Rose relinquished the satchel enough that it dropped between them;
they each had hold of a handle. It was an awkward bag, longer than the maid was
tall, not heavy so much as cumbrous for its tightly packed length. "We'll
do it together." They began in tandem. "I packed your extra
handkerchiefs."
"Thank you."
"Do you have your tonic?"
"In my purse."
"I put your wool wrap on top here, in case you get
chilly."
Lydia
nodded, not
mentioning that she planned to put the satchel in the coach's boot. It was too
unwieldy to keep with her.
"Oh, and I packed sandwiches at the side, one cucumber, one
chutney and cheese—"
"It's only a three-hour ride, Rose—"
"You should make yourself eat them. And your hot water bottle
is under the sandwiches for when you get to Bleycott."
Lydia
let out a soft
snort. "You sound like my mother."
"Your mum would kill me if she knew I was letting you go
alone." Rose glared over the bag as they trudged with it, then yanked it
suddenly. "Let go. I have it." As if carrying the bag alone might ward
off the wrath of the Viscountess Wendt – wrath that, in point of fact, was
almost impossible to prevent in any predictable way, though God knew people
tried.
Rather than fight further,
Lydia
obliged. She
could not have done what Rose did: With a grunt, the shorter, stockier woman
hefted the long satchel into her arms and took off at a good pace – a woman
carting an enormous, leather-and-damask baguette, the circumference of which
her arms didn't quite encompass.
As they climbed the front steps of the station,
Lydia
said,
"Put it down there. I'll get the driver to load it for me."
Rose answered by clutching the bag to her, a gesture that
suggested Lydia's lack of robustness – which certainly translated into less
muscle and stamina than her maid – and general susceptibility to chills and
rashes and sneezing were life-threatening. Which, generally speaking, they
weren't.
Rose talked over the diagonal end of the satchel. "If you
won't take the train, why not hire a private coach?"
Lydia
laughed
outright. "Now that
would
be expensive, wouldn't it? I can't."
She mugged a face, making fun of herself. "Too budget-minded." She
sighed. "Rose, it's good for me to go out on my own. I don't get to often
enough. It feels wonderful." Gently, she told her again, "Put the bag
down, please."
Rose relinquished it slowly, putting one end down, then letting
the other slide down her body. As the whole dropped onto her toes, she opened
her mouth.
Lydia
held up her
hand. "No more. We're meeting in Bleycott in three days' time, then taking
the train back to
London
as planned,
like the very proper lady and lady's maid that we are. No one shall ever know I
struck out on my own to attend your wedding." She made a face of mock
horror, then rolled her eyes. "Oh, forbidden pleasure that it was."
When Rose only bit her lip,
Lydia
let off
teasing. "I wouldn't have missed it," she said. "Thank you for
abetting me." Her parents had expressly forbidden her to go "out
among the moorspeople to a wedding between servants," while she herself
could think of nothing butter than watching a miracle happen: seeing her very
sweet lady's maid marry their footman, Thomas Simms.
Rose –
Lydia
's friend,
companion, and generally coconspirator for nine years now – pressed her little
bow mouth into a solemn expression. "Thank you for coming," she said,
her eyes round with sincerity. "Thomas and I were so proud to have you
here."
The bride was speaking her ostensible reason for leaving her groom
and wedding celebration in order to drive Lydia the mile down the road to the
coach station: to "have a private moment to thank my dear mistress, the
Honorable Miss Bedford-Browne, for coming."
Lydia
looked down,
nodding. Imagine, she thought. Rose, married. She was overwhelmed by a sudden,
confusing rush of feeling: sadness, joy, jealousy, affection.
Rose, too, bent her head, mirroring
Lydia
's movement.
The two women stood there, nodding in some sort of mysterious agreement. A
moment later, they raised their heads simultaneously, looked at each other, and
grew still in the same instant. And there they were – inappropriately across
class lines, yet somehow inexplicably – connected.
Finally, the only way to break the tension was to do what was
natural. "Oh,"
Lydia
cried out and
threw her arms around the young woman with whom she had grown into adulthood.
"Oh," she said again, hugging Rose to her. "You are dear to me.
