Beast (24 page)

"You should have answered the door."

"I couldn't."

"Why not?"

After a pause, "Because I was in the water closet throwing up my din—"

"Oh, shut up." She cut him off. Like a tantrum, the words welled, overflowed. "I don't want to hear anymore reasons why you can't be with me, now or later. Just shut up." With a bounce of springs, she sat down on the bed beside him, then settled against his back.

After a moment and a small, fighting dig through the covers she found his hand. Taking it, she made him roll enough that she could bend it at the elbow and press it to her breast. She simply held it there.

The two of them sat like this, until the sound of their breaths settled into a kind of labored harmony—two people worked up over something, a duet of sorts. Tentative. Watchful. Waiting.

For Louise, the guarded silence grew dense, filled with unspoken emotions. She knew what he would say, what he thought: that she was infatuated with him, nothing more. He would tell her this, if she so much as mentioned… other, stronger feelings. And he was wise. He was experienced, quite, quite smart in these matters. He was probably right.

So she wasn't in love, but what was he in? she wanted to know. He struck her as too sophisticated, too jaded, something, for infatuation. Yet
he
eventually pulled her hand to his mouth.
He
kissed her wrist then lay it against his chest, covering the back of her hand with his palm. He was angry she was here, angry at the lengths to which her willfulness could drive her. yet
he
forgave enough to relax and let her stay without another word.

Indeed, Charles lay wordless with inexpressible enchantment for her hand spread flat upon his chest. His knee throbbed, but it didn't matter. Louise stayed for an hour, her presence the sweetest consolation he had ever known.

She didn't say much. For a change. She merely said, as she stood to go, that her father expected her to be ready, bright and early, in the morning for a healthful walk about the deck. She had to get some sleep.

She kissed Charles's fingers, one at a time, then put his hand back onto the sheets.

"Tell housekeeping," she said, "when they come tomorrow, to leave your door unlocked when they go. I will let myself in. I nearly broke my leg leaping over that railing. You're right—" She laughed, though a little despondently. "Heights are more interesting in romantic concept than in the reality of leaping over them." She added in words that began strongly—"What a fall"—then trailed off to hardly more than a hoarse whisper at the back of her throat—"what a very long fall."

Reality. They shot forward into it at twenty-six knots, the days seeming to slide beneath Louise's feet with the speed of the ocean rushing against the hull of the liner. The last evening, gulls appeared, chasing and diving in the kitchen refuse as it was dumped overboard. Louise watched for a long time from the taffrail as these land birds gulped up nautical miles while drafting in the tailwind of the ship.

Infatuation, romantic preoccupation, she thought, these things dragged like an anchor she needed to cut.

Yet she knew where she would be tonight at the first opportunity: in Charles's lightless, curtained suite, inside the hollow of his arms. She would not give him up one minute sooner than she had to.

She watched the sun set into the water. It sank into a neat part of waves that spread out and out from the ship to become a gentle V of rolling wake. Farther out. these waves settled back into the vast, smooth sea that could swallow up even the sun. Behind the ship at the horizon was only this, an ocean as calm as if they had never sailed upon it. fading into night. Louise feared this was what was happening also to herself, that as wonderful as she felt on this ship recently, any change, the openness, the stirring maturity she had grasped for a moment was slipping through her fingers like water, as unclaimable as westward ocean disappearing behind a swift eastward bound ship.

Once again, she felt her old sense of everything happening too fast, events moving too swiftly for her to get a clear, defining perspective on them.

Fast. Full tilt. They were making good time; they made up for lost time. Everyone else was joyous. Out here in the open, Louise began to feel friendless and numb. It was an old familiar feeling; she hated it. But she needed it, if she wished to walk without reluctance straight off the gangplank and down the path she herself had always planned to follow.

That last night. Charles sat and waited for her. He had draped his bed's counterpane over the window, making the dark in his room fairly black again. He had mounded the rest of the covers over his leg so that the whole lower part of his body was impossible to find. He'd put his cane into the closet and literally hopped into bed to await Louise's arrival.

She came late, after one in the morning, in full evening dress. Satin and pearls and smelling divine. Her shadow was surprisingly tall as she sat beside him, until he realized her hair was piled high on her head, some sort of artful arrangement of feathers and a swept-up roll of curls. "Captain's table, high festivity."

she explained to him. Charles tried to imagine traveling on this ship with her, sitting at the captain's table by her side in the light. Then this formal creature shushed and scooted and squirmed backward to settle into the crook of his arm, where she became his Louise again, sufficient unto herself, smelling grassy and nubile. She leaned her silky head onto his shoulder as the two of them rested back into the pillowed darkness, and he didn't care about anything else.

They argued briefly over his "stomach illness." But he would let her do nothing, say nothing to anyone—no doctor, no medicine, no home remedies—for a stomach that felt secretly fine. She gave up.

