Black Silk (8 page)

“Ah, is that what you’re doing?” He smiled up at her. “Trying to be smart?”

“No—” She changed her mind. “Yes. Is there something wrong with that?”

“It can be a terrible hindrance to simply having a good time.”

He struck a match and threw it onto the pile of silvery powder. It made more light than she’d imagined, a rather nice
whfft
and a white burst accompanied by several sharp snaps.

“Ahh!” The earl jumped back, quickly brushing off cinders.

As Submit watched him examine a neat hole in his trousers, a little jolt of satisfaction ran through her. It was surprisingly sharp. The fancy-pants know-it-all, she thought. A novice had no business fooling with fireworks, and they remained dangerous even if one knew very well the chemistry and mechanics involved. Netham should have stuck to the properties of gold, how gravity draped it from watch pocket to watch pocket on a glittering vest.

Feeling as though she’d won something, she repeated, “I’d like to speak with you. Could I do so now?”

He threw her a look of exasperation, though for a moment there seemed a hint of humor in his expression. “No,” he said emphatically and smiled, as truculent and rational as a two-year-old. He was on the move again, heading toward the far terrace steps at the end of the house.

“Where are you going?” Submit had to walk quickly, or she was going to lose him again.

“To get more magnesium.” Between statuary and stone urns, he began down the steps, taking them in leaps, two at a time.

“More? Aren’t you finished ruining your clothes?”

At the bottom of the steps, he glanced down. He picked
at something on his pant leg, inspecting the damage now with what seemed like fastidious concern. “You think I’ve ruined my trousers?”

“Without doubt.”

But when he turned, he had a smile that was thoroughly unabashed. “And such a dandy as myself,” he said, “should be aghast at that.”

The humor, creased deeply into a wide smile, took her by surprise—as did something else. There was an astuteness in his face, an awareness that said he might not be quite so easily summed up as she’d first thought.

She was left standing halfway down the stairs, perplexed, trying to puzzle him out. “I’m sorry,” she said.

This held him there a moment, interested in her apology, though not impressed.

She added, “I’m sorry if I’ve treated you like some sort of dandiprat.”

“I am a dandiprat.” He cocked his head and leaned his arm on the plinth beneath a stone urn. “Why do you think you’re so damned smart?”

She blinked. “I don’t.”

“Why do you think I’m not?”

She laughed a little nervously. She was beginning to feel giddy, like someone turned upside down. “All right. You’re a
clever
dandiprat.” He liked that better; so much so, in fact, she couldn’t resist adding, “Still, you don’t know much about magnesium.”

“Mag-what? Those big words confuse me.”

“Mag-NEEZ—” She realized he’d said it a few moments before and stopped.

He laughed, shaking his head at her. “I make my own fireworks. From copper and niter.” He shrugged. “I’ve used other things, lately magnesium, depending on what color I want. I know a great deal about magnesium. I’d just prefer
to brush off the sparks rather than miss them close up.” His smile broadened into something strangely uninhibited. “I rather like it, in fact, when they explode all over me.”

“How very dangerous.”

“It’s thrilling actually. It doesn’t hurt.”

All she could say was, “I’d bet it takes a toll on your clothes, though.”

He began walking, backward again, along the path that ran against the house. He was still looking at her when he said, “Nothing, I’d bet, compared to the toll your caution takes on your sparks.” He turned out of sight.

Submit felt confused for a moment, then turned around and felt an unreasonable embarrassment.

Rosalyn Schild was standing at the top of the stairs. She did not look happy, and beyond her stood a curiously quiet little crowd.

Submit found Graham Wessit to be paradoxically elusive in this house. He was either everywhere, marching right into the center of things, or nowhere in sight. By early afternoon, she had still not spoken to him about the box; she could not even find him. Finally, in a front corridor, she stopped a servant to ask if he knew where the man was.

“Why, he’s gone home, madam.”

