The Privilege of the Sword (37 page)

T
ERESA LAY ON THE COUCH IN HER STUDIO, AND CRIED
and cried. She was pretty much done when Lucius came in, pink and disheveled from a quick nap in her room and a long night before that. He blinked at her and said, “I have to go. I’m expected at my cousins’ for a card party, and I’ve cried off too many times before.”

“Off you go, then,” Teresa said, but her voice sounded strange, even to her. She jammed the letter into her pocket.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing. Another bill, that’s all.”

“You’ve been crying.”

“Rubbing my eyes, that’s all. I got paint in them or something.”

“Do you need money?” He sat on the couch, on a shawl still damp and wrinkled from her weeping, and held out his hand to her, asking, “What is it, what’s the matter?”

She stared at the hand as if it might bite her. But she answered him. “It’s Roddy—my husband’s family, I mean. They send me these horrible letters. I shouldn’t read them, really, they’re always the same. It all comes down to the same stupid thing: they won’t return my dowry, what remains of it, anyway, because I left him. That’s all.”

There was a table between them, cluttered with art supplies. Still, he went down on his knees, self-consciously theatrical, and held out his arms to her.

“Marry me,” he said. “I know I’m not much of a prize, but I can offer you the protection of my name, and all the true devotion you can stand.”

She stared at him. “Oh, Lucius.” She was laughing, but the tears refused to stop. “Oh, Lucius, no. I can’t.”

“Am I too loose for you? I could reform, you know.”

“I don’t want you to reform. You’re even worse than I am. I like that.”

“Then marry me, and we’ll be bad together all the time.”

“I can’t.” He looked so silly down there. She was laughing; the tears were just left over, that’s all.

“Come on, Teresa, please?”

“I just can’t, that’s all. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t marry you.”

“Why not?”

“Because my husband’s still alive.”

He dropped his arms. From his knees, he looked up at her. “Your husband is dead.”

“No, he isn’t. I wish he were, but he is not.”

“You told me he was dead.”

“I never said so. I just let you think it.”

“And you think I didn’t inquire elsewhere? No one’s seen Roderick Trevelyn for years.”

She jammed her hand in her pocket. “Then how is he writing me letters?”

Her lover took the paper from her. She let him unfold it and watched him scan the words, his face wrinkling in disgust. “This is insane,” Lucius said. “It’s revolting. He doesn’t—this is insane.”

“Yes. They’ve got him nicely locked away, but he still writes.”

“Who lets him send them?”

“His family, of course. They won’t give me a divorce. They want me back.”

“For landsake,
why
?”

She wiped her eyes, took a breath. “To punish me, I suppose. I didn’t give them what they wanted. It got worse, after I left, they tell me. They say if I came back, he would get better.”

“No one who writes like this is going to get better. Why didn’t you try to divorce him before you left? There would have been witnesses, you could have—”

She seized the paper back from him. “Do you think I wanted witnesses?” she flared. “Do you think I wanted the world to know what he was doing to me? I had no family, no money of my own—do you think anyone would even have believed me if I’d taken my stories to court against my husband and all his family?”

He watched her blaze across the room, back and forth like a comet in its course.

“I’m sorry,” he said. She flew at him as if she would attack him, but he stood his ground, arms at his side, and she flung hers around him and clung to Lucius Perry for dear life.

I
T WAS COLD IN THE SHADOW OF THE HOUSES.
I
FELT
lightheaded; it was hours since I’d eaten anything. I reached in my pocket for the nuts I’d bought at the theatre, and ate them, and felt a little better. I unfolded the paper they came in. It was a playbill from the theatre.

THE SWORDSMAN WHOSE NAME WAS NOT DEATH,

A N
EW
D
RAMA

BY A
L
ADY OF QUALITY

AT THE
L
EAPING
H
ART
T
HEATRE ON
W
EST
B
ANK,

H
ENRY
S
TERLING,
A
CTOR
& M
ANAGER

W
ITH THE ADDITIONAL TALENTS OF

THE INCOMPARABLE
B
LACK
R
OSE,

THE FIERCE
M
ASTER
P
INCUS
F
URY,

THE BOLD & DASHING YOUNG
M
ISTRESS
V
IOLA
F
INE AND

D
IVERSE OTHER
T
ALENTS

C
ERTAIN TO
E
NRAPTURE
& E
NTERTAIN

A NEW DRAMA never before played before the P
UBLIC!

U
NLIMITED
E
NGAGEMENT OPEN TO THE
V
AGARIES OF
P
UBLIC
T
ASTE.

I
F YOU
A
PPEAR, WE WILL
P
LAY!

