Beast (33 page)

Louise stopped, waiting to see what he wanted.

In just his shirt, he didn't look so… thick… Is that what she'd thought? That his broad chest hid a slight corpulence? It didn't. He was muscular. Heavy-muscled and rather fierce-looking in the flesh. He looked extraordinarily hale, except for the limp, which she realized for some reason hadn't been as bad as usual tonight. He appeared to have left his cane downstairs.

At length he said, "There is an adjoining room on the other side of those curtains." He nodded to a set of heavy, drawn draperies Louise had thought hid a window to the south. "My mother used it. The room isn't aired out or clean, but we can see to that tomorrow." He offered this flat-voiced, without a smile, without a trace of the graciousness she had come to associate with him. Then, as if purposely holding to this tenor, he asked, "So I can't sleep with you, and I apparently can't kiss you. What exactly am I allowed to do as your husband?"

Louise stood up and faced him, annoyed that he wouldn't let the matter rest, at least for the night. "This matter was discussed and concluded downstairs, I thought. Closed."

"I want to reopen it."

"Well, I don't see any reason to. Unless you intend I provide sexual services that I wouldn't give freely for some benefit you otherwise intend to withhold. Which would amount to blackmail, to my mind." She said the last, intending to reap an immediate and gentlemanly retreat, a quick denial. "Or a form of prostitution."

He only shrugged, a lift of his shoulders without unfolding his arms. "Call it whatever you will. I'm not here to argue. I'm here to remind you that, if your whims should ever include children, I can't see myself providing my half of the service, as you call it, like some sort of hot and cold running tap, without having something to say in the matter myself."

Louise frowned, unsure how to answer this. She offered, "Your pride is wounded. That's all. You will get over it."

He looked at her with that sullen, magnetic glare he could command, ugly yet mesmerizing. Like the fixed stare of a serpent. He repeated, "'That's all'?" then snorted. "If you knew the size of my pride, you would not dismiss it so easily." He shook his head, one quick, vehement negation. "I want to be understanding, but I'm telling you: This is not going to be easy for me to understand. I am wounded, yes. But I can't get over being furious as well. Quite frankly, sleeping with you
was
a pleasure I anticipated. And no small pleasure either. Not to put too fine a point on it, you are very beautiful."

Beautiful. She blinked. Perhaps if he had said
sweet
or at least acknowledged she'd been forthright…

He continued. "I can't watch you walk or your eyes glide over your surroundings, I can't notice the texture or color of your hair or the movement of your clothes that I am not aware of you as a woman.
My
woman." Or
my wife
, he said; the two were the identical word in French.

In either case, on top of everything else, the man was possessive, which Louise associated with
restrictive
. She said stiffly, "Yes, I gathered you were angry when you dumped everything from the table then attacked the potted palm."

He twisted his mouth and looked at her, as if his tongue reached for a back tooth. "So what do you propose?" he asked.

"We have already settled this."

"Yes, I thought we had too. But there was apparently a misunderstanding. I agreed you could sleep on a couch. I did not understand that to mean I could not so much as put my arm around you or my lips to your mouth."

Louise had played this game often and well, telling a man
no
and making it stick. One gave no quarter to a man who pushed. She said, "I won't discuss this. Just leave me alone for the time being."

"With your calling every shot?"

"It's my body we are discussing, I believe."

"How foolish of me. I thought we were discussing mine as well."

His display suddenly struck her. He'd come in here to show her. No coat, no vest, the open shirt. He was passably well-built.

No, that wasn't accurate. Louise slid her eyes down him. For a half-blind oaf, he bordered on the magnificent—in the way of those huge, Scottish draft horses. As if, with a good a harness on him, he could have pulled an eight-wheel wagon, wheels sucking and creaking, from the mud.

"Time," she said. "I am sure in time I shall be perfectly amenable to whatever you wish of me."

"What I wish is to be allowed to touch you. Now. Tonight. I don't necessarily want to sleep with you, if that is too much. But when I agreed to give you time, I wasn't agreeing to what you seem to be taking for granted. You have to come part of the distance, make an effort. I want to touch you,
give
pleasure as well as take it."

