A Passionate Girl (49 page)

In the modest center hall, Jonathan Stapleton gestured to facing portraits. One was of a powerfully built man with an exceptionally strong face. The other was of a petite dark-haired, bright-eyed woman. “My mother's great-grandparents,” he said. “He's my namesake. Jonathan Gifford. He was Anglo-Irish, from Dublin. That's his wife, Caroline. He was a British officer before the Revolution. Resigned from the army and settled here and went with the Americans.”

“Does this mean the Stapletons have Irish blood?” I asked lightly.

“I suppose so,” he said with a brief smile. “We'll have to swear you to secrecy.”

Upstairs, Jonathan Stapleton led me to the front bedroom, with its magnificent view of the sea. “This will be yours,” he said. “I'll be across the hall. We can enjoy the view together.”

His words, his manner, stirred desire in my flesh. He wanted to share more than the view. As did I. Rawdon burst in on us, restoring propriety. “Let's go for a hike on the beach!” he shouted.

“We old folks are too tired from our train trip,” I said. “You go and tell us what you find.”

“You're a couple of layabouts!” he said, and charged downstairs. From the window, we watched him race boyishly down the drive toward the water. “That's the first time I've seen him in a good humor since I came home,” Jonathan Stapleton said.

“There's something hopeful about this house,” I said. “With the sea open before us.”

“People were happy here,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “Perhaps they've left echoes behind them.”

“Were you among the happy?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said with a sad nostalgic smile.

“Can you not be happy again?”

“I'm afraid I never had the knack. The happiness was created by others. Especially my brother Charlie. He had the gift of laughter. Of seeing the lighter side of things. Unfortunately, he laughed at everything—responsibility, hard work, women, morality.”

He paused for a long pregnant moment. “Rawdon has an amazing resemblance to Charlie—”

“All the more reason to love him.”

“Charlie was heart and soul on the rebel side of the argument. He died in Cuba hoping to make the island a Southern state. It was to be the first step to a Southern Caribbean empire.”

I sensed—no, better, I
knew
—he was confessing a deep dislike of Charlie that was entangled with a demoralizing love. Here was the real source of his antagonism to Rawdon, his fear that the boy was morally contaminated.

“How terrible. But—it's all past. Charlie's dead along with the South's dreams of glory. The sea is like the future—open to you, to all of us.”

“Perhaps.”

“You should venture out on it—for Rawdon's sake as well as your own.”

He gazed intently at me for a moment. I was sure he was going to say,
And for your sake as well
. I sensed his wish to say it. I was certain in that moment he longed for me as I longed for him.

“Will you stay the night?” I asked.

“There's no train back.”

“Good,” I said. “We can be happy for a few hours, at least.”

Those penetrating gray eyes studied me for another long moment. Was he reading my very soul? “We can try,” he said.

After a delicious dinner of clams and oysters from Raritan Bay, followed by roast duck, shot only a few weeks ago as he winged south over the marsh, we retired to the south parlor and Jonathan Stapleton announced we were going to play “The Checkered Game of Life.” He got down from a cupboard a brightly colored board that had attached to it a teetotum—a spinning arrow, whose point came to rest on a set of numbers from one to six. The board was covered with squares denoting various crises and experiences as well as traits of character. The goal was to get from Infancy in the lower left-hand corner to Serene Old Age in the upper right-hand corner. The teetotum delivered to the player with each spin the number of moves he could make, and in which direction.

It was great fun as well as productive of serious thoughts. The creator of the game had no illusions about America or life itself. If you landed on Influence, you leaped across the board to “Fat Office.” The next spin of the teetotum could be fatal for the fat-office holder because it might land him on Ruin, which was very near. This pitched him back to the beginning. Bravery sent you to Honor, Industry sent you to Wealth, but neither advanced you toward the ultimate goal. Cupid sent a player to Marriage, which was also a backward step. There were the disasters of Jail, Disgrace, and Suicide to be avoided as well as the bad habits of Idleness and Intemperance.

I won every game we played. Jonathan Stapleton came close to beating me once, when he reached Success, just below Serene Old Age. But his next spin was a three, which forced him to move diagonally back to Bravery, which in turn sent him back to Honor, very near the beginning. Rawdon was even more unlucky. He had a fatal tendency to land on Disgrace and Intemperance, and he never once landed on Perseverance, which shot you all the way across the board to Success. Eventually he grew disgruntled and quit the game.

“I think you're a couple of cheaters,” he said.

“That is no way to talk to Miss Stark—or to me,” Jonathan Stapleton growled.

