Slow Seduction (Struck by Lightning) (10 page)

“Ah, so that’s where you got the designation
crimson
. I wondered why you used that word instead of
red
.”

“He might have been saying
crimson-gloved society
, but she heard it as a name, anyway. And so when I saw yours, it clicked.”

“All right, and this Jules, describe him?”

“About six foot, built like a dancer, all muscle but no bulk, blond. His mother was British and I guess he did some school here. Sound familiar?”

He shook his head slowly. “Can’t say that he does. But don’t be discouraged by that. But you still haven’t told me why you think you’ll find him here, rather than back in the States. Is he in York?”

“He might be. Another mutual friend, my boss at the museum, got a letter from him with a York postmark on it.”

“And you’re going to walk up and down the streets calling his name like a lost puppy?”

“Jerk. I figure I’ll start with the post office, ask around, and there are a few art-world-related connections I may be able to follow.”

“Aha. All right. You pursue him that way, and I’ll start inquiries within the society. It’s a shame we can’t start your society training this weekend if you’re out of town, but there will be ample opportunities to get worked over at the club.”

“You think I’ll be approved?”

“Vanette will go along if I give you the thumbs-up. Which I will. The director is already quite taken with you. You’ll be fine, Karina.”

M
y weekend with Damon wrapped up with much more “not-sex.” He definitely kept his word when he said my clit would be sore, but we didn’t have any more deep talks. On Monday I went back to work, and if I sat somewhat gingerly because of the welts on my butt, no one noticed.

If I thought the previous week had gone by slowly, this week dragged even more. I gave two more after-hours tours, both to couples, none of them remotely like Damon. One was a man in his sixties and his slightly younger wife, both quite knowledgeable about the art, and one was a late-forties-ish couple who didn’t know much but were enthusiastic listeners. I was a bit hoarse after the evening with them. The daytime tours I was giving had become monotonous, though. I started to wonder if people were even listening to what I was saying. Then again,
I
was barely listening to what I was saying. Damon messaged me to say Vanette and the director had accepted my application for training, which would begin after I got back from York. The demolition finished at the gallery and we moved on to plastering. I chatted online with Becky a few times, but now that I was on a schedule I was usually asleep by the time she came online.

The night before I was to leave for York, I checked my e-mail and was surprised to see a ton of notification messages from the LL fan site. I had nearly forgotten about the story post I had made.

There were more than a hundred comments. I started to read them in the e-mails, then logged in to the site, where I could see them all at once.

I was amazed at how many messages I’d received, most of them surprisingly sympathetic. “I miss him, too!” one wrote. “Oh, GlassTiara, you have perfectly captured the longing we all feel in this superb piece of writing!” said another. “I feel your heartbreak,” said a third.

I had thought it was nothing more than a silly porno piece. But somehow what I felt had come through. It hadn’t occurred to me before that there was any emotional connection between me and Lord Lightning fans. And yet they all felt like I did: abandoned. Why? Because they loved him too much? It made me wonder: why had he decided to retire from performing? It was yet another thing I wanted to ask when I saw him again.

I would see him again. I had to believe that.

I caught the train on Thursday morning from King’s Cross. There were several trains leaving, every five minutes or so, for all different parts of the country, but exactly like they did at Penn Station, everyone would stand around until the track number for their train was announced. It was nowhere near as confusing as I feared it would be.

The seats were assigned on the train I was on, exactly like an airplane. Unlike on a plane, however, I had a window seat at a table. The trip would take about two hours, so I brought a book, but I ended up spending most of the time staring out the window. Very quickly we seemed to move past the city and into countryside. There were places we passed, with green rolling hills divided by hedgerows, that looked so idyllic I expected to see the doors to hobbit holes. Quite at odds with that were the gigantic nuclear power plants, towering over the landscape, sending up massive clouds of steam. I saw at least two like that.

The York train station was very historic looking to me, but it was new when compared to the rest of the town, much of which was built in medieval times. The guesthouse Martindale had booked for me was a few blocks from the train and just outside a massive stone gate that looked like something from a Dungeons & Dragons book. Except that cars were driving through it. The guesthouse had a pub on the ground floor and the rooms above. I dropped off my bag in the room, pocketed the metal key, and went out to look around.

I passed through the stone gate and walked on a narrow cobblestoned street, which opened up at the intersection to the plaza in front of the church Damon had told me about. It looked huge compared to the buildings around it, and likely full of fascinating art and architecture.

