Claire Page 26

  There is a gradual advancement to the trees, to light on the flat branches. There will be no error.

  After he had gone she sat there for a while longer, her eyes closed, her face abruptly colorless, and then she got up and tied the apron over her full skirt, and pulled on her gloves. Calling to Sully, Claire took her trowel to the bulb bed beneath the oak trees.

  Once, she had stood on the flat branches and fallen into this cool grass below and had committed an error. She hoped she was wiser.

  Drew was gone out all the rest of the day; she had a tray in her room and turned out the lamp at ten when he still had not come home. Sleep was impossible; she had seen his eyes, had seen the fierceness of a warrior there, a fighter who is threatened and who will not be defeated. In spite of what she had told him, Varian thought she had come for that purpose.

  She had come because she loved him: and here, in this last fight with herself, she would either regain her place in his heart which she had, by her own act forfeited, or she would lose her heart, once and for all. There was to be no battle between the two of them, for she did not care to win his heart by defeating his determination not to love her; she wished only to prove herself to him, so that he would choose to accept her heart in realization that he did love her.

  She was not sure that he did. With a sigh she turned her head on her pillow and opened her eyes in the darkness, and stared at the fire in the grate across the room, and then, half-exasperated, she threw off the coverlet and pulled on her dressing gown and went downstairs to his library, and lit the lamp.

  She threw a cool stare at Balaghat lying fiercely on the floor between her and the cold ashes in the grate, and then she said quietly, “I shall win, Balaghat,” and went past him behind her husband’s polished desk. Books; row upon row upon row of books; she found a book of Shakespearean plays, the Tragedies, and passed it by without pause, and then her eye fell on a small volume inscribed The Sonnets. She pulled it out and glanced over it. Claudia had said that she would like these; she turned down the lamp and took the book back upstairs, and curled up in one of the large, comfortable chairs by the fire.

  She read them all. There weren’t so very many, which surprised her. Claire had always imagined Shakespeare to be endless, and nothing at all like these speaking lines. Teasing, fervent, longing, angry, hopeless, bitter, ecstatic— surely there could be no greater evocation of love than to accept that all emotions lay somewhere within it.

  After she closed up the thin book she sat staring into the fire for a long while, until past midnight. At last, when she heard him come up the stairs and quietly close his chamber door, she laid down the book and climbed back into bed and pulled the coverlet up over her.

  There came a quiet rustle in the darkness; a click. She lay there, wide-eyed, her heart still, her breathing arrested, and listened to that door open, to his heavy tread across the carpets toward her bed.

  “Good evening, darling,” he said mockingly, bowing grandly to her from the end of her bed. He was still dressed in his immaculate black coat and white linen, as though he had been to his club, perhaps, or the theatre, and there was a glittering fire in those brilliant blue eyes so hard and cold in the firelight. “Pleasant day?”

  Claire sat up slowly with the coverlet clutched around her. “I was busy,” she said quietly, staring at his face, at a hatred she had not known a human could possess.

  “Yes,” her husband said, a muscle tensing at the side of his mouth, “you were, weren’t you? Did you plan that delightful little scene this morning in the gazebo, or did the opportunity just present itself, and you leapt upon it, like a ten-headed monster upon its prey?”

  “Varian . . . leave. Please,” she said, in a low calm voice. He was castaway; she could smell cognac on him, even from six feet away.

  “Leave?” His low mocking laugh was full of menace. “But isn’t this what you want? That I should admit your power over me, that I desire you, and that I cannot keep from you? Isn’t that what you have come for?”

  “No,” she said evenly. “You are not yourself, Varian; I am sorry to have surprised you this morning, and I did not mean to distress you. I did not know any other way to tell you.”

  “That I have begat a child on you out of one night of your overcome mistrust of a traitor?” He wrenched himself suddenly out of his coat and ripped apart the buttons of his shirt as he tore off his clothes. “Very well, madame; then I shall begat another on you out of the overcoming of my hatred, tonight, and you shall have won. Damn you, you shall have won. Is that what you want? Shall you be satisfied then?” His clothes were balled up and sent flying across the bed into her face.

