Judith Ivory Read online

  “It’s a Viennese. Listen.” It was indeed a fast Viennese waltz. Ever buoyant, she said, “Come dance and spin me round and round till I can’t stand. Then just at the end, kiss me. Let’s be happy and gay. And romantic.”

  “I think that wouldn’t go over very well.”

  “It would with me.”

  “Remember whom you’re entertaining.”

  “Certainly not you.”

  He sighed. “Rosalyn, I’d just as soon not remind anyone tonight of—anything romantic. Dinner was a bit much for me.”

  “What? That twit with the twins again? Come now, you can’t let people—”

  “But I do, apparently. I don’t like being the butt of these jokes. Not after suffering the reality of it all day. Be a good girl and understand.”

  She wrinkled her nose and mouth. “I’m not anyone’s good girl.”

  “No. Thank goodness.” He freed his fingers, enveloping her hand in both of his. “Now let me see what this woman wants. Then I’m retiring early. You can wake me when you come to bed.” He manufactured something more like a smile, which usually pleased her, but not this time.

  “You can’t leave. I was counting on you—”

  “You are doing wonderfully well on your own. I’m very proud of you. Proud for you. It has nothing to do with me, you must believe that. It’s your own doing in spite of me, in fact. I’ll come back before I retire, for an hour or so to say my good-nights.” When she didn’t immediately respond to that, he added, “And spin you once around the dance floor, if you’ll put up with my clumsiness.”

  “You’re never clumsy.”

  He touched two fingers, first to his mouth, then to hers.

  “But you’re a third-rate romantic,” she said, then with hardly a pause, “I love you.”

  He disappointed her again, somewhat perversely this time. “What a lucky man I am.”

  “Cad.”

  “A third-rate slander. You should have been in court this morning.”

  She lifted her skirts, turned, and dropped her eyes over one shoulder. “Well, if you can find me when you return—”

  “I’ll find you.”

  “If I’m not in the ballroom, you can check the carriages.”

  “Now who’s the cad?”

  “Women can’t be.”

  “Of course they can.” He forced her retreating chin around. “I love you, Rosalyn; happy?”

  She stuck out her tongue, didn’t look happy at all, turned and began to negotiate the masses. Half a dozen people away, she was talking animatedly again. Then she laughed so hard that she had to cover her mouth with her hand, and the laughter still came out noisily. He watched her, but she never looked back. The laughter was not for his benefit, he knew, but for her own. She had a facility for dredging up happiness from her bottommost moments, as though she tapped some hidden spring and up came artesian joy, an unending supply. Without props or prompts—this was a trick he would like to learn.

  Rosalyn Schild could have had a foul disposition and still been sought after. She was stunning. Large-boned, buxom, beautiful in an exuberant, unwithholding manner, she was as radiant and full-blown as a blood red rose with every petal bent back. People held their breath when they first saw her. She was wealthy and stylish. Tonight she wore a magenta gown for which there was not a match in the room (but then she had special access to the new aniline dyes, her husband reputedly being in textiles). She was as genuinely, wonderfully, certifiably fresh as anything Graham could imagine ever coming into his dismally homogeneous life.

  Rosalyn was as un-English as a Thanksgiving dinner—an American feast provided at the expense of an American husband and sampled somewhat warily by an English elite interested in such esoterica. She was the novelty of the season, a curiosity with the good fortune of not disappointing the curious. She proved to be just what the complacent English mind wanted to believe about Americans. She was a great Anglophile, impressed into speechlessness by title and royalty, and—though a bright woman—with no head for keeping any of it straight. She was naturally polite and could be deferential to a fault. Thus protocol and English culture, as she turned them upside down, were generally kind to her, for she provided amusement without expense to ego and with such gracious and ingenuous charm that there was a minimal loss of face to herself. It was tacitly assumed that, had she been born English, she would have been queen; but being born American she was through no fault of her own a dunderhead—a gross underassessment of her abilities, but suitably and soothingly ethnocentric.

  To her credit, the dunderhead had produced a shimmering affair much attended by the people she most wanted to impress. It was the final seal on her English acceptance.

  The first of her acceptance had begun with the earl of Netham, Graham Wessit. He had stumbled onto Rosalyn nearly five months before; truly stumbled, for he’d been quite drunk. Sober morning had revealed good instinct—or else one of those bolts of good luck that occasionally strikes on behalf of the helpless and innocent, categories to which Graham could only lay claim when dead drunk. But instinct or good accident, he was, overnight, paired with her, and it was not a disagreeable match. Rosalyn had gone on to exceed the most optimistic of expectations. Besides her fine attributes, both social and physical, she was an unfaultably good companion. She was considerate, bright, and affectionate; her sexual attitude, straightforward and satisfying. He liked her. He might, he considered, even love her. In any regard, he enjoyed her company, not only publicly, but privately.

