The Rich Are with You Always (57 page)

  He sighed. She chuckled and said, "You'll never understand, will you, poor love?" He kissed her hand, not taking his eyes from her face. "All that"—she gestured at the newspaper—"is the magnet pulling me on."

  Three rooms away, Sarah was dressing for dinner, letting Kitty—the maid who had stayed on from Sir George Beador's day—try a new plait in her hair. She paid little attention to what the girl was doing for she was deep in her own thoughts, wondering whether she was mad for thinking them and even madder for courting the conclusions they tended toward.

  It had excited her all day to know that she could get this Mr. Thornton for the merest nod. How different he was from Sam. She could easily have fallen in love with Sam, who was good and kind—and funny and comforting and reliable; a sort of unworldly, unambitious version of Tom. But this Thornton was the very opposite. How anyone could love him was beyond her imagination. Arabella must be blind. Or perhaps he had become a totally different person at home from the man who roved abroad. He reeked of experience and self-confidence, and not an atom of modesty or shyness to mar it. "Turn your back and you're on it," as one of the bar maids had said of her most lecherous customer; that was Thornton too.

  In the end, she forced herself to stop thinking about him until she was alone for the night. Then she would have to ponder, coldly and step by step, exactly what she wanted from Mr. Thornton, and how she could make him comply— whatever notions of his own he might entertain. Over the last eighteen months she had become adept at stopping herself from thinking about anything, and at thinking about that same "anything" coldly, step by step.

  Next day Walter came in his snowshoes. He was not nearly so exhausted, even though there had been a fresh fall overnight, making the snow deeper. And he had brought a pair for Sarah. She let him tie them on.

  She was surprised that he took no liberties at all, though her skirts were up to her ankles and his hands had to go up inches higher to bind the thongs around her riding boots. A bone-setter could not have been more chaste or discreet.

  But ninety minutes later, when they all came in tired and happy, and the children all ran up to the day nursery to play with Young John's fort until teatime, Walter said, "Let's put this sled in the garden room. There's no need to drag it back and forth each day, is there."

  "I'll go and unlock it from inside," Sarah said.

  But he caught her arm. "No, no. Come this way. See if it's still there." He would not be drawn further until they were at the door, which was, indeed, locked.

  "I told you," she said.

  At once, he bent down to a ventilator brick in the wall, a foot off the ground but buried in drifted snow. He pushed his little finger in one of the holes, took a grip, and worked the brick from side to side. It was loose and came free with a jerk. "Ice," he said. "It used almost to fall out." He reached a hand inside and pulled out a rusty key. With it, he opened the door to the garden room.

  When his hands strayed as he untied her snowshoes, there was no ambiguity about it; he did not say, "I can't seem to find the thongs," or anything of that sort. He was like a farmer in an auction, absorbed with the quality and firmness of the flesh.

  She tapped him on the head. "Good afternoon, Mr. Thornton," she said. "I'm sure you remember me."

  He kissed the hem of one of her petticoats. "Forever," he said, and set to finish untying her snowshoes in earnest.

  "How did you know of that key?" she asked.

  He looked to see if she was joking. "Didn't you know? This house belonged to my uncle. He sold it to George Beador only a few years ago. I grew up here." It was obviously news to her. She was thinking furiously. His heart began to race. She was very pretty and very imperious.

  "So you have often…
used
this room," she said.

  He smiled, not trusting his voice.

  His wet tongue and gleaming teeth excited her but she fought it down and said aloud, as she had said in her mind three dozen times that day, "Well, let me make it clear, Mr. Thornton, there will be no rushed embraces in cold garden rooms, fearful of discovery and courting disgrace. In fact, there will be no risks of any kind whatsoever."

  He blinked at her. He breathed at her; there was the faintest trace of cloves upon his breath. It almost unsettled her. Tom had been fond of chewing cloves.

  "Risks," he said, nonplussed.

  "Risk of discovery, risk of conceiving, risk of contagion." If she had not said it so often in her mind, she could never have been so calm. But it had the most extraordinary effect on him. His eyes darted over her face, shivering in their sockets like loose marbles; she could see the blood hammering at the side of his neck. A gasp, with overtones of admiration, escaped his grinning jaws. "God. You are cool."

  She was afraid then she might have overplayed, so, with a coy smile, though still preserving that cool edge, she said, "I think you may find me warm enough— when you remove those risks."

  "Me!"

  "Well, of course you. I will go to London tomorrow. In Mr. Stevenson's coach. He is going up too, I think. You may find some reason to beg to come with us, and upon the journey, you may contrive to invite me to see Paddington Station. Which we will do. And when you have shown me Paddington, you will accompany me back to Mr. Stevenson's, where I shall see my banker. On the way you may find somewhere discreet"—she shivered and stood up—"and warm."

  "It will not be easy," he said. He could not keep his hands still, and he dared not touch her.

  "Of course it won't," she said. "That is why I have gone so far to help you. I hope you will be worth it." She had not prepared that last sentence, but he seemed to enjoy being commanded and challenged by her.

  He caught his breath in his delight. "Oh, Sarah!" he said.

  "Mrs. Cornelius," she corrected. "Never call me anything else, Mr. Thornton. I told you—we shall take no unnecessary risks."

The plan was almost spoiled when John suggested she ought to take Kitty or one of the other maids along, in case she needed to go shopping. She could hardly explain that she would be going to Paddington, since Mr. Thornton had not yet made his "spontaneous" invitation. But she remembered that Chambers, who lived over his own shop, had once offered her one of his maids as chaperone, so that was that hurdle over. Everything else went as she had planned; she thought they carried it off most convincingly.

