Grahame, Lucia Page 10

  Some day—perhaps only a month or two from now, it all depended upon how rapidly Poncet’s greed swelled and upon how skillfully I was able to placate him—my husband would learn how wrong he had been. I could hardly bear to think of it.

  That miserable awareness kept me as lifeless and cold, when he finally took me in his arms, as I had been when I’d received his kiss at the end of the ceremony that locked us in matrimony. The fires which had blazed for Frederick and had flickered dangerously for a moment in the forest of Fontainebleau had gone out forever.

  But I could tell from the way the gentle stranger who was now my husband had begun to handle me that he was seeking to engage me fully in the ancient dance of love.

  I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to be drawn into anything I might be unable to control. I was prepared only to submit passively to the restrained power that I had sensed —or imagined—lay within him as he had stood at my window and asked whether I was ready to give myself to him.

  Still I knew that I must make an effort to demonstrate the love I had professed to feel.

  But I was at a complete loss as to how to do this. How would a newly married, utterly respectable woman display her ardor? My experiences with Frederick could hardly serve as a blueprint. He’d been a free spirit, and we had not even been married the first time we’d let passion carry us away.

  I thought the business might be easier if the room were dark, so I asked my husband to put out the light. He assented without protest to this request, although I sensed he was somewhat taken aback by it.

  In the sheltering darkness, he was as tender and considerate as he had always been.

  He sat down upon the edge of the bed and drew me toward him. He was touching me as carefully as if I had been the most fragile of blossoms.

  I felt his hands, slowly stripping away my clothing piece by piece, and then his lips on my skin. I shivered, neither with cold nor with passion but with a wracking, fathomless sadness. I could not speak.

  It was so odd to experience his gentle, exploring touch, never unpleasant or clumsy, but always somehow distant and muted, as if my nerves had been deadened and muffled, as if my body had been laid away in thick rolls of cotton wool.

  I tried to be as pliant and obliging as possible, but I was unable to rise above a lassitude born of guilt and despair, self-loathing and anxiety, as I allowed him to use me.

  Nothing short of love and its attendant passion could have eased the ordeal. I knew now why I had once been able to give myself to Frederick so fearlessly and that it had, after all, had nothing to do with hot blood! But I could not call upon love now. Darkness was my sole, flimsy protection, the one barrier I could raise against the intimacies I dreaded.

  Oh, why was I so frightened? Whatever private longings he might harbor, surely my decent, well-bred, chivalrous husband would not dream of shattering my psychic boundaries with the kind of behavior to which my grandmother had assured me that no true gentleman would dream of subjecting his wife.

  He did not.

  But even at the climax of his lovemaking, I felt a thousand miles away.

  I lay beneath him, understanding at last the magnitude of the impossible role I had been driven to take on: I had sold myself to him. I was nothing more than a mistress—as emotionally distant as my grandmother had said one must be— but one who had committed herself to the lifetime job of pretending to be warmhearted, open, and affectionate. But of how this fictitious creature might behave in bed I had not the faintest idea.

  Certainly not as I had: I was barely able to open my lips to my husband’s kiss. He had not pressed me; instead he’d simply moved his mouth downward to the hollow of my throat.

  As for the rest… there had been no escaping it, but it had awakened nothing.

  When he was finished with me, he shifted his body to the empty space at my side. I almost imagined I could taste his disappointment.

  I was disappointed, too, although I could never have told him so. I was sure I would have been far less painfully aware of my shortcomings had he merely shown the same indifference to my lack of excitement that Frederick had latterly displayed before he had tired of me altogether.

  I felt like a tight, locked casket, with all my guilty knowledge sealed inside. I half believed that, if he had only the will to do so, my husband might have used his own lithe body to drive it open, releasing every secret and reawakening every desire. Perhaps with a little more insistence and a little less restraint, he would have wrested from me both truth and passion. But that would have put me entirely at his mercy.

  Still I felt it was incumbent upon me now to do something. I turned toward him and brought my lips to his cheek. I heard his soft sigh.

  He was staring up at the ceiling and did not speak. I moved closer and hesitantly rested my head against his smooth chest. He put his arm gently around me, and I lay there, like the survivor of a shipwreck, stranded beside a stranger, and counted my losses. I mourned, rigidly and with dry eyes, for Frederick, who was dead, and for my little dead daughter, and for the man beside me, whose joyous expectations were perhaps already dying in the face of what I knew to have been so grave a failure on my part, and for the innocent, idyllic happiness I had tasted in the Bois de Boulogne and once again on the morning we’d set out for Fontainebleau. Now that was as dead as everything else.

  Perhaps if I had yielded then to the almost overwhelming urge to weep for everything that had slipped through my fingers, it might have released me to feel something beyond guilt and fear and the terrifying hollowness which seemed to be all that remained of me. But as usual, I held back the tears, which could never have been more inappropriate than on my wedding night.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  For once in my life, I longed for my grandmother’s practical, earthy advice. With what zest she would have risen to the challenge of instructing me in how to hold a man’s love, even if I could not return it, and in how to fan the flames of passion even when I lacked any heat of my own.