“Home?” This possibility hadn’t occurred to her. She sank onto a little stuffed bench in the hall. Which home? she wondered. Home to the house in Belgravia or home to the flat on Haymoore Street or, she wondered, was the family house in Netham itself “home”? She was right back where she had started last night.

“He’ll return, I assure you, madam,” the servant told her.

Yes, she thought, he probably would. All the same, she felt a little irritated and just plain tired of the whole game. If he had been
trying
, Henry’s cousin could not have made asking about the box more difficult.

Of course, Graham
was
trying.

In the aftermath of last night, he had developed a kind of resentful gratitude toward Submit Channing-Downes. The excuses she’d made for him over the box, her repossession of it without so much as a word, were favors he both appreciated very much and minded in the extreme—unsought favors badly needed, which he wouldn’t, on a bet, repay in kind. If Henry’s widow expected any sort of discussion to ensue over that stupid box, she had another think coming.

Cheerful in this knowledge, Graham bounded through the side carriage entrance of his London house, past fluted
alabaster columns and up spiral marble stairs. His shoes tapped and echoed throughout the round, wide stairchamber, a tattoo that rose up, around, and above him, spiraling with the stairs toward his private rooms.

“John,” he called, his voice preceding him up three winding flights. High above him, he saw the man’s head pop over the railing. “Draw me a bath! I want to be gone again in an hour!”

Graham was in fine spirits. He looked forward to a change of clothes, then a day of pure fun. He had come home to pick up more magnesium by the bagful. He might even bring back some of the other components of his fireworks. In his shed behind his London house, he had bags of gunpowder, niter, copper sulfide, magnesium, barium nitrate, sulfur, and more. He knew how to build green stars and skyrockets and tourbillions; there was hardly a known fire display he couldn’t make, and he could extemporize new ones offhand. He always laughed when he talked about this. “One of my many useful accomplishments.” The general uselessness of this knowledge, however, didn’t stop him from enjoying it—particularly when other people became enthusiastic and wanted to see more, as they had at Rosalyn’s today.

At the top of the staircase, John handed him his mail.

“Thank you. Is there hot water?”

“I lit the coal half an hour ago.”

“Good fellow.”

His man already had hold of the top of Graham’s coat, lifting it off his shoulders. Graham shrugged out of the arms as he walked, alternating his hold on the mail. He undid his own neckcloth and top shirt buttons, discarding behind him his tie and shirt collar. His manservant followed along, gathering items in his arms.

Graham handed back an empty envelope. His mail consisted of a bill for twenty-five teapots, two quid each, silver
plate, a bill from the plumber who’d converted his dressing room to a bath, and a letter from Claire, Graham’s daughter.

Graham had two children, Charles and Claire. Both lived in boarding schools abroad. He tore open Claire’s letter and began to decode her tiny, elaborate handwriting. The letter’s contents were not particularly newsworthy. She needed “a small advance on next month’s allowance.”

“When you go down for fresh towels,” he told his manservant, “tell Sheffield to come up.” Sheffield was Graham’s secretary.

“Sheffield, sir,” the man replied, “has been conscripted into tallying accounts and writing receipts. There has been a bit of a crush on today.”

By a “crush” the man meant a larger than usual crowd roaming the grounds and downstairs interior of the house.

Graham had a slightly unusual living arrangement. On a Sunday at this time of year, his house and back gardens were always swarming with people. This was due to an interplay of economics and family history.

All the earls of Netham had been wealthy, but not monumentally so, yet Graham lived in a house fit for a king. His London property took up a square English block. This was a lot of land to own in the best part of the city; the only person who owned more was his neighbor, the queen. He could see Buckingham Palace from his northwest windows. His house was older than the palace and almost as ornate. Graham lived in only the upper rear portion, however. The house was much more than any one family, let alone one person, could ever inhabit. It was also too large to afford and too valuable to give up.