But I wasn’t here to look for art. I was here to find James. As I walked, it became quickly clear to me that wandering the warren of streets was only going to result in confusion for me. I found my way to the tourism center I’d passed when walking from the train station and picked up some maps and brochures.

My first stop was the post office, which turned out to be a counter inside a shop, which was confusing to me at first until I found it. There were about twenty people in line and two clerks working. When I saw how slowly the line was moving, though, I decided to go back later. I looked in the brochures I had picked up, trying to decide where to go next.

There was a shop called York Glass. That was as good a place to start as any. I took their brochure and went looking for it. It took some time, as the streets were narrow, winding. A few times I took the wrong side street, but ultimately the walled city wasn’t that large and I found the even narrower street called the Shambles, where the shop was located. In New York it would have been called an alley, not a street.

“This is like something out of Harry Potter, isn’t it?” said a woman standing on the corner looking at her map just like I was. Her accent was American. She got out her camera and took a picture of the alley. “It’s like right out of the movie.”

“Did they film it here?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t think so. They built a wider version anyway, so there would be room for the cameras and everything.”

“Ah, I see.”

She wandered down the street. She hadn’t even looked at me through the whole conversation, and it was a good thing there were no cars, because she wouldn’t have seen them, either.

York Glass was a tiny shop, with barely room for a handful of customers. A shopgirl sat behind a register in one corner, and the walls were lined with brightly lit cases and shelves of glass knickknacks and baubles, everything from glass Christmas ornaments to cat figurines.

I lingered while a few other people came in, and the shopgirl came out to help them. She had reddish brown hair and freckles across her nose. The people, a woman and her two daughters, made a fuss over what color glass cats they were going to buy, then left without buying anything, leaving the shopgirl standing there with several cats in the palm of her hand. She carefully put them back onto the rotating shelf in a case where they were displayed, waiting until an empty space for each one came around so she could replace them.

She turned to me as she closed the case door. “Can I help you with anything?”

“Oh, um, I’m trying to find out more about the glass artists in the area.”

“Are you, now? A collector?”

“I work at a museum,” I said. That was true, after all. “I’ve got a special interest in glass. I’m fascinated by how it’s made. Are there studios nearby?”

“Oh, I suppose. Most of this”—she waved her hand toward the shelf—“is made by our own people, ’specially for the shop. I don’t know much about the artists around here. I’m just helping out the owner of the shop. You might come by later when my boss is here?”

“That’s a great idea. I’ll do that, thanks.” I stepped out into the alley again, deflated. That wasn’t much of a start. I would go back as promised and ask again. Meanwhile, I needed to eat something. Right across the alley was a small place—I mentioned they were all small, right?—called the Earl Grey Tea Shop. Perfect.

Inside was a series of low-ceilinged rooms. A very nice lady sat me down and explained the menu. I picked a rose-flavored tea and she bustled away to get my order started. I felt like I was having tea at someone’s grandmother’s house, which was perfectly charming.

The sandwiches were large compared to what I had been getting, made on full-sized bread, and the pastries included a whole slice of cake, so I was quickly stuffed. The rose-flavored tea made me think of what Damon had said. If all I wanted was roses and chocolates and bubble baths, I might as well be asleep.

I could see the appeal of that, but I wanted to feel I’d earned it. The cuddles and the bubble bath should come
after
the mind-blowing sex or whatever intense thing I’d experienced. Right?

I was toying with the remaining half slice of Victoria cake that I couldn’t eat when the hostess came back to bring my bill. “And what brings you to York?” she asked. “Seeing the sights?”

“Oh, pretty much. I’m in England for a summer job in London and I wanted to get out and see a little of the country.”
Now’s your chance, Sherlock,
I told myself. Ask. “I’m also interested in glassmaking and glass art. I hear there’s some of that here?”

“Oh, goodness, yes, a little bit,” she said.

“Do you know where? I’d like to meet some of the artists.”

“My daughter’s an artist. She might know. Let me ring her. I won’t be but a moment.” She went out to the front counter, which was in the next room over, where they sold tea and accessories, and I heard her pick up the phone.

I still had some tea in my pot and a pile of brochures to look through, so I contented myself with waiting around a little to see if the lead turned up anything.

A short while later, a woman about my age, in jogging shorts and a tank top, her hair in a bandanna, stuck her head into the tearoom. “You the American who wants to see the glassworks?”

“Me? Yes!” I closed the brochure I was reading.

“Mum says you’re keen to go down there. If you give me a minute, I’ll take you.”