  Mr. Thornton was avuncular calmness itself as he showed her over the station. "In a few years," he said, "we shall build a new one on the other side of the Bishop's Bridge. So this may be your last view of it, Mrs. Cornelius."

  "Oh no, Mr. Thornton," she answered. "I hope I may see it often."

  Her imagination did not dwell at all on what they would be doing together very soon now, but the notion of it frequently came, like a kind of memoryin-advance, glancing through her mind. It gave her a sense of luxury not to entertain it but to push it out, waste it.

  "I have never used this place," he said when they were in the cab. "Not myself, you understand. But I once made an arrangement there for—an important person."

  "Is it a hotel?"

  "A sort of hotel. It is a house used for this purpose only by people of the highest class. No common women go there."

  "Well," she smiled and pulled a thick veil down from her bonnet, "I am in your hands."

  "I will go in at the front," he said. "The cab will take you around to the mews. It is arranged there so that you may alight without being seen. He knows. All you do is wait until I open the door."

  When she was alone she felt the first twinge of doubt, a hint of regret, at what she was doing. She remembered John's words for it: tawdry—tawdry and something—unlovely. Was it going to be like that? Perhaps she would be better left with her imaginings unsullied? Still, there was no turning back now.

  Perhaps her passions could only be roused now by things that happened in her mind? She remembered how she had lain in bed with Sam after he had…gone off all over the place, leaving her both unsatisfied and unroused, and incapable of being roused. Was it too late to turn back? She could just say to the cabman, "Drive on to Dowgate immediately." She commanded herself to shout it. Not a muscle twitched. But what if the pleasure was all in her mind? What if it lay merely in making and planning such arrangements as this? If she went on now and proved the thing itself was…tawdry and unlovely, that would destroy those mental pleasures too. She would be left with absolutely nothing. Only the memory of a memory.

  Her mouth felt dry when Mr. Thornton opened the door and helped her float out of the cab. "Wait," he said to the driver.

  "Of course, guvnor," the man replied, the whisky flask already in his hand.

  She felt no better prepared than she had been at the age of sixteen, listening to incomprehensible stage directions from that whey-faced clergyman, or later, when they left her alone with the man who had saved her. It was nothing, nothing, nothing like it had been with Tom.

  In his unfeeling, monomaniac way, Thornton helped her through these hesitations. A more sensitive man would have noticed her mood and, in trying to comply with the change, would have turned doubt into debacle. But if he noticed her coolness at all, he took it for the same as that commanding, mocking promise which rehearsal had enabled her to offer yesterday.

  "If madam will inspect the room," he said. "It is our best Oriental-lascivious, otherwise known as Birmingham-aristocratic."

  She laughed. It was more French in style than anything else, with heavily draped windows looking out over Portland Place, and lots of gilding and carving on the furniture. The bed was a wide half-tester, the carpet thick and well strewn with cushions. A cheerful fire burned in the grate, with a kettle moaning on the hob. It was warm—too warm to stay long clothed.

  "Enough light?" he asked.

  There was the fire and eight candles. "Enough light." His crass insensitivity helped her slip back into the role she had chosen yesterday.

  "A drink, Mrs. Cornelius?"

  "No, thank you, Mr. Thornton."

  "I agree." He came toward her.

  
He's going to kiss me,
she thought.
It's going to begin.

  But he took both her hands and, like a dancer, so manipulated them that she had to sit back upon the sofa. Her silk dress made little rustling whistles on its satin covering.

  "Now the other arrangements," he said. "As your Highness commanded." And from an inside pocket he drew a large condom, a huge condom. She recognized it at once, of course, for she had cleared away dozens from the rooms at the Tabard. But never one so great as this; a quart of water would not fill it.
Oh
Lord!
she thought.

  "The bishop," he said. "I don't know why we call it that, but see!" From inside "the bishop" he pulled a small oilcloth packet. "Unwrap it." he said. "Please."

  She obeyed. The sight of her fingers twitching at the cloth excited him. She lingered over it, feeling a sort of borrowed excitement too. "A present?" she said. "For me?"

  "No." He laughed. "You could say it's the very opposite."

  Inside was something like a watch case, sealed with wax strips that pulled off with a tearing sound.

  "Open it!" he said, trembling now quite eagerly.

  Her dainty fingers struggled with the fastening. At last the two halves parted and out fell a salmon-pink sheath of the finest silk. "Woven air!" he said with reverence, taking it gently from her. "And see—it is dipped in a solution of the purest rubber, which dries to make a perfect seal. My own invention. You will catch no…
present
from me, Mrs. Cornelius."

  She took it from him and tried its fineness where she tried all soft materials—on her lower lip.

  "Wait!" he said. The emphasis his eyes added to the word made her, for the first time, confused. She handed him the sheath, which he folded carefully back into the tin, without closing the lid. He put it between them on an occasional table behind the sofa. In the candlelight, its colour looked raw and almost vicious.

  "Is that your monogram?" she asked, looking at the lid of the tin.

  "Yes. I send it back to have it refilled. The sealing stops the rubber from perish ing." He was closing in upon her, speaking the words like a special endearment.

  It struck her then: the mechanics of it—the cabman, knowing exactly what to do, the very existence of such a house. It was an industry. For so long now she had planned some affair like this, thinking it extraordinary and very special. But what they were about to do was no such thing. It was probably the most normal, ordinary, everyday activity in London—in anywhere. And that was the thought which finally unlocked her reserve. It was not special. It was not supposed to be special. It was everyday. It was just—nice.