And I am so happy for you." She pushed her away. "Now, off with you.
Go have your honeymoon with your handsome new husband."
Rose sniffed. Her eyes grew teary.
"No."
Lydia
pushed at her.
"Go on now."
"You'll be all right?"
"Guaranteed."
"I'll walk you into the building, stay till the coach—"
"No, no,"
Lydia
protested. Apparently a secondary reason for the bride wanting to take
her mistress to the station was to carp endlessly about the choice of
transportation. To distract, she teased, "Besides, you have that research
question to report on. You must find out what Thomas calls himself there and
what exactly all the fuss is about." The anatomy books,
Lydia
thought, made
it all sound like pistons and packing rings.
"I've waited twenty-seven years. I can wait half an hour
more."
Lydia
sighed.
"All right. But once the coach arrives, you run off. No need to wait till
it leaves."
Rose nodded, an accord at last. At which point she made a move
toward her mistress, hesitated, then gave in: She boldly linked her arm through
Lydia's, opened the door, and the two women walked through it together into the
small, wood-plank structure that was the local coach house to the only coach
line that ran, village by village, across the
Dartmoor
.
2
Love, any devil but you!
T
he two women walked through the door to be immediately confronted
by
Lydia
's large black
trunk. It stood on end not five feet from the doorway, smack in the middle of
the one-room station. Rose's brother had delivered it earlier that morning.
"Now why would Artemis put it there?" Rose asked.
"Couldn't he have put it to the side so we could move about?" She
shook her head as they rounded the corner of the trunk. "Why are men such
fools—"
They both stopped, confronted with the fact that there was a … a
fool in here with them.
A man lay stretched out on a bench against the back wall, his arm
over his eyes at one end of the wood plank, his legs dropped off the other, his
feet planted on the floor. He didn't respond to their noise, presumably deeply
asleep. His spraddled feet caught
Lydia
's attention.
On them he wore strange, eye-catching boots, while between his feet lay a black
hat, high-crowned and banded by a piece of thin black leather on which were
threaded, spaced, and knotted half a dozen silver beads. The two together – hat
and boots – were foreign yet familiar.
She remembered: They were American, the attire of Wild West
cowboys, the likes of which had whooped and shot their way through Buffalo Bill
Cody's Wild West Exhibition when it was on tour in
London
two years ago;
her brother had dragged her to it. She had at first been resentful of having to
sit there with him, then excited by the strangeness – there were dramas, for
instance, "re-enactments," of savages chopping the hair off people
with axes – then faintly appalled by her own excitement. She would not have
thought she could respond to such a display of horror – horror done badly for
sensational effect – and didn't know what to make of the thrill she felt.
She and Rose walked between the trunk and the man to get a better
look at him, his shoes, and his hat. She stared down, full of curiosity, taking
him in from one end to the other, and felt a whiff of that same odd excitement;
He was big, built on a grand scale, like the idea of the Wild West itself.
Then, as she drew closer, she caught a whiff of something more tangible:
liquor. Ah, he wasn't sound asleep so much as passed out, perhaps.
For whatever reason, the man's body was a study of sprawl and
balance: positioned not to fall off the narrow bench yet relaxed enough to be
truly asleep. Given the width of the bench and the size of him, sleeping on it
seemed a small athletic feat.
"Do you think he's all right?" she asked.
He didn't look all right. His very un-English clothes were a mess.
Perfect really, just exactly what she'd expect of someone who'd been chasing Indians
all day: His slate-gray coat was dusty and torn at the shoulder. He had a cut
at the corner of his mouth – his arm was flung over his face, so the lower
portion was all that showed. His complexion was browned by the sun, so tan that
his lips looked pale by comparison, though this didn't keep his dark,
clean-shaven jaw from exhibiting a darker-still bruise. The hair of his head, a
shiny tousle above his arm, was on the long side, unruly, uncombed; it looked
black in the low light of the room.
"He's breathing," Rose said. "I think he's healthy
enough: just foxed."
Lydia
angled her
head to get a better look at his boots. With his knees bent, the cuffs of his
trousers pulled up. A long stretch of boot showed – leather the color of black
cherries with a lot of stitching that made embossed wings along the sides.