“Great! I’m Karina.”

“Helen.” We shook hands. Hers was sweaty. “Back in a mo’.”

I continued with my reading, and a short while later Helen returned to collect me. I paid my check and followed her through the narrow streets, an actual alley that was barely wide enough for a bicycle, and we emerged on a wider thoroughfare. Another two blocks down and we went into a parking garage.

“Is it far?” I asked.

“About ten minutes’ drive,” she said. “That all right? It’s a few miles.” She unlocked the doors and we got into a small car. “I mean, kilometers. No, wait, you Americans use miles, don’t you?”

“We do. Isn’t it metric here, though?”

“Some things are. We British invented the mile, though, so I guess we feel we’ve still got a right to use it, eh? Anyway, we’re headed to an old factory-type building up the river. A bunch of art going on there.”

That sounded promising. “Really?”

“Mostly sculpture. There’s a fellow who welds industrial scrap into things. All manner of crazy good stuff and some glass. York’s always had glassmakers, though not always the arty type, if you see what I mean.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“I grew up here, so here’s the schoolbook version, all right?” We pulled out of the garage onto a busy street. I had to suck in a breath as my instincts said we were on the wrong side of the road. She didn’t seem to notice my anxiety and barreled us cheerfully onto the road out of town. “All business in York was controlled for hundreds of years by the guilds, the guild of Merchant Adventurers—”

“Adventurers?”

“I know. Sounds like something made up, don’t it? Anyway, they allowed kind of monopolies to various companies. This one for shoes, that one for combs. You had to apprentice in a shop to get anywhere, and the license to run a shop was passed from generation to generation. The early glass companies weren’t making art. They were making medicine bottles for the apothecaries and such. When industry came along, it was industrialized of course, but you didn’t have the kind of horrible mills and factories here that you had in a lot of West Yorkshire. The guilds didn’t allow it. So it stayed small scale. There were three glassworks with a dozen or so employees each. One by one they moved out or outgrew the area. Redfearns left in the sixties and their building got turned into a hotel. So all that was left was little guys again, some hobbyists and artists.”

“I see.”

“What I’m saying is there’s a tradition of glassworks, but what we’re doing now isn’t really part of that.” Helen gestured around with one hand, then put it back on the wheel. “It’s a new thing.”

“Art.”

“Yeah.”

“So what kind of art do you do?”

“I was in painting for a long time, but that world is so hard. So competitive, and you’re being compared not only to every painter working today, but everyone who ever put paint on a canvas. You look at Rembrandt and Titian and van Gogh and you think, why do I even bother? Dalí. Rossetti. It’s all been done. And it’s so restrictive. So I moved into sculpture, where…I can’t say there are no rules, but there are a lot fewer of them.” She hunched over the wheel as we zipped along on a two-lane highway, with a river on one side and fields on the other.

“What medium do you work in?”

“That’s the fun of it. Sculpture can be anything. Metal, wood, glass—your own poo if you’re into that sort of thing.” She cackled. “Don’t worry, I’m not. Lately I’ve been using animal bones, though. And doing things like casting them in metals. Thousands of years from now they’ll dig up the site of where some piece of mine was and wonder why the hell they have a pig skeleton that is partly copper, partly bronze, partly steel. I hope in the future we’re smart enough to say it was art and not some weird pig-worshipping cult.”

That made me smile. “I hadn’t thought of that before.”

“Glass, too, glass lasts forever. There’s a glass artist from America. He makes these globes that look like planets. Think paperweights, only he makes them all sizes, up to huge like this.” She took her hands off the wheel for a second to make a space bigger than a bowling ball, then quickly grabbed control of the car again. “And he marks them with the infinity symbol and hides them all over the world. He wonders what people will think in three thousand years when they’ve found hundreds of these things all over. If his name is forgotten, will they think space aliens put them there, or what?”

“What is his name?” I asked.

“Josh something,” she said. “Super-nice guy, too. Came to visit the glassworks here, gave a talk. Singleton? Simpson? Can’t remember. I’m not good with names. He was really nice and his work was gorgeous and amazing.” She pointed up ahead. “There’s our destination.”

We pulled into a cleared parking area lined with gravel, next to a stone building that made me think of an old firehouse. In each of what would have been a garage for a fire truck, there was a workshop. The bay doors were open, and she showed me one was for melting, smelting, and forging, one was for glass blowing, and the third was for woodworking. There were very solid stone walls between each section. Other parts of the building had some offices and smaller studios.