“'Twas the luck of the Irish,” I said. “I'll share some of it with you.”

I drew him to me for a firm kiss. He stepped back, half smiling. He wiped his hand across his mouth, and for a moment I wondered if he was responding with more than boyish thoughts. “I think it's past your bedtime, young man,” I said.

Rawdon confessed he was sleepy and went to bed. The Littlepages, mother, daughter, and Abner, had long since departed. Jonathan Stapleton said he felt the need of some exercise. He asked me if I would join him in a walk along the shore. We found an almost full moon riding high above the bay. The night wind was cool but easily repelled by my gray cloak. The general wore his old army cloak, which he left open to the wind.

We walked for almost an hour, he guiding me over numerous rocks and logs in the path. Each time he took my hand, I felt something flow between us that quickened my heart and pulse. As we walked he told me the story that had come down to them from his maternal great-grandmother, Katherine Rawdon. She had lived through the American Revolution and recalled how her stepfather, Jonathan Gifford, had fallen in love with Caroline Kemble, the mistress of Kemble Manor, even though she was married to the wife of his best friend. The latter had remained loyal to the king and fled to British lines for protection. Caroline chose the American side.

“The old lady made a romance out of it,” Jonathan said. “She had Gifford tricked into coming down here one night on the pretext that someone was breaking into the house, and Caroline Kemble, taking the initiative, telling him she loved him—and saw no point in waiting for a clergyman to prove it.”

“Do you think it happened that way?”

“I don't know. I haven't thought about it for a long time.”

“I don't think it's impossible. Women are not such passive creatures as you men like to think.”

“My mother certainly was not passive. My father found that out a hundred times.”

“A woman in a revolution—in a great upheaval—may decide love is more important than respectability.”

He stopped to search out some landmarks on the moonswept moor. “We'd better turn around,” he said. “We'll soon be halfway to Shrewsbury.”

Our return journey was not so pleasant. Clouds began to scud before the moon, and the wind developed a cutting edge. “It will storm before morning,” he said.

I was trembling violently with the cold by the time we reached the manor house. He flung logs on the dying fire and declared that the only remedy was some brandy from the wine cellar. “This belonged to the original Jonathan,” he said as he uncorked it. “He kept a tavern not far from here. That was a respectable business in those days. Before the Irish came over and gave it a bad name.”

“What a pity that there's this bad feeling between the Irish and the Americans. They're natural allies, both with such good reasons to oppose the English.”

“It's the low types that came over in the late forties and fifties that gave you a bad name,” he said as he poured the liquor. “Of course we except Protestants like you. It's the Catholics that we dislike. It's hard to respect people who let priests and popes run their lives.”

“Yes,” I said.

I spread my cloak before the fire and sat down, holding up the brandy to let the flames glow through it. “Let's drink to ancient Ireland, before there were priests and politics to divide us.” I said.

He sat down beside me and raised his glass before the fire in the same way. “To ancient Ireland,” he said.

We drank off the strong liquor. Age had soothed its bite and deepened its strength. I felt fire run through my whole body.

“The women of ancient Ireland were like your ancestor, Caroline,” I said. “They, too, sought out their men. The old books are full of stories of queens riding on white horses to invite great warriors into their beds.”

“Did they find happiness?” Jonathan asked.

“For a while. But Ireland had a way of withering it, alas. I'm thinking of the greatest of them, Dierdre. In the end she became Dierdre of the Sorrows, an image of her sad tormented country.”

“Is that why you came to America?” he asked.

“You yourself said it. There's hope here. A future as open as that sea.”

A wind that might have risen out of Ireland beat on the windows. The fire blazed, turning our faces and hands golden. Jonathan was on his elbow, staring into the flames as he must have done in a thousand camps in his four years of war. He looked up at me. “I begin to wish I could share that American future with you,” he said.

“Let us at least share the happiness in this house.”

I pressed my lips against his dry, aching mouth. With a sigh that was almost a groan, he gathered me into his arms. His kiss was harsh, almost angry, full of terrible need. Without another word he picked me up and mounted the stairs to his bedroom. There, with great shafts of moonlight on the floor and the sea wind beating on the windows, he made me—I hoped, I wished, I prayed—his American bride.

His entering me was both a real and a mystical thing. I also entered him, almost crying out with the joy of a blind wish fulfilled. Wrapped within each other's arms we journeyed into the darkness of our opposite selves, all things melting, male and female, age and youth, flesh and spirit, faith and doubt, ancient Ireland and new America. He was a tunnel down which I groped to a world of new hope and fresh promise. I was a bower in the field, a secret cavern in the mountain, where magical refreshment awaited the warrior.