  As for Submit Channing-Downes, her mere presence and the fact that Graham was about to meet her gave him the queerest sensation. He remembered William’s assessment of her, the opinion he himself had held for so long by default. Plain and drab, William called her. Yes, Graham recalled from that morning, he could see how someone might think that; whatever there was about her that attracted, it was subtle. Dry, William said. Yes, Graham had even gone further. In his own mind, he realized, he had relegated her to a composite of the two or three other women he had met in Henry’s house. He had made of her either a woman who spoke offhand in sage, witty remarks or else a silent soul who stared out over the tops of eyeglasses from behind large, exophthalmic eyes as she wrote letter upon letter to all manner of people. She would be the daughter of some don or beadle. Or poet. Wrong, all wrong, Graham thought now. None of these women would have come here to find him tonight. He was delighted that reality had proved imagination to be just that—pure, groundless, self-indulgent fantasy. Having had a glimpse of the real woman this morning, he anticipated liking her tonight.

  This and a great many other pettinesses rushed about through Graham’s thoughts, like so many disturbed moths and spiders; dust on old notions being brought out to air. Henry was dead. Nothing drove this home so tangibly as the fact of receiving his wife.

  Graham was madly revising the marchioness of Motmarche to make her young, attractive, plausible, when, as he rounded the archway, he was confronted with the quarter profile of a woman he only marginally recognized. It had to be Henry’s wife, for she was alone in the reception room and covered—buried—from head to foot in black. He hesitated, found himself wary, looking for a sign, even a small corroboration that this was the woman he had seen outside Tate’s. She seemed different. The very way she was standing gave him pause. Far from open, her arms were clutching something to her chest, a seeming prop of this new mood. It looked to be a flat box, perhaps the flat box from that morning. She hugged it in front of her, in the posture of someone terribly cold. Or else straitjacketed.

  It was this stiff, constrained back he came up on. Black taffeta stretched taut over moiré shoulder blades. She was staring at a huge painting that hung in the reception hall. The picture ran many feet above her head. It was a full-length portrait; Graham did not know of whom, only that it was kept for its ornateness. Rich colors, gilt-framed, and draped with heavy aging fabric. At the sound of Graham’s steps, she tried to drag her eyes away, but clearly this was difficult. Her eyes slid do
wn the drapery and along the room, pulling reluctantly over the items that lined its walls. Picture, chair, picture, settee, picture, small table, vitrine. Until her objectivity rested on Graham.

  He was brought up short. She was so unexplainably different from anything he had imagined.

  She was small and thin, though not what he would have called bony, and her eyes were not the color of plums. They were merely blue. Her thick, curly hair was pale, a kind of colorless blond. It was also damp—she wore no bonnet. A fine mist of droplets had sifted into the wayward bits of hair that were trying to escape a tight chignon. Her skin looked blanched beneath a speckling of faint freckles that were more numerous across her nose. The most outstanding thing about her was that she looked very, very young, not in her thirties but in her twenties. Graham was surprised. He had assumed she would be closer to his own age.

  “Lady Motmarche? Netham,” he introduced himself with a nod. Then his familiar name, “Graham Wessit,” as an act of cordiality to a cousin, an interesting cousin. “May I be of service to you?”

  The little marchioness responded to his politeness with some inanity of her own. They nodded through introductions. Her voice was soft, controlled, strangely sweet. The sound of it was the nicest thing about her.

  Graham dropped his eyes down the woman, as if there were something he might have missed. There wasn’t very much to her. She was all dress, yards and yards of prim, proper widowhood.

  It was then that he recognized what she was holding.

  Graham blinked. The room shifted. Air seemed to push up against him rapidly all at once, as if a railway train had come out of a tunnel with him standing squarely in the middle of its tracks. Like an idiot, he could do nothing but stare.

  There, cradled in a pair of narrow black arms, was something he hadn’t seen in twenty years. And something he could have happily gone another twenty without. Henry’s widow was holding an art case known sometimes by the underground name of Pandetti’s Orchids and sometimes by the more bluntly crude double entendre: The little widow held Pandetti’s Box.

  Chapter 6

  Submit found the earl of Netham to be almost a walking corollary to the box: entirely too good-looking, suspiciously decorated; a glossy exterior.

  He was tall, loose-limbed, road-shouldered. His clothes were fussy and pretentious, his coloring dark. He had black hair and black eyes that spoke of Moorish blood from the century when English titles were earned in Aquitaine. His eyes were set deep beneath a sharply defined brow, the sort of facial architecture that invited dark, dramatic circles under stress—there were traces of these now. The eyes themselves were large and heavy-lidded. They turned down at the outside edges at a melancholy angle: beautiful, romantic eyes.

  They were the sort of eyes—he was the sort of man—over which women could make asses of themselves.

  Submit spoke her apologies and explanations with a kind of aloofness from this fact. “So sorry to disturb you at this hour…difficult to find you…on my way out of town…. My husband, Lord Motmarche, left you a small bequest, which I have brought and would like to discuss…”

  When she produced the box, the man smiled politely and stepped back from it. “What is this?” he asked.

  “I’ve just explained. The marquess of Motmarche left the case and its contents to you in his will.” She watched for some further reaction.

  He was stoic. “No, thank you.”

  “No, thank you?”

  “I don’t want it.”