Fancy boots, though they were creased and scuffed. The heels were worn down.
Still, they looked soft, creased in a way that said they moved exactly with the
man's foot and ankle. His slate-colored trousers, besides looking as if they'd
been wadded into a ball before he'd put them on, showed scraped skin through a
tear at the knee. From the tear something else peeked out, the edge of
something red. It was his underclothes. They were red!
Lydia
wanted to
giggle.
"He's in terrible shape, isn't he?" she said.
Rose tittered, making
Lydia
glance over at
her.
Aah. Before Thomas there had been a string of male callers, every
one of them good-looking. Rose had an eye for the handsome ones.
Lydia
frowned back at
the inert man, feeling disgruntled somehow. His body extended off the bench in
both directions. He was too long for it, his shoulders too wide, which of
course to Rose would translate to
tall
and
broad-shouldered
. All
right, Rose was correct. He was nicely proportioned in a long, loose-limbed
way. His arm lay gracefully over his eyes, his hand relaxed, its palm a pale
hollow against its otherwise darkly tanned skin. Aside from the rumpled mess of
his clothes, he looked … healthy, strong. Healthy, that is, for a beat-up
foreigner who smelled of whiskey. Rose was also right in that he was deep in
his cups –
Lydia
recognized the
smell from her father. Scotch whiskey, his favorite beverage, bar none.
Lydia
made a face,
about to criticize further. Then thought better of it. Here was almost surely
her companion for a coach ride. No sense in adding to Rose's chagrin. She
shrugged. "He looks harmless enough." She tried to believe it
herself.
At that moment, outside in the far distance, the sound of a coach
– the whir of wheels, the rapid clatter of hooves-rose faintly out of the
silence.
The man on the bench stirred. He lifted one boot and crossed it to
his knee, groaning at the effort.
The sound of horses and wheels grew louder, distinct.
She reminded Rose, "You promised: time for you to go. I'm as
good as in Bleycott. I'll see you there Tuesday evening."
Reluctantly, the girl kissed her, hugged her again, thanked her
for the hundredth time for coming, then offered to cancel her honeymoon and
travel home with her.
"No, no,"
Lydia
said,
laughing. "You must answer the penis question, remember? You must report
when I next see you on all that is decent to tell."
"O-o-h."
Rose groaned
and bent her head to
Lydia
's.
"There must be other words…" She lowered her voice,
whispering, and they were suddenly in conversation about honeymoons again.
*
The
penis question
. The phrase drifted through Sam's mind, though he couldn't gather
its sum and substance. He was dreaming.
The dream seemed to spring from a noise, a sound akin to the
movement of high wind in tall grass. Skirts rustling. Yes, that was it. Silk
against silk.
Voices intruded, women's voices. They were soft and nearby. Ha,
they were talking together, confiding about men and sexual relations. Oh, yes.
His sleeping mind strained toward these voices. He could make out bits.
Honeymoon
… decent … indecent.
That was all he could catch, though a few moments
later – or a few hours, it being hard to tell, since he kept coming back from
the netherworld without knowing how long he'd been there – he knew the smell of
a woman's hair. As if she bent close through the darkness. The smell of soap,
ginger-lemon floral, the scent warmed by her scalp, her skull, her neck. Hair.
His dreaming mind imagined coils of it, cascades of feminine hair. Oh, he loved
soft hair and silky skirts.
Gwyn, he thought. She had nice skirts, beautiful dresses, though
her hair wasn't her best feature. He liked her hands, her long fingers. He
could feel them suddenly in the dark. The last time he'd seen her alone on
peaceable terms, she'd surprised him. She'd slid those fingers down his shirt,
over his belt, and along his fly, till through his trousers she found the
outline of him. He'd been kissing her and was already pretty darn firm. The
pressure of her fingers through his clothes, though, made him rigid. She
laughed coquettishly at what she'd done, at his response, then said, Your
manhood. Which struck him as a silly word for his fully erect penis, though he
sure couldn't complain about the context. He pressed her palm down onto him
with complete approval, whatever she wanted to call him.
