The Elopement (4 page)

Amanda Brown flashed into her head. She didn’t want to admit that she had already liked doing it. He was right. It was so
small
, such a little thing to want. Not worthy of her. “No, I won’t. I won’t be like that. Never.”

“Never?” he asked her, and his eyes demanded a vow.

“Never,” she promised.

Oh, surely what he was doing with his mouth was a sin. Surely
wanting
it so badly was a sin? She could not help the involuntary lift of her hips. His lips curled in a knowing smile. He bent his head again, nuzzling her. “You’re mine, aren’t you?” His words, his breath, were a whisper of sound, a feeling more than something she heard. “You belong just to me.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I belong just to you.”

She wondered sometimes over the next weeks how she could have come to be this. How was she so split in two? She was both the woman who had dinner with her father and entertained Michael Bayley and loved the evenings spent with him at the opera or the theater and the conversations afterward, and the woman who kept assignations at the hotel and, yes, other places too, caught moments, stolen intimacies in which her lover led her into doing and saying and thinking the most wicked things. She felt herself slide. She would do anything for him. Again, that troubling plasticity. But the world he showed her, the freedom he promised . . . He whispered to her, “Hypocrite,” and she knew she was, but then again, was she?

Because that other side of her . . . She truly loved society and being seen on Michael Bayley’s arm. She enjoyed elegant dinners and balls where she dressed in jewels and gowns and danced to the strains of a glittering quartet. She found the little pretensions of her peers annoying, yes, but they were endearing too. She thought often now of what Michael Bayley had said about feet of clay, and it made her more tolerant, more hopeful. She wished she could be as kind as Mrs. Adler and as generous as Mrs. Thomas.

So accommodating. So easily swept from side to side. She hardly knew which part of her was the hypocrite. The one who felt happy and satisfied in the company of society, or the one who laughed with her lover in contempt of its foibles?

Things could not just go on this way forever, she knew. Her father was growing anxious; Michael Bayley was more insistent. And then . . .

“Marry me,” her lover said to her one day. They were in a glen, hidden from the world by a copse. There was a picnic only a short distance away. Her bodice was around her waist, her corset unhooked. His mouth was on her breasts, and the danger, the excitement that someone might come upon them any moment . . . oh, the thought of it, of disaster . . . She had never been so aroused, so aware of being alive.

“Marry me,” said Michael Bayley, on his knees in her parlor, his blue eyes shining, the kindness of him putting truth into the words he said to her, all so very proper and respectful, his admiration a balm. He would never think badly of her; he would always ask of her the best.

He kissed her softly; it was so chaste, and yet . . . she felt a little thrill at it. A tingle that began low and climbed into her chest. He drew back, saying gently, “I think we’d do so very well together, don’t you?”

Yes, she thought so. But then she remembered that glen, the danger of it, the thrill . . . It was impossible. How could she make a choice?

She asked them each for time to think. Her lover had given her that knowing smile—oh, such arrogance, but he had made love to her until she was dizzy, until she felt as if she had no edges, as if she were simply melting into his body and together they melted into the world, and she thought,
How can I live without this?

Michael Bayley had only nodded, and she’d seen the flash of pain in his eyes and realized that he was afraid she would refuse him, and that it would devastate him if she did. That surprised her, the depth of his feeling, though truly she had known it, hadn’t she? She had seen it in a hundred little ways, a thousand of his tiny kindnesses, and she thought,
How can I live without this?

She was certain she could not decide between them. But she felt too that she was drowning in fear over who she was and what she would be, and with a rather fatal lunge at self-preservation, she gasped for breath and chose.

The last months had been full of wedding plans. Churches and invitations, a huge dinner planned, gowns and flowers and rings. She had been in such a flurry she had hardly seen him. “I think it’s rather usual, don’t you, for a bride to be too busy to see her groom?”
he’d said, laughing a little cynically.