She pressed her lips together. He was not unattractive. This was a strange thing to realize. He wasn't handsome. There was even something quite horrid about him, if one stood at the right angle. Bui Charles Harcourt was so rivetingly peculiar to look at that, once the surprise of him wore off, one almost couldn't look away. And this translated into a draw of sorts. Attractive-repulsive. Then Louise felt strange for even acknowledging this, as if she were disloyal to think her husband interesting. Like a woman contemplating bigamy—with a man who happened to be handy and happened to remind her suddenly and profoundly of the man she wanted.

Her husband had her Charles's physique more than she'd imagined. Her own Charles had been lovely like this, his body vigorous and masculine. She missed him suddenly quite horribly, a strong lament for his gentle sureness, the way he listened, the way he accepted. His absence shot through her all at once with such emotional force she felt the room shift.

To Charles Harcourt, she said, "Well, you can't." She turned, agitated. "And don't mistake this for a negotiation. I won't bargain. You may not touch me unless I say you can, and for now I say you may not."

Silence.

He didn't leave, but at least he'd stopped arguing. Louise returned to straightening her sheet.

A moment later, a noise downstairs made them both turn their heads. It was a servant. No, several servants coming through the house. They had come home to sleep.

Without intending to, Louise cast an inquiring glance in the direction of the man in the doorway. The house staff was small, but large enough that sooner or later everyone in town would know that on the honeymoon night the bride and groom had gone their separate ways.

He watched her. narrowing the one eye he controlled completely, the other one more or less following suit. Then he said quietly, "I require your clothes."

She was momentarily nonplussed, then realized what he was suggesting. She joined him in unspoken conspiracy, gathering her dress and petticoats, her corset, underlinen and stockings from where she'd left them on the chair, a table, the floor. She took these over to him. then watched him run his hands through them, as if checking these were what he wanted. Then he tucked them in a bundle under his arm and walked back into his own room.

She followed the sight of him as far as the doorway, where she paused—her turn to stop, as if at a border to a hostile country.

His bedroom was spacious, not eye-catching so much as comfortable. Her bags sat at the edge still of a big feather bed, sunk down into its thick
eiderdown
beside a pile of pillows. Behind the pillows along the full length of the headboard ran a long, round bolster, a sleeping accoutrement to every French bed Louise had seen and what she could only imagine made every French neck awaken with a kink in it. The bed itself was uncanopied, just a solid old bedstead of dark wood with high endboards, graceful, simple, a heavy, old piece of furniture with a minimum of flutes and pediments. It was deep and boxy. Not so bad a bed, if there hadn't been an angry, lascivious man in it.

There was an armoire of similar dark wood, one side full of bronze pulls and knobs, the other a full-length mirror. Another large mirror on the opposite wall ran along a low, lengthy chest of drawers.

Marble-topped nightstands. A matching washstand, its marble with a crack through it. On the wall beside the washstand hung an odd piece: a sharp, curving blade that ended in a gold and silver cross-handle, a scimitar. An Arab weapon. She looked at Charles Harcourt again as he went to the washstand, turning his back to her. She scanned the breadth of him, the length, from his longish hair to his bare heels. In his bare feet, he was about the same height as her pasha. He had the right width of shoulders.

From the doorway, she asked in a language she hadn't spoken in two weeks, "Do you speak English?"

In the small mirror over the washstand, his reflection came up to look at her. He paused, as if the question itself were incomprehensible. Then he answered in two syllables that took a moment to recognize. "Nah tooell."

Louise frowned. She remembered reading his letters in English. They were short, but perfect. She tilted her head, studying his dark crown in the mirror—he'd bent over the washbowl again. She supposed, there were people who could write in French yet did not speak it. Or preferred not to.

Then he turned, and Louise drew back, alarmed: He set a razor behind him onto the washstand, while he held his thumb up. It was bleeding, sliced intentionally, deeply enough that a bright red bubble oozed, then ran slowly down the inside of his wrist.

