Judith Ivory (26 page)

“What was he like?”

“Who?” she asked, then owned up with a shrug. “Zach.”

Stuart took his hat off. The carriage rolled away from the curb. “What made you marry him?”

“I don’t know.” She looked out the window; she was going to leave it at that. Then she said to a passing flower cart, “When I first met him I didn’t believe he was a vicar. I thought vicars had to be stuffy. You know”—she laughed—“
good
.” She laid her head back onto the seat cushion. “I met him over a poker game. Charlie had taken me under his wing only the week before. So my first night I watched Charlie, Ted, and Bailey mostly work a three-card monte in a public house on Chaney Street, and in comes this clergyman, complete with white collar and Bible. They ran a quick crooked poker game on him, cold-decked him on his own deal.

“The thing was, though, Zach had amazingly deep pockets—he could collect money from strangers. He had an uncanny patter. It turned out, to get by, he gambled with church money, returning the principal and keeping the ‘interest.’ Except of course that night they took it all. But he only raised more and came back. That’s when they told him the truth—no point in wasting a fellow as talented as Zachary Hotchkiss, Charlie said.

“For Zach, it was a kind of revelation: ‘Separating the greedy and dishonest from their money,’ he called it. He enjoyed the retribution, saw the whole thing in somewhat righteous terms, I think, though at the time I didn’t realize. He seemed to be having a good time with it, was clever, and I admired his cheek. He ended up organizing much larger shenanigans than any of the small-timers had gotten up to. For a while, he made us rich.”

She sighed into a turn of the carriage, jostling, then repeated Stuart’s question almost to herself. “Why did I marry him?” She answered, “Because I was young. Because I thought he was daring.” She sighed. “But he was a walking shell game. He knew only one trick: Move the shells faster.”

She didn’t say anymore. Enough.

Then Stuart interjected, “He was charming.”

Taken aback, Emma blinked and looked at him. His dark coloring and clothes were set off against the shadowy red carriage seat. She laughed—a little pathetically. She said, “Zach could smile at you like you were the sun of his universe. Except, of course, his universe had a new sun every ten minutes.” And his favorite by far was a bottle of gin.

“So was the vicariate just another scam?” asked the man across from her sarcastically.

“You mean Zach’s? In Malzaard where we lived?”

He nodded, his attention fixed. It wasn’t casual information he sought, though she wasn’t certain exactly what the point was of his asking.

“No, not really,” she said. “He had a year at Cambridge in theology, two years in an Anglican seminary. As a young man, he wanted to be a vicar. Then, as he put it: He decided he’d rather fool people some other way.” She laughed. “He came to think of religion as a kind of confidence game. Until things went very wrong finally. The night I was shot, he prayed. I’d never heard him pray like that. He wanted me alive and his sister free.” She made a wry laugh. “God gave him one out of two, I suppose.”

“The ambivalent, agnostic vicar. How interesting.”

“Oh, no, he believed. He just wouldn’t admit it. Deep down, all along, he believed absolutely in Heaven—and the fact that he himself was going to Hell. He was already there by the end.”

Stuart’s face was stone. He stared at her.

At first, she felt sick inside, as if she’d said something wrong—offended him with regard to his ideas of God or by consigning her husband to Hell.

She didn’t dare tell him the rest: that shot, ill, trundling along toward a place she didn’t want to go, home, she’d felt a victim of a kind of fraud herself. Her wild, lawless husband muttered over her all the way back on the train, the full
litany; he knew the entire Book of Prayer. Her sense of betrayal was complicated. It wasn’t that she minded that Zach turned out to be a real clergyman, or nearly one. Only that she minded his sloppy slide into religion when the chips were down. Zach played hypocrisy from the other end. He took the classic offense of bad vicars—a pretense to more godliness than one had—and turned it inside out, pretending to less, the worldly sophisticate. What was the opposite of sanctimonious? That was Zach. A boy who thumbed his nose at God, misbehaving—when she’d thought she’d married a man with difficult, but considered convictions.

For Stuart’s part, any enjoyment he might have had from the story of Hotchkiss’s downfall was muted by the fact that, even dead, the antics of her wayward husband could make Emma laugh.