They wandered into conversational limbo, talking of nothing, everything, anything. She told him about her trip to Montreal and the money she'd won there. She gambled, with some success apparently. With amusement, Charles heard all about what she and her family were trying to keep from the ignorant groom. Her "tendency to roam" didn't bother him, since he believed his home would not provide the same motivations that sent her off from her own. The gambling, however, might be something to watch, at first at least, since Monte Carlo was the closest large neighboring town to the east.

Finally Charles said, "Tomorrow. You embark tomorrow on this adventure of marriage and France. Are you happy about it?"

"No," she said simply. Her head lay back on his shoulder, her cheek in the curve of his neck.

"Louise," he said, "this husband. I know you've been told he's ugly, but perhaps he's not as ugly as they say."

"I hate when you do this."

He sighed and grew still. "What am I doing'?"

"Acting as if I were ten."

"Well, there are young women who would be affected by all the talk of a man's appearance, who might let that influence their first—"

"Oh, shut up. I'm not one of them." She lifted forward out of his arms, as if she could turn and face him.

Her shadowy silhouette put the flat of her hand on his chest. "I'm not a ninny," she continued. "The only people who have said these things are those who have something to gain by slighting the Prince d'Harcourt. I'm sure he's fine."

What a relief to hear this.

"It's just—"

"What?"

"Well, he's not you."

Charles blinked, caught himself, then coughed—for fear of laughing. For fear of crying—how absurdly his ruse circled back on him at times. Its ironies were silly. They were funny. They were terrifying.

"Are you all right?" She patted his back.

"Yes, yes"—sputter—"I'm fine." When he could talk again without sounding giddy, he told her, "You must let go of what we've had here, get on with your life—"

"There you go again. I'm not a child, Charles. I know what I must do."

And there in the dark, he was stymied again, silenced by a combination of the masterful conviction in her voice and her use of his given name, always in the right inflection, now from a slightly condescending plane. She had a way about her, a confidence, a competence that was simply astounding for someone so young. After a few seconds, he murmured, "It's just that I am worried about you." More honestly, he admitted, "And a little bit about this fellow you are to marry. I feel as if I have done something horrible to him, when I didn't intend to."

"I know." She waited, then said, "I shall give him a fair chance. Don't worry. We'll be fine."

"Well, I can't tell you what a relief it is to hear how mature you're being about tomorrow." He added,

"And the rest of your future."

She didn't respond. Nothing. Not a word. After a minute, he thought, despite her hauteur and bravado, he heard a catch in her breath. "Louise." he said, "you're not crying, are you?"

"No," she said instantly. "I never cry. What would be the point of it?"

Exactly. She was a strong, healthy young woman, capable of recovering from a preempted love affair.

Moreover, he didn't plan on giving her any other choice.

Some joke
, Charles thought.

It was supposed to have made him laugh, but it only made him wonder as he threw shirts and trousers into his suitcase the next morning. (He had already wrapped his gallibiya and kaffiyeh into a tight ball and thrown them into the ocean.) Who on God's earth would imagine that in five days he could have formed such an attachment to his own unfaithful soon-to-be-wife?

What a dilemma. He should shoot her. He should be furious. Yet he was in thrall. He adored this girl, his Louise, so much he grew lightheaded when he thought about it. And, poor beast, he longed for nothing so much as that his affection be returned.

Some joke indeed. He would have given all the ambergris in the ocean if only he had not begun it. Or if only he could imagine that this fierce and lovely creature would forgive him for it. No, the only solution was to start again. If she loved him now, which he thought she might, she could fall in love with him all over again in France. He would start clean, fresh. He would make every possible effort. He would woo her like no woman had been wooed before. They would recapture this. He was sure they could. Couldn't they? This wasn't a myth, a miracle. It was real. It would happen again because of the substance to it.

Ambergris exists in not more than one whale among thousands.

Charles Harcourt, Prince d'Harcourt

On the Nature and Uses of Ambergris

Early the next morning, Louise was dressed and packed far ahead of the rest of her family, so she slipped away to pass by Charles's rooms. All she found though were the maids cleaning them out. bags and buckets standing in the hallway. From the door, Louise could tell by the breeze that every window was open. When she peeked in. every drapery was drawn back. The sitting room was streaming with sunlight. Louise stepped into the room, taking a good look for the first time at a place in which she had spent hours yet had never seen.

The suite was amazingly sterile. The expected art hung on the wall, predictably good without being wonderful. The furniture was solid, in a taste designed to impress without giving offense. The pieces, on the whole, were Western: no hookah, no silk pillows, no curtains or tents in the desert. Moreover, there was not. anywhere, a single personal belonging or hint that a human had made the sitting room or the dining room or the little room off to the side a temporary home place. In the bedroom, a maid stared up at Louise when she walked in. The bed was stripped, a bare, satin-ticked mattress.