Black Silk (14 page)

“I’m not like Henry,” he said. “I am not so attached to words and theories that I can’t give way to something that feels stronger.”

Her mouth pursed. She was glaring at him. Her eyes looked dark and bright against their peculiar little feathering of short lashes. For a moment, these eyes stared over his hand, in open rebellion against attempted mastery, even this small one over a jawbone. She abruptly made a high arch, a display of long, white throat; she took her chin away.

“You are so—” He was going to say “pretty” or “beautiful” or—what?—“winsome”? Did a man tell a woman she was winsome? This woman was, but it didn’t matter. He suspected that if he told her there were some universally pleasing quality to her looks, she would only deny it outright. And not without grounds. He stared at her, as if to anatomize his own attraction to her. Her eyes were too large for her face. Her nose was narrow, her chin pointed. Her skin was washed out except for its smattering of pale freckles. He found himself staring at her mouth, her lips as plump and pink and soft as a baby’s. She wet them and looked down.

He watched the color rise in her cheeks. Her skin was ivory, he decided, not washed out. And her eyes, behind their canopy of thick lashes, were a changeable, mysterious blue. She was plain one moment, pretty the next. He couldn’t figure her out.

“You are devastating,” he said honestly. Her skin, he realized, was flawlessly smooth, something a man wanted to touch. What she was was tactile. She had a fine, gold down along her cheek. He watched her mouth, waiting for it to open, thinking of the teeth that overlapped in front. He ran his tongue along the back of his own.

“Don’t do this,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Don’t pretend I’m your sort.” Her eyes slid to him rather meanly. “Or you mine.”

“I don’t have a sort.”

“Of course you do.”

“Which is?”

“Laughing, pretty women.” A pause. “Mrs. Schild.”

He made a disgusted sound. “So I am a dark, morose fellow with a penchant for trivial women.”

“Mrs. Schild is not trivial.”

He made a glum twist to his mouth. “You were meant to deny the
whole
description.”

He rolled out flat on his back.

There he sank into wounded silence. Why do this? he thought. Why march in where there were already any number of clues that his forwardness was not welcome? He was rebuking himself silently, indulging in a particularly male groan—sexual overture gone awry—when he felt a touch at his hand. He started and caught her light, cool fingers in his own. It was her turn to look surprised.

“Graham—” she said softly. She tried to politely retrieve her hand.

With her use of his first name, Graham’s mouth went dry. He held onto her fingers as he opened his mouth, thinking to respond gently, seductively,
Submit
. But mysteriously he couldn’t. The stupid given name, so much a crude command for exactly what he wanted of her suddenly, could not be coaxed beyond the tip of his tongue. The name sat there in his mouth, unspoken. He found himself suddenly with no handle, nothing by which to take hold of even the smallest intimacy, whatever the touch or the name was meant to imply.

He took hold of what advantage he had: He pulled firmly on her hand.

There was a small battle for possession. She leaned away, pulling equally hard. They were immediately at cross-purposes again. His mind was snagged on French hooks, naked sketches, the perspired dampness of the slopes and
crooks of her body. His wanting her was all of a sudden much stronger. He dragged on her fingers until she was pulled over, catching herself with a hand on his chest. She righted herself to her knees, looking much like an animal trying to back out of a hole.

This awkward moment held, balanced delicately between his concerns for how far to push it and how very much he wanted to push it further and further. He wanted to pull her down onto him then roll her over and cover her with his body.

He tried to tease her out of her reluctant mood. “If only he were in a pillory now,” he said. He offered a quizzical smile.

She looked baffled, then solicitous for an instant. “You were actually pilloried for them?”

When he didn’t answer, or only answered by pulling on her all the harder, her sympathetic interest waned. A small, uncertain fear crept into her expression.

For several seconds more, the palm of her hand held the distance. Its pressure seemed to give his heart something to thump against. He could feel every beat traveling into her arm. He could sense her warmth, smell the perfume of the soap she used on her hair. He couldn’t recall any recent longing stronger than this. He wanted to penetrate Submit Channing-Downes—physically, but also metaphorically. At that moment, he wanted all of her female mysteries to open up to him, her complexities to unravel right there in his hands, her privacy to yield to raised skirts, parted thighs, deep, wet acquiescence.

While he hadn’t so much as kissed the woman.

