Joan Smith (10 page)

“They’re ugly,” he said bluntly. “If God had wanted women to wear trousers—”

“He would have given us two legs?”

A reckless grin flashed out. “Touché. What I meant, but was a little shy to say, is that He would not have given you such prominent...er, that is to say.” I felt myself blush as he examined my prominent posterior. Despite the objection, his interest did not seem unduly critical. Rather otherwise. “And the shirt, too. You look quite the little guy,” he said, and put his hands on my chair, but of course, he couldn’t draw it for me.

“I’m working on the prominent thing,” I murmured, seating myself. Raventhorpe remained standing.

“Don’t.” It was less than a command, more than a request. “Just wear a dress next time. It is more feminine and alluring. I don’t understand the contemporary she. You starve and batter your poor bodies to skin and bones, then drape them in monstrous shirts that hide it all. Can you explain this mystery to me?”

“We call it being in shape. It’s good for you.”

“It is no favor to men, to burden our imaginations with inventing a body for you.”

“Fashions change. The contemporary male prefers slender women.”

“At least that has not changed. I am heartened to hear all your self-inflicted punishment is to please us. I venture to say you misunderstand the male mind. Men have never objected to feminine women. Between losing your figures and your skirts, you put the onus of sexual attraction on the men. But then it is so in nature,
vide
the peacock and the lion.”

“Was Arabella plump?” I asked, to direct his attention away from the body and clothes that did not please him.

“She was—perfect. Or so I thought, but then I never saw a flaw when I was in love.”

“You did truly love her then, at the beginning?”

He looked confused and hurt that I should ask. “At the beginning? Longer than that, Belle. Until she would not let me love her.”

“Until she fell in love with William, you mean?”

“William was not the cause of her change, but one of the effects.” He shook his head, as though to dispel a bitter memory. When he spoke again, it was of other things. He glanced at the typewriter. “That’s an infernal machine. I am glad I could convince you to ignore it. Nothing mechanical should come between the artist and her thoughts.”

He
had convinced me? The man’s conceit was incredible. “How did you write? Cut the end of your finger and write in blood? A pencil’s mechanical.”

“You take me too literally, my pet. I meant you should stick to the minimum of interference. The clatter of that contraption would deafen an auctioneer. I, if you are really interested and not just being satirical, used a quill first, then a patent pen. You’re very prolific, Belle,” he continued, gesturing to the written pages. “I was told by my publisher, that’s John Murray, that I wrote too much. I never could bother to recobble my outpourings, pasting on a simile here and a quotation there. I daresay I was overly prolific, though my readers managed to keep up with me.”

I felt a thrill at that casual “my pet,” and braced myself against him. “I don’t much care for your Grecian and Italian poetry,” I said sternly.

His brows lowered and his lips thinned. “That wasn’t poetry. It was literary bile. I am surprised you choose to dredge up that particular subject.”

“It compromises three quarters of your output.”

“Whose fault is that?” he asked roughly.

“Yours. If you’d spent less time whoring and more time with your patent pen—”

He flung an angry arm into the air. “By God, if this don’t beat all! I thought you were my friend, my redeemer. If you only mean to hack and hammer at what remains of my poor reputation, go back where you came from—or you will be very sorry, madam,” he said, finishing on a tone of silken menace that sent a shiver up my spine.

This was the first I had seen of the infamous Raventhorpe temper. It was a little frightening, and after all, I had only said the truth. “It’s only a story,” I repeated.

“Yes, a story about a lady called Arabella Comstock, of Chêne Bay, and a gent called Raventhorpe. It stretches the long arm of coincidence to suggest it is all make-believe.”

“I shall probably change the names before I send it to a publisher.”

“In other words, you’ve no imagination. You’ve come here to plunder my story, and Arabella’s, and palm it off as your own idea. Why, I shouldn’t be surprised to see you hammer on a happy ending. By God, that would be the ultimate irony.” His arms flayed the air angrily. “If that’s all you’re good for, I shan’t help you anymore.”

“Arabella is helping me,” I said airily. My fingers went to the locket, fingering it as a talisman.