  “Varian, I beg you, do not do this,” she said in a whisper. He stood beside her bed, breathing hard, a naked giant with bronze glinting off his magnificent body and a fire blazing in his face. “You are wrong; I do not wish you to hate me; I do not wish to force myself upon your life— ”

  “Then I,” he said, throwing away her coverlet and dragging her nightdress off her shoulders, “shall force myself upon you. Fitting, wouldn’t you say?” His brandy-laden breath overpowered her senses as he pulled her roughly toward him and bent her head back to receive that violating kiss. “I shall give you your four sons, and they shall all of them be bastards, every one,” he said, as she stifled a small cry of pain at those bruising lips, those rough hands over her.

  “Varian, stop!” she gasped, trying to turn her head away from that cruel mouth, pushing against those immovable shoulders that held her captive. “Don’t— please, Varian! No! Stop!”

  He dragged her head backwards with a fierce tug in her hair, and closed his grip over her shoulder as he laid himself heavily over her, his breath hot against her neck.

  For an instant she could not breathe; she thought she would faint beneath him, her protests unheard, and then came a small, protesting kick of frustration from inside her softly rounded belly.

  He froze.

  The golden head came up, away from her, and instantly his weight was shifted, as he leaned on his elbows and stared into her face in the firelight, those brilliant blue eyes meeting and holding her gaze in a shimmering, breathless second of revelation.

  Abruptly his jaw clenched; from between his teeth he muttered, “Oh, god,” in an agonized voice, and closed his eyes and rolled away from her. He lay there mutely, staring up at the shadows of the canopy over them.

  For an agony of time she trembled uncontrollably, her lashes dark against the blue shadows beneath her eyes. He was no longer touching her, and yet she knew he was there, in an agony of his own. She did not move, even when she felt his weight leave the bed beside her, when she heard him gather up his clothes and quietly go back into his own chambers, and close the door.

  One shall be all astray on the subject of returning; there will be evil; there will be calamities and errors. If with his views he puts the hosts in motion, the end will be a great defeat; even in ten years he will not be able to repair the disaster.

  Claire had wanted to speak to him, and her throat had closed; she had wished to touch him, and she had felt only fear. She huddled there in the light of the fire for a while longer until she was able to move again, and then somehow managed to pull the coverlet over her, and lay there, shaking, cold, with the taste of blood from where he had bit her lip like the bitter potion of defeat in her mouth.

  The newspaper was not in evidence in the morning; Varian sat at the breakfast table, for one more stolen day of pleasant autumn weather laid out on the terrace, staring at something invisible, and looked up as Claire came through the door.

  “Good morning, Claire,” he said quietly, and dropped his eyes as he heard her sit down.

  “Good morning, Varian,” she said. He heard a clink of china; the silver teapot moved in the corner of his eye, and she poured out her tea.

  “Claire, I— ” He raised his eyes to hers and saw a bright stain of color in her pale face rise suddenly under his gaze. “I am sorry; I was drunk, I was not my
self, just as you said. I was— insane. Inexcusable; I— ” He drew in a painful breath. “It shan’t happen again. I hope you can forgive me.”

  Her blue eyes fell to the teapot as she set it down. “Of course I can,” she said calmly, with a hint of a smile. She stared at her teacup for a moment, and then looked up, and said, “Perhaps I shall seem a little less threatening to you, now that you know that I have not come, as you said, to defeat you.”

  “Why have you come?” Varian asked quietly.

  “I am fighting against nature, Varian; it has already been decided, somewhere, by someone, that I should have fallen in love with you three years ago in Tony Merrill’s garden, and that I should love you, in some form or another, for the rest of my life. Evidently you have not been similarly fated.”

  Varian paled slightly beneath his tan. “I thought you said when you first came that you had fallen in love with someone else, in Portugal.”

