Beast (48 page)

"Explain. You know him. Tell him—"

The walls of the room did an interesting thing, three of the four of them were covered in framed mirrors, every shape and size. It was a lifetime's collection, an interest of Charles's; his gallery of looking glasses.

These reflected him in multiple incarnations now as he suggested, "I can inform him about the baby."

"I want to tell him myself. You convince him to come."

"I won't." More plausibly, he said, "I can't."

As if they had arrived somewhere in this conversation, Louise sat back and folded her arms. She asked,

"All right, Charles: Why not?"

Why not, why not, why not
? This phrase repeated like his image in the mirrors. Charles caught a look at his own face, a man confused, uncertain in every framed piece of glass.
Why not
?

Because, Charles thought, he had completely lost his way. Because his own machinations had become so convoluted, he had given up trying to find the path out of them. He just wanted to bury her pasha at this point. (Her
pasha
, for God's sake. Why did women think this way?) Louise was angry with this other Charles; she was fierce. She admired Charles Harcourt. So Charles Harcourt guiltily accepted her admiration. Her idealized impression of him seemed the only thing in his favor. A hero indeed. But heroes occasionally got to shag the rescued maiden, and he was fairly certain rotten bastards didn't.

He prayed for insight and a rematch.

Sexually, he feared that Charles Harcourt compared badly to her pasha, which especially worried him come to think of it, in light of her request—no, her demand—to see this other fellow.

Lost again, Charles thought. He couldn't figure out
what
Louise's relationship was to his other self. She hated the shallowness of their affair, the trickery, yet he feared that she had never completely let go of the fantasy man in the dark.

Louise seemed to care about both of him.
(Both of him
. The phrase itself made him dizzy.) So where did this leave him?

Nowhere. Blank for a moment.

Then, unbidden, an insane idea occurred to Charles. A kind of mad, torturous answer to his dilemma.

No. Not even worth thinking about.

Then, as he stood in their mirrored dining room, watching his multiple reflections—all of them looking faintly wild and needy—the unholy thought rose up. fully formed, into consciousness. He considered it, threw it out again, then the idea crept back into his mind and insisted upon serious consideration.

Her pasha could return and take his own measure. He could even
be
a miserable son of a bitch, make
her
give
him
the heave-ho, fix her wounded feelings and get rid of the fellow in one fell swoop.

While leaving Charles Harcourt the hero, standing alone center stage in Louise's life.

No. God, no, he told himself. What an idiotic notion.

The logistics themselves were impossible. He couldn't just walk in his own front door and pretend to be someone else. The idea was unworkable, not to mention devious—beyond the pale of any "heroic and handsome heart."

But what if… What if her pasha returned to behave more in keeping with his original purposes: like the game-playing, inconsiderate bastard Charles knew perfectly well how to be? Then a worse what-if appeared from nowhere, catching him off-guard.

What if Louise's demand to see her pasha meant she was not finished with her affair after all? What if her pasha behaved like a bastard, and she liked it—just as she had before?

It was the original question that had started this mess in the first place. Would the highly desirable Louise Vandermeer Harcourt do what she could do so easily, at any moment she chose: make a cuckold of her ugly, lately-fumbling husband?

"Charles?" Louise's voice said. "What has gotten into you? Are you all right?"

He blinked, then set his folded newspaper down on the credenza. "Certainly," he told her. "I'm fine." He looked around for his coat. "I'm, ah—" He found it. "I'll just go into town and wire the fellow, shall I?"

"What?"

He glanced at her, at the strange choke in her voice.

Louise was staring at him over a half-eaten apple held in her hand.

He smiled. "Old Al Baghdad," he explained. "I'll just wire him and see if he'll come, all right?"

Where was the man who wanted directness? Louise wanted to know. Who wanted her to
choose
him.

come at him
headlong
? And how did one choose someone who made of himself a multiple, moving target? Where was her husband going in such a hurry? Not to the telegraph office, that much was for sure. Where was his crooked line of reasoning taking him now?

Were she and this circuitous man in love? Or were they merely entangled?

Louise would not have been able to imagine a snarl as large as Charles had woven for them, if she hadn't been an unknowing—then suddenly very knowing—party to it for the past six weeks. Impossible, yet here it was:

Her pasha's deep, rich voice, speaking perfect French, wondered where in the blazes he'd left his hat.

Louise followed Charles through the house as he searched. He had no limp. None whatsoever. Or perhaps only the faintest one that he could control, she had realized, if he walked carefully—which he always did in front of her.

Re yourself
, indeed. That's what he had told her in the dark, but apparently it was advice he didn't follow himself.

"The newel post," she said. "On the newel post."

Louise got there ahead of him and handed Charles his hat from off the fat knob where he'd set it on their way upstairs last night. Dear man, sweet man. He had been fairly shattered when he had come into her room, then been allowed to stay. He had had none of his normal composure or savoir faire. And it had been wonderful. Perhaps less thrilling in her body, but deeply, deeply pleasing in her heart. She might have been happy, if she weren't still waiting for him to tell her the full truth.

And now. What was this? He was going to send himself a telegram?

There had been much to forgive, but she had done it. No small feat for the cool and exacting Louise Harcourt.