  Submit let the box sink into her skirts. In the room beyond, music swelled for a moment above the sociable noise of a crowd talking, drinking, laughing. In the empty entrance room, Submit had to speak quietly so her voice wouldn’t echo. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  He made a brief, perfunctory smile. “I can’t take it, though I appreciate that you’ve gone out of your way to bring it to me. I’m sorry.”

  Now what? Submit had known it would be difficult to ask a stranger what he knew about Henry and the contents of this box. She had never imagined she could not get the stranger—ostensibly the owner of the box—even to look at it.

  Submit glanced down at the burden she still held in her hand. “I have been told,” she said, “that you and Henry were not on the best of terms, but surely—”

  “Henry and I were on no terms at all. I haven’t seen him since I was nineteen. Exactly half a lifetime ago.”

  More puzzling. She said, “But when you were ill three years ago, he visited—”

  The man made a snort of disbelief. “If he did, I was unconscious at the time.”

  Submit felt completely turned around. She reached for the only explanation she could think of: “You know what’s in it,” she said flatly.

  He shrugged. “Poison. Something vile. If Henry left me anything, it would be something despicable, insulting.” He looked at her fully and heaved a huge sigh. “I’m sorry. I have no idea how you came to be named for this errand, madam, but let me assure you, you have been used for something Henry never had the nerve to do when he was alive.”

  Submit’s back straightened. “Whatever my husband left you, I’m sure he had a perfectly justified reason—”

  “Malice.” The shadowed eyes fixed on her, looking sadly, meanly convinced. “Lady Motmarche, I hope you will not consider me too rude when I tell you I simply cannot accept that box or anything else from Henry Channing-Downes. I prefer to remain after his death just as I was during his life: forgotten. I’m sorry your late-night trip here was for nothing. Now, may I get you a carriage, or would you prefer to come in for a while?”

  “Perhaps I haven’t explained well,” she began again. “I don’t know what to do with it if you don’t take it. This is part of the legal settlement—”

  “Keep it. I make you a legal gift of it.”

  “But you have to take it—”

  “Why? I can’t be compelled to take a gift.”

  “Why would you refuse it?” When he didn’t answer, she asked, “Do you know what’s in it?”

  There was a long pause before he finally committed himself to a direct response. “No.” He looked at her levelly. “Lady Motmarche, I am trying to spare us both embarrassing explanations. I could never predict what Henry might do or want to do to me from one moment to the next. All I know is that, for my own peace of mind, I have steadfastly refused to have anything to do with Henry’s designs on me since I was nineteen years old. I apologize if that is offensive to you. My refusal honestly has nothing to do with you.”

  “Except that I can’t understand it. Why would anyone be so impossible as to refuse Henry’s attempt to make a last contact, especially after so many years? If you don’t even know what’s in it—”

  “I don’t care what’s in it.” His voice rose slightly. The riveting eyes narrowed. “It could be filled with thousand-pound notes on the Bank of England. It doesn’t matter.” He left a measured pause, then lowered his voice, a trick that made his height and sharp good looks a little menacing for a moment. “Knowing Henry, however, and how we felt about each other, it is more likely a box full of adders. I should be very careful, if I were you, about opening it.”

  His eyes shifted away from her. Submit found herself speaking to the side of his face. He watched the dancers through the archway in the ballroom. “Henry never did anything to anyone,” she insisted, “that wasn’t based on the best of motives—”

  He answered this with a perfect, blatant non sequitur. “How lucky you are to be leaving London.” He didn’t even look at her. “It’s been an ugly May.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “London. You said you were leaving. Where are you going from here?”

  Submit blinked. She wanted to smile at the bluntness—the rudeness—with which he had dropped the topic of concern to her. “I, ah—there’s an inn at Morrow Fields. I’ve hired a driver, who’s waiting outside.”

  “Ah. How nice. Just far enough to be rural.” His thumb absently stroked his vest over the outline o
f a watch—he was wearing about ten of them—as if he could tell time in this manner. “And close enough to make by midnight. Too bad the weather isn’t better for travel.”

  The traditional English conversational refuge: the weather. The rain outside on the stoop whipped up to a light patter suddenly, as if to give his absurd digression some validity. Submit would have none of it. “Well, yes,” she said, “and I had rather a devil of a time getting here. Lord Netham—”

  “Please. You may call me Graham, if you like. We’re cousins.”

  Again, she fought an urge to smile in disbelief. She was taken aback by his familiarity, then completely undone. “Look here—” she said, and he did.

  He turned to her, smiling warmly and directly into her eyes. Briefly, he touched her shoulder. For one quick second, there were all the vibrations of sincerity, friendliness, an incredible personal charm. Where he touched her, chills—surprising, involuntary—ran down her arm. She drew the case to her chest again. Then his coffee-black eyes lifted away, above her head. She realized he was scanning the entrance room, looking for someone, anyone he might honestly want to talk to.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I’ll send someone to fetch your coat.”

  Submit was staggered, amused, confounded. To keep him from going, she had to lay a hand on his arm. “No,” she said. “And I think you should take this. Henry would want you to.”

  “Henry?” He glanced down. At the mention of the name again, his expression soured. He frowned.

  “Henry Channing-Downes. Your guardian. My husband.”