  “It was what I meant you to believe,” Claire said quietly, and raised her teacup to her lips, and then looked away, into the peaceful, dew-wet English garden just awakening out of the morning mists. “I did fall in love while I was in Portugal, with an Englishman. I had met him only a few times, and yet I felt that I had known him for a very long time. We were separated for a long while; I had news of him here and there, and occasionally I would feel some intuition that he was in danger, for when I had seen him last he had been in poor health and had not been very strong. He had gone away to India, you see, to make his fortune,” she said, allowing her eyes to return to his across the spotless linen tablecloth and silver service and china. “I was married to him.”

  “Why did you not take that packet straight to the authorities when you came home?” he asked in a low voice.

  “Because I loved you, Varian,” she said simply. Her pleasant, casual smile disappeared suddenly, and her voice fell to a whisper. “I tried very hard not to, you know; I watched you go around with Lady Morgan, and I knew that whatever you had once felt for me was gone, and that it should not matter. It mattered.”

  The recriminations and accusations were long past; Varian asked in a low voice, “Could you not have come to me and asked me about it?”

  The blue eyes that rose to his face were tinged with an angry challenge beneath the pain there. “Could I? After everything that had passed between us, could I have come to you? Would you have listened to me at all? Or would there have been that answer that you gave me when I asked where you found twenty thousand pounds for your mine: I cannot tell you. What would you have said, Varian?” She made a helpless gesture with her hand. “Don’t you understand? I did not want to know the truth; I was afraid of what I would hear. I hadn’t the courage to face an absolute; so instead I lived with those vague, unanswered questions, those half-believed, half-mistrusted suspicions, hoping somehow that you would prove it all wrong, and that I could learn to forget it. I held that letter— ” She swallowed painfully— “I held it over the fire a hundred times, determined to burn it and to give you the half of myself that wanted to go to you, and to ignore the half of myself that could not trust you. And I— I could not do it; I wanted— I wanted all of it, Varian. I’m sorry— I— ” She stood abruptly, her linen falling unnoticed to the bricks of the terrace. “Excuse me, please.”

  She went hastily inside, out of sight of the terrace, and clung shakily for a moment to the table by the library door in the hallway. On a tearful sniff, she found her handkerchief and wiped her eyes and saw Sully sitting with his tail wrapped around his dainty white feet at the bottom of the stairs, regarding her with two very blue eyes. “I shouldn’t have cried,” she said apologetically to her cat.

  Sully stared at her immovably.

  “I see he’s been giving you his sirloin again, you absurd creature,” she said, feeling suddenly very deserted. “I suppose you’re wishing me gone away, too?” she inquired, as she came over to the cat and picked him up, and rubbed his neck against her chin, and then suddenly she closed her eyes and struggled vainly against her tears, just as Sully leapt out of her arms and disappeared behind her toward the terrace, and she was left to rather blindly make her way up the stairs to her room.

  Without thinking she dragged out her valise from beneath the clothespress and opened it and set it on the bed. For a moment she held it tightly, willing herself to stop weeping; she dried her eyes again, and blew her nose, and very calmly set about her packing.

  There will be one with tears flowing in torrents, and groaning in sorrow. How abrupt it is, as with fire, with death, to be rejected by all!

  “Claire?”

  For a tiny second she hung half-way between heaven and earth, her hands suddenly paralyzed over her bed; then she finished folding the silk scarf, and laid it in the valise, atop a neat stack of her underthings. “Yes, Varian?”

  “Shall you come down and finish your breakfast?”

  “I’m not hungry, thank you,” she said, without turning around.

  There was nothing but silence for a moment as he stood in her open doorway, his hand on the latch. “You haven’t eaten at all,” he said, with a touch of unsureness.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” she said quietly.

  Another brief silence. “Are you— going somewhere?”

  Claire’s chin trembled, but her voice was perfectly steady. “Yes, I think it is time that I went home to Finchingfield,” she said calmly.

  “To Merrill House?”

