Beast (4 page)

Quick as lightning, however, a rather large fan came out. It rapped him on the knuckles loud enough that Charles heard the crack and saw the young officer jerk his hand away, clutching the back of it.

The young man exclaimed, "By heaven, Miss Vandermeer, you quite nearly broke my fingers!"

Free of him, she trotted around and climbed up the first half-dozen steps where she turned and sat—sending a voluminous, shushing billow of silk and ruffles to flop through the spaces between the foot treads, directly onto Charles's bare shoulder and arm. He caught his breath—holding in a deep, pleasing intake, floral-scented. Then he quickly had to remove his own hand from the step or she would have put her sweet little feet right down onto his fingers.

The smell of her settled like a little cloud at his shoulder. She wore a jasmine perfume with hints of acacia and clover, one of the more elegant jasmine blends, though a bit too clustered in the middle range of notes to be perfect. Belvienne's of Paris. All this registered in an instant without effort, then became complicated. There was something more, something separate. The scent of real jasmine. There was distinctly about the girl, her dress, her entire person, the faint smell of the fresh flower itself, not the attar or perfume but something light, layered, harmonic, the sort only nature could produce, reminiscent of late summer when the blossoms themselves were piled waist-high on the floor of Charles's factory, ready to be spread on cloth frames soaked in oil. Then she bent her head forward, and the sharp, unearthly light from below shot up the back of her to reveal the explanation: Tucked into the neat shadows of very fair hair were small white stars, fairer still, of
Jasminum

simplicifolium
. This little constellation of flowers trailed down the back of a rolled chignon; it intertwined the knots of the gown's dropped shoulders.

The young man, meanwhile, had swung round the handrail and climbed a step or two. He placed one arm on the bulwark wall, cornering her this time on the stairway.

"You almost broke my fingers," he insisted.

She let out light laughter, a sound that up close had a cool nuance to it. "No, I didn't," she said. "I know precisely how hard I hit you. It wouldn't have broken a finger, though I'm sure it smarted."

The young officer was annoyed by this response. "Well," he said, "don't use that thing on me again."

She leaned her shoulders back against the step at Charles's ear. "Then don't grab me when I don't want you to. You keep your hands to yourself, Lieutenant Johnston, and you shall walk away tonight with your knuckles intact."

Heedless of this warning, the young lieutenant leaned forward, putting his knee into her copious skirts as he bent his elbows. He pressed forward, an attempt to kiss her. Then pulled suddenly back. Or more accurately was pushed back. Charles could just see past a round, bare shoulder to where the girl's extended arm, aided by the fan again—held straight out not unlike a bayonet—put the fellow at more than arm's length. The lieutenant looked down at the thing poking him in the chest.

His face rose to hers again as he murmured inscrutably, "Don't be a fool."

She only laughed.

He countered earnestly, "He's a devil."

"Yes, you have implied as much all evening."

The young officer made a kind of violent guffaw. "Ha. Well, I won't imply any longer. I'll speak plainly.

Harcourt is an abominable fellow…"

Harcourt? Miss Vandermeer
? Charles frowned.

twisting his head around to scowl past a lot of silk and shadows in the general direction of the young man on the other side of the stairway.

"… a lame devil who's quick to anger…"

Like the creak from a dark dungeon door, Charles sensed his vanity stir.

The young idiot went on. "Ask anyone who will be frank. He's blind in one eye and eerie to look at in the other. He walks with a limp. And he's aged. He's twice your age at least."

Tie most certainly was not aged. Nor was he twice her age (though last year he would have been)

. The girl's age had been one of Charles's own reservations to the marriage. He had never particularly liked eighteen-year-old girls, not even when he was eighteen. Time, however, would fix this particular shortcoming on her part. Though how to fix a babbling simpleton who wooed at another man's expense…

"… and when he's angry, which is often, he bellows like a banshee at everyone…"

No, sometimes, he simply saw to it that young lieutenants lost their commissions on luxury liners

—
to be sent into Antarctica on a dredge
.

"… he's vindictive and confrontational…"

Of all the stupid… and from an impudent imbecile who couldn't so much as get a kiss from a silly
young girl.

When the silly young girl laughed at this tirade, however, Charles caught a trace of something in her mirth that the lieutenant didn't seem to suspect: a savviness along with a possible note of disdain.

"… he dresses like some fantastical peacock, as if he were something to behold, which he is." The young man made a sound of disgust. "He's hideous…"

Charles gritted his teeth and enjoyed the image of his own "hideous" hand reaching out from between these steps to grab this fellow by his throat—when Miss Vandermeer came up with her own kind of strangle. She said, "And let me guess: You're my answer. You want to 'husband' me in his stead, at least for the night?"

The lieutenant made a sound, a sputter. He couldn't respond for a moment. "Well, of course, er, no—"

He cleared his throat. "Well, yes, though I. ah, was truly offering marriage."

Her laughter this time—two abrupt syllables that sounded as if they came from someone far older than her years—mocked him openly. "You're proposing I run off with a ship's junior officer based on an evening's acquaintance?"

"Well, yes, I, ah, assumed…" For a moment, he was lost in this conversation, then reentered it with almost comic solemnness: "Miss Vandermeer: I saw you; I adored you. You've come out here with me.

Don't you believe in love at first sight?"

"No, I don't believe in love at all," she said flatly.