And neither did it look as though he were going to. She took a worried breath, a frisson. She remained on alert. He could feel her reluctance digging, finger by finger, into the muscles of his chest. There was nothing else for it. He let her go—with a show of upheld, innocent hands.

He was sure he had shaken her confidence, that she was preparing to fly, for she was getting to her feet and brushing herself off. But she didn’t leave immediately. She picked up the picture and looked at its grass-stained edges, studied its center of historic bad taste. Then she tore it, neatly at first, in half. Then she tore those halves, then those and more, until the entire picture rested in uneven bits in her cupped palm. She looked at him as she let her hand flatten, her fingers spread. The slight breeze spun and separated the confetti over a wide area.

He watched her walk all the way back to the inn, wondering what in the world it was that she had just said to him.

The innkeeper brought slices of cold jellied chicken and a bowl of hot peas. It was a meal to which Submit would normally have sat down with appetite. As the daughter of an abattoir owner, she had developed an aversion to red meat. In her house there had always been an obscenely large supply, every muscle and organ sliced and gravied and stewed in cooked blood. Since she was twelve or thirteen, much to her father’s consternation, Submit had lived off chicken and cheese, with the occasional variation of fish with chips and vinegar. Above all, she preferred fruit.

She pushed the dinner away now, only half eaten. She felt oddly lonely tonight. It was the sort of feeling that simply knowing Henry was reading in another room would have relieved, she thought. Or inviting Graham Wessit to dinner. It surprised her to think this, but then the whole afternoon had been rather unpredicted, except the advance out on the grass; she should have expected that.

Submit tried to decide what she thought of a man who made advances toward women he hardly knew, toward gentlewomen, widows, widows of cousins—a man who involved himself with actresses and public orgy and porno
graphic art. She knew what she was supposed to think, of course, fully as much as she knew that on some honest and inquisitive level she was not nearly so appalled as she ought to be. Just as there was something rather horribly fascinating about the pictures he’d taken away with him, there was something perversely interesting about Graham Wessit himself. Submit frowned. This was the trapfall of a handsome man, she supposed. His beauty and charm obscured objectivity. Here was a man, she told herself, nearing middle age, who, it would seem, had yet to have had a meaningful, marriageable relationship with a woman—and a man who had had what sounded like a truly horrible, wrongheaded relationship with perhaps the wisest, kindest man who had ever walked the earth.

Henry. Submit’s frown deepened. Why
had
Henry left his cousin those awful pictures? He could at least have put them in a sealed box, so she wouldn’t have been confronted with them and the embarrassment. “Full knowledge,” Henry had always said. “No expurgated truth, Submit.” But—blast him—those things, even out of sight, out of hand, still churned her up….

A good thing, she decided, that she was done with Henry’s questionable cousin, that the bequeathed case was in the earl of Netham’s possession at last.

She got up from her table and went to the small bookshelf behind the counter, where she’d been invited to browse for a book. Instead, she ended up staring at the register, at her own hand, her own name. Submit Channing-Downes, marchioness of Motmarche.

The marquess and she had had a healthy bedroom relationship. Quiet, normal, reassuring. From the very first, Henry had come to her with a gentle reverence that disarmed even the first thrill of fright. She was married the day she was sixteen, and from that day forward, Henry had come to bed, approximately one night a week, treating her
considerately, hesitantly, as if he had little right. No salaciousness, no unwholesome requests. He seemed almost guilty in this, the most ordinary of human acts. Submit had had no qualms. She had accepted the fact that once a week they would indulge in the ritual of attempting to make an heir. Like the cows in her father’s herds, that was what she had been bred to do.

A child by the name of Submit was not one to misunderstand her position in life. Her father had given her the name so that, from the moment of birth, she would know what was expected of her. He wanted no protests as he shoved and shouldered his only female offspring up the ladder of social success: Submit understood, very early on, that she was her father’s bid into the upper class.

She was hardly six when she was sent away to the first boarding school. She went through a series of girls’ schools, all expensive, all distant from home, and all terribly middle class—geared to take middle-class girls (and their fathers’ middle-class money) and make them snobbishly self-conscious. She didn’t like these schools at all, nor did she do particularly well in any of them. She knew her father expected her to become an aristocrat—and she knew this was not happening by learning to skate in unison with three other girls or by having the Countess M come watch as a herd of them leaped around in ballet slippers and Grecian dress. Here was something of a misunderstanding on her part, she discovered much later. Her father had been perfectly satisfied with the young lady she was becoming; it was she who did not want to be a fake aristocrat. Submit did not want to be a fake anything.