  Claire did not think she could bear to go back to Merrill House, to see that quiet and mystical oneness between Tony and Claudia. “Yes, I imagine so,” she lied, without a change in her voice.

  “I told you that I would buy you a house wherever you like,” he said in a moment. “And I will, if you wish it. Only I— ”

  She allowed herself, at last, the luxury of ceasing that pretension to normalcy, and after she had laid the last of her chemises in the valise, she stood there, silently, and stared down at her hands on either side of the clasp.

  “Only I— I thought perhaps you might want to stay at Banningwood until after the baby is born,” Varian finished in a low voice.

  “To stay at Banningwood?” Claire stared down at her hands holding so tightly to her valise that they had turned white. “As what? A distant relative? A wife? A housekeeper?”

  “As the mother of my son,” he said quietly.

  Claire swallowed; she had said she would take whatever part of him that he would give, and that this time she would not make the mistake of wanting too much. Very well; so she would. “I shall be happy to,” she said, without once having faced him, and heard the door close quietly, and then sank into a heap on the carpet, her hands dragging uselessly at the pretty lace coverlet, and wept.

  The Drews had been invited to the dine with the Duke of Portland the next evening, along with the Cannings and the Liverpools, and another odd politician here and there. It wasn’t much of a social occasion, as London was thin of company this time of the year, with everyone having gone up to their hunting boxes or perhaps still enjoying the southern coast, but it was an honor to be included.

  Although Lady Banning chatted pleasantly enough with the ladies before they went in to dinner, it was in her conversation with the elderly Prime Minister that she had her greatest sparkle, for he had asked her about Portugal. She lost herself in the subject; for a moment she was only Sir Colbert Ffawlkes’ daughter giving forth her views on the subject of Napoleon with all the exuberant brilliance that her father had bequeathed to her. She did not see her husband’s faint smile as he overheard the conversation.

  It was after the sweetmeats that Lord Canning, who had been seated next to Lady Banning, rose and said suddenly, “I’ve a toast, Your Grace; give me the table for a moment?”

  “Well, of course, Canning,” said Portland, raising his head from his conversation over a treasury bill with Perceval, and nodding benignly at the Foreign Secretary. “Have you got word that Boney’s surrendered?” he added, with a laugh.

  �
��No, not precisely, although it won’t be long, I promise you, with our good English regulars in the Peninsula now,” he said, nodding. He stood and smiled at the table, and, raising his glass, said, “I’ve a toast to Varian Drew this evening; after bringing us his lovely wife Claire, and then making us a gift of nine French ships at Vimeiro, he has just informed me that he is to present England with the first of his progeny in January. Congratulations,” he said, and laughed, and indeed, the entire table, after drinking to the Bannings, fell into the most delighted confusion.

  It was fortunate that they did, for it disguised Lady Banning’s sudden uncertain gaze at her husband, who merely smiled at her from his place across the table beside Lady Liverpool.

  Then Her Grace the Duchess of Portland was patting her arm, and asking her about her nursery, and if they planned to stay in London, and so on, and she somehow managed to find her voice again, and answered all the questions and the congratulations with natural grace until the ladies withdrew and left the men to their port.

  The Drews did not stay long after dinner; after they had come home and were inside the hallway, and Varian had sent Stiles off to bed, he turned to find his wife staring at him from the base of the staircase.

  “Why did you tell George Canning?”

  He returned her gaze. “Do you wish that I had not?”

  “No; I cannot imagine that it will be long before everyone is aware of that I am pregnant,” she said frankly. “I didn’t expect— ” She halted, watching his face in the glow of the lamp at the top of the stairs.

  “That I would be pleased over it?” he finished quietly, his eyes unreadable.

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  “I am very pleased,” he said without much ado, regarding her from beside the front door, and then, after a second longer, he came toward her and held out his arm. “Shall I be honest with you? I watched you tonight at Portland’s house, in his drawing room, and there cannot be another woman in the world with half your intelligence and perception, nor your charm. I was very proud to call you my wife this evening, Claire.”