After which, gravity changed its course: He extended his hand over the bed. A bright red drop fell onto a sheet as he pulled back the bedclothes. Louise was transfixed by the sight as he dripped blood into the sheets—four, five, then six dark droplets on snowy white linen.

"We wouldn't want anyone to think you weren't a virgin," he told her in throaty Southern French. The sarcastic pull to his mouth said, in any language, he thought she was not.

Staring at the sheets, Louise asked in a French murmur, "Is this what it looks like?"

"No." he said. "It is messier, lighter: mixed with the man's seed. Though I haven't the heart to do what it would take in order to fake that as well, I'm afraid."

Louise lowered her gaze to her own feet. "Have you known many virgins?"

"Oh, hundreds," he said. He noisily shook the covers.

Something in his voice, even in French, made her look at him and ask, "When you came back from the States, what ship did you come home on?"

"Pardon me?"

"Which ship?"

"The
Aubrignoise
. Why?"

She didn't know why. She shook her head as she looked down again, shaking off a brief, eerie disquiet.

It made no sense, what she imagined.

So desperate, she thought: to turn the man she had ended up with into the man that she loved. And this was the problem, of course. Love. Never mind that she wasn't supposed to have loved her friend on the ship to begin with. Never mind he was gone. Love didn't seem to respond to permission. Or even absence. Never mind that adults played this way. Like a silly schoolgirl, she had lost her head and now couldn't find it again. She couldn't stop thinking of him.

Thus she made up unlikely scenarios, inventing similarities, mentally trying out nonsensical hypotheses, for no better reason than to make the Charles she'd married into the Charles she loved. Stupid, she thought. Don't be stupid; don't be childish.

The Charles she had ended up with said, "Such is life."
C'est la vie
. "My favorite shirt, lost to love."

Louise frowned at this reiteration of her own thoughts, then watched him smear his cut thumb down his own shirttail.

Love, she thought. What did he know about it? This unsightly man who had married a conspicuously beautiful woman he hardly knew.

She found herself saying, "I'm sorry. For everything. It is not as if I don't understand your… your position."

He looked up from her chemise he had tossed to the floor. "You couldn't even begin to," he said.

"Well, I appreciate at least that there is no name-calling or bullying or threats," she added hopefully, "or silly retaliations. Thank you for being"—
What
? she wondered—"gracious, of sorts."

"I don't know where you got the idea that I'm going to be gracious." He stared humorlessly at her. While being as gracious as a man could be under the circumstances, all but heroic in fact, from cutting himself to draping her clothes around his room.

Louise said, "Well, thank you for your candor then. And your gentlemanly regard for my wishes."

He made an indignant grunt. "Listen, dear"—é
coute, chérie
—"don't thank me for what neither one of us is sure you're going to have. Now, get out of here, before my 'gentlemanly regard,' as you call it, is shown to be what it is: salvaged pride—that might insist at any moment on having something, anything to breathe a little life back into it."

Charles was up all night, finally settling out on his bedroom balcony, where he stared at the moonlit balcony across the courtyard, the balcony of the bedroom that would become his wife's tomorrow. The two rooms were at right angles, separated internally by the sitting room, externally by a courtyard with a white oak, a huge jasmine vine wedged into the niche at the bend in the building.

He sat outside in the September night air, wearing trousers and a long frock coat and nothing else, his chest cold, but he was too lazy or moody or something to get up and get enough clothes to make himself comfortable. With his bare heels balanced on the railing, he rocked back on two chair legs as he tossed small oblong acorns, windfall from an overhead branch: seeing how many he could get to hit the closed-up window boards of the room across the courtyard.

Grand, Charles, he told himself.
Thwap
, a hit. Married ten hours and separated already. God, even his parents had lasted longer than this.
Thwap, thwap
. And so clever of you to tell her advice more or less culled from the Kama Sutra.
Wait until a woman has enough interest
… Not only, this way, did it become a neat, backhand slap of his face, but it also made his wife sound well-versed in quasi-intellectual erotica. Maybe next time a dirty verse or two of "Will You Come Up to Limerick?"