It was violent and brief, that first time, dominated by his need, tormented by the terrible historic voice that haunted him even as he possessed me. I felt the dryness, the harshness, of him—until the great pounding release that lifted me up on a flood of joy, on a river of fire. The youth, the life, that was locked within him cascaded into me, and I returned it to him through my lips, my fingertips, the nipples of my breasts, the throbbing rise of my belly, the pulse of my thighs. We were one being and my heart was ripped open, defenseless with a love that abandoned all caution, all rules of survival, that mocked danger and embraced the future. I really believed that we were entering a new country, that together we were finding the power to change a world. This indeed was happening, but it was a country of the heart, a world that existed outside time.

I would not, I could not, think about this uneasy truth that night. Perhaps he did. It was harder for him to free himself from the grip of time, responsibility, reality. He wanted to take me to my room almost as soon as it was over, but I would not let him make it a furtive, guilty thing. I refused to leave him. “You're mine as long as the moon is high,” I said. “We're equals here, in the house of happiness. That is all I ask or expect.”

I pressed my body against him and sealed those words with a long, deep kiss. We begn to make love again, slowly, tenderly, with less of need and more of sweet sensual caring, of seeking and finding and exchanging new pleasure in every touch and turn and caress, in every soft lingering kiss. This time I felt the slow gathering of his desire, I felt him possessing it, controlling it, using it to turn me from queen to servant to woman to queen again, into laughing sighing pleasure into May in December into the sunlit sea on the back of a great white horse springing from wave to wave toward the vast shining horizon.

Yes! My love, my love, yes you are with me and I am with you there is no part of the sea or sky that we cannot reach—

In the darkness—in the sweet trembling moonlit darkness—

O my love, I am there with you again as I write this, so many long years after that night.

At last the moonlight dwindled to a single patch on the ceiling and vanished. I left him with a final kiss and gathered the clothes that lay beside the bed and went naked back to my own room while the house shook in the rising wind. In our separate beds we watched the dawn bring a storm of cold gray rain. It was a kind of omen, a commentary on the summer world we were creating in the face of winter.

At breakfast we met each other as ordinary mortals once more. We discussed train schedules and food supplies and decided to let Rawdon subscribe to New York newspapers to replace the Hamilton ones he read at Bowood. Behind our commonplace words we watched each other with eyes forever changed. I sensed he wondered what I expected from him now. That wary sadness was in charge of his spirit once more, but it had received a challenge from something deeper in him, the youth that early responsibility and a puritanical wife and hovering mother had denied him. He could never go back to that gloomy defeated self, as long as I was here to look him in the face.

He asked me to ride to the station with him, ostensibly to arrange for the delivery of the New York papers. We left Rawdon unpacking his toy soldiers. Abner Littlepage, swathed in oilskins, brought a closed carriage to the door. In its dark interior, with rain beating on the windows, Jonathan took my hand in an almost mournful way, as if we were going to a funeral.

“What shall we do?” he said. “What shall we do now?”

“I told you last night. I ask nothing, I expect nothing.”

“Why? Why should you take all the risk and I—”

“Women have been doing that since time began.”

He laughed harshly. “When I married, there was a contract, two pages long, specifying who would get what.”

“You could still have been happy, if you loved each other.”

“I don't believe in it. Not for me, anyway.”

“Love.”

“Yes. I should. I saw men die because they loved their country. But this kind of love—”

“You think you don't deserve it.”

“Perhaps.”

The carriage rocked and rumbled. The rain splattered against the sides. “Let me give you an Irish poem to recite,” I said.

He laughed briefly, uncertainly. “I like that,” he said.

A moment later he grew serious again. “We must trust each other,” he said. “I'm not by nature trusting.”

“No, love each other. If we do that, all else will follow. For as long as we want it to follow.”

He looked out at the long arms of the marsh grass, thrashing wildly in the rain and wind. “Here in your kingdom of the heart that's possible. But up ahead, the real world begins.”

I flung myself against him, pressing my face against his damp cloak. I breathed the battle smoke, the bitter residue of a thousand campfires that was in it. “I've had enough of the real world for a while. So have you. So has Rawdon.”

He said nothing. But I felt his hand in my hair. Then he began to whisper:

In the distance, a railroad engine shrieked a warning. The storm beat maledictions on us, but we were safe within each other's arms. All will be well, I vowed. All will be well.