  But her voice, which had once railed at me so insistently, had fallen silent. Perhaps it was because I was now in a realm where her heartless manipulations had no currency. Could any of her clever stratagems withstand the blinding light of my husband’s love?

  I soon discovered how weak they really were.

  I knew that our wedding night had been a disappointment to him, and I was determined to find some way to make up for it. I did not act on that wish immediately, however, for I still had no idea how to go about this.

  The morning after the wedding we set out by train for Lyon. From there we would go to Nice, and then on to Greece by water. During the ride to Lyon our conversation was amiable; but once we were in our hotel room, all my anxieties returned. That night was not very different from our first night in Paris; in Nice, it was the same. My husband always took me with tenderness and restraint. I would lie passively beneath him until he had spent himself, and then when I was free of his weight, I would move, almost apologetically, into the shelter of his arms. He never turned away from me. He never suggested that our relations were any other than what he wished them to be.

  But I knew he was troubled.

  While we were at sea, I had a little respite, for we slept in separate beds. It was a mixed blessing; although I had not enjoyed my conjugal duties, I’d almost welcomed what followed them.

  I did not take this as a hopeful sign, however; it only made me feel worse. What a hypocrite I was! I couldn’t respond to my husband’s lovemaking, and yet, as faithless as a lost dog that had stumbled into a new home, I liked to fall asleep cradled against that long, cool body.

  In the daytime, when my husband seemed relaxed and almost cheerful, I tried to convince myself that my coolness at night was pleasing to him, that it was really what any well-bred Englishman would naturally wish to find in his bride. My grandmother had always insisted that although English gentlemen craved passion and abandon in their mistresses, they would be horrified to find the same qualities in their wiv
es.

  But where my husband was concerned, I was increasingly aware that my inert passivity was too pronounced even for his gentlemanly tastes. I would have to change.

  In Athens, I recalled a fragment of my grandmother’s counsel. It told me what I must do.

  “A clever mistress,” she’d once said, “will study her lover as carefully as any general studies his enemy’s position. If she watches and listens closely, she will quickly learn his strengths and weaknesses; she will discern what pleases him and what does not. Every time he betrays a certain desire or inclination, however subtly, she gains power and he loses it. All she has to do is take that power and use it.”

  Of course I’d never had to employ such tricks with Frederick. I’d practiced some of the other techniques she’d described to me—the kind it would be unwise to reveal any knowledge of to my new husband—but I’d done it only because it had excited me to give back to him the kind of pleasure he gave me. It had never been a matter of trying to gain ascendancy; we’d been co-conspirators, spurring one another on to bolder demonstrations of passion. Our natures harmonized.

  But now, where nature had failed, perhaps artifice could triumph.

  That night I took greater pains than I had done before to please my husband’s eyes. I clothed myself in the one truly alluring nightdress from my small trousseau. It was made of the softest lace imaginable, and had a deeply scooped neck. I had bought it for my wedding night, but that night I had worn no nightdress at all.

  I unpinned my hair and let it rumble loosely over my shoulders; I already knew that my husband loved to see it unbound. It made a glossy black nimbus around my pale face and bare throat.

  Then I walked slowly into the sitting room.

  My husband was on the sofa, still absorbed in the newspaper he had taken up while he waited for me to prepare for bed. At first he didn’t look up. I felt subtly rejected.

  “Anthony,” I said.

  I saw him press his lips together and fold the newspaper carefully, as if he were bracing himself for something. With a flash of genuine remorse, I understood, far more fully than I ever had before, how troubled he was by our unacknowledged difficulties—by the incompatibility of our bodies that was rooted, although only I knew how deeply, in an incompatibility of spirit. It would be even worse for him, I realized, because be had no way of knowing what was at the bottom of it.

  He lifted his head at last, almost reluctantly. I saw the resolute set of his mouth soften. A slight flush came to his cheeks; a hopefulness that I had not seen since our wedding day sprang to his eyes.

  “Fleur,” he said.

  He sounded surprised, almost dazed.

  I was somewhat stunned myself to think that my deliberate maneuver could have such an instant and obvious effect. It made me feel both elated and ashamed.

  I forced myself to stand motionless and let him look at me. The white lace might have been molded to my body. It was loosely woven but held me tightly.

  After my husband’s eyes had taken their fill, he stood up and came to me, still with that air of wonderment.

  “Fleur,” he murmured again huskily, putting his hands upon my shoulders.

  I tipped my head up and nearly parted my lips to his mouth, which was moving down to mine. It wasn’t a calculation; it was an impulse. To at last be able to give my mouth over to one that didn’t reek of alcohol! Toward the end the fumes Frederick gave off had made me feel nauseated. But a cleansing, healing kiss might—

  I moved my head just in time. If I gave in to that one fleeting but genuine hunger, who could say where it might end? It might start with a kiss and end with my needing my husband—in every way.

  But sooner or later my blackmailer would surely raise the ante beyond anything I could possibly scrape together.

  Then he would go to my husband.

  And after that, my husband would never look at me again the way he had tonight, would never bend his head tenderly to bring those firm and gentle lips to mine.