Voices again. The sound of a carriage. It entered the dream
raucously, horses snorting wet breath, shrieking, stomping. A man yelled at
these unhappy animals, but Sam couldn't make out the words, as if vowels had
been moved around just enough to turn the meaning into garble. Then the door to
the coach opened like a maw. Perhaps Gwyn was inside. Where had she gone?
The pleasure of a moment ago became a vague awareness of pain. His
nose hurt. His face stung. Slowly, rib by rib, he realized his chest ached. His
shoulder blades had a pinch in them where he was lying on something hard, the
whole effect painfully reminiscent of the after-hours following the brawls of
his youth. He didn't do that anymore, he assured his sleeping self. No
brawling. But, God bless, he hurt like he'd been ridden hard and put up wet.
Sam stepped into the waiting dream coach, into its dark interior,
hurting now, wanting someone to soothe him. There was no one, though, nothing
in the coach, only cold, then suddenly he was falling, swallowed up into
blackness. He tumbled until, in the far distance, appeared what became a rocky
piece of grassland, opening up wider and wider, coming at him. He was hurtling
toward it. The land came faster, expanding in all directions. He knew terror
for an instant as he realized he was going to smash into it—
"The coach is here," someone said.
Abruptly, Sam jerked, his breath came out in a gulp. The back of
his head hit on something, wood. And he was suddenly awake, his heart pounding.
Disoriented, he blinked up. He lay on a board bench that cut into
his shoulder blades, staring up at – of all things – a woman's upside-down
face, behind her head a raw rafter ceiling.
Her face hung over his, a wince fixed on her features – not what
he was used to seeing in a women's face at this close range. Which said a lot
for how his eye was looking.
"Is it blue?" he croaked. His speech, normally deep and
drawling, sounded downright raspy: rusted, whiskey-voiced.
"What?"
"My eye."
Her face – heart-shaped with a little, pointy chin – frowned,
looked disconcerted, then answered, "They both are."
He let out a snort, a dry laugh. "Blueing up. Black and
blue."
She nodded. "A bit. Mostly just jolly well swollen. How did
you do it? It's horrid."
"I got myself into a little fight where I was sort of
outnumbered."
"You lost."
"No, I didn't," he said quickly. He'd won, damn it. She
blinked, then asked, "What were you fighting over?"
"Whether a man, then him and four of his friends from a back
alley, could rob a woman on the street." Sam tried to sit up, but he moved
too quickly. He groaned and lay himself gently back onto the bench. Lying
there, he told her with some satisfaction, "You can't, it turns out."
He grimaced when he might like to have smiled smugly. "Two of them were
hospitalized."
"You put them there?"
"I did."
"And you're proud of that?"
He lifted his chin, tilting his head backward enough to frown at
her upside down. "Under the circumstances, yes. Listen, Gwyn—" he
began. Then what he'd said brought him up short.
He tried to sit up again, this time moving slowly, stiffly forward
till he had rolled up onto his backside and lowered his legs over the edge of
the bench.
"Achhh,"
he groaned, laying his head into his
hands. Success. Of sorts. He hurt so many places he couldn't separate out all
the aches and spasms. He was too old for this, he thought.
"Indeed," the woman said as she backed out of his way –
and possibly his reach: She looked wary.
Indeed
. He lifted his head enough to throw her a
scowl over his spread fingertips.
She was thin, hardly more than a hundred pounds soaking wet, while
being maybe five-six – which was nine or so inches shorter than he, making her
taller than average and downright skinny. He couldn't resist telling the
scrawny thing, "Putting two of them in the hospital was fair return, if
nothing else. And the other three were messed up about as badly as me. The woman
got away with her purse without a scratch. First-rate results, though of
course, it cost me some—" At which point, he remembered all it cost him
and that humbled him into silence.
Arguing with a stranger after calling her Gwyn. How crazy was
this?
"Indeed," she said again.
He twisted his mouth at her as far as it would go without killing
him with pain. "In-goddamn-deed."
She'd turned partly away and moved toward the door – the trunk that
had been in the middle of the room was missing. She looked at him now over her
shoulder, her neck making a long, willowy arch. A pretty stretch of spine.