She glanced at him again. He lifted his head enough that his eyes from under his hat met hers. He forced a quick smile at her. An offered consolation.

And Emma’s sick feeling lifted a little; it turned to something else. A possibility dawned, like some great, fond hope: Stuart was jealous of Zachary. He didn’t like him. Could it be that the Viscount Mount Villiars resented a fondness, mixed though it was, she’d had for a man to whom she’d been married, for a husband now dead?

Emma looked away, out the window, trying to hide the smallest, inappropriate smile; it wouldn’t stop asserting itself. While in her belly she felt a lightness, a sensation akin to giddiness, pleasure.

As to Stuart, jealous? Dislike? He out and out loathed Hotchkiss. If the man weren’t already dead, he would have wished him so.

Noon and finished. There was nothing more they could do until they heard from Emma’s friend Vandercamp. And it frustrated Stuart no end that this left him watching her round, rather stylishly dressed bottom climb into a hansom cab
alone, on her way back to her hotel, while he had to return to his house, a mere three and a half blocks away from the Carlyle. He would like to have claimed her for the afternoon. For tea at his house. For a walk. An afternoon’s talk. All right, for more, if possible, though he loved simply looking at her.

It also occurred to him that he was putting her in danger. For the first time, this struck him with certainty, and he vacillated as to whether the statue and a bit of jewelry were worth what he was doing.

Up till now, any doubt was overshadowed by the memory of Leonard’s smug face. The obnoxious relative had no right to precious items that had graced Stuart’s childhood, some of the few pleasant and interesting associations Stuart could conjure up from Dunord.

Then a new emotion: He felt grateful. He believed in Emma absolutely and loved her help. Her competence, as she breezily proceeded, amazed him; it worried him a little: She could, he realized, just as easily cut him out and abscond with a valuable statue herself, not to mention all the money that would float through her fingers. Not that he thought she would. She wanted to live down the hill from him on her sheep farm. Plus knowing her intentions, reading her mind, didn’t matter. He’d once invited her to trust him, like a free fall, simply drop into it. And that was what he did in return.

Do with me as you will, Emma. I trust you.

A week and a day remained of their reason for staying together. He suddenly realized it wasn’t enough. Down the hill? Why not live up the hill with him? Or in a house of her own he would pay for? She should live better. He would keep her; he would offer. She should wear lady’s blue kid ankle boots every day. Her ankles and small feet looked neat as a pin in them.

A note later that afternoon brought Emma to Stuart. She arrived, tucked back into the dark of a cab, at his very own front curb and sent her driver to the door.

“The miss in my cab says ye’ll be wanting to come right away, sir.” The man handed Stuart a note.

Charlie Vandercamp. What a fine fellow, Stuart thought as he shouldered on his coat. The note read:

The note didn’t give more information, which Emma took in stride. “He probably doesn’t know when or where he’ll be exactly. We have to look for him and wait.”

If she was happy to deal with the fellow, so was Stuart.

“We couldn’t do better,” she told him. “He’ll know that we need oil on canvas, something small, and he’ll be excellent if he has even half the talent of his father.”

Stuart was content knowing he had the afternoon with Emma after all. He hoped the fellow didn’t show up till evening.

Emma was impatient at first, then began to enjoy strolling among a new collection of art at the rear of the main building. “Would you like to know my favorite painter?” she asked of Stuart whimsically as they walked through a room of French paintings.

“All right, who?”

“Manet.”

“Why?”

She smiled. “Because I like the look of his canvases, nothing more. They don’t require anything beyond looking at them. They’re clever on their own.”

“I like the
Bar at the Folies-Bergère
.”

“I do too! My favorite!” she exclaimed. “I like that the viewer isn’t in the mirror and the man in the top hat at the side.”

“And the daydreaming barmaid. What
is
in her mind?”

She smiled at their agreement, looking down as they walked. There was hardly anyone about. They had the place to themselves. “To paraphrase Zola,” she told him: “To enjoy Manet one must forget everything one knows about art.”

Stuart laughed at her. “Ah, there’s the reason you like him. A breaker of rules.” Then he felt his brow furrow, even as his lips remained in a smile. “And when do you read the French newspaper?”

“Pardon?”

“Zola.”