Thanks to one particularly astute teacher, Submit managed to communicate her grief over the predicament in which she found herself. The teacher put forth the idea of sending her to Le Couvent du Sacre Coeur, a genuinely upper-class convent school for girls in Geneva, where Sub
mit ultimately spent three years. There she became what she could live with and what would ultimately astound, puzzle, as well as make her father deeply proud. She studied etiquette, deportment, Latin, and French. She learned to paint, play the piano, and crochet delicate, perfectly insubstantial webs of lace, a gossamer complexity at which she became particularly adept. But more important than her formal subjects at the Swiss school were her “classes” after hours. From over the top of her crocheting, she watched the daughters of Europe’s upper class eat their breakfast, wash their faces, and hold their breaths so their corsets could be tightened. She learned from them the basic engineering of whalebone and wire, so as to make either soft silk or heavy damask stand up and out equally well—while she listened and followed these girls’ trains of thought into the basic engineering of the upper-class mind. She learned how to do what she already had some inkling for, how to be both herself and her father’s daughter with polish and aplomb.

In Switzerland, Submit also learned the one fallacy in the whole operation. It would still be very difficult, nigh impossible, for her to do what her father ultimately wanted of her: to marry well. No matter how polished she became as an individual, the upper-class married family to family, not person to person. She knew herself to be, if not exactly unattractive, neither so striking as to make a noble scion immediately consider a mésalliance. She realized she had neither the pedigree nor the barrier-breaking beauty for the kind of marriage her father sought.

She found herself living within a paradox. She wanted to be real, she wanted to please her father, and she wanted to be happy—three things she could never do all at once. Meanwhile, her father was busy trying to accomplish the impossible. He searched for the perfect upper-class mate for his daughter. Her fifteenth year was spent in a confusion of
“vapors,” a condition doctors liked to bestow on females, especially upper-class females who found themselves falling short of their very limited uses—decoration and marriage. To Submit’s father, her “delicate constitution” seemed only greater proof that he had created the genuine article, a genuine made-to-be-queen young lady.

It was this year, however, that Submit met Henry Channing-Downes. Nearly overcome by the conundrum she was living—losing weight, losing energy, crying inexplicably to herself a great deal when she was alone, Submit that winter was given what seemed an impossible reprieve. Knowing the “perfect” mate her father was looking for did not exist, knowing that any upper-class husband would necessarily not be able to make a better match, she feared the worst: a stupid man, a man that her father could dupe.

Henry Channing-Downes was anything but that. Clever, sophisticated, erudite, Henry knew, she realized, from the very first moment what her father was up to. John Wharton connived their introductions. Henry, with cool, brisk charm, evaded the sought-after end for several months. But he turned up periodically nonetheless—much to Wharton’s continual pleasure. And somehow, somewhere, Submit did something that made her feel wonderful, something that couldn’t be taught: She enchanted a man. It was so much easier than she’d thought! With Henry, she talked of what she loved most, books, poetry, science, art. He never minded if she became animated or “unladylike” in her discussions to the point of argument. He encouraged it, in fact, while somehow in the process he became thoroughly and hopelessly enamored. And, best, Henry’s defect—the one that made all the other girls and fathers pass him by—was one that didn’t matter to Submit at all. He was only old. Her marriage to him had been the most healing, salutary event in her life.

“Submit?”

She looked up. “Arnold, what are you doing here?”

Arnold Tate stood by a table in the eating common, his hat in his hand. “I finished late and thought I should bring these to you.” He held two papers out. “They’re bank drafts on two different London banks. One’s for fifteen pounds, payment for Henry’s Kierkegaard biography in
Men of the Age
this month. The other is for a monograph to appear in
Metaphysics Journal
next. Henry licensed all his work, it seems, in your name.”

“Thank you. I know.” She took the drafts. They were part of the “trust” she had mentioned to William, her only current means of support. “He always had the drafts cut to me. My ‘pin money’ he used to call it. It was supposed to make up for all the time he spent at his desk writing the things.” The unsettling fact, of course, was that the payments would end. A dead man did not produce dependable income. “Thank you,” she said again to Arnold. She didn’t know why he lingered, turning the brim of his hat in his fingers. He seemed to be at loose ends.