As his dark eyes followed the movement of my fingers, his little burst of anger faded. I sensed that he was the volatile sort who flared up like a fire rocket and soon settled back down. For a fleeting moment, a small, vulnerable boy peered out from his eyes. “I see you got hold of the locket. Are our locks of hair still in it?”

So the hair was his! “Yes.”

“I’d like to see them.”

I removed it and held it out. He reached, as if he would like to hold it, then glanced unhappily at his hands. I held it out to him. “It’s your hair, then? I thought it might be William’s, but his hair looked lighter in the picture.”

“William’s! Why would she keep that mawworm’s hair in the locket I gave her?” His voice was rough with anger, or perhaps with regret. It was hard to say. “Light and dark—we used to joke it was a symbol of our natures.” It was regret, and infinite longing. His sad eyes would draw pity from a rock. “I, it hardly needs saying, was the dark one, Arabella the light. Vain creature.”

“Tell me about her death,” I said. The words came unbidden. I hadn’t meant to ask him, not while he was in such an uncertain mood at least.

His regret hardened to a sneer. “You ask all the wrong questions, ma’am. Ask, rather, what she did with her life. What other hearts did she break, besides mine? Look in your own heart, if you have one, and see who was truly wronged in this piece of ‘fiction’ you are plagiarizing from my life.”

“Tell me,” I repeated, untouched by his anger.

“Who cares how she died? We all must die. How we live is the important matter, and she lived badly. I’ll tell you this, there never would have been a Vanejul if Arabella had not—” He stopped in frustration. “No, I shan’t say it. I shan’t accuse her of such a wicked piece of perfidy until I know for sure what happened.”

“You mean you don’t know! But you are the one who—" I stopped short of accusing him of murder, because I was afraid. “No one can harm you now. It’s all done and over with. You must tell me.” My voice was brusque with eagerness.

“You think I hastened her demise?” Again he cocked his head to one side in a playful manner. “Doesn’t everyone kill the thing he loves, one way or another? If not an actual physical death, then spiritually. I know she stopped loving me,” he said, in a voice schooled to indifference, but his pain showed through the mask, like old paint on a cracked painting, with a darker picture behind it. “That was the beginning of Vanejul. But for that, I might have been a real poet. I only wrote that claptrap to punish her, to show her how little I cared. I frittered away whatever talent I had on those puerile pieces.”

“They’re not that bad,” I said softly, to ease his pain.

“I am ashamed to admit authorship of them. I chose her name for those angry works, so that she alone would know the author. I could not like to sully my family name with such literary sludge. ‘Vain jewel’ was a pet name I used to call her. Hazlitt, that louse on the locks of literature—I am indebted to Lord Tennyson for the delightful phrase—invented the notion that I was rearranging the spelling of Juvenal, perhaps because he, too, was a satirist and a poet.”

“And a woman-hater.”

He looked astonished. “I never was that!
Au contraire.
I enjoyed women only too well.”

“A telling phrase. I expect you enjoy beefsteak, too, and horses and—”

“Point made.” He executed an exquisite little bow. “I should have said I appreciate women.”

“Only too well!”

He colored slightly, and immediately changed the subject. “With regard to Juvenal, there was the exile, too, and the military career. A few points in common. At least I concur with his reason for writing satire. When asked, he replied, ‘How could I help it?’ I doubt he had as much reason as I.”

“Was she in love with William? Was that what happened?”

After a frowning pause, he said, “She liked him at first. I thought, toward the end, she loathed him quite as thoroughly as I did. But there were twists in the girl I never began to understand. As I said, William was only a pawn in the game. She used him to punish me.”

“For what?”

“For loving her. That was my sin.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“No, it doesn’t, does it? I have been brooding over that enigma for centuries.” He looked at his hands, and frowned. “Demme, I’m fading.”

I was thoroughly shocked to see that it was the case. He was disappearing before my very eyes. I had forgotten that he was not actually flesh and blood.

“Don’t go! I want to ask you a hundred things.” I leapt up from the table and tried to hold on to him. It was like trying to hold smoke. He was gone. The spot where he had been was cold. I thought, or imagined, a sigh of regret as he departed.