This didn't stop him. He took a liberty. "Louise," he said, "look at yourself. You are lovely beyond imagining, more than lovely…" The nincompoop was literally without words for a second. Then he uttered with ridiculous reverence. "You are divine. A man like Harcourt. why the fiend—"

"Oh, stop." she said. "I know who Charles Harcourt is, and he will make a wonderful husband for me."

This gave both Charles and the young man pause.

The young ship's officer standing above in the light neither said nor did anything further; he was stymied.

While the man beneath the steps was merely disturbed. The girl's assertion, though vaguely pleasing, held an irony in its context—since she was saying it to a young man she had laughingly led out into the dark, where the two of them now sat alone. Or almost alone.

The three of them watched the rough sea for a moment as it commanded their attention, only Charles aware of their odd togetherness: the way they each, two men and a woman, leaned and angled their bodies similarly to counter the ocean's careless tossing, up then down, of their bodies, of their separate concerns. He thought he heard wrong at first when he heard a tiny murmur.

Almost inaudibly, as if to no one in particular, her voice asked, "Is he really lame?"

"Yes," said the young man firmly.

No
, Charles wanted to defend.
I limp sometimes, only sometimes, and when I do, I use a very
elegant cane
. He realized at that moment—a humbling piece of timing—that his knee in fact had begun to hurt, that it was becoming stiff, due either to the dampness or a barometric drop. As the ship took its next plunge downward, he had to brace his hand on the nearest support—a lower step.

"That's funny," she murmured, "my parents didn't tell me this." She added, "Though they did mention that the Prince d'Harcourt was not classically handsome."

"He's ugly," said the lieutenant's low, vehement voice.

Charles grumbled inwardly and pressed his lips together.

As they ploughed into the next wave, the girl adjusted herself on her seat of steps. Something moved at Charles's fingers. Her dress was caught under his grip. In stabilizing himself, he had latched on to a piece of her hem.

She doubled over her own knees and jerked on the fabric.

He let go immediately.

"What's wrong?" asked the man above.

"Nothing. My dress caught on something."

The two of them bent down into their own shadows, heads together. They pulled at her now puzzlingly free skirts. From this position, the lieutenant must have pressed his face an inch closer, for a moment later—the reason for the mysterious catch of her dress left moot—he was kissing her.

She sighed softly and sat back, tipping her head up. This time she gave in to his advance, letting him knead her bare shoulders as he kissed her mouth.

The young man knew success for about ten seconds—ten chagrined seconds wherein Charles's irritation shifted from a meddling junior ship's officer to a callow, unimaginative girl whom, lame devil that he was, he seemed to have offended, sight unseen.

Charles's vanity whispered through the dark, its hot breath fanning this offense.
I am glorious
, it said.

Not to be judged by ordinary standards. I am fabulous to look upon, wonderful to see, unique
. His wrath grew hot. My God. here was his intended, the woman to whom he expected to give his name, properties, position, and all the respect attached, every consideration, and what was she doing? Why, emitting little throaty sounds all but into his ear as she kissed someone else, a total stranger she'd met on the ship on the way to her wedding.
The little tart. The floozy
.

Hang my own explanations
! Charles thought. Let explanations fall where they may. starting with hers.

She could damn well account for why and what exactly she was doing out here. (Where were her parents anyway?) He was about to step out from under the companionway.

Then the poor, bungling lieutenant arched back slightly, drew his arms forward, and grabbed all at once for the front of the young woman—presumably for her breasts—in an abrupt motion not unlike that which he might use to take hold of two steaming valves in the ship's engine room, wrenching them tight.

She drew back sharply, shoved him away, and the next moment, leapt down onto her feet. With a sniff, she faced him, which put her partway into the light.

Charles paused. The ship's lights from below shone up the side of her, making her dress, whatever color it truly was, a silvery mauve. Her fingers came up to play with beads at her throat. She wore multitudinous strands of black pearls—small, matched, round and glistening, like strung caviar lying in tiers down the white cream of her throat. She lifted her chin. Her face turned slightly to become visible, or partly visible.

And, good Lord, it seemed impossible, but Harold Vandermeer had been modest!

"Dear Lulu" was more than beautiful. Merely to list her attributes (blond hair, fair eyes, high cheek bones close to the surface of her skin, a full red mouth as plump and chiseled as a baby's) didn't do her justice.

There was an aura to her… a glamour… a natural beauty polished to a high sheen by money. (The caviar analogy was apropos, the pearls being about the size and color of large, pale beluga. It occurred to Charles that, if he indeed married this girl, he could be acquiring something very expensive to maintain.) Louise Vandermeer was to the female sex what the Taj Mahal was to architecture: resplendent, elegant, extravagantly gorgeous. No hastily glanced at black-and-white photograph could do her justice.

And something else her father's photo had not shown very clearly: She was also staggeringly young.

As Charles looked at her, he realized he hadn't truly understood what
eighteen
meant. Her pouty lower lip came out as she played with the necklace strand at her collarbone, making her look (accurately, he supposed) like a peevish adolescent—a very beautiful, jasmine-scented peevish adolescent. The hair on Charles's neck lifted.

This exotic young creature met the lieutenant's regard with a cool, unwavering poise, a seemingly ageless composure. She spoke only one more word:

"Clod"—that sang with such utter finality that even Charles felt a shiver of embarrassment for the sexually gauche young man.

Then she swayed around, turning her large skirts in an effortless, undulant sweep. As she walked back into the haze of light, her hips rolled leisurely from side to side, rather like the
Concordia
herself: listing, righting, impervious, cutting buoyantly full-throttle through the black, rocking night.