“Have you eaten?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Ah.” He was disappointed. “I haven’t. Do you suppose the innkeeper would get me something? And that you could sit and talk to me while I ate?” He made an apologetic gesture. “If it isn’t too late, of course.”

The innkeeper brought more sliced chicken. Arnold had a good appetite. He ate and smiled and smiled some more. He hardly talked at all.

“How is Eunice?” Submit asked about his wife.

He shook his head. “Not well. But you know her.” He paused, looking at Submit. “You seem a little subdued tonight. Are you all right?”

She gave him a faint smile. “I suppose I’m a little lonely. Missing Henry.”

He looked at his plate. “Yes.”

“But not so bad as all that.” She laughed. “Cheer up, Arnold. I’ll be fine.”

He looked at her, really looked for a moment at her hair and face and shoulders, the black dress. “Are all your dresses black?” The question took her by surprise.

“No, of course not.”

“How long do you intend to mourn?”

She hadn’t thought about it. “I don’t know.”

“Somehow a year seems so long.” This was the conventional length of time, though the upper class observed such conventions less rigidly than the middle class.

Convention. It occurred to her that she was steeped in convention for the moment. She didn’t dare step outside of it for fear of horrifying everyone, including herself. Aside from a few days, actually more as Henry was dying than after his death, she wasn’t even sure she was mourning at all. She didn’t feel dark and black inside. She had hardly cried for Henry. She had accepted his going, once the shock was past, with grace.

“I really don’t know,” she repeated, “but I’m sure I’ll know when I’m done.”

“Will you?”

She laughed. “Of course I will. What’s got into you, Arnold?”

He shrugged and cut off a bite of chicken. He squeezed some lemon over it. “Feeling old, I suppose. Passed by.” He looked up. “You’re young, Submit. You belong in pretty dresses.” Submit was very surprised to hear this. “I worry when I come upon you like this. Alone. Aloof from any of the usual society even a widow might indulge in.” He paused. “Don’t you have any fun?”

“Of course I do.”

Arnold hesitated with his fork, as if he might say something more, then he seemed to think better of it.

Just as he was leaving, he added, “William is trying to paint you as cold and calculating. Never mind the legal implications of that; I can handle the court. But he plays on behavior that disturbs me a little. You have always been quiet, but since Henry’s death you seem almost unnaturally composed. Call it what you like. Reserve. Hauteur. You have a lovely, quiet dignity, Submit. But total control can be a dangerous thing. I would like to see you respond with stronger interest to—to life.”

Submit looked down. What was he advising? she wondered. That she go on a spree of “fun”? Or that she indulge in fruitless tears? She felt things, sadness, joy; they just weren’t sharp. And, if they were, there’d be no point to giving in….

That night, as she lay half awake, half asleep, her mind seemed to find strong interest in all the wrong things. Pornographic images. Dark green velvet vests, a deep, rich green, the color of moss from the most sunless parts of a forest: The same color, her semiconscious mind recalled, as that of a collar on a favorite dress. A frivolous dress bought for her by a man who was dead….

Henry bought her the dress the year she turned twenty. They’d been married four years. It was white wool, folds and folds of it, enough to slide over a huge, domed crinoline wider in diameter than Submit was tall; a white dress with a dark velvet collar, the color of Graham Wessit’s vest. How she had loved that dress. Loved it, then ruined it in one fell swoop. She had only owned it a month.

The destruction of the white dress happened on the very first day that she and Henry arrived on the North Sea coast. Typical of the whole adventure, the trip began with crossed wires, missed communications. She and her husband had rushed to Yorkshire, having received the message that her father was dying. They missed the next
message, that he would recover, by mere hours (and missed his actual death entirely seven years later, since it came, as death so often does, without warning or fanfare; it hit Submit’s father in the form of an omnibus as he was crossing a London street). When the brighter message of recovery arrived at their home in Cambridge, Submit and Henry were already on a train, hurtling toward Yorkshire and what they thought was tragedy, a man cut down in his prime. When they arrived, they were nonplussed to discover that not only was John Wharton very much alive but that they neither one liked him any better for his brush with mortality.