  Once he had absorbed those images of me splayed out upon the canvas, he would be lost to me as irretrievably as everything else I’d ever loved.

  I couldn’t risk letting myself come to love him, too.

  Having evaded the perilous kiss, I rested my head upon my husband’s chest and swayed against him, weak with the knowledge that I had narrowly escaped a sensation that might easily have swung out of control. In this precarious marriage, control was everything.

  “What is it, Fleur?” my husband was asking softly. His mouth was buried in my hair.

  I reminded myself of the part I must play.

  “We don’t have to… sleep apart any longer, do we?” I murmured.

  “Oh, Fleur, sweetheart, did you mind?” He sounded astonished and remorseful. “I’m sorry. I thought it might be… more comfortable for you.”

  “No,” I whispered. It was as much the truth as it was a lie. I never felt my loneliness and isolation more than when he was making love to me; I never felt it less than when I was falling asleep in his embrace.

  “What’s gotten into you tonight?” He was stroking my body gently through the fine lace.

  “I don’t like it when we’re apart.”

  “You’ve missed me already?” The gratification in his voice was faint but unmistakable. At least one of my grandmother’s lessons had begun to prove sound.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  I could feel his relief at being able, at last, to believe that I wanted him the way he had let me know, with so many subtle signals, that he longed to be wanted. He lifted me in his arms and carried me into the bedroom.

  Again I asked him to put the lights out. I knew my part would be easier in the dark. But the faint, watery light of a quarter moon trickled through the two long casement windows. One of them was wide open. The other seemed to have been painted shut. We had tried to pry it open earlier and had failed.

  Now we sat on the wide bed facing each other.

  My husband’s fingers were unfastening the tiny mother-of-pearl buttons at my wrists. Then they moved to my breasts. His palms cupped me lightly. The sensation was not one that I was able to enjoy; my breasts had not given me any real pleasure since—well, for years.

  But I let out a little sigh and arched my back slightly as if I craved this touch, as if I were straining to give him greater possession. My left nipple had broken its way through the loose network of lacy threads that held my breasts and was wholly exposed to him. He brushed it tenderly with the pad of his right thumb and began to stroke and flick my right nipple until that one, too, sprang free. I raised my hands to his shoulders, gripped them, and moaned softly.

  The sound of his breathing told me how much this pleased him.

  His hands lingered at my nipples for a while longer and then moved on to the row of flat little shimmering buttons that ran from the top of my breasts to the bottom of my hips and held the soft lace tightly against my skin.

  My husband began to release those buttons slowly, one at a time. My breasts spilled out of the lace. He bent his head toward them. I wrapped my arms more closely around his neck and gasped and writhed like a woman in ecstasy as his mouth nuzzled one nipple and his fingertips pulled gently on the other.

  In reality, I wanted to wrench myself away. It wasn’t his fault. Even Frederick’s fingers, which had rarely touched me quite as tenderly and skillfully as these, had become clumsy irritants after my miscarriage. My breasts had been so sore then that the lightest touch was torture. The raw sensitivity had faded, finally, but they had never been filled with the old, sweet yearning again… except for one moment at Fontainebleau.

  My husband brought his head up and gazed at me in rapt silence. Then he began to unfasten the remaining buttons. He slipped the nightgown down over my shoulders, over my waist and hips and legs, and let it fall from his hand to the floor at the bedside.

  “Lie down,” he said thickly, as if he’d had to force the words out of his throat. His hands guided me backward. The weak, col
d moonlight puddled over the bed like watered-down milk. I lay there in the thin, ungenerous pool.

  “You’re so beautiful,” whispered my husband, looking down at me. “You don’t know how much I’ve wanted you.” By means of another soft sigh, I tried to convey in a ladylike fashion that I, too, was at last plagued by the same fevers.

  He slipped off his shoes and then his jacket. It fell to the floor and covered my gown. He removed his tie; the strip of silk glided out of his hand like a serpent and disappeared over the side of the bed.

  He lay down beside me, with his body turned toward me and his head propped up on his left hand. With his right hand, he lifted a loose strand of my hair and twined it idly around his fingers.

  “I wanted you the first time I saw you,” he whispered. I heard him swallow. This openness, this self-revelation on the part of my reserved husband, who had for so long carefully hidden his desires, was painful to me. Nothing burns a liar’s eyes as cruelly as the clean light of truth.

  I could feel my skin glowing with embarrassment; but I was sure it could pass for the wanton heat he longed to ignite in me.

  “I wanted to break every rule,” he was saying. “I couldn’t believe that a stranger—that anyone—could make me feel that way. I wanted to snatch you up and carry you off like a prize.” He let the strand of hair fall back to the pillow and began to trace my jawline with light fingertips. “I couldn’t think of anything but you, of what it would feel like to have you… like this.”

  I reminded myself of what I must do.

  “I wanted you, too,” I whispered hesitantly, turning toward my husband. It was truer than anything I had said to him for weeks, months. I bad wanted him, for that one brief moment in the forest. Now I could not even remember how it had felt.

  “Did you?” he said with something between a soft little laugh and a sigh. But then he grew silent and abstracted.