Historically, much of the building and grounds had been closed until Graham’s great-grandfather had opened up the back gardens to “friends.” This had been a magnanimous, and probably exhibitionistic, gesture. Tea had been served three afternoons a week to whoever wished to come and ad
mire. This had become somewhat popular. Then the next earl, Graham’s grandfather, had opened up the front portion of the house itself, and it had gone from being merely popular to being public. He had instituted a brass dish for donations to help defray costs. Eventually guides and caterers had been allowed to come in. By contract, they answered questions and served tea five days a week for a percentage of the profits. By the end of the last century, the house had been given over to the phenomenon of domestic tourism.

Graham’s own father had added his bit when he so famously shot his wife, then himself. People flocked. For a shilling in the dish, most of London and its visitors had walked through Graham’s house at one time or another. It had acquired a strong sense of public ownership. Graham simply had never had the strength, or money for that matter, to turn this around. He had learned to live companionably with tourism, residing in the upstairs rear of the house in the private quarters entered through the carriage foyer. It was ample. No one disturbed him. He had become comfortable with the fact that his steps were heard overhead, explained and interpreted by some historian below. “Now, that is the present earl….”

The present earl yanked off his trousers and stepped into a tubful of hot water, blissfully lauding to himself the miracles of modern plumbing. His secretary managed to slip upstairs with paper and pen a few minutes after that. Submerged in three feet of water and with a fat cigar between his teeth, Graham puffed out a severe letter on profligate spending to his daughter, then instructed that a ten-pound note be included with the letter. He knew that lecturing Claire, then giving her money, was contradictory, but he didn’t know how else to handle the girl or, for that matter, her brother.

He knew he was not the model father. He was hardly a father at all, in fact. He had a tendency to forget the
children—a thought that gave him pause. Frowning and watching smoke rings drift over the tub and wisp to nothing, he tried to remember if he’d mentioned them yet to Rosalyn.

He’d better do so soon. Such large things began to seem like secrets when they went too long unspoken. Rosalyn was already up in arms that he had a widowed cousin who could track him down at a party. Why hadn’t he told her he had such a cousin? she had wanted to know this morning.

“I didn’t know myself.”

“What were you talking to her about at the end of the terrace?”

He’d rolled his eyes, amazed that she would pay attention to this. “Are you jealous?”

“Should I be?”

He expelled a quick breath, having to feign exasperation. “For God’s sake, Rosalyn, she’s a pale little thing with frizzy hair and crooked teeth.”

Luckily, lightning didn’t strike a man down for lying with fragments of reassembled truth.

The pale, frizzy, little crooked-toothed woman aroused a mild but persistent curiosity in Graham. She interested him—an interest he was in no hurry to share with Rosalyn. He couldn’t have explained to her or anyone else why he was intrigued by the widow. She wasn’t very pretty. She wasn’t even very nice. Perhaps it was having the secret of dirty pictures between them. Or all those mounds of swaying, slithering black silk. The steel hoops under that silk had to be so thin, an expensive undergarment bought by Henry, he reminded himself. Her skirts jiggled and shuddered at the slightest movement she made. Graham dropped her into a category, hoping this would sum her up and sort her out—she was what the French would call
une beauté mystique
. A woman with no obvious beauty who managed by some quirk of personality to be mysteriously appealing all
the same. Take away that smug air, those fancy hoops and full skirts, and what would you have?

Graham was laughing at himself as he stepped out of the tub and picked up a large towel. He found his clothes laid out on the bed. He was fastening the bottom buttons of his vest when his valet came in carrying a handful of watches. As the man bent to thread a watch chain, Graham took the whole lot from him. “Thank you, John. I’ll take care of the rest myself. Go down and tell Royce to open up the shed, will you? Oh, and tell him to stay and mind it till I come down. You know how people are.”

Graham moved to stand before a wide, lead-mullioned window twice as tall as himself. In this light, he set a watch that had stopped, then stood there winding it, absently looking out the window. His eyes fixed on a curious little scene taking place outside, three stories below him. A large family was posing among the statuary on his back lawn before a man with a gadget that was becoming more and more common. The man had his head bent down under a black cloth as he looked through a box on stick legs. A portable camera. There were men who took these around, traveling in wagons full of chemicals, making pictures inside these cameras with a smear of glop on a sheet of glass.

