hurled the bottle of Calvados at him.

Invigorating in its way.

She supposed it was relief she was feeling for not having hurt him. He’d leaped out of the way; the bottle had shattered against the mantel. Brandy was dripping down to the hearth, raising blue flames as though from a plum pudding and causing a ridiculously festive round of popping.

Well, he shouldn’t have said that about Richard. Though of course she and Richard shouldn’t have given him cause to say it. Not that they ever would have, if…

They were shouting at each other now.

It appeared that a part of her had wandered off into a corner of the room to witness their verbal sparring. Quite as though she were a spectator at a match between a pair of boxers.

A good, experienced couple of pugilists, each of them leading with a classic gambit.

“But he was my closest friend, Mary!”

“Rubbish! You’d begun ignoring him, quite as you were ignoring me! ”

Feinting, parrying, now; dancing on their feet, catching their breath while exchanging stupid, babyish insults. She’d never minded that he wasn’t much above medium height, but he minded terribly-he left her the opening; she took it. It was as easy a jab as ever. And he could always get to her about certain inadequacies in her toilette-damn him anyway, for making fun of the state of her undergarments.

Ah yes, and now the new moves they’d picked up during their years apart. The political vocabulary: Tory and radical. Habeas corpus. Treason.

“Danger in the countryside,” he said. “Sedition, even if your friends are too blind and naïve to see it.”

“Nonsense,” she snapped. “Just because your family has always and entirely opposed any extension of rights to the general populace doesn’t mean…”

They circled the ring, taking the time to repeat some of their earlier gambits. The actress… but I wouldn’t have looked at her, he was shouting, if you’d ever listened when… no, of course I didn’t try to explain it to her, why should I, she wasn’t my bloody damn wi-

“Nor would I be at this moment, if we lived in a civilized nation. If the law didn’t insist on considering the two of us one person-and you know very well which bloody one of us they mean. But I shall manage. I’ve managed thus far to live a quite reasonable and satisfying life; I shall continue to do so, and you can like it or… or lump it. England isn’t so small a country that we can’t both reside in it.”

But she must be running out of energy. She imagined a boxer staggering against the ropes. One final offensive, she thought-against him and against her own ambivalence.

“While as for being your wife-perhaps I shall give you cause to put an end to that.”

Had she scored a knockout blow?

The pity was that it never felt quite as good as you thought it would.

“Suit yourself, Mary,” he was saying. “I wish you well with your reasonable life. Of course, you never really did have the dash, the ton…”

Bits of glass crackled below the soles of his boots as he made his way to the door.

Had she meant to speak of the possibility of divorce?

Until this moment, it had remained only that-a distant and rather abstract possibility.

Not so distant now. She’d opened a Pandora’s box; the room seemed to swarm with nasty little winged things, with names like alienation of affections, bring suit, criminal conversation, Parliamentary divorce.

A legal nightmare and a public ordeal.

But at the end of it, she’d be free to marry a man she wouldn’t want to pitch things at.

She found that she was pacing again, between the fire and the window. I freeze, I fry, the old poets liked to say… Simple, not inaccurate, and not entirely unpleasant.

Her hands were icy, her breasts were warm… Dear Lord, her nipples were hard and erect as cherry stones, through the fabric, between her fingers.

She’d have to watch where she stepped, with all that glass on the floor. Too bad; she’d wanted to taste the brandy straight. They’d have drunk it by now. She’d have had his boots off by now. His boots, and probably more than that.

She ached from her thighs to her belly. And didn’t exactly mind it.

There hadn’t been a great many lovers in his absence. But those there had been, she’d chosen with great care, both for their attractions and their inability to upset her life’s precarious balance. Capable, intelligent, and always profoundly self-involved men: a painter, a married physician from Edinburgh, a Milanese patriot smarting under restored Hapsburg rule-each of them secure in his busy, substantial life, with his own passions, commitments, and obligations. The affairs had been discreet, satisfying, meticulously planned and administered. No point deceiving oneself that a liaison could be kept entirely secret; the important thing was to maintain a certain public esteem for social convention. In each case it had been she who’d ended the connection, and there’d never been bitterness or recrimination.

An impressive thing to have kept up over the years, and an exhausting one. Which was why, when Matthew Bakewell had announced that he wanted more from her, she’d been disposed to take him and his importunities seriously. And why it wasn’t a comfortable thing to find that her troublesome and entirely unmanageable husband could still make her feel so riotous and disorderly, so dazed, addled, lost, and distressingly exhilarated.

Too disordered to think any further about divorce; she’d wait until morning for that. Meanwhile, there was laudanum, put aside for strong megrims, and who could cause her a worse headache than Kit? No wonder Peggy had left the corked brown bottle so visible, with a glass of water right beside it.

Four careful drops, so distinct she could almost hear the tiny splashes they made: she watched the little dark clots of liquid spread, swirl, and attenuate, like feathery tiny clouds, before disappearing into the clear water.

She swallowed it down, threw off the rest of her clothes, slipped naked below the quilt, and-quickly and coldly, skillfully and purposefully-touched herself until she cried out. Until the aching became a burning, a hard white light easing to a warm orange glow, until the trembling stopped and the candle guttered and died and the visions faded, of blazing eyes and strong tapering hands, of pain and anger, disillusionment and rivalry-oh, and other visions, memories from youth, of things they’d done and things they hadn’t dared to try. The smell of lemon oil, warm, smooth cherrywood surface of a desktop, her face and breasts crushed against it. All subsiding now to a dull dark red, as though dimly painted upon the velvet insides of her eyelids. Ebbing, waning, flickering. Until she slept.