At the Stephensons’ autumn party, she had watched him at the edge of the room, listening and judging as she talked with the other women about wedding plans—“It’s only a few days away; how excited you must be!”—and she had agreed that, yes, she was excited, and he had lifted his eyebrow at her as if to belie it, as if to mock her hypocrisy, the big wedding, the trappings of a society she claimed only to disdain. At his look all thoughts of plans and decorations and the gown waiting in her armoire, so carefully designed, had suddenly risen like some overwhelming tide within her, and when she had left the room to get some air, he’d waylaid her and whispered, “I’ve let you do all this, but I know it’s not really what you want. Come and marry me. We need no witness but God.”

It had felt as if she’d waited months for him to say those words. He convinced her as he always did, with a look in his eyes and a touch that thrilled, and when the entertainment had started, she slipped away with him, caught by his caprice.

And so here they were in his carriage now—the same one in which she’d given herself to him a year ago, and it seemed as if her own ghost sat beside her, between them, as the carriage hit every pothole in the road.

He said, “Say you love me.”

“I love you,” she said.

“Say it again.”

She reached up, tangling her fingers in his curls. “How often must I say it?”

“Until I believe you.”

“How can you not? I left with you, didn’t I? I’ve left all the plans behind, just as you wanted from the start.”

His mouth quirked in a smile. “That means nothing. I saw your face—you could hardly stand to sit there and listen to them. ‘What shall you have? Roses or lilies? A quartet or a pianist? You know, I think a quartet is quite the thing. Sarah Waterstone had it at
her
wedding, and it was divine.’ ”

As always, his gift for mockery made her laugh. “It wasn’t so bad as that. And it was interesting to hear Maureen Edgemont talk about her wedding tour. They went to Rome. And Venice.”

“You don’t like Maureen Edgemont. You told me her simpering drove you nearly to distraction. And besides, Rome and Venice are ordinary. Everyone goes to those places.”

She felt stupidly provincial. “Oh yes, I suppose. Still . . . I should like to see them someday.”

“And have your hands done in marble? Or perhaps I shall have a bust made, looking very regal, of course. We can put it in our salon.” His tone was derisive, dismissive. She knew how much he hated those things. How much he hated to be like everyone else. She felt a little sadness spring up within her, and she tried not to dwell on it. She wondered if perhaps she could teach him to be a bit more accepting, if she could tell him what Michael Bayley had said about all people really wanting the same things, if she could make him believe it.

She opened her mouth to say the words and then realized how brutally he would mock her for them, and Michael Bayley too.
Another time
,
she told herself.
I will tell him another time, when he is half-asleep with his head on my breast, when the world is wrapped around us and it is impossible to think there is anything bad in it.
Instead, she said, “But shouldn’t one see the Coliseum? And I’ve heard the canals of Venice are so very lovely.”

“Stinking and full of tourists, both of them,” he said. “No one appreciates the beauty of them—in fact, they aren’t so beautiful any longer, are they? They’ve been desecrated by those too busy ticking them off their checklists to really see the truth of them. ‘Let’s see . . . I have seen this and this and this. Am I cultured yet?’ ” He made a disparaging sound. She let thoughts of Rome and Venice fall away. He was right; why should they do what everyone did?

“Where are we to go instead?” she asked. “Darkest Africa?”

He laughed. “Why not? Or we’ll live on a boat on the Amazon, fighting off anacondas and crocodiles. We’ll put aside your corsets and your petticoats, and you can go about bare-breasted as any native, without anyone to sneer or tell you what’s proper. You will be my own wild woman. We’ll eat grubs and fish and do as we like. Does that appeal to you, my little heathen? Shall we make love in the open air?”

“And what of our children?” she asked, trying to tease in return, though to be honest, the thought of being bare-breasted on a boat among anacondas was not all that appealing. But she would do it for him. She would do anything for him. “Won’t you be afraid they’ll fall off and drown?”

“Children?” He kissed her temple. “What are children but the vanity of all vanities?”

She twisted to look in his eyes, surprised. “You don’t want children?”

“If you do, my love,” he said. “But I’ve no fondness for their mewling, to tell the truth, and I’ve a wish to keep you to myself for quite some time.”