Beyond the photographer and his subjects, Graham could see his own gardener’s shed where he kept his fireworks, much as he had kept firecrackers in Henry’s years ago—happily, he had not yet burned down his own shed. Royce, the gardener, and John, his manservant, waited dutifully outside, guarding a shack full of explosives, including a box of magnesium chunks. Graham quickly tucked in the rest of his watches. The group who’d witnessed the display at Rosalyn’s house had told a few other people who’d missed it. A larger group was waiting at Rosalyn’s to see whatever he might choose to take back with him. This positively delighted Graham.

He picked up his coat, slipping it on while trotting down the rear stairs. On his way to the shed, he decided to have a good look at that camera-thing first.

When Graham Wessit returned, Submit was dismayed to discover he’d brought two more people with him, as if the house weren’t busy enough. Another two dozen human beings had arrived by mid-afternoon. Carriages kept rolling up. Vehicles pulled into Mrs. Schild’s drive with the frequency of bees to a hive. The place had begun to swarm with activity. Tea, an opera, then a late-night supper were planned, invitations to which Submit politely declined. People were actually arriving with two and three changes of clothes. To this assembly, Graham Wessit added one photographer and his helper. It seemed the earl was about to take pictures of everything. He was full of enthusiasm and fascination for a newfangled camera. She couldn’t get his attention, try as she might.

She followed him and the photographer out onto the front lawn. The only way to get his attention there, however, would have been to stand in front of the camera lens. The earl, directing the photographer, wanted pictures of the house. Pictures of Rosalyn. Pictures of Tilney, the blond man, from this morning, who, after the first photo, wanted his image to appear on every photographic plate. Pictures of the cats: Rosalyn traveled with eight. Pictures of the earl himself. Graham Wessit, always agreeable, took pictures of virtually anything that would stay in one place. Submit found herself always moving to stay at his back. She wanted to talk, not be in his photographs.

A growing group moved with the earl to the back terrace. Two neighbors came over to watch. Submit followed, thinking he would soon give up. But he kept inventing more pictures, while discoursing with a vagabond photographer on the subject of light. More people, the postman, two
maids, the cook, and the scullery, were drawn to follow the sight.

And he
was
a sight. In the late afternoon sunlight, Graham Wessit removed his coat. He rolled up his shirtsleeves and bent over the camera, taking instruction. He sported a bright red vest that made the sleeves of his shirt look even whiter, his coloring all the more dark. His face and forearms, Submit realized, were deeply colored by the sun. His wrists and flexors were corded with veins and solid with muscle. He had a broader, stronger physique than she had imagined. He was a dandiprat with the height of a Titan and the build of a rugby fullback.

And the face of a Byron: Submit was caught short as he straightened up, his eyes lifting over the heads of a group sitting in front of him on the grass. Submit, on the terrace behind them, felt an odd rush. She was the center of his attention for a moment. He smiled and mimed an offer. Would she be willing to pose? His open palm indicated a raised flower bed that had gone to poppies. Submit was caught off guard, embarrassed at being caught staring. She frowned and shook her head no. Flustered, she gave up. She went inside bewildered, wondering why he would want a picture of an unphotogenic woman standing in a patch of floppy, wild weeds.

More than an hour later, as the sun was finally setting, she heard people in the front parlor. At last. He would have to stop taking pictures; he was losing daylight. She went toward the sound of voices. When she opened the parlor door, he was on the other side of it—and so was the idiotic camera. The earl was moving people into position for a group photograph. He moved a man by the arm, then took Mrs. Schild by the waist, picking her up and setting her on the back of a sofa. She had to grab the mantel of the fireplace to keep from falling backward. Everyone
shrieked in delight. Submit walked into this only to find herself taken by the shoulder.