All she needed now was for him to be honest.
Tell me, Charles. Reveal yourself. Put yourself in my
power. Tell me. Tell me all about this stupid idiocy you have devised
.

But, no, he took the hat she offered. She frowned. She had been sure that, after last night and with a little bit of prodding today, he would spill everything.

He kissed her instead. A nice kiss. He pulled her up into his arms and pressed his mouth on hers, just like her pasha might have. A big, wet, suave kiss. To which her husband even managed a smooth end, then a neat, unlimping exit. With her pasha's poise.

Oh, there was no doubt. It was wonderful to look upon him at last; it was also vaguely horrid.

The wet taste of his mouth, left on hers, reminded her of earlier actions and motives. This man, without a doubt, had nurtured all the shallow designs on her that she had credited to his ocean self. He'd set her up as a dupe. He'd hurt her, though perhaps not so intentionally. And, worse, he knew everything. All the things she'd volunteered about herself, all that she and her parents had tried to keep from the prince, the prince had heard from her own mouth.

Naked. Naked twice. Once on the ship. And once here on the beach, telling her husband in odd reverse all her secrets about his
other
self.

"Oh, Charles," she murmured as she watched him leave. "You'd better not be setting up more of your plots and schemes. For, if you are…" If he was, well, it boded very badly for their present, their future.

Louise shook her head. "You must come clean," she murmured.

And she meant it. If that's what he was doing, if this "telegraphing" was yet another knot added, then his tangle was endless.

Everything condensed down to this:
If you can't stop yourself, if you can't get hold of yourself
… as she had told him to before.
If you can't speak your mind to me, if you can't show yourself put
yourself in my hands… Oh, Charles, then I will ever be able to get hold of the whole man
?

And she wouldn't even try.

Louise promised herself that if Charles went further into this charade, if all the prodding and waiting meant nothing, then she would take herself and this baby home. Life was strange enough, hard enough.

She would return to where large breakfasts of bacon and eggs were easier to come by—and where she wouldn't be left standing naked alone.

Recipe for spirit of ambergris: 1.5 oz of ambergris, 30 grains of musk, and 20 grains of civet to
powder in sugar loaf, to which add the juice of one lime. Pour into 3 pints of pure alcohol spirits
and stopper jar. Embed jar down into the constant heat of horse manure for 21 days. The liquid
decanted will be clear: ambergris tincture
—
the beginning of the best perfumes
.

Charles Harcourt, Prince d'Harcourt

On the Nature and Uses of Ambergris

Louise went to bed early that night. Like most evenings, the baby made her so tired she could barely stay awake through dinner. Thankful she knew why at least she was so exhausted, she said good-night to Charles. He kissed her lightly, preoccupiedly, and promised to come along later, as was becoming his practice. He simply didn't need to sleep as much as she did.

So she was alone when she heard the noise outside, only half awake. She could not identify the sound exactly. When she got up to see what it was,
voilà
—there was suddenly a man on her balcony. She leaped back, exclaimed something, then was not allowed to get a full scream out before she was pushed into her room with force, a hand over her mouth, and a lot of shushing.

"Sh-sh-sh-sh. He'll hear you." English. A British-educated whisper with a slight foreign accent under it—an undertone she knew immediately to be French, not Arabic.

"Ch-Charles?" Even knowing whom she spoke to. Louise could not quite believe it. The robe, the headdress, the shadow in the dimness—Charles's errand in town. And a suddenly familiar shadow in the dark thai made her giddy.

She wanted to laugh. She wanted to throw him back over the balcony from whence he had come.

"How did you get up here?" she asked. A man with one eye—no depth perception—and a bad leg had no business climbing up trees or across vines or however he'd gotten here. A sane man would have developed by now a healthy fear of heights.

Which, come to think of it, he had. Louise blinked. Her Charles of the ship wouldn't leap over railings when other options were present. So stupid, Louise thought.
I am so stupid
. How had she missed this?

"Charles." she said. As if repeating his name were going to call him out into the open.

It didn't, of course, because she—
she
—had woven this particular circle into their mess through
her
devious thinking. More and more idiotic, she felt.

But she couldn't stop saying it. "Charles, it's you!"

"Of course, it is. Your half-blind husband said that—"

"Oh, stop! Don't do this!"

He tried to take hold of her.

She took hold of him, two fistfuls of robe, one containing a piece of shoulder, the other an upper arm.

She tried to shake a man as heavy and immovable as stone. She said, "Tell me."

"I am telling you." Additional stupidity—of a more dismaying nature—flew in her face. "You wanted an affair, because your husband was ugly. He's still ugly. Do you still want one?"

"Charles—"

"And my name in Alain—"

"Stop it. stop it, stop it!" She tried to pound, to shove, but he caught her arms. Almost pleading, she told him, "You have started to tell me a dozen times"—this was true, she realized—"do it now, without that little, dancing sidestep at the end, when mv reactions aren't perfectly k-k—"
Kind
, she was trying to say.

And Louise let go and ran for the light across the room.

She hit it before he even knew what was happening.

Charles, all of him, his swirling, be-robed self burst into visibility, squinting at her with his one bad eye.