Oh, that shrinking, puny will. She told herself she wanted what he did. To do what they wished and not be what all of society expected. He was right: who needed to be consecrated in a church, walking down an aisle in lace, carrying roses while everyone looked on in mute approval? Why must one start married life with a dinner to serve one hundred? Salmon and . . . and . . . what else had there been? The details seemed muddied now; she couldn’t remember. The wedding cake was fruit, of course. She had chosen a pianist—a quartet reminded her too much of a balcony at a dance, laughing at a woman with tears running down her cheeks.

Darkest Africa. It would be hard to remember regrets there, wouldn’t it?

“What are you thinking?” he murmured. He caught her chin in his hand, urging her gently to look at him. “Oh no, not so sad. Not today, when all our dreams are coming true! What have I said? Don’t tell me you’ve changed your mind.”

She didn’t know how to say what she was thinking. She wasn’t certain she
knew
what she was thinking. “It’s only—”

“Is it the children? We’ll have a dozen, if you like. I promise it. Though”—he brushed her mouth with his own—“I’ll wager I can make you change your mind.”

And he could, she knew. He had that power. To make her want what she should not want. To make her think things she should not think. He would keep her to himself, and she would be lost in the drug of him, and she would never want to wake up. Until . . . until one day she did, and then what? What would happen then?

He captured her hand, holding it to his cheek, kissing it. His fingers caressed the ring about her finger. “Do you really like it?” he asked her. “It doesn’t seem to you vulgar?”

Vulgar. Like the bright and vibrant dahlias in an exhibition painting.

“I like it,” she whispered. “I love moonstones.”

“It reminds me of the moon that shone on the night we met. Do you remember it? A full moon.”

Full, yes. Stars glittering brightly in a sky spangled with them, because there was no moon to occlude them . . . Oh, wait, no. There had only been a slivered moon. She could not quite remember. A slivered moon and a woman with shining tears, and she had laughed—her own happiness bought by another’s sorrow . . .

“It was a crescent moon,” she said.

“Was it? Ah, perhaps it was. What I remember best is the look of you. I wanted you from that moment. I remember thinking: How lovely. Now there is a woman like me. One not afraid to take on the world.”

Had she looked that way? She had been nervous, she remembered. Thinking of her father inside, and Michael Bayley, unsettled by the attraction she felt for a stranger, feeling as if things were spinning too quickly for her and yet unable to slow or stop them. Looking for something to distract, something to show herself who she was, who she would be, her will wavering and fluttering, searching for somewhere to perch.

She looked down at his fingers clutching hers, his thumb rubbing over the glossy surface of the moonstone. She wondered suddenly if it was true that it reminded him of the night they’d met.

“Is that what you really thought?” she asked. “That I was like you? What made you think it?”

He smiled. “For one thing, the way you laughed when that woman reappeared.”

“Did I laugh? I don’t remember that.”

“You did,” he assured her. “How could you help it? She was pathetic. I don’t remember what I saw in her. I can hardly remember her name.”

“Constance,” she said. “It was Constance.”

“Yes, that was it. I must send her flowers sometime, to thank her for abandoning me on the balcony that night. If not for that, we never would have met.”

She said, “I’m certain she cannot wish to be reminded of it. You won’t really do that, will you? You won’t send her flowers? Tell me you won’t be so cruel.”

He laughed shortly. “Ah, there she is, my little conscience.”

But he didn’t say it admiringly. He said it as if it were a trial that must be borne, an irritation, and she found herself wondering how long it would be before he stopped saying it. Before she stopped being it.

She glanced out the window. The sun was setting, the golden light becoming deeper, like honey seeping through the leaves. The entertainment would be done, the party ending. Carriages would be called. “The party will be nearly over,” she said softly.

He leaned close, pressing to her shoulder, looking out the window as well. His hand was at her throat, fingers curling against her pulse. “Too late to turn back now,” he murmured. “They’ll discover us missing soon. We’ll belong to each other well and truly.”

There was something in his voice that made her look at him. “And then what? Will it truly be darkest Africa?”

“Perhaps not right away,” he said. “There’s some business I must attend to first.”

“Then where to?” she asked.