Then she didn’t have to say. Stuart took one look at her face, groaned, and said for her, “The omnipresent Reverend Zachary Hotchkiss. Have you any idea how much I am coming to detest that man?”

In a kind of apology, she explained, “He was full of irrelevant facts like that, an encyclopedia of them.” Then she laughed. “Which he knew so flat-out he could recite even foxed. In fact, foxed was when he usually spewed them best, his vicar’s collar standing askew, straight up by his ear with indignity, as if to say, How could a man so intelligent and educated be such a horrible mess?” She stopped herself. Here was the closest she’d come to speaking aloud how much she resented Zach’s drinking, to admitting to herself how truly enormous the problem was. It was ghastly. A pathetic, sad truth that underlined everything else. She sighed deeply and long, then said, “He was so useless sometimes. I would go to him when I was sad or angry or feeling muddled, and he’d just wave his hand and say, ‘Oh, you’ll figure it, Em. You always do.’ Then I would, of course; what choice did I have?”

“He couldn’t get it up. Ever. He was worthless that way.”

Emma turned her head sharply around to look at him,
partly from the surprise at the statement, partly for the surprisingly base euphemism she would not have put with Stuart. Was he being condescending, saying it that way for her benefit? “Excuse me?”

“You know what I mean. You mentioned before, though not in much detail. Could he ever take care of you that way? How am I supposed to phrase it?”

“You said it all right,” she decided. Should she answer honestly? Oh, why not? “No,” she said. “Or not after his sister died, at least.” In fact, by then, Zach drank too much to do anything that required much concentration.

Stuart smiled his slow, sly smile. “I can,” he said. “And I take care of you emotionally also: I should spend the night with you at the hotel. Or you with me at my house. We have one more day till Leonard actually arrives. And afterward, if you would allow it, you could live with me here. Or I’d find you your own house here in—”

“Stop—”

“No. I’m good for you. Recognize it. You look better for your few days with me. I’d wager you feel better, too.”

Did she? She supposed he was right. It was good to have someone to complain to, an understanding ear. Then she made a face, though. “Well, I’ll let you listen to my problems, if you’re determined to. But we stay in role in London, then I go back to my sheep. I won’t be your mistress—you can whistle ‘Dixie’on that score. Do you know that expression?” “No.”

“It’s from the American South.” Many confidence artists in London were American. “Their anthem: the anthem of the losing side,” she said and laughed. “Your anthem with regard to the way you badger me on the subject.”

“You know a lot.”

“I learned a lot—” From Zach. No, to give herself credit, “I read a lot of Zach’s books.” She snorted. “Till he sold them. I talked endlessly into the night with his friends in London,
many of whom had bits or whole chunks of education—confidence gaming is the cream, you see.” She laughed. “The
smart
thieves.”

“You have a hunger for knowledge.”

Did she? “I suppose.”

“You should go to university.”

This truly made her laugh out loud. What a hilarious idea! “Oh, fine, Stuart. Right after we’re finished, I’ll shut down my farm, all my village duties, my sheep, then saddle up Hannah and ride her down to Girton,” the girl’s college at Cambridge. “I’m sure they’d admit me. At nearly thirty. Without a penny to my name.” Her laughter grew ironic. “And where they would be happy to let me sit for the Tripos examination, but unwilling to admit me fully to degrees and university membership. What would be the point? At Cambridge, we may as well enroll Hannah, both of us being girls.” She frowned, giving him a look of mock-seriousness. “Why don’t we do that: apply on behalf of Hannah T. Mule.”

Then she felt relatively as smart as Hannah The Mule for allowing her resentment to reveal too much: her excessive knowledge of Cambridge, its colleges and policies toward women, especially poor ones.

When she and Zach had first come home, she’d talked to him about her possible admission there, since he was a one-term fellow of Trinity. She’d thought, bumpkin that she was, he might be able to pull strings. Instead, all she’d done, because a one-term student couldn’t do anything, was point out that he was inadequate again. She’d actually made him quite angry for considering, wanting, her own education. She’d let the matter drop. University. Honest to goodness. A poor Yorkshire lass, daughter of the local shearer, now the local vicar’s wife, wanting a formal education. How hilarious was that?