A feeling of utter fatigue came over me as an aftermath of my busy day and the meeting with Raventhorpe. I regretted that I had not put the meeting to better use. I hadn’t discovered the answers I needed for my book. I had been too fascinated by the man. The trees blossoming out of season was a mere detail. But as I reviewed our meeting, I realized that he seemed to take my story for an actual account of his relationship with Arabella. Had the rout party really occurred, if not then, at an earlier date?

Was Arabella the true author of this book? A nice moral question, as I planned to put my name on it. I made a pot of tea and a cheese sandwich and read over the hastily scrawled pages. It was as though I were reading them for the first time. Really they didn’t sound like my writing at all. What was a rout party, for heaven’s sake? And a curricle? He spoke as if he had truly splashed Arabella with his curricle.

When I returned the locket to my neck, I felt just a slight intimation of warm fingers assisting me. Was it Arabella, or was he still here, in some invisible form? How interesting if I could get them both to come at the same time, and hear why she had jilted him. After having met him, that was the greatest mystery of all.

Would he ever come back? When I realized how very much I wanted him to return, I drew myself up short. This man had murdered Arabella. He tried to weasel out of answering me, but the facts spoke for themselves. After having met him, I understood how she had fallen so quickly and easily under his spell. What I could not fathom was how she could ever have jilted him. There must have been an overpowering reason. Infidelity? That would have enraged her, but I felt he could charm even that transgression away. The man was an enchanter. Had he seduced her? But that would more or less force her to marry him, in those days. Perhaps his violent temper had been his undoing. Had he struck her, or made threats? He had threatened me.
You will be very sorry, madam.

I was happy Mollie was coming to spend the night with me, but I decided against sharing this latest adventure with her. I wanted to hug the secret to myself a little longer. When she returned, I told her I was writing Arabella’s story; but said not a word about Vanejul. Vain jewel. He found Arabella vain, then, as well as a precious jewel. That would not bother him; he was no stranger to vanity himself.

“I sold Duggan the house!” Mollie smiled. “Lovely commish for me! And how was your day, dear?”

“The story went well.”

“No ghosties came to visit?” she asked playfully.

“I felt Arabella was guiding my hand,” I prevaricated, “but she didn’t make an appearance.”

“Shall we turn on the telly? I heard Raventhorpe’s taken a turn for the worse. He might be dead by now. Not that it’ll make any difference to our ghost, but it makes the case interesting somehow. The past and the present all mixed up.”

We watched the news. Raventhorpe was not dead, but had recovered somewhat. It showed a tape of him at Ascot a few years before, but the picture was not clear. I could see he was tall and well enough built, with some trace of his ancestor’s charm in his smile.

“Since Vanejul had no son and heir, who inherited the title?” I asked Mollie.

“It was a cousin. A forgettable man. None of the rest of the family are poets. A pity Vanejul hadn’t had a son.”

“I imagine Italy and Greece were littered with by-blows. Little Fitz-Vanejuls, if he acknowledged them at all.”

“I don’t suppose he did, though. Shall we have a cuppa before bed?”

We had tea and toast, and went to bed early. Exhausted, I sank into a deep sleep. After thinking of Vanejul and Arabella all day, it was natural that I should dream of them. But was it normal that the book should continue writing itself while I slept? This robbed me of any control, and frightened me when I awoke in the morning with the memory of my night’s doings. But then what could be considered normal in the whole affair? I had passed far beyond normalcy, into another realm. I had allowed myself to take the great leap into the unknown, and now I must ride the whirlwind.

Chapter Eleven

Mollie continued on with me for a few days. I have some vague memory of her comings and goings, but very little recall of her actually being in the house. I remember her worried eyes peering out from that halo of Titian frizz, asking me if I was all right when she returned from work. When I assured her I was, she must have gone out again, since I wrote in the evenings, too, and I would not have done so if Mollie had been there. Most of my waking hours were spent in a frenzied storm of writing, writing, writing. It seemed of the greatest urgency that I write the tale Arabella revealed to me as I sat at the deal table, mindless of the spring sunshine at the window, of the sink filling with dishes, of the world beyond the cottage.