“By a Lady of Quality.” Was it the same one who had written the novel? Maybe it was someone younger, someone who had read the book as a girl and loved it and wanted to see it on the stage. “A Lady of Quality”—that meant a noblewoman. Could it be someone I knew? Someone who had been to one of the duke’s parties? The duke’s ugly friend Flavia had been speaking of the theatre. She was clever, but I didn’t think she was noble. I tried to see her as the mysterious author, but I could barely imagine her reading the book, much less writing about it.

Did the Lady of Quality ever come to see her own play onstage? What did she think of the way the actors played their roles? And did she ever go backstage to visit them after?

T
ERESA DREW A HARSH BREATH, AND THEN ANOTHER.
H
E
let her try to find control in the safety of his arms.

“I understand,” he said. “It’s all right. It’s not your fault. You couldn’t know.”

“I didn’t know,” she whimpered like a child. “I really didn’t know. How could I? No one told me.”

She didn’t realize how tightly she held the letter in her hand. “Oh, Lucius, he was so beautiful once. He was like a young forest god, all dappled golden. It made it harder to believe what he was capable of. Even when I was all bloody and aching, I’d look at that face, that perfect face, and wonder if I could be mistaken, if somehow I really had done something so terrible that he was perfectly justified in what he did.

“But he never said he was sorry. That’s how I knew. The other girls—I knew women married to men who merely drank, or had bad tempers. They never tell you before the wedding—maybe your mother is supposed to know—but theirs must not have, and of course I didn’t have one. Afterwards, though, it all comes out. We’d sit together over our sewing and our chocolate, and one would flinch or try to hide a bruise…and so we knew. And sometimes, though not often, one or the other would say,
It’s all my fault, I know it is. I should try harder. I make him angry. He cries, you know, he cries and tells me how sorry he is, and begs me not to make him so angry….
And she’d show us the jewel he’d bought her, to prove how much he really loved her after all.

“Roderick never said he was sorry. He would just look at me as if I weren’t really there, as if my weeping were some pointless annoyance. So maybe I was lucky; at least I knew the truth.” She laughed, an old, brittle echo of the drawing room. “I tried to kill him once.”

“Why didn’t you do it?” Lucius Perry asked harshly.

“I’m not sure.” Teresa walked away from him, across the room. If she was going to speak of these things, she did not want to be held or touched by anyone. “I stood over him with the poker while he slept in a chair by the fire. We’d both been reading there, very quiet and companionable, and Roddy fell asleep. I didn’t know, when he woke up, whether he would be—agreeable, or the other way. You never knew with him. I stood there with the poker, knowing I had only a few minutes and that I would have to beat his brains out. And it wasn’t that I didn’t want to spoil his beauty, although I didn’t, really. It was just a—a ridiculous moment of clarity, when I realized that putting an end to his life would ruin mine; that it would be simple now and simple afterwards because it would all be over, but that wasn’t what I really wanted. I realized I had another choice, which was much less simple but much more attractive.”

She put her hand up against the windowpane, looking out at the empty winter garden. “I knew in that moment that I would leave, that it was only a matter of time. It made the waiting bearable as things got worse. I had it all thought out—what I would take, how I would get out—not where I would go, though; there didn’t seem to be anything more important than getting out the door, and I was afraid to tell anyone beforehand. So one day I went upstairs, put some things in a bag, and walked out the door and into a great many complications. But at least I had something I wanted. And I have it still.”

He stood waiting, listening.

“They never forgave me, the ones who stayed.” Her breath misted the glass. “Ladies who’d wept on my bosom, as I wept on theirs—girls I shared secrets with of how to layer powder so the bruises wouldn’t show. They are not the ones who buy my work, or send me flowers left over from their parties. They are the ones who castigate me loudly in public for leaving my poor husband when he needed me most. They are the women who won’t receive me in their houses, and turn their heads away when they see me on the street.”

“I won’t let them hurt you anymore.”

She shook her head, smiling mirthlessly. “Now you sound like one of my heroes. Maybe that’s why I like you so much.”

“Love me,” he insisted.

“I may. I probably do. But I’ve tried that word before, and those feelings, and look where it got me.”

“Abjuring love? Real people don’t do that. Now you’re the one who sounds like someone on a stage. That’s not the real world. Real people follow their hearts, wherever it takes them. Real people refuse to be put into a little tiny box. You can say you love me or you don’t love me, it doesn’t matter; I know you have forsworn nothing except an existence you found intolerable.”

She really did smile this time. “Now you’re making me sound like a heroine. Be honest, Lucius. For all that you go on about the real world with its real people, you don’t really want to live in it, either.”

“I like,” he said in a nobleman’s lazy drawl, “to have some choice of which world I inhabit, that’s all.”

“Yes. And so do I. Which is why I am perfectly content where I am, and as I am.” She went to the table, straightened some brushes there. “Really, I don’t know why I made such a scene. I must be spending too much time with the theatre. China is so much more restful. All those nice patterns. I’d better get back to it.”